Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop

On
Sondranos
,
stripped
of both title and life, I became Leon Bishop.

I should have toured the great
Spire, nearly catatonic from wonder and amazement; or maybe I could
have danced in the rain trickling down the causeway.

Instead, I smell ash searing the
wind, the heat-burn scent of sheared Aurichrome and pavement. And a
hundred years from now you’ll find diamonds of blood belonging to a
nearly extinct species littering the soil, blood which I helped and
found cause to spill.

Sondranos:

The Narrative
of Leon Bishop

a novel
by

Patrick J
Stephens

JULY
2014

This is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,
events

and incidents
are either the products of the author’s imagination

or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or
dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover
Illustration by Peridot Media
Cover design by Peridot
Media,

Book design
and production by Patrick J Stephens

Editing by
Lianna Palkovick

This book is
released under a Creative Commons license.

This book or
any portion thereof may be reproduced and used in any

manner
whatsoever provided proper attribution to the author is
given.

Printed in
the United States of America

First
Printing July 2014

Any concerns,
permission, or compliance issues may be sent to:

[email protected]

for
J

Chapter
One:

The
Rationalization of Running

Sprint when
you have to
, but never stop.

If you want to avoid all
aspects of the life you’ve left behind, then the finish line’ll be
wherever you can get to the fastest without seeing where you
started. As for me, I put sixteen colony worlds, forty-nine billion
kilometres, and a couple hundred inhospitable wastelands between me
and Earth before blowing the whistle and ending the great race to
the end.

My last act on Earth was
setting up a passport account with Sondranos United.

From the aerobridge, I paused,
looking at the holographic prompt from SU on my mobile:

Would you
like to proceed?

I hung my finger over the icon
to cancel the allocation. Five thousand in international currency
would be enough, but that dense of a transaction required identity
theft tracking. Meaning I’d effectively nix the ‘hide’ out of ‘run
and hide.’

From the
bridge, fuel pumps disconnected from my shuttle like eels
slithering back into transport compartments, dripping petro-fuel in
little anti-freeze coloured pools. Two men in flame retardant
uniforms inspected the exterior hull and a third gave a thumbs-up
to someone out of sight – likely the pilots – who were obscured
from my vision by the steel causeway meant to connect me to the
shuttle that would soon dock with the
Korsikov
, a star-liner bound for the
borderlands.

When I’d
bought the transit pass, I’d scanned for the destinations that
occurred only once in the travel list. ‘Sondranos’ via the
Korsikov
was the
earliest, cheapest flight. It was also the last one for weeks. Had
I found a cheap flight to the new Ilosan regiment, or one of the
Jameson Realty company liners, I would have taken one of them.
Anywhere but the Munich colonies – they had at least half a dozen
shuttles coming to and fro at any given time, meaning easy
retrieval if Daniel decided to call the authorities. Since we’d
gone on stellar flights before, the purchase wouldn’t be a red
flag.

Back to the prompt.

Would you
like to proceed?

Rule one of running: don’t
allow yourself to be dependent on what you’ve left behind.

Glasgow Trust and Sundry
allowed transfer of a thousand credits a day if I wanted to remain
inconspicuous; sending such a sum to the very distant Sondranos
United would have gained even more attention. I’d already taken all
the necessary steps, and it was just SU that needed
confirmation.

Rule two: work with what you’ve
got.

With the trace, a record would
exist.

The police would take a while
to comb through it, and they would hold on to the information for a
short while before releasing it to Daniel. It was a delay, but the
message would get there. I flicked aside the prompt, affirming the
transfer, and dropped five grand into the account, letting that
serve as a goodbye letter and hoped my assumptions on time were
correct.

As I made my way down the
aerobridge, I tossed the mobile into the nearest bin. I remember
hearing a truck engine rumble to life, then getting drowned out by
the growl of the shuttle spooling to life.

I should have been thinking
actively of Daniel, not treating him as a condition.

We’d been together for five
years. He deserved to know why I’d left, but when my thoughts
drifted towards calling him and addressing our disintegrating
relationship, the idea vanished, replaced with the memories of the
last time I’d seen him and the last question we’d left on: how many
times had I failed him?

Not just him. What about:

Julien,

Roland,

Karan,

and a whole host of people I’d
never been man enough to love?

But in that is the answer. The
greatest not-so-secret mankind has ever known.

Why do we run?

Because we live in a world
where it’s always an option.

Your family doesn’t approve of
your fiancé?

Elope.

You can’t stand living with
your parents anymore, but there’s always a job on a cruise ship and
status as an illegal immigrant to help you out.

In South
America,
Edgar Wallace Industries
is always looking for a few unskilled,
under-the-table migrant workers.

International
Aeronautics
was founded on the American
Dream; even more so once they moved shop to Minsk. All it takes is
the awareness of a few outlets and you can be gone.

But why
did
I
run?

Well, Sondranos was another
colony, another planet, another time and another place.

It wasn’t home.

Two weeks
later, Sondranos soil
crunched beneath
my
shoes. Since only eight of us were
leaving the
Korsikov
, only the primary shuttle needed to be used. You’d be
surprised how eight people can smell like a hundred when
compressed, recycled air and a few first-time fliers are
involved.

I stepped off the transport and
stretched my arms. We’d landed on a large patch of concrete three
or four minutes from the terminal. The receiving building was only
two stories high and sat like a rectangle fallen into the soil,
partially concealed by a build-up of dirt on the west end. Pavement
surrounded it like a moat and the outdoor baggage claim – shaded
only by a green awning that spanned a space the size of a classroom
– started to hum. Two attendants piled bags onto a conveyor belt
that wound indoors to be scanned and back out to the transfer
haul.

The rest of the passengers made
their way towards baggage claim in a crowd of shuffling feet and
body odour. I staggered when a man who’d smelled of gin and limes
the entire trip pushed past me at the door and skittered down the
stairwell. He perked up the minute he hit the ground. Whatever he’d
been dwelling on inside the cabin fled his features, widened up his
eyes, and out of the shuttle walked a businessman who’d insisted
the world should bend at his feet. I didn’t much like him for
that.

I had to squint past the
sunlight and incredibly cerulean sky, but I didn’t have to scan far
to catch sight of the city. From my spot, I couldn’t imagine
Sondranos as the bustling city I’d heard of. We might as well have
landed in a desert with the city as a mirage. The spires were so
distant that they looked like needles trying to draw blood from the
blue skin stretching across the crater’s edge. Aurichrome
frameworks belonging to the tallest skyscrapers glistened under the
sun while smaller hubs sat like bricks in their shadows.

It would take two stops on the
city’s metro system to get there, and then I’d find out just how
hard it was to create a new life.

I’d glossed through a few
magazines on the state of Sondranos’ economy on the flight down.
While Earth hadn’t changed much technologically since the inception
of star travel, it made up for stagnation by expanding – leading to
Sondranos. The mother planet, with around two million cities,
evolved into over fifty planets with their own cities and colonies.
Because of the expansion, Sondranos wasn’t considered a tourist
destination and never had been; however, it still had plenty to
offer by way of medical and job opportunities. Planets on the
Borderlands – which is to say, the ones that took over two weeks by
flight from Earth – had made a name through opportunities.

On every brochure, pamphlet,
and docket, Sondranos-proper was a cascade of numbers: population,
businesses, buildings, factories. Yet, none of them would be
tangible until I set foot inside the perimeter.

The only
thing I knew for certain – thanks to a short informational docket
handed out on the
Korsikov
- was that the most of Sondranos was located
within the only habitable crater on the planet’s face. It hulked
like grotesque prison walls, a deep red near the horizon and a
softer clay brown near where the sun had dried the soil. Nobody
could survive outside the crater. That was the first time I felt
like an idiot for running. I’d fled in the hopes of avoiding my
life’s collapse and found myself in a self-imposed
prison.

Instead of moving forward, I
walked back up the steps into the transport and leaned my head in
through the cabin. The pilots were busy shutting down the engine
systems and recycling the oxygen tanks on the back of the
shuttle.

“
Excuse me.”
I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead. “Where’s the nearest gift
shop”

The co-pilot turned to me after
flipping a small red switch on the rear console. The GPS screen
flickered off - first a holographic 3-D map floating above the main
console, then nothing. He was a tall man whose moustache reminded
me of the pompous men on Victorian book covers. “Depends on what
you’re looking for. Shirts? Pants? Trousers? Postcards?”

“
Anything,
everything.”

“
Did you
bring cash or card?”

“
Few bucks,”
I said, remembering that my passport account wouldn’t be ready
until I walked into Sondranos United and handed them three forms of
identification.

“
Try the
Abbey. It’s a church, but they have a gift shop. Take all forms of
cash.” The co-pilot stood and leaned out the door, pointing to a
peeking sliver of a church hiding behind the terminal. “Just head
towards the baggage claim. Turn left once you reach the exit and
follow the path. Ask for Davion, he’s the Father there – he
sometimes cuts guys like you some slack, sets up a tab for the ones
who need it.”

“
Guys like
me?”

“
Yeah.” He
tugged on his shirt and grimaced. It was the kind of look that
reminded me how tattered and poor I must have looked after such a
long and impromptu flight.

I returned the smile and
thanked the co-pilot for his help. I started out again.

Within a few minutes of casual
wandering, I’d rounded the baggage claim and started following the
co-pilot’s instructions. The terminal was empty save for the few
who’d come in on the same flight I’d taken. They waited in front of
the carousel. Nobody could collect their bags until they’d gone
through scans, but every now and then a neon coloured bag would
come back around. One of the travellers would walk up to collect it
like he or she’d won a contest.