The Jack's Story (BRIGAND Book 2) (9 page)

"But she’s not everyone else’s mother. Only ours. I should be able to call her that." Jase was especially obstinate today.

I muttered and pushed past him. My tiny SU-7 fixbot, 'Su', followed, constantly checking for anything about my suit that might need attention. She seemed especially interested in the seal ring of my helmet and clumsily orbited my head like a drunken halo.

Jase made a shooing gesture at her. "Why do you have to bring that thing with you everywhere?"

"She's more useful than you might think." I commented as I slipped a small piece of europine into her intake hopper.

Fixbots are little factories. They're incredibly versatile, capable of fabricating pretty much anything they need, on demand, for their repair jobs. Normally, you'd stock them with standard base elements, but I'd had this idea, one that as far as I knew, nobody else had come up with. I'd wondered what would happen if I let Su try her hand at picking apart europine. The process can take a while. Sometimes a long while. Fixbots use nanites to do their molecular level magic, foregoing the speed of particle furnaces as a concession to the fact that they aren't supposed to incinerate their owners. I’d made some adjustments to her recently and hoped she would be able to use the europine. For something else entirely.

Su accepted the offering with a little beep. Jase walked slowly ahead of us, meandering as he always did, balancing on fractured blocks of ice, hopping from one to the next as he chatted about his upcoming trip. Our parents had paid dearly, six months of mining added to their tour, to get Jase passage to the Inner. He wasn’t meant for this life, for the life of a Belter. Certainly not a Belter on Europa. Digging up little purple rocks by hand. Living subsurface to avoid Jupiter's ferocious radiation. Endless harassment from the Jovian Fuel Combine. None of us cared for it that much, but Belters are a stoic lot. Except Jase. Nothing about him fit the way we lived. That much was painfully evident.

He even avoided his bots.

I adjusted my wrist comp and the thick plastic straps that held the armored torso panels in place over my stiff exo suit. Only recently had I been allowed to go into the mouth of the mines and begin my apprenticeship. It was an art, our father, Sardar, explained to me. Far more than hammering away at a pile of rock and ice. We molded, sculpted, taking a craftsman's pleasure in finding our way through jagged seams of ice to the best europine deposits.

There was a lot to know. A lot that could go wrong. The ice in the rilles was constantly shifting. On the surface, it was as hard as iron, but down here, closer to the ocean, it was softer and far less stable. Warmth from below was constantly causing the ice to shift and fracture. We'd learned to take advantage of that, finding our way into newly opened seams, to the europine. But careless digging could kill you. So could a misplaced step. And sometimes, when you broke into a seam, the icediggers would come spilling out. They weren't dangerous one at a time, but a swarm was another story. Their little pincers could puncture a suit or lop off a digit with ease. And the big ones could do far worse.

A miner's life was dark, dangerous and solitary. Which is why most tours in the mines lasted only a few months. Survival wasn't the issue. Our family could last indefinitely with the right equipment and supplies. The problem was more psychological. Too long in the ice and you could just lose it. Happened all the time and my family was already coming up on eight months.

But Jase wasn't like us. Despite our genetic similarity, he wasn't like me at all. He had no talent for the work we did. In fact, he was a liability. He could never seem to remember the safety protocols, as if they simply wouldn't stick in his mind. He should have been a disappointment to our family, but instead he was like some graceful pet. His light hair, his green eyes, his easy and completely unselfconscious charm. We all loved him and we covered for him. He was our only luxury in a land of ice and stone.

"So where are we going this time?" I asked as I finished my equipment check. My suit was encrusted with a dozen embellishments - extra armor against the cold and the occasional physical mishap, bot extensibles that I used to make the mining easier. We Belters are a resourceful lot. We repurpose everything, including bits of our decommissioned bots. I'd even been thinking about integrating Su into my suit. After her work with the europine was finished.

Jase continued to hop along next to me like an excited child, while I tightened and checked straps and bearings.

"It’s along the edge of that big rift. I found a cavern and you’ve got to see it."

"I thought you didn’t like going down there, into those tight spaces."

"This isn’t like that at all. It has a huge opening and these amazing rocks. Or maybe they're ice. I don't know, but I wanted to show you first, before Dad."

"You mean Sardar," I interjected.

"Whatever." Jase waved off my correction. "It’s going to be great. I think it’s something
new
."

I smiled despite myself. Jase loved anything new, anything different. It was a frustration and a delight.

We walked in easy silence as we climbed picked our way deeper into the rille. Far above us, the whisper thin atmosphere of Europa twisted and glowed in the sleet of fast moving ions that whirled around Jupiter. Up there, was frozen death and ruined DNA. But down here, there was life and even beauty.

As we approached our destination, the ice beneath us bucked and tiny cracks spun through the wall to our left. Nothing major. Just part of the constant flux of Europa's crust. But we knew, at least I knew, that it meant we needed to be on our guard. The ice could be fickle.

Jase saw me pause and said, "The quakes happen a lot around here. I noticed that before, when I found the cave."

He was the only one who ventured far from our camp. It’s not that we were forbidden per se, but none of us saw the use in it. We had all we needed, the mines, our camps. All together. No need to look beyond. But Jase was always different.

"You’re not going to believe the colors..." He continued, as the quake shook itself out and the ice settled.

"Here it is!" he cried.

Jase stopped in front of a narrow vertical crevice that slashed diagonally across the face of the ice cliff we'd been following. The opening would accommodate him easily enough but my bulkier suit was going to have trouble fitting through the gap.

"Not closed in huh?" I smiled at him and he grinned big, pleased at even my grudging display of humor.

"Come on inside." He waved me forward more as he wriggled into the opening.

As I followed, my utility harness got hung on some unseen protrusion and I couldn't move forward without releasing it.

"Just leave it. It’s not like anyone's around to take it."

The harness, and the tools it carried were my apprenticeship gift from Sardar. I wasn't just a kid helping out any more. I was a miner and, when I'd learned the trade, I'd become a journeyman, qualified to work in the deepest rifts, where the richest seams lay. I couldn't wait to go deep.

I wasn't thrilled about leaving my newest tools just lying out here in the rille, especially my cutter - a fusion-powered device that every hard-scrabble Belt miner knew how to use. It could rip through almost anything. But he was right. There wasn't anyone in this whole sector who wasn't family or very nearly so.

Su was hovering just outside the opening. "You watch out for this, okay."

I then turned and wedged my way after Jase, further into the cave.

The cleft narrowed more as we progressed. I didn’t mind at all, but I suspected Jase found it uncomfortable. He didn't seem to do well in tight spaces like this.

"Why are you doing this? How did you even find this place?"

"I wanted you to see them. The rocks I mean."

We slid around a shallow curve in the crevice and we had to lean back, at an awkward angle to fit our bodies through the narrow opening. And then we were through…

The cleft opened into a huge space, a gigantic void in the ice. My mouth dropped open in wonder as I took in the sheer vastness of the place. The far wall had to be a good kilometer away. Above us, slabs of ice leaned together into a vault that extended almost half that far.

And everywhere were nodules of eruopine. Trillions of them. Gigatons. I was looking at more of the stuff than all the Belt miners in all the generations since we first came to Europa had gathered. This was so far beyond the mother lode there wasn't even a word for it.

"What. Is. This?" I breathed.

Jase smiled broadly at my obvious amazement. "Told ya it was awesome."

"We have to go tell Sardar right now."

"But I wanted you to see. Isn’t it beautiful?"

"Yeah, Jase. It’s um, pretty. But do you know how much wealth we’re standing in right now? Do you have any idea?"

Jase frowned and lowered his white blonde head. "We can’t tell anyone."

"What!"

"You can’t tell anyone!" He pleaded. "I wanted to show this to you. Because it's beautiful. Not so you can dig it up. So you can destroy it. That's all we do…"

Something heaved under the violet-colored mounds. Something big.

Jase was standing in front of me. He couldn't see what was happening, but he saw my face.

"Crom, what's wrong?"

My voice cracked, swinging into falsetto as my throat clamped down on my fear. In that moment, everything changed. In that moment I knew…"Behind you!"

I was too late.

In the beginning, BRIGAND wasn't even a story at all.

In 2012, I started working on a game concept, a pitch that, in my head, was something like Shadow Complex meets Firefly directed by Guy Ritchie. As the concept came together, I saw this weird new world unfolding in front of me. It was full of amazing things, but it was also brutal and kind of shocking. The more I dug, the more caught up I became. BRIGAND was taking on a life of its own.

Even more surprising were the characters. They began as archetypes, as templates on to which a player would impress their personal stamp. They were conceived to span a range of gameplay styles that players would find both familiar and a little unexpected. Like the character classes in games like Diablo, they were created to be deliberately indistinct, but hopefully inspiring. I wanted players to bring their own imaginations to them, to fill in the details I'd so purposefully left out.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Natalie French and I happened to be talking about one of her writing projects and I mentioned this crazy-assed game idea I'd been noodling on. Somewhat to my surprise, she asked if she could read the concept. I sent it to her that day.

Before the week closed out, she'd responded with a story, a poignant little piece about this girl who wanted nothing more than to be normal, but was instead trapped by her extraordinary nature. That original story was maybe 5000 words, but we both knew she'd tapped into something. We both wanted to hear the rest of the tale.

Natalie had turned the idea of a Wraith into Trig and then made me fall in love with her. That was the real birth of BRIGAND. I continued to work on the game concept, diving into design, planning prototypes, recruiting friends to help me do some previz. But Natalie and I both seemed to be dealing with something that had its own momentum. There were five character archetypes in the concept. Natalie wanted to write their origin stories. And I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more to read.

And so BRIGAND was born all over again. It's a much bigger place now. Natalie and I are still exploring. We don't always know where it'll take us but, so far, it's been a pretty awesome ride.

-
Scot Bayless, August 2015

Photo © 2013 by Chris Appel

Natalie resides in the Pacific Northwest, on five acres of land, but has yet to purchase a lawn mower or figure out how to grow anything besides weeds. She lives with her fiancé, her two children and Frankie the dog.

You can visit her at
http://nataliekfrench.com
.