• Published 16th May 2014
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Planet Hell: The Redemption of Harmony - solocitizen



While searching for his childhood friend, Thunder Gale is confronted by an ancient presence that forces him to reconcile the darkest elements of his soul, or die trying.

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14. Silent Shout

Planet Hell
Solocitizen

14.
Silent Shout

1st of Planting Season, 10,056 AC
Hearts and Hooves Day

Empty houses and apartment complexes sprawled over the hills and, with their white walls against the setting sun, painted the endless suburbs beyond the windows of the tram orange. Thunder Gale rested his head on the cool of the glass and watched it all speed by. Every now and then the swaying of the tram jostled the glass and him apart and back together.

Aside from Thunder Gale and his two companions, XO Lightning Fire and their jumpship pilot, Gerard, the tramcar was empty. Its seats still smelled of fresh plastic, and the interior was factory white.

Gerard fidgeted in the seat behind him while Lightning Fire, the ever vigilant soldier, stood with one hoof grappled to a pole a few feet away.

“Hey!” Gerard kicked at the back of his seat to get his attention. “When we get to the tower, there’s a package I gotta run and pick up.”

“We don’t know what to ask for.” Thunder Gale turned to him. “You’re the one who’s going to have to make the maneuver, not us.”

“Yeah, I know, but I have to take care of this real quick. Okay?”

Thunder let out a sigh and turned back to the window.

“I think that’s Greener Pastures now.” Lightning Fire peered up the central aisle.

The city hit them from around the bend in the hillside and it was anything but green. Brown hovels jumbled together cluttered every available foot of real-estate between the city walls, and the lonely towers piercing the clouds above.

Originally the colonization of Azrael IV was a joint effort by the New Canterlot Kingdom and some big corporation. The corporation showed up before the colonists, scrubbed the atmosphere clean of chlorine, and installed some basic infrastructure, housing, and industrial projects. The plan was that the government would pay for the terraforming and then start shipping colonists over. They got as far as sending the first wave over, and then, The Empire declared war on the unicorn kingdom and the colony was abandoned. The settlers were too poor to purchase the pre-existing structures and too few to make a real start at colonization on their own, and the corporation staffed just enough employees to defend their investments.

Beneath the tram, and Thunder Gale’s scanning eyes, unicorns hustled to and fro down the dirty alleyways and sun-bleached homes. There were so many of them, and all of them were half-starved and so stained with grime that their pastel colored coats blended into the buildings.

Though none of the crew knew it yet; but they were out of money to pay for passage back to Marble, or anywhere for that matter. Thunder stiffened in his seat and his heart raced in his chest at the sight of the unicorns below.

“Was this what the lower side of Pegatropolis was like?” He pulled himself away from the window just long enough to put the question to Lightning Fire. He had picked out a crisp cuirass he saved for public events earlier that morning, and it squeaked on the seat every time he moved.

“No,” she said. “It’s worse; you can’t see the sky.”

Gerard shifted in his seat.

The tram sped over the walls of the corporate sector and the impoverished city vanished. The streets there were clean, well organized, and constructed with anal-retentive precision. And empty.

They disembarked less than a block away from their destination: a gleaming blue tower with a holographic emblem, a heart backed by a shield, over its entrance. Once through the revolving doors, the receptionist pointed them toward the hyperlift and they set off, with their hooves, and talons, clicking on the marble. Thunder Gale counted the floors until they hit the bottom, and neither his XO nor the griffon said anything on the way down.

As soon as the hyperlift opened a beaming unicorn with a spiky mane almost too tall for the doorway stuck out his hoof and said, “I’m Dr. Wise Guy—and yes, that’s my real name—and I’m the head of the Interplanetary Express’s R and D department here on Azrael IV. I’ll be your guide today!”

“I’m Major Gale.” He shook his hoof.

“Yes, I’ve heard of you.” Dr. Guy bounced over to Lightning Fire and gave her his hoof. “And you must be General Fire, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” And then he did the same with Gerard.

“And what about me?” Gerard asked. “Don’t you know my name too?”

“Of course I do.” Dr. Guy retracted his hoof from Gerard’s talons. “The package you’ve requested is waiting along with details on your next assignment in Personnel Resources.”

Gerard shifted on one talon to the other and nodded his head.

“It’s really very rare that I ever get visitors down here,” Dr. Guy said. “My colleagues transferred to the facility on Azrael III, which I suspect is what brought you here. I’ll give you a quick tour and then I’ll show you The Cartographer.”

“If you don’t mind, we’re in a hurry to continue our mission.” Thunder Gale held up a hoof between him and Dr. Guy as if it were a wall.

“Very well, come right this way and we can get started.”

Past the vacant offices and plastic-wrapped laboratories, he led them to a blast proof hatch that required both a retinal scan and a sample of his voice before it cracked open.

It was completely dark on the other side, and even as Thunder Gale leaned his head beyond the hatch, he couldn’t see anything other than the black, but from the echo of his own hoof-falls he knew he was staring into an enormous and empty chamber.

“What is this?” he asked.

“This is the only way we know of to get to the third planet.” Dr. Guy trotted past the hatch and into the blackness beyond. “It’s also The Interplanetary Express’s best kept secret, and the only reason why I’m still here and not with my colleagues.”

A lever snapped into place, and the roof overhead groaned and clanked. The scent of burning oil trickled in throughout the chamber. He looked up right as a flash as bright as the sun light up the room.

He hissed.

“My apologies,” Dr. Guy said. “Sometimes it does that if it hasn’t been used in a few weeks.”

When the light dimmed enough for Thunder Gale to open his eyes again, he found himself standing amidst a star field. They peppered the walls and floor and the dome over his head. A child-like part of him couldn’t help but gaze upon the lights in awe. It reminded him of his father’s office.

In the center of the room spun an orb orange and angry as the sun over Azrael IV. Eight spheres of brass revolved around it on their own concentric rings, the outermost of which orbited along the wall and all the way around the chamber. In fact, now that he thought about it, the entire thing probably was a model of the Azrael system.

The weird part of it was that every orb and ring hung eight feet off the ground—without any visible poles or strings holding it up. That freaked him out the more he thought about it. He had seen machines that could levitate a cat before, on Hellas, but never as stable or as delicately.

“How’s it doing that?” Thunder crept toward the farthest ring and waved a hoof underneath it. “If it’s magnetic, how come the buttons aren’t flying off my cuirass?”

“Of course it’s a magnet.” Lightning Fire edged closer to the sun in the center, but stopped halfway. “How else are they doing it? Magic?”

“It might as well be,” said Dr. Guy. “Everything here is held up by some sort of quantum suppression field. I can’t tell you more than that, not because I don’t want to, but because our best scientists and engineers don’t have any more than a theoretical understanding of its mechanisms.”

“So how’d you even build it in the first place?” Thunder Gale glanced at him, and then back to the planets and their sun.

“We didn’t build it.” Dr. Wise shook his head and his mane wobbled and swayed with him. “We found it here. We don’t know who, or what, created this. All I do know is that it required an understanding of electromagnetism and quantum physics that far exceeds our own.”

Thunder Gale pulled himself away from the solar system, and looked to him as he asked: “So who built it?”

Lightning Fire turned to the doctor and waited for his answer.

“I don’t know what did or didn’t. There isn’t enough data to draw any conclusions and I don’t care to speculate. You wanted to get to Azrael III, didn’t you? The Cartographer—that’s what the survey team named it—is the only way to get there, and that’s all we know. That and it’s not so much a model as it is a quantum projection of some kind rendered in real time. At least, that’s as far as I’d care to guess.”

He pointed at the center and Thunder Gale followed his hoof all the way to the sun. “Look and watch. The next appearance should be any second now.”

Two planets orbited close to the sun. Both were brass and shining against the light, but much further away and across an empty expanse, the next planet sat along its ring. Then, as Thunder Gale traced Wise Guy’s hoof back to the sun, a spot in the gap shimmered, and wobbled, and filled with charcoal as hard and solid as metal until a third planet coalesced from out of the empty space. Unlike the others, it had no ring and was as black as the void between the stars.

“Okay, Dr. Guy, you’ve got my attention.” Thunder Gale trotted to the orb and raised his hoof to shield his eyes from the sun. “What did I just see?”

“The Cartographer isn’t just a model of the Azrael system.” He darted over to Thunder and waved his hooves out excitedly. “It recreates on a micro scale the same electromagnetic conditions that surround the system. For reasons I can’t explain, that planet is never where it’s supposed to be; we can’t calculate its location based on its velocity and known trajectory. To make matters worse, an EM anomaly has rendered it invisible ninety percent of the time. The only thing that can accurately predict where it’s going to be, and when it’s going to be visible, is The Cartographer.”

“Great. So, Gerard, how soon can you have the Ursa Major prepared for transport?” Thunder Gale announced. “I want to leave for the third planet as soon as you receive the astronomical data from whatever this is.”

There was no response, and when Thunder spun around to ask again the door out hung open. He glanced to Lightning Fire, who shrugged, and then at Dr. Wise, who had already forgotten about their pilot and looked on with his head cocked to the side. Thunder cursed under his breath.

For at least half an hour Dr. Wise talked at them about the eccentricities of The Cartographer, before Thunder finally got the chance to break away and look for Gerard.

Aside from the secretary on the ground floor who directed Thunder to Personnel Resources, the tower was empty. He passed by offices, cubicles arranged in beehives, and laboratories all dark and wrapped in plastic. They caught the low light of the emergency exits and glistened. His hooves were silent on the carpet and it all smelled like a factory: immaculate.

At the end of the corridor he arrived at a hologram of the Interplanetary Express logo, hung over a reception desk. The secretary had been replaced by a computer terminal and when he touched it, a welcome screen for the Personnel Resources Department flashed awake.

“I’m looking for my pilot, a griffon named Gerard, did he come this way?” Thunder asked.

“Don’t bother trying to talk to her, she’s not that kind of AI.” The answer came from behind the reception desk, and when Thunder trotted around the other side, there sat Gerard crumpled over a holorecorder idling on a block of text.

“Dr. Wise is waiting to speak to you,” Thunder said. “He needs you to talk to the Ursa Major’s AI before he can send over data about the third planet.”

“I waited too long to get out.” He wave a talon until the hologram scrolled down to the end of the text block.

In big red letters it spelled out the words, “Winter Protocol in effect—wait for further orders.”

“What’s Winter Protocol?”

“I’m never leaving here, that’s what it means,” Gerard said. “The last available jumpship in system is ordered to stay put and wait until there’s an emergency and the colony needs to call for help. The last one left to relay a distress signal when the techs here lost contact with the colony on Azrael III. So until another ship jumps this way, I have to stay put.”

He tossed the holorecorder across the empty floor and buried his face in his talons.

“But you still get paid for your trouble, don’t you?” Thunder asked. “Waiting here sounds a lot less dangerous than your normal routine.”

“Do you think I wanted to be a pilot? I took this job because maybe one day I could afford to live somewhere I could see the sky over my home again. It might be years, decades even, before another ship comes this way. There’s no sky inside a jumpship!”

“So, why don’t you quit?” Thunder paced a step closer. “If it’s that bad, there has to be someway out.”

“I can’t quit. I’d never get what I wanted if I quit.”

Looking on in silence at Gerard as he raked at his face, crumpled and defeated, Thunder came to see himself. Though he hadn’t the words for it yet, the misery of all the sacrifices made toward an unrealized, but desperately sought after, future was the same. They were battered housewives, married to abusers who promised the future in exchange for the present. Thunder Gale stared into Gerard as he raked his face and winced as if it were his own.

The horror of it, of suddenly understanding the circumstances he sought for himself, cut at Thunder Gale right into his gut.

“What are you staring at?” Gerard sprang to his feet. “You don’t have any right to judge me! You’re the reason why I’m stuck here and not under the sky beneath my home!”

Thunder Gale said nothing; he wanted to open his mouth and scream, but he remained silent. In the quiet he stared right back at Gerard.

“Buck you.” Gerard shoved past him and stormed off into the deep of the tower, and left him alone to contemplate the distant hum of machinery.

* * *

By the time Dr. Wise had finished compiling The Cartographer’s latest schedule, and the tram ride back to the spaceport, it was late, and when Thunder Gale creaked open the hatch to his room, it was dark and only the blinking orange light of his bedside clock was there to greet him.

After the horror of the day he wanted nothing more than to wrap himself Breeze’s comfort, but right away he knew she wasn’t in bed. He didn’t know whether by the absence of her sleeping breathes or by the lack of her warmth he figured that out, but he didn’t waste any time in flipping on the light and confirming what he already knew.

The bed was empty except for a basket wrapped in bright yellow paper resting upon it. Thunder Gale wormed his hoof through the wrappings and pulled out a bottle of hard apple cider. He held it in his hoof, puzzled, until he remembered Breeze Heart mentioning she wanted to do something special for Heart’s and Hooves Day.

And I promised her I’d be here about three hours earlier. He smacked his forehead. He didn’t even signal her datapad he’d be late.

He set the bottle down on the nightstand and bolted out the door and galloped all the way to sickbay.

When he got there, and put his head up against the window and peeped in, he found her curled up on a bed with a blanket pulled over her head, rising and falling with each of her breathes.

He watched her for a while, and then headed back to his room, and fell asleep still dressed in his crisp uniform.

Author's Note:

Thunder Gale will embark on a suicide mission on November the 4th.
But if you want a chance to read more of my work, I wrote a little short story to help promote Emergence, a board game I helped to make!
You can read more about Emergence: The Game itself here. And find the short story here! It borrows a lot from Planet Hell as far as the set-up goes, but it's more of my writing and it's final update comes out this Monday.
Shameless plug over.