Chapter 3 - Galameis Caligna

A traveler from the distant past arrives at his old home, and meets its new inhabitants.

Verginius Star System 

Annaserria Asteroid Belt

Oxygenated Region

“So…” James said, sidling up to the Buzz and leaning on the hull. Arty was kneeling beside the ship, a screwdriver in hand. Metal pipes wrapped around the ship, running from the many solar panels to the rear exhaust engines, and into the internal space of the ship. Arty had set about attacking one of the clamps which held the pipes in place, half unscrewing it, half chiselling it off without regard for the yellow paint beneath. 

“What you doing?” James asked. 

Arty didn’t reply for a moment. Instead he wedged his screwdriver beneath a pipe and levered it off. The metal broke free, and Arty handed the pipe to James, to took it gingerly. It was heavily rusted, and when he banged the pipe on the ground a burst of red dust flowed out. 

“That was new when I left to get you guys.” Arty said, starting on the next rusted pipe, “They rust out when you space travel, especially at speeds. Has to do with the fuel we use, just really purified solar energy.”

“How fast can you go?” James asked.

“Oh, faster than the speed of light.” Arty said, nonchalantly. 

“Isn’t that, you know, physically impossible?” 

“No,” Arty said, sitting back and wiping some sweat from his brow, “I wondered that too, when I first got here. I forget exactly what the deal is, but its something like… it’s impossible back in Earth’s galaxy, but not here. Here you can go up to sixty times the speed of light. I think in this galaxy space time is more compressed, or something? I don’t remember. But that’s how I managed to get to you guys so quickly.”

James snorted.

“Yeah, I know,” Arty conceded, “I know it took a long time for you observers. But I was in Genera when the embassy told me you were here, and that’s a good few light years away, and there’s immigration to deal with. Sorry, I came as fast as I could.” 

James nodded, resisting the urge to excuse Arty. He knew that Rachael wouldn’t excuse him. She’d snap back that he took his swell time from their perspective. Evidently Arty had the same thought, too. 

“If it helps, the journey back’ll be a lot quicker. Time dilation and all that. The quicker we travel, the less time it seems to take for us, in comparison to how time’s actually going.”

“Uh… what?”

“You know, time dilation.” Arty said, ripping a second rusted pipe away from the ship and leaning back against the hull to rest, “That thing where you put one clock on a rocket ship orbiting Earth, and you put an identical clock on the ground, and after a couple of orbits the clocks get out of sync? Basically, if your travelling really fast, like really fast, like we’ll be doing, it feels like time is progressing the same, but you start travelling through time faster than anyone else is. Time dilates. That’s why you were here for what, a few weeks? It’s been a few hours for me.”

“That’s pretty cool.” James conceded. “Confusing, but cool.” 

Arty smiled. “That’s why I need to replace all these pipes, even the ones that aren’t so rusted. I’m going to try and get back to Imperialis a bit faster; I reckon it ain’t wise to push Rachael’s patience with a long trip, and we don’t have space for food aboard the Buzz, so best to travel fast as we can. The nodeway - uh, that’s like a highway but between star systems - starts a bit further on from Pieria (that’s that silvery star over there). It’s just under an L long, so I reckon we can make it, uh I dunno, three hours, if we go at fifty-nine and nine. If I can I’ll push us to fifty-nine and nine-nine it’ll only take an hour, but I dunno, might be a bit much.”

“What does that mean?” James asked, feeling like an idiot.

“59.9 times the speed of light. Or 59.99 times, whichever.”

“And sixty is the maximum speed you can go at?” 

Arty nodded. “Not that you’d want to, even if you could. This girl can’t even go above fifty-nine and nine-nine, the operating system wont let you go any faster. Some of the luxury liners and that can go a few decimals higher, supposedly, but that close to max speed dilation gets a bit too extreme. Start to become a bit of a time capsule, you know?”

James, sighing, asked yet again, “What’d you mean?”

“Well,” Arty said, “If we travel at fifty times the speed of light, say it takes us seven days to get where we’re going, but it feels like four days to us. Say we travel at fifty-nine times, it takes us six and a bit days to get there but feels like one day to us. Travel at fifty-nine and nine, takes six and a little bit of a day, but it feels like three hours. You get diminishing returns, ya see? ‘Salways gonna take six days, but if you keep going faster it might only feel like a couple minutes, or a couple seconds. You could travel for weeks, but it’ll feel like an instant if your going fast enough. In which case, how do you know when to put on the breaks? You could travel years and years into the future by accident. Or on purpose, I guess. If that’s what your into.” 

“You can do that? Just travel into the future if you want?”

“I guess,” Arty shrugged, “If you sort out the computer to take you there. There’d be no going back though.”

***

Verginius Star System 

Planet Pieria 

In Orbit above Tennebraya

Pieria had not been to Galameis Caligna’s liking. He had been born there, a native Homo sapiens susceptor, complete with the chimeric skin patterning that marked him as such. As it had through his whole family, a ripple of ebony ran across Galameis’ skin. But not any more; those cells had been purged long ago, leaving only faint scar lines behind. It had disguised him as a plain-skinned Homo sapiens inferma, and let him walk amongst the stars. But it also meant that he'd never been able to return. He had left Pieria behind. 

He’d spent the first quarter of his life on that planet, in the macabre city of Carnem, trapped by shadows that might as well have been walls. Would there still be people down there who would recognise him? Surely they would all be dead now, having grown old and withered. Perhaps his entire lineage was gone. He had been travelling at many times the speed of light, for such a very long time. 

At extremely high speeds, time began to dilate; what to a pilot might seem a day, could be a month to an observer. Go fast enough - close enough to that theoretical maximum speed of sixty times the speed of light - and a ship become a time capsule. Years race by in moments, propelling you far into the future.

Galameis had been going that fast. It took a special kind of craft, one modified by the best Grey scientists and Susceptor mechanokinetics money could buy. Even then there was no way influence your trip, or when it would end. This sort of time travel was one-way. The ship would fly time until it broke down and died, and Galameis' ship was dying. The piping that pumped the solar fuel was now so derelict that not even additional layers of plasma shielding could save them. The air inside the ship was viscous, the Vanderdrone Inertial Dampeners so glitched and broken that they slowed everything down to a crawl. The operating system, detecting updates that it couldn’t even comprehend, broke down. Great clumps of binary code smeared themselves across the heads-up display, broken by lines of dead pixels. The ship shuddered, nudging its trajectory towards Pieria before powering down for good. After a long while of sitting in the dark, in the quiet, Galameis felt the ship rock. They’d entered orbit around Pieria. High above the atmosphere, the ship set to drifting. 

With an effort, Galameis shifted in his chair, to better see out of the unfiltered window to his left. Though he had hoped to never see his segregated world again, he also felt some pride in it. After all this time, it was still pure. There were no global cities of smoke and metal, no ozone holes or ocean-borne garbage barges. The North Ice was at its height, feeding down through the rings’ shadow like many fingers, clutching the world.

[Translated from Imperial Esperanto]

Dropping his gaze, Galameis reached for the bag at his feet. His zweihänder sat on top of it. The sword was wide and long, and made of metallic glass with a handle of printed leather. The scabbard was made of vantablack. It was an immense thing, but so was Galameis, and he often swung it with one hand, breaking through weapons and armour alike. Now it required an effort to shift. Beside it was another, smaller sword. Curved and covered in dried blood, its blade was processed steel, with a natural leather grip. It wasn’t his. It had recently become stuck in his shoulder, and it wasn’t until after boarding that he’d had the time to wrench it free. Aside from these and the clothes on his back, his only other possession sat in the bag at his feet: a tablet computer. He pulled it out and switched it on.

According to the tablet, the date was the twenty-second of Quaternary, year 413. He’d travelled forward a hundred years. Almost exactly. Was that significant of something, some intelligent intervention? Maybe, but if so it hardly mattered. More to the point, surely a hundred years was enough time for his friends to die. Surely that was longer than an Inferma could live, wasn’t it? Yes, of course it was, it was perhaps twice, or three times as long. And his friends had been of middle age when he’d run from them. Still…

Logging onto the Imperial Internet, to an online obituary index, and began to type in the names of his demons, one by one. Sator Electus had been reported dead on the 24th of Quinary, 306. His wife, Eyras, had died on the 25th. Krakinosk Amolakaran, the Okaridi warrior who had rammed the blade through Galameis’ shoulder, had lived substantially longer, finally passing away on the 99th of Unary, 310. Despite himself, Galameis couldn’t help but sigh with relief. The Okaridi had been almost as bad as Sator. 

What about Caesius? The obituary search yielded no results. Galameis opened another tab and looked more generally. It didn’t take him long to find that Caesius was still alive. 

“” Galameis muttered, tossing the tablet aside. It didn’t matter. So what if Caesius was still out there; Galameis didn’t care about him. The Grey was a no-one, who hung around Sator to benefit from association, like a skinny youth buddying up with the cool kids. But Sator was dead, and regardless of who else was still alive, with Sator gone he was finally free. 

“” Galameis said, shaking his hands as though he could throttle the air itself, “”

The curse sounded lame, even as he said it. 

A soft cooing came from behind his shoulder. It was the creature, Lamia, perched on the chair behind him. The size of a large dog, with great black claws and wiry fur, Lamia’s perch was a precarious one, but he was grateful of her presence. Alone in the dark, Lamia’s wordless whispers were the only thing to distract him from his last remaining demon. 

“” Galameis muttered, “”

 

Galameis shut his eyes tight, and shook his head to clear it, but the voice didn’t go away. It never went away. No matter what he did, or who he killed. No matter what life he tried to build for himself that voice was always there to tear him down. A constant presence at the back of his mind, an endless torture of tiny cuts. At one time, Galameis had thought the voice was some sort of schizophrenia, brought on by the barren life he’d lived on Pieria. It was a ghost in his mind, and one he ignored aside from a few minutes every day when he’d withdraw to battle with it, to surrender to it. Eventually he came to realise that the voice wasn’t only inside his head; others could hear it too. It was the reason that Sator had turned on him. It was the reason that Krakinosk had attacked him. It was the reason Caesius had evicted him from the Empire, driving him from Sanif and the fourth century, to a future where almost everyone he knew was dead. 

And now his last demon was the only ally he had left. 

Galameis glanced up. By now they had drifted below the ring network, between it and the planet, and the shadows which created Tennebraya flickered across them. He couldn’t see anything approaching from the planet’s surface.

Galameis grabbed the controls and shifted the ship, pointing its nose toward the planet’s ring network above. It was writhing, small pieces breaking off and forming ships which flew down to meet him. Pacifist Union Ships. From its spot on the floor, the tablet lit up again. It had landed face-up, and now the screen bulged outward, permitting the face that had appeared on it a greater view of Galameis’ ship. It was an Ozlonian. Resembling something between a Grey and an Inferma, it was tall and pale, with sunken features and long hair. Stalked eyes swivelled, one finding Galameis while the other focused on piloting his own ship. 

“Gräl pösodik levalanaf. Dalestümik Ozlone büdöns ol kosädön ol desin.” the creature shouted. Galameis understood nothing. The Ozlonian language was a robust one, and hard to learn. Even in the Pacifist Union, most races preferred Solresi, a much simpler language based on music.  

“” 

Author's Note

The first part of this chapter relates to other characters, James and Rachael, from previous chapters.