PAC Goruym – Ramx`atol
1 Yubol 2249 – 2150 Hours
The skua fought against the unyielding gale, its patchy down ruffled by a relentless midnight wind. Hope emerged beneath its hooked bill in the form of a radiant colossal turtle, itinerant on the powerful swells.
Dox stepped clear when the beleaguered skua landed sloppily on the railing overhead—no good ever came from standing under a gull.
She gazed at the flight deck as if it were her first day on the planet, still reeling from her commanding officer’s decision to land here. An eleventh-gen marix, Dox’s fascination with the vessel’s anatomical pedigree surpassed her awe of its advanced inorganics. Long before her birth, the Prime Lab created a brain from the biofossil remains of a prehistoric Archelon. Nature did the rest, forming the operative intelligence that would someday become the PAC Goruym.
“If I’d been born a brainer or a biz,” Dox said to the thick-necked skua, busy tucking its ruffled feathers back to rights. “I would’ve scored a job working with Gory.”
The gull remained indifferent.
Across the flight deck’s expansive plain, the ninth-gen Bakikom, Uvi Gaz, stood tall. Her thick, corded arms stretched the fabric of her red and white uniform, a striking sight against the illuminated landing pads. Dox’s lean handsomeness caught her eye, and she found herself closing the distance between them.
“You Divisional?” Gaz called to her on approach.
The leggy Donmat brought a fist to her stomach in a salute.
“It’s my first year,” she said. “No real missions yet, Bakikom,”
“You’ll get your share.” Gaz admired how the tight charcoal uniform brought out the black in this one’s hide. “What division?”
Dox paused before revealing she served the Femitokon. This division evoked either admiration or disgust, with rarely a middle ground. Despite its unsavory reputation, she accepted her role. What she didn’t like was being unable to work alone. None of the other nine who’d made rank after her generation’s Final Trial had been saddled with a commanding officer.
“Femitokon,” she said.
Gaz didn’t judge. She wondered if this lanky chunk, who served the male hunters, belonged to Sofita Kul. “Where’s your Komad?”
“She’s still aboard our Ornith,” said Dox, turning her youthful face to the sea.
Kul’s infamy didn’t stem from being the Primary’s donation or the twin of the deceased Fusada Kul, still considered Orta’s best. Every marixi, regardless of their generation, knew her by name because, unlike the Primary and Fusada, the hizak had conquered the Femitokon Shell.
Gaz hooked her beefy arm around the Donmat’s shoulders.
“Have you seen the Striker Bay?”
Dox’s dark eyes grew wide. “Am I allowed, Bakikom?”
“You can do whatever you want,” Gaz said, smiling. “When your Komad’s not around,”
Dox followed the older marix, whose stain was a circle of three dolphins, one red, one black, and the third blue: the colors of the Polar Air Command. When a marix reached the pinnacle of rank, she visited a hide-stain artist and got her head decorated. Most designs symbolized duty assignment, a mark of pride for achieving her highest rank. Others chose stains related to their lives outside of Orta, who they were as citizens, and those they cared about. Dox would get a scalp stain, too, someday.
Gaz led her to a narrow portion of the flight deck, where Dox caught a glimpse of the Goruym’s turtle-like head, home of the command bridge. The older marix boldly stomped upon the large square pad beneath them and took the opportunity to lay hands on Dox by steadying her when the metal platform jerked to life.
The platform descended, trading the cold night wind for bright lights and pungent warmth. Echoes rumbled throughout the expansive hold, pony-tailed bizaki walking the wet porches of a canal-shaped moonpool, their work guided by a pikavel beat. Their music was a mix of poetry and singing that Gaz found to be an acquired taste; Dox loved pikavel rhymes, having spent the first eight years of her life in Pikalit.
Narrow berths curtained the canal, each housing a delphic life form under jetted sprays. One randy metallic beast tucked its side fins and playfully rotated, offering its glassy underbelly to the bizak and her scrub brush. The Delphic greeted Dox and Gaz with trills and whistles, its sleek body vibrating noisily as the brush painted frothy hashes over its glass panel undercarriage. To the naked eye, Delphics looked like robotic fish, but, like all Polar Fleet cyberized life forms, the organic neural tissue bound to the coils of their tiny kyrsbrains gave them distinct personalities.
Dox stepped onto the berth’s narrow, wet deck, earning a grin from the tenth-gen bizak. The bizak, her sparse two-piece wetsuit clinging to her yellow, green-spotted hide, gave a nod to Gaz and cast a cursory glance at Dox’s uniform.
“I think you’re making her icy,” Dox laughed.
“She loves it,” said the bizak. “Right, Beck.”
The Delphic hummed with pleasure, spinning madly and coating the water with cottony soap. Her makodak unit floated in the froth, its umbilical uncoiling from her midsection as she rotated the other way. In her youth, Dox had eagerly told her toob-mates about Delphics; their deadly accuracy, their ability to leave the water and fly through the air, those bio-synthetic masks worn by their pilots. Naturally, they mocked her by asking if she had ilitux.
Dox studied the makodak, its caul-like mask bobbing upright in the suds.
“Can you breathe with that over your face?” she asked, looking up at Gaz.
“It seals around my neck, forces fluid into my lungs,” said the pilot, about to join her, until Komad Kul appeared out of nowhere.
“The embryonic fluid that lets the delphic breath for you,” said Kul, her dead eyes fixed on Gaz as she hopped down onto the wet deck in her place.
“It connects me physically to Beck,” said Gaz, maintaining her position on the ledge, her eyes never leaving Kul.
Instinctively, she examined Kul for any threats; if forced to fight, Gaz could take her. Clad in the ivory uniform of a divisional superior, the hizak possessed that whitish-gray patina native to House Kul, but her broad, angular face didn’t mesh with the requisite short hairstyle.
The bizak noted the tension. Not everyone tolerated Gaz’s brood-bearish proclivities, but being friends with the pilot for over twenty years, she felt obligated to defend her. She spoke loud enough to bait the uniformed hizak’s attention. “The programming fools her into thinking she’s pregnant,”
“Thinking the pilot is hers,” Kul added. “Alters her naturally reckless behavior.”
Dox extended a downturned hand, silently seeking permission. When the borders lining Beck’s long, conical nose pulsed with receptive light, Dox petted her smooth tharspin head. “Has this been her only Ark?”
“All her life,” bragged the bizak.
Dox ran the back of her hand along the Delphic’s tapered nose.
“Did she experience depression on arrival?”
“Some of her sisters did,” the bizak told her.
Gaz focused intently on Dox as Kul rejoined her on the ledge.
“You interested in delphics, Donmat?” she asked.
Before Dox could reply, a thundering voice cut through the striker bay.
“That backswell is going to sink my Ark!”
Bakiprime Deltad Polvix came strutting along the overhead high-walk. Polvix was a brawny marix with a pinkish hide covered in hashes of gold. Inked onto her scalp was a large teal Architeuthis whose serpentine tentacles ran along her forehead, around her ears, and down her neck, their lingering menace indicative of her sexual nature.
Everyone in uniform saluted, even Dox, but Kul barely brought a fist to her abdomen for her deceased twin’s peer. Rumor had it that Polvix once latched onto Kul’s thick backside at a citbluz in their native Utama. Still, Fusada Kul intervened by punching her friend in the gut.
Polvix stopped to lean over the railing, the golden marks in her pink hide dulling under the striker bay’s hard, white lights. “Komad, where’d they find a uniform to fit those brainer cheeks?” she demanded, inciting laughter. “Do you know how fucking icy those hizbacks looked when you ran across my flight deck? I had to come down here and admire that shit up close,”
Despite the lewd address, Kul kept her composure; she’d been dealing with sexually aggressive marixi since her first day in Orta. Most held no real attraction for her; disrespect and power were the goal.
The bizaki handlers laughed heartily throughout the striker bay, and this made their delphics click and whistle. Dox took note of every bruiser still laughing, and hardened herself to the incivility. Light-hearted menace permeated marixi social interaction, a complex soup of affection, power play, and camaraderie. But not since her assignment to Kul had she witnessed such profound disrespect.
Kul silently retreated to the platform, her taller Donmat falling in behind her.
“Look at that bounce, Gaz. That’s what happens when a hizzah spends some quality time in the weight room,” the Bakiprime’s voice dripped with lustful admiration. “Orta needs to assign you to me, Kul! Gory’s got plenty of chairs big enough for that backswell!”
Goruym’s intelligence, nicknamed Gory, rested in the capable hands of seven fleet-assigned citizens, five of them hizaki, one of whom, a ninth-gen, stood behind Polvix and regarded Kul with disdain.
Dox joined her Komad on the platform, turning her back as Kul did in solidarity as they rose to the flight deck. Back on the surface, the Ark’s pulsing lights dimmed the stars but guided another of Gory’s assigned hizak to intercept them.
This one came well-dressed in a red and white pantsuit that matched the uniform colors of striker pilots like Gaz, and her highly molded hair stood impervious to the wind.
“Komad Kul,” she said, arms open.
“Administrator Kusat,” Kul bowed her head. “I’ll refrain from embracing.”
Kul and Tharsix Kusat met as donats in Mynu when the first letter of their genetic names led them to the same classes before testing elevated Kul to an elite curriculum. Kusat, with two marixi siblings, had proven amiable to Kul’s unnatural aggression while the other hizakidoe kept their distance.
The aqua-hided Kusat lowered her arms. “Komad Kul, the Bakiprime’s sexual harassment of you is unacceptable. If you wish to lodge a complaint-”
Kul said, “Marixi, do not file charges against each other-”
“—You’re not marixi,” Kusat interjected.
Dox stepped up behind the Komad, her brow bent.
“Administrator Kusat,” Kul spoke to her like a hizak. “I appreciate your concern regarding the Bakiprime’s disrespect. Though I’m not a marix, I do serve as a Fleet operative in World Oceans. I therefore must adhere to marixi social convention.”
“I was discourteous,” Kusat conceded, the pink streaks in her hide darkening with embarrassment. “But my offer, Komad Kul, remains sincere,”
“Thank you, Administrator Kusat,” Kul responded with a stoic formality, but then, she opened her arms.
Kusat quickly stepped into the embrace, her eyes filled with admiration. Dox, having seen this before, knew that many hizaki from the Marixi Administration served in divisions throughout Orta. Whenever a tenth- or eleventh-generation member came across Kul, they would display varying degrees of esteem.
Dox silently followed Kul down the ramp to where their flyer waited on Goruym’s port side paddle. Despite its brain originating from a pteranodontid, the Ornithocheirus flyer bore no resemblance to its ancient namesake. Like the other fliers in its line, Orny resembled a small, winged bubble with a large glass face. Its photovoltaic skin came alive during flight while its curved, plated wings took in enough solar energy to power it beyond the speed of sound.
Kul dipped her head as she entered the rear hatch, a gesture that reminded Dox to do the same. During her first days aboard, the lumbering marix often found her forehead colliding with the Ornith’s arched casing. Under their boots, the white borders of storage cabinets formed a neat puzzle around a small oblong hatch that pulsed when Dox crossed it.
Dox fell into her red padded chair, awakening the half-circle dash. Above it, a giant round window provided an unobstructed view of the Goruym’s long starboard paddle, with no sign of the checkered panels that bordered the flier’s glass face.
“Canopy, please,” said Kul.
The window went black, and Orny’s acknowledgment of the command materialized in white text upon it. Dox glanced at Kul’s back while tapping at one of the forward array’s many colorful shapes. The words were gone before Kul sat her huge backside upon the cushioned box seat lining the right side of the cabin.
“Did you see the attack footage, Komad?”
Kul frowned at the palm-sized disk between Dox’s fingers.
“Where’d you get that, Donmat?”
Dox slid the disk into one of the array’s brackets, her eyes flaring with excitement. “Arrived before we left Orta,” she said, her voice filled with thrill. “Highly classified,”
“Not that highly,” Kul droned. “I’ve already examined freezes from it.”
Dox turned her swivel chair around. “How is that possible, Komad?”
“Begin playback,” Kul said to the ceiling.
The entire cabin transformed into an underwater village.
A giant shark coasted between Kul and Dox before diving deep and speeding through the structures at their feet. Movement within one of the pedestrian tubes lured the massive fish to a specific apartment. Dox knelt where the shark hung outside a large oblong window. Suddenly, the fish slapped the glass with its tail and jammed its enormous head into the jagged hole.
Unseen jaws labored as dark water billowed out from its gills. The shark pulled out, bringing a cloud of fleshy debris with it. Clearing out of the spoiled sea, the monstrous fish froze as if taken by surprise. With a tilted snout, it measured Kul, who now stood where the observational sphere had been floating during the beast’s brutal attack. An open-jawed lunge ended the playback.
“Orny, repeat,” Kul ordered.
While watching it again, the hizak touched the scene, pausing it.
“It punched a hole with its tail, not its side bulk. That’s deliberate.”
Her finger moved the action forward slowly.
“Here, it backs up fast before the collapse force can pull it inside.”
She halted the playback again at the moment the shark discovered the recorder.
“It hesitates before moving in on the ob-sphere.” Kul leaned back on the array’s edge and caught Dox smirking. “My cheeks aren’t going to sink Orny!”
Dox’s mouth fell open. “Komad, I wasn’t thinking—”
“-Can you focus, please?” Kul demanded.
The gray hide on Dox’s head darkened. “I thought you couldn’t read minds outside of Femitokon mode.”
“I can surmise some thoughts by observation,” Kul snapped.
“Again, I’m sorry,” said Dox.
Kul let the attack play to the end.
“This is unusual behavior for a great white.”
“With all due respect, Komad,” Dox spoke as if she were a hundred years older. “This thing’s forty feet from the dorsal to the tail.”
Kul knew what was coming: “This thing is not ramxkul, Donmat.”
“Are you sure?” Dox pressed. “Look at the size of it,”
“Have you ever seen a ramxkul?” she asked.
Dox cocked her head. “I’ve seen freezes,”
“Then you know a ramxkul’s jaws are bigger. Its fins ragged, and bony knobs cover its snout.” Kul tapped the playback, stopping it when the fish confronted the recording orb. “One trait a ramxkul does share with this non-polar species is an incapacity for the logic on display here.”
Dox stepped into the scene, the holographic structure marking her long legs.
“What if it’s…something older?”
And here it was: “Are you suggesting it’s prehistoric?”
“We can’t rule it out, Komad,” Dox said, excited. “Listen, when I was a donat, I saw the bones of a shark pulled out of the Vand’takal, and it was much bigger than this.”
The discovery of the fossils and the Second Generation’s cultivation of them were a popular subject among Ramaxia’s newest citizens. Fuzo Dox had spent her first week on duty marveling at Orny, whose base organics came from the preserved remains of an Ornithocheirid found on Greenland’s bay floor.
“Listen, toob,” Kul mocked her underling. “It’s not a megalodon. It moves with the skill of a fish that evolved to hunt smaller prey. It also displays behavioral sapience,”
“That means it thinks instead of just doing shit on instinct, right?” Dox asked, restarting the playback. “Could it be one of our throwaways?”
Kul mulled this, saying, “Perhaps a cloned throwaway?”
“Not possible, Komad.” Dox’s head swung. “Helovx can’t get near one of our throwaways, much less clone one of them.”
The age of humans hunting large aquatic mammals ended after the femmar began releasing their engineered baleens unfit for cyberization. Femarctic geneticists set abnormally high physical criteria and rejected most candidates for even the simplest circulatory anomalies. Rather than terminate these whales, the femmar released them into the world ocean. These discarded lifeforms left the polar region and reproduced with native populations, producing offspring that recognized and hunted whaling boats.
“I know helovx have fish farms, but they can’t clone shit like this.” Dox closed the underwater scene with a tap, darkening the cabin. “Maybe a rejected ramxkul got loose and bounced a great white. This might be their baby.”
Light returned to the small space, trapping her in Kul’s stony gaze.
“Bounce,” the young marix explained, “it’s another word—”
“I know the word bounce is a euphemism for sexual congress.”
Dox cracked her neck with a head-jerk and studied the floor.
“Ramxkul possess an inherent dislike of non-polar sharks,” Kul said. “They were engineered to keep sharks out of the subglacial bays during the Benthic Dome Era.”
Dox pulled a puzzled face. “How did they go from protecting us to eating us?”
“Ramxkul, do not consume the living, Donmat.” The hizak stared up at her younger charge. “On that note, Faltrix doesn’t consume us either,”
Dox tutted. “What would you call recycle?”
“Faltrix processes corpses,” she explained. “She doesn’t kill or eat them.”
“She don’t process males,” Dox blurted, and when Kul moved to speak again, Dox fell back into her chair. “Save it, Komad, I got the speech from Prime Hibz on my first day. Femitokons kill males on sight, and if I feel the need to notify the Collective of what we do here, I can kiss my place in Orta goodbye.”
After a beat, Kul said, “Femtrux knows the purpose of this division.”
“Femtrux don’t know shit, that’s why the Cavern of Death is off the grid.” Dox swung her chair around to face Kul. “We serve an unethical division, Komad.”
The hizak’s smile always unnerved her.
“What?” asked Dox.
Kul slipped behind the frosted panel, hiding their gapirx. No other Ornith contained a private gape since most were operated by a single-femmar. Still, Orta insisted on Kul having a partner.
“We don’t terminate males.” She touched the glass bowl, causing water to bleed from its sides. “We eliminate hybrids.”
Dox sniggered as Kul brought cupped hands full of water to her face.
“What amuses you, Donmat?”
“They make you take on a marix partner,” she said. “Even though the Shell got made, so one bruise could hunt down males hiding in the skin,”
“And?” asked Kul, watching the water evaporate. “What makes that amusing?”
“I’d rather not share my thoughts,” said Dox.
Kul emerged, dabbing her face with a towel.
“Why do you think I have a partner?”
“Punishment,”
“Punishment?”
“Yeah, that’s why you got sent between the poles.”
“I hunt hybrids. Hybrids live between poles.”
Dox huffed a laugh. “When you refused to hunt males, CM Dag wanted to put the Shell in somebody else, but there was nobody else. Since you won’t hunt males, Orta sent you between the poles,” she brought up her fingers in quotes. “To hunt hybrids,”
Kul sat in the central operations chair—another custom addition to an Ornith accommodating two operatives instead of one.
“We still have a shark problem, Donmat.”
“A meg problem, Komad,” Dox corrected.
Kul crossed one leg over the other. “You believe megalodon has returned after two and a half million years of extinction?”
“Whales are bigger than they used to be.” Dox jumped up and began pacing, her routine when explaining herself. “The great white evolved from megalodons when prey got smaller and moved into cold waters. What if the whites are changing back into megs?”
Kul tempered her arrogance. “The helovx theory of Isurus Origin states that C-Carcharias descended from I-Hastalis, not C-Megalodon.”
“Yeah, well, the tow-doss theory says great whites come from the big-toothed sharks,” Dox paused. “What’s so funny, Komad?”
The hizak’s eyes gleamed with joviality. “I’ve never heard the Otodus Origin Hypothesis, referred to as the tow-doss theory.”
“Just because I didn’t say it right,” said Dox. “Doesn’t make what I said wrong,”
“Your suggestion is absurd,” Kul grinned. “Evolution takes too long,”
“Helovx can’t engineer shit like this,” Dox argued. “They’re too stupid.”
“One of them could, Dox. This shark ate him for dinner.” Kul spun around in her seat and tapped at the holographic interface that materialized before her. Dox, feeling a wave of discomfort, stood there for a moment, unsure of how to proceed, as Kul addressed her by name, not rank.
“Prepare coordinates,” said Kul.
Dox jumped into her chair. “Where to, Komad?” she asked, acknowledging Kul’s authority.
“Yazhou,” Kul vanished the glowing screen with a wave of her hand. “This will be your first time around humans, Dox. You’re in for a treat.”
“Ornithocheirus, flight pattern north to launch.” Dox pressed the brightest button on the panel array, then slid her finger over another to keep the viewscreen free of text. “Thirty degrees at mark fifty-seven. Eighty-eight, east of thirty-eight,”
The propulsion kicked in without a vocal affirmation from the Ornith.
Kul leveled her eyes at the back of Dox’s head.
“Where’s Orny’s voice, Donmat?”
“I can see what Orny has to say,” Dox pointed at the viewscreen after a quick swipe brought some text into view. “The words are right there on her interface—”
“His interface,” said Kul.
Dox cleared her throat.
“We need to talk about Orny’s programming.”
“An Ornith’s identity isn’t programming,”
“She can’t be male, Kul,” the marix whined. “We’re Femitokon.”
“We know what we are, Donmat,” Kul’s cool breath tickled her bare head. “Orny and I have been Femitokons for over five years,”
“No disrespect, Komad,” Dox spoke softly. “Orny has female parts.”
“Gender identity is fluid,” said Kul. “It’s not native to a body part.”
The hizak moved back to her chair, triggering a holographic page that detailed Goruym’s landing manifest. She entered their departure time in the floating document before swiping left to reveal a map of the West Islands.
Dox lowered her smooth head as her mind cycled through how best to request a flyover of Antarctica City.
“Komad,” came her gravelly voice. “We should fly over—”
“Our path is north, Donmat,” Kul vetoed. “The AC is west.”
Following the Eros Impact, decades of volcanic activity melted the western ice sheets, transforming a once-mountainous peninsula into four rugged islands.
Port Antarctica dominated the northernmost isle. On the next island, the femmar built Surface Medical at Faraday’s old settlement. Here, they trained select women for life on the submerged Ramaxia Primada. On the third and smallest island, at the former mouth of the Amundsen Sea, sat a globular building called Surface Quarantine. This is where the femmar imprisoned women who couldn’t hack life in the poles.
Antarctica City, on the southernmost island, was a bustling hub where enterprising humans and Ramaxian merchants did business. One of the busiest ports in the world, its colorful skyline could be seen from Ramaxia’s closest orbital base.
“Come on, Komad,” Dox pleaded. “It’s polar night, and I’ve never seen the AC lit up.”
Kul sat unmoved until she heard Dox mumble.
“What, figures?” she challenged, but the marix kept silent. “Being a hizzah, how could I appreciate the colorful lights?”
Dox stared at her without a hint of shame.
“You can read minds when not in Femitokon mode.”
“I cannot,” Kul spoke the truth. “Nor would I waste my time reading yours.”
FEMITOKON SERIES BIBLE STUDY