IN THE SHADOW OF THE MANDALORE
CHAPTER 1 (Part 4)
Keramud Ver’dika stood on the seven hundred and thirty-fourth floor of his Third Level apartment, looking out over the vast cityscape of Taris. Skimmers, Air-speeders, and cargo transports filled the ochre-tinted skies, the clouds a hue of orange and brown. He watched the Three Sisters cresting the distant horizon and found himself thinking of home. He wasn’t usually a man who lost himself in waves of nostalgia, but there was something about his home planet’s natural wonders and scenic beauty that Taris didn’t have. Taris was a city in recovery the politicians claimed. It was more of a city that was over developed and had never gotten over itself, Ver’dika thought.
And for what? The vanity of Man’s ambitions?
There was little he liked about Taris. He preferred the wide-open plains and soaring mountains of his home-world — even the harsh reality of Korriban was more inviting than anything Taris had to offer. Where are the lakes, oceans and rivers a planet needs to survive, he thought? Taris took its water supply from polar caps where huge hydrostatic factories broke down the ice and converted it into water. The oceans on the planet’s surface had died untold millennia ago, and with them, the planet itself. Taris had rebuilt itself over the successive millennia. Huge platforms rose above the land masses as the world slowly died underneath. Thousands of years passed, and a second layer was added as the oceans died.
Was it any wonder there’d been food riots in the past?
He took a slow sip of the black Mandalorian wine he held, turning away from the cityscape with a grunt of disgust. Everything about the city was too big. Even this apartment is too big, he thought, crossing the floor. He could see his reflection in the transparisteel windows staring back at him.
The swirling tattoos on his chest and back looked distorted in the glass, the colours bleeding into one, like a child’s water colour left out in the rain. The beaten chrome of his skullcap held a nimbus of dull silver in the window, the rivets attaching it to the bone looking like black dots, distorted in the reflection. The scar that had been once his left eye was nothing more than a dark smear on his face. The grey cybertronic eye would be an improvement, they told him; now, it served as a reminder of everything he’d lost. It was something for him to focus his anger on — like the order they’d given to advance on an impractical target.
He placed his wineglass on the table and picked up his robe, pulling the cowl up over his head. He stood in front of the holo-pad looking at the readout on the clock.
Two minutes.
As part of his research on the planet, he’d read about the large, industrial corporations, and how they looked at Taris as a way station to the stars — a gateway to the Outer Rim, they called it — an investment in the future that must have seemed as plentiful as the stars at one time. And, he supposed, maybe at one time it was.
He picked up his wineglass and looked at the clock again. Turning to his reflection in the window, he focused on the single blue eye staring back at him over the rim of the glass.
The blue and the grey.
There was a hint of the chrome skullcap under his cowl, and he wondered if he looked as imposing when he stood on the holo-pad. He shook the thought from his mind as he stared at the city beyond the window.
Taris was an anomaly. It was a city so large they had to come up with a new word to describe it: ecumenopolis. A cityscape developed by huge multinational conglomerates like Lhosan Industries, Adascorp and Aether Hypernautics, that eventually spread across the entire planet and redefined what life could mean.
And people willingly do this to their planets, he thought — enthusiastically destroying everything sacred — even abandoning their gods for the sake of commerce.
They deserve what they get.
And they call this the new Taris, he told himself as he took another sip of wine. He looked out at the menagerie of colossal stratoscrapers towering two kilometres high, and some higher, buildings glistening in the distance like sparkling needles — a forest of silver spires as far as the eye could see.
The Three Sisters were nothing more than an afterthought now, where once they were the central figures of the entire planet’s religion. They were relegated to an asterisk in the history books of the planet they’d helped create.
Now, dozens of huge air lanes crowded the skies, filling it with swoop bikes, and air-speeders, and transports of every kind.
The last time this city expanded was ancient history to these people.
The Great Hyperspace War of Naga Sadow; the Mandalorian Wars of Exar Kun and the Sith Brotherhood, were all regaled to the realms of myth — a distant memory, he thought, but not so distant that they didn’t still fear the name of Mandalore.
As they will again.
The power feed on the holo-pad kicked in and he turned, putting his goblet on the small table as he stepped onto the pad and fell to one knee, bowing his head.
A blue flickering image towered in front of him.
“Master?” he said, placing a clenched fist over his heart.
I know this is short. It’s not even 1000 words. But it’s the end of the chapter and what am I supposed to do? It’s my piece for Sci-Fi Friday.
A piece of writing should be as long as necessary and not one word more.
Short but most excellent.