Dawn of the Courtezan: Phase 01 (The Eighteenth Shadow) Read online

  THE EIGHTEENTH SHADOW

  Phase 1.0

  Jon Lee Grafton

  DAWN OF THE COURTEZAN

  THE EIGHTEENTH SHADOW – PHASE 01

  Jon Lee Grafton

  Copyright © 2017 Jon Lee Grafton Books

  All Rights Reserved.

  eBook editions by booknook.biz

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events which may take place in, during or around the year 2082, as well as any resemblance to persons, alive now or long since gone to the stars, is purely coincidental.

  Digital piracy of copyrighted literature is illegal and punishable by law. In general, it’s just not cool. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  You can contact Jon Lee Grafton via e-mail at [email protected], visit us on the holostream at jonleegraftonbooks.com or on Facebook.

  CONTENTS

  DAWN OF THE COURTEZAN

  Chapter 1.1 – The Hunted

  Chapter 1.2 – Only Coyotes Know

  Chapter 1.3 – My Name is Tara Dean

  Chapter 1.4 – The Slaughterhouse Rules

  Chapter 1.5 – Why Don’t the Eyes Work?

  Chapter 1.6 – Flight Risk

  Chapter 1.7 – Live Free or Die

  Chapter 1.8 – You Just Met the Boss

  Chapter 1.9 – Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd

  Chapter 1.10 – The Prophet of War

  Chapter 1.11 – The Puzzle Master

  A glossary of terms and acronyms can be accessed HERE for reference.

  Acknowledgments

  To my friends in the west, * of R and the girl who loves otters, thank you for believing in me. And at the other end of the road, this project would not have been possible without the help of two of my oldest friends from Kansas. Pickles and Snowball, your support, encouragement and minds have been invaluable assets. You helped make these novels a reality.

  DAWN OF THE COURTEZAN

  THE EIGHTEENTH SHADOW

  PHASE 01

  Jon Lee Grafton

  Somewhere on this planet lies the fossilized carbon imprint of a single biological cell. This is the 4.5 billion year old ancestor from which every form of life as we know it originated. Including you.

  anonymous black dolphin stream

  Chapter 1.1 – The Hunted

  From the Cloud Diary of Dax Abner – June 3, 2074 1:13 am – Eight Years Four Months Before Event.

  “I am archiving this initial entry on my combud local. The cloud stream is not yet established. Nothing is. The farmhouse is a disaster. We paid a fond digidollar for this.

  Outside, an American thunderstorm rages, walls of purple clouds 100 km tall, thunder cracking, lightning burning. The rain will not relent. Kansas is humid, like New Miami in summer, yet here the oceans are built of tallgrass, wheat and jane. There is no sound but my dictation, the patter of rain. And the bizarre yipping of feral dogs somewhere by the river.

  I have to return soon. I have been waiting 18 hours, all streams dark. Eva instructed me to keep this diary, to leave a part of myself for the Secondcity team. Firstcity doesn’t even have a relay to the solar grid! But the legacy is now mine. So I will continue waiting for this Israeli.

  I have walked the 600 acre piece of land thrice, end to end, dodging storms and a couple of nasty looking wood possums. Mother said to find the poet? Poets, much like the possum, continue to persevere. So shall I.

  You are reading entry one, day one. Whoever you are, Secondcity must now be spooling, so there is I hope reason to celebrate. I think I hear the peal of an airship. 1:27 am.”

  Salina, Kansas, November 2086 – Four Years One Month After Event.

  CNED Director, Franklin Fhelps was a company man, a creature who found comfort in regulation. The mud and clouds disgusted him, and he was regretting bringing Saxon along. It was a hunt in the countryside for actual shiners! The boy should be thrilled, but he loped down field like a churlish ape.

  What other foster parent would let their teenager carry a lightning gun?

  It was his wife’s fault, the boy’s sullen attitude. Fhelps would have to discipline Bao-Yu for this when he returned home.

  He raised his hairless, alabaster chin to the horizon and licked the slivers of his lips, studying the world through eyes the color of wet stone. There had to be signs. Recent intel from his DEA mole had lead him to these Dogforsaken hemp fields. The plantations lay fallow for winter, and it had rained the night before, a long, Kansas drizzler. He did not appreciate the way the mud caked his boots, nor the bite of damp, westward wind howling at them across the cruel abdomen of the land.

  A rage headache was rising. Saxon’s lack of enthusiasm for law enforcement was the root of this ill. It made Fhelps’ toes itch in his boots to think of it. He didn’t dare lay a hand on the child, a complication that made the migraines feel downright lethal.

  The relentless zoom-voom-voom of wind turbines spinning at the nearby Saline County power gen farm was not helping either.

  Vaporizing a little jane might fix all that.

  No. The ’noias.

  If a particle cannon had to be fired, it was a violation of protocol to be blended. He angrily ripped off a glove and popped a Pleasium tablet into his mouth instead.

  A flock of starlings a thousand strong roiled through the wispy winter clouds. The birds flashed and swooned unpredictably like a school of airborne sea fish. Fhelps started trudging again, watching the birds. It would be enjoyable to incinerate half the flock, but that would be a waste of valuable ammo. The birds were too far away to hit with a sidearm. His foster son’s footsteps sloshed rhythmically a hundred meters ahead. Everything irritated.

  The Pleasium will kick in soon.

  Saxon was young. He had been taught how to stroll a proper recon, but did it wrong. Gunpowder or particle weapon, he was the best shot in the city. Probably the state. But he showed no enthusiasm for such talents.

  When Saxon was unsealed seventeen years earlier, Fhelps had lifted the squealing infant from his gestation cradle and examined him as though he were a slice of petri-veal at the deli. Saxon’s squirming, pink body was smeared with synthamneotic fluid. Fhelps had grimaced and placed the child back in its growth medium, promptly immersing his hands in a sonic wash.

  The Mighty Sky Dog of Circumstance had chosen him for this.

  But why? Because Saxon will grow up to be the greatest CNED agent the Union has ever seen. Of that, Fhelps was sure. What he was not sure of was the means by which the child came into his life. It had been seventeen years, and not a word since.

  Back in 2069 Fhelps was still just a CNED volunteer, paying back the IRS for his own visit to the slaughterhouse. In the basement of CNED HQ, he had a volunteer’s office with a heavy wooden door surrounded by stone walls that smelled of damp plasticrete. Here, day after day, he perched on the edge of his chair, voraciously studying the city drone streams, waiting for a citizen to commit an alcohol infraction.

  The last thing on Fhelps’ mind that morning was unsealing a child.

  It was early, no one else about. He had just sat down behind his desk when the door opened and an enormous, hooded man in a beige robe brazenly entered. The man looked like a Bedouin nomad. Fhelps’ calculating eyes dashed to his holoscreen projection. Oddly, the building computer had dimmed the lights as soon as the man entered. No unauthorized entry klaxon had sounded.

  As Fhelps trudged through the mud, he tried to remember the basics of the encounter, but the details were fuzzy.

  The
Bedouin man had not introduced himself or asked questions. His face was blackness, paired with a synthetic voice that held no mercy. He informed Fhelps that he was paying him 5,000,000 digidollars to adopt a specific child at the hospital.

  Fhelps was incredulous. He rose from his desk, not a small figure himself, astonished as he checked, then re-checked, the banking widget on his holotab.

  His anxious voice whined like a damaged trumpet, “I don’t know if I can accept this. Is this IRS verified? How…”

  The Bedouin raised a white gloved hand, “Silence. The IRS is not your concern.” The voice deepened grimly, “You have ten hours to take custody of child #20821016, or the money will vanish. If any harm comes to this child by your hand, you will vanish.”

  The hooded man reached into his burlap robe. An odor of burnt leaves filled the small office. Fhelps remembered instinctively activating the emergency transponder hidden beneath his desk. All he could make out beneath the sandy, tough-wove hood were two glowing, emerald eyes.

  He shivered as those emerald eyes turned on him now with a predatory focus, “Notifying the police of my presence will not be necessary.” Without averting his gaze, the Bedouin produced a tiny silver device from his pocket and tapped its glass face. Fhelps’ holotab chimed a receipt tone. “That is your cloud key for scanning clear at Salina General. The child is ready to be unsealed. You are now its legal guardian.”

  Fhelps had then made a calculated mistake he flushed to think of. The CNED intimidation regimen had trained him to respond with authority when threatened, however.

  He cleared his throat and began to contentiously challenge the Bedouin, “Sir, let me be clear! The only thing I’m going to do is ping the proper authority! Bribing a public official is against the law and I have certainly not agreed…”

  The Bedouin stepped forward and pounded a mammoth fist into Fhelps’ desk. The metal surface squealed, crushing down like foam. Fhelps backed away in shock. The odor of incinerated leaves grew stronger.

  The slow-spoken words, bottomless now, resonated from every corner, “I am the proper authority, Franklin.” The Bedouin tilted his head to one side and leaned closer, making the desk’s metal frame buckle under the punishing force of his fist, “I see from your bio-rhythms you still have questions. The answer is everyone. We watch everyone, Franklin. We watch everything. All the time. You will adopt infant #20821016 from Salina Regional Health Center. You will do it today.” The man stood again to his full height, consuming the tiny office, “Be grateful. If it was up to me that desk would be your skull, Mr. Fhelps. In eighteen years, we will speak again. Listen to the voice in your dreams.”

  How does he know… Fhelps gasped.

  The Bedouin turned and partially crushed the antique doorknob as he exited. Unlike his silent arrival, the man’s boot steps now clanged densely as they receded down the hall. Fhelps remained frozen, sweating, eyes and fingers running over the indentions on his wrecked desk.

  I’m going to have to give up the booze.

  Could he survive without booze? The slaughterhouse had not abated his addiction. It was his dirtiest secret. The treatment gave him the rages, though, and the headaches. He had kept a delicious sipper of closet whiskey under the kitchen sink for years. But those days were gone. He had to obey.

  We watch everyone, Franklin. We watch everything. All the time.

  Fhelps had heard what happened to a person in the lunar work camps. It wasn’t simply fear of the horrifying hooded man that compelled. His brain told him it was the right thing to do.

  I’ll have to learn to like jane.

  But marijuana made him paranoid. Maybe if he popped a Pleasium before vaporizing, he’d like getting stoned better? Everyone at CNED swore by the red Federal pills.

  Everyone. Everything. All the time.

  A short month after Saxon’s unsealing, Fhelps trailed a drinker to a speakeasy in the basement of a private home. He put twelve college students in magcuffs in a single day. The promotion to Salaried Enforcement Agent came quickly. He floated through the ranks, soon building repute for his successful yet cruel manner of field work. There was something stimulating about watching a citizen’s eyes as he bound their wrists and poured their pricey shine down the loo. Especially lady violators, their anxiety pheromones made him salivate. Discovering a sex toy among private things was in fact his favorite high.

  Fhelps would smack his glossy lips within tickling distance of a female boozebum’s ear and speak his words with a pasty tongue, “You going to learn to love swallowing Pleasium.”

  Fhelps shook himself, realizing he had become slightly aroused.

  Never in front of the boy.

  Those were long gone days anyway. He had since sent 1,842 citizens to the Bmod facilities. Other CNED agents called him The Digidime Sheriff because the majority of his arrests were small-time possession hits.

  The dixies are just jealous.

  He had busted fourteen solar stills in his career as well.

  No one mentions that.

  The citizenry called microbrewers and still operators shiners. Musicians wrote them songs. Poets pushed shiner haiku to their holoblogs, oft uncensored.

  Poets. Traditionalist pawns. Drug dealers deserve no songs!

  Nothing gave Fhelps more joy than sending a shiner to the slaughterhouse.

  Fhelps returned his attention to the present as his HUD chimed. A data packet had arrived; groundwater numbers from a DEA hack he had paid the mole some high digis for.

  Buried centibots detect a 12,000 liter hydrologic friction anomaly every 168 hours… science, blah!

  Fhelps immediately lost interest. He didn’t want to read. He wanted to shoot something! The civilian class Mantis lightning cannon was getting heavy. He gripped its rubbery stock tighter with chilled, well fed fingers and looked ahead at Saxon. The boy had activated his holoflage suit. Only the contrastic edges of his legs were visible as he walked. If he stopped moving, he would become a ghost.

  Saxon was brilliant with a rifle. Even Fhelps had to admit. It enraged him that the boy had no interest in this gift for guns. Nor the CNED Youth Initiative. The child spent too much time in the basement, obsessed with smoking hand rolled, antique joints of the like no one had smoked in half a century. Music thudded constantly from his room. The boy seemed to accomplish little besides playing hologames and streaming with friends about their next telepathic DJ set.

  They call it Dub n’ Drop. I call it an attitude problem.

  That very morning, Fhelps had been forced to listen to Saxon whine over the hempcakes Bao-Yu made them for breakfast, “CNED Youth kids are damaged, yo! And I’m sick of walking around in the cold! It’s one Saturday a month vaporized while Reggie and Prab are at The Solarium hoverboarding! I just wanna chill, amigo.”

  Whenever the boy used the word chill, Fhelps would close his eyes and take a deep breath, imagining that he was strangling Saxon violently and shoving a blade through his eye. This fantasy always improved his spirits.

  The child desperately needs the sort of behavioral structuring Bao-Yu receives. But I can’t… I never have.

  The wife came to heel nicely after the slaughterhouse. Fhelps felt lucky, because unlike most women who saw the drill, Bao-Yu still liked to cry.

  The Pleasium had begun to work its magic on his nerves. The present drifted back, featureless gray clouds, dirt rows and mud puddles, stripped, hollow hemp stalks and a line of trees in the distance, stretching out like a chorus line of skeletal gallows. This was all the present offered. Fhelps turned his head as a drone whizzed past on the nearby county hovroad. 15,000 meters overhead, a co2 scrubber raked its giant, black tentacles through a break in the somber clouds, then vanished once more.

  Fhelps reengaged the holoflage filters on his HUD and Saxon snapped into view, a green stroke outlining the boy’s form. Saxon held his lightning gun too languidly. Its fat, silver barrel was pointed towards the earth. He simply didn’t care.

  Fhelps knew from purchasing a black mark
et hack into the boy’s holodiary that his foster son was fixated on four things: betties, marijuana, music and holosims. Of course he had not tried alcohol! Though, he had lost his virginity.

  Fhelps had not told Bao-Yu. As a woman, she wouldn’t understand.

  Fhelps tapped his combud irritably, “What’s our numbers, child?”

  Saxon answered quickly, “03:41 on the ground, still progressing south towards the grid four terminus.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  Fhelps dialed up the magnification on his HUD. They were getting closer to the row of trees marking the next property, a private farm, Gaeveinn Hemp & Jane, LLC. He and Saxon presently stood on the sprawling fields of the Federally subsidized Peoples’ Hemp Plantation.

  “Computer, scroll profile on adjacent farm.”

  Fhelps mumbled and licked his lips as he skimmed the text that began scrolling before his eyes. James Gaeveinn and his wife had purchased the property six years ago.

  The old Nichols place. Good riddance.

  The new owners began planting a strain of affordable, mid-grade indica under a private gene patent. The farm also rotated a hectare of textile grade hemp for a boutique women’s clothier downtown… as Fhelps scanned the holo, he realized he had met the man. Gaeveinn was a CNED donor, came out to the quarterly citizen briefings at the Mason’s Hall. The farmer sat in the back. His questions were industry related, perfunctory. His handshake was callused and firm.

  A typical hemp cowboy tossing his digis on the legal side, wants to keep booze off the hovstreets. That’s good.

  Fhelps blinked twice. His HUD flipped to the next page in the file. Gaeveinn’s wife was 29, originally from Florida. Kansas resident since 2081. Public records indicated the woman was pregnant in her second trimester and had forgone fetal transfer. The child was queued for a vaginal birth.

  Disgusting.

  Only nineteen percent of women gave birth corporeally. It was the only odd detail Fhelps could see, but it wasn’t unusual for farmers to be antique about things.