EVE Fiction

[Before]

Far above the docking bay corridors, removed from the clamor of automated mechatronics operating in the hangars, an old sand-barque jutted out from the crude nest constructed for it within the station’s innermost bulkhead. The squarish piping which wrapped around the old hull had dulled in the vapor that tended to float this far from the station’s center of mass, but the color complemented the worn floorboards of the barque’s upper deck. Nisme ran her finger idly along the soft and fragrant wood, noting a few grains of Matari sand that had fixed in the miniscule grooves between the boards. Home is where you take it, she mulled, sitting cross-legged a few paces from the bow of the old sandship.

“What wind-wasted stowaway trespasses here?”

Striding up the deck came a pair of thickly-muscled women, hair freshly shorn. Behind them shuffled four more, slight in comparison to their guards, wrapped in layers of dark, patterned silks.

"Would that your cousins believe you everborn, and not a husk coughed up by the dunes," they cackled.

Nisme, annoyed, focused her gaze to the open air of the docking bay rather than turning to look at them. “Mother sends word to be here, and here I be.”

"Weltering before your kith," her mother, Riginle, jeered quietly, "so much for this 'Little Warlord' as the braves so name." She led her small entourage opposite Nisme by the low black slab that divided the deck between them. Lifting her silks, she sat cross-legged, tossing the folds of her robes on her lap before motioning her bouncers to make way to the exit. After and behind her sat her sister, Valang; after and behind Valang, their two aged attendants seated themselves. They rustled softly, waiting for the younger Vherokior to meet them at the table, but she was not inclined to oblige.

Nisme appeared unfazed in her languid posture, holding still her absent-minded gaze into the enormous landing bay as a clan-marked Hoarder crept toward the hangar below. Automated warning beacons blinked to sudden readiness, and docking commands reverberated into the haze above. Time, it seemed to her, was moving ever slower here, moments stretched into crystalline vistas of normality.

Riginle sighed. She looked on her daughter, this breathing body that looked so much like the one she had borne from nothingness, through childhood and into promise assured. The idle movements of Nisme’s bare feet caught her eye. Like an infant’s, they were tender and unmarred. So much unlike the weathered and hardened feet of the foremothers that Riginle remembered from her own youth. She had summoned her child, and had received a simulacrum instead.

“What once we bless, must we now curse,” she whispered to herself.

Valang eyed her sister, wary of her distraction. She grasped Riginle’s shoulder gently, calling her attention back to the visit.

“Nisme,” she paused, “were that you were my daughter still and not some shadow what wears her bones, you do us no kindness to endure these words so rudely. You embody the many of the Clan, our icon, but your tell must be one our goodly doings and advantage. It’s why the Tribe upcast a daughter of the Suidis. What’s the tell of a Clan who says to the whole of the heavens that the path of the ancestors is blasted?”

“I do surely feel the luck of the foremothers to be laid upon with your scorn, mother, so let the floor be clear and make the argument.” Nisme spat a caustic chuckle, nodding.

In the silence that followed a moment after, the vague echoes of activity below swirled around them.

“Are you even the child I raised, in that shell?” Riginle shook her head, jaw clenched. “You have the look of my daughter, you bear the name of my family… but my foremothers must fear us soon bankrupt for my policy.”

“Your claim, mother; make it and stash your estimations for the keepers of our ‘goodly doings’.”

Nisme rocked back and up to her feet, her mother watching sharply.

“So you’ll have it, daughter,” she hissed, “the new security enterprise has borne fruit, thanks to the Clan chiefs, my sister, and myself. The Suidis family will expand security services into the computerized sector, and our first exchange with the Sebiestor will make way with Clan sanction. You will travel to Teonusude and see the bargain made official for the Idisen. Personally.”

“Is that the full of it?” Nisme turned toward the exit.

“No. Your tender to Clan Katanga, it has no blessing. End it.”

Nisme halted briefly, then paced down the deck of the barque and re-entered the station. Riginle did not watch her go.

(( Soundtrack: Adham Shaikh & Tim Floyd - 'Drift'

This was partially intended as a study of the Vherokior family structure and the strain that might result as a capsuleer transitions from baseliner to infomorph. It struck me as something that might be very difficult for them to deal with, depending on the capsuleer in question.

The rest is based on in-game events. ))