tabaqui | Scaling Heaven, part one...

Scaling Heaven, part one...

Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 07:20 pm

Here it is, timeline included. Heh. Yes, i am a geek.
*bounces away*

Character Sketch/Backstory is here.
ETA: I'm an utter dork. Thank you thank you

reremouse for endless chat and beta-ing, and

darkhavens for the scifi junkie beta!
*smoooches you both*

Timeline:
2005: On assignment for the Council in Japan, Xander comforts a dying man after a devastating earthquake. The man gives him a gift - a small figure of a three-legged toad - and then bops him on the head. This is actually, as he finds out later, a good thing.

2027 - The Outsiders - a genuine alien race - make first contact with a clan of Yn'ng demons in Siberia and begin negotiating a trade: advanced tech, including faster than light tech, for magic. The Yn'ng are ecstatic. Demons all over earth begin to gather to get in on the deal. Earth governments are not amused but eventually are forced to acknowledge demons, to make them citizens and to realize that demons will be the first to use the new tech. The Outsiders introduce two other allied races - the Chaddock and something incomprehensible that humans dub 'Fairies'.

2028 - The Gate is built near Mars as a jumping-off point to Outsider space. Demons begin to leave earth for space. William the Bloody, also called Spike, leaves aboard the FTL ship Mercury. He has hired on with the Outsiders as a bounty hunter.

2029 - The first all-human ship sets out from the Gate. It is a ship of war and aboard are several thousand volunteer Marines. A fourth race - shadowy, distant, and nearly a match for the Outsider's own ferocity - is the target and humanity learns that there are worse things out there than seven-foot talking dogs. As a reward, the Outsiders help fund Fenris station, which is completed in 2037 and is the first human/demon owned and run station in space.

2040 - In lieu of his usual fee, Spike is offered a ship and becomes owner and Captain of the Tur-gah, an S-class Chaddock fighter/scout. The enslaved crew is freed but chooses to remain aboard. Spike re-christens the ship Drusilla and it is retro-fitted for himself and his human and Fairy crew.

2054 - After a disastrous job, the Drusilla goes for repairs at the distant Whale Deep - a ship and scrap-yard on the very edge of Outsider space. Spike and his crew meet up with an un-aged, still human Xander Harris. Things...happen. The Drusilla acquires her very own mechanic and computer geek.

2069 - A trade-war between two corporations becomes an actual war, complete with revolutionary slogans, blockades, and a competing 'People's Brigade'. The Drusilla, of course, works all three sides but her crew also learns that once a white hat, always a white hat. Fortunately, luck has them on the winning side.

Our story begins in 2099.

"Who, my friend, can scale the heaven?"
The Epic of Gilgamesh

Spike was dreaming. He dreamed a lot but these were different dreams - skip dreams - and they always had an extra edge to them. As the Drusilla moved faster-than-light - an electric-blue bubble in an ardent current - he dreamed of dragons, and angels.

"I kinda wanna slay the dragon," Angel says, leg braced back and sword raised, something like ecstasy and something like agony on his face. And Spike lifts his own sword, wincing from the wounds that are bleeding him dry - watching the mob of monsters that is surging towards them like a wave of black oil.

"You're no saint, you ponce," he says, grinning, and Angel grins back and the dragon roars...

Two warriors facing what they thought would be their final battle. Determined to win. But, funny thing - it was Wes who'd saved the day on that one. Wes who'd had some sort of plan in place, and deals struck, and who'd come back from the dead and opened a portal and the Wolfram and Hart immovable rock had been smashed to flinders by an irresistible force. Wesley, who was dead these last fifty years - finally at peace. *Do not go gently...* Spike thought, and dreamed on.

The bubble goes - traveling millions of light-years in the blink of an eye. Ricocheting along the surface of real-time and real-space like a cosmic skipping-stone, heading unerringly for the well of gravity and energy that is a sun, a station - their destination. Three weeks ago they'd left Dur'rhii Station - Outsider station - and were now bound for Fenris and the closest they'll ever get to Earth. Earth...and Spike is dreaming again, of the first time he ever shook the dust of the mundane world off his boots and sailed the seas of faster-than.

Aboard the ship 'Mercury' and in his closet-like cabin Spike's got the screen on so he can see the Gate. Earth is so far from anyplace anyone wants to go that there's a booster gate to kick ships out, 100-billion light years or more. Straight to the heart of Outsider space and the center of all trade, all war - all life. Suddenly all the old myths - vampires, werewolves! - are true and a lot of humanity is in a philosophical tail-spin. Having actual aliens prove the myths true makes it that much worse. Some of humanity has yet to recover, and space seems like the better option, just now.

The Gate is made of seven skip generators, tethered in a circle by Outsider know-how. Spike watches as the ship joins the queue for the ride, moving slow. In real-time it's the middle of October and Spike and the Mercury and everyone on board will arrive at Midway sometime in June. But there's no 'June' at Midway since it's an Outsider station and it runs to Outsider cycles. In skip-time, it'll feel like maybe he took an hour's nap. Until he wakes up.

The warning comes over the PA - they're about to skip out - and Spike's fingers are tight, tight, tight on the edges of his coat as he watches the screen that's above his head. He's flat on his back in the bunk, the Gate looming closer. St. Elmo's fire surrounds them as the gate fires - actinic lightning that meets and expands into a writhing ball of energy. A sort of bone-deep hum vibrates through everything and time seems to slow to nothing at all...and suddenly they go. A kick like a mule and a few seconds of free-fall and then they're in faster-than. For a moment Spike can see every molecule that makes up his body - every atom of the ship - and it's all streaming around him like a river - a ribbon of fire and ice and light. And he's flying and falling and laughing. And then he's dreaming - dreaming of Dru and the first time they made love - and then he's jolting back down, down, down, into slow-space again and the ribbons of time and matter furl themselves away like a cosmic umbrella. The PA is telling them not to move until they get the all-clear and his mouth is dry and he's thin, so thin from the longest skip in space. It takes him four days to get back to full strength again, drinking the 'approved' synthetic blood that most vamps live on. Taking down a drunken stationer or two as well, because you can't beat it straight from the source.

And he only goes through the Gate two more times in the next fifteen years because Earth isn't part of the plan much anymore, and the Dru is all the home he really needs.

Fenris Station was an old station - the first demons and humans had ever built, completed ten years after first contact. It was out in the Canis Major constellation - Earths closest galaxy. A system choc-a-bloc with debris rich in minerals, ores, and heavy metals - hazardous to fly through, but profitable to mine. The station's age showed in the old-fashioned metal decking that rang under Spike's boots as he strode along the Concourse, heading for the Segue bar and his client. Fenris' age also showed in the pockets of weather that tended to generate themselves far up in the soot-blackened supports and cross-beams of the overhead. With a huff of annoyance Spike sidestepped a puddle and the drizzle that was making it. It was coming down from the tangle of unshielded conduits and pipes that carried water, atmosphere and heat to the stem, where the ships were docked. Fenris was like a huge metallic flower, with the ships docking all up and down the 'stem', and the living and working and everything else going on in the various levels of the 'petals'. The center of it all was Engineering and the Outsider power-source that kept it all going.

Spike had only been in there once - something like thirty years ago when Fenris was in danger of being blown up and Xander had talked him into joining the guerillas and liberating the station. You could still see the fire-damage from that time - scorch-marks along the metal and plastic infrastructure that aren't worth the effort of a clean up. They're a reminder, those marks. 'War was here, and could be again. Never forget.' Even gifted with tech beyond imagining, humans had still found it necessary to kill each other over those oldest of all prizes - gold, water and flesh. Outsiders had watched with a detached, amused eye. They had fought more wars than humanity ever had and most of them with their own kind, and the little scuffle over trade routes and mining rights had interested them not at all. They had their own interminable battles to fight - their own labyrinthine politics to thread.

It made for wild times and outrageous profit if you got involved in an Outsider fight - if you picked the winning jyiiy - the winning house. If you didn't - you lost your head right along with the boss. Spike had so far always picked the winning side, even if he sometimes picked after the fighting was over. An Outsider jyiiy was very much like a corporation, if corporations condoned torture and rape. 'Family' didn't actually translate all that well into the Outsider language, much less 'friend', 'compassion' or 'mercy'. It was pure chance that a sort of cosmic game of leap-frog had led Outsiders to human space, and all of humanity had come this close to being the next handy gene-pool for supplying Outsiders with slaves. Demons - and demon magic - had proved too fascinating and luckily Outsiders had met a magical human or two, as well. Something that had caused them to lump humans in with demons, much to the horror of some overly zealous humans. The smart ones - once they'd learned a little history - had happily gone along with it.

Spike growled as some station trash - drunks, junkies or unemployable-due-to-criminal-history types - swarmed him at the lift station, selling trinkets and lottery tickets and drugs. He vamped, snarling and most of them scattered. The couple that were too fucked up - or too desperate - to back off got the back of his hand.

"Undead freak!" one muttered, limping away and Spike hissed in dissatisfaction. He didn't like the stink of them.

"Fuck off, little snack-pak, I'm feelin' peckish." The human glared at him but scurried faster. Most vamps lived on the synthetic blood vat-grown to specification and dispensed at every restaurant, bar, and hotel on-station. It was tasty and it kept you healthy but no vamp ever gave up the hunt entirely and everyone knew it. The Outsiders just shrugged that off - they were predators themselves - and no Station had yet done anything too extreme to try and keep vamps from feeding. Of course, the smart ones kept it under the radar. The dumb ones - got dusted. Spike had had a hand in that from time to time. No sense in making things hard when they didn't have to be. The Outsiders knew a thing or two about genocide.

The lift took him up three levels and he got out and stalked on, the vast hollow of the Concourse ringing and singing all around him. A six-story jump from the top level and the whole thing a dizzying, neon-lit canyon that sold every vice and every virtue a skip-drunk spacer could want. There were mostly humans and Earth demons at Fenris, but Spike stepped aside for a clutch of Outsiders. Anywhere between seven and eight feet tall, they most closely resembled dogs who had learned to walk on their hind legs. But an Outsider skull had a set of jaws that opened much too widely for comfort and were studded with a double row of razoring teeth. Large, bat-like ears heard too many secrets and the brain behind the wide-set eyes processed endlessly for advantage - conquest. Outsiders fought and Outsiders won, and it was only their intense need to win against each other that had kept Earth from becoming one more burnt-out cinder in their path. So busy fighting that they didn't have the time or inclination for manufacture, agriculture - research. The devoured, like upright piranha. If you were smart - and didn't mind stepping aside - you could live like kings off the chum in their wake. Humanity and demon-kind - stepped aside.

The com-set in Spike's ear ticked with static and then the Drusilla's pilot came online, her voice a faint whisper in Spike's sensitive ear.

"Fenris Traffic Control just posted the 'Billy Bud' inbound for dock," Nia informed him.

Spike sighed. The Drusilla had a feud with the Billy Bud. Chiefly, with their bigoted, brainless Captain but it all filtered down. "One thing at a time, please. Bounty first, opinionated gobshites next." He didn't actually open his mouth to talk - the throat-mic array stuck more-or-less invisibly under his chin and on either side of his Adam's apple picked up sub-vocal speech. Good for loud bars and back-stabbing.

"Just wanted to let you know." Nia sounded sulky.

Spike sighed again. "And I'm glad you did. Going into the bar now."

"Confirmed," she said, and then static as she shut down. Nia disapproved of the way Spike was handling the feud. She wanted bloody mayhem on the docks rather than the covert sort of guerilla approach Spike was taking. Ferro - his ship's gun and weapon's master - approved of bloody mayhem too. Xander didn't particularly approve of bloody mayhem, but fighting made Spike horny and horny made Xander happy, so...there might be approval in there somewhere, except mayhem wasn't going to happen. Neither Nia nor Ferro nor Xander would have to pay the fines if they took out the entire complement of the Billy Bud while docked at Fenris. Spike would. He was the Captain, and that made him responsible. *Responsible. Christ. Been running from that for over two hundred years!* And destroying the Billy Bud might get them all banned from Fenris, which was - unacceptable. Spike settled his Captain's jacket across his shoulders, pushed the door to the Segue open and stepped inside.

"Fuckin' Billy Bud. Why'd those assholes haf'ta be here now?" Ferro scowled at the vid-screen in front of him, watching the course that the station was plotting for Billy Bud. "Don't tell me they're gonna dock 'em on our level. Nia, tell me they're not that fuckin' stupid!" Ferro glared over the top of his station at the back of the pilot's head. She waved a slim, palely bluish hand over her shoulder, ignoring him. Intent on the final moments of the water-swap from their tanks to the stations, and gleaning the stations data-feed for anything useful. Ferro slumped back in his seat and contemplated arming the Drusilla but station - and more importantly, Spike - would skin him alive if he powered up right there at dock. At Fenris, which was aggressively neutral at the best of times and suicidally tolerant at the worst.

"Thank you, Fenris, there's our credit number," Nia murmured, and Ferro watched the camera view that showed the line of dock-monkeys leaving the Drusilla, empty loaders trundling in their wake. Re-stocking essential items, a priority in the first few hours at dock. Later would come the real shopping, when they searched out the Earth delicacies that Fenris always had. And maybe found a Billy Bud crewman or two to...annoy.

Fenris-station didn't approve of feuds, grudges or private little wars. That just made it harder to carry out each skirmish. Ferro stretched, grabbed his coffee and went down to his 'office'. Basically, it was the armory with a hanging chair and a stash of porn for the player; a place Nia avoided and Xander sometimes hung out. Spike bought the porn and inspected the weapons, and long before Xander had come along they'd made use of the hanging chair quite a few times. Now it generally just saw Ferro and a random selection of off-world beauties. And a lot of gun oil, one way or another.

Ferro crawled up into the hanging chair and stared in dissatisfaction at the weapon-covered walls. Fenris did not allow knives, free-projectile guns or energy weapons of any sort. They'd learned their lesson well during the war years and were as aggressive about their weapon's policy as they were about their neutrality. But that didn't mean Spike didn't have that old-fashioned straight razor on him, and probably a taser, too. Didn't mean that when Ferro went on-station later he wouldn't be carrying a little shock-knife of his own, a Chaddock stinger that felt like acid over your nerves and left neatly cauterized slashes inches deep. Fenris didn't acknowledge the need for those weapons any more than they did the inherent idiocy of having warring Outsider jyiiy docking on the same level, much less the same station, but Fenris seemed to have gotten away with it for years. Didn't mean either Ferro or Spike would stop carrying hidden weapons any time soon.

There was a loud crashing noise from the corridor and then cursing and Ferro got up and sauntered to the doorway. Xander was standing there in that raggedy-assed coverall he wore when he was working, wrestling with an access cover. Getting ready to do some maintenance or some precise and finicky thing to the ship's engines that would make her .38 percent faster or some such. Xander was their fix-it guy - computer guy - the guy that kept the Dru purring along like a big, happy cat. Kept Spike purring along, better than Ferro ever had.

"What'cha doin'?" Ferro asked, calculated drawl and Xander shot him an evil look and then yelped as the cover slipped and the unfinished edge gashed his palm.

"Fuckin' help me or fuck off," Xander growled and Ferro grinned and went over - helped him wrestle the stubborn cover out of its grooves and onto the floor. Xander clipped a safety line to the recessed ring in the wall - clipped the other end to the cover and kicked at it with his boot.

"Stupid damn thing."

"The Billy Bud's out there. Fuckers are dockin' 'em right on our level."

"Christ." Xander raised his hand to his mouth - bad habit he'd never broken - and Ferro snatched at his wrist.

"Go get this fixed right," he snapped, turning Xander's hand and examining the gash. It was bleeding nicely, two-inch cut right across the meat at the base of his thumb.

"Later. I wanna get this filter in before we go -"

"We're gonna be here three days, Xander." Ferro pulled an old square of pale red cloth - a bandana once upon a time - out of his pocket and made to wrap it around Xander's hand. Xander recoiled.

"You are not putting that filthy rag around my hand!"

"It's not filthy!" Ferro examined the cloth. Well, it was a little...stiffish. "Cleaner then in there," he added, jerking his head in the direction of what Xander obscurely called the 'Jeffries tubes'. One of the many crawl-spaces that riddled the Drusilla and provided access to her inner workings. And the hidey-holes where they'd smuggled everything from drugs to escaping slaves to - on one never-to-be-forgotten run - fish. Bags and bags of bright-finned guppies for the core-crawlers out on Charybidis. The things Spike hit on...

"Look, just go and spray some damn nu-skin or something on it, okay? I don't wanna hear the bitchin' and moanin' that'll happen when Spike gets back on board and smells your blood everywhere." Ferro snatched the plastic storage-box of filters that Xander was proposing to replace and sauntered off with them. "You come show me you fixed it up and I'll give these back," he said smugly, knowing that invoking Spike's name would get it done like nothing else would. Xander could be a stubborn son of a bitch.

"Ferro, you fuck!" Xander yelled, but he stomped off towards the infirmary and Ferro grinned - shoved the filters into his office and locked the door. He had a funny feeling about this deal and he wanted to be back topside, monitoring what was going on at the meeting. Spike's contact was a Chaddock and he didn't trust the slimy bastards.

Part two.

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