Renegade on Kara: The Great Basin, Chapter 7, Escaping the Confederation

Roger keeps finding out more and more that what he learned was a lie and the humans of the confederation are far worse off than New Gate said despite having the most political power here.

chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Not long after starting his trek down the Jonathan Michelle-Crossing Road, the slum and open-air-market/warehouse district morphed into the traditional five-story buildings used by Tomlins, Monderins, and Ikerids that you could find all up and down the desert road. Clans owned these buildings, though the clan structure differed greatly between those three races. Roger wished he had time to get a look at what he had read of, but never seen. All of these buildings were identical, sand-colored blocks from the outside, and extended for at least twenty blocks to each side of the main road, making each of these side streets having higher populations than most road cities. Yet no two buildings would be the same inside. The only thing they would have in common was that the ground floor was the business floor, for whatever enterprise that clan was involved in.

Extending his mage sense, he was unsurprised to find them blocked at the walls of those buildings. He began probing each of the closest to the road as he walked.

Tomlin buildings were the easiest for Roger to penetrate without leaving a trace that he had, though still far harder than the books led him to believe. Ikerid buildings only presented a slightly harder challenge. To his surprise, Monderin, who paid the other races to shield their building for them, not having the power to do it themselves, had better building-shields than either. Each Monderin building had a minimum of nine mages, making those shields, and used at least three different races in their construction: Human, Tomlin and Ikerid. He even found a couple that had fourth races that he recognized as G’Dan or Tupla added to the matrix making up the shields even though he had never seen a G’Dan and hadn’t tasted the magic of the lone Tupla he had encountered.

Roger caught his breath as those block buildings ended, and he got his first good look at the Giants of Crossing; the Tomlin-made towers, unlike any that existed anywhere else on Kara.

Damn it, he really wished he had not sacrificed his mage camera. These towers were magnificent.

Every one of the thirty-eight towers was sixty-four stories tall and shaped like the clan leader that had them built. Standing at the foot of the Tos-Ue tower, you felt his presence. The massive building looked and felt like that aged Tomlin. Without his mage camera, there was no way to show how overwhelming being at its foot was. Even if he managed to get back here with one, that first sense of being overwhelmed would be gone.

The shields they had protecting these buildings showed the earlier ones he had probed to be just second-rate shields of minor clans. He stood there looking up at Tos-Ue thinking about breaching them.

It would take time, days or even weeks. He would learn a lot about Tomlin magic doing so, but enough to warrant looking for work and a place to stay? Unlikely.

He moved on to the next.

Since the first tower went up six hundred years ago, researchers like his father on First have been arguing whether they were a sign of a degenerating or growing society. One thing they show is how rich some Tomlin clans had become under Confederation protection and why the Tomlin and the Monderin were among the Confederation’s strongest supporters. This was despite the fact no Tomlin or Monderin make it through the mandatory Legion basic training to serve the necessary tour before holding any government office so had no say in government at all.

Those two races didn’t care so much about having power themselves as long as they had a system that restricted others from forcing them into servitude.

The Giants ended and the five-story buildings resumed, or rather the neighborhood became dominated by them. Other shapes and sizes were generously mixed in among them. In contrast to the first neighborhood that had no signs, gaudy signs and advertising decorated most of these buildings. Even the feeling of this area was different. Bordering the Giants, it was where the affluent lived and worked and not the slums of his first stop.

Without technology, large cities were the exception on Kara, not the rule. But even so Crossing had no peer outside the NewGate colonies, with seventy-five percent of all confederation citizens living in that one massive city. Making his way across it on foot was a herculean task, yet one that thousands did every day.

There were no vehicles in the Great Basin. Not only did not having technology make them prohibitively expensive to build here, but the risk of damage to the great road, an eighty-thousand-year-old artifact, was too great. They even limited the animal drawn wagons in size to avoid any risk to it. Freight moved slowly here and unless you flew, so did the people.

He tried scanning the sky with his goggles again for flyers and didn’t find any.

He really needed to take the time to work out a better pair. There should be a hand full of people with flying carpets or flying cloaks in the sky. That high risk means of travel wasn’t popular, yet with a city this big, a few were always in need of fast travel enough to take that risk.

At home the average was Ninety-two days of use before you had a fatal accident. He expected that people went longer than that here on average without having to dodge modern traffic, but that didn’t make them safe by any means. Roger’s need to get out of the Confederation was such that he would have risked it, had he had one, and experience in flying.

But he didn’t.

He knew the theory behind making them, but it would take weeks of full-time work, as hard as any of his school projects, in order to build one. Not something that he could do while having a job somewhere to keep fed.

Nor could he hide being someone capable of building one if he started such a project. Without a shielded work room, it would be announcing his University Training for all to see, as those flying carpets made here were the works of scores of mages over the course of a few weeks to months.

He sighed. Making or using one to get where he needed to be, was out, even if he had known how to fly.

His foot coming down on the Great Desert Road shocked him out of his thoughts. Or rather, his foot failing to come down on it did.

He had passed many intersections this size and there had been nothing to indicate that this one was special until his foot was coming down on that road. His shields went active, preventing him from making contact with it, and he stepped back.

Roger had never read of that happening to anyone, and people passed him on both sides, heading out into the busy intersection. He edged to the side to study the problem, glad that the non-humans gave him plenty of room to do so, but otherwise ignored him.

Examining his feet, he found that the very spell supposed to make his boots better for walking on sand and the integrity spell built into the road conflicted. That conflict triggered his cloak.

He adjusted the magic in his boots, and the conflict vanished.