Alias Tomorrow

Hey folks, it’s a milestone in the journey of launching Alias Tomorrow.

You can order your Kindle copy now and have it delivered in November, when the book launches.

Check out the promotional video and then click here for the opportunity to jump aboard with a pre-order.

Here is a sample of the first few pages:

One

The dwellers in the glades of blissful freedom made coffee while he searched for words in the shadows. When they came, they would ring with the sound of trumpets and distant harmonies.

Go.

Alpha

Antioch could no longer say with confidence that his conversations with Reid had been kept confidential. Yes, they had taken place in the Zocalo during the recreations of the ancient fire festival. But hidden among the costumed participants there could have been OneWorld plants.

“Look, man. Can you tell me whether Reid will even be here in fifteen minutes?” asked Garcia.

“Wait, give him a chance to show up,” said Antioch.

“No time,” said Garcia.

“So, you’re suggesting that we ditch him. He shows up here and the beach is empty.”

Garcia ignored him, shoulders twitching with some memory of insolence or trauma.

“Look at them. They ain’t no fishermen,” said Garcia.

“Those boys? They’re here every day fishing. Snapper, parrot fish. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Antioch.

“Parrot fish? They extinct now, like fifty years, brother. You've been set up with some cheap ass special effects.”

There was a glitch, a glint of light reflecting off the nets cast by the fishermen from off of the rock. Antioch suddenly thought that Garcia might be right, had probably been right all along. That meant that all the months of stalking and cultivating Reid as an informer, all the notes he carried in his head from their conversations, all the coded entries on the transponder were now worthless. What’s more, they were dangerous and would need to be wiped.

“Okay. Say it’s all shit, the Reid notes, all his so-called info. We go up to Tijuana. And then what? What’s Shoeman going to say? That’s gonna be one hell of a conversation,” said Antioch.

“Shoeman ain’t even real, man. Getcha game on, Antioch,” said Garcia.

“How do I know you're real?”

“How do you know anything? Shithead.”

Garcia, annoying as he seemed, had a point. Antioch had a hard time knowing anything was real. He’d been raised by Mancie Littell in Tennessee with the perhaps imagined words of his long absent father Don forever in his ears, ringing the alarm of fight. As a runaway teen landing in the streets of Knoxville, he’d come under the influence of a Chomskyite cell that espoused action against the machine as a path to cleansing and personal salvation. Disillusioned with the personal politics of utopia, he’d joined the Democravian military, volunteering to salvage his abused sense of personal honor in what remained of his youth. Years later, battle scarred, part of that defeated army under General Steiner that had surrendered to OneWorld, still searching for redemption, he’d drifted out west. He’d married Winona, and they’d had a daughter, Uvlin, who was the key to their happiness.

He took on freelance work, investigative gigs during those years, and ended up working full-time undercover for Shoeman’s foundation, the Anthrog Nosti. He liked reporting to Shoeman because the occasional existential threat gave him direction and a backstop to his own still meandering consciousness.

“Let’s go,” said Antioch.

“See?” said Garcia.

The two men walked silently, plodding across the waste ground of a parking lot in Cabo San Lucas. In their wake the wind picked up, scattering spouts of dust across the pockmarked asphalt. The Pacific shimmered beyond the break, a silver pool of mystery. In the distance, shrouds of unresolved matter blanketed an army of giant blades. They rotated at a pace dictated by a fragmented logic that was the object of their quest.

Zipping up Carretera Uno, the coast road to La Paz, they stopped at a charging station in the center of a dusty, overheated crossroad. Teenaged girls ate soft synthetic chocolate cones in the shade, sitting cross-legged at the curb. Local boys, rodeo stars, wearing shades and braided rainbow mullets, charged their amphibious vehicles, customized Chinese puddle hoppers, while Garcia and Antioch waited on their bikes. Only their channel blockers, downloaded on the black market, rendered them immune from the wireless, dopamine enhancing blasts from the OneWorld puppet regime in the radius of the station. Once the bikes were fully charged, they looked around, ignoring the local youth, and gunned the electric motors for the road again.

The sun was sinking out on the horizon, torching, eternal fire in and out of sight. At the crest of the hills, buzzards rode the thermals in silent predatory spirals, drifting up and out of the violet dusk. It hadn’t rained in 16 months. The desalination plants, running on modular fission, worked overtime to provide the remnant population, descendants of the indigenous Guaycura mixed with a century’s refugees from around the globe. The OneWorld north of the border was a sprawling, amnesiac haven amid the wreckage of civilizational collapse. South of the border the lands were running out of water.

Antioch’s mind relaxed its fearsome grip on his sympathetic nervous system. He checked the transponder on his wrist with a glance. It was 6:30 Pacific Time. Uvlin was asleep in Atlanta, dreaming her nightly attempts to get unstuck from whatever road she had wandered off on. His cortisol levels were fine but the catecholamines were still in the orange zone. What would Shoeman say? A moment, a breath, a day, and a night at a time. He was on the road, a particularly corrugated stretch of hills, water and sky under the planet’s rotational spell of light and gravity. In a few weeks, he would head back East to see Uvlin, settle his mind, see she was okay. They would catch up, eat at her favorite restaurants, hang out with her friends, and try to forget the pain of Winona’s long-expected last flight. Whose fault? No-one’s fault. Antioch’s brain had automated the call and response to that thought.

Two

The phone buzzed on his desk. He hoped it would be Daniel, calling with an update on travel plans. He picked up the phone, thumbing the cracked screen. It was not a known contact, but a 603 area code. He took a chance. A tele-marketer would be an amusing distraction, he thought.

“Hello, is this William Morrow?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Good morning, William. This is Shelly Patenaud with Sun River Bank in Hanover. I believe you are the executor of the Margaret O’Donnell Cox estate. Is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

Margaret O’Donnell Cox. Six months gone. Predeceased by second husband Rich Cox, from Covid. Nana’s remembrance service in St. Agnes a muddy March morning. Siblings, cousins and long lost acquaintances arrived in waves. Sarah, Mackenzy, and Ellen between, cradling them each with her arms, together in the front row of folding chairs in the community room, facing the table lined with photos and candles. He spoke, tears streaming freely on some of their faces. He couldn’t remember now what he had said. Daniel stood in the back with his cousins, dressed in rough weather gear and work boots. The month before, when the old woman had tossed and turned on her final fevered dream, Daniel had called home at midnight on WhatsApp from the depth of the PNW, fuzzy cell phone image of his face, long, black hair covering his eyes, in some darkened Portland street, swaying in the dusk.

Two weeks ago she'd appeared in two dreams. He'd noted them down, as much as he could remember.

“You are aware that the account here is off limits until the probate process has run its course.”

“Yes,” said Morrow, red flags slowly rising on the tracks of his muddied synapses. He reached for his coffee and waited. The woman cleared her throat and shuffled around in her swivel seat in the Hanover branch office.

“There was an attempted withdrawal several hours ago from that account. The server indicates it came from a computer logged in in your vicinity, William.”

“Well, that’s impossible.”

“In any case, we are obligated by federal regulations to inform you and do some verification. You’re saying it wasn’t you.”

“Yeah, no. Wasn’t me. Or anybody here.”

Ellen drifted by in her slippers behind him, padding softly on the old, worn pine boards. Mackenzy and Saroj slipped in the back door from the apples. Ellen caught them and directed them to the kitchen table with some commentary on the state of the season and early fall leaf colors.

Shelly Patenaud was going on about “the account has been restored to default status” and “avoiding significant short and long-term financial damage”, and “we are prepared to offer you credit monitoring and identity protection services.”

“Can I have your social security number, William?” she asked.

“My social security number? Sure,” said Morrow, stalling for a second until the numbers appeared in his mind. “Zero five two…”

“No,” said Ellen, appearing at his shoulder. “Don’t give them…”

“What?” asked Morrow, covering the bottom of the cell phone with his index finger.”

“Not your social,” said Ellen.

Morrow lifted his index finger and raised the phone to his chin.

“I’m sorry. I guess I prefer to come in in person.”

“That’s fine,” said the woman. “You do understand the account is frozen until then.”

“Yes,” said Morrow stiffly, putting the phone down on the table. Ellen lifted it and checked it for the details of the call, to make sure it was off. She placed it back on the table.

“Why don’t you come and chat for a bit. There’s fresh coffee.”

“I don’t need more distraction right now,” he grumbled.

“Oh, come on. It will be good for Mackenzy,” said Ellen, her hazel eyes firmly fixed on him. “They’re already bored,” she whispered.

“Well, that’s not…”

“Shh,” she admonished.

Morrow rose to his feet, stretching, putting the work aside. The low morning sunlight in the window struck him harshly. He stepped toward the kitchen. Mackenzy and Saroj sat at the table. Mackenzy laughed at something Saroj was saying. Morrow was jealous for an instant. He loved his daughter’s laugh possessively.

“Well, I guess I will have a refill,” said Morrow, pouring himself a cup of coffee again from the french press on the wood stove. The echinacea flowering outside swayed in a gust of wind, survivor of the tropical storm that had swept through overnight.

“How are you, Dad?” asked Mackenzy.

“I’m all right,” said Morrow. “How did you two sleep?”

“Saroj. Allergies,” said Mackenzy, holding up her palm, a parodic echo of television show comedians.

“I don’t know what it is. Maybe pollen,” said Saroj in a sing-song, congested voice, hints of a British colonial past.

“Maybe it’s the country,” said Mackenzy wryly, screwing up her lips in a comedian’s smile, bringing awkward possibilities to the surface in a way that Morrow identified as one of his mother’s ancient traits to put people at ease. Sometimes it backfired. It took confidence, a social confidence that Morrow himself had never possessed.

Saroj laughed.

“Could be,” he said.

“You’d think the rain would have washed away any pollen in the air. But with the changing climate, the pollen season is getting much longer,” said Morrow, leaning against the window in what he hoped was an authoritative yet friendly pose.

“And the growing season,” said Saroj. “Possibilities for cash crops, Mr. Morrow?” he added.

“Well,” said Morrow. “Maybe.”

“Farming is always going to be a hard row to hoe,” said Ellen, wiping a counter with a kitchen cloth.

“Especially in today’s environment,” added Morrow.

“We had the sheep. Remember?” said Ellen.

“I wish we still had them,” said Mackenzy wistfully.

“Well, you all decided you were vegetarians at some point in the not too distant past. Made keeping the sheep a difficult proposition to justify,” said Morrow.

“We couldn’t stand to see them disappear once we figured out we were eating our cute little things, could we,” said Mackenzy.

“We always tried to get them loaded and off to the butcher while you were asleep on the weekends,” said Ellen.

“Saroj,” coughed Morrow seriously. “We had visions of ourselves as homesteaders when we moved here over twenty years ago.”

Morrow wanted Saroj, from Punjab and studying in his first year at the college in Maine where his daughter also was matriculated, to see that once they had been appropriately filled with grand ideas about how to live lives of balance and sustainability. Now their field, once humming with an electric fence and mowed by the sheep, was overgrown with ragweed, nettles, thistle and milkweed. At least it qualified as a pollinator friendly, successional ecosystem, if Saroj or anyone were to ask.

“Youthful idealism,” said Ellen, smiling at him, tolerant of both their foibles.

“Visions,” said Saroj, looking at Mackenzy.

He wasn't smirking, as far as Morrow could tell. But he didn’t trust the utterance, and Mackenzy’s tight-lipped smile was a new expression. Morrow stored away his thoughts, consigning them in a practiced move to memory.

“We could go for a hike in the woods,” said Ellen. “Show Saroj the woods. Our woods.”

“It’s not our woods anymore, Mom. The ATVs have taken over,” said Mackenzy sourly.

“Oh, no. There’s still our woods,” said Ellen insistently.

Mother and daughter stared at each other, banking their secret accords and disagreements, the shared years that had passed as the children grew into their adult selves in flashes of time. Morrow thought he should say something, but couldn't think what. He gulped a large part of his lukewarm coffee and retreated into thoughts of his book. Where was it headed? Who was the intended audience? He needed to develop the elevator pitch for a phone call he had scheduled with Mitch Epp, his agent in Los Angeles in the coming week. He could feel his throat tighten with the thought.

The buzzing in the kitchen rose in pitch. Seated again at the table in the dining room, away from the main stream of breakfast, Morrow bent to the task, staring at the last thing he’d written before the interruption of the phone call from Sun River Bank. This is what his work had alway boiled down to, staring at a blank screen and waiting patiently for a rising impulse to lift his fingers into action. He could be hiding from something, missing something back at the breakfast table, but Morrow would not contemplate that right away. More to the point though, what was he railing against in this book? How would it all go down in the end? That was the beauty of the calling that had attracted him from the beginning, the notion of being a servant to some hidden narrative rising from the shadows. It always did.

“Come on, Dad. Get ready.”

On the other hand, there was Mackenzy, tugging at his attention. Just as he was about to get started again. There could be no mistaking it now. This was life calling. He couldn’t resist.

Morrow sighed and rose again from the table. Outside, beyond the old double-hung windows, the sun had broken through clouds and streamed a bright, rising light on the dying red leaves of the maple tree that overspread the driveway. The four of them set out up the dirt road, past the new houses that led to the Gorman farm at the top of the hill. Here, up the rutted drive, behind the ruined old farmhouse, beyond the rusting hulks of a tractor and the two moving trucks that had once served as grain storage, was the old Class VI road leading into the reserve of forest that had last been logged when Dwight Gorman had still roamed the earth. Morrow was explaining how Dwight’s life had been forever set on the downward spiral typical of late stage capitalism and the get-big-or-get-out mentality that afflicted his country. Saroj interrupted him.

“Does the town not have a health officer?” he asked. Morrow wondered whether he was being intentionally spoofed.

“Oh, not really,” said Ellen, catching up to them with Mackenzy at her side.

“A health officer,” said Saroj, repeating himself in case she hadn’t heard. “I mean look at the state of this. There could be issues, no?”

“We don’t have that sort of a town,” said Ellen, grabbing Morrow by the arm. “It’s more of a … small town with a libertarian bent. “Live free or die’ is our state motto,” she added. “Wouldn’t you say, William?”

“You’re doing fine, dear,” said Morrow. Ellen had a stronger handle on local politics. Starting out as a school nurse, Ellen had risen to the position of hospital administrator, working in the orthopedic section of the Catholic Medical Center in Manchester.

“My God,” said Saroj. “This would never do.”

Morrow liked the fact that the kid was expressing shock. But he, William Morrow, author of science fiction, creator of imaginary worlds, liked the wrack and ruin of the place. It made it attractive, in his opinion, a better spot from which to observe the entropy that ran the table in the wider sphere. Eventually, all their efforts came to this, to the beauty that lay in decrepitude. You might as well accept it. How could he communicate that thought? He would put it in the book he was writing. He made a note to himself: ruined house, rising tides.

In the woods now, they walked two abreast along the old logging track cut not too many years ago by oxen-drawn carts in the snow and mud of the Wabenaki forest, through stands of beech, birch, oak, and maple second growth, occasionally big old hemlock survivors of the first clearances, and the bare, skeletal remainders of the ash, fallen prey in the last few years to invasive, wood- boring beetles. Morrow looked up at the virgin blue sky through the trunks straining upwards, drawn by the sun in a millennial feeding frenzy. He wondered about his own life and what was pulling him along, now that he had reached the age where the clamor of existence no longer seemed as compelling. Was it mere inertia, strength of habit, like the solid trunks carrying the canopy of leaves, that held him on the path? Or was it Ellen, her lithe frame belying a strength and conviction that she herself did not believe she possessed, that beckoned him further? He loved the forest for the way it inevitably drew him into a search for deeper answers to the existential questions. He pushed them away, deeper into denial because there were no answers. Slow down, you mere two-legged creature, was what the woods seemed to be saying.

They heard the drone in the woods long before the ATVs appeared at a junction of two snowmobile trails, four of them, one behind the other, two riders on each vehicle. They were accelerating up the incline of the trail towards them. The driver of the first ATV slowed when he saw them, the second following suit. He smiled as he drew alongside. He had a red beard, bad teeth and a grin in his eyes behind the plastic workshop goggles. The four of them instinctively stepped off the trail and paused, standing safely among the stones of an ancient border wall and the snarl of old logging operations as the ATVs passed by.

Beta

It was Garcia checking in.

“I say we pull off, get some sleep,” said Antioch, slowing down around a curve south of Mulege. There was static on the headset. Antioch could swear the static was telling him something about Garcia’s thoughts. Quantum glitches interfering with the resistance. Garcia was cutting speed, slowing down. Improvisation like the fox. Their winding, back-pedaling trail would be impossible to decipher or predict. Instead of riding all night, which they had intended in order to arrive in Tijuana in time for the meeting with Shoeman, they would pull off and camp out incognito.

“Yeah, okay,” said Garcia, braking. As did Antioch. They pulled off the road.

A quarter moon rose just out from a headland that jutted eastward. Its light spread a silver cone on the still waters of the Sea of Cortez. They maneuvered onto a furrowed foot path and wound through the brush and boulders along the hill, descending gently towards a slightly indented bay ahead. Antioch stopped, putting his left boot down and leaning into the hill as Garcia caught up. Their way was blocked by glinting snags of barbed wire. The two motorcycles alternated strafing light searches across the hillside.

“What do you think?” asked Antioch into the headpiece, adjusting the volume down on the dashboard above the battery pack.

“It’s all right. We go down there and get underneath the wire.”

Antioch looked over to verify the direction Garcia intended. Cutting back into the headland to the left and behind, along the diagonal path of the fence, there seemed to be a gully in the shadows, the crotch of the land, perhaps formed by recent flood waters coming off the the ridge out of which the moon seemed to be rising, as if expelled from its hiding place. He wouldn’t have picked such a trail himself, but working with Garcia meant trusting Garcia’s instincts.

The two motorcycles made their way in the shadows of the moon down into Garcia's gulley. When they came across a ditch with the barbed wire fence cutting across it, they paused again. Antioch shut off the motor to save power while they figured out how to get through the wire. Garcia followed suit. They pulled off their helmets to speak and be heard more clearly.

“Only thing I can see is to slide the bikes under,” said Antioch.

They worked in the dark to unpack the pannier bags and dry packs and sling them over to the far side of the barbed wire fence, careful not to snag or rip any fibers from the all weather jackets that could give away any clues to their passage. Then they wheeled the bikes one by one into the ditch, laid them on their sides, at a good angle to the fence, on top of one of the foil sided blankets, and pulled them under the wire, pried upwards by carefully placed mesquite branches. It was hard and slow, but they succeeded in a short time to sit back on their bikes with all of the gear assembled. The night was as quiet as before, just the sound of water lapping rhythmically on the rocks of the dark headland. Antioch took a deep breath, stretching his back, quieting the nerves.

Switching the bikes back on, they continued down on the beach side of the fence. The beach was about a hundred yards long, and about thirty yards wide at low tide. There was one sparse, tin roofed palapa down at the south end but no other visible sign of human habitation. The water out to the horizon was lit silver by the risen moon, the stillness only broken by the sound of howling coyotes to the back of them. When they had the camping tarp stretched out over the soft sand, yellow in the moonlight above the tidal flotsam, and the military issue sleeping pads inflated, Garcia broke out a bottle of pulque he’d picked up in Mazatlan. Antioch brushed his teeth down at the water’s edge. Garcia’s drinking habit bothered him, although he had also once been a heavy drinker. That was one thing that got in the way of Garcia’s effectiveness – his need for recreational drugs no matter where they were and what the circumstances. He walked back to the tarp, making a checklist of what he could see, a hillside broken by boulders, mesquite, cactus, and shadow, and above it the extrusion of the Milky Way. He took a long slug of water from the camel pack and settled under the foil blanket, prepared to forget all cares and dream of better, more peaceful days.

“Set your alarm, Garcia,” he said.

“What time?”

“We got thirteen hours of riding to get to Tijuana.”

“Five o’clock?

“Sounds good.”

“You going to sleep?” asked Garcia.

“Of course,” said Antioch.

He waited for a response. Garcia lifted the bottle and slugged down a couple of long gulps. Antioch screwed himself further under the foil blanket. The coyotes sang in blood-thirsty yips to the moon. Soon he would be in Atlanta and none of this would matter. The OneWorld and its ever-growing totalitarian presence, Shoeman’s shock troops for the beleaguered democratic resistance – a plague on both their houses – before drifting off to sleep, perhaps to a dream of a better, less analytic, more synthetic path.

Garcia was shaking him.

“Get up, dude,” said Garcia.

It was early light. Dawn. Maybe five. He sat up.

“Is it time?”

“Look.”

Garcia’s voice was hushed, the air caught in his larynx by something, an unexpected event, maybe a person. He ran instantly through several possibilities: the bikes had been stolen, the tide was swamping, someone was there, perhaps the regime’s guardia regional. But no, he couldn’t hear the waves any closer or the sound of any humans. And the theft of the bikes was way too improbable. Garcia was prone to these fits of sudden, alcohol induced panic. It was probably nothing, thought Antioch, rubbing his eyes before propping himself on his elbow, proceeding to push up with his hand in the sand, wet with condensation.

He twisted and turned from under the tarp to look to the east, towards the waters of the little bay where they had parked for the night, the waves lapping placidly on the beach.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Out in the bay was a barge of some sort, a long, flat boat above the mercurial waters.

“Don’t know,” said Garcia, vindicated.

Antioch made a sudden burst out from under the blanket. Garcia slapped an arm across his chest to slow him down.

“Woah, there, bro.”

“What are you doing?” sputtered Antioch.

“It could be OneWorld. Stay down.”

Their wrestling somehow set the vessel in motion. It slowly began to approach the shore, growing larger, sprouting outriggers, humming in an insect-like low pitch as they spread, until it reached the shallows, where it set the outriggers down and began to levitate itself out of the water like a giant six-legged beast.

Antioch felt ill, a sudden wave of nausea hitting him full force. With extreme difficulty he willed himself to move, Garcia following after him. Both men stood on the sand, unsteady on their feet, staring at the horrific object rising before them.

Panic-struck, they dashed in a blur to their bikes where they were parked against the rock edge of the cliff. The shadow of the boat loomed behind. Despite the pull of the boat, exerting a kind of gravitational force, they managed to sit astride the bikes, ready to haul out of there, but the motors weren’t switching on. Nothing was happening.

“What the fuck’s this now?” groaned Garcia.

“Some kind of force field,” said Antioch, panting for breath. “Can’t start.”

“OneWorld bullshit!”

Garcia jumped off the useless motorcycle back to his feet, followed by Antioch. But the ground beneath was disappearing, as was the sand and the sky, all of Antioch’s field of vision, even when he turned and looked at Garcia beside his bike, sucked down some swirling vortex towards the vessel hanging overhead like a monstrous bird of prey, blacking out the sun.

Antioch retained consciousness. He was aware, even as he spun around and around in some dream state, that he was still there, still relatively conscious and able to identify himself as an observer undergoing the experience of being subjected to this panoply of dreams.

His mother and father and a black river banked by willows. He was swimming in the deep part of the river as was his baby sister Skye, who had died when he was twelve in a drowning accident on Eagle Creek. His mother Mancie, who’d worked as a hair stylist in town for decades and was buried in the Benton County Memorial Garden, was calling from the shore, but they couldn’t hear her. Mancie always responded “out west" when he asked where his father was, so he imagined his final resting place was a patch of desert out on the high plains south of the urban sprawl of Greater Las Vegas. But Skye, whom he did not recognize, her face was fuzzy in his mind’s eye, was telling him that his father wanted him to contact an attorney, that he wanted his remains transferred to the family plot next to Mancie, who had been ripped away from him by the unmitigated impact of his afflictions.

He didn’t know where he was. He tried to imagine where he was going. He wasn’t sure he was still alive in the traditional sense of the word: breathing, with a heart beat, with an ability to mobilize himself after the necessary resources to survive. What would those be? That was also a difficult question to answer on his own. He really needed to acknowledge his own limitations regarding the basic questions of existence that had plagued him along with his father, Don Littell, and probably everyone that had come before. The ones who came after – Uvlin and her children, were she ever to find an appropriate mate and partner with whom to share her DNA, they might not have the same concerns. He couldn’t be sure of that, either. Times changed, that was for sure. It was changing very fast about now. He had the distinct impression of crossing a threshold in the fabric of the universe, which put a stop to all his useless contemplations.

He opened his eyes. A blank white slab of metallic ceiling and inset, blinding halide lights. He tilted his chin, craned his neck upwards and stretched his back and shoulders. Two metal chairs, two indistinct shapes of people in the chairs, no nonsense types, observing him as he awoke. Where was this? And where was Garcia? One of the observers slowly stood and approached the foot of the bed where he was lying. He could see a crisp uniform shirt over broad, heavily muscled arms, the patches of the Kraken Brigade, the expeditionary force of OneWorld, on the sleeves. At one time they had been mostly hired mercenaries from the former Islamic regions of the Caucasus, originally re-formed from the fragments of the Russian Federation’s Wagner divisions, after the fall of Kazakhstan.

A face took shape before him. Black, creased lines on a short forehead and small, smug eyes under heavy brows. This was not going to be fun. Antioch wondered if there was going to be vindictive behavior – beheadings, torture and the like.

“We are happy to have you with us now, Mr. Antioch Littell. How do you feel? Is there anything you would like?”

“Yes, I need you to tell me where I am."

“Admirable. How you say straightforward. Very much with the personality profile. But you are a prisoner, I regret to inform, of the Admiral Nazar, one of the Kraken fleet’s amphibian spearheads. We are to keep you safe and how you say secured until we reach our destination, Base Svyatogor on the Red Planet, Mars. Your companion is in a separate habitation. You are to be provided with whatever you like, food, drugs, entertainment, and any other which you need. What do you like? The sooner you become how you say accustomed to the passage rules of the space fleet, the better for us all.”

“And who do I have the pleasure of dealing with?

“Major Ignace Dmitrievsky at your service.”

"Nice to meet you.”

“Yes. Equally. My pleasure as well.”

“Have we … met before?”

“I believe we may have previously met, eh, metaphorically. But not in a personal way.”

“Kazakhstan.”

“Kanyagash. Yes. We are well aware of your time in the 69th Armored Division, Sergeant Major.”

“We lost a lot of men and a lot of armor in that one.”

“I’m sure you remember it well. The roads of Dzagurk and Yrgyz were a strategic, how you say a bad loss for our Wagner Division that day.”

“February, 2132. I think I can still feel it right here.”

Antioch gripped his right femur, grazed by gun fire. He'd never fully recovered strength there.

“I was also once an infantry scout. Spetsnaz. We have a lot in common, Antioch.”

“Very nice. I want to know where Garcia is.”

“Your companion Mr. Jones is comfortable. Have no fear for him. He has quickly requested that he could be well provided with satinate. That is something we are fulfilling in a very quick time. Our satinate stores are indigenous, from greenhouses on board. Let me know if you need it. Anything you need, Antioch. We will try to satisfy. Just one question about the Anthrog Nosti. We believe you have been in employment, correct?”

“No clue. Garcia and I run a bike shop in San Clemente. I’ll be sure to let you know if I need anything. But I'd like to have access to Garcia. He’s a simple man, but easily confused,” said Antioch, sitting up and looking Dmitrievsky carefully in both eyes. He had a slight drift in the right pupil. No, he was not an avatar. Antioch was almost disappointed, since it meant he was dealing with a human with a real propensity for charm. Dmitrievsky was likable, partly because of their shared history of service, but also because he seemed to be genuinely capable of a civilized empathy. He quickly reminded himself not to be lulled into identification with his captors. The Stockholm Syndrome would be among the psychological ploys that the OneWorld would use to dominate and destroy his will to freedom.

They were in a pickle, there was no doubt. Bound for Mars across 140 million miles of space in an interplanetary vessel, probably of the Eskelon class, with the famed fusion-powered Magnitron jets built by Bosch Steinburgh in the early 2130s. It made it all the easier to bear if one could hope for decent treatment. But he knew there was nothing valued in that kind of approach by Dmitrievsky’s bosses. On the other hand, in order to gain access to his knowledge of Shoeman’s network of resistance activists, they would need to keep him alive, lull him into a state of complacency, and get him to spill the beans the old-fashioned way. The secrets of the brain’s memory stores were as fathomless as they had ever been.

He slept again, laying down with a heavy feeling of loss on the cot in this alcove on the Nazar. There was nothing left to do, no twisting thoughts at this point would avail to change the basic state of things. The weight of his failure seemed lighter than he would have thought, a mercy on the part of destiny. He was afforded the luxury of sleep, a legacy of the planet and the evolutionary matrix they were leaving behind. Despite the curving walls of his prison, he held in his mind's eye the image of the royal blue orb.