Hello and welcome back to another issue of Tight Beam! In the previous issue we shared the first chapter of the opening novel in The Descendant Saga, Altar of Scales, as well as the third installment of the new serial novel Pending Receipt.
Altar of Scales, published mid 2025 is the second edition of a book originally called The Descendant, published September 2019. Lots of changes were made, lots of improvement, as better editors helped, other professionals offered feedback, and our author, Chace, polished his craft. This second edition of his debut novel is much improved. There weren’t many structural changes, but this one big change really ties the story together. We added the antagonist’s point of view, increasing the book’s length by almost twenty percent but doubling the context.
In the previous issue of Tight Beam, we included the first chapter of Altar of Scales, as a teaser, but here, to show the diversity and improvement of this new second edition, we’re also going to include the second chapter, which if from the new, antagonist POV. After that, for this epic double feature is part four of the serial novel, Pending Receipt. Both for your reading pleasure.
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Altar of Scales
Chapter II
Upstart
Summer lingered this year, the air staying warm long after dark. Warm air currents rose from the sands late into the evening, making long-distance flights across the vast expanse of the dunes possible, even after the light had faded from the sky.
Tarko was taking full advantage of this. The sun had already set, yet the hot air kept his blood warm and his wings inflated. He still tingled with warmth and excitement as the air held him aloft. Carried upward on the warm air wafting from the peak of a dune far below, letting the current carry him even higher. He rolled his shoulders and held his tail out straight like a crimson tree branch. His energetic young flesh was eager for the hunt. The dingy red of his scales kept him warm longer than the rest of the big, winged lizards of his kind. His darker scales helped him absorb the morning’s heat faster. He recovered from the cold of night, letting him become mobile sooner than the rest of his cold-blooded brethren. At the moment he consciously took advantage of his color, the deep red scales, nearly as dark as the night’s star-spangled sky, helping keep his body and the ill will it bore hidden.
He had left the rest of his clan behind, striking out from their roost of his own volition. He believed many of the others had become slow and weak, exercising too much caution in their old age. Tarko’s young and exuberant blood thirst didn’t have the patience for the rules that tried to govern him. Tarko went out hunting against the direct orders of the clan’s alphas. Intentionally disobeying their explicit instructions. He did something he believed in even more, breaking the standing orders without a second thought. Tarko believed the Alphas had become too weak, not capitalizing on the opportunity the late summer afforded to kill their greatest foes. These didn’t have a real name. Each member of the clan had a different name for them and a different reason to hate them. He called them ‘softlings’, and he yearned for their blood.
He sought the blood of the strange creatures out here in his desert. These strange little warm-blooded pale things had soft skin and hair. They bore no scales, no shells, no fangs, no claws. Yet hundreds of them survived, living in some strange cave, made of some odd material. It was hard like stone, but smoother and flatter, and sounded terrible when scratched with claws. Tarko and the others called it a cave even though it was not, but they didn’t have a better word for it.
***
Three generations previously, the strange sideways obelisk had just appeared, with the odd pale inhabitants already inside and established. The softlings couldn’t fly. The thing they lived in must have risen from the ground. Tarko could think of no other explanation for it, much like its occupants, surely couldn’t fly. It was much too large and very inert.
The strange not-cave cave had proven a good place to roost, for the strange stone grew warm quickly, even in the weak light of the early morning, it grew warm faster than even the best stones on the mountains. The pale softlings lived inside it, but Tarko had never seen them on top of it. Tarko had spent several days on top of their domain. He watched their comings and goings, often without them even knowing. He took them as fools, for they only kept watch in one direction. If one flew past their nest, turned, and approached from the far side, to land atop their caves’ stone, not stone hill, they probably would never notice. Tarko marveled over the fact that the softlings survived despite their dim obliviousness.
Tarko coiled his mind around the softling’s hive, unsure of its true nature. He knew it wasn’t stone, but he had no better word to describe it the material. Not being a hole in a mountain, he couldn’t rightly call it a cave. It was strange, artificial, and out of place. It didn’t belong, just like the soft pale things that lived in it. Like a colony of flesh, squirmy sandworms that died in the sun, if dug up. The hive left an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. The weird way that it stuck out of the sand was just wrong, like it had fallen from the sky. His gut told him it had fallen from above, but that wasn’t possible. Mountains didn’t fly.
Tarko had grown impatient with his clan’s alphas. They may be the oldest mating pair in the clan, but that did not guarantee they were the smartest. They hesitated to attack. Blinded by an overabundance of caution, he figured. The lingering heat made it so the entire pack could fly out in force to eradicate these strange pale creatures that didn’t belong, yet the alphas did not capitalize on this advantage. They held him back. They held the whole crush back and let the opportunity slip between their talons.
Tarko was the quick-witted one, the one committed to his cause. Those pale little creatures had been out there in the dunes for generations, burning things, making noise and light at night. An unnatural, disgusting abomination that ignored the natural day-night cycle of the world. They killed their brethren whenever they got the chance. At first, it was dangerous to get close to their cave. It killed his great-grandfather with thunder. He had fallen from the sky after being stuck by noise. Many had died in that manner, though none had in Tarko’s lifetime. Gradually, Tarko had overcome the fear of being in proximity to that unnatural place despite the Alpha’s insistence on extreme caution.
He regarded softlings with supreme disgust and earnest contempt. The worst transgression forcing his claws into action was that the softlings had even started spreading beyond their hive. One even lived on its own in the depths of the desert. Others regularly made trips out from their cave thing to the canyons to steal the water from the streams. Recently, other hunters spotted them going farther out from their hive, traveling in larger groups that were too dangerous to attack. These wandering groups spending more and more time afield too. He didn’t want them to establish a second infestation somewhere else, spreading like scale rot across the back of the desert. The alphas had spoken with traveling members of other clans. The other clans had never seen or heard of anything else like the softlings, no matter how far or wide they had traveled, or the distance they hailed from. For the moment, it remained a localized infection, something that, if removed promptly, wouldn’t be able to spread further.
The softlings were curiously strange in their nasty way. Smart enough, they could communicate amongst themselves, at least. Their bodies were all soft and wrong. They walked on two legs and they didn’t even have tails. They didn’t belong here and Tarko wanted nothing but to make them not be here. He suspected they weren’t even safe to eat. As far as he knew, no one had ever tried. He refused to be that foolish.
As the warm air currents carried him higher, he calculated his move to the next updraft. He left the air column he had been circulating on, curling one wing slightly as he banked and let himself fall off the top of the warm air. He sank heavily into the cooler air and lost altitude surprisingly fast. Tarko beat the air with several powerful strokes of his wings before he found the next air column off the peak of another dune. Even warmer and stronger than the previous, it carried him upwards again.
Tarko shrugged through the air, with a few more wingbeats reaching the pinnacle of the column. He was mentally preparing himself to slip off the air column in search of the next when he spotted the twinkle on the horizon he wanted to see. The faint light flickered in the distance, the fire. The incessant burning of wood was one of the things about those soft-bodied vermin that bothered him most. Now it aided him, a beacon heralding him to their destruction. Tarko understood how precious the trees were, trees sheltered his prey, and the constant destruction and burning of wood worried him.
Tarko used the distant fire like a bright navigational star and homed in on it, twisting his face into a toothy, evil, hungry smirk. With renewed vigor he tucked a wing again and slipped silently through the night sky, bounding from one column of air to another across the desert, using what heat, still radiating from the sunbaked sand below, he could find. His eyes lit with the distant firelight.
***
Tarko got himself directly over the bonfire, riding its turbulent air currents high over the cave entrance. The smell of the burning wood overpowered his nose even from this altitude. He widened his orbit around the heated air, putting just enough distance between himself and the air column over the fire that he sank slowly through the blackened sky without having to beat his wings, yet close enough to the column that it still kept the broad span of thin membrane sprouting from his shoulders warm and tingly. His flesh nearly quivered with anticipation. He could see the tiny shapes of softlings moving about near the edge of the firelight below. He rolled his head sideways and peered down at them with one keen eye. If he dipped his head to look with both eyes, it would have influenced his flight. He reminded himself of his childhood flying lessons. ‘body follows the eyes.’ He could see several of the softlings returning to the cave, slipping out of the darkness like spirits. How they stayed so active through the cold of the night was beyond his comprehension. Typically, only the smaller insects were truly nocturnal, yet these soft bipeds were always doing something, always some activity going on.
Tarko shook his head, ridding himself of the speculation. Speculation wasn’t the reason for his visit. As the softlings mewling about below split up, he chose his target and tucked his wings, holding them wrapped over his body like a sheath. He plummeted from the sky like a murderous meteor. He narrowed his eyes as the increased airspeed tried to dry them out, struggling against the urge to close the inner semi-transparent eyelids, not wanting the blurred vision to cost him. Free-falling for only a heartbeat. Too long and he wouldn’t be able to slow down enough without hurting himself. He rolled his shoulders forward to catch the air current in his armpits and let it open his wings again, oozing them back out into the night sky. He didn’t snap them out all at once, for that might be catastrophic too. Even as he eased them open, the strain on the thin skin was painful as the tiny membranes stretched over the air, trying to contain his weight. If he had waited too much longer, he could have torn his skin struggling against the air currents. He briefly chastised himself, remembering one of his brood mates who had made that mistake when they were younger and free fallen from too high and waited too long to open his wings. He tore the membranes from his flesh in a panic, trying to slow down too fast at too low a height and made a mess of himself on the rocks in the mountains near the nest.
Tarko focused on the quickly approaching desert floor and his victims below. The strange, pale creature rotated its small, round, noseless head up to look at him as he dropped low enough for the firelight to reflect off his dark scales rather than letting the sky’s shadows swallow his silhouette. He let the muscles in his wings relax again. He plummeted through the remaining gap onto his victim, letting the small unarmored body catch his weight. His now deflated wings fell over both of them, enshrouding the victim in a curtain of dark hatred, the last thing the softling would ever see.
Tarko, with a flurry of teeth, clamping jaws, and claws, with joyful blood lust set about disassembling his victim. The other small, soft creatures fled and made odd barking noises. Their motion hardly drew his attention as he mauled his victim with a vigor that was somewhere between hunger and hatred, reverence and lust. Eventually, he lowered his wings and brought his head up, reopening his awareness. The smell of their strange salty liquid secretions wafted through the fire’s dancing flames to him. He left one victim and approached the others. His disgust at their oily scent made him only more enraged.
Tarko kept his head low, just high enough that the scales of his chin didn’t touch the broad, flat stone that served as the stage for their death dance. The air was cooling quickly now, and he wanted to take as much heat from the fire and the stone as possible. He used the muscles running down the top of his long neck to lift and lower his head as he nearly slithered across the stone, his jaw mirroring the contours of the rock.
He worked his mind, now dazed with blood lust, to focus through the mental fog of violence and hatred as he approached the strange creatures that he didn’t understand, flicking his eyes about to make sure he wasn’t being snuck up on. Struggling between his mind and his instincts as he debated on the best way to approach the three before him. They carried sticks, sticks that hurt, and the three of them together gave him pause.
Tarko closed the gap and squared them up, deciding to make a leap for the one on the end. He wanted to hurt it and get away before the other two could hit him with their sticks. The one that stood in the middle had a longer stick that made him even more wary.
He sank to his haunches and readied himself to pounce, tightening all the muscles he had in his legs, even coiling his tail like a spring against the rock behind him. As he readied his mind through the fog of bloodshed, he heard wind behind just before the gusts rolled over him.
He recognized the uneven blasts of air as someone landed behind him. The air scolded by the vicious beat of their cold-blooded wings pushed the flames around, making the light dance erratically with its passing, as it stretched and bent the shadows. Tarko wasn’t alone with the pale vermin anymore. He and his prey didn’t move. Unsure of what was going to happen, he dared not turn his head to look. Soon, the smell percolated past the wafting smoke. Tarko could identify them by smell alone as they got closer. He recognized the powerful, heady scent of a joined male – female pair. Chern and Scow, his clan leaders. The alphas had arrived.
Tarko withered, caught intentionally disobeying their explicit directions. They had come all this way just to fetch him. The effort required on their part was liable to leave them tired and short-tempered. Tarko figured the two of them were more likely to hurt him than the three softlings in front of him. He nearly leapt at his prey right then. That would surely be suicide. If the softlings didn’t kill him, the alphas probably would afterward. He spent a moment weighing the actions’ merit.
A claw landed on his shoulder, then a second on his other shoulder. He nearly winced at their touch. A single word oozed out of Chern’s nostrils, her voice so low in frequency it was both felt and heard. Sounding veiled and threatening without Chern even having to open her jaw to speak. “Come.”
Slowly, gingerly, Tarko followed them back to the other side of the fire. Both Chern and Scow walking on their hind legs, asserting their dominance and regal superiority to him in front of the softlings, forcibly making him subservient to them in front of his most hated foes. It both infuriated and frustrated Tarko.
Once out of earshot, they started in on him. “You insolent hatchling. You young, dumb upstart.”
Tarko looked into the distance, his eyes staring off into the darkness somewhere between the horizon and where the ring of firelight ended. Refusing them to let be the focus of his eyes, not paying them any more heed than he must.
Chern continued for Scow, “We can’t afford to lose you. You may be overeager, but you also hold promise. You are at the forefront of your generation. Even if you don’t lead them, you still bring them motivation.”
Scow took over. “Yes, these creatures are a threat to us. Things are getting tough for us. For the entire clan, fewer eggs are hatching than they used to. We still aren’t comfortable with your ideas. We think it is a risk we need not take, but if you are going to be this stupid about it, running off on your own to face down their horde…”
He trailed off and looked over his shoulder at the three softlings still standing determined at the entrance to their cave.
“Despite your insolence, you are too valuable to risk losing. Every member of the crush is too valuable these days. If you’re going to insist on doing this, then wait a couple of days. We’ll do it another night, together, as a clan.”
Chern added, “Provided the heat holds for a few more days while we gather our strength.”
Her mate continued, “We’ll get inside their hive, make a mess of things, we’ll hurt them badly.” The anger oozing into his voice too. His instinctual blood lust taking over. Chern wanted to get things over with before her counterpart got out of hand, too. “Come on, they are smart enough to communicate. Let’s go apologize and maybe they won’t suspect anything in the coming days.”
Her hand still on his shoulder, Chern lead Tarko back towards the three softlings still on the other side of the fire guarding their nest. They stood face to face again, and the disgust and hatred creeping back into Tarko’s heart. Chern grew impatient as Tarko got lost in thought over the small, strange bipeds. She stamped a clawed foot, settling all her weight onto one leg. Tarko felt the force of her stamp through the stone they stood on.
Tarko slowly and solemnly apologized for killing one of their number. Speaking forced and weak words, heartfelt or not, it was an apology. He wasn’t sure if they would have understood him, even if it had been more sincere. It was enough to satisfy the alphas, at least.
Chern led him away from them before someone tried something stupid as the tension continued to rise. She motioned for Tarko to lead. The night was cooler now, and he struggled to gain traction with his wings, but he got airborne. The darkness swallowed him from sight as the three took off together. He guided his alphas home, hiding his mischievous satisfaction. He had won, his will was becoming law, and he hadn’t even given the orders. It was not a single massive victory, but a step in the right direction. He had forced their hand. Maybe he could wrestle leadership from them someday, and not have to do things underhanded.
Pending receipt
04 Refit
Chief Konstantin put his fists on his hips, turning to look at Marina when she came into the reactor control room. She wanted to giggle at the pose. It was something she would expect from the stern man, but spending the effort to pose that way, without gravity, it seemed silly. “Mar, what are you doing here, you’re off duty! Doctors ordered at least two weeks off for recovery.”
She stifled her smile. Grimacing internally, bracing for the pain of speaking. “It’s been almost two weeks.”
“Ten ship days does not make two weeks.”
“I can’t sit around doing nothing the whole time. There’s too much work, the crew needs me, Stalingrad needs me.”
“Stalingrad needs you, all of you, a healthy Marina.”
“I couldn’t take it anymore Chief, I was worried. I had to know what happened.” She turned away to hide her wincing as she coughed.
She straightened up, facing the concerned look on the chief’s face. “Fine, but shut up. No talking. You‘re supposed to be resting. But I know you won’t rest if something is bothering you.” She glared at him, but didn’t speak, mostly because they both knew he was right, not because he told her.
“Things are taken care of, Lev and Sofiya isolated the panel you were working on. We got the other systems online and ran without internal lighting for a while we jumper’d the panel. It’s all good now.”
“Jumper’d the panel….” She started, but Konstantin interrupted her.
“Hush, girl, no talking, we agreed. You’re still on rest orders. Go back to your bunk, or the chow hall, or whatever, just not here. No work, no elevated breathing. I read the report.”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t leave either. “Don’t give me that look. You were the only casualty, and I’m your supervisor’s supervisor. Of course, I was privy to the report. Your effort was gallant, but there’s too few people on this operation for us to lose someone, anyone to a mishap like that.”
“Had to do something, could have lost everyone.” She croaked.
“I know, power was out to everything, but we had plenty of time, hours, maybe days to work the problem before we would really have to worry about air quality.”
“Botanical.” Her wounded voice was soft, but the implications did the lifting she intended.
She could see the gears turning behind the chief’s eyes. “Fair. But no more talking. Now, back to your bunk. Don’t make me make it an order.”
She lingered, giving him a knowing look, floating in the open hatch just long enough to make her point before she shut the hatch. But she didn’t go back to her bunk. She went back to the control panel, full of relays and inverters that melted down. The lights were off, but came on automatically when she entered the room, as they were supposed to.
Well, that’s a start…
She drifted across the room to the panel, the scorch marks still evident around it, the paint bubbled and peeling from the now absent heat.
They didn’t even paint it, c’mon guys, have some class.
She popped the latches and opened the panel. Her eyes bulged as she saw the scorch marks and melted parts still inside. Did they fix anything? How is this working? Peering into the corners of the panel, trying to find something, anything that had actually been repaired. The wires she had disconnected from the relays lay where she had left them. She discovered a pair of thick white cables came in from one side of the panel, were routed along the inside of the rim, over the top, and exited the other side of the panel.
He wasn’t kidding, they literally jumper’d the panel. An entire panel! How is anything working with all these relays, inverters, and capacitors not in the system? Does the chief know this is how it was handled?
Marina wove her fingers into her hair, digging her nails into her scalp. How could they have done this? This is disturbing, it’s so sloppy! This is something you would come across in a textbook scenario, and the class would still say it’s unbelievable. Struck with utter disbelief, Marina lingered at the panel. It hadn’t been fixed, the problem had been ignored, circumvented, and left to rear its ugly head again later. She was so struck, so disgusted, disappointed, and terrified that she couldn’t acknowledge the technical heresy that had been committed. She couldn’t bring herself to close the panel. Perhaps someone else would find it and be equally outraged. Perhaps they would speak on her behalf, her voice was still too damaged to use.
She left, drifting in the access way, too dumbstruck to do anything. Numbed by absurdity of what she had discovered, academy cadets not even through their first year would know better. Was this Lev’s doing? He should know better, this is something a child would do. How could he have done this, on our colony ship of all things? Will the Stalingrad forgive us? Will the colony survive, or will we die before we even get to Langok?
We have to fix this, we have to do it right before something else goes wrong, before the problem gets worse. Did the Chief come inspect this work? Did he sign off on it, does he know this is how things were done? This is not okay, what can I do?
Marina squared her shoulders, a newfound determination straightening her spine as she set off for her bunk as directed. Her mind racing on the way through the compartments. I should have done better. If I had held my breath more carefully. If I had gone and gotten a pressure suit myself, something, anything, I should have been there, this would have been done right, this problem would have been corrected, not delayed. This wasn’t maintenance, this is willful neglect that borders on sabotage. This cannot stand, and something must be done, Lev, if responsible needs punished for this, severely.
***
At the shared bunk serving as her sickbed, she pulled out her private computer terminal and opened up the messenger, typing out message angrily. Her fingertips hammering the glass screen, slamming out the words in a text that her voice was too wounded to speak.
She typed out, “Chief, I passed that electrical panel on my way to my bunk. Have you inspected the repair work yourself? We have to talk about it.” and sent it to him through the ship’s text chat system.
She waited, after about twenty seconds, the little spinning icon popped up, telling her Chief Konstantin was typing out his reply. “Yes Mar. I know it’s crude, but it has been working.”
“Just because you made it work doesn’t mean you fixed it!” She typed out, even more angrily than before.
“Mar, calm down. Don’t worry about it, you’re supposed to be taking it easy and healing after the incident.”
“Take it easy? How can I take it easy when I know that’s what is holding our ship together? How much current is even going through those wires? How long until they melt down too? It’s like something a self educated 10-year-old would do.”
“You were gone for eight days. We weren’t sure if you were going to pull through, we did what we could.”
“Never mind me, what about the rest of the ship, and all the colonists on board? Are they going to pull through, are we going to pull through for them? How could you, in rational mind, have signed off on this?”
The answer was slow in coming, the spinning circle, starting and stopping twice as the Chief Engineer debated on what to say. Eventually, a terse message came through. “You rest up. Busy. Talk later.”
Busy getting us all killed in a slow and surprising way. They turned the ship into a ticking bomb. Marina looked up through the floor above her, through the ship’s superstructure, imagining the small colony cylinder above her piggybacked onto the Stalingrad’s belly. I can’t believe we’re putting all these people in danger like this. I’m so glad they don’t know how little is keeping their lights on. What if they did know? Her mind raced and swirled like a dog chasing its tail, her frustration mounting as she couldn’t quite catch the solution that was evading her. Perhaps she could go fix it herself, bed rest or not. This could not stand, someone had to do something.
A gentle knock on the frame of the entry hatch politely informed her that someone was approaching. Marina looked up from her screen to see Lev floating in the hatchway, a thermos cup in each hand, his expression soft, frosted with a warm smile. A smile that fell away as soon as Marina made eye contact with him. She launched up from her bunk, terminal still in hand as she drifted towards him, her outrage overwhelming her injury. Forgetting her voice was broken, wincing as her hoarse, unrestrained words tore through her throat. “Are you this bad on purpose?”
Thanks for the read, we’ll see you in the next edition of the newsletter with part five of Pending Receipt. Leave a comment with your thoughts of this installment of Pending Receipt.
The Descendant Saga 