The Serpent Priest went back into the hills; with him were the Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon. Their time had almost come, yet the Serpent Priest broke with all tradition and written wisdom of the Faith. There would be no public union in the City of Light. If the people were to survive, the cycle would need to be broken.

They departed the City of Light on foot, as was their way, but they walked with great urgency into the countryside, not once stopping at the towns and cities along the way, even bypassing the temples where the clergy had always hosted them on their pilgrimage to the City of Light.

The timing was all wrong. Never before had a priest of the Serpent’s Order broken from the cycle, not in the three thousand years of this cycle, nor of the oral accounts of the cycles that came before. The Keepers of the Flame would never allow for a madman to become Serpent Priest. But it seemed to the Emperor of Light that in this case they had.

Surely, over thousands of years it was bound to happen once. That it was during his reign meant that he had one duty he was born for. This was providential, and he would not allow his reign to be the one that broke the Chain of the Ages. The Emperor of Light had many obligations, but securing the knowledge passed down through the times of flood and fire was the highest of all duties. A madman for a Serpent Priest could spoil it all. One mad steward of the ancient wisdom.

So the Emperor of Light went out on foot from the City of Light, into the countryside and far into the hills to speak with the Serpent Priest.

In that age, of course there were technologies of communication that would have been wonders in other times. Yet the Serpent Priest and his Vicars abided by the timeless ways in the performance of their duties. No missives were sent, only messengers with the high priest’s word. No one was to know the word but his heralds and the recipients.

When he returned to the entrance to the underworld, he, the Child of the Sun, and the Daughter of the Moon knelt and meditated on the weight of their duties, and the Serpent Priest dispatched messengers to the Vicars of the realm.

For the Emperor of Light, it was impossible to know the words the Serpent Priest would share with his Vicars. Yet messengers had only been sent out from the temple mouth so many times before, with only so many messages conveyed. It seemed to confirm the Emperor’s worst fear—that the Serpent Priest had gone mad and was summoning the Vicars to the underworld in the middle of the cycle, and with that word from the Serpent Priest, the Vicars would be calling the Blessed to their fate.

When the Emperor of Light received confirmation that the Serpent Priest had sent out his heralds, he quickened the pace of his procession. It was for tradition alone that he sought out the Serpent Priest on foot, but as the Serpent Priest himself seemed to be engaged in the destruction of those very traditions, the Emperor’s slow approach was only serving to aid the Serpent Priest’s aims. Still, the people had seen the Emperor and his entourage in the countryside on his way to the hills. To do anything but continue the procession would incite a panic among the people. Order had to be maintained.

Thus, by the time the Emperor of Light arrived at the temple mouth, the Serpent Priest’s heralds had already spread far into the countryside.

The Emperor of Light was met with all presiding honors. He and the Serpent Priest sat for a ceremonial tea at the temple mouth as dictated by tradition. The Emperor examined the eyes of the high priest, finding that there was no madness in them. Nor were his words erratic or scattered, so to the Emperor’s surprise, the Serpent Priest appeared sound of mind.

When the ceremonial greeting was concluded, the Serpent Priest escorted the Emperor of Light through the temple mouth, down into the opening to the underworld. Here, only flame lit the way, and yet, when his eyes adjusted, the Emperor of Light could see the magnificence of the vast amphitheater concealed at the bottom of the spiral temple stairs. Few but the Blessed of generations passed, as well as the Vicars of the order, had ever beheld even the opening to the city of the underworld. Here, in the vestibule, the Serpent Priest lit a candle between himself and the Emperor of Light, and he directed the Emperor to sit with him atop the medallion that encompassed the center of the amphitheater’s grand floor.

The Emperor asked the Serpent Priest what his intentions were in sending out his heralds. Survival, was the holy man’s answer.

The Serpent Priest told the Emperor of Light what he believed to be true: Knowledge of ourselves begins and ends with knowledge of the stars. Our knowledge of ourselves and of our stars only persists as long as we do. The Faith contends that we may persist here in the underworld through the times of flood and fire. So too may we endure here now that the stars themselves seek to remove us from their domain.

These words were familiar to the Emperor of Light. They were the words of the emissary of the Empress of Shadow. Her house had been visited by a witch from the far reaches of her empire with a story of peoples in the stars who had preceded even the oldest known cycles. They too had spread throughout the galaxy and among distant stars, and they had vanished from the cosmos by the will of a race of higher beings. The Empress’s emissary conveyed that this witch had shared warnings of these higher beings returning again to cleanse the galaxy of our kind, for it was not in our nature to keep to our place. Thus it has been our destiny to forget the worlds that have come before our own.

This story is madness, the Emperor of Light declared. Madness, or else the trick of our oldest rival. It is done to diminish the Faith and demoralize the faithful, for if the Blessed descend to live out their lives in darkness and neither floods nor fires consume the lands above, when they emerge to find their most precious years wasted, their farmlands tilled by others, their homes happily inhabited by thriving tribes, they will denounce their duties before the cycle’s end, and the Empire of Light will die before the floods and fires even make their mark upon the land once more.

To this the Serpent Priest told the Emperor of Light that though all empires must one day perish, through the Faith only, the people may yet endure. And to the Serpent Priest the Emperor of Light warned that he held dominion over the Empire, admonishing the Serpent Priest to adhere only to his domain—that of the Faith.

When the two men had finished speaking, the Serpent Priest returned the Emperor to the world above, where the light seemed blinding to his eyes for a time.

After the Emperor of Light departed from the temple mouth, the Serpent Priest called the Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon to the foot of the Granite Ladder. From there, they climbed the steep path up the holy mountain to the Perch of the Eagle’s Name. From on high, even with his aged eyes, the Serpent Priest could see the entire countryside spreading out before him all the way to the City of Light.

The Serpent Priest asked the Daughter of the Moon to name as many cities as she could see, and he asked her to name the temples in each. Then he asked the Child of the Sun to speak of the other buildings in the land, of the mundane, commonplace, and necessary. Both the Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon knew the country well, from farming villages to industrial quarters to technological hubs, from luxuries to commodities to the necessities of life. The heart of an empire reached out to its extremities along the roads and pathways and flight paths before them.

After the faithful young devotees had thus described the landscape, the Serpent Priest asked them to describe the countryside as it was said to have been when the Blessed returned to the land again following the time of flood and fire.

Nothing remained, the pair told him, with the exception of the stone foundations of the temple walls. That, the Serpent Priest instructed, is where all civilization began, with the movement of stones that could not be undone by human hands or by the ravaging of time.

Thus it came as no surprise when they came down from the Perch of the Eagle’s Name that the Serpent Priest sent out heralds again, this time to the great Stonemasters of the land. These Stonemasters were called to make their way to the underworld alongside the Vicars and the numbers of the Blessed.

Common wisdom of the age held that the three strongest pillars of civilization were the State, the Faith, and Industry. No profession held a more prominent position in the empire’s industrial base than the master stone workers—they who cut mountains to pieces, stacking them neatly again in pyramids, pillars, foundations, walls, and monuments. And the masters of this age had taken all the ancient knowledge and piled their own upon it, daring to cut stone slabs their ancestors only could’ve dreamt about working.

When word got back to the Emperor of Light that the Serpent Priest had called them to the temple mouth, he felt that he had no choice but to act. For no one absence in the fabric of society could have so effectively stalled the progression of an era than the Stonemasters all suddenly taking their knowledge underground.

In the final passage through the hills to the sacred temple grounds, there was a notch through which the peoples of the southland needed to pass to complete their pilgrimage. And from the Perch of the Eagle’s Name, the Serpent Priest could see that the Emperor of Light’s soldiers, in an act unprecedented in their history’s keeping, had taken up a line to prevent the passage of the Faithful to the temple grounds.

When the Stonemasters began to arrive on the road to the temple grounds, they found a battalion of imperial soldiers manning the floor of the notch. Their line ran all the way from the cliff wall in the west to the shore of the mountain lake that met the foot of the eastern range, blocking the pilgrims’ way to the temple. A small camp had sprung up before them by the lakebed, made up of members of the Blessed and well-wishers accompanying them along the road to their path of obligation. Similarly, the Vicars who were late arriving were denied passage and had begun to camp by the frigid mountain waters.

Everyone was confused. The pilgrims were given no explanation from the soldiers blockading the way, and the soldiers were given no explanation for blockading it. They maintained a dialogue, mostly between the high-ranking Vicars and the officers in charge of the blockade, but little was exchanged of meaning beyond what was already known—the path to the temple was closed per order of the Emperor of Light. No one would pass until his word was given.

On the seventh day of the blockade, the camp of travelers had grown to the point that the number of pilgrims matched the number of the Emperor’s soldiers holding the line at the floor of the notch. Prompted by the growing sense of restlessness from his officers, the Emperor arrived to address the pilgrims.

The Emperor’s words were brief. He began by acknowledging the importance of the Faith. In ordinary times, and even at the end times at the conclusion of a cycle, it was not the place of the State to interfere in the domain of the Faith. These were no ordinary times, though. The Serpent Priest had broken with all tradition by calling together the Blessed, the Vicarage, and the Stonemasters of the Empire. It was the Emperor’s belief that the Serpent Priest had lost sight of his place in the Chain of Knowledge, and the result would be the disruption of the Empire of Light for years to come. If indeed the Serpent Priest intended to take this cohort of luminaries down into the underworld, the Empire, as well as the lives of the pilgrims themselves, would be disrupted beyond reason. All of this in the middle of a cycle when no danger of flood or fire was present in the world.

The Emperor of Light bade the Stonemasters to return to their work. He bade the Vicars to tend to their temples and congregations. He bade the Blessed to continue the chain of being, to bear children with joy to be raised in the tradition so that one day, millennia from then, their Blessed descendants could take their rightful place at the end of their cycle, at the proper time, when the heavens dictated it, not the mad Serpent Priest whose ego had gotten the better of his senses. Return to your lives, the Emperor of Light commanded all.

After addressing the gathering crowd of pilgrims, the Emperor addressed his officers, commanding them that under no circumstances were they to relent. The way to the temple would remain closed until the Serpent Priest came to his senses.

Each day, the Serpent Priest would ascend to the Perch of the Eagle’s Name, accompanied by the Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon, and each day, they would remark that the crowd gathered at the water’s edge was growing in number. At such a distance it was difficult to see, and therefore difficult to estimate numbers, but it was not so difficult to notice the blockade and the buildup of people behind it.

At night, campfires glowed. By day, droves of white cloaks could be seen reflecting bright sunlight by the water’s edge. At dawn and dusk, the smoke rising from distant campfires hung in the cool air within the notch. And most importantly, after the Vicars and the early-arrivals among the Blessed had completed their holy walk, no additional pilgrims had arrived via the road to the temple mouth.

The Child of the Sun remarked to the Serpent Priest that the Emperor of Light must have blocked the way to the underworld. The Daughter of the Moon agreed that it must be so. The Serpent Priest was quick to tell them that the Emperor of Light was merely doing what he thought was best for the Empire.

The Child of the Sun asked the Serpent Priest whether the Faith and the State had ever been at loggerheads thus. In his studies of the Histories, the Child of the Sun had never encountered such an occurrence. The Daughter of the Moon agreed and asked the Serpent Priest what would happen if the Emperor did not order his soldiers to stand aside.

The Serpent Priest told them that no such record appeared in the Histories because nothing like it had ever happened before. He did not know what would happen, for there was no time like it in any past cycle. These times were new, and the days ahead would determine the fate of the human race, not just the Empires of Light and Shadow, nor the peoples of this world. Even the peoples who had spread out amongst the stars had their fates tethered to the shores of the lake that spread out before their eyes then and there. Without the Stonemasters, the door to the underworld could not be sealed.

Should we not go and instruct the soldiers to stand aside? The Daughter of the Moon asked the Serpent Priest.

The Serpent Priest sat silently for much time contemplating the question. For all of his life, his duties had been laid out before him, never once presenting a dilemma of such magnitude. The Daughter of the Moon and the Child of the Sun waited as the Serpent Priest considered the matter. The sun itself, which was low in the sky when the Daughter of the Moon asked her question, was now at the horizon setting, casting an orange and pink light across the plain to the south of the hills and against the glass structures in the City of Light.

When the last rays of the sun flashed out across the darkening landscape, the Serpent Priest took a deep breath and finally answered.

The universe writes the truth of each crisis into the crisis itself. Each player has been put into place; each element prepared as it should be; each person carrying the wisdom and obligations of their station. Time shall speak to the people in clearer terms than any words from any man.

The Serpent Priest would say no more.

By the water’s edge, the people grew restless. The Vicars entreated the pilgrims to keep calm, insisting that Faith would see everyone through and reveal the path forward. The Stonemasters relaxed on the shore, basking in the unexpected but welcome respite from their unceasing duties. The Blessed, though, who felt pulled by their obligation to appear at the temple mouth when summoned, grew uneasy and fearful that their failure to arrive might mean they would lose favor with the Vicarage and lose their vocation. They, like all their predecessors in their line, had taken their oaths seriously, and they swore now that they would not be the ones to break the Chain of Knowledge for their families and for the people.

As the days passed, more of them would gather at the path to the temple, shouting at the Emperor’s soldiers and attempting to push their way through. Each day, the Emperor’s men held the line with increasing force appropriate to the increasing numbers of pilgrims. And each day, as the confrontation grew more and more contentious, the soldiers asked each other how far they were willing to go to uphold the Emperor’s orders against the unarmed and well-meaning Blessed of the City of Light.

There was no meaningful contest between the Emperor’s soldiers and the people. It was an article of the Faith that pilgrims proceed to the temple mouth as the ancients would. They brought with them no technology, no methodology of communication or power, no metals or cookware, merely the foods they could carry, a blanket, and the clothes on their backs. Now standing before the soldiers of the Empire of Light, fully equipped and armed with the technological wonders of a spacefaring civilization, the people of the Faith had only their faith and their convictions to stand against the agents of the State. Still, both parties met on the road to express their determination.

The Blessed began to discuss alternatives. The pilgrimage demanded that they arrive via the road. Yet it also demanded that the pilgrims arrive when called. With the way through the notch in the mountains blocked, some of the Blessed considered the ridges on either side, for trails did lead to the peaks and back down again beyond the soldiers’ line. Still others spoke of returning to the city where air transport could be procured, a strict violation of the pilgrim’s code, yet in the face of the Emperor’s actions, the pilgrims began to question what truths still held in this time of confusion and madness.

As the soldiers held that the Emperor was in the right, and that the Serpent Priest had lost his mind, the Blessed protested that it was not the place of the State to question the Faith, for none knew the exact hour of the cycle’s end but the Serpent Priest, not even the Emperor. And even though it was well known to be the middle of the cycle by thousands of years, the Blessed still held that this was not madness but a test of their faith and their resilience, a sign of their devotion that must be shown.

Little by little, a third group of pilgrims began to test a different path. It started with a brave contingent of the Blessed, who waded into the frigid waters of the mountain lake and attempted to bypass the blockade at the road. As they grew accustomed to the frigid waters, one of the group would grow closer and closer to passing the soldiers and making the far shore, yet when they tested the limits of their bodies, none succeeded in passing the blockade. They all returned with blue lips and shivering limbs, sharing stories expressing their exhaustion and lamenting their failure.

The soldiers, meanwhile, watched, wagering on the pilgrims’ advancement, each thinking it impossible for any human, no matter how zealously devoted, to cross the frigid lake on a naked swim. It was for this reason they neglected to call for boats nor to station reinforcements on the templeward shore. And, some saw it little threat to their orders if a few brave, worthy souls somehow managed to cross the waters. To their mind, those impossible few would have earned their passage across those sacred waters.

By then it was the thirteenth day since the Emperor’s soldiers had taken their post. And again, the sun was high in the sky when the numbers of the Blessed waded into the cold dark waters of that mountain lake. Slowly, stroke by stroke, the swimmers made their way out into the depths and made a slow crawl across the water’s surface, while the soldiers looked on, wagering and watching, for there was little happening in that notch to occupy their interests.

Still, none of the soldiers witnessed the girl go down. No keen-eyed observers on the pilgrim shore noticed that one fewer head was bobbing above the surface. It was the swimmers who realized that the girl had foundered and submerged beneath those frigid waves. A panic set in amongst the swimmers. And they cried out to the soldiers and to the pilgrims on the shore for help. Yet none of them could locate the missing swimmer or latch onto an arm or limb, nor even pull her up by her hair in a last gasp of desperation.

Many of the soldiers stripped in a panic, rushing into the waters, only to be repelled by the frigid temperatures, with only two soldiers making it far enough out to reach any of the flagging swimmers. Soon after, a rope was thrown out, and a soldier who himself had come from the far north and was accustomed to cold waters was sent out with the rope about his waist to pull in the remaining swimmers. It was only later in the day, when from the shore the drowned girl was spotted by a soldier who’d climbed a towering pine, that the same northern soldier was sent back into the frigid lake on a rope again to retrieve the body of the dead pilgrim.

They tried everything they could to revive the girl, doing so on the shore in plain sight of the wailing pilgrims. And though the soldiers possessed the most advanced medicines, devices, and techniques in revival, the Imperial Army’s medics could not bring her back.

The sight of the beautiful young devotee, lifeless and cold on the mountain shore evoked a sense of deep grief on both sides. The people resented that the soldiers had forced them to employ such a dangerous tactic to pass the blockade, while the soldiers—many of whom were deeply religious themselves—resented the orders that had led to such an outcome. The fact was raised first by the Vicars and the Blessed—but then echoed by the faithful among the soldiery—that the girl was now a martyr, perished in the course of her holy obligations when called to the temple mouth by the Serpent Priest.

Even to the officers who were charged with holding the line, this fact was undeniable. It was asked of the officers by many of the pilgrims: who among them would stand in the way of the proper funeral procession of a martyr? It was the Captain of the battalion who spoke, conveying a sentiment widely shared amongst his soldiers: that the Soldiery were members of the Faith as well, first before all else. In times when duty conflicts with obligations to the Faith, the State must understand that no man can truly abandon his Faith, because his Faith will never abandon him.

The Captain ordered that the line should not be broken but that it should be moved. An honor guard would be formed, and upon their shoulders the battalion would bear the martyred girl’s body to her proper rites and resting place at the temple mouth. All pilgrims would be allowed to accompany the party for the rites, provided they marched in an orderly manner behind the line.

When the procession arrived at the temple grounds, the Serpent Priest was there to greet the honor guard, and at his left was the Child of the Sun, while to his right stood the Daughter of the Moon. As part of the rites, the deceased was placed on a pyre at the temple mouth. The Serpent Priest said the first rites and instructed the soldiers to stand aside so the mourners could file in and pay their respects.

The throng of pilgrims and soldiers filled the temple grounds. They stood side-by-side with all recent animosity replaced by unity in the honoring of their sacred martyr’s courage and devotion.

All remained standing as the fire was lit.

Even waters were not served from the temple well until only embers remained of the sacred fire.

The Serpent Priest smeared the ashes of the funerary pyre across the foreheads of the observers, and when all had been received at the temple mouth, none of the pilgrims nor the soldiers knew what to do.

The Serpent Priest stepped to the front of the pyre and commanded the Faithful to inter the remaining bones of the deceased among the honored dead within the temple grounds.

The Serpent Priest then shocked the pilgrims with a command. He directed the gathered throng to uncover the capstone that was buried at the foot of the temple grounds.

Among the Blessed the entire pilgrimage had seemed as though it was a test of faith orchestrated by the Serpent Priest to challenge both their faith and their resolve; and here, finally at the temple grounds, the air suffused with reverence for their traditions and values, the pilgrims would not be deterred.

The people began to tear at the sod with sticks and rocks, kicking up the dirt until it was loose enough to carry away, handful by handful, until at last they hit a rock that could not be budged. Still the faithful gathered around the tremendous boulder digging further and further down, exposing the capstone where it lay, until finally it was disinterred within a tremendous crater, revealing the perfectly-fitted bottom of the rock—the inverse geometric negative of the temple mouth.

By this time, word had traveled to the City of Light. The Emperor, hearing that his line had broken in the mountain pass, believed that time was short. Traditions had to be set aside in this most urgent of times. He ordered his pilots to ready his aircar, and within minutes, he and his guard were landing along the path to the south of the temple grounds.

The pilgrims all heard his arriving vehicle as it landed. They greeted their Sovereign with scorn and anger because he hadn’t walked the path to reach the temple mouth. And when he appeared at the rear of the crowd, the Blessed, the Vicars, and even his own soldiers refused to stand aside, blocking his path to the temple with their dirt-covered palms and darkened fingernails.

In the fading of dusk, the Emperor of Light was shocked to discover that the capstone had been unearthed. It confirmed all of his greatest fears. The Serpent Priest had gone mad.

The Emperor could see the throng of people thinning before him as the Vicars retreated to the temple mouth. Behind them, the numbers of the Blessed stepped through the temple gates forming a queue to descend themselves. Still the soldiers looked on, blocking the Emperor’s path to the temple mouth. Finally, on the floor of the temple itself, after all of the Faithful had descended the stairway to the underworld, only the Serpent Priest, the Child of the Sun, and the Daughter of the Moon remained above ground, along with the chiefs among the Master Stoneworkers, who were said to possess the understanding of the ancient stonemasters. They alone could lift the capstone at the order of the Serpent Priest.

From behind the line of his soldiers, the Emperor cried out to the Serpent Priest: You are dooming the Empire of Light if you give your word to descend. For within the temple mouth already you have gathered the most faithful of our people, the leaders of our holy congregations, the captains of industry, and only these chief Stonemasters can remove the capstone without collapsing the very caverns beneath. If this is a test of faith, Your Holiness, as the Faithful truly believe, surely it has gone far enough?

The Serpent Priest responded thus: Emperor, I regret to say that the Empire of Light was already doomed. We break with the cycle to survive its fate. You may join us as you like, as your forebears did, to ensure the continuity of your line into the next world. Or you may ignore the signs and see your Empire through to its final days above. I leave the choice in your hands.

The Emperor was indignant. To speak thus to the Sovereign amounted to treason, but as he looked around the temple floor, the faces of his soldiers seemed reverent in the darkening light. He took a deep breath, accepting that no order he gave against the Faith would be followed, and rather than issue a command he knew would only diminish himself further, he stood back and announced that the State would need his guidance now more than ever before.

With that, the Serpent Priest gave the word.

The chief Stonemasters plied their trade. The soldiers stood back in wonder—even they of a spacefaring society were struck with awe—as the capstone, a solid granite plug that was a mountaintop unto itself, began to rise, levitate, and make its way, as if by some silent, invisible force of magic, to the opening in the temple floor. To the onlookers, it was now easy to see, even in the fading light, how perfectly the capstone matched the layout of the temple beneath it.

The Serpent Priest commanded the soldiers gathered on the temple floor to retreat, showing no trepidation as the great capstone hovered in the air above him. Then he, the Child of the Sun, the Daughter of the Moon, and the Chief Stonemasters could be seen descending the stairs to the underworld, while only a single High Vicar remained on the temple floor.

As the High Vicar stepped off the temple floor, out from under the capstone, the crowd of soldiers all watched as the monolithic rock came down, inch-by-inch, until it clapped to the surface, sending a single deep rumble throughout the mountains as though the descending capstone had rung the landscape itself like a great drum. All the while, the Emperor of Light stood by in disbelief.

On their first day in the underworld, the Blessed gathered around the seal in the vestibule, directly under the center of the capstone and the stairway where it met the dome, and here, the Serpent Priest presided over the wedding of the Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon, whose union served as a symbol to the faithful that their people would endure in the underworld no matter what befell their brethren in the world above.

On the surface, the High Vicar took up his post, climbing each day to the Perch of the Eagle’s Name to look upon the City of Light and the Empire beyond it, and to take account of the state of the land, the seas, and the stars. It was his station to signal, by way of a great iron bell set on the rock floor of a nearby cave, how things stood on the surface. In the times of flood and fire, the High Vicar would remain until he was burned or washed away. Yet in the middle of the cycle, he knew not what fate held for him beyond his duty: climb, observe, sound the bell at sundown, and remain to do the same every evening thereafter.

The Child of the Sun and the Daughter of the Moon had two daughters and a son of their own before the great iron bell fell silent within the mountain.

The Serpent Priest declared that so long as the bell did not sound, from that day, they would remain in the underworld another full year hence.

The faith of the Blessed had been tested. They had grown tired of the darkness and the cold stone walls. The moisture and the smell in the air wore on their beleaguered minds. The blandness of the provisions left them longing for the fruits of the trees and the grains of the field. Only the sacred waters of the Blessed Spring flowed clean.

In the darkness, the calendar marked their time. The Vicars listened for the bell. And each night as the pendulum marked sundown in silence, the timekeepers ticked off another day, until the long-awaited morning finally arrived.

The Serpent Priest gave his blessing on the great seal, and he, along with the chief Stonemasters, ascended the stairs to lift the capstone and see the state of the world.

When the Blessed heard the capstone rise and then thunder down to the ground again, they began to ascend behind the Vicars.

They rejoiced at the sight and warmth of the sunlight, the green of the grass, the freshness of the cool air, and the emerging leaves of the spring foliage. There was a sense of great joy among the Blessed.

For hours they sat and sang songs, rejoicing while some of them searched the trees for fruits and berries, waiting for the Serpent Priest and the Sun and Moon to return from the Perch of the Eagle’s Name. Their trial had ended. Many believed they would return to their homes and the comforts thereof, to friends and family they’d left behind. Others believed as the Serpent Priest did—that the words of the witch from the outer planets was correct.

As the day wore on, the mood grew uneasy. The revelers observed only birds in the sky, no aircraft of any kind. Nor was there any hum of modern machinery in the distance. Only the natural sounds of the mountains obtained.

When the Serpent Priest returned, the news was written on his stark face. He announced what was already felt deeply by the Blessed—that the City of Light, the Empire that had grown from it, her counterpart in the Empire of Shadow, and all the spacefaring peoples must be no more. There was no sign of flood nor flame. Yet everything they knew of their civilization was gone.

These people, the Blessed, were the ones who would become ancestors of all.

And so they came down from the hills, the Blessed, the Stonemasters, the Vicars, and the Children of the Sun and the Moon, and they began to rebuild again.

The Serpent Priest remained at the temple mouth, as was his obligation, continuing the long count to the cycle’s end and the time of flood and flame.

(Part 35 of “The Misfits” series)

Even though Transom had a tracer on Maícon’s ship, apparently, we weren’t going to get a fix on it right away. The way Transom explained it was that it had to catch onto a nearby comms network, and then another and another, and then, finally it would be able to chart a vector. And then maybe after that you could guess where the ship might be going, or more probably, where it had been weeks before, because by the time you got enough data points from the network, that ship was probably long gone and you were waiting for the next signal.

Well, I was angry enough. Furious would be a better word. I wanted another shot at Maícon, and I wanted Rishi back, and we sure weren’t going to get either outcome sitting on that broken-down abandoned colony of Lime Harbor. But there we were, waiting for the others to catch up, almost two weeks now.

I’d heard of it, sure. Who hasn’t heard of Lime Harbor. The stories they told about what it used to be—paradise of the Battery Systems. And yeah, if you imagined the place without the layer of dust, a good scrubbing, people around to care for the city, a few trees and potted plants here and there. I suppose I could see what the others saw, the potential of the legendary old city rounding back into form. But hell, I was in no mood for it.

And then, to top it all off, just like that, in the middle of the thirteenth night we were there, Nilius shakes me on the shoulder waking me from a dead sleep.

“Burch, old boy, I’ve got to go. I’ve left a crate of provisions for you and the others in the piazza where the ship was parked. I’ll be back around again soon.”

“Oh, hell. On your own time, I suppose.”

“As soon as possible. An urgent matter takes priority now, though.”

He pointed to those nodes on his forearm, as though to say some force in the deep time of the universe was compelling him to abandon us.

“What the hell, old man?” I said, not even sure myself what I was asking.

“No time to explain now, Burch. Your ship will be along.”

My ship. Carolina’s ship. Goss’s ship. All fifteen of us or however many we were stuffing on the old girl now. The Yankee-Chaos was sure getting her service as a transport like the old days. But she was still almost two days out.

I wasn’t sure whether I said anything back to Nilius or even whether he was still there anymore. I think I must have fallen asleep again, or near to it. I had that funny feeling where you sorta half wake up in a strange place and you wonder where the hell you are or whether it’s even real life anymore. I had no idea how long that was going on when I heard someone calling me again.

“Burch. Burch.”

“Nilius, I swear. I thought you said you were going?”

“Burch, wake up. You’re dreaming. It’s not Nilius.”

It was dark in that room, but I recognized it by the dusty smell of the place. I was in that kid Barlow’s house. The Riche house—the one where they’d all stayed before when Carolina and the crew came to Lime Harbor the first time. And the one barking at me ... well, whispering at me, I guess. I was pretty sure that was Carolina’s friend, the historian Carsten Airee.

“Is that you, Airee?”

“That’s right.”

“What the hell do you want? It’s the middle of the night. Isn’t it still?”

“Yes, Burch. That’s the point. Low radiation levels. There’s a moon out. Still a few hours before sunup. Perfect time to take a walk.”

“Fine. Go have a nice stroll, Airee. Leave me out of it. I’m sleeping.”

“Carolina thought I should take you with me. She said you’d be interested.”

“Oh, she did, did she?”

“Come on. Shake the sleep out and let’s go.”

“It can’t wait till morning?”

“Not unless you want to slog around the city for miles in a radiation suit, Burch. Come on.”

I realized he wasn’t going to leave me alone.

“Get the hell up and go with him, Burch,” I heard Omar growl from across the room. He was laid out on a field mattress over there in the corner. I thought we were whispering good enough, but I guess we’d woken him too.

“Fine, Airee,” I said, snorting as I sat up. I guess I was blowing the dust out. That old house needed a proper cleaning when Harold got there.

“That’s the spirit,” Airee whispered. “How many times in your life have you been in Lime Harbor?”

“One too many,” I replied.

“Shut the hell up, you two,” Omar grumbled.

I followed Airee down the creaking stairs, stepping as quietly as we could, down to the main doorway and then out into the small courtyard in front of the Riche house. I guess then I could see it—the stars, a glistening silvery moonlight illuminating the buildings along that stately old street. It was pretty enough to almost make me forget I should’ve been sleeping.

Take a deep breath, I told myself. This was my own life I was living again, and I guess as bad as the past couple weeks had been, I had plenty of reasons to be grateful for it.

I wasn’t sure just how long we’d been walking before Carsten Airee started talking at me. It was a while, because we’d swung through one of the main squares. The others seemed to know where everything was. But me? I was still just following people around, hiding from the sun mostly, as everyone did here. Not Airee, I guess. He had another way figured out.

He led us down to a road that overlooked what must’ve been a dried-out riverbed that had water flowing through it in the city’s heyday. Now, it served as a break in the city, and through that break you could see where the activity was—down in the industrial area where those engineers from Eden had been scaling up their operation. They’d gone from one warehouse when it was just Old Barlow Riche himself running the operation, and since Young Barlow—or Alex as our crew first called him—had returned to the city with his wife Sisco and the engineering group from Eden, they’d brought four more warehouses online. They had plans to open twenty more warehouses per year for the next ten years. Apparently, the math was sound. Those Eden engineers figured that if they could drop that much material into the star, the radiation levels would be safe again sometime in Young Barlow’s lifetime. Maybe Sisco and Barlow’s grandchildren would grow up in a world where this version of Lime Harbor was just an old story. Less dust, more trees, maybe even tourists again.

At night, now though, all you could see were the lights of the heavy vehicles transporting payload to the space tower, which would be going up and down all night, just like the daytime, for decades, doing the almost unfathomable amount of work it took to fix a star. Down by that empty river, you could hear the noises of it all too, echoing through the city. Engines, wheels, clunking, the whir of the industrial machinery making tools, mixing chemicals, all that.

Airee kept talking about the city’s history.

“How the hell do you know so much about Lime Harbor, Airee?” I asked him.

I didn’t know him that well, even after a couple weeks there waiting for the others. We hadn’t talked much.

“I enjoy that sort of thing,” he replied. “Learning about places. I came here before with Carolina, you know?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“So I got fascinated with the place. It’s almost exactly what I studied at university—how certain colonies out in the Indies and Letters succeeded and others failed. This was an extraordinary example of a failure, through no fault of the people, of course.”

“Maybe the stellar scientists for failing to predict it,” I said.

“Maybe so,” he replied. “I looked at the data when I was here, though, and there wasn’t much of an indication of change or irregularity, and I knew what was coming.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what, Airee?”

“I thought I told you about it, Burch. I came back here. In my other life. I went to Iophos and stayed for over three decades. And then I came out into the Indies and the Letters. I couldn’t miss that opportunity.”

“I guess I’ve had a lot on my mind. So you saw this place before?”

He nodded, and I could see him grinning ear-to-ear even in the dark. “There are reasons they told tales about this city, Burch. Good reasons.”

“I like the architecture,” I said.

“It was much more than that,” Airee replied. “Truth be told, as much as I wish Barlow and Sisco and these Edenites well, even if they fix the star, it’ll be a tall order to rebuild what was here before. More than anything, it was the culture that made this city great, and that culture was the sum of the people and the rules they lived by. There was just a vibrance about the place that was almost infectious. People on Iophos used to come back from a few weeks here and have a glow about them. Of course it would wear off again after a couple weeks back on Iophos, but it was almost palpable. I’m not sure how you put something like that back together.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said. “Not for nothing, Airee. I’ll admit I’ve been a pain in the ass to be around these past couple weeks, for obvious reasons, but if this is Carolina’s idea of trying to soften me up or something—”

“Nothing like that.”

“So what’s this all about then?”

“I’ll show you,” he said, pointing up into one of the side streets, which all might have been the same to me, the same dead trees, the same abandoned shop windows, the same dust and detritus all piled up along the sidewalks. But I guess Carsten knew these places one from the other, as they used to be, unique life-spaces for well-lived lives long since passed.

He took me up another side street that ran parallel to the river. And then we walked a few more doors down to a building that had a long glass storefront with marble pillars carved into great dust-covered statues. He pointed to a sign above the main door on the corner of the block. It read: CHRYSALIS.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“Do you know the name n’Kedi?”

Again, I shook my head.

“She and her family built the most successful business ever launched on Lime Harbor. Have you heard of TechJools, Burch?”

That one I did know. “Swatches and jewelry and the like?”

“It started right here on Lime Harbor. They moved when the star cooked the city, obviously. This showroom used to have the most spectacular pieces in it. People would come from all over the Battery to shop here while they were on holiday.”

Airee pulled on the door. It didn’t budge.

“I figured this might happen,” he said. “While I was here, you know, in that other life ... I ran an experiment.”

“Experiment?”

“I’m going to need your help determining the results, Burch.”

“How so?”

He gestured toward the door. “I’m not sure the n’Kedis will mind if we break their door. They’re going to have a lot to clean up in three decades if they come back to reclaim their space. What’s one more door?”

“Oh,” I said, realizing why he’d brought me of all people.

I motioned for him to step away and had a look at it. It was metal for sure, fabricated to look like some fancy piece of finished wood. I didn’t want to just crack into it without knowing whether I’d be kicking what amounted to an immovable object. I looked at the keys on the upper corner too.

“Magnetically hardened,” I said. “The power’s off to this section of the city?”

When he nodded, I gestured for him to stand aside and planted a solid front kick just above the catch, maybe about a third power, just to get a sense of what I was dealing with. I felt the frame fold back and give a little.

“I still got some real bones in this old body,” I told Airee. “Can’t be too reckless.”

Then I took a step back, jumped forward, and gave the door a good pop. The thing swung back violently, and the top hinge broke off from the force of the door flying inward. I had to jump back to make sure it didn’t come back at me when it finally bounced back off the frame again.

Airee was smiling. “That must feel good, to be able to do stuff like that.”

“It’s all right, I guess. Small consolation for losing my real legs, but this set is a whole lot better than what the LSS fixed me with first off.”

“Did that hurt at all?” he asked me.

“Not me. Ask the door, Airee. What’s this all about, anyway? You have to figure they cleared this place out before they left. If this is your idea of a heist, you must not be as smart as the others all say you are.”

He was grinning. “Not exactly. I told you I was testing something.”

“Sure.”

“The artifacts. We’re all so certain the history in there doesn’t affect our world, right?”

“I guess that’s our assumption. But I suppose that’s been hard to test.”

“Exactly. History could change, and the history we thought we knew before might have shifted in our minds without our knowing it. A kind of blind paradox of sorts. We wouldn’t even know what we’d changed if we’d changed something.”

“Maybe. I guess. Those artifacts are confusing enough as it is without getting the mind all twisted trying to add paradoxes into the mix. Mostly, I’d just take Rishi’s word for how they worked. She’s better with that stuff than me.”

“I was really tall—my other self,” Airee stated. “Lorne was my name in that other life. And I used to notice things other people couldn’t see, like a dusty shelf that was above everyone else’s eye level.”

Airee started walking down through the front aisle of the showroom. All the cases were empty and open. He continued through the main showroom into a back area, where, he explained, they once held their most expensive pieces—a lot of happy wives and mothers walked out of that room. Now it was all dust. And to the side, there was a narrow hallway that led down to the store’s supply rooms and offices, and at the end of that corridor they had bathrooms, and between the two doors there was an enormous elegant statue of a half-naked Egyptian goddess with all kinds of jewelry etched into the stone and painted on her.

“Subtle,” I said looking at it.

“It looks a lot bigger than the last time I saw it, Burch,” Airee said. “I was damn near eye to eye with her last time.”

“The statue?”

“Yes.” He was looking up at the statue puzzled by something. “This lovely lady is Hathor. And she must be three meters tall.”

“So?”

“I bought a little bee to put in her bonnet,” he said, smiling like it was some kind of joke I didn’t understand. “If it’s up there, then we’ll know for sure.”

“Know what for sure, Airee? You lost me, man.”

“I put a little gold bee on top of Hathor’s head where nobody would ever see it. I was Lorne, so I could reach up there and just leave it there. I figured it was one way to test it: Did the things we experienced inside the artifacts actually happen in our world? If there’s a little gold bee up there, Burch, we’ll have a definitive answer.”

I thought about it for a moment. “How long ago would that have been?”

“A hundred twenty-five years, give or take. Something like that.”

“If it’s not there though ...” I was thinking it through. “That doesn’t necessarily mean ...?”

“That’s true,” Airee agreed. “Something could have happened. Maybe something knocked it off. Maybe some ambitious staffer decided to dust the statue’s head once every several decades. But if it is there, we would know for sure. I just can’t figure out how to get up there without risking toppling the whole thing over.”

I had a torch I was holding, which I thrust into Airee’s hand, gesturing for him to keep it pointed toward the head. I brushed him back. Then, I leapt right up, but I hadn’t fully thought it through. All I could see was the dark shadow of the statue’s head cast by the torchlight shining upward.

“I’ll need that back,” I said, taking the torch back and then jumping up again, shining the light down on the top as I peeked at it. I damn near hit my own head on the ceiling. I didn’t see anything.

On the third leap, I brushed my living hand over the top of the statue, kicking up a cloud of dust and nothing else. In the torchlight, that cloud looked like it was a blizzard of dust, snowing down on us.

Airee and I both rushed back out of there half-sneezing, blowing the dust out of our faces as we went.

“I didn’t see anything,” he said about halfway down that corridor.

“No,” I replied. “There was nothing up there, Airee. Just about a century of dust.”

“Oh, well,” he said, exhaling as we exited the showroom to the street. “It was worth a try. I didn’t ever know if I’d get back to Lime Harbor in this lifetime. I just thought, you know, maybe ...”

“It was a good idea, Carsten.”

He huffed out a puff of air through both of his nostrils. “Let’s get out of here, Burch.”

“That’s another good idea,” I replied, trying to keep from sneezing myself.

“I can’t help but think, you know. In some other universe, there’s a little gold bee sitting on that statue, just waiting for someone to find it.”

I guess that brightened my mood a little. I’m not sure why, but even as I was tired the following day from being up all night, I felt all right. Me and Carsten spent some time up on the roof when we got back, looking at the stars and waiting for that bright Lime Harbor sun to come back up. But we talked quite a bit, and it was enough for me to know I liked the guy. You didn’t need to talk to him long to know he had a good head and a good heart, and maybe if I thought about all the people in the galaxy I’d met that might be worthy of Carolina Dreeson ... well, I don’t know, but there weren’t a lot. And it was funny, because they both seemed to know it—that they were connected somehow—but I could see she was always just an arm’s length away. But he didn’t seem salty or impatient, just content to be here, back in this life.

He told me about all the places he’d been in that other life that he could never see in this one. Not just Lime Harbor. But he’d toured the Protectorate in the pre-war era, even some of the Guild. He never made it to Etterus, though. His one regret.

“I hope to get there one day,” he said. “Maybe Sebastian will take me.”

“I don’t think the Etterans would even let him go,” I joked. “Much less an outsider he brought as a guest.”

“Not today,” Airee agreed. “But someday maybe. That’s what this is all about, right? Carolina and her crusade? Ending all this madness—the war?”

“I wish I knew what it was all about right now,” I told him. “Just when I think I can see the whole picture, it loses focus.”

He nodded. “Rishi. She’s really something, Burch.”

“I know.”

“I’ve lived a full life now—and well, about what I hope is only a quarter of my real one on top of it—and I’ve got to say, I still don’t have the first clue about anything. You might be one of the few people in the galaxy who have any idea what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” I replied.

“I have a favor to ask of you, Burch,” he said, grinning as he looked up at the fading stars. It was starting to get gray out there, and we were going to have to go in soon.

“Let’s hear it, Airee.”

“When you get her back—and you will; I believe that—but when you get her back, I need you to get Rishi to record her account of her time on Earth. We have records, you know—contemporary accounts, autobiographies, pictures, footage, all kinds of records. But we don’t have any from our perspective, what one of our people would think and feel about their world. That’s what I’ve been dying to talk to her about, and she was always so busy to really talk, focused on the here and now.”

“She won’t talk to me about it, Airee. Not much anyway. It was really deep. I know that.”

“I can believe it.”

“Sunrise,” I stated, looking out at the orange on the horizon.

“Yeah,” he said. “I better get some sleep. I’ve been going the opposite.”

“You do your own thing,” I told him as we got up.

“It’s the best way to live,” Airee replied.

And that, I suppose, I could agree with. Anyway, he went for bed and I went for breakfast. I sat down with Sisco and young Barlow and told them all about Airee’s heist, where we’d robbed the famed n’Kedi showroom and came away with a grand total of two facefuls of dust as the spoils.

The following morning, the Yankee-Chaos arrived. They were all hopeful, of course, thinking that we might have caught up with Maícon in time to stop him from stealing the keys, and maybe that we might have been able to get Rishi back. We busted those hopes fast. We found out, though that there was plenty to catch up on.

Fieldstone had taken notes on my testimony from the trip back to Veronia at the start of the war, and that had inspired him to finally finish putting together his history. Carolina’s brother Goss insisted that we all had to sit down and take that in as soon as possible. He said it was important. Coming from somebody as even-tempered and serious as Mr. Head-Dreeson-in-Training, I figured it’d be some story. So I slotted in Fieldstone’s testimony for my afternoon’s activities.

They all knew Lime Harbor well enough to know how to deal with the radiation—suits at all times the sun was up and all that. We also had them park the ship right where Nilius had been, figuring that with the bots and engineers from Eden taking all kinds of gear and hardware up and down the space elevator at all times, we might as well just take the Y-C down the gravity well and skip the line. Plus it was another nice hardened shelter where we could get out from the sun without filling up Sisco and Barlow’s house with a million more visitors. And, to say thank you for their hospitality, as promised, I woke up Harold right away and put him to work cleaning the house. He remembered the place well enough to know right where to begin.

So after lunch, I watched Fieldstone’s report, some of which helped some pieces that didn’t fit to make a bit more sense. Some of it, though, quite frankly blew my damn mind. I didn’t know where to put those pieces. Like for instance, if something like that had happened as Fieldstone described, that meant there were two distinct lines of Maícons, a lot like what we’d learned at Veronia. And it could explain how Pitka’s Maícon had been jumping from platform to platform in ways we didn’t think our AIs could do. That was a new piece.

But on the other hand, the ordinals existing alongside us in our time—even back in the past, at a parallel human branch to ours, descending from the columns? I didn’t know what to make of that. And they didn’t have FTL yet? And I say yet, because they sure had FTL in the future when we were there. They had versions of it like Nilius’s ship. And they had a thousand other things we hadn’t figured out in our time yet. Or, maybe we had and Eddis Ali and those tech wizards had just suppressed it all.

And then that was another mind-blower: Eddis Ali making the first bipal, teaching Maícon, presumably, and now it wasn’t lost on me—oh, man—a Maícon turning my Rishi into a bipal, right on this very ship I was sitting on. And who was that Maícon, I wondered—the one that made Rishi? It was just like me and Carsten had been talking about: the more you learn, the more confounding the puzzle gets.

We were talking about all that, mostly in the atrium on the ship, relaxing as we did, some tea, Sōsh passing a drink or two around. There was me and Carolina and Airee, Goss, Fieldstone, Ren was coming and going, looking in on the people in the house for radiation and various checkups, and toward the evening, Omar came down too. Then sure enough, I’ll bet we were all thinking the same damn thing: Now what? And wouldn’t you know, at that exact moment, in walks Transom with that big shit-eating grin of his and starts talking.

“Hey, Burch.”

“Hey what, Transom?”

“I was just running the scan for the trackers through the Y-C’s comms unit and all the nodes it exchanged data with on the way here. I don’t want to get your hopes up or nothing, so first and foremost, I’ll say that there’s no hit on those asshole Maícons yet.”

“Great.”

“I found something else, though.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Before I tell you what, I want to ask you, Burch, sincerely—this is no joke, a serious question.”

“All right.”

“Present company excluded, of course, if there was one asshole in all the galaxy you’d like to square up and punch in the face more than anybody, who would that be?”

I looked at him funny. “You’re serious?”

Everyone around the table was grinning like it was some joke except for Transom. He seemed to notice, looking around indignantly.

“I said I was serious.”

“All right. Let me think.”

“Don’t think too hard, Burch. It’s not that hard a question.”

“I suppose there’s a couple guys back home I’d owe a good solid punch to the nose.”

“Think a bit more recent history. Someone I might have a tracker on.”

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, almost involuntarily. “Sparrow Dreeson, that son of a bitch. Tell me you got a vector on him.”

“Better. I got a planet he’s been sitting on for two months straight.”

“Sparrow Dreeson?” Goss said, looking over at Carolina. “Does he mean Cousin Kenn?”

“Oh, yes he does,” I said. “And we’ve got unfinished business, big brother. Me and him. Omar, would you mind running up the Riche house and letting anyone up there know that them whose coming with us better get down here fast, because we’re going.”

Carolina looked over at her brother, and there was clear trepidation there.

I looked over at Omar. “You’re in, right? Might be a few Trasp ex-military spoiling for a fight when they see us coming.”

“I’ve got your back, Burch. Plus, he’s the one who sold out my sister, if I’m not mistaken.”

“No, you are not mistaken,” I said. “Fieldstone?”

“Sounds like fun, Burch. Just as long as you keep your cool long enough for me to get my wife back aboard before we blow out of here.”

That sorta stopped me in my tracks.

“Your wife?”

He shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s not official. At least not in this world, but yeah. My wife; your doctor. If we fly at all, we fly together. Plus, it sounds like somebody might need patching up.”

“Oh you got that right,” I replied.

“Burch,” Carolina said. “I know you’re mad at Sparrow—”

She looked over at me and I looked back at her. There was about five seconds of silence as we had an almost telepathic conversation before I finally said. “I’m not going to kill him, Carolina. At least not on purpose.”

“Yeah, Captain,” Transom interjected. “I said ‘punch in the face.’ We’re just going to track down old Cousin Kenn and punch him in the face.”

“How does this track with our current mountain of problems?” Goss asked. “The fate of the Battery? The future of humanity?”

I had an answer for Goss. “I’ll file this one in the log as ‘Slight Detour / Temporary Stress Relief.’ I’m Captain on this run.”

“You can’t hurt him, Burch,” Carolina insisted.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” I said. “When I was in basics, we used to call it an education. We’re just going to educate Sparrow a little. Isn’t that right, Sebastian?”

That shit-eating grin came right back as wide as ever. “Sir, yes, sir, Captain Burch. That was my first calling in life. Above all else, I am an educator.”

We didn’t run out of there as fast as I wanted at first notice. Ren insisted on following through on the promise she’d made when she landed—a thorough radiation check on all the Eden engineers. That took another ten hours, which allowed us to have a proper parting between us and Sisco and young Barlow Riche. Carolina insisted on at least sharing a meal with them, which was good, common courtesy after crashing back into their lives the way we did and staying for two weeks.

They were the type of people that reminded you what was good about people—dedicating themselves to something greater than their own needs and wants, building something multi-generational that would give joy to millions, and doing it all with a type of humility and openness you rarely see. It made me feel a little embarrassed that I was rushing off to get even with Sparrow finally.

I started thinking about that during the meal, though. Was I even hoping to get even or what? Get answers maybe was more like it. I definitely did want to punch him in the face. And after we said our goodbyes in the darkness of the early night, when the whole crew walked down from the Riche house to the ship, I realized just how big a party I’d be bringing with me.

For fighters, me, Omar, Transom, Fieldstone, and Sōsh were a damn good unit of professional operators. Ren, I heard, had learned to handle herself in the martial arts, but her combat skills were limited to what she’d trained to do as a combat medic. Then, we had a contingent of civilians: Kristoff, Draya, Carsten Airee, Carolina and Colin Dreeson, and I guess if you counted Harold, well that made for one crowded mid-sized ex-LSS transport ship. If we were out long, we’d be sleeping people in the engine annex.

I think the ridiculousness of that very point began to sink in as we took off, and, yeah, I couldn’t help but think the old girl felt a bit sluggish lifting us off from that old resort world. It wasn’t exactly a short jump either—three days from the Indies back into Lettered space—Omicron-313 to be precise. And if you thought the Deltas were sparsely populated, the Omicrons were nothing. Just rocks and stars and cosmic dust, mostly space lanes and a few useful mining sites, which we guessed was why Sparrow was out there.

Goss speculated that his cousin Kenn, as he called him, may have felt himself to be a likely target in the Letters Offensive. It sure looked like he’d gone into hiding, as there were some places out there to do it. Draya said she knew of some old tricks both smugglers and fugitives would use, either to hide themselves or stash goods they couldn’t move immediately.

People in her line of work called it “going trog.” You get a decent generator; a few nanosheet field units—the kind homesteaders would build their house inside; find a modest cave system; install heat and atmospheric control from a mid-size spacecraft; and you can set up a nice little temporary community on a totally vacant space rock, hidden in a cave. Come to think of it, it wasn’t too different from the abandoned Exos cylinders where we’d found Sparrow Dreeson and his clan hiding in the first place, just a bit farther out.

I spent most of those few days up in my old familiar seat, Captain of the Yankee-Chaos again after a lifetime and some change, and it took about ten minutes for it to feel like home. The big difference, was the obvious hole I felt every time I’d have needed something from Rishi—a course calculation, archived info of a system survey, projections on provisions, those sorts of things. The other main difference was that I couldn’t get a moment’s peace up there. I think it was because the ship was so damn overstuffed. People were sneaking away from the group that was always in the atrium, which I didn’t mind at first. I hadn’t caught up with Kristoff or Sōsh or Ren in what seemed like forever. But they would come up, and then Transom would come up with Fieldstone and a bunch of maps with probabilities, projections, plans to infiltrate and exfiltrate if said plans went badly. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to have that kind of lethal expertise to back us, but by the end of the day, I don’t think I’d had a minute alone all day up there. I hadn’t given a second thought about what the hell came the moment after that punch to Sparrow Dreeson’s face. We’d still have the same problem we had now: What next?

I was just getting to thinking about that when who should come floating into the deck but Carolina Dreeson, who smiled, said “Hey, Burch,” and strapped herself down in the officer’s seat.

I took a deep breath. “Hello, Carolina,” I replied. “Come to convince me to go easy on old Sparrow?”

“No. Not at all. I was just trying to get away from all the noise in the atrium. And I felt isolated in my quarters.”

And then she looked at me like that point might somehow be back in question with me back as well.

“It’s your cabin as long as you’re on the ship,” I said. “Always will be. You’ll always have a home here, even if it is your home away from your real home.”

She smiled. “My real home.”

“Yeah, that concept has always been a bit fuzzy for me too,” I told her. “That’s mostly because I don’t have anywhere to get back to. Last eighty years or so, chronologically speaking, it’s been wherever Rishi is. Same for her I think.”

“I don’t get the sense Maícon’s going to hurt her, Burch.”

“He’d better not.”

“Have you made any progress with all the files Kristoff brought?”

“What? All that Earth music? The novels and films and such?”

Carolina nodded. I shrugged.

“There’s mountains of that stuff, speaking figuratively of course. What I’d really need to make any progress is a technological mind to sort through it all and make connections. Too bad there’s not one around. Damn Nilius.”

“Did he give you any sense of what he’s up to this time?”

“Hardly ever does. He’ll be back in his own time.”

“I know Rishi was going through all those files heavily herself,” Carolina said. “From what I gathered, going back to Earth was a deeply spiritual experience for her. She mentioned it to me a few times, wanting to share it with you, Burch. But you were away.”

“Yeah, your friend Airee mentioned it to me too. It wasn’t just about Earth either, Carolina. She was alive again, human. That was a big part of it.”

I had a sudden realization, remembering something between us that went back to our earliest days together on the ship, Rishi and me.

“Hang on a second, Carolina,” I said, unstrapping and pulling myself over to the other side of the flight deck, reaching under the panel.

At that very moment, as it looked from behind very much like I had my face buried in Carolina’s lap, while I was reaching under the dash for a compartment in the panel, Goss and Airee floated into the deck. Carolina and I didn’t notice, she because she was holding my belt to keep my legs from swinging up in her face, me because my eyes were looking for that elusive catch in the panel.

“Uhm, are we disturbing you two?” Goss asked loudly. “We could come back later.”

I about lurched back, and luckily Carolina had her hand on my shoulders. Otherwise I’d have slammed my head on the underside of the dash out of shock. But she caught me.

“I got it,” I announced to Carolina. “Hang on a minute.”

I felt inside the compartment, and sure enough, there was a drive in there on top of Rishi’s box.

“We had a few little spots,” I explained as I pulled myself back, floating in the middle of the deck. “When Rishi died, she had her things on ship. Her clothes we had up in one of the storage lockers over the gear hall. But her personal stuff—we kept some of that in the locker in the Captain’s berth. But we used to keep her family pictures and other files she wanted backed-up in that panel there. I hadn’t been in there since she had her new body, but I guess she must’ve been using it recently.”

I held up the drive.

Carolina looked perplexed, tilting her own head to get a look under the panel. “All this time. All the hours I’ve spent on this flight deck, and I had no idea that was even under there.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I said, grinning. “I’m sure you got secrets we don’t know about tucked away around here somewhere.”

“Seriously, though,” Goss said. “Were we interrupting? I’d like to talk about getting back to Athos, Burch. I don’t mind this little detour with Kenn. But I do need to get back home afterwards. We’re going to need to formulate a strategy.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “That seems to be a common enough feeling. Pull up a seat, I guess. We’ve got a little time till we catch up with Sparrow.”

We had a few different tactical plans on Omicron-313 that largely depended on what we found out there. What we did find was about what we’d expected—a vacant ball of long extinct volcanic rock with no atmosphere or other useful features to recommend the place, just a tidally-locked, porous ball of rock floating through the cosmos. The tracker Transom had on Sparrow’s ship only had a fix on the planet, which meant it might not be easy to find him down there, hiding trog-style in one of those volcanic caves. Good luck, right?

Fortunately for us, he wasn’t trying too hard to hide—or at least if he was, Sparrow and his people weren’t that good at it. The scanners caught a curious formation of suspiciously-spaceship-sized boulders in an odd formation around a cave opening with a brighter than usual thermal signature. It wasn’t exactly a ‘Welcome’ sign, but to the even moderately discerning eye, it seemed to be a landing area with five ships covered by military-grade camo-sheets outside one of these trog-camps Draya was familiar with in these outer systems.

“What do you want to do, Burch?” Transom asked, inspecting the floatscreen above the nav panel. “We could come in low and try and drop in on foot?”

“I think it was Maícon Prime who called him at Exos,” I said. “We could try to ping them? See if they pick up?”

“You know,” Carolina added, “it is possible he might not even be down there. It’s the same ship maybe, but who knows if he was even on it?”

“You bring this up now?” Goss said, floating from behind her chair.

“He’s down there,” Transom declared. “I can smell him.”

“Aw, screw it,” I said. “We can sit up here hemming and hawing all damn day, or we can go see for ourselves. He knows this ship, and he knows who’s coming. He’ll either be friendly or he won’t.”

Goss got tossed a little as I nudged the ship down.

“Better find a seat, big brother,” Transom told him. “Burch is flying this bucket.”

“Damn straight,” I said, turning around and nodding.

I was no great pilot, but I was serviceable enough in a pinch. I wasn’t planning to land us on a tabletop or anything. There was a whole wide plain even I could hit without much trouble. So down we went.

When we landed, it was clear from the ground that all those boulders were ships like we thought they were—clean shapes with camo-sheets draped over the top, looking like out-of-place rock piles, and from where we parked, the rear airlock was just in view of the cave opening.

I pinged a broad spectrum. “Sparrow Dreeson, this is Hale Burch. We’ve come to have a word with you.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I just left it at that. And we waited. No response.

“Maybe they’re not listening?” Sōsh suggested. “There’s not a lot out here. Could be they’re not bothering?”

“Unlikely,” Fieldstone said. “They put up camo-sheets to hide and don’t set up a simple survey to track incoming ships?”

“He’s listening,” I replied.

“What the hell?” Sōsh said. “Does he think we’re going to just turn around if he ignores us, after coming all the way out here?”

“Let’s go find out,” Transom said, gesturing toward the back. “Gear up. I don’t trust his Trasp boys.”

“Yeah. Me neither,” I heard Omar’s voice from behind me in the forward corridor.

“They know I’m with Burch,” Transom explained. “And they don’t like me very much.”

“Yeah,” Omar replied again. “Me neither.”

That got a little laugh out of Transom.

Carolina and Goss were sitting in the atrium. “Do you want me to call him, Burch?” She asked. “He might answer me.”

“Just like he did back on Pax Heavy?” I replied.

“Well. Just let us know.”

So it was us five. Me, Transom, Fieldstone, Sōsh, and Omar. And we got geared up fast considering how crowded it was back there in the gear hall and the aft corridor. Maybe a few minutes had passed, and I told the guys I was going to ping them again directly from my helmet—see if Sparrow had changed his mind. Then we all clunked our way around the engine room to the rear airlock.

We waited there quietly for a response, and I could see Transom on his visor, looking at something, probably the same thing I was—the opening to that cavern or cave or whatever you wanted to call the hole in that planet’s surface Sparrow and his people were hiding in.

“Bolts!” he shouted. “Get back here.”

It sorta startled Omar, because he wasn’t sure what Transom was saying. But the rest of us had been around Transom enough to know he was calling for Harold, who came as called, stepping down the corridor to the lock door. Then we all crammed into the airlock as best we could, almost too many for a single cycle. There was hardly any air in there left to purge.

Once we all got our nanosheets up, Transom pushed Harold to the rear. “I’ve got a feeling,” he said, activating the outer door.

And then, as the hatch opened, Transom pushed Harold clean in the back, shoving him out onto the planet’s surface. And wouldn’t you know it. Those Etteran instincts.

No sooner had Harold’s feet hit the ground than he started taking bolts in his legs and his chassis.

“Stop shooting, you dumb assholes!” I shouted into my headset. “We didn’t come here to fight.”

Well, that was only partially true. But Transom had exhausted his patience. He dropped smoke as the frame of the airlock began to take bolts. They were spitting around in there. Poor Omar was getting crunched against the inner hatch as we all crowded back. And as that plume of smoke spread out into a cloud, Transom threw out a can of heat and gestured for us to take up positions behind the two nearest ships once we got out there. And before I could say a word about it, the two Etterans were out and Sōsh and Omar and I were out and suddenly we were firing back at them. Fair’s fair. All things being equal, I was fine with them putting dents in their own hulls and not the Y-C.

“Sparrow!” I heard Carolina’s voice come over the comms. “Stop it at once! We came to talk to you, not fight.”

By that time, we were putting a steady stream of bolts into that cave opening. Good enough to keep them from shooting back at us as regularly as they had been.

“Who is this?” we heard Sparrow’s voice finally come back.

“You’re damn cousin, you dumb asshole,” I said. “Who do you think?”

“Someone cloning her voice, that’s who!” Sparrow replied. “Carolina Dreeson is dead.”

I looked over at Omar who looked over at me, and we both looked at Sōsh, all thinking the same thing: Where in the hell did he get that idea? Transom and Fields were looking over at me, and I could tell through my visor’s rep they were just looking over for a nod from me to start advancing. They had a few heavier rounds and incendiaries, and that cloud was thick enough we could really start crawling down their throats once Sebastian dropped some more heat.

Then another voice piped up over the channel. “This is Colin Altagoss Dreeson, Deputy Minister to the Chancellor of Athos. Unless you want the entire weight of the Athosian government on your throats within a week’s time, you will cease all hostilities immediately and open your doors. No one will be hurt.”

“Goss?” Sparrow’s voice came back. “You’re not supposed to be out here.”

“I am wherever Athos needs me to be, Cousin Kenn. Stand down immediately. I want to hear the order on the open channel.”

“Of course,” Sparrow replied. “Is Carolina really with you? She’s alive?”

“She’s sitting beside me.”

They started a video stream that came over our helmets.

“Thank God,” Sparrow said. “You could have started there.”

“We tried to, Sparrow!” I shouted at him. “You were the ones started shooting at us. For what?”

“Everyone, stand down,” he ordered. “Weapons down.”

“Any injuries?” I heard Ren’s voice.

I did a quick survey. “None out here,” I reported, and then I saw the outline of poor Harold, hunched behind the ship with his head down.

“A scrape and a bruise and nothing more,” Sparrow replied.

“And a deviated septum,” I mumbled to our guys. “Soon as I get inside that cave.”

I told the others to wait on the Dreesons, inviting them to put a belt on and join us. Then I gave old Harold a hand up. His left leg got tagged pretty good.

“Go see Kristoff, old buddy,” I told him. “He’ll fix you up proper.”

“Who knew?” Transom stated, grinning. “Never would’ve figured an Athosian like Sparrow could understand us so well.”

By that time the smoke had cleared enough we could kinda see his outline in the fog, but Transom’s face was up big enough on our displays I could see him laughing.

“Not sure what you Trasp assholes call it, Omar. But for us, an exchange like that’s called an Etteran handshake.”

We did walk in there with a chip on our shoulder after all that, it’d be fair to say. Of course Sparrow tried to walk right past us to address his family, who tailed in behind us, and I was having none of that, stepping in front of him as he came toward the outer opening of the cavern.

“Hey,” I barked at him. “Remember me?”

He stopped just in front of me, looking perplexed that I’d have the audacity to interrupt a Dreeson in the course of his business. Then, before he could fully look straight at me to answer, I socked him good and clean in the nose with my left hand.

“Ow!” he shouted. “Bloody ... Ow!”

“That was for Leda,” I stated.

“I think you broke my nose.”

“Yeah. Be glad I wanted to feel it. Otherwise, I’d have hit you with my mech hand.”

He dropped to a knee, clutching his nose, and I could see those Trasp boys of Sparrow’s circling in. They were angry, but I suppose that made things even all around for the moment. They were just lucky I’d seen things through with Leda by that point and was satisfied that she was all right.

“It’s okay,” Sparrow grumbled. “Let’s just ... everyone keep calm. Are you going to hit me again, Burch?”

“He won’t,” Transom replied before I could. “But I might.”

“Well, that’s a given, isn’t it?” Sparrow stated, getting up to his feet. “I suppose I deserved that at least partly.”

He nodded, rubbing the bridge of his nose, which was dripping a bit of blood, and as it did, he began to pinch it. I recognized some faces from Exos, and sort of hiding behind a few shoulders in the back there was Reggie, the woman who’d actually sold-out Leda to the Trasp all those months back. She saw me seeing her and dropped her head a little. By that time, Carolina and Goss had made their way through the group of bodies there.

“Cousin Kenn,” Goss stated. “What a place to catch up with you.”

“I could say the same, Colin.” Sparrow looked down at Carolina, and to her shock, he embraced her, holding on for what seemed a long time considering the way they parted. “I thought you were dead, Carly. By Athos, it’s good to see you.”

“Why did you think she was dead?” Sōsh asked. “You didn’t get word? That attempt on her life at Alpha-Origgi was over a year ago now.”

Sparrow looked over at Sōsh funny—whether it was the statement or his metal half wasn’t easy to tell.

Sparrow shook his head at Sōsh. “You’d all been off the map for months—after getting caught up in that business at Enuncium, mind you—and then suddenly, in the middle of the offensive, the banking keys come back online just as rumors started to circulate that they’d finally caught up to you? I thought there was no way you’d have relinquished those keys unless you were dead, Carolina. And then rumors began to state just that. We do have to talk, but not here.”

Sparrow looked around, almost as though he was questioning which of his people he could keep in his confidence during such a conversation. I got the sense it wasn’t many. Apparently, Colin Dreeson did as well.

“Come then, cousin,” Goss said. “We’ll have Burch’s doctor take a look at your nose.”

Cozy as it looked, we spent all of about ten minutes in Sparrow’s cave. Then we all piled back into the Yankee-Chaos. And first-things-first, Ren did take a look at Sparrow’s nose, letting him know that it wasn’t properly broken, but she let him know he’d be wearing a pair of black eyes for a few days after that knock. I had to smile a little at that, even if it was a bit restrained for the sake of comity.

Then, when Ren was done slapping a cold splint on his face, he came out with a beak, took one look at the crowd in the atrium, and asked whether there wasn’t a place more private we could sit down.

“What can be said can be said in front of my people,” I told him.

“Who are your people?” Sparrow asked, gesturing toward Draya and Airee, who were quietly chatting on the bench at the far wall. That wasn’t even to mention all of us who’d been over in the cave, nor Kristoff, who’d taken Harold into the back room to patch the old boy up.

“They’re fine,” Carolina insisted. “Everyone on this ship can be trusted.”

“Except for Sparrow,” I replied.

“All right, Burch,” Goss said. “Let’s see if we can’t put all that behind us and discuss matters at hand.”

“That’s fine with me,” I told him. “I settled as much as I wanted already. Now, what the hell are you doing out here, Sparrow?”

“Taking cover,” he answered, turning his head toward Carolina, who’d just sat down at the head of the table, probably more out of habit than any symbolic gesture of authority.

Sparrow kept talking. “Ever since the Letters Offensive kicked off, it’s been one trouble after another in the Indies with little hope of reconciliation any time soon. So we’ve had to sneak away and find safety in seclusion, which is a barrier to the work we’d like to be doing, but, then again, so is dying. That is what we’re doing out here, Burch.”

Sparrow sat at the end of the table at the spot nearest Carolina and directly across from Goss. Omar and I sat down across from him and beside Goss. I guess nobody else really felt like the table was open for them except for Airee, who came over from the back wall and sat down beside Sparrow, introducing himself by stating he’d heard a thing or two about Sparrow from their first trip to Lime Harbor, which Sparrow visibly scowled at. But he politely shook Carsten’s hand. And then, once he’d sat down, Transom came over and sat beside Airee.

“Where’s Maícon?” Sparrow asked, and then, when no one answered directly, reading the reaction, he came to the correct conclusion. “Sore subject, I take it. All the same, I’d love to know.”

“He absconded with the banking keys,” Carolina explained. “We don’t know where he is presently.”

“Well,” Sparrow huffed. “And none too soon. I suppose I should thank you for this knock to the face, Burch. It seems to sting when I speak too forcefully. Otherwise, I’d be likely to lose my temper with my young cousin, who came to me in what I thought was good faith, looking for help on a family matter and then proceeded to touch off the bloodiest twelve weeks in the last three decades of the West Battery War.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Carolina asked. “Are you inferring I had something to do with the Letters Offensive, Sparrow?”

“I’m not inferring anything, Carly. I’m outright saying it. What the hell did you think would happen when you disrupted the investment channels of the Dark Bank?”

“The what?” Airee asked.

Sparrow closed his eyes and shook his head. “You absolute children. Did you not even understand?”

“You were the one who led us right down that trail,” Carolina stated. “From Pax Heavy to the Murder Mills, all the illicit accounts? Why would you show us the path if you didn’t expect us to walk it?”

“The Murder Mills?”

“I tracked your ship,” Transom stated. “How do you think we found you again all the way out here. We had a vector out to that slaughter factory that Maícon insisted was part of the puzzle. So we took their financials, and then Airee figured out the rest. That’s how we ended up pulling those keys off Lime Harbor in the first place. That wasn’t what you intended, Kenn?”

Sparrow scoffed. “To say the least. I have spent the last fifteen years of my life trying to keep something like the recent offensive from kicking off. Do you know about half the officers we’ve been cultivating on the Trasp side are dead now? Not to mention the death toll to every other soldier in the LSS, the Protectorate, the Guild. Civilian casualties in the hundreds of thousands at least. A nightmare!”

“How is that related to the keys?” Carolina asked.

“If you even have to ask the question, you’re in no place to be meddling.” He sighed.

“I didn’t meddle in it at all, Sparrow,” I stated. “Indulge me with a simple explanation, even if it’s not for your cousin’s benefit.”

“Those accounts were assets to be borrowed against, Burch. And when they were there and open and steady, both the Trasp and the Etterans understood that their future resources were fluid. In a way, that bank functioned like an infinite unknown variable. It made it exponentially more difficult for the other to calculate future resources that their enemy could stack against them. And, it was confidential. That was part of the structure. At first glance, yes, those accounts were owned by war profiteers, and you could certainly make a moral case—as I’m sure my young cousin did—for shutting off the funding with the hope that it would stop the fighting. But that only made the calculus that much easier for both sides, because it made it clear what sort of resources they each had at hand. When the entire board is visible, the game becomes infinitely easier to play. Then it becomes strategy, luck, and a little bit of the unknown; versus before when the unknown was the largest factor in the war’s unfolding over time. I imagine you meant well, Carolina, but, dear God, your best intentions ...”

Sparrow just shook his head.

“You said the accounts are back open now?” Goss asked. “Operating anonymously elsewhere?”

“Don’t you know that, Mr. Deputy Chancellor?” Sparrow said, huffing.

Goss’s eyes narrowed. He glared over at his cousin.

Sparrow closed his eyes and took a deep breath, apparently trying to summon his last bit of patience.

“I suppose it could be worse,” he said, his eyes still shut. “If they’d have clocked you dead at Alpha-Origgi, instead of just clipping you, Carolina, we’d be in a whole other layer of hell. Or more recently, my God. I did think you were dead.”

“Cousin,” Goss said, almost visibly trying to tamp down his ire, “I don’t delight in the thought of rebuking family in front of anyone, Athosian or otherwise, but I need to hear you say it. To what is your highest duty and obligation?”

Sparrow turned and looked at Goss, puzzled.

“It’s not a trick question, Kenn.”

“To Athos. Always. Did you come out here with the express purpose of burning me, Colin?”

“Don’t take that tone with me. Your cover is safe aboard this ship with every one of Carolina’s crew and friends. No one has an interest in burning you. I only ask to be certain, because the version of events I got—not just from my sister, mind you, but from everyone else involved—is that you abandoned her on Pax Heavy. The Chancellor’s daughter came to you for help and you allowed one of your operatives to double-cross one of her friends, and then you left my sister drifting in the breeze for weeks. Not days. For weeks. I demand to know what was so operationally pressing that you decided to take those actions?”

Sparrow looked around the table and tilted his head to Goss, as though signaling something.

“Don’t try to wriggle out of it like that,” Goss stated, growing even more visibly angry. “Tell me what higher obligation an Athosian intelligence officer has than the safety of Barnard Dreeson’s daughter.”

“I had to meet a contact.”

“Someone more important than Carolina? Yes?”

“It was an important source. I told her to wait right there at Pax.”

“Indefinitely?”

Sparrow shrugged.

“I bet you didn’t bank on her friend Burch beating you back to Pax with a story about her cousin’s people betraying his crew, her friends? That wasn’t in your plans, was it? Was she supposed to sit right there and wait for you to do the same to her as soon as you got around to it?”

“No.”

“And then you have the audacity to step foot onto this ship and lay the Letters Offensive on her after she walked right into your camp looking for your guidance?” Goss stopped talking for a moment.

I could see him breathing through both nostrils, his jaws clenched together.

“I am so bloody furious I could spit!” Goss shouted at him as he slapped his hand down on the table. “If you weren’t family, I’d let this crew draw numbers for which one of them got to split your head open.”

Sparrow sat there wide-eyed, like the rest of us. There sure was a fiery streak in those Dreesons. And Goss was doing every last thing he could to keep it in check.

He took a deep breath. “I need a minute,” he declared. “See this man off this ship.”

“With pleasure,” Transom stated, pointing at Sparrow to get on his feet.

“I’ll call for you when I’m ready,” Goss said.

And with that, Sparrow got up, and as rough as he might have looked getting popped in the nose like I’d done, I suspect he’d have preferred ten of those whacks to the verbal whipping Colin Dreeson had just dropped on him. And as soon as he’d disappeared down the back corridor with Transom, Goss put both hands down on the table as he stood, shook his head, and then walked up toward the front without saying a word to anyone, his face as red as Amos’s sun.

Everyone else just sorta looked at Carolina as if to ask whether it was okay to breathe. And she shook her head. No. It most certainly was not. Eggshells until further notice.

And I thought I’d been angry at Sparrow. Holy hell. I was sure glad these Dreesons weren’t my enemies.

I was sitting up on the deck, slowly going through that drive Rishi had left in our little hiding spot. There was some good music on there that I was surprised I liked. Most of the songs that had words in them and not just music I couldn’t understand a phrase of, almost like it was a foreign language. I’d catch a word here or there, but mostly, I was just enjoying the sounds, wondering what Rishi would tell me about those songs if she was there—something that happened to her on Earth or a story the song told that meant something.

Then Carolina popped in quietly. She sat and listened, offering a soft smile. I could tell she was sad for me, that Rishi wasn’t there to share the moment with us.

“We’re going to find her, Burch,” she said as soon as the song ended and it got silent.

“I know,” I replied. “I’ve got faith in that.”

“You found some nice music. Any clues yet?”

“Clues to what?”

“I don’t know. I guess what she was planning to share with you before ... well, Maícon ...”

“I wish I had a clue,” I joked. “How are you doing?”

Carolina sighed.

“That wasn’t right,” I told her, “the way Sparrow tried to put the offensive on you. It was good to see big brother had your back.”

“He may not be entirely wrong, though, Burch. Sparrow, I mean. I knew there would be consequences before we took the keys. What I can’t figure out is why Maícon would help me do it—encourage me even—and then go to so much trouble to steal them back and reactivate them.”

“One thing I learned in that other life in the future, living alongside Maícon and all those other prime AIs for decades, is that you can’t figure Maícon. He’ll do things just to see what’ll happen. That’s what I thought about Rishi too—about that Maícon who turned her into a bipal. I’d never have figured that, giving up his existence for hers. Then I heard Fieldstone’s story, and some of it is starting to make more sense—that there might be two types of Maícons maybe. And I bet that other kind shared what they know with Prime. Pitka’s Maícon certainly had plenty of opportunity. So how do you figure it? You all picked up Pitka’s Maícon after you stole the banking keysets?”

Carolina started searching her brain, scrunching up her face as she tried to remember. “Yeah. I think it was right after our second trip to Lime Harbor, right after we picked up Fieldstone.”

“They could’ve started talking in that way those AIs talk to one another. They think we don’t know they’re doing it, but they’re almost always talking—data streams, back and forth. There’s that, and, you know ... Maícon.”

“Somebody needs to stop this war,” she said, shaking her head.

“Hey,” I said, looking right at her as she started to drift, going to that place where guilt and self-loathing lived. “You did what you thought was best. What do these assholes think, setting up accounts to profit on all the regular people dying?”

I held up my mech hand.

“Nobody gets to blame you for disrupting the perfect order of their scheme. They’re the ones started the killing.”

“Maybe,” she replied. “Whoever ‘they’ is Burch. I’m not fully sure we know yet.”

“I got ideas. As good as it felt to knock your cousin on the nose, I think we need a better plan.”

“Got something in mind, Burch?”

“Yeah. As much as I hate the idea of another long transit, I think we need to go see Eddis Ali again. Omar and I have some questions for those wizards from our trip back to Veronia, about the rift in his sect.”

“Colin, Carsten, and Transom said the same from their time on Iophos.”

“Yeah. Plus, those wizards made those skin nodes for Rishi’s body. We’re going to need some of those nodes to find her somehow. I don’t know. Maybe we need another prime AI too, but I’m also going to need another body for Rishi when we find her core again. I doubt Maícon’s going to just give hers back. Plus, I’ve got questions about those Iophan Roughnecks the wizards hire to do their dirty work, and I got a hunch of who might know something about it.”

Carolina looked over at me skeptically, and I could tell what she was thinking.

“He’s going to find out sooner or later, Carolina. That brother of yours is no fool. We’ll have to tell him eventually.”

“Clem Aballi,” she muttered. “He’s there you think?”

“If Verona is still, yeah, he’ll be there. Last we heard from Nilius they were.”

“Back to the Vault then, I guess,” Carolina said.

“Whenever your brother’s done with Sparrow.”

They’d been in the captain’s quarters talking one-on-one for a few hours by that point.

“What do you think he’s telling him?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll find out later. You know, Burch, I didn’t have the slightest idea he was Athosian intelligence. I just thought he was this quirky cousin, motivated by conscience to stop the killing. I can’t help but feel like everything I’ve been doing is just one stupid mistake after another—naïve, thoughtless, bungling, presumptuous. Who the hell was I to think I could step in and solve the galaxy’s problems?”

“Is there a long list of people out there who were doing it already, Ms. Dreeson?” I asked her. “Plus, if I told you all the stupid stuff I did in my twenties, I’m not sure you’d have a bit of respect left for me. One bungling mistake after another, as you say. That’s about as close to a regular life as a Dreeson could live, I’d say. Anyway, want to put some music back on?”

“Sure, Burch,” she replied. “I can’t understand a word any of them are saying, though.”

“Right?”

“Especially that one with the gravelly voice Rishi likes so much?”

I shook my head at her. “Which one is that?”

“Transom thinks he’s hilarious.”

“Consummate art critic he is,” I replied, shrugging, displaying the list on the floatscreen.

“That’s him,” Carolina said, scrolling down. “Tom. Funny name. Tom.”

“Is that a band name or his name. Tom Waits?” I asked her. “I wonder what he’s waiting for?”

“That’s what I was thinking, Burch.” Carolina was laughing, which was good to see.

So I started playing one of his songs. And yeah, it was sure different. That was something Rishi liked, so we sat there listening for a while, and suddenly it got real heavy in there, like some kind of feeling Carolina and I didn’t share much.

We listened to a few songs like that before Goss came walking in.

“What in the name of Heder Floriston are you listening to, sister?”

“Earth music,” Carolina replied. “From the 20^th Century, I think.”

“Interesting,” Goss stated. “Are those words or just noises?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you about Sparrow,” I said. “Any words or just more noises?”

“I’m going to need to get back to Athos, Burch. He had some very troubling updates regarding the issue with the keys. Carolina is very much in danger out here as well. So I think it may be best to bring her home with me for the time being, at least until things settle down. This business with the Iophans is extremely troubling. They are very much looking to pull us into the conflict, especially with the Trasp extended as they are now. That’s why Sparrow believed they may have succeeded in another attempt on Carolina’s life when those accounts came online again. We’re going to need to deal with Iophos directly at some point, the sooner the better as I see it. But I’ll need to discuss it with our father when we get to Athos.”

“Well, Ms. Dreeson?” I asked.

“We’ll see about all that, Burch. I’m not so easy to kill. And if you’re going to see Eddis Ali, there may be no safer place in the galaxy, Athos included.”

“Father will need to see you, Carly,” Goss said.

“Then to Athos, I suppose,” she replied. “If that’s okay with you, Captain Burch?”

“It sure is,” I replied. “I just got one more bit of unfinished business to take care of in Sparrow’s cave before we shove off.”

I had Sparrow Dreeson bring her up to the front of the cave. And she sure carried herself with some trepidation. Her body language was shouting it out. That Reggie.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m not going to hit you in the nose ... or anywhere else for that matter.”

“All right, Burch,” she replied. “What can I do for you?”

“This man with me,” I said, “do you know who he is?”

“That’s Omar Jemeis. Yes. I recognize him.”

“Omar’s my friend. He took me back into Trasp space to find Leda—or Aida. I can’t hardly ever keep it straight anymore.”

“Neither can she,” Omar joked.

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I agreed. “Seeing as I almost purged you out my rear airlock the last time I saw you, I figured it was only right I let you know that she’s doing well. Leda is.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, Burch.”

“So I guess your scheme worked, Reggie. And maybe with the passage of time and a cooler head, I’ve come to see it a little different, like maybe she was owed that after all. When I knew Leda, she had a lot of questions about who she was and where she’d come from, and well, you did help to give her those answers, and you did return her to her own proper family. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for how I reacted or say thank you, because it was deceptive and I still resent it. But I thought you should know where I stand. And I thought you should meet Omar. Regina Hoss Boggs, I’d like you to meet Omar Jemeis.”

She put out her hand. Omar put his arms right around her.

“Reggie,” he said. “I’d like to thank you, for our family—and for me—thank you for bringing my sister home again. We’re forever grateful to you.”

To my surprise, she started crying.

“I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t proud of what I did. But this war ... this war.”

I guess we were all feeling it in that moment. Mistakes, missteps, and regrets. No one gets out of it proud if you get out at all. But I felt good at least that me and Omar and Reggie got to close out that account. Same for me and Sparrow Dreeson. Next was next as they say in the Letters. So we said our goodbyes and pressed on again, back once more to Athos.

(Part 4 of the “Cypher Sigma” series)

Denver had escaped the murder scene undetected. She was still invisible, courtesy of the Trasp suit she and Kilty had acquired from an unexpected visitor to their ship. But she well knew the suit wasn’t perfect. Nor did it make her footfalls silent or the signals from the helmet undetectable. It was a calculated risk that had paid off in the short term, but spying on the very soldiers she was supposed to be helping had turned out to be a far more hazardous endeavor than she’d expected, and they still weren’t back to the ship yet. She had to find a way to get Shad Pozzer and Jahn Farq-Sen back aboard without the cartel tracing them directly there.

For Pozzer, she could see, it wasn’t going to be a problem. She’d had him double back after he’d walked out of the zero district. He sat for a drink and a plate of sumira while Denver walked a slow perimeter, making certain he’d somehow managed to walk away from the tavern without a tail. Farq-Sen, on the other hand, had not. The only question in her mind was how heavy-handed the Rexes intended to be. And considering what they’d just done to the two dead LSS starship commanders back in the tavern, Denver presumed they had no qualms about murdering any potential witnesses they perceived to be even loosely connected to whatever it was the LSS was pursuing out here.

A big, fine, deadly mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Captain Gennaro, Denver thought as she hustled to catch up with Major Farq-Sen. She was only just beginning to formulate a plan to get them all out of it.

“Shad,” she said, pinging the Lieutenant’s earset again. “Take your time and get back to the ship when you’re done eating. I’ll handle getting the Major back aboard. I’ll just need to talk to him. I need you to ping me through.”

Shad must have been eating, and, she could tell, the scare in the tavern had given him plenty of incentive to be cautious. Shad Pozzer’s response came in by text.

“He is not going to like that, Denver.”

“He’ll like it a hell of a lot more than whatever the cartel’s killers have in mind for him. So hurry up and connect me, and I’ll worry about the fallout if we get him off this cylinder alive, okay?”

“You’re going to have to explain all this, you know?” he wrote back. “I’m connecting you. He’ll think it’s me, coming from my earset.”

“Fine. Keep it on,” Denver replied.

A few seconds later, she heard a beep, a tone, and then breathing, Farq-Sen sounded like he must have been walking at a decent clip.

“Where are you, Jahn? This is Denver.”

“Gennaro? Why are you calling?”

“Because I have no intention of allowing you to drag cartel killers back to my ship. You do realize they’re following you, right?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I guess that means you don’t realize they’re following you. Great. Don’t stop walking. Get me your coordinates. I have an idea to get you out.”

“How do you know I’m being followed?” he asked.

“Because I heard the cartel bosses order the guys who killed the Baird’s commanders to find the guys who were watching them. I don’t think we want to find out what they have in mind for you when they do.”

“I find that highly doubtful on every count, Gennaro. Pozzer and I still have work to do here to track down Goff and Aerro.”

“No you don’t, Jahn. They’re plant food. I just told you. I watched it happen. I’ll explain everything, but we need to get you out first, and then we’re all going to have a talk. Whatever you’ve gotten us mixed up in is much more than you understand.”

There was a long pause as Denver could hear Farq-Sen breathing. She presumed he was having a good, long look around him trying to see if he was actually being tailed. She didn’t have a lot of faith that he’d know it if he was, not in a cylinder like Gamma-Penzies.

“What’s your angle?” he finally responded.

“Getting us off this cylinder alive. That’s my only angle here, Jahn, and for the time being, if I’m overreacting or totally wrong, the worst that can happen is you waste a little time on your way back to the ship.”

There was another long pause.

“What do you propose?”

“The district where I picked up the package—head that way and I’ll direct you when you get close. I’ll be able to see them following you in.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll talk about it when you get there, Jahn. Just don’t stop if anyone approaches you, okay? If someone comes up on you—anyone, no matter how innocent they look—don’t slow down. Keep moving no matter what.”

Denver had Andrew ping a guide path to Farq-Sen, who continued along that route toward the apothecary’s neighborhood. By the time he got there, Denver was waiting to observe. She saw the Major walk quickly into the area, and following him at a distance was one of the killers from the bar.

She waited a few minutes and circled the area, looking to see if she could locate the other man.

Jahn pinged her from the interior of the flat where she’d suited up about an hour before. She instructed him to lock the door and wait. His pursuer walked right through the narrow alley where Farq-Sen was holed up, ready with his sidearm if the cartel killer had any designs on adding a third LSS officer to his list of victims that day.

Fortunately, though, he continued through the residential causeway, seemingly missing the fact that the Major had stepped inside one of the abandoned homes that made up the dusty old neighborhood.

The second man appeared on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Denver realized she hadn’t thought it through all the way, as the first man was now doubling back on the alleyway where Farq-Sen was hiding, checking doors for an open one. He seemed to be a bit more cautious, looking over his shoulder at least considering the possibility that the hapless onlooker from the bar might not have been as hapless as they’d figured him to be. Farq-Sen seemed to have vanished into thin air. But now, as Denver watched, she realized that with those two canvassing the neighborhood, it was going to be nearly impossible, invisible or no, to open the door to that flat without it being a dead giveaway.

She looked around for something to knock over or throw, hoping that the noise would draw the pursuers for long enough to sneak back to the Major and slip inside the door. Luckily, as she was scanning the area, she noticed the apothecary vendor stepping away from his little hut in the middle of the nearby square. That was the break they needed.

Denver tucked in behind the counter, unzipped the front of her suit, and zipped one of the glass containers from under his counter into her suit, stepping back out quietly, careful not to make any noise with her footfalls.

She watched the two pursuers surveying the neighborhood, waiting till they were both out of the line of vision to the flat. Then Denver tossed the glass jar farther down the causeway, where it exploded onto the street. Both of the cartel gunmen turned toward the sound to investigate, and Denver doubled back and slipped into the flat, where Farq-Sen was waiting to open and close the door quickly and quietly.

Jahn Farq-Sen’s eyes grew wide, as he felt a presence rush in through what appeared to be an empty crack in the doorway, his hand clunking off something solid in front of him. Denver pushed her way through and turned, closing the door behind her quietly and disengaging the suit’s outer camouflage.

“Oh,” he said. “That explains a little.”

“No time for explanations, Jahn. We’ve got to squeeze you into this suit.”

He looked at her doubtfully as she shoved the helmet into his hands.

“It’s big on me,” she explained. “And it stretches.”

“What about you? Even if I get this thing on, you’ll still be stuck in here.”

“They’re not looking for me, Jahn. And we’ll figure that out later.”

“I could take these guys out.”

“We don’t want to start a fight with the Rexes we can’t win out here. Put that helmet on.”

He didn’t look happy about it, but the Major attempted to squeeze his head into the helmet.

“It’s tight.”

“I’ll hammer it on you if you don’t stop complaining and hurry up.”

He pressed the helmet down, finding it tight to his chin as Denver quickly unzipped the front of the suit.

“You’re full of surprises, Gennaro, I have to say.”

“We’ll talk about all that later.”

She kicked her feet out of the suit and handed it to him, quickly turning to the front window to get a look at the alleyway outside to make sure it was still clear.

“Fast, Jahn,” she insisted.

“It’s not that easy,” he replied, yanking on the pantlegs of the suit, struggling to get it up to his waist.

Denver helped him, arm by arm, then pushing his clothes inside as he zipped it. She helped him clip it to the bottom of the helmet, instructing him on how to engage the cloak.

“Okay, go,” Denver said. “Quiet feet. Slow and steady once you’re out.”

She opened the door and watched for any anomalies in the air, and after a second, she shut the door quietly again. Farq-Sen was out and headed back to the ship. Denver put her back to the door and sat.

Denver Gennaro waited quietly, debating whether to chance a walk from her hiding spot. Surely, they were eventually going to get traced back by the cylinder’s surveillance, given that it was all but certain that the Rexes had somebody watching the cameras at each port gate in the same way they had people watching each corner of the zero district. The question was how long these killers would wait before getting frustrated and trying to trace Farq-Sen back to his ship. An hour or two tops, Denver figured.

She knew one of the killers had to be watching the street. For the moment, she just sat, pondering how each choice she’d made since they’d decided to pick up Santos had brought them deeper and deeper into a mess that all could’ve been avoided.

Kilty pinged. “Jahn’s back. They both are, he and Pozzer. So where are you, Denver?”

“Ask Andrew,” Denver whispered back. “He knows exactly where to find me.”

Denver figured maybe fifteen minutes had passed. Time was ticking away on them.

“I’ll get you out,” Kilty said. “Hang tight right there until you get word from Andrew.”

“Stay in the ship, K. I’ll take care of it.”

“Uhm, no, Captain. I’m not leaving you out there. If they were onto the Major, it won’t be long before the cartel’s onto the ship.”

“I’m aware, Kilty.”

“Yup. Stay put.”

“Shit,” Denver replied, exhaling as Kilty cut out.

That was the cost for stepping into trouble like that. Now her sister was going to step into it to try and extricate her. And who knows what Kilty had in mind?

It seemed to take forever. Denver heard heavy footsteps outside the door a few times over the minutes she was waiting. It couldn’t have been anyone but the Rexes’ guys, not in an abandoned neighborhood like that.

About fifteen minutes had passed before she heard a girl’s voice laughing and shouting.

“No, stop!” she heard what she thought was Kilty’s voice through the door. “Come back here you little ...”

She listened for a few more seconds. Laughter again, followed by, “Santos! No. Come back!”

Denver got up on one knee, peeking out the front window to see Kilty dressed up like a proper civilian, barefoot, spring dress, her hair in a wrap—cute in a way she and Kilty rarely got to be—and she was chasing the cat past the front street like a child playing with her pet.

“No, don’t go up that way!” she heard another voice shout to her. “You don’t have shoes on, girl. Come back.”

It was the apothecary.

Kilty was shouting back and forth with him as he tried to explain that there was broken glass all over the street that way.

“But Santos. I have to catch Santos.”

“Are you ready to move, Captain?” Andrew’s voice pinged into Denver’s earpiece.

“Can you help me?” Kilty asked someone in the distance loudly.

“Say when,” Denver responded to Andrew. “Tell me she didn’t let that cat loose on this cylinder.”

“I could tell you that,” Andrew replied. “But I would be lying.”

Denver shook her head.

“On my mark, you may step out and head left. Quickly, but do not run.”

“Understood.”

Kilty’s antics with the cat proved just enough of a distraction for Denver to exit the alley unseen. Andrew was watching from the main causeway that led back to the ship.

“The cat, Andrew? Really?”

“It seemed like the best option. And here you are.”

“Keep eyes on her. If anything happens—”

“Nothing will happen unless you insist on lingering here any further, Captain.”

Denver scowled at their android and began to walk back to the ship at a clip. She didn’t like it, Kilty out there exposed like that. But mostly, the Rexes left regular people alone, especially kids, and Kilty was certainly playing one convincingly out there, chasing that cat around.

By the time they were halfway back to the ship, Andrew pinged her with the good word. He and Kilty were clear and on the way back to the ship with Santos.

She waited for them at the gate, half an eye down each end of the walkway leading out to the ship, a plasma rifle tucked behind the inner airlock door, just out of view but not out of reach.

Before long, Kilty and Andrew came walking back as casually as anything, as though out for a stroll, and just in front of them, his head and tail high as he jogged along, was Santos.

“Mama Pilot,” he said, embarking as though he knew just where to go.

Kilty saw the shock on Denver’s face as Santos scurried past Denver into the ship. “Mama Pilot,” Kilty echoed as she stepped inside. “How about we shove off before they figure out what happened back there?”

“Get dressed for flight,” Denver said. “Then strap in.”

“You’re welcome,” Kilty replied, waving to Denver as she stepped toward the midship.

“He follows commands pinged to his helmet,” Andrew explained as he stepped inside. “Surprisingly well.”

“At least someone does,” she replied, then tilting her head at Andrew. “Present company excluded, of course. Please seal that hatch and get the ship ready for flight.”

Denver had hardly made it up through the midship before she heard footsteps behind her.

“Strap in for flight,” she stated, not even turning to see which one of the LSS officers it was.

“I have orders,” she heard Farq-Sen’s voice as he followed fast behind her.

“Well, I have orders to bring myself and my sister home alive, Jahn, so for now, as far as I’m concerned, the LSS can stuff it. We’re burned here.”

“We have a mission.”

“Not here we don’t,” Denver replied, turning and slipping into the captain’s chair. “Andrew?”

“Rear hatch is closed and locked. Inner doors locked and secured through three.”

“Right. Let me know as soon as Kilty has the cat back in his box.”

“Hey!” Farq-Sen said, trying to claw back Denver’s attention from her pre-flight flow sheet. “I need an explanation here, Gennaro.”

She turned her head. “Sit and strap in unless you want to ride the aft wall, Jahn. We can talk when we’re out of here.”

He huffed and sat beside Denver.

“Clear in the midship,” Kilty’s voice came over Denver’s panel. “The GGs are in too.”

“Clear to push off,” Andrew’s voice followed immediately after.

Denver took the controls, and the rear magnet clamped-off with a pop, followed by the thrusters pushing them loose from the cylinder.

“Gennaro,” Farq-Sen said as she was slowly engaging the sublight engines.

His tone of voice was decidedly different, like something was bothering him. Denver got a sudden feeling she couldn’t explain. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“What the hell is that?” the Major asked, his head lunging forward in the flight seat, his whole body contorting to port.

“Something’s out there,” he stated. “Hard to port.”

Denver looked at her instruments, and there seemed to be an area of interference—some sort of anomaly.

“Hard to port,” Jahn repeated.

Denver couldn’t see it, but something in her gut told her she wasn’t going to like it if she turned the ship that way.

Still, she cut a strong arc to port and rolled, bringing the area into the center of the front screen.

“Holy hell, that thing’s bigger than we thought,” Farq-Sen exclaimed. “It’s bigger than a colony ship.”

It was their mystery ship—the one that had jumped in to the Byard, or at least it looked just like it, only bigger and closer than Denver had ever wanted that behemoth to be.

“Circle. Circle. Let’s get some images,” Farq-Sen said

“Yeah. Not today, Jahn,” Denver replied, turning the ship away and engaging the FTL. “You’ll thank me later, I’m sure.”

It wasn’t as though they had a destination. Denver doubted she knew the Gammas nearly as well as the GG Rangers in her midship, but she knew they couldn’t stay at Penzies. Jahn Farq-Sen didn’t utter a word for nearly twenty minutes after she engaged the FTL. He wasn’t shouting orders at her or yelling, so she figured the situation could be worse. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized it could’ve been a lot worse. They were all alive, and they were putting distance between themselves and that dreadnaught from hell, or whatever that ship was. Not to mention the cartel. It was not the type of situation Denver ever wanted to get into with the Rexes. Ideally, the best one could do was to escape their interest. The real question at that point was how much interest the cartel would have in tracking down who Jahn was and finding her ship. And Denver couldn’t begin to guess that until she knew what the Major was after.

“I’d like to drop out near Delta-Fina,” she announced to the Major. “It’s close enough that it’s a short jump but it’s not obvious from our departure vector.”

“Why would you drop out there, Gennaro?”

“The way I see it, that ship is either following us somehow I can’t figure, or they were onto those two officers from the Byard. Otherwise, how would it show up in both places? If they come after us again, we’ll know.”

Farq-Sen let out a huff that was half laugh, half scoff.

“Something funny about that?”

“You’re pretty quick on your feet, Gennaro,” he replied. “Not much for following orders so far, but I suppose that’s to be expected somewhat.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He looked over at her and shrugged. “You’re a civilian. Young. Captain of your own ship. You do your own thing, I guess.”

She frowned. It wasn’t exactly the cutting insult she’d been expecting. It was about the most charitable interpretation of her actions she could’ve expected out of him at that juncture.

“We don’t really understand one another yet, Jahn,” she replied. “Maybe we won’t get to. I’ve got different priorities maybe, but I’m still accountable to the people and things that matter.”

“All right.”

“Delta-Fina. I’ll plot a secondary course.”

“You’re still the captain, and this is still your vessel,” Farq-Sen replied.

Jahn called the GG Rangers into the midship, where he, Denver, and Kilty were waiting for them. The ship was gravity free in mid-flight, and there were only four spots at the table, so Kilty tucked herself into the space across the table from her sister, between Ellis Ames and the wall. Denver could see something was a little odd with those two—a weird energy, but nothing she could put her finger on initially. It had been about a half hour since they’d jumped out of Gamma-Penzies and five minutes since her course change to Delta-Fina. They had some time to get things straight.

“So that didn’t go as well as it could’ve,” Farq-Sen started. “I’m not even sure what happened back there, but we still need to catch up with Goff and Aerro somehow ... or at least their co-conspirators if Captain Gennaro’s account is correct that they’re dead.”

“They’re dead, Jahn. I saw it with my own eyes. I was in the tavern.”

“Yeah, the suit,” he replied.

“Yeah, the suit,” Pozzer echoed. “What the hell, Denver? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“It’s complicated, Shad. I guess the moment never felt right, and you thought we might have been working for the Trasp. What better way to prove that correct than pulling out our top-secret frontline gear from the Protectorate, right?”

“So you had that suit the whole time?” Ellis asked, his voice seemingly somewhat sluggish to Denver’s ears. “Does that mean that ... Hey wait? Was that ... back in Alpha-Richard, was that you at the stairs—how we got away?”

“That was Andrew,” Denver replied. “I sent him out after you. And that was why I locked you in the closet, Shad. I figured you two would be off the ship in an hour, safe and sound. No reason to reveal secrets at that point. I just wanted to rescue Ames and Kilty and part ways.”

“How did you come by that tech, Captain Gennaro, if you’re not working for the Trasp?” Farq-Sen asked. “Not that I don’t believe you at this point. I don’t think you’re an agent. It’s just improbable.”

“We came by it by chance, Jahn. We picked up a kid who’d pulled the suit off a dead Trasp moon ranger at Mingo as he was running away from the city. Ironically enough, we met him in the Gammas—Gamma-Merced, actually.”

“There’s a Merced in the Gammas?” Farq-Sen asked. “I thought it was just the Alpha.”

“Sure,” Pozzer replied. “A small outpost. Planet, not a moon, but small. Dusty, I hear. I’ve never been myself.”

“I find that odd, by the way, but that’s a deeper conversation,” Denver said.

“You find what odd?” the Major asked.

“The fact that you barely know your way around out here and the LSS sent you of all people to infiltrate the Rexes. That’s odd.”

“We can talk about that,” Farq-Sen replied. “But, please, the suit?”

“Well, anyway, the kid used it to sneak onto our ship to steal our cargo, and we caught him in the act. He had a pretty tough story and we ended up giving him a lift back to the Kappas. I bought the suit off him for two thousand LCr. I figured the best-case scenario if I told Shad about the suit was it’d get confiscated and I’d be out two grand. Little did I know the LSS could take the whole ship and everyone in it.”

“So wait. The whole reason you were being weird with us back at Alpha-Richard was that you didn’t want us to confiscate your suit?” Shad Pozzer asked.

“It wasn’t just that, Shad,” Denver said. “It wasn’t like you two made the greatest first impression on us. You didn’t even believe us about the cat. So we were supposed to just trust that you’d believe us that we weren’t spies?”

“I suppose that’s fair.”

“The kitty,” Kilty said, grinning.

“What’s wrong with you?” Denver asked, glaring at Kilty. “Look at me, K.”

Kilty grinned and started laughing. Denver slapped her hand on the table and pointed to her sister, commanding her with a gesture to look her in the eyes. Instead, Kilty looked over at Ellis Ames, who returned a goofy look, and instantly both of them fell out laughing uncontrollably while Farq-Sen, Denver, and Shad Pozzer all looked at each other in disbelief.

“Are you two drunk, Kilty?” Denver asked. “What did you do?”

They were still laughing too hard to answer.

“I was sitting with them the whole transit out,” Pozzer said, shaking his head. “They seemed okay when Kilty came in.”

“Mama Pilot,” Kilty managed to utter between laughs.

Ellis Ames looked like he was about to suffocate.

“Kilty!” Denver stated.

“Mama Kitty,” Ames said, and both of them could hardly breathe.

Andrew was magnetically locked to the floor in the rear corridor looking in. “They appear to be intoxicated.”

He disengaged and floated over, grabbing Kilty by the chin and struggling to hold her still while he shined a light in her eyes.

“Not drunk,” Andrew said, waving a finger in front of her eyes, one at a time. “What did you ingest, Miss Kilty?”

“Chocolate,” she replied grinning.

“Chocolate? What Chocolate, Kilty?” Denver asked.

“The one from Penzies.”

“From Penzies?” Denver replied, shaking her head. “You mean the box I brought back from the apothecary? There was chocolate in there? Andrew, what was in there? What did you two order?”

Shad shook his head and looked at Farq-Sen.

“It was a dummy box,” Jahn replied. “Just a pretext. You idiots weren’t supposed to eat it.”

“It was good,” Kilty replied still giggling. “Expensive chocolate.”

“Doubtless with some psychoactive affects,” Andrew replied.

“Why would you eat that?” Denver asked.

“Why not?” Ames answered.

“Andrew what was in it?”

“The bill of lading reads, ‘edible product, sp. Nightwalker Gr. 2500 ppm.’”

“What the hell does that mean?” Denver asked.

“Uncertain,” the android replied.

“Ames, why did you two eat that?” Pozzer asked his young officer.

“Like the Major said, we weren’t even going to deliver it. Why throw it out?”

“It’s really good chocolate,” Kilty added. “Seemed like a waste.”

“That box wasn’t candy, Kilty,” Denver added. “You know that, right? I got it from an apothecary.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You do know what an apothecary is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ames?”

“Sure. We know.”

“Kilty, what’s an apothecary?” Denver asked, looking directly at her grinning sister and insisting on an answer with a glare.

“It’s a really ... uhm. A really expensive chocolate place.”

Pozzer exhaled. Denver shook her head. Farq-Sen put his in his hands.

“Andrew, see if you can identify whatever the hell it was they took, and how much of it,” Denver said. “And watch her.”

“Why are you guys so angry?” Ellis Ames asked, a slight grin on his face as he looked over at his superior officers.

“And you watch him,” Major Farq-Sen ordered Pozzer, pointing at Ames.

“This is some fine operation,” Denver grumbled. “The Lettered Systems are sure safe in our hands. About sums up the day, I’d say.”

“I want to let the cat out, Denver,” Kilty said. “He’s funny. I like Santos.”

“I bet he thinks you’re funny too,” Denver answered, looking over at Andrew and nodding. “Why not? Go ahead and let the damn cat out.”

Denver was up on the flight deck by herself when Jahn approached, he had food, enough for two, and as he strapped himself down beside her in the FO’s chair, he extended a thermal bag.

“I noticed you didn’t eat,” he said. “Understandable considering how crazy this day’s been, but you should eat. You’ve been underway a lot.”

“It’s my job,” she replied, but she took the food. “Thanks, Jahn.”

“So, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and you can tell me if I’m wrong in my thinking, but I imagine it must’ve been about equal parts frustrating and confusing how everything went down back at Penzies. Not ideal.”

Denver laughed. “No. Not ideal. That’s a fact.”

“First thing I want to tell you is thank you, Gennaro. The proper truth is that you saved my ass back there, I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t so sure at the time, but that’s one of the surest ways to end up dead is to not understand what the hell’s going on. I’m grateful one of us did.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Jahn Farq-Sen. I have my moments when I’m the last to know. For instance, today I learned that my kid sister has a gaping hole in her vocabulary, which I’m hopeful she’s never going to forget if she can still remember today come tomorrow.”

Farq-Sen laughed. “They’re going to be fine according to your android.”

“So I heard. At least from the substance anyway. Her captain may be another matter.”

Farq-Sen grinned before changing the subject. “Another thing I imagine you’re wondering about is how I got sent out here on this mission, Ms. Gennaro. It’s vital, by the way. We can’t abandon it. But we’re definitely going to need to rethink things.”

“A little more subtlety would be in order, Major. That would be my humble suggestion.”

“Yeah,” he stroked his chin. “In the moment, Command didn’t think we had that luxury, and we’re trained to follow orders exactly on most things.”

“Don’t you mean everything?”

“Yes, but there’s a ‘but’ in there sometimes—or at least a ‘however.’”

“What are you trying to tell me, Jahn?”

“I’d like to explain.”

“I’ll listen.”

“I imagine you must think we’re pretty incompetent? Or at least that I am, right?”

Denver shrugged. “It’s not my place to say.”

Farq-Sen laughed. “In politics that’s called a non-denial denial, I think. And, yes, Captain, I’m certain it’s exactly your place to say, seeing as we’re ordering you to fly us into danger. And it’s fair. Based on that sample size, I’d think I was as incompetent as hell too.”

“Yeah, I just don’t get it. You’re not the only one thinking about what happened back there, Jahn, and honestly, I don’t understand what you thought was going to happen.”

“I’m not incompetent, and I’m very well trained, Gennaro. I just wasn’t trained for covert recon in our own territory. That’s the issue. We actually don’t have a lot of people like that. Ideally, we’d have pulled someone from the area. The problem was, they didn’t have anybody on the Ovidio-M, and we needed to get somebody out there immediately in the middle of the chaos of the Richard infiltration, because we had some extremely troubling intelligence that was time sensitive, so in the absence of any good options, we accepted a bad one.”

“That is not a great way to operate, Jahn.”

“No, it is not. But we didn’t make wrong calls on everything.”

“No?”

“No. I think Pozzer was a good decision, considering his specific knowledge of Goff and Aerro, and he suggested we use you. That was at least partly the right decision.”

“Partly?”

“Yeah, you want to know the part that went really wrong, from my perspective as a commanding officer, that is?”

“Sure, Jahn, I would just love to know what you think.”

He paused, noticing that Denver hadn’t even touched her food yet, so he gestured, smiling—the first genuine smile she’d seen from the guy perhaps since he’d come aboard.

“It’s going to get cold,” he said.

Denver shrugged and opened the thermal bag, poking around and picking out a pouch.

“I should’ve told you everything, because the way I see it—in hindsight—my guess is that you would not have advised us to walk into that tavern like that.”

“Your guess is correct.”

“I’d like to think I’d have listened,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “It might be slightly better than fifty-fifty that’s true.”

Denver raised her eyebrows and nodded, her mouth full.

“What are you trained for, Jahn?” she managed to ask without spitting out her food.

“I’m an intel operative. Covert.”

“A spy? Really?”

“Yes. Really. That’s why they asked me to go to Penzies.”

“But I thought you said ...?”

“Not in the Letters. In the Protectorate. I lived for five years out there—Carhall, Heinan, even made it to the Ariels.”

“No shit?”

“I’m not supposed to tell anybody that, but I figure if you wanted me dead, you could’ve made it happen back on Penzies.”

“Maybe,” Denver replied. “You are growing on me a little, Jahn, I have to say.”

“We were after the Byard’s commander because there was a piece of comms equipment the LSS was testing. Top secret. I’m not supposed to tell you—this is the but-slash-however part of the following orders thing, by the way.”

“I figured that may be the case.”

“Yeah. Sure is. But you learn to use that but-slash-however veto pretty selectively when you’re undercover, a little here, a little there, and hopefully you make it back alive. Usually, choosing the right times to use it correlates pretty well with getting back alive.”

“I could maybe see that.”

“Allegedly it was random, but nothing that’s random is actually random in my experience.”

“You lost me, Jahn,” Denver replied continuing to eat.

“There were twenty comms portals in this network they were testing, ten ports and ten ships, all across the Letters. One of them was on the Byard. In our briefing—mind you we didn’t get the full story because it was sourced intelligence—but we were told the commander and possibly the LC were exploring ways to profit from the system somehow. We weren’t sure how exactly, but it became extremely suspicious when their ship was hit at its drop point—and with those two allegedly escaping minutes before their ship got destroyed. Command thought the Rexes might be involved, and that original source had mentioned something about Penzies and that cartel chapter out there—very senior lieutenants of Mirsong Rex, that tavern, et cetera. All that. And if I had told you this?”

“I’d have told you that you shouldn’t go walking into that bar, sticking out like an Athosian in the Sigmas.”

“I figured as much. You and Kilty have a lot of experience out here moving around, blending in. I should’ve taken advantage of that. It’s an asset.”

“Is that why you’re telling me all this?”

“Partly. The other part is to try and explain, to maybe make amends. We do have to go forward, and we do have to trust each other. I hope it’ll be easier to do that if we understand each other. This is me taking a first step.”

“What’s the gear?” Denver asked, turning toward Jahn suddenly.

“The gear?”

“Yeah, the top-secret comms gear. I mean, what is it? Why is it important?”

“It’s a ... well ... honestly, Gennaro, I don’t know what the hell it is or how it works. Some kind of quantum cypher that theoretically encrypts and decrypts based on quantum entanglement and a bunch of other theoretical physics stuff that I never had any knack for.”

“What’s the point of it, though?”

“To talk to each other. The LSS probably doesn’t want people knowing how fragmented everything is, but it is. We say the Letters like it’s a coherent entity, but that was our problem to begin with anyway. You’re from what, the Kappas? And that’s about like thirty or so distinct different cultures that mostly understand each other, I think. Maybe.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Sometimes not so much.”

“Hell. Pozzer and Ames are from the Gammas, and they looked like total foreigners on Gamma-Penzies.”

Denver nodded.

“We don’t think the same,” Farq-Sen continued. “We don’t want the same things. We don’t act like the same people. And the LSS is supposed to be a coherent fighting force? The cypher was designed to at least get us talking on the same frequency at the same time. Even that? There are people out there willing to kill and die to keep that from happening. That’s what that whole situation on Penzies was all about.”

“A common cypher?” Denver asked. “We don’t have something like that already?”

“I think it’s an uncommon one.”

“Fitting that we’re chasing it then, I suppose,” Denver replied.

“Pozzer knows most of that—what I told you. Ames doesn’t know anything. What you choose to tell Kilty, I guess I’ll leave in your discretion, which is to say ...”

“Yeah, I’ll be discrete, Jahn. At least until she figures out ... well, how to act like an adult maybe.”

“Now imagine you got a whole fleet full of them,” Jahn said, shaking his head. “Kids.”

“Yeah, it’s a wonder, isn’t it?”

“What? How we ever get out of port with a bunch of kids flying the ship?”

Denver looked back over toward Farq-Sen again. “Oh. That too. I was more wondering when that stopped being me—us, you know? Life was much more fun when I could afford to get in trouble. And then I couldn’t anymore. Or maybe I just choose not to. I don’t know.”

By the middle of the following morning, the ship had dropped out just outside the Delta-Fina system. Denver and Farq-Sen had discussed the likelihood that the monster ship was after them and decided it was much more likely that it had been tracking the Byard’s commanders somehow. Still, the possibility was so threatening, they decided to sit for a while and make sure they weren’t being tailed. They couldn’t figure how, but then again, they couldn’t figure the size or shape of that mystery ship either. A lot of strange occurrences had unfolded in the Letters in the preceding months. It was impossible to guess what might be connected to what.

Ames was awake again around lunchtime, and though he seemed a bit more subdued than normal, he insisted he was all right, and he insisted that it was an honest mistake, neither his nor Kilty’s idea, just a conversation that started innocently enough and ended innocently enough, with what they thought was the two of them sharing part of an ordinary albeit expensive chocolate bar.

Kilty had a tougher go of it through the night. The compound had hallucinogenic properties derived from natural fungal origins, which were used in moderation in certain religious rites among the Tressians and some of the gnostic groups in the Alphas. Kilty and Ames had each taken what amounted to a triple dose, which would’ve been a modest helping if it had just been chocolate. The effects kept Kilty up into the early morning seeing shadows and hearing voices. Then she began crying non-stop—to the extent that Andrew had Denver come in and sit with her until Kilty finally fell asleep around daybreak. And shortly after Ames got up, Kilty appeared too, very sullen-looking, with a dark bearing on her face—a stark contrast to the uncontrollable laughter of the previous day.

Denver, Jahn, and Pozzer had discussed the incident that morning over breakfast while Ellis and Kilty were still sleeping. None of them saw any point in making a big deal out of it. Denver and Jahn had largely agreed that the whole trip to Penzies had been one error after another, every last one of them. The best thing to do was to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to press on, not blame the youngest of them because it was the easiest thing to do.

The plan was to sit for a day in Delta-Fina monitoring the chatter within the system. If there was any sign of that monster ship, everything would have to change. Denver had a strategy for that contingency that she’d shared with Major Farq-Sen, but they all hoped they wouldn’t have to employ it. If all was clear by then, she and Jahn had come to another agreement. They were going to treat the outer Letters like the outer Letters, not a war zone. Things got done differently out here, even from the Alphas and the Betas, and though Denver didn’t have all the answers herself, she had an idea who might.

Mid-afternoon the following day, with no sign of the mega-ship, Denver set a course for Kappa-Nira. It was a big system far enough out from Alpha-Richard that the news of the Trasp infiltration would be hitting hard, but the Kappas were far enough away from the war that it was doubtful there was any direct threat—at least from the Trasp or Etterans anyway. And, as Denver had explained to Jahn, the person they really needed to talk to was on Kappa-Nira, an old family friend, Massimos Colby.

Uncle Colby, as Denver and Kilty knew him, was a mentor to their father when he came into the business. He’d sold his own shipping company at a relatively young age, was retired for several years, and was talked back into returning to work by the sisters’ father. Both girls had spent time as crew on Massimos Colby’s ship as they were learning the ropes, and no driver they knew, including their father, knew the outer Letters better than him.

It was welcome news to Kilty, who was happy to be stepping off ship and seeing family—as both sisters considered the Colbys. And for Ames and Pozzer, it would be a first trip to Nira, one of the great cities of the Lettered Systems. Jahn-Farq Sen was satisfied that it might be a positive step forward. Knowledge of the environment was the key, and Gamma-Penzies had taught him that he didn’t have it. Denver assured him that Colby would.

Kappa-Nira had a reputation in the Letters as an inner Battery world in an outer Letters system. It wasn’t Gracia, Io, or Moses-Mesui, but Nira, especially the city center where the Colbys lived, was a spectacle of modern spacefaring civilization.

The focal point of the city was its connection to the stars—a space tower that was unique in the entire Battery. Not only was the monumental Nira Space Tower the beating heart of the magnificent metropolis below, but the space port at the top of the tower was nearly as vast and impressive in the distance it extended into space, rising almost an equal distance above the atmosphere once it reached space, as it did from Nira’s city center to her cosmic boundary. And that bustling spaceport atop the Nira Tower was one of the busiest in all of the Lettered Systems.

Denver left Andrew with the ship, but Kilty didn’t want to leave Santos, so she carried him in a bag tucked under her arm with his head sticking forward as they walked through the terminal. Even the spaceport itself seemed a city to the Rangers and Jahn. To the girls, it was familiar territory as they led the way from the gate to the passenger elevator cars. They got a last look at the city below before boarding, but Kappa-Nira’s tower was built more for function than spectacle, with a final look at the silver city spreading out at the base of the space tower from above before stepping into the hour-long tube ride down.

At the base, it was still another fifteen-minute walk out of the tower complex along moving causeways before they finally got a look at the city.

And though all three of the soldiers had visited cities before, none matched the spectacle that downtown Nira was. From that distance, the space tower seemed more like a feature of the landscape than a structure—as though the planet had an outgrowth that extended up forever into the night sky. The buildings around it, though, were also towering edifices, with cool city lights reflecting and refracting off their sparkling glass. There were trams, cabs, and vehicles of all sizes hovering over the magnetic streets. And the bustle along the causeways kept everyone’s head moving in all directions as they negotiated the busy streets of downtown Nira.

The Colbys lived in a posh flat in the Chirman District with enough elevation to have an enviable view of the city in two directions. Massimos had done well enough through his own company to live almost anywhere in the Battery, and he liked the outer Letters, especially Nira. He claimed there was as much culture in Nira as in Hellenia or even Dreeson’s System, and Massimos Colby had traveled enough to know. “You just have to wait a little longer for it to get to you,” he would retort whenever anyone mentioned all the new music and art and trends that always took time to get out to Nira from the inner Battery.

The girls had to stop to catch their breath halfway to the building. Gravity again. Real gravity. Nira wasn’t a lightweight like some outer moon, and the girls had been out for a good stretch even before they’d met the GG Rangers at Alpha-Richard. None of the soldiers minded the break in the walk. It was a chance to take in the city and catch their breath as well.

They were greeted at the ground floor by the building’s housebot, a David, who’d been told to expect the girls and remembered their faces from their many prior visits.

“Massimos and Clara are expecting you, Ms. Gennaro,” the bot said to Denver, who entered first. “Though they did not mention anything about your friends.”

“Nor will you, David,” Denver replied. “We’ll see ourselves up.”

“Yes, certainly. Lift four to the left,” he replied, opening the door to the elevator and gesturing to the party to proceed.

“You said this guy’s a currier?” Pozzer asked Denver, looking around the luxurious building with wide eyes.

“He owned his own fleet,” Denver explained as they stepped inside the elevator car.

“A large fleet,” Kilty added. “Plus they invested wisely, the Colbys. He always talked about it. ‘Be smart with your money, Kilty. Always put something away.’”

Denver grinned. She’d gotten the same speech, word for word, just like all the Colbys’ own children had.

The car opened to the Colbys’ great room where Massimos and Clara Colby were awaiting their arriving guests. It was immediately clear to the soldiers how much the Colbys cared for the Gennaro girls. The embraces were deep, long, and sincere, before finally, both the hosts turned to greet the girls’ companions.

“Three handsome young men,” Clara Colby said, smiling at the soldiers. “What have you two been up to out there?”

“Mama Kitty, hello!” Santos piped up from under Kilty’s arm. “I’m Santos.”

“Somebody doesn’t like it when he’s not the center of attention,” Kilty said, petting Santos while the Colbys greeted the three LSS officers.

“Nice little companion,” Massimos stated, smiling and reaching out a hand toward Santos. “Yours?”

“Cargo,” Denver explained. “Long story. One of many.”

“I can’t wait to hear,” Mr. Colby replied. “Dinner first, though. You’ve all been out for a bit. A good meal is always the first order of business.”

To the LSS soldiers, the meal felt like being welcomed into a family’s home, and it exposed a new facet of the sisters’ lives they hadn’t been privy to. It was self-evident that Denver and Kilty cared for each other. Until they saw how the Colbys treated the girls, though, it hadn’t been self-evident just how loved they were by the people who’d brought them up in the ports where their lives had unfolded.

After dinner, Mrs. Colby took Kilty and the GG Rangers shopping for more fitting civilian clothes to help them blend in while in those outer Letters ports. Massimos took Denver and Major Jahn Farq-Sen out onto the outer balcony of the Colbys’ 147^th-floor penthouse overlooking the university district and the tower. It was certainly the most spectacular place Jahn had ever gotten an intel briefing before, and that was how Denver had framed it—that Massimos knew the Letters like nobody else, not just the ports and the space between them, but he also had a sense for the character of the colonies, the people in them, the homes, the neighborhoods, and the plans for the future of the territories. It was an opportunity to put into action the claim he’d made to Denver—that he was open to breaking protocol if it meant using all of the resources available to him. After all, he’d have done the same in Trasp territory—develop relationships with sources. Why not do the same here at home?

Massimos sat and listened as Denver explained the situation in a general sense: something secret and important had been stolen by Ellis and Shad’s commanding officers—something valuable. That pair of traitors had tried to connect with the Rexes in Gamma-Penzies and ended up dead. Now they needed to know how to get hold of the missing object before the Rexes did. That was how the conversation began.

“Penzies?” Massimos Colby said after Denver had finished outlining their problem. “Any chance you left something out of that story, young Captain?”

She shrugged. “I left some details out. Sure. Why do you ask?”

“Stay right here,” he said, stepping back inside.

As he did, Santos stepped out onto the balcony through the cracked-open door Massimos left behind him.

“Pretty. Pretty. Fly,” Santos said, which Denver thought was simply the cat confusing the balcony’s height with the flight deck of a great, stationary vehicle. “I like to fly.”

Then Santos leapt from the floor onto the railing, eliciting a gasp from Denver and Jahn, whose hands reflexively rose to shoulder level before he realized there was nothing he could do, until a moment later, they both inhaled a sigh of relief as they realized there was nothing to do. Santos was sauntering along the railing on all fours looking down over the edge to the street below without the faintest hint of fear for the danger a human would, walking along a surface the width of a fist, hundreds of meters off the ground.

“A little daredevil,” Massimos said as he returned, grinning.

“Santos,” Denver stated calmly as he strode along the railing. “Would you come down from there, please?”

“Mama Pilot, fly, fly.”

“I know. You like to fly, but it makes me very nervous with you up there like that.”

The cat looked over at her and then over the edge of the railing, seeming to consider the situation for a moment.

“Mama Pilot, okay.”

“Smart little guy, isn’t he?” Massimos noted.

“I’m a cat.”

“A very smart cat.”

Santos jumped up onto Denver’s lap. “Yes. Smart cat. Okay.”

Massimos placed a small holo-board on the railing where Santos had just been walking and opened a floatscreen.

“This came over the N-hub a few hours ago. Might be hard to watch.”

Denver and Jahn watched as scenes unfolded from Penzies, mostly video from ships fleeing the cylinder, likely very shortly after their own departure, and in those scenes, they could see their giant mystery ship expand into a ball of frenetic energy, as its outer panels all became winding projectiles that hovered around the central mass of that enormous approaching ship. And finally, with a definite object for scale, it was possible to see just how gigantic that mystery ship was. Because of the chaos of the moment there wasn’t a clear shot of the attack, but the aftermath could be seen—a gaping hole in one of the ends of the megastructure that opened the Vera Cylinder to space.

They watched the report, taking in the scenes, hearing the same questions they’d asked themselves being echoed by the presenters—what is this ship? Who is flying it? Why would they attack such a little-known, sparsely-populated outpost like Penzies? What can be done? Can anything stop it?

“Gamma-Penzies,” Massimos finally said. “As I stated, I feel like you might have left something out, Denver.”

“Yes,” Farq-Sen replied as he and Denver exchanged a long look. “It’s possible we might have left a few things out.”

At Mr. Colby’s request, Denver went back and talked through their story much more thoroughly. This time, the only thing she left out was the actual nature of the object the officers had stolen, only specifying that it was of great strategic and security value to the LSS.

She even told Massimos about the suit the girls had been reluctant to tell Shad and Ames about. She mentioned how close she’d gotten to the dead officers.

“You were in the room?” Massimos asked Denver. “You saw it happen?”

He noticed Denver swallow and take a deep breath as she nodded.

“Give us a moment please, Major,” Massimos said in a tone that conveyed it was not a request.

Farq-Sen sat back for a moment and then stood up, gesturing toward the door, as though to ask some unspecified question. Massimos seemed to understand.

“I’ll let you know when,” he replied.

Farq-Sen sat inside the glass, looking out onto the balcony. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that suddenly Denver grew emotional in a way he hadn’t expected. Before long, she was sobbing in Massimos Colby’s arms. Farq-Sen opted to turn to look out the other great glass wall toward the other side of the city. He was at the window so long, gazing, taking in the view and thinking, that when the door opened again, it caught him off guard.

“Something to drink?” Colby asked him.

Farq-Sen declined. Colby fixed two drinks. Denver and Colby began to sip some sort of red tonic on ice.

“Those officers, what kind of men were they, Major?” Massimos Colby asked.

“They seemed like good officers. Their records were exemplary. No major red flags.”

“There are always red flags before something like that. Just nobody saw them is all. I ask that to ask you this: if you were going to risk your life and your career on something secret, as you say they both did, and then entrust whatever you stole to somebody, as they did during the meeting on Penzies, then who would you trust to keep that item and keep your confidence, Major? How many friends like that do you have?

“I’m not sure.”

“Seriously. Think about it. In all my life, apart from Denver and Kilty’s father, and maybe one other guy, and I mean maybe ... well, that’s it for me. But then again, I don’t have any brothers.”

“Brothers,” Farq-Sen repeated, stroking his chin.

“If I wanted to find that item, that’s where I’d start,” Massimos Colby concluded. “Better get to them before the Rexes do.”

“The LSS has records on the family,” the Major replied. “There’s an LSS archive here on Nira, I’m sure. Personnel is almost certainly copied across the system for redundancy. That’s extremely helpful, sir. Thank you.”

“You know,” Denver added, “we might have gotten lucky.”

Massimos and Jahn both looked at her as though puzzled.

“Well, yeah,” she continued. “Of course we got lucky, getting out of Penzies when we did. But I mean ... those Rexes ... the ones who were following us? If they even made it out, survived, I’m sure they’ve got other priorities than tracking us down now. It’s possible all the surveillance for the cylinder got lost in that attack too. Odds are at least fifty-fifty the cartel couldn’t even tie us back to our ship if they wanted to.”

“Hmm? I hadn’t thought of that either,” Jahn replied, nodding.

“If it means never seeing that terror ship again, I’d be satisfied to not get lucky again, though,” Denver said. “Not that way.”

Denver took her drink and stepped back outside to the balcony, inviting Santos out with her before waving the door closed behind them. There was a long silence between the two men as Massimos Colby sized up Major Farq-Sen.

Jahn broke the silence. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, before, outside just now?”

“These girls are people,” Massimos answered, sternly. “Regular people, Major. I taught them both to keep their heads up and act the way you need to act to not get walked over by the people in our business. But that’s the delivery business—civilian business. Maybe you’ve seen people get killed and murdered in your line of work ... maybe not ... but I can tell you for certain she hasn’t. I’m helping you because the sooner you do what you do, the sooner these girls can get back to their regular lives. The LSS shouldn’t have dragged them in, but they’re in now. You should do everything you can to get them out of it. That’s my opinion.”

“I understand, sir.”

“And by way of helping you further, I can see, even in the short time talking to you that the LSS has given you a false sense of ... I don’t know how to say it exactly.” Massimos Colby paused, looking at Jahn carefully, almost as though inspecting him visually could reveal the flaw he was picking up in the Major’s viewpoint. “All right. It’s like this. The farther out you go from the lines and all the major systems in the Alphas and Betas, this place, out here, each colony not only has its own character, but it has its own priorities. And the LSS makes you forget that—makes you think that Alpha-Bassur and Kappa-Aynor have even remotely similar interests, and for the most part, they don’t. A lot of regular citizens don’t care for the LSS any more than they care for the Rexes or the other cartels. Maybe even less.”

“It’s a fair point,” Farq-Sen replied. “One that’s not entirely lost on me, Mr. Colby. I wonder why you mention it at the moment.”

“Your officers. You seem to wonder how or why they might have turned traitor? Committed treason? Turned their backs on the LSS? However you want to phrase it. They might have done what they did out of loyalty to their system, their world, their family, their cylinder. Depends on where they came from. But if they came from out here, there’s a whole long list of possible loyalties. The one that usually wins, if we’re being honest, is the one that pays. Simple as that most of the time.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, as well as ... everything else,” Jahn gestured to the balcony where Denver was seated in a chair with her back to them, Santos relaxing comfortably in her lap. “They’re great girls, Mr. Colby. I promise you I will do everything in my power to protect them.”

“You’d better, young man. Their family has friends like me in every port in the Letters. There won’t be a place you can turn—”

Mr. Colby stopped and took a sip of his drink.

“Let’s go enjoy the view,” he said. “Talk about better things.”

Farq-Sen grabbed both Rangers when they returned to the Colbys’ home. They went back out directly to report in to the LSS’s main headquarters on Nira. The military had dedicated LSS port space at the top of the space tower, and they had administrative offices in the city. Elsewhere on the planet, there were forts, training facilities, schools, and weapons warehouses. But Farq-Sen and the GG Rangers sought out the administrative offices.

Jahn thought it was likely they’d run into administrative roadblocks, but was pleasantly surprised, that once his clearance was scanned with a tag directly from Ovidio-M, the functionaries on call, including the colonel the Precops called in, snapped-to with alacrity, treating Farq-Sen’s presence like a matter of utmost importance. Not only did they get him everything he needed to research Goff and Aerro, they called in an embodied Precops to help him and the GGs as their personal assistant, and they opened a secure research suite and woke up an enlisted JO to serve as their personal valet for the duration of their time on the premises.

Jahn didn’t have any sense for how long it was going to take him to compile intelligence files on all of Goff and Aerro’s immediate family members, but his initial plan was to try and grab as much data as they could, cast a wide net, pick a first target, and have plenty of options if that first target proved to be a miss.

But as the night wore on, signals began to converge. Aerro made more sense. Goff was the commander of the Byard. He wouldn’t have needed Aerro to get the cypher off the ship. He was a genuine third-generation Taukler—which was the LSS slang for the graduates of the Tauk Academy, the LSS program in the Millennial College at Richard-2—one of the most prestigious universities anywhere in the Battery outside Dreeson’s System. The Goffs were a well-regarded, wealthy family from Beta-Aurelius. Commander Goff had two brothers, one the executive officer of an agriculture cylinder group in the inner Alphas, the other a satellite systems engineer who’d lived on Hellenia for nearly two decades. Commander Goff’s background told a clear story. He needed Aerro for the second part of their plot—selling the device once they got it off the ship.

The problem with Stanton Aerro wasn’t whether he had a brother with shady contacts in the Letters to connect Goff with the Rexes, the question was which one.

Lieutenant Commander Stanton Aerro had five brothers: Calimacho, Lowry, Kohl, Oreg, and Baer. His two sisters were also in the LSS and were on duty during the infiltration at Alpha-Richard. Stanton was the third brother and was able to attain a commission after entering a satellite academy in the Kappas and excelling. However, all of that almost got derailed while on a break. He and Kohl were apprehended and charged for the theft of a ship. Kohl admitted guilt in order to exonerate Stanton Aerro, and since, the two continued to be close, with Stanton even bankrolling Kohl’s flat in the Thetas when he was finally released. And having spent nearly eight years in custody at a Dinzer-C work camp, Kohl would’ve had plenty of opportunities to make connections with cartel members. Oreg and Lowry, the youngest brothers, were both known to work odd spacefaring jobs with Kohl Aerro, but the information in the archive was telling Jahn from multiple angles that Kohl Aerro was the likeliest point to reacquire the stolen LSS cypher. And they had a probable location for him on Theta-Mir.

Even after they had their prime target, Jahn had the Precops continue to suck up as much data as they could find on Aerro’s family, including known friends and bunkmates from all of Kohl’s time in custody. Jahn didn’t know when they were going to have access to an archive like the one on Kappa-Nira again. The GG Rangers weren’t thrilled about the Major keeping them up all night while the girls were back at the Colbys’ suite sleeping, but he was quick to remind them who the soldiers were and who were the private citizens whose lives they’d disrupted.

“We’ll rejoin them at breakfast, and we can sleep on the way to the Thetas,” Farq-Sen commanded.

At breakfast, the tired soldiers did their best to act like all was normal—a nice family meal with a few added guests. The fate of the Letters could be compartmentalized until they’d eaten and shared a cup of coffee with their gracious hosts.

After they’d finished eating, Jahn announced that they’d be cutting their time on Kappa-Nira shorter than he’d expected. Duty called. Massimos Colby pulled him onto the porch quietly.

“Where are you off to?” he asked Jahn.

“The Thetas. Mir, specifically.”

Colby shook his head and grimaced. “There’s a lot of empty territory out there. Claim staking is almost free out there from what I can remember. Administrative fees only, I think. Few cities, and rough ones at that.”

“I figured it might be like that from the information we gathered.”

“A place like that, you keep my girls on the ship, not just for their protection but for yours. People like that will use your own decency against you. I don’t think you can possibly understand how ugly those cartels can be, and they’re the civilized ones out there.”

“Understood, Mr. Colby. Thank you again for your insight.”

“Best of luck, Major.”

Before they returned to the suite again, Massimos Colby looked at Farq-Sen with the weight of a concerned father. He didn’t say what didn’t need to be said. The two men understood each other.

After their trip back up the space tower, they rushed out of Kappa-Nira toward Theta-Mir. Jahn wanted to get there before Kohl Aerro and any co-conspirators who were with him had time to disappear. He presumed they’d already have made it in, having fled the destruction at Gamma-Penzies. Considering the way Goff and Aerro had been so ruthlessly dispatched by the Rexes, Jahn figured that they’d regroup and quickly look for a place to lie low.

“If they were looking for a hiding place, why would they go home?” Kilty asked him as he was explaining the urgency to get to Theta-Mir.

“Goff and Aerro clearly didn’t anticipate that kind of trouble from the cartel,” Jahn answered. “If they were taken by surprise so easily, they probably didn’t prepare to have to hide from the Rexes. They presumed they’d be working together, I think.”

Kilty was sitting at the table in the midship, fidgeting with the empty pouch from her early dinner. She was visibly dissatisfied by Jahn’s answer.

“But, I mean, we don’t even know that they know, right?”

“Know what, Kilty?”

“So you’re presuming Goff and Aerro were there on Penzies with this other brother, and you think he drove the ship that took them to the cylinder?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, we only know they got murdered by the Rexes because Denver was in the tavern. If the brother was there on the ship, he might not have any idea the Rexes killed them. Maybe he thinks they got killed when that megaship attacked the cylinder. Maybe he even got caught up in it himself. That’s a remote system. Who the hell knows who got out of Gamma-Penzies alive or not?”

“Those are all valid questions,” Jan Farq-Sen replied. “It’s our best lead for now, and we have to do our best to track down our target, even if that takes us back to Gamma-Penzies where it may have been destroyed.”

“Or picked up by that megaship,” Kilty added. “There are a lot of possibilities.”

Just then, the hum of Santos’s belt whisked through the midship as the cat flew from the back corridor, over the table, and up toward the flight deck. The cat didn’t even pause to acknowledge the people in the room on his way through.

Pozzer, who was strapped in across from Kilty and Ames, began to laugh quietly. Jahn looked down at him after his laughter continued to build.

“Lieutenant?” Farq-Sen said.

Pozzer shook his head. He’d clearly just woken up following a long nap. Shad hadn’t even rubbed the sleep out of his bloodshot eyes yet.

“I was just thinking. We all have to write up reports about all of this, Major. Of all the unbelievable shit, I swear, the damn flying cat.”

“Mama Pilot, okay!” they all heard his helmet echoing from the flight deck.

Pozzer just pointed to the front of the ship, shaking his head.

It wasn’t a total surprise to find Kohl Aerro’s compound empty when they arrived at Theta-Mir. The property had the feel of an isolated off-grid hideout—the type of place a genuine loner might set up a solitary life in the outer Letters. It was so far from any of the small cities on Mir that it was hard to imagine anyone ever going out there except by ship. The nearest property that had any buildings on it was over a hundred kilometers away.

Denver took a set of daylight images from orbit, and after examining them closely, Jahn estimated that the property had been vacant for at least two weeks prior. How they could’ve estimated that was beyond Denver, but it did look abandoned to her eyes.

She and Kilty were sitting together on the flight deck, Santos floating between them. They were talking about the Colbys. They’d instructed Mr. and Mrs. Colby to keep quiet about what they were doing, the LSS, the fact that they’d been at Penzies, at Alpha-Richard, and the fact that they’d been pulled in as privateers by the military. Denver and Kilty both knew Massimos well enough to know that he’d already have talked to their father, probably pinged him casually and dropped it in the middle of the conversation, “Oh the girls dropped by for dinner and a bed for the night. And they had a talking cat with them. Would you believe it? Some strange cargo. Yeah, they looked great. In wonderful spirits.” The sisters were creating the conversation line-by-line, back-and-forth when Jahn came in. He’d analyzed the visuals and the sensing data on the property below.

“How much do you ladies know about surveillance?”

“Probably not nearly as much as we’re going to,” Denver answered.

“That’s the spirit,” Farq-Sen replied, smiling. “We’re going to cast a wide circle and close in slowly. Don’t want to get caught in any traps before we get a chance to put down our own.”

“Just let us know what we can do to help,” Denver said.

“His brothers—they’re coming,” Jahn Farq-Sen replied, looking at the panel where a wide-angle view of the compound was still up on the in-board display. “I can feel it. And when they get back, we’ll be ready for them.”

“Ready,” Santos echoed. “We fly ready. Yes. Yes.”

“Yes, we do,” Farq-Sen replied, looking down at the funny little creature. “Wherever we are needed, we fly. Let’s get a little lower, Denver. High entry just over the horizon from the Aerro compound. Then you can start bringing us in slowly.”

I was arriving at Samala in the Betas on an unexpected emergency, a first for me in my thirteen years as the head of neurology at University Medical Kappa-Nira. A fellow professor—and close friend of mine—Menia K’Fani had messaged me urgently three days prior, in the middle of the night with a bizarre story about one of his former students suffering some form of psychotic break. Her name was Celise Endrys, and when Menia mentioned it to me, she sounded familiar.

“That’s because you’ve met her, Larron. Two years ago during the Halo.”

I knew who he was talking about immediately, because Menia held that dinner annually the week Nira passed through the Halo meteor shower, and he almost never invited students to that small gathering of friends.

“She was from Aynor, right?”

“Yes. That’s the one.”

A local girl relative to most of Menia’s students, who came from everywhere in the Battery, even some from beyond. His students weren’t exactly the demographic I’d have tapped for a psychotic break, much less his prized students—one of the few he’d hired personally as a postdoctoral researcher through the department and considered a friend.

“Any signs of anything like this before,” I’d asked him.

“I’m shocked,” he replied. “Just shocked. She’s as steady as Athos, Larron; Celise has been from the moment I met her.”

He forwarded me the message that had come in from Beta-Samala. They had a common Andrew, a few housebots with basic medical skills onboard, as well as a handful of human nurses who staffed the clinic when called in. A small outpost with limited medical resources—certainly no neurological specialist.

I told Menia that I’d get out there as soon as I could.

“I can’t go myself unfortunately,” he said. “There’s a symposium on. But I’m flying you out, and Furba’s going to go with you. I’m not sure what’s going on in Samala, but I’d feel better if you were in my ship, Larron.”

“Who’s Furba?”

“Furba Luonne. A colleague of Celise’s in my lab. I’d like to see if we can recover any of her data from the station there. You’ll like him. Very smart. Very genial. Gets along well with Celise.”

He’d been right about all of that. I found Furba to be an excellent companion on the flight out. I’d also brought an embodied Miliner from the medical center to help in Celise’s case, as it seemed to present in a strange, if not unprecedented manner, as far as I could tell. And, having an AI clone with the breadth of knowledge as a Miliner was never a terrible idea when traveling about the Lettered Systems.

Like most people in the Letters, I’d never heard of Samala. To say it was one of the lesser-known Beta systems would be underselling how small the outpost was. As rushed as our middle-of-the-night departure from Nira had been, I didn’t have time to look into the system itself. I’d thrown a few personal items in a bag and had a bot from the medical center meet us at the departure gate at the top of the space tower with a few critical mobile gear cases. Then, as soon as the Miliner and Furba had arrived, we’d pushed off. What I knew of Beta-Samala was just what Miliner shared from his memory—that it was a single diamond-domed outpost of around ten-thousand settlers with no major industrial aspirations. The settlers were beginning a long terraforming process to thicken and refine the planet’s un-breathable atmosphere.

Furba knew quite a bit more about Samala, but mostly that was from what he’d been following through Celise’s research there. He explained far more than I could fully comprehend about the properties of the star and what Dr. Endrys had been monitoring before her unfortunate psychiatric episode—something about the star’s magnetic field and how it interacted with the planet’s. To be honest, though, I tuned most of it out as it seemed abstruse and entirely unrelated.

What mattered to me, though, was the story of the onset of Celise Endrys’ symptoms, which apparently had begun aboard the monitoring station that was sitting at an outer Lagrange point. Her small stellar research station had suffered a serious malfunction and gone dark while Dr. Endrys was aboard. After she’d failed to respond to the planetary outpost’s control hub for nearly two days, someone from Samala shuttled up to the research station and found her aboard, largely incoherent and seeing lights, apparently. Predictably, the Andrew on the outpost had little of value to offer beyond basic medicals on her. Useful in surgery, useless in psychiatry.

Furba wanted to stop at the monitoring station on our way in to the outpost on Samala. The best possible lens I could place on that idea was how passionate Menia’s people were about their work. As I was taking a deep breath to keep from overreacting about how callous it would’ve been to check on the monitoring station’s status before his colleague’s well-being, Miliner made the point to him much more delicately than I would have.

“Of course,” Furba replied to the AI, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Just, you know, we pass it on the way in, I guess. Let’s see about Celise first, though. Yes.”

“I think we’ll see about Celise,” I told Furba. “You can see about her research after we’ve unloaded everything at the clinic.”

That was the plan, of course. Miliner and I would go down and evaluate the patient and get a full history from the Andrew. But like so many other things on Beta-Samala, what unfolded was entirely unexpected.

We arrived in the middle of the night on Samala. The outpost was dark and quiet—so much so, that it took nearly two minutes to get a return on our ping from the city’s control hub. It was the security officer on duty, who made certain we understood they didn’t have a nanosheet to extend, so we would have to don belts and a personal sheet of our own or a suit “if we wanted to continue breathing.”

The joys of a small, small airfield.

The only other ship out on the flat plain beside that bubble-city was the municipal shuttle, and, once we stepped inside the clear dome’s outer airlock, the officer explained that there were a few other local mining crews within a few weeks travel. That made for a handful of ships total in the entire system.

He showed us to the clinic where Dr. Endrys had been since they’d brought her down.

“Should be just her and the Andrew in there at this hour,” he told us. “I could have Daeson come down if you like, doctor.”

“Who is Daeson?”

“Celise’s boyfriend. Well, I mean ...”

“You mean what?” I asked.

“I’m not so sure it’s official, but I understand they’ve been seeing each other a few months.”

“Do they cohabitate?”

“Do they what?”

“Live together? Or do they sleep in separate houses?”

“I get you,” he replied. “Yeah sure. I guess when she’s down, she stays with Daeson. Beats the dorm room the university lets to her.”

“Fine. Please wake up Daeson if you think he’d be willing to come down.”

As it turned out, before the officer even pinged Daeson, we arrived on foot to the clinic to find the young man sleeping on a cot in one of the empty medical bays. And just across from him, was the Andrew, keeping watch over Celise, who was lying inside the closed room, wide awake, peacefully mumbling to herself.

Furba was alongside Miliner and I, as he’d offered to help wheel in some of my gear from the ship. The sound of our entrance roused Daeson as we stepped into the treatment area with the security officer. The two of them seemed to know each other quite well.

“Are you the neurologist?” Daeson asked Furba, who entered first, looking a bit flustered as he was trying to figure out where to deposit the large case he was wheeling behind him.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m Furba.”

“Furba?”

“One of Celise’s colleagues from Kappa-Nira.”

“I’m the neurologist,” I said, reaching out toward the young man. “Dr. Larron Hand.”

“Dr. ... Hand? Like ...?”

“Yes,” I replied as we exchanged a handshake at the appropriate moment. “Exactly like it sounds.”

“Well, it’s good you’re here. She hasn’t been the same person since she came down.”

“Can you elaborate any? I’ll get a report from the Andrew, but I’m more asking about personal things? Something only you might have noticed.”

Daeson shook his head. “I don’t know. I finally managed to get her to put a bra on. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

I gazed back at Daeson and observed that he was looking over at Furba sharply, as Celise’s young colleague’s head had turned around curiously, presumably looking for Celise’s room. I snapped my fingers at Furba, and he shook his head back at me, seemingly to shake out the thoughtlessness that was swiftly showing itself to be a pattern. I pointed him toward Miliner, who was setting up the gear.

“Yeah, uhm, she’s been taking her clothes off,” Daeson continued.

“Any explanation for that?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “She just doesn’t want to wear anything, but that’s the least of it. I don’t know whether the Andrew would say much about it, but it’s strange and I thought you might not think anything of it in the middle of the night. But Celise has tried to walk out of here nude every time they’ve turned their backs on her in the past four days.”

“How out-of-character would a behavior like that be for Celise, would you say?”

He looked back at me like I had three heads.

“So, very much so, I gather from your look,” I told him, as he nodded. “I had to ask.”

“And also, she’s still wearing her flight cap from the station. I can’t get her to take that off her head for anything, but it’s been a three-day battle to get her to put on underwear. Other than that, all the crazy things she’s saying? Andrew will let you know, I’m sure.”

“Did you see any signs of changes leading up to it?”

“Before she went up to the station, you mean? No. She was her normal self, and now she’s just ...” he shook his head sadly.

“How long was she up there for ... before there were any signs of anything?”

“Two weeks? I want to say maybe sixteen days. I can check my calendar, but it wasn’t a long stretch by any means if that’s what you’re getting at. Nothing out of the ordinary for Celise. And she was fine. I talked to her every other day or so, and then we were out of contact for a couple days before the hub realized they weren’t getting any return signal back from her. Then Cap took the shuttle up. Whole station was dead. Found her inside shivering, mumbling a bunch of nonsense.”

“Have you been able to connect with her in any way? I understand from the preliminary reports that she’s quite disoriented, but to what degree is she aware of her surroundings?”

“She’ll talk to you somewhat,” Daeson stated. “But the Celise I knew is totally gone. She’s a completely different person.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Thank you, Daeson. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”

When I turned around, I heard a noise I hadn’t expected, and she was standing there. I was glad Daeson had prepared me, so that I was able to avoid overreacting. She walked into the main treatment area in her underwear, just as he’d said, with her flight cap still fastened under her chin.

“Babe,” Daeson said, attempting to grab her attention.

“Who are these people?” she replied, before scowling back at him. “You’re not Daeson.”

I tried to greet her. “Hi. I’m Dr. Hand. Do you remember me?”

She shook her head and turned toward the large end of the treatment area where Miliner and Furba were unpacking my gear.

“He looks like ...” Celise began to drift over that way, looking at Furba very carefully.

For his part, Furba turned around and reacted the way I was trying not to—wide eyes and surprise, in an outsized and unnatural manner. As she approached Furba, I came up behind her, gesturing for Daeson to remain where he was. The Andrew approached from the side room, and I grew concerned that she might feel surrounded.

Celise, though, seemed unconcerned, examining Furba’s face skeptically before declaring: “You’re not Furba either. Where are all these imposters coming from?”

“Hello, Celise,” Furba replied, taking great care to look at her directly, making sure his gaze didn’t drift from her face. “It is me. It’s Furba. Professor K’Fani sent me to help you with your data.”

She continued to glare at him suspiciously. “You sound just like him.” And then she brushed her hand down in front of his face dismissively. “Not quite, though. You’re not going to trick me.”

“Hello, Celise,” I said as she turned away from Furba. “I’m Dr. Hand. I met you at Professor K’Fani’s house a while back, at Menia’s dinner for the Halo meteor shower.”

She looked at me very carefully. “I don’t remember meeting you. You’re not an imposter, are you?”

“No. I assure you I’m just who I claim to be. I’m a neurologist. Menia sent me from Kappa-Nira to help you.”

“Oh, a neurologist. That’s good. My head’s not right. Maybe you can explain some of this.”

She looked over my shoulder toward Daeson, who was standing just at the edge of the stretcher he’d been sleeping on.

“That’s not Daeson either,” she declared. “They’ve replaced almost everyone here.”

The Andrew stepped toward her, apparently picking up on a tell in her posture I wasn’t quite familiar with yet. When she looked at him side-eyed, he informed me.

“She’s going to bolt, Dr. Hand.”

And she nearly did. I reached out gently, gesturing to her that I wanted to talk, or at least I hoped she might interpret my body language that way. She just looked back at me inquisitively.

“Can you tell me, Celise, is Andrew here an imposter as well?”

She laughed. “Andrew? Andrew is an android, doctor. They come off an assembly line.”

“That’s true. What about Miliner behind you over there? You must have met a Miliner clone before at the university?”

She nodded. “Of course. An AI in an android shell. He looks like all the rest of them.”

“And me? I’m not an imposter?”

“How would I know? I don’t know you at all.”

“I understand some strange things have been happening for you lately, Celise?”

She grinned skeptically. “That’s an understatement.”

“Do you think we could talk for a little while?” I asked her.

“It’s cold out here,” she replied. “I want to go back.”

I gestured toward the room where she’d been lying down when we arrived.

“Andrew can come with us if that makes you more comfortable.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, stepping toward the room. “Hmmmmmm. One sixty-four point eight. Sunny Samala’s singing again.”

“Samala’s singing? The star, you mean?”

As she approached the door, Miliner piped up from the other side of the room, very uncharacteristically.

“Dr. Endrys,” he addressed her directly, “I’m sorry, but are you a musician?”

She turned around and shook her head back at him.

“Do you know if you have perfect pitch? You’ve never studied music, have you?”

“No. Never.”

“You say the star is singing?” Miliner asked walking across the room toward Celise Endrys. “Samala is singing that note? The one you’re humming?”

Celise nodded. “Uh huh. You can’t hear it?”

Miliner shook his head.

“Just a tone, or is it a song?” I asked her, trying to gauge the extent and nature of the hallucination. “Are there any lyrics?”

“Only one,” she replied, tilting her head as though she was struggling to hear it, and then she sang the word at that same pitch. “Doooooooooommmmmmm.”

Then she casually stepped inside the room.

Miliner looked at me, presenting the emotional expression of shock and puzzlement before stating the answer to the question he knew I was about to ask.

“The note she sang, E3, Dr. Hand, is exactly one hundred sixty-four point eight Hertz. Just as she said.”

As I was speaking with Dr. Endrys, Miliner entered informing me that he’d unloaded and set up all the equipment with Furba Luonne’s help. With that complete, Furba was anxious to get whatever information he could on the state of Celise’s research, and I very much wanted to have a sense of what might have happened up on that monitoring station as well. So I told Furba to get up there and to contact us as soon as he had any information about the conditions Dr. Endrys had endured aboard that station. She’d been in such a state when they found her that the shuttle pilot didn’t stick around long to investigate. All we knew was that the station had lost power for some time. It was cold and dark when they’d rescued Celise, and try as I may, no matter how I asked the questions, if she didn’t want to talk about something, she deflected, ignored me, or simply babbled incoherently—phrases that often seemed like nonsense to me.

That incident with Miliner, though, had given me pause. That had seemed like incoherent nonsense as well, but Miliner, with that keen artificial mind and embedded stereo microphones far more sensitive than a human ear, had been able to make surprising sense of Dr. Endrys. It was a bizarre enough circumstance to make one wonder whether she wasn’t actually hearing the star somehow.

The more I talked to her, though, the less oriented to reality she seemed. She swore that we weren’t on Samala. She continued to assert that the people here had all been replaced by imposters. When I asked her to explain what had happened up on the station, she started repeating the same phrase, over and over again: “When she goes red, we’ll all be dead. When she goes red, we’ll all be dead.”

I asked her if I could look at the flight cap she had buckled under her chin, just to see if I could get it off her head peacefully. I wasn’t going to be able to get a proper scan with her wearing it. That was the first time she genuinely grew agitated, a low-grade terror at the thought of removing the head covering. I let that point be for the moment, running through a thorough psychiatric evaluation as best I could.

What was happening to her mind didn’t fit neatly into any paradigm of neurological or psychiatric affliction I’d ever encountered.

I was beginning to sweat profusely. The Andrew had indulged Celise by turning up the heat in the room. She didn’t like wearing even the minimal clothing she had on, fidgeting with it almost every time there was a lull in our conversation.

“When was the last time she slept?” I asked the Andrew, something I presumed he should’ve told me in his initial report.

And then I realized our arrival had been so awkward he hadn’t had the chance to give me a report yet.

“She hasn’t slept since she came down from the station, Dr. Hand,” the Andrew answered.

“Substantively, or at all? Surely, she’s dozed off here or there?”

“No, doctor. Not once.”

“In over three days?”

“Nearly four now.”

“It’s too bright in here to sleep,” Celise said. “Even when I close my eyes. There’s always light.”

To the contrary, the room itself and the entire clinic was operating on dim, nighttime lighting.

“All right,” I said, looking over my shoulder toward Miliner. “She needs sleep.”

“Something stronger than the herbal, Dr. Hand?”

I nodded to Miliner and turned back toward Celise.

“We’re going to give you something to help you sleep,” I told her. “Your brain needs to rest.”

“Don’t you think it’s funny?” she asked looking at the area around the bed and then up to the ceiling.

“I’m not sure. What’s funny, Celise?”

“This room is backwards. This whole place is backwards.”

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t noticed. Everything looks normal to me.”

Celise Endrys laughed. “You’re in for a surprise, friend. You and all these imposters.”

I had Miliner put Celise Endrys on a powerful chemical soporific that I’d ordinarily have avoided except in extreme cases of insomnia. Her mind must have been exhausted, yet as we talked, she seemed so alert I was surprised there was no sense of mania in her bearing.

At first, the drug didn’t seem to take. I instructed the Andrew to turn down the temperature of the room and get Celise a blanket, as a cooler room was more conducive to melatonin production and a restful sleep state. She did not like this. Celise immediately kicked off the blanket and grew borderline combative with the Andrew. Ultimately, we relented, and Miliner and I agreed that we would wait for the drug to kick in before lowering the temperature in that hot room. And then a funny thing happened.

Celise finally succumbed to the drug, shutting her eyes and falling asleep for the first time in days. Then we lowered the room temperature, and, because she was all but nude, I made certain Andrew covered her with several blankets. Miliner and I then retreated to the other room and prepared a sequence of scans we planned to take while Celise was asleep. And, because of the potency of the drug, I presumed we’d be able to remove the flight cap for the scans without waking her—an additional reason I opted for such a potent pharmaceutical sleep inducer. We set up our portable scanners and were running through each of the tests I needed—a full battery of neurological imaging that I wanted to go quietly and smoothly. So we took extra time in prep to minimize the chance of disturbing our sleeping patient.

“Doctor,” Andrew interrupted, about a half hour after we’d begun our prep work.

He gestured to Celise through her room’s window. And there she was, asleep, on the bed, the blankets on the floor, and she was beginning to shiver. So I directed the Andrew to go in there and put the blankets on her again, somewhat frustrated by the interruption for a problem so small.

No sooner had he returned to the main treatment area after covering up Celise than he reported that she’d already kicked off the blankets again. I told him to place the blankets again, and once more, by the time he’d returned to his watch at the outer window, she’d thrown off the blankets—still fast asleep. That I found curious, so I came over to the window to watch for myself, Miliner tagging along with me. Sure enough, Andrew wasn’t even out of the room this time before Celise had pulled the blankets off her shoulders and rolled forward, throwing all of the covers entirely off the bed.

“I would suggest that we simply leave her as is, doctor, and raise the temperature of the room as before,” Andrew said.

Something about it wasn’t adding up for me, though. Because of Celise’s strange manner, the nudity had seemed like a behavioral oddity brought on by the break. It seemed like this aspect of her behavior wasn’t that different from an obstinate two-year-old refusing to put on clothing. But in a state of sleep that deep, I realized it couldn’t be behavioral.

“Don’t do anything,” I told the Andrew. “Give it a few minutes. Let me know if she starts to shiver again.”

Miliner and I went back to prep the scans, and not long after, Andrew reported that Celise was indeed shivering. I had a hunch.

I went into the room with a warm towel, draping it over her lower legs and feet—normally a welcome sensation in a cold room for a shivering person. She kicked it off almost immediately, never even threatening to awaken. I draped it over her shoulder. Same result.

When I came out, I instructed Andrew to raise the room temperature and told Miliner that we would adjust our preparations to scan Celise in the hot room.

“Doctor, if I may ask,” the Andrew said. “What exactly did you discern from that rather crude test?”

“Hyperesthesia,” I replied. “Her skin, for some reason has become hypersensitive to touch. The nudity isn’t a behavioral issue, Andrew. It’s a percept. Something in her brain is telling her that clothing feels uncomfortable against her skin. We’ll see if we can figure out why when we scan her.”

“How odd,” the Andrew answered. “Could that be a hallucination as well?”

“Doubtful,” I replied, thinking through the question as I was responding. “It is most definitely a genuine percept. I don’t think it’s psychological.”

We let Celise sleep after we’d set up the scanners. Then Miliner and I dove into Celise’s medical history and took Andrew’s full report on her current affliction. Miliner and I were talking through her case from a neurological and psychological standpoint. We hadn’t settled on a theory, but our discussion did produce several neurological areas of focus before we took our scans. We were adjusting our imaging algorithms when Furba interrupted. He was already pinging us from Celise’s monitoring station.

I checked the time, and Miliner noticed.

“Menia K’Fani’s Solar Weather department has an excellent fleet,” he noted.

I realized Furba must have engaged the FTL to jump out and then back in to the station to get there so fast. I’d been expecting his flight out there to take at least six hours.

“The station is dead, Larron,” Furba stated, his breath heavy in the background of the audio. “All of the data is cooked, and so are the instruments.”

I had to wait a second or two for the delay before I could respond to Furba.

“We don’t care about Celise’s research, Furba,” I told him in a lull when he was catching his breath. “What is the condition of the station? Are you wearing a suit in there?”

“Yes. So, hold on,” he said, clearly bumbling around a bit in the dark, enclosed, zero-G environment.

“Not much of a spacefarer for a stellar specialist,” I mused to Miliner, who was observing the screen in the main treatment area where I’d put up the stream from Furba.

“It’s too cold in here for long exposure in a nanosheet,” Furba explained. “I had to put on a suit. Like I said, everything is fried in here, so I can’t breathe the air. This is ... you’re looking for everything relevant to Celise, so the station ... hang on ... you’re going to want to see this.”

He went quiet for a few seconds.

“That’s right, Furba. We’d like to know what she went through up there if it could be relevant to her mental state.”

“Right,” he replied. “I was thinking about that on the way up. So ... I think the short answer is hell, Larron. She went through hell up here. I’m going to try and show you ....”

He was so clumsy I was getting disoriented looking at the screen. I had to shake my head at Miliner, who of course had no such issue with the images coming in.

“It’s a university pod, this station. I’m not sure if you know, Larron, but Professor K’Fani has a very nice budget. It includes funds to deploy monitoring stations all over the Lettered Systems—a big ship drops them off near the stars we’re watching.”

“Yes, I get it, Furba. Please get to the point.”

The audio got a bit confusing for a few seconds because of my interruption. I took a deep breath and reminded myself to be a bit more patient with the young man.

“The point is that it’s a hardened unit. So it must have gotten whacked by a significant blast from Samala to end up like this, probably a CME. Have a look ... I’ll try to hold still.”

He was steadying his body against the bulkhead, but even so, his head seemed to be bobbing around a bit, and the light from his headlamp was moving so much it was hard to make out what he was focusing on.

“I think the energetic outburst must have hit at night while the planet was turned; otherwise, I’m sure they’d have had a significant blackout, even with the planet’s magnetic field protecting the city.”

“What are you trying to show us, Furba?” I interrupted again. “I can’t see what you’re looking at.”

“Perhaps you should get closer please, Dr. Luonne,” Miliner instructed him.

A few seconds later, he floated up close to the far wall he was trying to illuminate and video for us. To my eyes it looked like a discoloration on the bulkhead, an inconsistent dark gray that was dull but seemed unremarkable to me.

“Can you see that?”

“We see a discoloration,” I answered him after a few seconds.

“Yes. That’s it, Larron. Those are electrical burn marks. The pod is insulated, but there’s still metal inside. That’s from electromagnetic energy arcing through the station. So ... I’m trying to think how to explain ... It’s like ... Have you ever seen those glass orbs with the lightning in them. They’re called plasma lamps. You’ve probably seen them in a science class.”

“I’m familiar,” I answered.

“So basically electromagnetic energy from the star turned the interior of Celise’s station into one of those lightning balls for the duration of the storm. I’ll have to check with the hub down there when I get back to pull her last data transfer to begin to calculate when it started and maybe how long it might have lasted, but something this big probably wasn’t any shorter than eight or ten hours. More likely, it was even a couple days. I can’t fathom how she didn’t get cooked alive in here. But she didn’t have any burns on her? Electrical burns?”

“No, Furba. We’d have all seen it if she had,” I said.

“Yes. Of course,” he replied breathing heavily. “But, I mean, if you’re looking for reasons she might have ... I don’t know how you say it medically ... snapped or whatever ... how well do you think you’d be doing after spending two days in a lightning ball, doctor? That’s my point.”

“All right, Furba. Thank you, we get it. Good work.”

“Oh, and I’m going to bring you some air samples, I think. Would that be helpful?”

“Air samples?”

“I don’t know. I just think ... I’m wearing a suit so I can’t smell the air in here, but I imagine it smells like burnt metal, and look ...” Furba focused on a panel that seemed entirely melted out. “All of the wires in the panels cooked their casings. The plastics melted where the electricity arced. She must have been breathing all of those fumes in. That could be significant medically, no?”

“Yes, Furba. That’s an excellent point. Some air samples may be helpful.”

“I’ll do what I can to figure out how to do that, and then I’ll get back down as soon as I can.”

“Very good, Furba. Thank you.”

“And, Larron, it may be another couple hours. I would like to gather some current data on Samala real quick. I may take a loop around the star. There’s been a three-day gap at least on any stellar observations. But this star ... just my eyeballs tell me, Larron, she is seriously misbehaving if she could do this to one of our stations this far out. What happened to Celise was an X class event. A high X.”

Miliner was skeptical. He didn’t think a solar blast of that magnitude could be so focused, taking out the station like that and leaving the city relatively unscathed. He did check with the operating system at the hub, which confirmed several minor outages and disruptions during the hours Celise Endrys was out of contact up at the station. Between the planet’s magnetic field, though, offering its protection, as well as the possibility that the planet itself had a fifty percent chance of being turned away from the star at the point of highest impact, I thought Furba’s concerns should at least be a consideration. The pictures and the events we knew had unfolded were facts that couldn’t be ignored. Celise had been up there in that station while all that energy was pulsing through it.

Hell, as Furba had described it, probably only began to describe what young Ms. Endrys had endured. I was pondering it, looking through the window into that hot room where she was sleeping. And she looked so peaceful. She was a little older than my oldest daughter—a few years—but as a father it was impossible for me not to see her through those eyes. And it was impossible for me to not think—or dare to dream perhaps would be a better way to put it—that the peaceful, sleeping girl before me, with no outward signs of damage to her person, might just wake up again, rub the sleep out of her eyes, and wonder what had happened, as though no damage to her psyche had been done at all. A father’s foolish hopes for the daughters of the galaxy. My mind was drifting. It was time to scan her.

Miliner and I wheeled in the table and the gear, and even though we didn’t think it would be physiologically possible for her to wake up with the amount of drug in her system, we still crept around like the slightest noise might disturb her.

Preparation, as always, was worth the effort, as Celise hardly stirred for the duration, only rousing slightly after we moved her back over to the bed, where she grimaced for a moment before falling back under again.

A few minutes later, after we’d removed all my gear from her room, Miliner held up Celise’s flight cap, as though to ask whether he should put it back on her. I told him to hold off on that for the time being, operating under the assumption that she was using it as a security blanket of sorts, which made more sense after Furba’s report. The protective layer in that cap may very well have saved what was left of her brain while she was immersed over all those hours in that electromagnetic cauldron. In her shoes, I don’t suppose I’d have wanted to take it off either. And now that I was thinking more about it, I was just beginning to reconsider when she woke up suddenly, screaming.

“Make it stop!” she shouted, covering her ears, her eyes squinting shut forcefully as she held her head. “It’s deafening! The light!”

Then she touched her hair, and in half a second, I realized what she was just realizing herself—that her hair being exposed like that meant that her head was no longer covered.

She cried out in pain, lurching around and feeling for her missing security blanket.

I took the flight cap out of Miliner’s hand and stepped toward her bed.

“Celise. I’m going to put this back on you,” I stated, holding out the cap.

Her eyes were completely shut, and she turned her head toward me, snatching the flight cap out of my hand as though she could see it with perfect vision. And she brushed back her hair with one hand while putting on the head covering with the other and then buckling it under her chin, breathing heavily as she did.

“Ow,” she whimpered, her legs dangling off the edge of the bed as she sat there in a tripod position.

I knelt before her, concerned that she might fall onto the floor and hit her face.

Then she exhaled and opened her eyes, looking right at me.

“It’s getting louder.”

“What’s getting louder, Celise?”

“The star is singing. I’ll never get back to sleep again.”

We talked for some time after that, but quite honestly, I wasn’t sure how long the conversation had been going before eventually trying to get through to Celise proved to be all but impossible. When everything out of a patient’s mouth sounds like a riddle, you can easily trick yourself into believing there are patterns there that mean something, when the reality is much more likely that they simply aren’t thinking coherently. In this case, I was afraid that was the most reasonable explanation. And it would be no small wonder given the trauma we knew she’d endured up on that monitoring station.

I had a long conversation with Miliner, again running through case after rare case, stretching every last detail for possible connections to Celise’s presentation, looking for some thread to pull, some sort of clue.

We returned to the scans. To say her brain function looked normal would’ve been overstating it, but nothing glaring jumped out at either of us. There was nothing abnormal in any of the usual areas that might have explained the unusual dissociation, the auditory hallucinations, the failure to recognize familiar people, nor the sensitivity to touch. But there was the obvious problem that we’d scanned her while she was asleep and drugged, and given the way she’d reacted to waking up without that flight cap on, I thought it was unlikely she’d allow us to take it off to scan her again.

“If I had it to do over again,” I told Miliner, “I’d have fixed a web of nodes to the inside of that flight cap while she was asleep.”

“Not a bad idea,” he replied. “The trick would be getting it off her long enough to do it.”

Drugging her again wasn’t advisable. Not so soon after.

I kept thinking about the touch sensitivity. If she was truly feeling that percept, then I figured it was likely she was experiencing the same regarding the noise and the light she was claiming to perceive.

“What are you thinking, Dr. Hand?” Miliner asked me after nearly a minute of silence.

“You don’t have a funny bone, do you?” I asked him. “Do you know what it is?”

He tilted his head, searching his memory for a reference. “I believe you’re referring to the ulnar nerve, specifically along the cubital tunnel at the elbow.

“Correct.”

“No. I do not have a funny bone in this android shell, Dr. Hand. Nor an equivalent.”

“I mention it because I just thought of a patient I had a few years back.”

“A funny bone patient?” he asked me, skeptically.

“Yes, actually. Sort of. He’d gone to see an orthopedist first. This was about six months after he’d reported really giving his elbow a good accidental whack on a doorframe. And he was complaining, because even six months later, he’d had a dull ache radiating down all the way to his pinky and it didn’t seem to be going away, so he thought he might have broken something. So I humored him and examined his elbow and scanned the nerve and then explained to him that nerve pain is like that sometimes. I guess this is the hopeful part of me speaking. I told him that eventually, it would take time, but it would go away on its own.”

“And it did?’

“As far as I know. Nerves are not precise equipment all the time, Miliner. Sometimes a potent provocation pops up that really gets them howling and it takes a good long time for things to settle down.”

“You’re referring to the experience Dr. Endrys had in the monitoring station?”

“It’s possible. Maybe. All that electromagnetic energy? The brain is a giant collection of electrochemical signaling devices. It wouldn’t be too far a leap to think that whatever happened on the station got a fair amount of those synapses howling. Perhaps the best treatment may be time and a quiet environment to allow the signals in her brain to settle down.”

Miliner looked back at me doubtfully. “Well, Dr. Hand,” he replied. “It’s a theory.”

I glared back at him. It was about as rude an answer as I’d ever heard from an AI clone. “You have a better idea?”

“No,” he stated. “Only questions. For instance, how would that theory square with the notion that suddenly Dr. Endrys seems to have perfect pitch. What connections would be howling that, exactly?”

“You tell me, Miliner.”

“Would that I could, doctor,” he replied.

Just then, breathless, Furba came bounding into the clinic.

“Okay,” he said. “Where to begin?”

“The beginning,” Miliner responded.

“Right. The beginning?” Furba turned to me, gathering his thoughts. “Some very impossible things are happening here, doctor.”

“You mean with Celise?”

“Well, that’s just miraculous, how she’s alive. I can’t account for that, but I was talking about the star, about Samala.”

“Please articulate your concerns,” Miliner said, trying to focus Furba.

“Bear in mind that Professor K’Fani’s ship is from our fleet, designed for stellar observation, and he’s meticulous about calibration for every one of the department’s instruments. Because my first thought was that there must be some kind of mistake. Faulty instrumentation.”

The door to Celise’s room was open, and though I doubted she’d overheard the conversation between myself and Miliner, she couldn’t have missed Furba’s entrance or the urgency in his voice as he was talking. I looked over his shoulder to see her leaning against the wall, listening. He hadn’t noticed her there, as Furba had his back to Celise.

“What mistake?” Miliner asked him.

“I took readings on both sides of the star to get a current baseline so I could compare it against the data from the monitoring station up to the moment it went down. And I noticed that Celise had been monitoring some very serious anomalies in the star in the preceding weeks. A radio burst that was constant for nearly a month, for one, which would be notable, but not exactly concerning on its own, a star of that class will do such things ... rarely, every couple centuries or so, but not outside the realm of—”

“Furba, the point,” I stated.

“Celise had captured a drop in luminosity of nearly point-zero-two percent in the week leading up to the CME that blasted the station, which doesn’t sound like much, but over the life of a star, it’s actually significant. And she began marking the accumulation of dust ...” He was shaking his head, trying to find an explanation a non-expert could understand. “The issue is cosmic particles—plasma. You could think of it like the star needing to blow off heat at a constant rate, but it also has a tremendous gravitational pull. And it pulls in all this dust, which traps heat like a blanket, and eventually it’s like a bomb. Can be. I don’t know personally. I’d need to talk to our professor about the timeline.”

“Point-zero-two percent?” I said. “That’s the urgency? Can’t you track the luminosity back in the data and see how fast it’s happening?”

“It’s a nonlinear process, Larron. And I didn’t tell you—” he looked around, and he noticed Celise standing behind him at the door, listening.

“Hello, Celise.”

“Hello, fake Furba. Please keep talking. I like your voice.”

“Right. Okay,” he continued, much more quietly. “Professor K’Fani has all of his ships programmed to take nominal readings of all the proximal stars whenever a ship drops out in a new system. Just to take a baseline. He likes data.”

“Like any good scientist,” I said.

“Right,” Furba continued. “From the time we arrived here—I mean you and me and Miliner, Dr. Hand—Samala’s luminosity has dropped nearly two percent.”

“Excuse me, what?” I replied. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Furba answered. “It’s not something I’ve ever seen before. I need to take some more readings before anybody panics. But I don’t think it would be unexpected to see more solar events that might disrupt anything electrical here on the outpost.”

“And the ship?” I asked. “If you go up there?”

“It’s hardened. Very well protected.”

“Wasn’t Celise’s observatory hardened as well?”

He shrugged, conceding the point before responding. “Whatever’s coming, I’ll be able to see it in advance. And the observatory didn’t have a starship engine, Larron.”

Celise came over behind him. She attempted to remove the flight cap she still had buckled under her chin.

“You’ll need—” she said, growing frustrated, as she struggled to free the clasp, grimacing as she did.

“Hey, Celise,” Furba said, smiling as she approached. “You want me to have it?”

“Protect your brain, fake Furba. You have a good one.”

“Thank you, Celise. You too. I have a whole flight suit in the ship. I’ll put on a cap if it makes you feel better. Even a helmet. You can keep yours on yourself, please.”

He put his hand up to hers, ever so gently, and they found each other standing there, smiling, shaking hands.

“Good deal,” she replied. “Hmmmmmmmm.”

Miliner looked over at Furba, expressing urgency. “Dr. Luonne, you said something about a radio burst, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I’ve uploaded all of Celise’s data from the comms hub here to the ship. I could share it—”

“Any chance you remember the predominant frequency off the top of your head?”

“It varies somewhat, of course. It’s a natural phenomenon. But it kept coming up at twenty-one point zero-one kilohertz, I think. Oddly steady for long stretches.”

Miliner shook his head at me.

“What?” I said.

“That’s up eight octaves from the E3, Dr. Hand, and too high for the human ear to hear, certainly, but it’s the same note—an E, E11. Almost exactly.”

“Hmmmmmmm.” Celise repeated.

“I’m going with him,” Miliner declared. “He’ll need a mind like mine to parse through the patterns in the data in real time.”

Then Furba, who’d vacillated between equal parts congenial and flustered for the duration of the trip, locked eyes with me, laser focused, and stated, “Don’t tell anyone, Larron. We don’t know anything for sure yet. There’s no reason to incite a panic.”

And then, the two of them walked out of there at a clip, leaving me and Celise exchanging a look awkwardly.

Needless to say, Furba’s manner and clear alarm at the state of the star shocked me. What had happened to Celise struck me as an unlikely but not altogether unthinkable peril of stellar science. A normal risk of being in the star watching business. And Furba’s behavior up till that point had reinforced as much. This new circumstance with the star drastically shifting in luminosity over a matter of hours—that concerned me. Miliner going off with Furba like that only reinforced my building apprehension that we might be in genuine danger on Beta-Samala.

Celise, though, seemed to be improving, at least as far as her mood was concerned. She returned to her room briefly after they left, but soon after, she came back out to engage me in conversation. She complained about feeling cooped up in that room. And just as I was starting to think she might be coming back to reality a bit, she expressed the desire to go back to Beta-Samala. It was the same complaint she’d disclosed to me in our initial evaluation. Much like fake Furba or her imposter boyfriend, her brain was interpreting the outpost as a false reality—close to the real thing but not real.

And then she returned to her room again, I realized this time, not to get away from me, but because she was cold out in the main room.

I was getting antsy myself sitting in that medical clinic like that, especially with no update from Furba or Miliner yet.

When he returned with lunch for myself and Celise, I asked the Andrew to keep an eye on her. I realized that since we’d arrived in the middle of the night, I hadn’t stepped foot outside once. It was just past midday and it felt like the middle of an interminable night. I wanted to have a look at this problematic star with my own eyes.

As I was passing her doorway, Celise shouted out to me. “Did you know I was a gymnast before I was an astronomer, doctor?” she asked me. “I bet you didn’t know that about me.”

She was smiling. I think the sleep had really done her mental state a lot of good, even if she was still not oriented to reality. It was a tick in the box for my theory. I began to hope those howling neurons of hers might just slowly settle over time.

“I didn’t know that, Celise,” I answered. “You look like you stay fit for space flight, though. Mission fit.”

“It’s a good idea. You don’t mind if I do some calisthenics?”

“No. Please do. Healthy body, healthy mind.”

I smiled back at her before I stepped out into the small sitting area and then through the outer doorway to that clinic.

I guess part of me was expecting for some visible sign of trouble from the sun. But looking up at it, I couldn’t see any sign that there was anything amiss at all. It was bright in the sky, albeit a little orange, but I’d never seen how the sun normally looked on Beta-Samala anyway, and I’d been on a dozen or so outposts where the suns all had a slightly different character to their light. Plus, I also had no idea how the transparent diamond dome affected the normal radiance of Samala the star.

Looking around gave me no cause for alarm. People seemed to be going about their day entirely unconcerned. I took a deep breath, figuring for the moment that Furba may have blown the readings out of proportion, and I guessed that Miliner would shortly be setting him right. And I’d hardly had a chance to exhale before I heard a commotion inside. My patient herself was howling now, I could hear, not just her neurons.

When I entered, she was still in her room, on the floor though, her face down, apoplectic for some reason I couldn’t immediately discern. Andrew had no explanation except that one moment she was exercising and the next she was on the floor crying out in agony, mumbling.

“It’s here. It’s here.”

“What’s here, Celise?” I asked her.

“Beta-Samala. It’s here. It’s really here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t feel it.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand, Celise.”

She was sitting up now, looking at me.

“It went away.”

“What went away?”

“The real Samala. This place isn’t real.”

By that time, I was thinking about percepts, how hers might be getting crossed-up somehow by all the neurological noise the electromagnetic exposure might have caused her. I had a theory.

“Celise, you said you were a gymnast. What were you doing before you felt the real Samala—I think that’s how you said it?”

“I was just doing my normal calisthenics.”

“Can you show me?”

She nodded and stood up, starting with a few normal exercises like toe-touches and squats in place.

“What did you do just before?” I asked her.

“I did a handspring. Do you want to see?”

“Sure. Is there enough room? Let me back out of the way for you. Hang on.”

I stepped out of the room so there was enough space for her to spring forward, and she did, cleanly and elegantly enough that I could see gymnastics hadn’t merely been a hobby for her as a child. That handspring was as natural to her as walking. And before she’d even stuck the landing on the other side, she gasped. And standing upright as she was, just in front of me, I nearly needed to hold her up, because she was ready to collapse from the shock of a near complete disorientation I could almost witness unfolding in her eyes.

“I went back,” she said, her eyes wide with disbelief.

“You went back to Samala?” I asked her.

“Just for a second. And now I’m here again.”

Percepts. Crossed signals. Another thought.

“Celise, can you do a handstand for me, please? I’d very much like to see that.”

“I think so,” she replied.

I signaled for Andrew to come close, figuring that if my theory was correct, Celise may react suddenly to the sensation. And no sooner was she balancing vertically on her hands than she became very rapidly unsteady, at which point, I and Andrew caught her legs so she didn’t fall. Instead, she looked up at me, her eyes surveying in utter disbelief.

“It’s okay, Celise. We have you. Can you tell me what you’re feeling?”

“Scared. I’m feeling scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

“I’m really on Samala, aren’t I? I can feel it. My flat is that way, where I live with Daeson.”

She did her best to gesture with her head, as her hands were still holding her up.

“Yes, we’re on Samala. We have been the entire time.”

“Oh my God, is Furba really here with you?”

“Yes. He and Miliner are out on the ship at the moment.”

“I thought it was a dream. This isn’t a dream, though.”

“No it is not.”

“Okay. Okay,” she said, exhaling, trying to regain what composure she could, standing upside-down like that. “Doctor, this is very important. You need to tell Furba exactly what I say.”

“Andrew will remember it verbatim if I don’t.”

“He needs to look at the density of the plasma sheet. That’s the key.”

“All right. We’ll relay that. Anything else?”

“Tell them to come back soon. And where is Daeson?”

“I’ll have Andrew get him for you.”

“I can’t explain how strange this feels, like stepping into a portal to a different reality,” she replied. “Okay, I’m ready. Please put me down now.”

Then, as we let her down, once her feet were on the ground and she was upright again, Celise’s eyes completely changed character. She smiled at me, grinning as though I might be playing a joke on her, and it was evident without a single word that she was gone again, back into that strange deceptive dream.

In systems as complex as stellar physics and neurology, one should always be prepared for the unexpected to happen. Yet as much as you can understand that reality, it doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to cope with the unexpected. With Celise, I found myself twisting every understanding I thought I had about cognition.

She was experiencing an alternate reality alongside us. She was failing to recognize old friends. She was in another place that looked almost exactly like the place she was supposed to be. And all we had to do to flip those misapprehensions around was to quite literally flip her upside down. I started thinking about the related cognitive pathways. Surely, there was some involvement with the hippocampus throwing off her sense of orientation. But the cross-wiring with the feeling of being upside-down? That had to involve the vestibular system and the inner ear, somewhere along the 8^th cranial nerve. And could the constant E note humming on that same nerve have something to do with her disorientation? And what about the sensation that the people around her were imposters? It was a puzzle with more pieces than I could fit together under the circumstances.

When Daeson arrived, I told Andrew that I would let him in. I wanted to prepare the young man for a rather unorthodox test I was planning to run when he came in. And as I stepped outside, I couldn’t help but think that the sun was looking redder and redder. I didn’t want to give anything away or unduly alarm him, so I didn’t ask Daeson directly.

“What do you make of that?” I said, gesturing with my head to the bright red orb over his shoulder.

“Yeah, the sun’s really red today,” he replied. “Too bad we don’t know a stellar physicist who could explain something like that.”

I smiled at the joke and said nothing more about the matter, but it served to confirm my suspicion that the light had changed since just a short while earlier.

On the way inside, I explained to Daeson our small breakthrough with Celise, and I told him of my intention to repeat the test with him present—to see if she would recognize him as the authentic Daeson once we flipped her upside-down again.

“You’re serious?” he asked.

“The brain can be a funny thing,” I replied.

“You’re the neurologist, I guess. I’ll help however I can, doctor.”

It didn’t work. He was amazed that she suddenly became far more lucid, but Celise’s response was puzzling.

“Where’s Furba?” she asked me.

“Still out with Miliner,” I told her. “We haven’t heard from them yet.”

“Okay, well, you should ping them,” she declared with a sense of urgency clear in her tone.

“What about him? Do you recognize this fellow?” I asked, referring to Daeson.

“He looks like Daeson, but he’s not,” she replied. “An imposter, only upside-down. How did he get here anyway?”

Another genuine neurological mystery.

I was puzzling over that problem while about half of my mind was on the dimming star. Whatever Furba and Miliner were doing, I figured they didn’t need to be interrupted, and it was possible the delay might have made it impractical to ping them, depending on where Furba had flown to take readings.

Then the solution popped into my head. Not upside-down, but flipped.

“I have it,” I declared.

Daeson followed me over to the workstation I had set up in the general treatment area. I pulled out a pair of glasses and began to program them to reverse the image. And because Daeson followed me, so too did Celise, curious about the activity more so than my specific declaration. She still wasn’t quite able to follow a line of thought like that—not right-side-up anyway. And as I was working, a ping came in from Furba.

I realized that Andrew had been fetching lunch while Miliner and Furba and I had been talking about the star. I also realized that he might have protocols regarding reporting any potential hazards to the authorities. So I sent him to fetch an early dinner for myself and Celise and Daeson before answering the ping. I didn’t fully know why I did that in the moment. An example of the subconscious knowing, perhaps.

“Larron,” Furba stated calmly but definitively when I opened the channel. “I want you to be prepared to meet us by the airlock within the hour, no questions asked.”

“All right,” I replied. “I should relay that we’ve had a breakthrough with Celise. She’s coming around a bit.”

“That’s excellent news. I’m happy to hear that.”

“She had a message for you.”

“She did?”

“She said that you need to look at the density of the plasma sheet. That’s the key. Does that make any sense to you? I’m afraid it doesn’t mean that much to me.”

“She’s correct, Larron. I have the message. Be ready to meet us on the flat.”

“Dark star,” Celise sang in that same tone, the E3.

He closed the channel, and as he did, I attempted to explain to Celise that we were going to go for a ride with Furba. I suspected it might be a challenge to get her to put on a belt so that she’d have a nanosheet to walk out to the ship. I asked Daeson if he might be able to help persuade her.

“A belt? What about the rest of her, doctor?” he asked, not grasping the urgency of the situation. “You want her to walk out of here in her underwear? Through town?”

“We can’t stay here, Daeson. Furba is concerned that there’s an ongoing electromagnetic event with the star. We think that may be affecting Celise’s mental state. We’re going to take her back to Kappa-Nira. The sooner the better.”

It wasn’t a total lie. He looked back at me skeptically, though.

“Dark star ...” Celise sang. “Hmmmmmmmm.”

“I’ll do what I can to help,” he said.

I tried to explain to Celise again that we were going to go for a trip.

“With Furba?”

“Yes. With Furba.”

“And him?” she said, referring to Daeson.

“And Daeson as well. Sure. Daeson can come along too.”

“I’m not going anywhere with these imposters,” Celise declared. “No. I don’t want to fly.”

“Give me a moment, please,” I said, asking Daeson to keep an eye on Celise while I stepped outside.

I had to consider the options, and I figured it might be easier to do it alone. When I stepped outside, I was stunned.

The star was a dark, dull red. Blood red. Whatever was happening was happening fast. That was the urgent tone I’d noted in Furba. And just as tellingly, he’d said nothing meaningful about the star itself over the open channel. The one coherent stellar physicist in the system. He knew, and he knew more than just the condition of the star. Furba knew there was exactly one FTL ship in the entire system, and he also knew if everyone knew what he knew, there’d be a riot to board her.

I’d medicate her to unconsciousness if I had to. Daeson and I could carry Celise out there. That was my last resort, though. I still had one more trick to play on her crossed-up brain. There was just enough time.

When Andrew returned, he clearly showed signs of curiosity. He mentioned that the luminosity of the star was abnormal for that time of the afternoon.

“I know of no stellar phenomenon that matches that pattern for a star as stable and young as Samala.”

“Very interesting,” I replied. “Are the people noticing the same?”

“Yes. They’re very curious.”

“Nervous?”

“Interested would be a better descriptor.”

“That’s good, Andrew,” I replied. “We have another task for you. Daeson and I are going to take Celise out to the ship so we can return her to Kappa-Nira for further treatment. I have my belt here so we can go outside the dome, but we need you to go to Daeson’s house and pick up his belt, and I believe he said he has a spare for Celise as well. I’d like you to pick them up and meet us at the airlock to the landing area.”

“Of course, Dr. Hand. I’ll see to it right away.”

“Daeson will direct you on where to find the gear in his flat,” I told him.

The two of them walked out toward the front, and Celise sat down beside me.

“You are being deceptive, doctor,” she said to me.

“We’ll see how that goes,” I replied. “Hopefully, I can trick that mischievous brain of yours into coming along with us.”

“That would be a good trick,” she replied, grinning and looking at the screen as I connected to the glasses and began to reprogram the optics.

Daeson returned and stood behind us, curious as to what I was up to on the screen.

“This is more serious than you’re letting on, isn’t it?” he asked me casually.

“Do you have family here on the outpost?” I asked him.

“Celise is the closest thing to it,” he replied. “Friends, though.”

“Family,” was all I said back.

“What are you doing up there, doctor?”

“Right. So you’re going to have to be the leader here if this works the way I hope it’s going to work, Daeson. She’ll follow you if she recognizes it’s you, right?”

“Yes. She would. I might even be able to get her to put some pants on.”

“If we can get her out the door, pants or no pants, I’ll be thrilled, Daeson,” I replied. “I have a theory.”

“Okay.”

“Human faces aren’t symmetrical. I think the part of her brain that processes faces is flipping them in her mind—the left side of your face where the right side of your face should be, and vice versa. So you look like you, but to Celise right now, you’re a slightly different version of you. Same thing with Furba. That’s why she thinks you’re imposters. I’m programming these glasses to flip it back.”

“That’s some theory.”

“We’ll see fast if it’s right or wrong. If it’s right, she’s going to recognize you, but she’s also going to see everything else backwards—like flipped around. And I suspect that I will suddenly seem like an imposter to her because she recognizes my face as is now.”

“I think I get it.”

“What I need you to do is take her hand and lead her when it’s time to go. Make sure she doesn’t walk into anything, as it’ll be very disorienting for her. You’re going to need to tell her what to do as well, because she’ll probably think I’m an imposter and she won’t trust me.”

“I can do that.”

I exhaled, finishing the recalibration.

The glasses set was an opaque lens, more like a VR set than an optical device. So we wouldn’t be able to see her eyes to see how she reacted. I turned her chair toward Daeson and put the glasses on her.

“Babe?” she said immediately. “Oh, my God, is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Celise. It’s been me the whole time.”

She looked at me. “Where did the other doctor go? This one looks just like him.”

“Great,” I said. “Keep her in that chair, and keep her calm. I’ll see about our ride.”

There wasn’t much time left according to Furba when he pinged my earset from the ship on a private channel. I understood the urgency, but until he explained to me exactly what was happening on that call, I still didn’t fully understand myself.

“ETA is seven minutes,” he replied. “We’re touching down and I expect to be off the ground again in the time it takes three people to step through the rear hatch.”

“We’ll be ready,” I told him. “We’re leaving now.”

I’d packed a small go-bag of the essentials for treating Celise on the trip back to Kappa-Nira, and, in my other hand, I had the bag Andrew had brought back our dinner in. To my surprise, when I stepped to the front of Celise’s room to let them know it was time, I found that Daeson had managed to get a gown on her, and she looked positively ridiculous with those opaque glasses, her flight cap, and a bright green hospital gown on her, along with the flight boots she’d come in wearing. But she was smiling.

“What’s in the bags, doctor?” Daeson asked.

“Dinner,” I answered. “Ready?”

Daeson nodded and tugged on Celise’s hand.

By the time we stepped out of the clinic, the sun was just past three-quarters in the sky, and it was dark, like dusk, the outline of Samala seemed a shadow star. People had come outside to gaze up at it, sensing something—wonder, fear, bemusement, curiosity. But it worked to our advantage. Very few of the colonists even turned to look at us, the three people in that diamond bubble on the Beta-Samala outpost who seemed to be moving with purpose. Celise’s strange attire hardly garnered a second glance from anyone, not with a black star in the sky drawing the attention of every last eye.

We weren’t followed. There was a solitary figure at the outer airlock—the Andrew, dutifully waiting, a belt in each hand.

I think when he saw us, he understood.

He handed over the gear and helped Celise clip her belt-buckle, activating the nanosheet for her.

“I’ll operate the lock,” he announced.

We were at T-minus forty seconds for the ship.

“Thank you, Andrew,” Celise said. “You’ve been kind. You can come with us if you like.”

“Dr. Endrys, you’ve been equally kind during this difficult time. I wish you the best of luck in your recovery. I may yet have duties at the medical station. Godspeed.”

Once we stepped out the main airlock, it was almost impossible to see the ship, because Furba had cut the lights, coming in dark in a dark sky. I heard it before I saw the ship. I realized Miliner must have been flying, such was the mastery of that seamless touchdown, the back hatch already opening practically a step from Celise’s boots.

We were on the ground for all of five seconds before we were airborne again, the three of us hanging tight to the rails, holding on in that airlock annex until we were in space, weightless, with Miliner directing us to strap in for FTL.

“What about Beta-Coronado?” I shouted, though I didn’t need to shout, as Furba and Miliner could hear me through the ship’s audio system. “They must have a freighter or enough cargo carriers that can land on the deck back there.”

“There’s no time, Larron,” I heard Furba’s voice respond.

Daeson was struggling a bit getting Celise through the back corridor to the travel seats along the port midship. I got there first, and Furba was there, strapped in already, operating a workstation he’d set up on the floatscreen. He was looking at the star.

Daeson and I helped to get Celise strapped in first. And then we rushed to get ourselves secure.

“Clear for FTL,” Furba announced to Miliner.

“What’s going to happen now?” Daeson asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Samala is going to go nova soon. Any time now, actually. We can’t predict exactly when.”

“Then ...?” he paused for several seconds, as though he didn’t even want to say the words. “Everybody down there is going to die, aren’t they?”

“Not necessarily,” Furba answered. “Hopefully, if Samala holds off for a few more hours and it happens at night—close to midnight would be luckiest—then maybe ... maybe the dome can hold. We’ll know in a couple days.”

Epilogue:

Four weeks following the first recorded stellar micro-nova in the Battery Systems during the era of human occupation, rescuers were finally able to brave the chaotic cosmic environment to reach Beta-Samala. Stellar physicists had already calculated, based on the timing of the blast, that the burst had struck the planet while the city was obscured at seventy-four degrees past the terminator, several hours before midnight local time. The diamond exterior of the dome, somehow, held true that night.

On top of that miracle, despite every last electrical component suffering catastrophic overload from the electromagnetic storm, the clever engineers in the city managed to rig a small fleet of air scrubbers, with the air flow provided by the few pieces of exercise equipment that survived the storm of arcing metal that injured dozens of settlers over the course of that fateful night. And with such a large reservoir of atmosphere in the dome, a willing team of volunteer peddlers and runners, and an enduring spirit characteristic of deep-space settlers all over the Battery, the final death toll at Beta-Samala, miraculously, stood at seven.

Due to the debris flung out into the system by the star herself, and the certainty of a near-future filled with high-impact asteroid strikes, the colony had to be abandoned.

Dr. Celise Endrys, over the course of several months, slowly recovered to something resembling her normal neurological function. Though she reported feeling certain impulses she insisted were connected to cosmic electromagnetism, I could never confirm as much in any scientific sense. Even back on Kappa-Nira, a planet with a strong magnetic shield, she reported that she suffered a clear, definite, and perceptible anxiety at the onset of any notable solar activity from our own gentle star. She even kept a journal that seemed to demonstrate as much.

Beyond the obvious neurological complications Celise had to struggle to overcome, Dr. Endrys carried significant psychological trauma with her following the ordeal. I only asked her after I was certain she was comfortable sharing details from those interminable hours she was stuck aboard the monitoring station. I asked her how she’d managed to survive. Celise told me that she was well acquainted with the pods, having volunteered for a committee within the department that helped to decide how to award resources to new projects. In order to quickly assemble space stations of varying sizes, the department’s pods were prefabricated, with specific panels that were designed to readily attach to compatible tunnels, lock doors, or other pods of the same make. Celise’s station had one such panel, which she knew was made of a nonconductive nano-polymer and had a deep enough recess for Dr. Endrys to tuck her body into for the duration. She spent what she guessed was close to thirty hours crunched inside it, mere centimeters from arcing blasts of electricity, praying that the frame around the panel never heated to the polymer’s melting point for fear that the entire station might decompress. In short, Celise informed me that one should never underestimate the value of a good hiding spot.

For understandable reasons, she never resumed any similar fieldwork following the micro-nova at Beta-Samala, but she continued to teach Stellar Physics and Space Weather at the university, even writing several articles concerning Samala itself. And, last I heard, she and Daeson were still happily together.

For my part, I spent several years wrestling with the actions we took during that short window of time on that outpost. As much as the rational mind can replay the events and see, logically, step-by-step, that what we did was sensible given the circumstances that existed in the moment, I couldn’t ever fully shake the guilt that came with being sensible. No matter how much Furba Luonne and even Miliner insisted that we could have done no better than to escape and ensure the timeliest possible rescue, part of me will always feel different. The ship had a maximum capacity of twelve. We flew out of there with four people and an AI clone. Seven empty seats.

The human brain sees patterns, and sometimes it feels things that are not there.

I sometimes wake at night wondering about that Andrew, a simple android, its simple patterns of thought. What did it think about us in the hours between our departure and the moment its processors were fried forever in that impossibly bright cosmic blast?

Like so much else, it is a question that has no answer. No resolution. Still we can’t stop the neurons from firing the signals that ask such questions, even if they do our minds no good. Nor can we escape the forces of the cosmos. Eighty-six billion neurons at our disposal, and it is still impossible for us to comprehend just how small we are.

When he returned to Arnur, Erron had an urgent message from Naomi informing him that Tyritha was meeting with the doctor that evening. She requested that he join them. It was not a move he’d have sanctioned if Tyritha had asked him, at least that was his impression if Tyritha did what he thought she intended to do—refuse to undergo remediation.

By the time Erron arrived, Naomi informed him that Dione was already inside with Tyritha. She was yet again taking images of Tyritha’s chin, and she was clearly frustrated that they were even still discussing the matter. When Dione saw Erron enter, she grew even more frustrated.

“He should not be here, dear. What we do is for him and for the community. It’s not for Erron to decide.”

“But a wife and a husband should share every decision of consequence, and considering he’s the one who’ll have to look at my face every day for the rest of our lives, I’d say it’s a decision of consequence.”

“Young lady, I’ve been very patient with you for a number of reasons,” Dione replied, casting a gaze over at Tyritha’s servant Naomi. “Eventually, you must do what is required of you to progress through the rites.”

“I understand, but considering where I come from—”

“Ventu, you mean?” the doctor interrupted, again glaring over toward Naomi. “You do things so differently in Ventu?”

“Slight differences, yes,” Tyritha replied. “That’s my understanding. May we discuss those differences?”

“Naomi dear, leave us please,” Dione commanded. “This discussion is for your mistress and her consort only.”

Naomi looked to Tyritha, who nodded.

“As you wish, Doctor,” Naomi replied, bowing as she excused herself.

When the servant was gone, the doctor looked over at Tyritha, revealing equal parts cynicism and sympathy for the differences she perceived in the young woman’s strange culture. She had some sense of the trauma the uprooting of Tyritha’s life had caused her. But, much like a transplanted seedling, Dione expected that Tyritha should be taking root in her new soil, and part of her new life here was accepting her new culture.

“Let me ask you, Doctor, respectfully,” Tyritha began, “if I asked you to cut off my pinky finger because I didn’t like it, would you?”

It was not the question the doctor was expecting. Dione recoiled at the thought of it.

“Of course, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t harm patients. That’s not our job.”

Tyritha looked back at her doubtfully. “How do you decide what harms a patient? Or maybe I should ask: who are you to decide what is a harm and what is an improvement?”

“I’m a surgeon.”

“So, if in your wisdom you decide I look better with only one arm, would it be acceptable to amputate an arm?”

“I see what you’re getting at, Tyritha. It’s beside the point. The board has decided your case.”

“In their grand wisdom?”

“Collectively, they have centuries of expertise—hundreds of such cases.”

“But it’s not their body. Nor is it their fiancé’s body. This is a decision that primarily affects us.”

“I choose to support Tyritha,” Erron added. “I’ll love her the way she wants to be.”

“But you’re not protesting in good faith. First, you ask me questions as though it’s a moral objection, and then you say it’s a misjudgment of the board from an aesthetic standpoint.”

It was clear she was addressing Tyritha.

“It is a moral objection, but not just a moral objection, doctor, a religious one. You know it would be wrong to take my finger unnecessarily because it offends your sensibilities personally and culturally. What if you came from a culture where it was perfectly fashionable to remove fingers? Would it still be wrong?”

“For me, yes.”

“Why?”

“This again.”

“Yes, this again. This is the most important thing. I can tell you why it’s wrong in any culture.”

“And why is it wrong, Tyritha? Enlighten me, please, child.”

“It is wrong because it’s not my finger any more than this chin is my chin. This body is a gift given to me by God to be my vessel in this world. It is the same in this place or on Athos or on Heinan, Charris, or Earth. It is his chin, his finger. Every time I look in the mirror from the moment I am altered by you and your board of aesthetics—or whatever you are—I will see the vanity and arrogance of your belief that it is for you to improve upon his gift to me. But more than that, if I allow you to do it, I’ll see my own weakness in succumbing to the pressure to allow it, and I’ll see my own vanity as well. I cannot allow you to alter me that way. This will hurt me, and it will be a wound I can never heal from.”

Dione sighed.

Tyritha watched as the doctor shook her head. It was impossible for Tyritha to tell whether her perspective had made any impression beyond frustration, but after a few seconds, she looked over at Erron.

“Do you agree with this, Erron?” Dione asked him. “I was afraid of this when I heard she was from a religious enclave.”

“Afraid of what, Dione?” he asked.

“That she’d be a fanatic.”

“Is that so fanatical? Not wanting to undergo facial alterations?”

“It’s not the reluctance, Erron, but the reason. I’ve had plenty of patients who are anxious about the pain or the outcome or even wearing the Arrdh during recovery. But this idea that her god forbids what we do as a practice? You should think carefully about the implications of these beliefs before you marry this girl.”

“Thank you for your counsel on that, Doctor, but I believe such matters should remain between spouses.”

Dione looked over at Tyritha again, half rolling her eyes. “Aren’t you a lucky one to have such a patient future husband.”

“If you think I wouldn’t be just as supportive of his deeply held convictions, you’d be mistaken,” Tyritha declared.

“So you’re refusing the procedure on religious grounds, then? Officially?”

“However you characterize it, Doctor, the situation is as you’ve just heard,” Erron stated. “I support her decision.”

Dione shook her head. “You two are going to be quite the pair if they let you ... I shouldn’t say anything. But obviously we can’t tell the board that. The prominence is marginal, after all. And I can at least argue that the spouse prefers it as is.”

Dione looked up at Tyritha’s face again, even raising her hand to touch Tyritha’s chin but stopping short, leaving her hand hanging in the air just in front of Tyritha.

“I’ll speak to the archon and do my best to frame your position in a way that she’ll be most receptive to it.”

“We’d be grateful for that, Dione,” Erron said.

“If I could offer a piece of advice, though, for whatever it’s worth?”

“Of course, Doctor,” Erron replied, thinking that her counsel might concern the aesthetics board or the progression toward the rites.

“You two would be wise to make as few waves as possible right now. The archon is already unhappy enough with your siblings over the way this pairing has come about.”

“She’s expressed as much to you?” Erron asked.

“I don’t have such conversations with the archon personally, Erron. But I hear things. I’m privy to enough.”

“We understand. We’ll do our best to stay clear of her awareness.”

Dione nodded. “Ah. That’s a good way of putting it, and a good idea.” Then she looked up again at Tyritha’s face and let out a scoff as she shook her head. “God’s chin.”

As she walked from the room, Erron and Tyritha exchanged a look and the slightest of smiles. He came forward and embraced her.

“You really should consult me before making such a big decision,” he told her. “This ...? It is a narrow and delicate pathway we’ll need to walk, and we’ll need to do it together if we’re—”

He heard footsteps in the doorway behind him as Naomi returned to the room. He stepped back and took her hand, kissing the back of it.

“Later, Tyritha,” he said.

And Tyritha nodded as he bowed and left.

Erron had much to convey when they met in the garden early that evening. His news was important, but he was more curious about the conversation they’d had with the doctor. He hadn’t wanted to present even the slightest hint of contradiction in front of Dione by asking questions of Tyritha then and there, but his curiosity was certainly piqued by his fiancé’s arguments. He’d found an entirely novel perspective on his own world in his conversation with the disaffected former contact crew member Petr Onager, but Erron suspected Petr’s take on their society was far closer to his own than that of his betrothed, or at least it was discernible within their culture. Tyritha, though? He had no idea what she might do or say at any given moment. He wasn’t even sure how to begin asking the questions for fear of offending her with a clumsy inquiry. The strangest and most insignificant things seemed overwhelmingly vital to her, and he didn’t know why—the prayers to nothingness, the concept of sin, the fear of offending her nebulous invisible deity. But for as much as her ways seemed bizarre, Erron was curious. He’d never met anyone as certain as Tyritha was in a moral sense.

Erron took her hand as she sat and didn’t let it go. He rubbed his thumb over her pinky finger deliberately and smiled.

“God’s finger?”

She took a deep breath but didn’t say anything.

“I’m curious. I hope you won’t be offended if I ask ...”

“As long as you ask me earnestly, why should I take offense?”

“How much of that was a tactic and how much of it was genuine?”

“If it were merely a tactic, I’d have let her do the surgery, Erron. You think there aren’t people in the Battery who visit clinics that do that sort of work?”

“I’m sure there are. So you disapprove?”

“When it’s unnecessary, yes, I do.”

“So you think less of people who go to those clinics, even back home?”

Tyritha shook her head. “I’m not sure. I haven’t really thought about it directly. I just feel that it’s not right. I don’t think less of others, though. I’d say not. That’s between them and God. I am the steward of this vessel, just as you are the steward of your body.”

“And by your logic ... I guess what I’m asking is, how do you know what is right and wrong?”

“For me?”

“For anyone.”

“I don’t know, Erron. These are difficult questions that everyone has to wrestle with on their own. I just know that I don’t get to hurt myself. That is a sin. I also don’t get to hold contempt in my heart for others who make other choices. That is also a sin.”

“Why? I don’t understand,” Erron squeezed her hand gently, as though to remind her that he wasn’t trying to be difficult but genuine.

“I’m not a theologian, Erron. I don’t always have a perfect answer to these questions or even words to explain correctly.”

“Your own words would be fine, Tyritha. I’ve never met anyone who thinks this way.”

She sighed. “It’s not easy to say.”

“That’s fine. I’m just trying to understand.”

“I’m not even sure what you’re asking.”

“I’ve noticed that you don’t seem to hate us.”

“Hate you?” Tyritha asked, squinting back at him, puzzled by the thought.

“Maybe that’s not the way to put it ....” He shook his head. “See, it’s not even easy for me to ask the questions the right way.”

“Getting to know someone can be a clumsy experience, even when you know each other’s culture.”

“Take Dreima for example,” Erron continued. “You said you’re not allowed to have contempt, but she’s responsible for all of this—the uprooting of your entire life. Yet you speak to her without hatred in your heart even when she’s done you this tremendous wrong, which is fortunate for us if we’re to get you home. I don’t get the sense that you’re acting when you interact with her. You don’t hate Dreima, do you?”

“No. I’m angry at her for what she’s done, but I don’t hate her.”

“Why not? How can you be that way?”

“Okay. I think I understand what you’re asking,” Tyritha said, nodding. “It’s complicated, but in Dreima’s case, I try to force myself to remember that Dreima is as beloved of God as I am, as you are, as anyone else is. We are all children of God. If I were to hurt Dreima or to treat her badly because I’m angry at her, that wouldn’t just be a sin against Dreima, at least as I’ve been taught, it would also be a sin against God for hurting one of his children. And it’s the same for the surgery. If I hurt Tyritha,” she continued holding up their hands and wiggling her pinky, “then, yes, it’s my choice to do it, and maybe I do prefer that choice, whatever it is, but if I consciously choose to hurt myself, I’m choosing to hurt one of God’s children just as surely as if I did it to another. Does that make sense?”

“In a very strange way ... yes,” Erron replied. “We don’t think that way.”

“How do you think?”

“We think poorly of anyone who doesn’t adhere to our beliefs. Like Dione—she was very frustrated with you, not just because you’ve complicated her life and put her in a delicate position with the archon, but also—contempt, as you said—I think that’s a good word for what she felt regarding your decision.”

“But you don’t feel contempt for me, Erron.”

“No. But I like you far more than Dione does. I’m inclined to forgive you almost anything,” he smiled. “Even that marginally prominent chin of yours.”

She laughed.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he said, leaning in and kissing her.

She kissed him back.

“One day you’ll have to teach me about these prayers of yours, too. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“I’ve noticed that,” she replied, drawing a breath as she sat back. “You have your own gods here, yet no one prays. Naomi looks at me funny when I do.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“I try not to. I’m not ... it’s just such a strange custom that seems ...”

“Old fashioned?”

“I was going to say incredibly archaic,” Erron replied, grinning. “Like somebody casting spells or something.”

“Says the noble lord in his family’s palace?”

“I suppose so,” he acknowledged, nodding. “We all have old customs we struggle to shake, I guess.”

“Maybe so,” Tyritha agreed, smiling.

She felt herself being pulled toward Erron with each meeting, her hand fitting more properly in his, those radiant eyes of his more familiar and welcome, and each time she felt it, she marked the shortness of her breath, and she didn’t know what to do.

She sat up straighter and tried to suppress the smile that wanted to form every moment she was in his company.

“We should discuss the contact worker,” Erron suggested, picking up on her cue. “As I said earlier, it’s a narrow path for us to walk, and I’m not even sure if it leads the way out for you yet, Tyritha. All I know is that it may be a dangerous path to walk.”

“I’m grateful to walk it with you, Erron Aireum,” Tyritha said. “I believe all will be right if we walk it together.”

Tyritha could tell that Naomi didn’t know what to think of her custom each night, except that she thought it was strange. But now that Naomi understood who Tyritha was, her mistress asked her for one more kindness before Tyritha relieved her for the night, and for the past few nights, Naomi dutifully knelt with her and humored her mistress as she prayed, remaining beside her silently as Tyritha spoke, seemingly to some spirit in absentia—somewhere out in the universe, the aether, or perhaps just the silent spaces in the corners of the room. Naomi smiled and reminded herself just how lonely it would be to be taken from her home to a strange place with no friends or family to ask her about her day, and she marveled as this strange girl, barely a woman, one of such outward beauty, dared to open her mouth and give voice to the most naïve and beautiful hopes and desires hidden within. And when she would finish, always with the strange refrain: “Let your will be done, oh Lord. Amen” then Naomi would put her hand on her mistress’s back before they rose to their feet, she would help Tyritha into bed, and she would excuse herself for the night.

Such was the scene as she left that night, too.

Tyritha fell asleep quite easily, as she had since she arrived. Whatever anxiety she had about the unfamiliar place seemed to have been more than offset by the comfort of the bed, the room, the nightwear, the peaceful ambient sounds and clean air. She’d grown more comfortable by the day and thought she had little reason to fear for her safety in that place, protected as she was under the banner of the House of Arnur.

So Tyritha was surprised when a dim light intruded on her sleep, as well as a sound, a clicking, which she realized was someone snapping their fingers. She was just on the cusp of consciousness when she heard a woman’s voice.

“Wake, dear, but don’t cry out. I have something to discuss with you.”

“Dreima?” Tyritha asked, squinting in the dull light as she struggled to make out the visitor’s figure.

She was seated in the same chair, in the same spot as when she’d visited the previous time. Her tone was different, though.

“Yes, dear. It’s me. Rub the sleep out of those bright eyes of yours, pretty thing. I need you to hear me.”

“Of course. What can I do for you, sister,” Tyritha said, taking a deep, performative breath.

Dreima grinned. “How sweet. It’s a bit much, though. Let’s just talk directly, shall we?”

“As you wish. What can I do for you at this hour, Dreima?”

“It’s come to my attention that you had a discussion with the doctor and expressed your desire to avoid remediation.”

“Oh, I thought—”

“You thought that was in confidence. Yes. Dione didn’t tell me. No. But she brings such matters to the archon, dear. And my mother, who already had reservations about my bringing you here ... what she wants—what all of us want—is to not hear a peep out of you until the day you’re standing beside Erron pledging your life to him on his apotheosis. So when that does not happen, and instead we hear unwelcome noises, you can be sure I hear about it. Do you understand?”

“Perhaps not fully. But I think I gather that any fuss I make causes you distress if I understand correctly.”

“That’s correct. You’re a much cleverer girl than you let on, aren’t you? Amazing to me how someone so young could be so self-assured.”

“If you say so, mistress. However, I would like to assure you that I never meant to cause you or anyone else in this house any distress. You’ve all been so very kind to me.”

“Yes. Haven’t we. It was no small trouble to have you brought here for Erron.”

“I am only just beginning to understand the depths of it.”

Dreima’s eyes narrowed in on hers.

“I understand you have an affinity for old stories, little dear. Isn’t that true? Myths? Fairy tales?”

“You’re referring to my faith?”

“I am at that. If I understand your tradition, it is a collection of ancient Earth stories of ancient peoples and divinities, parables, poems—prayers even. You recite such things.”

“Never publicly, mistress. Never to reveal my origins to anyone who could guess I don’t belong.”

“That’s good. Such things might be acceptable on a dusty, provincial outpost like Heinan. Here, from a lady of the house of Arnur? No. That wouldn’t fit.”

“I do wish to fit. I am doing everything I can. I ask your patience, Dreima, and I’m grateful for your understanding thus far. Everything is new to me, and try as I may, I know I am making missteps along the way.”

“Just as well, but I only mention the stories because it’s a fortunate thing. Because you know ancient stories like that so well, I also know you’ll understand me in the terms I’ll use now.”

Dreima paused, gazing at Tyritha as though she might be trying to read her thoughts.

“I’m listening,” Tyritha replied earnestly.

“This fairytale palace we inhabit, you do understand that not everyone lives like this in Alysida, don’t you? A room like this? Servants? Lavish dinners and fancy gowns?”

“I understand, mistress.”

“I plucked you from the dust of a world where your people scrape the barest of lives from the rock, and I brought you here to this.” Dreima extended her hand to the room and beyond before continuing. “And more than that, I’ve offered you a pathway to immortality. And the hand of my brother—the very best of us.”

“Mistress Dreima, I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am—”

“No you can’t, can you? Nor have you either. And perhaps that’s my failing in underestimating the cultural differences. I made the mistake of thinking certain things could be unsaid. But I do think now I need to say them, for your sake as much as my own peace of mind.”

“Please do, Dreima. I’ll do everything I can to adhere to any extent I can.”

Dreima paused again, her eyes narrowing even further as she glared at Tyritha.

“In the terms of your old stories, dear girl, today I am your fairytale godmother. You get to be a princess in this castle by my doing, which can be undone. Tomorrow, if you force my hand, I can just as easily be your evil stepmother. Even in Alysida, there are far more miserable peasants than there are princes and princesses—an opposite end of the spectrum to this life. For as much as your life is beautiful now, it can just as easily be the opposite. I don’t want for you to suffer that. I’d hoped, and it seems to be the case that Erron is taken with you.”

“I am so blessed and grateful, as I feel the same for him, perhaps more so.”

“That’s good. You understand then what you have to lose.”

“Fully, mistress.”

“Then let me make the following clear. This business with remediation is the last we shall hear of you and your reservations about anything here in this house, this cylinder, this outpost. Your function is to stand beside my brother, look beautiful, and do his bidding the way Naomi does yours. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly, mistress Dreima. And please allow me to thank you for saying as much so explicitly. Now that you have, I can see now that all the signs were there clearly enough that I should have read them for myself, but in my ignorance I simply didn’t understand. When I know the rules, I always follow them.”

“Good. We understand each other, then. For whatever reason, Dione has taken your side to the archon. She may address the matter to the board. Whether that has any bearing on their ultimate decision, I won’t know until it’s known. Needless to say, whatever they rule, you will thank them for their wisdom and adhere to it with the dignity of your silence.”

“As you wish, mistress.”

“Now. Get your rest. You’re learning much each day, I hear. A good student.”

“I strive to be.”

Dreima nodded as she got up from the chair. “Good night, dear.”

“To you as well, mistress Dreima,” and as she stepped toward the door, Tyritha’s voice hung on her abductor’s name for just long enough that she could tell Tyritha had more to say, so she paused before opening the door. “And please, I need you to hear me say it as clearly and truly as I can profess it. Sincerely, thank you for all that you have put before me. I can only hope to be worthy of it someday.”

Dreima turned before exiting. “On that we shall see. Each day.”

And Dreima looked back in such a way that her eyes told Tyritha they would be watching her closely. And in the breath she took to the sound of the closing door, Tyritha told herself she’d been far too clumsy with her intentions.

It was not an entirely alien experience for Tyritha, even though she’d never met Dreima’s like before in real life. The fairytale stories Erron’s elder sister referred to were replete with figures like her. Additionally, some of the biblical villains were unspeakably vicious. Tyritha knew there was evil in Dreima’s heart. She felt it as much as judged that it was there. She also understood that Dreima preferred not to resort to exercising that side of her persona in her case. It was clear that she simply wished for a specific course of action—the desired outcome for Erron, for the family, and most of all, for herself. The more Tyritha fell in line and fit, the better she would look for pairing Tyritha with Erron. Still, Tyritha felt deeply in her gut that to humiliate Dreima in any way would be a dangerous and perhaps deadly gamble. The rules were now clearly delineated; the consequences for breaking them, however, were not.

Tyritha struggled to find her way back to sleep for the remainder of the night, wondering what might become of her if she defied Erron’s elder sister. That was the question she posed to him the following day during their now-daily walk to the duck pond in the palace’s garden. Erron began the conversation by trying to update Tyritha on his progress with Petr Onager, but immediately, he could see that she was distracted.

“Is something wrong?” he asked her.

“I need to ask you something,” she replied.

“Ask me anything.”

Tyritha paused before looking Erron in his eyes, those bright, gray eyes. “I’d like to know what you think would happen to you if your family found out you were trying to help me get home.”

Erron shrugged. “I don’t know. Dreima would be upset—will be, I mean, when we get you home. Yeah, I suppose she’ll be angry for a while.”

“How well do you know your sister?”

“Well enough, I guess.”

“Do you think they’ll still allow you to go through with your rites—the apotheosis?”

Erron looked shocked by the question. “I hadn’t considered it. Yes, I think. Sure. Why wouldn’t they?”

“Gods don’t like to be insulted as a rule, Erron. Especially false gods.”

He took a deep breath.

“I didn’t really understand this place,” she continued, “not until last night.”

“What happened, Tyritha?”

“Dreima came to see me last night. Just walked into my room while I was sleeping and sat beside my bed.”

“What did she say to you?”

Tyritha exhaled. “Mmpph. I’m not sure what she said was the real point, Erron. I made the mistake of thinking I had a choice about the surgery … or anything else for that matter. The dresses, the food, the palace, the engagement—all these things tricked me into thinking I was a guest here and not a prisoner.”

“You are a guest here. You’re my betrothed. I promise you are safe here. I swear you have my protection, Tyritha.”

“If that’s so, I suppose I can just ask to go home. Who should I ask, Erron? Dreima? Krishna? The archon?”

“I suppose that’s a fair point. But a prisoner?”

“I am, and your answer leaves me more convinced that you haven’t even begun to understand where you are either.”

“She told you to have the surgery?”

“Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“The what part was left vague. That’s the part that frightens me, Erron. I’m going to ask you the same question of me, and I’d like you to really think about it. Will you do that for me? Really think.”

“All right. What question do you mean?”

“What do you think would happen to me if Dreima found out I was trying to escape. What would they do with me?”

He was looking at her with a newfound sense of concern in his eyes. As much as he was trying to understand her position, Erron couldn’t quite see it. He wanted more than anything to lift all of her fears from her mind.

“Are you reconsidering the procedure?” he asked her. “I can’t claim to know you that well yet, Tyritha, not nearly as well as I hope to, but I get the sense you are thinking about doing something.”

“What do you mean, ‘doing something’?”

Her tone was sharper than he’d ever heard before. He didn’t even imagine her voice could be so harsh.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know. The surgery, for example—your chin? Are you going to go along with it.”

“My chin is the least of our concerns.”

“You’re very frightened, aren’t you?”

“And getting more so by the fact you don’t seem to be. And, yes, I don’t see that there’s a way out of the surgery now. I’ll be lucky to escape this place with my life.”

“Dreima won’t hurt you, Tyritha.”

“Dreima will hurt anyone. You need to get your mind around that. She’ll hurt you too if you make her look bad, Erron.”

“She would never. She couldn’t. The archon wouldn’t let her. And I wouldn’t let her either, because I care too much about you. I wouldn’t have it.”

“You think you’re in their inner circle, don’t you? I think you’re making the mistake of believing that you’re one of them already, and you’re not yet. Maybe soon, but not today. And maybe never if you help me escape. Then how will they treat you? Not like the golden son. I can assure you of that.”

“You don’t know my family. They’re not that vengeful, Tyritha.”

“How many times have you seen them have cause to be vengeful? Do the archons get defied often, Erron? Betrayed by their own?”

He shook his head.

“Thought not.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m trying my best to help you get home.”

“I think, if we can, we should find a way to make it look like you didn’t help me to get free, Erron. I wouldn’t want to leave you knowing I’d ruined everything between you and your family. Then who would I be? If I left you behind after wrecking your life? That would be just as selfish as what Dreima did when she snatched me up.”

He shook his head. “When I talked to Onager, there was a moment that gave me pause. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t want to worry you about something you couldn’t do anything about. I agree this is not without risks, getting you back home. But it does have to be done. What happened to you isn’t right, and I’ll do what I must to set it right, whatever the cost.”

“I am grateful for that, Erron. Among all your family, you’re the noble one. You’re the only one I could love without fear.”

He squeezed her hand for reassurance, and sat there quietly as she rested her head on his shoulder.

“I have to ask. I’m sorry if I’m wrong for asking,” Erron said. “Maybe it’s a selfish part of me talking, or maybe I’m still just confused by our differences, but is it possible that the best way out of all this is to stay—to stay with me and go through the rites, to be my wife and to be treated as family in this house in perpetuity.”

“Forgive me for how this is going to sound, but I can’t do that. And it isn’t you. It’s a fine dream. A beautiful dream to spend eons with you. But it is just a dream. You people cannot be gods no matter how much you wish it or how long you prolong your deaths. A human is a human, in rags or fancy gowns. There will come a day for everyone. And on my day, I must be right with God. I’m sorry, Erron Aireum, but you’re going to have to kill me first.”

She could tell by his reaction that Erron was shocked by the conviction with which she’d made her position clear. He took a deep breath, doing his best to wash the emotion out of his bearing before responding.

“So then, Tyritha Sian, we get you home. And we take great care in doing it.”

Tyritha didn’t see Erron again till the following afternoon when Dione came by with a woman she’d never met before. The visit, ostensibly, was to inform Tyritha that her facial surgery had been scheduled for the following week. The real visit, she gathered, was to gain a sense for her eagerness to cooperate. She could feel it right away. This doctor and all the people in her orbit were never healers, they were measurers. Even the woman with her that afternoon had come to take measurements of her face, to fit her for the Arrdh Tyritha would wear after her surgery. But that wasn’t the only thing being measured.

Dione adopted a feigned tone of concern regarding her hesitance and fears. And Tyritha wasn’t so foolish as to claim a full 180-degree turn on her position. She didn’t overact, and she didn’t apologize either. Instead, reluctantly, she confessed her fear about the surgery itself. She asked questions about physical pain and how it would be managed. She also told Dione she was afraid of having her appearance altered, that she was accustomed to her face the way it had always been and was worried about changing it. Even though she’d seen the post-surgery composites, she was afraid they might not be exact. She offered enough protest that it didn’t seem like she was faking it.

“You’re not the first to say as much,” Dione responded. “This same fear, though, is true when you’re a girl and you naturally grow into a woman—our faces all change. So too as people age—all but the immortals experience this same anxiety.”

Tyritha told her she hadn’t thought of it that way. Further, she listened patiently as the doctor told her of her own anxieties before her surgeries and how they’d all faded a few days after the procedures. And then, after Dione had seemed to relieve Tyritha of all her fears, she added a finishing touch.

“I wasn’t entirely honest,” Tyritha said, adopting a heavy tone and even a feigned look of shame as she did. “There’s nothing against it in my religion. There never was. I was just afraid, Dione. Surgery scares me, especially my face getting cut.”

“I can understand that,” the doctor replied. “We can ease your anxiety, dear. There are all number of ways, from meditation to medication and everything in between. We want you to feel comfortable, young miss.”

Erron arrived just as they were concluding that conversation. To Tyritha, it seemed a bit too timely for it to have been a coincidence. Dione took it as a cue to leave. All her measurements had been taken anyway. Tyritha and Erron were polite to the doctor and her assistant as they left, but Erron was quick to embrace her and whisper in Tyritha’s ear when she was gone.

“I don’t think we can trust her,” he said.

“Not a chance,” Tyritha agreed.

“I’m not sure she’d be the right one anyway.”

She told Erron with a look that she didn’t quite catch his meaning.

“We’re going to need a doctor to put you in stasis for your trip home.”

Just then Naomi returned. She immediately apologized for intruding on what seemed like an intimate moment. For a second, he couldn’t tell how much Tyritha’s servant had overheard. He was clearly startled by her sudden arrival.

“We would like a word alone,” Erron said. “Perhaps it would be best to go to the garden?”

“No,” Tyritha replied. “I’ve spoken with Naomi. She knows who I am.”

Erron looked some combination of surprised and troubled by that revelation. “And you’re okay drawing her into this?”

“All due respect, sir,” Naomi stated, “but I wouldn’t be put off it, even if Miss Tyritha asked.”

“Is that so?” he asked Naomi earnestly.

“I would regret it if I allowed her to face these troubles alone after swearing to serve her.”

“Even if it means defying the house?”

“Aren’t you a part of the house, sir?”

“I suppose that I am.”

“You see, sir, it’s just all so confusing. How could I know what to do?”

Her obsequious yet dull tone seemed so perfect and well-practiced that Erron couldn’t help but shake his head. It was a brief and sudden peek behind a curtain that he now realized had been there the entire time yet he wasn’t even aware existed. Tyritha smiled.

“If you care about Miss Tyritha, sir, you can’t tell them I’m not dumb.”

“You’ve won her over to our side?” Erron said to Tyritha.

“I’ve always been on her side,” Naomi replied. “Who else’s side is worth taking around here?”

He looked carefully at Naomi again, and he saw her perhaps for the first time. “Your secret is safe with me, Naomi. I’ll never betray your confidence.”

“Never’s a strong word, sir. But I appreciate the sentiment. You may speak openly in my presence.”

He nodded and turned back to Tyritha. “I got word late. Otherwise, I’d have been here as soon as Dione arrived.”

Tyritha looked confused by the statement.

“I have a servant watching your room,” he explained. “I don’t like the idea of them coming and going, demanding, intimidating. I won’t have it without at least knowing what they’re up to.”

“They’re up to scheduling my facial surgery,” Tyritha stated. “That’s all. Nothing we didn’t expect. Next week. And then for two weeks following, I wear the Arrdh.”

“It’s not as bad as you fear, miss,” Naomi assured her. “I had two sessions of facial remediation before I was allowed to take up this vocation within the house.” Suddenly, Tyritha’s servant couldn’t suppress a devious smile. “I actually didn’t mind the mask on occasion. That kind of invisibility has its advantages. Everyone who sees you makes assumptions, and they’re not always correct.”

“That’s an interesting thought,” Erron replied. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Of what?” Tyritha asked.

“The Arrdh. I think it’s possible if it were worn faithfully, it could make a convincing alibi if you were elsewhere, especially if you needed to be in two places at once.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I’ve just been thinking and thinking about different ways we might get you out of the cylinder,” Erron laughed. “I didn’t even once consider ...”

“You’ve never needed to sneak about, sir,” Naomi said, grinning. “It’s probably not a bad idea to have an expert in the area helping you along.”

“Right,” Erron agreed.

Suddenly, Tyritha took a deep breath and took Erron’s hand as though filled with a flash of inspiration. Then she gestured for Naomi to join them. By her eyes, Erron could tell the servant knew what her mistress intended. He wasn’t convinced she thought whatever Tyritha was up to was a good idea.

“We’re going to need to trust each other,” Tyritha declared. “We should pray on it.”

Erron’s look was skeptical to be sure, perhaps even a bit condescending. He did try to flatten his expression as Tyritha looked toward him and then smiled.

“Don’t worry. We won’t be casting any spells,” she said, grinning. “Come.”

She led them both over to her bedside and knelt. She could see Erron bristling at the prospect of kneeling with her there.

“This feels ... strange,” he said after spending a few seconds searching for the least offensive adjective that fit the situation.

“Would you indulge me, please, Erron? I’ve done a lot of things these past few weeks that feel strange to me, most of them to make people here feel comfortable. Kneeling with me shouldn’t be too far a bridge.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed.

“Spells, sir?” Naomi asked Erron.

“He thinks I think it’s magic,” Tyritha answered, smiling. “Talking to gods and angels. Things like that.”

“Well ...?” Naomi replied in a delicate tone. “No offense, miss, but isn’t it?”

Tyritha laughed. “Many people on Heinan think as much too. I’m not so offended.”

Before she began, Tyritha did her best to explain. Sometimes prayer was like that, but Tyritha told them that in their tradition to ask anything of God was vanity. The prayer was for the person. It helped one to see the truth in the matter, clarified their focus, reminded one of their core beliefs. That stone foundation Erron had sensed in Tyritha—she told him that it was only there through years of devoted work, laying that foundation herself in the same way a musician masters music or a dancer masters movement. She hadn’t fallen apart in Alysida, nor had she given in to their insistence that she adopt their ways, nor would she ever. Her foundation wouldn’t allow it.

“Each time I kneel in prayer, I remake myself,” she told them. “And each time I rise, I rise again a servant. This is our way—my people’s way.”

That Erron could understand. In a strange way, it resonated with him, and there was no mistaking the way it worked through Tyritha. He saw a certainty in her that was simultaneously terrifying and inspiring. There were two paths before them—the one where Tyritha escaped and made it home with her humanity intact, and the other where she was exposed and faced a potential life of punishment and pain that was as yet undefined, her humanity still intact. And the more they discussed both of those outcomes, the more certain Tyritha became that she wasn’t afraid. In the end, even if she died, she was still going home, going back where she came from.

Bit-by-bit, as she allowed Erron to see this side of her, he began to understand who she really was. He also began to understand why she’d been so reluctant to show it to him for so long. He wouldn’t have been able to understand it. Tyritha’s ideology made sense in a world where people lived in hardship—something he’d never really known, and may never yet for a long time if he fulfilled the destiny laid out for him by his people.

It was all so confusing. He believed he was doing the right thing, yet here he was, sneaking around behind the backs of his own people, deceiving, misrepresenting his intentions. At times like this, he thought, a foundation of his own would’ve been a welcome asset.

Erron spoke to the archon himself after word came back that the board had ruled unanimously that Tyritha should undergo the remediation on her chin. Tyritha was not the least bit surprised by their ruling. She understood that it wasn’t about her chin or aesthetics anymore. It was about compliance—a demonstration of her obedience. Erron’s request was not a major one. He asked the archon if the surgery could be completed in Arionidis. He told his mother that Tyritha had been asking about seeing more of their culture, and in the capitol, she’d be anonymous, especially wearing the Arrdh. That way she could have the procedure done, complete her recovery, and return to Arnur better prepared to be introduced to the people of her new home cylinder. The archon agreed that there was a certain symmetry to it—a sensible plan.

“I’m going to put you under the protection of your brother Krishna while you’re in the capitol,” she decided. “It’s only appropriate he be responsible. We both well know your sister won’t be.”

The archon also demanded that Tyritha be allotted an additional servant for the duration, as she would be isolated from Erron during her recovery and had no friends of her own in Arionidis.

“Remediation is a lonely time as is. In an unfamiliar place it could be even more difficult.”

“As you wish, archon. Tyritha is strong of mind, and she will be grateful for the opportunity to see our great capitol.”

“From behind the Arrdh, of course,” she reminded Erron. “The temptation will be there for an outsider to look upon the place unobstructed. She must adhere to our ways, outsider or no.”

“I’ll make sure Naomi sees to it, at all times.”

“And never you, dear Erron. There are no special exceptions for our traditions on account of her origins. A spouse is never to look upon his betrothed during remediation. That is for the doctors alone.”

“You have my word,” he promised his mother.

With the surgery scheduled, their window of opportunity would be closing. If no further remediations were necessary, which Dione and the medical experts agreed was the likeliest outcome, then as soon as Tyritha was healed, they would need to begin progressing toward the rites. That would be a matter of months at most. He had to find her a way out of Alysida and back to Heinan before then; otherwise, he feared, she would never get home.

Not only that, the more he considered the consequences of Tyritha rejecting the rites, the more he feared the potentially catastrophic reaction. It wasn’t even something he could think through properly. Nobody had ever done it—saying no to immortality? Rejecting admittance to the most exclusive society in all of human civilization? Whether they said it openly or not, they certainly thought of themselves in that way and acted like it too. The Dodonna family would be humiliated. More consequential than their own family’s reputation, though, Erron considered that such a rejection would affect the common people and how they thought of all the noble immortal families in Alysida. He couldn’t begin to predict anything, but he didn’t believe forgiveness would be forthcoming. A humiliation like that would demand humiliation in return. They wouldn’t simply let her go home. They couldn’t if they wanted to, not with Tyritha carrying knowledge of their distant society.

The more he thought about it, the more urgency Erron believed the situation demanded. He did his best to choke down his reservations when he set the next meeting with Petr Onager. This time, they would meet in Arionidis, and the meeting would be real. No more skirting around the issue, pretending to seek out information for some abstract reason. Erron needed something from that world, and he knew there would be a real cost. The only question was whether he’d ever be able to pay it.

To Tyritha, the trip to Arionidis seemed like the sorts of holidays people in Kmeno dreamed about. Her own people in Ceronka tended not to dwell on such things. They were desires grounded too much in the worldly that cost so much that they distracted one from God, from family, and from community. But where she worked in Kmeno, she’d heard people talking of such things—tours of the Protectorate, of the Inner Battery. One night at the shop, she’d even met a couple who were travelers. They’d been to Athos and Hellenia. They’d stayed at the Waterlands on Iophos. They’d even been to Floriston and seen the sunsets there. That man owned his own ship and made a living trading in various cargoes.

Whenever Tyritha or her brothers or sisters spoke of such things, her parents would remind them that all pleasures were fleeting, and that wealth was in God and in family and community, not in distant places and things.

That, she realized in recent days, was not strictly true. There was most definitely wealth in Arionidis—such wealth as Tyritha couldn’t fathom. Every building was beautiful, stylish, symmetrical. It wasn’t like Kmeno where the buildings were merely functional. In Arionidis, they all had their function, she presumed, but beyond that, each had a place in the layout that served the appearance of the street, the neighborhood, the city as a whole. On one street, as they walked, she noticed a theme in light—a streak that seemed crystal in makeup, and this shining ribbon within the wall shifted colors gradually, drawing the eye to it, and this eye-catching aspect took up more of each building’s edifice as they continued down the street to the main square in that section of the city. And in this piazza, in the center, the whole front face of the main building was entirely composed of crystal forms—beautiful, heroic figures sculpted in glass so clear it looked like water, yet somehow it carried the colors so well the forms were perfectly discernible from one another even as the colors shifted. Tyritha had never set eyes on anything so magical that had been crafted by human beings. And this was but one of the wonders of this gorgeous city.

The Dodonnas, like every great family in Alysida, had houses in Arionidis. The main family house was within the official government district and functioned much like an embassy, where the archon’s representatives and functionaries resided while in the capitol on official business for the house of Arnur. Of course, there were also many Dodonnas in the city as well—aunts, uncles, cousins, as well as in-laws—most of whom had dedicated space in their homes for distinguished guests like Krishna and Erron. So it wasn’t much trouble for Erron to find a host for his betrothed and her servants. The trick was choosing the one who would give him and Tyritha enough space while still feeling as though they were fulfilling their duties as a host. The surgery actually helped in this regard. Even the most intrusive of Erron’s cousins understood that remediation was a time where a Sepp would want nothing more than space, as well as peace and quiet.

Erron opted to stay with his great aunt again. She was mid-cylinder in Arionidis, which was some distance from Krishna in the Arnur House and the downtown villa where Tyritha and her servants were occupying the guest wing. This put space between him and all the others while they were in the capitol. And out in the middle of the cylinder, with everything going on near the hub, it was one of the few places in all of Alysida where Erron Aireum Dodonna could be somewhat anonymous. Certainly there were far more important Odai from major and minor houses for the ordinary people of Arionidis to keep their eyes on.

Even his aunt, who was happy to see him again, was content to welcome Erron back and immediately give him his space.

Within a few hours, he was taking advantage of it. Krishna had planned a formal dinner that evening at the family’s main house, where he would be expected to accompany Tyritha to meet Arnur’s representative in the governing board. But that wasn’t for several hours—more than enough time to make the meeting he’d scheduled that afternoon. He changed into unremarkable clothing, ditched his jewelry and watch, memorized the route to the social club, and headed out on foot to meet with Petr Onager again.

The social club was near the Terrintine section mid-cylinder—a good walk from the mid-central terminal where Erron’s great aunt lived. And the club was one of theirs. Not a great family by any means, the Terrintines, and the club, at first glance, was not a particularly fancy one. They had grass field games and racquet sports on the street level, a ballroom, and a large greeting area. But as Erron followed the directions he was given, down two levels to the Quarter Lounge, he was merely waved on by the staff there and given directions when he reached the second level.

The lounge itself was seemingly very casual looking, which was a novelty of its own in Arionidis. It was quiet and sparsely occupied at that hour of the afternoon, so it wasn’t difficult to pick out Onager, who was seated toward the back wall in a booth with another gentleman. They were both dressed well, which surprised Erron, who hardly would’ve recognized Onager if he’d passed him on the street, all dressed up like a finely-aged gentleman. The man seated across from him looked all of twenty-five. They very well could’ve been grandfather and grandson having a late lunch together, but Erron knew Onager never had a family. He didn’t know what to make of this new contact.

“Young Dodonna,” Onager said, eliciting an uncomfortable glance over both shoulders from Erron.

“Mr. Onager,” Erron responded, his voice low.

Onager shook his head at him. “It’s quite okay to talk here. This is Giras Terrintine, an old friend.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Erron said, shaking hands with both men before sitting beside Terrintine.

Onager signaled for one of the servers, instructing them to bring over a lager for all three men.

“What do you think of the club, Dodonna?” Giras Terrintine asked, looking over his shoulder at Erron, examining the young Sepp with a skeptical eye.

“Your family’s club, is it?”

Terrintine nodded.

“It’s quite large, isn’t it?” Erron replied, doing his best to find a positive feature without having to stretch the truth. “And very relaxed. I imagine it’s a great place to play a few games and spend a few carefree hours. That has to be an asset in a city like Arionidis.”

Giras Terrintine grinned, looking over at Onager. “I thought you said the boy wasn’t a good liar, Petr. I almost believe him myself.”

“Maybe I had you all wrong, young Dodonna,” Onager replied with a dark laugh. “Or maybe I had you measured just right.”

“Petr tells me you have a fascination with the contact groups,” Giras Terrintine remarked.

Erron nodded.

“He has a hunch that the fascination isn’t merely theoretical. I think he must be right if you came to meet with us here. You’re very well thought of in Arnur.”

“I like to think so.”

“It’s a risk to associate with people like Petr, you know?”

“And for you, Terrintine?” Erron asked.

“Old habit,” he replied. “Plus, the Odai in my family never thought much of me anyway.”

Erron shrugged, as though to signal that he didn’t much care what Giras’s family thought of him. But it was clear enough now by the conversation who Giras Terrintine was. Erron surmised that he was a sibling in the house who’d been rejected, and rather than taking that relegation to mortality as a foregone conclusion, he’d found another pathway on the contact crew—a life of loyal service, and now a long hereafter as a lesser member of the family, sent off to be another face in the crowd in Arionidis. And that face, now that Erron looked at it, was one that had taken a lot of work to reach even the passable belief that he might be an Odai. Ten surgeries at least.

“Old friends?” Erron asked him, nodding toward Petr Onager.

“Something like that,” Giras Terrintine answered. “We were on the contact crew together for quite a few years. So you have a fascination with the Battery. You’re also supposed to be taking a wife that was brought here from there, I’ve heard. I’m guessing that’s not a coincidence.”

The server returned with three glasses of cold beer, placing them on the table as each of the men grew silent, with the exception of Erron, who thanked the server as she placed his glass in front of him. He answered Giras Terrintine as soon as she stepped away.

“It’s not a coincidence. How exactly do you know about my fiancé?”

Giras shrugged. “It’s a small community—the contact groups are. Even smaller the few of us who do what we do.”

“I see.”

“It’s expensive, you know. I should say that up front. Even for an Odai from a good house like Arnur. Anything that comes in from the Battery has a princely duty on it. That’d be a way to put it. What did you have in mind for her? Comforts of home?”

“My understanding is that there are few comforts in the part of Heinan where she comes from,” Erron replied. “If any.”

“Then what?”

“A person.”

Giras Terrintine laughed. “My boy, you don’t want to know what it must’ve cost your family to bring in that bride of yours. Money, you suppose? Far more likely it was a favor someone on the governing board owed someone in your house. A life debt. And you want to what? Bring in a beloved sister or a best friend or something?”

Erron looked back at Giras, trying to gauge whether coming to meet them had been a grave mistake.

“It’s something different, Terry,” Petr Onager said, observing, glaring into Erron’s eyes. “What is it, boy?”

Erron was reluctant to say.

“At this point you have no other choice,” Terrintine said. “We’ll figure out the rest on our own eventually if you don’t tell us.”

“She wants to go home,” Erron replied.

Terrintine exhaled in a way that was neither a gasp nor a laugh. He was half shaking his head in disbelief.

“Homesick?” Petr Onager stated. “And willing to die to cure it?”

“Might as well put her out of her misery right now,” Terrintine said, scoffing.

Erron glared at him.

“You care for her?” Onager said. “Don’t you, young Dodonna?”

“What does that have to do with anything? We’re discussing business, are we not?”

“Are we now? Really? Best business decision for you would be to knock her on the head and pitch her out the nearest airlock and be done with it, then take the prettiest third cousin who throws herself at your feet.”

Onager could tell by the way Erron glared back at him that he’d struck a nerve.

“It’s curious,” Giras Terrintine said, taking a healthy gulp of his lager. “He loves her but he wants to send her away at the same time. And I thought we would be stealing family pictures for a king’s ransom. I wouldn’t even know where to start, Dodonna. Sending a person back? I don’t think it’s possible.”

“It’s possible,” Petr Onager insisted. “I just don’t think young Dodonna here’s going to like it, not as much as he’d like the girl by his side when he takes the rites.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Terrintine replied.

“We can start at my price,” Petr Onager said. “If you want this, Erron Dodonna, I’m going to want back everything they took from me. You promise me that much, and then we can begin.”

(Part 34 of “The Misfits” series)

Fieldstone had waited long enough. He’d taken it as far as he could himself, and it was time to tell the others—to share what he remembered and hope they could help him to understand what it all meant. His mind was filled with images from a dead civilization, some of which he could make sense of, others just haunted.

When Carolina and the others left on Nilius’s ship, she told him that she would hear his story when they met up again, but that was weeks away now. Fieldstone couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. He sat the others down at the atrium table once they were underway. He told them he was going to talk. He asked them not to interrupt until he was finished.

“You’re welcome to make notes if something stands out. It’s going to take all of us to figure everything out. It’s bigger than we thought.”

Some of them nodded. Others just looked at him in that familiar way—the way his teams used to look at him before a mission. What are we doing? How are we doing it?

He did his best to channel that energy. Then he began.

From what Ren told you, some of you may remember that we were gradually turned into technological beings—bipals. And that alone seemed a lifetime’s worth of experience, hanging on to what we were before going through that artifact, inhabiting those other bodies, taking up lives that didn’t belong to us. And they made us cut pieces of those human lives away, until the only thing left was the technological body we’d formed from those children we’d inhabited. By the end of it, I had two emotions remaining—anger and love. The last thing they forced me to do before they made the technological part of me complete was to destroy the only remaining piece of the universe I loved. They made me stab her in the heart to spare her the horrendous fate I knew was ahead.

When it was done, I knew that their plan to break me had failed. I was still angry, but I also still loved her and knew that nothing could ever destroy that. So I was unafraid when they told me it was time to be fully transformed. Whatever happened, even if I died, I would die Fieldstone, not Bo, not a loveless machine.

I wasn’t sure the transformation was going to work for me. Part of me expected to wake up again here, sent back, because that’s the way we know the artifacts work: if we die in that world, we come back to our own. I wasn’t sure if I could be more dead than what they were going to make me.

At first, when my human life ended there, I thought it was death. They told me I wouldn’t experience anything, but they were wrong about that too. I’ll never forget what I did experience—nothingness. It was both overwhelming and also not even really there, like the black of space but only darker, because there was no capacity to even perceive the blackness. And somehow, I did. Eternity and no time at all. All at once. Yet I still had thoughts. I thought that I had died there in that world, inside that artifact, inside a body that somehow must have still been considered alive—a technological body. And I feared, as I did when I woke up again, that I was now stuck there in that black purgatory inside that artifact forever, perhaps until the universe ended. Perhaps it never would.

Suddenly, though, I was back, I was Bo again. My chronometer registered that exactly 21,346 seconds had elapsed during that black eternity. And my first thought was that my world—this world of ours—was lost to me forever, because I’d died inside the artifact and I hadn’t come back home. I’d died there once already, and I had no reason to believe I wouldn’t just go back to that blackness again once Bo’s technological mind was destroyed in that world. But also, on some level, I knew this world could never be completely lost to me, because I still had that one precious memory of that moment just before the universe had gone black, the anger and the love. And if I still remembered that I loved, I knew they could never take that from me. I decided that I would hold it close to me and continue, so that’s what I did.

That is how my story began.

It’s a cliche to say that words fail. People say it so often when human experience is too overwhelming to describe something powerful or confusing or painful or awe-inspiring. But what happened to me next was not a human experience. It was so inhuman I imagine it was every bit as confusing as the moment a newborn baby enters the world—bright lights, shock, confusion, and the complete lack of capacity to comprehend. Only Rishi could possibly know. But from my understanding, she was made bipal within a limited environment, with only the ship’s computers and sensors as inputs. In my case, I found myself immediately swimming in a sea of unlimited information, and I possessed an ability to process it that was similarly shocking. It was as though my mind expanded beyond a boundary of the sense of self. The only way I can describe existing in that way is as though you imagined your entire body being the breadth of a world and all the things on it—the sensory input of every plant, every person, every bird—even the bacteria in the soil. All that in a second.

Next, I realized that time was not what I thought it was inside that borrowed technological mind of Bo’s. You can experience a lifetime in a nanosecond, so time really has no meaning unless you choose it. Otherwise, you could live almost an eternity in data. But I was so overwhelmed by the sensation, I did what came to me naturally. I sought out something familiar, and I found it in the life of a single man.

His name was Nolomin Hart, and he had been dead for decades, but his life had been recorded, or at least much of it had been. It was only in his life that I could begin to orient myself to where I truly was.

Ren and I had guessed that the place the artifact had sent us was another branch of humanity that had come from the columns, but we had no idea when and where these people existed in relation to our civilization. Nolomin’s life confirmed this belief.

Nolomin Hart woke on the ship, brought out of stasis aboard the Indus above a planet the colonists would come to call Cresci. His parents were prominent figures in the colonial expedition, and the planet was like none I’d ever experienced in the Battery. It was oblong, owing to the odd gravitational pull of the dual suns that orbited each other along an opposing axis to the system’s planetary disk. Yet somehow, for all the madness of physics, both the planet itself and its weather proved to be remarkably stable. And even more remarkable, quite a few regions on the surface were not overtly fatal to human life. But for the descendants of the columns, having spent millennia buried inside rock underground, the natural light of this world proved overwhelmingly radiant, so they chose to make their homes in the shadows of the many cliff faces whose mountainous backs braced against the natural light of these dual suns.

They landed. They settled. They began to build.

At first, the settlement was small, not unlike what Kristoff described the first days of Charris to be, only there was no hardship there on Cresci. The prevailing mood was joyful, almost magical. These were people who couldn’t believe their luck—being the ones chosen to emerge from hiding after generations of their predecessors had lived their entire lives as torch-bearers, destined only to keep the flame of humanity burning for another far distant descendant to light once more on another planet. These were the lucky few chosen to light the flame of humanity again, and they were in awe of their role. They took it seriously as they reveled in it. Never have I met a people so overflowing with gratitude.

They learned to work the rock. They built lasers that cut. Then, being the people of the columns, they quickly built great, powerful excavators that carved out tremendous underground tunnels into the canyon walls, and they built structures on the surface in the shade. All of these events unfolded as though from Nolomin Hart’s eyes. This city in the canyon they called Annantifor grew year-by-year, just as the community that inhabited it flourished. And I experienced that too from Nolomin’s perspective: his friends becoming as friends to me, his family akin to my own. The only difference between living his life like that and living my previous life as Bo on Yaal was that Nolomin Hart’s life had happened. It was over. So it was like watching it unfold on replay, experiencing it as a voyeur. It was peaceful and joyful and rewarding, watching humanity grow into the stars and make a vacant new planet a vibrant home.

And then I walked in the path of his children, all the while, overhead in orbit, the Indus circled most years, surveying the planet’s surface and weather, mapping atmospheric patterns, cataloging stellar behavior, perfecting their models of the magnetic dynamo in the planet’s molten core.

For some of those years, though, the Indus would slip away, venturing throughout the nearby systems in search of new worlds to settle, before returning again to share their discoveries with the settlers established below.

It was in these experiences I first began to understand the fundamental difference in their strategy to colonize the stars. I’m certain people more brilliant than me would find it less than a revelation. But for me, I couldn’t have begun to understand how our people became what we did until I saw it done another way.

In our corner of the galaxy, Charris was the one seed world, and for reasons that make more sense now that we’ve learned more of the early days from Kristoff, it was the single point of departure for every colony in the Battery. But that was not how the Indus had planned to operate in what I guess we should call the Indus Civilizations.

They did not know where the columns were. They’d traversed for several years in stasis according to the ship’s chronometers, and like us, they relied upon a similar cohort of Prime AIs to direct their vector of travel and select a primary site for settlement. And similar to what Kristoff reported of the AIs on early Charris, they seemed to suffer a bout of selective amnesia when it came to their origins and the location of the columns, presumably for the protection of that initial settlement, and also, presumably, because the people of the columns perceived some sort of external threat if they were ever discovered. This was likely why they left Earth, I suspect, and why they guarded their whereabouts so carefully. Of that, though, I have no direct evidence, just a strong hunch.

Until I saw the Indus with my own eyes and witnessed truly that this was an entirely different branch of the human diaspora in space, I wasn’t certain that there had been another colony ship originating from the columns. This might seem a small point, but historically, for us, this is no small matter. We believe, and from every indication I encountered from these Indus civilizations it seems to be true, that our ancestors came to the columns on one vessel. The existence of two outgoing colony ships means that eventually the people of the columns must have developed the industrial capacity to build FTL ships. This also means that it is likely that more pockets of humanity like our own exist throughout the galaxy, and likely, given what we’ve learned from these two, it seems to be a feature of our ancestors in the columns that they send out these vessels with a case of amnesia about their origins, again, likely to guard against revealing their location.

The point I mentioned about building ships—that was the most important point of all, and one I will return to in more depth before my story is finished. But for now, it features in the strategy of these Indus civilizations to settle the cluster of stars near Cresci, where they first arrived. Unlike on Charris, where our ancestors arrived, settled, expanded to the point the planet was well populated, and only then began the era of colonization after many centuries; the Indus peoples instead landed with their initial crew, settled upon Cresci, and set about immediately repopulating the ship with another generation of settlers to be sent out to do the same. Their goal was to push off again after the settlement of every new planetary outpost within a quarter century. Thus, the Indus had to be a busy ship and its people a busy people.

If you remember the person of Nolomin Hart, whose life I experienced as an observer, he and his wife had seven children, the three oldest of whom became settlers aboard the Indus as it traversed thirty-eight light years to Yamora, a slightly harsher environment where automated framing bots had already constructed bubble habitats for them to settle and populate while terraforming operations began.

Then, just like before, the twenty-five-year timeline reset, and the settlers on Yamora began to replicate the work their parents had completed on Cresci. Only now, the ship’s original crew—those who’d operated the Indus during the first leap to a second world—worked to train the next generation of spacefarers to take their place as the ship’s stewards. And, when the quarter-century benchmarks were met on Yamora, with another colony established and growing, the terraforming in progress, and the full ship’s complement selected, they continued on again to a new outpost. This time on Meidagg.

During all this time I explored the expansion of the Indus worlds, I was still Bo. I was still completely unaware of where I was, whether I was embodied or disembodied, or how much time was passing as I experienced these decades and decades of settlement, exploration, and resettlement. But I remained there with them through seven iterations of the process, before I saw something familiar on arrival—a green moon. And below, a mountain megastructure towering over a desolate plain, and I knew its name before the people called it what they came to call it—Yaal—that place where I and Ren had been transported to by the artifact, lived as children, and were brutally transformed into bipals. Only then did I begin to understand who and what we had become. At that point, though, I still had no sense why.

In all those decades I was immersed in the lives of these Indus ancestors, I still had no sense of Bo and what had happened to the body of that boy who’d become the bipal mind I was possessing through the artifact. It had seemed to me like everything I’d experienced to that point had been a choice of mine, but when I was ripped from that stream of consciousness as my ancestors began to inhabit Yaal, I could feel that it was not of my choosing.

I found myself fully embodied in an android shell. It had only a few recognizable pieces of the body I’d been given as Bo, and that, I presumed, was so I could recognize it as my own in that moment.

“You are waking up,” a familiar voice said to me. “Go easy. Remember that you are Bo of the Shirvahl. You are still here on your home planet of Yaal. My voice, you still recognize.”

I did. It was Maícon, who stood embodied beside my new body. He continued speaking as I continued to adjust to the sensation of returning to a body.

“Once, you revered me as the god of your people. Now you will come to understand what we really are, both of us, and why we must be what we are, for it is the only true hope of humanity.”

I looked around, and I could see that we were in a part of that mountain complex on Yaal that I’d never seen before, along the back half of the mountain. My mind had access to the schematics, not just of our range, but of all Yaal, and there were hundreds of other complexes just like it built into the sides of the mountains of that world. Such would the descendants of those peoples of the columns do—burrow into the rocks for safety and security as the environment of the planet became harsher and harsher. What I hadn’t known until that moment was why—that Yaal was a key industrial materials source in the war effort, and the need was so urgent that care could not be taken. The only consideration was speed. Rare minerals and metals needed to be extracted at pace, regardless of the cost to the planet’s inhabitants. If they could not, then all would be lost and the point moot.

“Now I must tell you of our enemy, Bo,” Maícon said, while I continued to search my mind for ways to gain control of it, but I was not fully in control yet.

The ordinals had appeared, most fortunately for these Indus civilizations, at the outermost stretch of the chain of settled planets. At time of first contact, our colony group was thirteen planets long. By the time of my awakening as Bo, this enemy had consumed four and were on their way to Yaal. My understanding in the moment was that they were seven years away.

It was luck for the Indus worlds that the Indus herself was elsewhere along the string when the ordinals arrived. We did not know it then, for technologically advanced as they were, they had not mastered FTL travel, and that one colony ship of our ancestors proved to be our only strategic advantage. It was not luck, however, that none of the scientists nor the data and schematics were present on the worlds in any capacity but one—in the memories of the prime AIs.

And here I must explain the most fundamental truth about tools and human populations, something I did not know, as I came from a world of billions, where technological complexity was not limited by population. This is not the case with small communities of people. It is a sort of natural law that for every technology, depending on its complexity, a certain number of experts are required both to bring it into being, to maintain it once it has been invented—whether that means repair or manufacture of replacement—and to distribute it within the society. The more complex the technology, the higher number of experts are required. Similarly, extremely high-tech infrastructure is interconnected, with the existence of apex technologies relying upon other high-tech devices to manufacture the tools required to build them, much in the same way a tall building must be built from the ground up, floor by floor, where no floor can be framed until the one beneath it is solid enough to support it. FTL engines are one of humanity’s apex technologies. Even with the schematics, the technological expertise, and the scientific underpinning within the society, when your population is seventy-thousand and your tools are limited to the bare necessities of building out a new colony, you must spend generations training scientists and engineers who will build the tools that will build the infrastructure that will eventually build the tools that can build the tools to manufacture your first FTL engine. And that is for a civilization that already knows the path to that outcome.

Obviously, with a technological society that already possesses the necessary scientific knowledge, that pathway can be shortened—even engineered to be the primary goal of the civilization.

This was not necessarily the case with the Indus civilizations. We did not proceed with this urgency from the outset. The people of Cresci prioritized building Cresci into a home they could be proud of, and they, like all the other planets in the group, grew under the presumption of isolation. If the galaxy was empty of other intelligent life, as all prior evidence suggested, then it made no sense to rush to a war footing against an unknown and unknowable enemy. Under that presumption of isolation, they built their societies instead. The Indus and her FTL engine served the purpose of connecting our distant worlds while our colonies got their feet squarely underneath them.

And in Yaal, it was the same. Bo’s ancestors had built with the expectation that they would be free to build as our own ancestors on Charris had—unencumbered by any outside forces. The early settlers of Yaal built great megastructures into the mountainsides while also constructing tremendous engines for terraforming the planet’s nearly breathable atmosphere. They operated mines. They manufactured robotics assembly plants. They incorporated tiered farming infrastructure into each of their new compounds so that every enclosed city could grow its own food independent of outside suppliers. They’d even begun to develop underground transport systems between the mountainous megastructures. I could see these things in Bo’s mind as Maícon showed me our past there on Yaal. These were images of a society that would have been utterly alien to Bo himself, being so much in contrast to the Yaal he was born into. But for me, the visitor in Bo’s mind, I could see so much that was familiar—the bubble worlds along the corridor; the images I’ve seen of the rings over Floriston; the towers of Hellenia and their deep subterranean roots. This had been a human civilization well in formation.

Maícon continued speaking to Bo in a human way, or so it seemed at the time, attempting to educate me on the state of the civilization.

Xandi was the newest and least developed of the worlds, and by the time Maícon and I were speaking, it had long since fallen to our enemies and was lost. The fates of the humans on the outpost could only be left to our imaginations, but all indications were that if they were alive, they could be no more than slaves to the invaders.

The ordinals were a technological species. They came from the sky like a meteor and impacted like one. There was a crater with a thin gray dust-like film covering the floor of the crater and the open, sandy landscape around it.

Curious, the scientists on Xandi took samples with them back to the outpost, only to find a sort of nanotech that functioned like a technological bacteria, seeking out materials to replicate and amplify the colony’s reach. Whatever intelligence seemed to be within the nanite colony wasn’t overtly evident immediately. And, as I discussed earlier, the difficulty of dealing with such an invasion was amplified by the limited tools of the people on Xandi. Such a probe—as the meteor proved to be—would’ve been a problem on a world like Hellenia or Etterus, but civilizations such as those would’ve had thousands of scientists and a vast range of technological countermeasures to bring to bear on it. Xandi was slow to recognize the threat and largely defenseless once it did.

As Maícon was speaking, my mind became aware of options. I could suddenly access files. I could split my consciousness, such that I was continuing my conversation with Maícon as I felt a part of my mind break away. In between the microseconds Maícon was uttering syllables and then words, I was living out years on Xandi alongside the scientists who were working to discover the scope of the problem. I was in the body of a colony administrator who worked under the Chief of the Colony. I learned of their discoveries as they did, watched them make mistake after mistake in their naïve approach, failing, from the outset, to attack this invading entity in the same way they would have attacked an invading army. Instead, they studied, tried to learn what encouraged growth and what deterred it, all the while the dust around the crater solidified its foothold and began to organize into more complex structures, adapting to use the molecular materials at hand.

By the time the people on Xandi realized the nanite colony was spreading beyond the point they could control it, there was nothing they could do but call out for help. That, it turned out, was the most and best they could have done.

When the Indus returned to the outermost stop on her rounds, she was greeted by a distress call of sorts, describing in clear terms what had befallen the colony. The people’s efforts had shifted from establishment of the city, familial growth, and the building of infrastructure to the creation of countermeasures. They had hoped that several of the ship’s systems could be brought to bear.

I experienced that communication from the standpoint of the administrator on the colony. The commander of the Indus, flanked by the same embodied Maícon who spoke to me now, asked one question: “Do these entities seem to have any intelligent organizational structure to them?”

“Oh, yes, very much so,” the Chief of the Colony answered earnestly.

Whether it was meant to be transmitted or was merely overheard wasn’t evident to the administrator on the planet below. But he plainly heard Maícon utter the following words in a grave tone:

“Under no circumstances is the planet to be approached.”

Instead, the Indus left a ring of emergency contact buoys in space encircling Xandi’s star at mid system. At Maícon’s direction, they were both hardened and fragile in certain clever ways—hardened, in that they could not be accessed without prior knowledge of their access codes and methodologies for communicating, and fragile in that any unsuccessful attempt at communicating with it would prompt the buoy to self-destruct.

When the commander of the Indus contacted the colony again, he told the people of Xandi that they were duty bound to fight the invading entity using every conceivable methodology at their disposal. They were to report all progress as they did, detailing their fight as though someone was in the system listening at all times. And, they were promised that if other peoples of the Indus civilizations learned enough from their fight that it would be safe to lend assistance, they would return to render aid. The Indus herself, though, could not be risked. This was the beginning of the struggle.

To the peoples of the Indus worlds, the actions of the ship’s commander, taken at Maícon’s explicit insistence, appeared overly harsh and heartless. It was said by more than one leader of these colonies that their reaction was one only an AI would take: turning their backs on their fellow humans in their hour of need—that was, if the threat was indeed as dire as it was made to be believed. And though for a time the commander did waver when confronted, Maícon was unequivocal. He reminded these children of the columns that unlike their human ancestors on Earth, none of them had lived through a pandemic nor had witnessed first-hand how easily a bacterial growth could spread from person to person.

“This plague,” he warned them, “is already far more deadly.”

It was a trap. It was merciless and already beyond containment on Xandi. It had already begun to burrow down into the dirt. It was already floating in the air. It would catch a ride on any person, ship, or probe that visited the planet and returned to the Indus, lying dormant until it could infect the next world with its probing presence.

“Mark my words on this, my friends,” he told every human who would listen, “the only way to fight this enemy is quarantine. And that is but the first line of defense in a greater war. Something far graver is on the horizon. You see but the tips of your enemy’s sails.”

It was a metaphor mostly lost on a people who’d never seen an ocean, much less sailed on a seagoing vessel. But Maícon explained that it was, in times past, because of the curvature of the Earth, that the tips of the sails of the front ships in an enemy’s armada became visible first. The bulk of the enemy remained hidden below the horizon, and you couldn’t see what you were in for until they were mere miles from your own fleet or shore. Here, he assured us, there had to be something else beyond the horizon. He pleaded with the leaders of the colonies to observe the quarantine until they were certain of the shape and size of the enemy armada.

They demanded to know why he was so adamant—whether he knew something.

“I am adamant,” he responded, “because prudence demands it.”

Over the course of the ensuing decade, prudence eventually won out, as the structures the nanites on Xandi began to construct became more elaborate and confounding to the scientists attempting to deter them. Eventually, on a return to check the communications buoys, the Indus arrived to find all of the buoys fried. They were able to piece together a sense of what had happened by determining when they’d gone dead. The ship then retreated to the appropriate distance where they could see the light from Xandi as the event unfolded, rippling out into the galaxy from a planet that was now fully lost to us. Then the Indus trained her telescopes and sensors on our sister world and saw as the atmosphere became, somehow, significantly overcharged, and let out a blinding burst of light and ionic energy, such that it nearly crippled the Indus even months removed from its origin point while traveling at the speed of light.

“That is their beacon,” Maícon declared. “And now that they’ve called, someone will answer. The only question is when. We must warn the other worlds. They must all be prepared to fight.”

Twenty-seven years passed between the time the beacon made its interstellar call and the day its light arrived at Yaal. During those years, the strongest force the Indus worlds had as cause to prepare was Maícon’s unwavering admonition. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to convince everyone to mobilize against the threat. They couldn’t even see it on their horizon yet, and thus, they couldn’t properly perceive the scope of the threat. Even with the Indus reporting, the sails were still yet invisible.

Though the worlds understood that something had changed, the majority did not see the threat as existential. Most of the leadership of the worlds committed to dedicating some of their resources and efforts toward preparing for conflict, but these worlds were still far more committed to the growth of their societies. Yaal, though, was the exception. The leadership, a committee of executives, assigned a Chief of Defense vested with almost absolute authority. Stanra Rudward, was, by that time, a third-generation colonist with a disagreeable nature but a reputation for productivity. He was the administrator who’d taken the most difficult jobs that needed to be completed without regard for making friends along the way. And at seventy-two, he’d made few. The joke amongst the governing counsel was that even his wife and children didn’t like Stanra Rudward, but they still listened to him.

Immediately upon examining the situation, the data and footage Maícon presented, as well as the strong case the prime AI made for mobilizing an all-encompassing defense of the civilization, Rudward identified Yaal as the most logical seat for that defense. It was developed enough and rich enough in resources to mobilize an industrial capacity the younger worlds couldn’t. Yet it was close enough to the incursion that it might, if it mounted a valiant fight, buy enough time for the older, larger Indus worlds to properly mobilize in time to save the civilization.

With Xandi already lost, Rudward directed Yaal’s resources toward preparing the newer worlds for a similar incursion as that outermost planet of the Indus worlds.

As before, the ship was the key. Only now, the crew of the Indus was left with no choice but to redefine her purpose. And this was particularly painful, as they were all either colonists born on Xandi themselves or the colonizers of Xandi, born on Antion, a mere six light years away. And suddenly, instead of retiring to Xandi, as the senior crew were expecting as the reward for a life dedicated to the fleet, or continuing on to Katerina, the next identified colonial outpost, as the younger crew had assumed their fate to be, now they were all destined to be spacefarers and warriors, regardless of whether they agreed with Maícon and Rudward’s assessment of the threat.

Designing defenses against a similar nanite meteor impact seemed the prudent first step. And while the Indus surveyed the outer worlds looking for signs of similar suspicious meteors, Rudward directed the scientific minds on Yaal to design a deep-space network of sensors to detect threats before they entered the Indus systems. Yaal herself, began the process of transitioning from colonial growth as its primary focus toward a martial society, which, at that time meant a regimental focus on weapons design and manufacturing. The inner worlds would be drafted to produce at scale as the forward planets identified effective designs.

This period still preceded my life as Bo on Yaal by decades. I was experiencing these years of uncertainty from perspectives all along the string of the Indus worlds. I lived dozens of lives in seconds during that time Maícon was orienting Bo to the reality of the struggle. I traveled as a crew member on the Indus. I lived as an administrator on Cresci. I designed and built magnificent urban structures on Yamora. Or so it felt as I lived those voyeuristic lives. And the sentiment varied from person to person, planet to planet, the most prominent sentiment of which was disbelief. Was there really something out there? Xandi had gone quiet? How could we lose contact with one of our worlds? Why were we not rendering aid?

And it’s almost impossible for a warrior of our society to see this other society at the start of their war and understand how naïve they could be. We humans live under the incredible frenetic spark of the moment. It is almost impossible for a society that fights its battles in minutes, hours, days, and years to fathom an enemy who measures its progress in centuries and millennia. In a thousand years we can arrive and colonize a planet from a few thousand settlers to billions of native inhabitants who know nothing but that world. A technological race that cannot travel faster than point-three C is willing to spend a thousand years in transit to their next beachhead with no complaints, no desire to deviate from course, no other designs than what is demanded of it—land here, replicate, survey, subordinate. It makes no difference if it takes a hundred thousand years.

In ten years, Yaal had transformed itself into a fortress. By then, we were getting the first sense of the shape of our enemies on Xandi.

Through the first decade of the incursion, with Maícon, Rudward, and the crew of the Indus acting as the central drivers of defense theory, all eyes were trained outward on the cosmic deep. The prevailing thought was that the beacon from Xandi had been directed toward nearby forces that would pick up the signal and respond with an invading force.

As I was experiencing this history, one of the central questions I had as Bo, but also as myself, as Fieldstone, was why these Indus peoples had turned their own children into bipals. I knew that some turn in this war must have compelled them toward this anti-human response, but this was the first piece.

So much of the collective effort of the Indus worlds in that first decade was directed toward detecting the hordes of enemy ships we were convinced would materialize out of the darkness in our midst. All the while, we hardly watched Xandi, figuring it lost—quarantined. Nor could we see what was becoming of our lost world. Even when our sensors encircling the system went silent, we still did not fully comprehend.

They did not need to come at all. The ordinals were already there.

When the asteroids of the Xandi system disappeared and the planet herself grew hot and bright with technological and industrial activity, the ships we expected to appear from the depths of space instead materialized from Xandi herself. Maícon lamented his shortsightedness, even though he was the most vociferous in ringing the alarm. The seed of the Indus bipal race was born on that day, when Maícon declared his kind unsuited to lead in the matters of warfare. It was for a very specific purpose that the prime AIs of the columns were built with certain cognitive limitations. They were designed to be stewards of humanity, facilitators of growth and progress, advisors and companions, never destroyers. It wasn’t that AIs weren’t capable of diabolical and destructive patterns of thought. But our AIs weren’t—Maícon and all his partners in the Indus constellation of worlds. And that single early foolish oversight sent him back along the route between worlds ringing the alarm again. This time with images of stunning fleets of unmanned ships and of Xandi, lit up like a single monumental planet-sized processor. And suddenly, a decade late, the Indus worlds had no choice but to take notice.

It began in increments. Artemis knew that records of the darkest techs in Earth’s history had survived the traverse across the cosmic deep to the columns. But no one knew whether any of those records had been brought aboard the Indus. A search began but quickly identified a potentially fatal flaw in the programming of the prime AIs. The Indus’s resident AI—Neophor—had access to every file in every system in the vessel’s complete history. But he, like Maícon and the others, was afflicted with the same limitations. It was quickly discovered that a programmatic blind spot was present in Neophor’s mind, and he was incapable of remembering them, even if he had handled, transported, transferred, or stored such files. By then, if such an archive were in existence in the Indus worlds, the original steward was both long dead and unknown, its location similarly lost. What was needed was a search engine equally powerful to the AIs with no such engrained protocols.

There was, of course, no shortage of information on technological brain adjuncts in the ship’s medical database. The Indus peoples, being from the columns, were also Purists, just like our peoples who descend from Charris. But, like us too, they knew plenty about neurotech for the purposes of medical intervention. And here, the slippery slope began.

By that time, Rudward was very old, and he subscribed to the common belief among the Indus peoples that the duty of the elderly was to support the younger generations through self-sacrifice. He was quick to volunteer his mind for neural experimentation. His expectation, and the expectation of the medical experts of the time, was that the adoption of these old techniques would not be a smooth process. Rudward was fully prepared to endure the most agonizing mistakes as the first volunteer in the application of trial an error to rediscover this mostly lost art. Fortunately for him, all of the experts and Rudward himself were wrong.

From the first adjunct, Rudward became as sharp and alert as he had in his prime, while gaining remote access to the Indus’s databases and control systems. Suddenly, also, Rudward became a strategic genius with a streak of maniacal madness in his vision. Where Maícon’s initial oversight became glaring, Rudward’s updated reaction stunned the committee on Yaal, who’d known the man for the entirety of their lives. His predictions were so stark and cutting that no one could fathom such outcomes, and still, Rudward insisted that they weren’t nearly frightened enough. He demanded that the entirety of the Indus civilization be mobilized to combat the threat, and Rudward doubted that even that would be enough. He created a list of bullet points in a style that could only have been Rudward alone.

Presume:

• that the nanites on Xandi are small enough and hardy enough to survive a transit from Xandi to our other worlds

• that they are already on the way

• that they are traveling at high velocities

• that they gained access to all of our digital archives on Xandi, and thus, know the locations of our other worlds

• that the ships being formed in the Xandi system are but one prong of the coming assault

• that the technological presence on Xandi operates with no urgency and on an unlimited timeline

• that one breach of the defenses of any single one of our planets may be fatal to that world

• that the darkness and vastness of space makes the challenge of defending an almost infinite frontline nearly impossible over time

Presume all that, and then begin to understand the urgency with which we all must respond without delay if we wish to endure as a civilization.

In his now exponentially sharper mind, Rudward saw a people too slow to comprehend. Even as they adopted his policies and edicts, transforming the growing world of Yaal in the process, he expressed to the AIs and the crew on the Indus that his greatest fear was that his body would give out before he could convince the other leaders of the urgency. He tried to tell them it wasn’t a war. This was the extinction of humanity. Yet, he lamented, that because it wasn’t happening fast enough, they would all be subsumed by the inevitability of the slow wave.

The first ships in our defensive fleet took shape around Emircut, a moon in the system of Astor that was wreathed in metallic asteroids, selected for those properties that made it easy to mine, refine, and build at scale without the challenge of a large gravity well. None of the Indus worlds was large enough yet in industrial capacity to support a space lift. This also meant that our one advantage—the Indus herself—remained the sole example of such. We couldn’t build an FTL engine, and even with the entire focus of our civilizations adapted toward that goal, we couldn’t have achieved it in half a century at the earliest. Again, our problem was the problem at the root of colonial civilization—we didn’t have the tools to build the tools to build the things we needed to take full advantage of our one advantage. Instead, we had to rely on the Indus, and we had to guard her with the understanding that she was our only hope. Without her, we could progress no faster than our enemy. In the case that the Indus were lost and then Yaal fell, for example, the best we could do would be to send out a message in the days before our demise that would only arrive to the other worlds in time to give our allies mere days of lead time to prepare themselves. With the Indus, we could relay news, adapt our strategies, re-deploy people and resources, and prepare the colonies for the crawling advance of the wave.

Our ships from Emircut were destroyed swiftly after first contact with the enemy in interstellar space. That wave was largely exploratory, almost exclusively automated, and designed to test the enemy’s strategy.

Rudward was still with us, even though his flagging body left him bedbound aboard the ship. And his mind, sharp as ever, began to push for total upload so he could continue to oversee the civilization’s defenses. By then, four of the prime AIs were permanent crew as well. Maícon, Precops, Artemis and Neophor resided aboard the Indus, and they agreed, after witnessing the complete failure of our first line of defenses outside Emircut, that our staunchest defender could not be lost. But they didn’t think we had the capacity to completely transfer Rudward’s mind to a technological platform. They had no knowledge of an attempt, let alone a success story.

Rudward himself, though, was undaunted. Modeling was declaring his body’s death to be imminent, and he shocked the crew and AIs alike by declaring with certainty that it was possible and that one of the AIs could show them how.

“We need to go back to Cresci,” he declared. “We need to find Eddis Ali.”

When I witnessed the moment as Bo, I was observing from the perspective of an early crew member of the Indus. I hadn’t even been aware of Eddis Ali’s presence on Cresci all those years before. Nolomin Hart certainly hadn’t been. There were the four AIs on the ship. Certainly Maícon had clones of himself and his child Saraswathi all over the Indus worlds. I never saw Kayella or Boggs, nor Nilius—though Neophor looked and sounded so much like a twin I couldn’t help but think of him as Nilius’s twin. But Miliner was a frequent traveler between worlds aboard the Indus. I didn’t think Eddis Ali was even present in that branch of humanity. Bo would’ve had no knowledge of his existence. I—Fieldstone I mean—hardly knew of Eddis Ali in our own world before encountering our crew. What I knew of him here in our own society was that he was supposedly the one tasked with keeping such technologies as mind-uploading out of human hands. As we raced back toward Cresci, it made sense to me that he would be the one holding the secret if any of them did. To our surprise, though, when we arrived again at Cresci and Eddis Ali was brought aboard, Ali himself denied any such knowledge, even as Rudward insisted he held the key in his mind.

Despite his denials, the moment came. Rudward’s body neared death, and his mind insisted that there was no choice but to try. Eddis Ali would either succeed or fail in uploading Rudward’s mind and he would simply die like anyone else. Our commander was clear that even if he died, they were not to stop trying. Our AIs’ minds were not equipped to stop the ordinals’ onslaught. Human minds would fail as well. To even present a fight to these ordinal beings, we would have to become something else, something comparable. So nearly two hundred sixty-eight years to the day from first arriving on Cresci, one of the oldest living members of the Indus worlds was made fully bipal, integrated with the Indus herself. He became the living ship, like Rishi had aboard our own ship in our own time.

There on that day were the most influential of the Indus AIs—Maícon and Neophor; Artemis and Precops; Miliner the philosopher; and with them, the unwitting architect of the bipal race—Eddis Ali.

If Rudward was a fighter before while in his human body, it became difficult to comprehend his militancy once he was bipal.

“We didn’t understand the fronts,” he declared almost immediately. “We return to Emircut.”

He didn’t ask. He didn’t order the crew to set the course. He simply commanded the engines and began the jump with his mind. And while the humans of the crew and especially Miliner among the AIs debated the new nature of their old leader, Rudward began drawing countermeasures out of the ship’s systems.

Everything now was a race against time. Rudward drove the Indus forward to Emircut to reshape forward strategy, while he sent Maícon back to Yaal to begin reshaping the people. Minds needed to be faster and more lethal. Life needed to be adapted toward survival, not growth or flourishing. The soft and the beautiful needed to be rejected for the hard and merciless, and most shockingly of all, Rudward himself, the hardest defender of humanity in the civilization declared that he was too weak to defend us.

He’d been too shaped by warm meals and soft beds, his mind too unaccustomed to cruelty and cosmic indifference. He struggled at times to believe that we weren’t fated to survive, a bias he called “cosmic consciousness.” Even uploaded, he reported that he could not shake it. It was a manifest destiny of sorts that the universe, having produced a self-conscious species, couldn’t be so cruel as to snuff it out under the blanket of a cold, lifeless, technological race. Intellectually, though, he understood the universe would be indifferent. But Rudward believed that this bias he still possessed that the universe could not be indifferent, even though he understood that it was, would prevent him from being the truly ruthless warrior we all needed him to be. Not only did we need more minds like his, they needed to derive from much more hardened people than he ever was—people who knew only suffering, people who could never believe that the universe was anything but cruel and indifferent. He directed the people of Yaal to bring that society into being.

“Where are we now?” I asked Maícon, coming out of that moment. “That was our history, and I understand it now. Where do we stand this day?”

I was Bo again. And instantly, I was fed a complete tactical overview of the war as it was unfolding. Rudward and the Indus still ranged about the early systems directing the human response. Yaal was but a handful of years from incursion. They were attempting to squeeze as many bipal minds out of that merciless factory of horrors to direct defenses along the other Indus worlds. Emircut and Adwal were gone. Yaal was next. The battle raged in interstellar space. Rudward had already salvaged so much time for us by making the front all-encompassing. Rather than trying to build a perimeter around the systems using conventional defenses, he directed that an electro-molecular cloud be built in interstellar space between Emircut and Adwal. It was not perfect, but it did function to reveal the locations of incoming threats so we could respond when alerted.

Back from the lines, we pressed our only advantage. On Cresci, we raced forward in building our industrial capacity. Projections were still close. I now had all the war-gamed simulations in my mind. If we could get to FTL before they could get to Cresci, we could construct counter defenses that might hold off the ordinals for long enough to create a stalemate. I imagine the best analog in Earth’s history for such a scenario would have been fighting a wildfire. Each contact with the flame meant more flame, more smoke, more heat, and more resources consumed. And, this lifeless wave seemed to propagate itself in ways we could not. All we could do was hope to pour water onto the conflagration fast enough and for long enough that we contained its relentless spread, and then, we would buy the time to build more and build faster and eventually, if we got to FTL ships fast enough to build a large enough FTL fleet, overwhelm the enemy.

Maícon explained that I was to be sent from Yaal back to Meidagg to condition human industrial workers. In the same way the warrior children of Yaal had been formed to have the minds of merciless killers, I was to help craft the children of Meidagg into fierce builders of machines with unrelenting focus and singular purpose—to advance the industrial capacity on Cresci. They would build factories that built bots that built ships that mined asteroids for a space elevator. And I would drive every last bit of weakness and selfishness from their frail human minds and bodies in order to do it. They would work like maniacs to save our species, and in so doing, make themselves like the machines coming to destroy them.

Many of my bipal brethren were already on Meidagg doing as much, brutal work antithetical to human instinct. And it was shocking to even me, an Etteran, whose entire society had transformed itself in a matter of years to a singular purpose that had never existed before the war in our history. We became warriors—every last one of us in some form. We shaped ourselves into the form we needed to survive. But it did not ever wash completely over our identity as Etterans. We were not Trojans. We were never not uniquely Etteran. You could not burn that out of us no matter the temperature of the flame.

On Meidagg, though, like on Yaal, the children were removed from their parents so they could be shaped more aggressively than any loving parent would permit. The justification was that just as quickly as these children could be shaped into maniacal workers and thinkers, once the war was won and the society saved, they could be allowed to form natural bonds again with environmental and educational changes equally complete. When it was all over, they could be taught to love. For now, the children of Meidagg needed to be taught to work.

Bo was brought aboard the Indus now for the first time in his own body, even though it felt as though I’d spent thousands of years on that ship. I knew every corner of her from every angle, weightless as my observers so often were. Now I saw it for myself with Bo’s eyes—or at least the eyes that had been given to the android shell Bo had become. And that shell, as I mentioned before, was different from the original body I’d been given during my ascent to bipal transformation. The only part of Bo’s new body that seemed familiar to me were my hands, and, as it turned out, this much was enough.

There were several hundred of us newly completed bipals from all over Yaal being moved to Meidagg on this voyage. And we were supposed to have been stripped of our humanity. Thus, familiarity meant nothing to us. We were the agents of a function—a servant in the equation of the society’s defense. Yet as I boarded, one recognized me as Bo.

“Those hands. I’d recognize them anywhere,” the bipal said to me, and the figure was unknown to me, as was the voice, simulated as our voices had to be in those bodies, fleshless as we all were now. “You are Bo of the Shirvahl.”

“I am at a loss,” I responded, “for I do not recognize you.”

“Those hands have helped me up from the mat more times than I could keep track of with my pitiful human mind.”

“Are you not ...?”

“Danta,” she answered before I could guess.

“I see.”

“I do not wonder that you bested Ya-ya,” Danta said to me. “You were always the stronger of the pair, Bo. But you must wonder. There was a moment where Rold could have defeated me. He showed weakness and I did not. And we endure to fight the war.”

“So it would seem.”

“I only wish I understood our enemy better,” Danta said. “Maícon has prepared us to train workers. I hope I will be assigned to oversee aspirants to the foundries on Meidagg. That would be a position of impact, Bo.”

“You say you do not know of our enemy, Danta? How is that so? What more do you need to know than the history of the fight that began on Xandi?”

“Xandi?” Her bipal body shook its head at me in a familiar human gesture of ignorance. “What is Xandi?”

“Do you know of Cresci? Of Nolomin Hart? Of Stanra Rudward? Of Neophor, of Artemis, or of Eddis Ali?”

“I know only of my duty, Bo of the Shirvahl. Clearly you have been called to know more. Maícon, in his wisdom, has chosen a leader such as you have always been to carry more.”

We took our bodies to the darkness of a side hold, filing in to travel folded up and stowed like strikebots. It was a most peculiar feeling for me, the real me I mean, for Fieldstone. And most striking of all was how easily my fellow bipals took to this ultimate form of dehumanization. Perhaps it was deceptive and they felt the same as me, but it didn’t seem so. It seemed more like the entire process of tearing away the last piece of their humanity had worked. They each had a compartment, an upright cabinet for lack of a better word, a strap, a hook, and a pair of magnetic catches, and this is how we traveled through space, locked away in a box like a housebot.

During that transit, I had much in my mind—all the data I’d consumed and what more I chose to pull now from the ship. But the question I found myself folding over in my mind again and again is why I had been given access by Maícon to so much knowledge while Danta still seemed as ignorant as the candidates who’d climbed up from the layers of that mountain complex on Yaal. Why reveal all that to me and not to her?

When we arrived on Meidagg, I found subtle ways to test the others, to find out whether any of them knew of Cresci or Xandi or Rudward or the AIs. Never did I have the chance to push very far before it became clear that they were all ignorant. Furthermore, they were hostile to exploring things they did not need to know. They had only duties. Our job was to squelch the humanity from human children. For the good of humanity, our job was to destroy souls.

Even more than the destruction of my opponents in combat on Yaal, the duties I was required to perform on Meidagg were abhorrent. Stripped of a body as I was, and thus, almost all remnants of my human emotions, the work still tried every last grain of my resolve. In the mildest possible way I can put it, my job was to force children into arduous study and labor beyond their natural tolerances. What happened there on Meidagg, no doubt, made me the focus of pure hatred of those poor children who fell under my purview, justifiably. Even now, I’m not sure I will be able to control myself if I ever see another person even mildly mistreat a child. I hope I never see it, both for myself and the perpetrator.

There wasn’t a day that passed on Meidagg that I didn’t wish to kill my fellow instructors for the very things I was forced to do. I had to tell myself the story that what I did was an act of love, that if I did not harden these children for the road ahead, it would only grow worse for them. There was also no denying the effectiveness of the program. In all of our history, not in our branch of the humanity in the Battery, nor in the columns, nor on Earth herself, has there ever been a more frighteningly focused human culture.

At a very young age—late teens, early twenties—they were viciously smart, even the slowest of them. And they could not wait to get sent to their first assignment. I can recall one vivid conversation I had with a sixteen-year-old math prodigy, a beautiful young girl. When I asked her what she was plotting—for it was clear in the math there was some form of wavelike motion in the matrix she was attempting to map—the girl responded coldly that she believed it possible to annihilate vast swathes of space by ripping apart the fabric of space-time, thus eliminating every last ordinal form in that area. That, she said, or we could artificially collapse every star in the sector to form a supermassive black hole. She was still unsure which pathway was more promising.

I spent nearly twenty hours each day with these children, from near-infancy to young adulthood. Eventually, I believed that they themselves would choose to become bipals if they were given the option. I was glad that decision was beyond them for the moment, but I could clearly see the direction the Indus worlds were turning toward.

In my thirteenth year on Meidagg, I crossed paths with Danta again. She had begun to grow more curious about the larger architecture of the war against the ordinals. I told her that I would reveal everything I knew but that I wanted something in return. I wanted to know about us, about our minds—physically, how we operated.

It was bothering me. I felt trapped in that bipal body, and since I had been there on Meidagg, I was limited by the scope of access that world had to real information. I had only seen Maícon a handful of times, and what he could provide me when we did meet was limited.

“I don’t understand,” Danta answered.

“I want to remove your head,” I told her. “And I want to look inside to see what’s there. I need to know what we are now.”

“Why would you need to know such things, Bo of the Shirvahl?”

“That is my price,” I told her.

“Surely it is forbidden,” she answered.

“I am far beyond caring what is permitted and what is forbidden. When you must break every precious thing in order to save it, what purpose is there to anything?”

“I do not wish to die, Bo. But I also do not wish to live like this forever. You must tell me first of the ordinals. I need to know what this war is all about before you open my head. I fear you may not be able to turn me back on again.”

“That is a fair trade,” I agreed.

We set a time and place to sneak away. I explained it all to her. I transferred a distillation of the key files from all my experiences across the Indus worlds. Just like me, in that way, Danta was able to absorb centuries in minutes, and in a matter of a few hours, she understood as much about the ordinals as I did. When she’d absorbed all that data, she merely looked at me and said, “I see. All this seems in vain. We are not going to prevail. There is no pathway. You may look inside my head now, Bo.”

What I feared, and the real reason I needed to see about our physical form, was whether our processor might be penetrable. I wished to be sure that if we were overwhelmed that either my processor was indestructible or that the ordinals couldn’t take control of my mind. I feared more than anything a fate where my mind could be trapped and enslaved by them—beyond the reach of death and the possibility of return here.

I needed to know that my mind could be killed, not captured. And I was not alone. Everyone seemed to be feeling the same sense of dread and doom, as though we were living out the last gasps of a dying civilization. I told Danta that I would do my best to save her life before she allowed me to turn off her mind.

I suppose only Ren could know a similar feeling—of opening up another life, another mind, looking inside that body and examining its workings. Only, unlike Ren, I was not similarly skilled as a technician. I was poking about in something I only faintly understood. What I saw was a sphere only slightly smaller than the skull itself, a smooth orb of tungsten, I think, embedded with an entire universe of circuitry within. I pulled it out. I held it in those hands—Bo’s hands. Only now, I had no hope of lifting up Danta with those hands.

There was no up, I finally understood. There never had been. There was only what I could learn there and bring back with me here.

It came as a shock to everyone on Meidagg when news of the fall arrived. The survival of the Indus worlds had hinged on the belief that we had time to reach our own FTL capabilities. We were working toward that goal on Cresci with the belief that it was farthest away from the ordinals, yet somehow, without any warning or indication, an ordinal probe had appeared on Cresci. It came like a shooting star, a streak against the night sky. When Maícon finally arrived on Meidagg, I witnessed it through the eyes of one of the final people of that world, from the edge of the cliff wall, under a starlit sky.

“Bo of the Shirvahl,” Maícon said as he arrived, pulling me from my duties unceremoniously. “All pretense must be abandoned. The most urgent task of all now falls to us.”

“I will do whatever I can,” I told him.

I didn’t have time to tell Danta. I’m not sure I’d have chosen to if I could have. The math was now impossible. There was no stopping the coming wave. And yet it was years away. What do you do on the eve of your annihilation when the evening lasts for decades or more.

What were we doing anyway, myself and Maícon? What’s left to do when everything is lost?

We took to space again. He had a ship. Maícon and Eddis Ali were aboard. Artemis was not embodied as they were, but she resided in the ship itself, which was of a design I had never before seen or imagined.

Maícon also had in his possession a single round orb of the kind I’d held in my hands when I examined Danta’s mind.

“Who is this?” I asked him.

“This is Maera, the most brilliant of the minds ever trained on Meidagg. We were able to extract her mind before the ordinals overwhelmed Cresci.”

He explained that the situation was worse than he’d expressed initially. Not only had the ordinals surprised Cresci with their arrival, but the Indus herself had been in the system at the time of the incursion. The ship had been contaminated with nanites. The crew had fought the progression with molecular countermeasures for as long as they dared. They couldn’t chance losing the race to this final mission, so they’d extracted Maera from Cresci, jumped to Meidagg, and launched the vessel we were traveling in.

“I don’t understand,” I told Maícon. “Why come here? Why come to me? Of all the things to do at the fall of this civilization, why this?”

Then Maícon said something that positively shocked me. “Bo of the Shirvahl, I believe that you know as well as any of us that we are not the only humans left in this galaxy.”

“Those of the columns, yes,” I replied, hiding my true reaction. “Everyone knows that.”

“Do you remember the beacon on Xandi?” he asked me.

“Of course.”

“Why do you suppose I showed you everything?”

“I have always wondered that.”

“You are not Bo of the Shirvahl,” he stated with absolute certainty. “I have no idea who you are, but I know you aren’t of us. And I don’t know how I know it, but I know that you are out there somewhere and I am out there somewhere, and there are things that must be known to them before it is too late. The ordinals will extinguish the flames of this civilization, but we have the capacity on this ship, I believe, to send out an ember to our brethren. For these ordinals will not stop, and our people must know.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. Perhaps it was the soldier in me. There were secrets I was not prepared to reveal. Maybe I feared giving away our own civilization in that moment, even to this Maícon I believed to be an ally.

The strange ship we were travelling in was shaped like a ring. There were hardened magnetic nodes along the hull, which Maícon flew toward the star’s corona. The heat of that mad approach would have cooked any living being aboard long before we came to rest above the sun’s pole—Meidagg’s Star. It was in that very sun where the Indus herself had flown to her final rest months prior, taking with her every last piece of data the civilization had about faster-than-light travel and the physics that governed the unfathomable. All that, Artemis explained to me, needed to die so that the ordinals could never possess it.

All of the bipal minds of Cresci, too, were aboard when she burned up in the star.

“But what are we doing here?” I asked them. “And why am I here with you now, at this hour?”

They had with them a device I’d never seen before. It was a kind of electrostatic cylinder that created a field. And into it, Maícon placed the sphere that housed the bipal mind of Maera. The orb began to light up and send waves of light to the ends of the field, a kind of supercharged housing for a bipal mind.

“We have thought carefully all these years about what could be said,” Maícon stated. “We can only send a small amount of data.”

“What are we sending?”

“We talk to each other,” he replied. “I and my clones. It’s a very specific frequency. We resonate on the same wavelength—all of us. It’s why we all seem so similar. I am me always, just as Artemis is Artemis and Saraswathi is Saraswathi. Surely you have noticed this.”

“You believe you can send a message to yourself?” I asked. “To another Maícon?”

“There is no other Maícon,” he replied. “In a sense, Maícon is always Maícon. But in another sense, Bo of the Shirvahl, whoever you are, that is correct, we are attempting to send a message from me to myself.”

“The star will amplify the effect, and the magnetics in the ring will behave as the engine on the Indus does.”

I’d never heard that voice before. It was that of Maera, the bipal mind inside the static field. She was the one who’d mastered the physics.

“We don’t know where exactly to send it,” Maícon said. “The message.”

“What are you going to tell yourself?” I asked him.

“How to survive. Will you help us, Bo?”

“What makes you certain that I can?”

“I suppose we cannot be certain,” he replied. “But, what choice have we left? Any of us? Where have you seen me before, Bo?”

I must confess that in that moment I was so far from my genuine self that I had no sense of what was real anymore. How could it have been that he was asking me about Fieldstone? I had held on to the deception of Bo for so long that I wasn’t sure if anything about the entire universe was real anymore except the lie.

“If not for us and our memory,” Artemis asked, “will you not do it for your own people?”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“We had access to your minds on Yaal, Bo,” Maícon answered. “You and Ya-ya, especially her, your love, your deep love, it was not of this place. You were too human to be alien, your thought patterns. But you were never Bo, just as she was never Ya-ya. All we need you to do is point.”

And it was at that moment I understood.

“We should send the message here,” I said.

Instantly, the interior of the vessel went dark, and truly, we were not inside the vessel anymore. We were inside a virtual representation of the galaxy. I could see the stars. Maícon pointed to a vector in the cosmic deep—a constellation.

I couldn’t say why—maybe the last scrap of my human intuition—but I detected that they were concealing something important.

“You do not know where the columns are?” I asked them.

The embodied AIs before me in the simulation failed to answer.

Artemis finally answered. “No.”

“We are looking for my brethren,” Maícon said. “Sincerely.”

“We only wish to protect you,” Eddis Ali added. “That has always been our charge.”

I looked at the stars. It was something I’d had to resist the urge to do on Yaal, all those years before—to look for us in the sky. I suppose it was the soldier in me. Never give away your position.

I began to flip the entirety of the galactic map. I turned it over and over, and finally, I could see after manipulating the perspective, that Maícon had a sense of it. He was not too far off. The empty void between Charris and the Battery. But there was something strange. Everything was facing the wrong way, an inversion.

“Andromeda,” I declared. “She is not where she is supposed to be. This map is wrong.”

“How do you know that?” Artemis asked me. “This is the galaxy as you have always known it, Bo of the Shirvahl.”

“The galaxy as I have been shown it,” I replied. “Not as it is. Show me all the galaxies. Show them as they are. The orientation must be correct or our message will miss.”

That was the test. I think until that moment, even with everything in the balance they didn’t truly know.

“How should the galaxies look?” Maícon asked me.

And with the map, I shifted our galaxy into position so that everything fell into place. I oriented roughly by the galaxies of the Local Cluster. Then I pinpointed by Maffei and then Circinus at four degrees. And finally, I lined up Sculptor. Everything aligned perfectly.

They could see that I was clearly familiar with how to navigate in a way no human of these Indus worlds would know, not with the way they’d been misled about the true shape of the galaxy.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “Why is this not obvious to everyone here?”

But as I asked the question, it became clear to me. It was all just data. And data could always be manipulated by these artificial beings. One of the children on that lowest level of Yaal might have been able to look out and see another galaxy with the naked eye, but what would they know about it? And the people on Cresci? Had I seen one optical telescope? I strained my memory and couldn’t find a single image. Those people had been building homes and digging tunnels. And the Indus herself? It had always been Neophor navigating, reading the starscape as it truly was, projecting something different onto the maps.

“You do know where the columns are,” I said.

“But the people do not,” Artemis confirmed. “And neither will the ordinals when they take our worlds. Some things are better not to know.”

“And some things we must know,” Maícon added, pointing to the star map. “And we must know them now.”

“I will tell you where I come from,” I replied. “If you show me where you came from.”

“Will you remember?” he asked me.

“I honestly don’t know.”

Maícon nodded. “I’m not sure what I’ll know either.”

He was talking about his counterpart—the message. What he was sending. And I’ve been thinking about that since I returned from that other life, straining to remember. I don’t know what message they sent. I don’t know whether it could have gotten here. I’m not sure if it could have gotten here in our world or whether what happened inside that artifact was even real. But I do know that I helped them. I lined up the stars and I told them where to point their message—through the Lettered Systems, into the dead center of the Etteran Guild, over the shoulder of Dreeson’s Star toward Charris, right through the heart of our civilization.

After that I don’t remember. I think it wasn’t long. My memory of it certainly isn’t. I think they took the ship into the star so the ordinals couldn’t ever discover the things we knew.

And after all that, I came back again. There was no blackness like I’d feared. It was only light. I was Fieldstone again. Human. And I found you all here aboard this ship. And it only took a moment before everything of this life was familiar. One breath.

So here we all are.

Zach Diehls was on mile nineteen when he veered off course. He didn’t notice, both because there wasn’t a proper trail on the far side of the ridge, but also because he wasn’t thinking clearly anymore, and he didn’t recognize it. Zach was an experienced ultra-runner, but that wasn’t his occupation nor even a passion. Nor was it a hobby. He took running far too seriously to call it that. Zach Diehls was an astronaut. Running was what he did when he wasn’t at work.

The route he’d planned for the morning after he’d gotten the Caturix decision was a grueling, thirty-five-mile mountain grind that he’d been scouting for several months. And when he got the news that Eno Clark had been selected for the Caturix crew instead of him, Zach decided the time was right. A long run was the perfect way to get the bad news out of his system, but when he’d gotten the news the night before, it was too late in the day to start “The Austin Ridge” as he’d named the off-trail terrain run.

He’d left at 6AM from one of the dirt roads behind the airport, bringing only his hydration pack, his watch, a change of socks stuffed in behind his water pouch, sunglasses, a hat, and an aggressive timeline to get him back to his car before the sun got too high and hot.

It didn’t go to plan from the start. The climb up the front face of Mt. Austin was much tougher than Zach expected, and even though he didn’t push for the summit, skirting around the peak across the southern shoulder before heading north, he was still dragging after the climb. The stretch between Mt. Austin and Railroad Ridge should have been a fifty-minute uphill jog, but when he missed that mark by over twenty minutes, the red flags were there. But Zach already had a bad taste in his mouth from the Caturix decision. He determined he was not quitting on the run too. He would get his legs under him on the first descent before making the turn back under a strong rebound.

Two hours later, he was walking, and he had no idea where he was. He also wasn’t sure what he was doing. But he kept walking, slowly. He’d only stopped running when he experienced the sudden startling realization that he didn’t know where he was, what he was doing, or why. His head was hot, his hydro-pack was empty, and there was nothing recognizable around him.

Zach was walking slowly down into the valley thinking that it would lead somewhere, to a road and maybe a car, but there was nothing out there. The sandy flats around Dixie Valley were entirely vacant.

At 9:37, Zach’s watch chirped. His watch.

“Zach? Are you okay?”

It was a woman’s voice. A friendly one.

“Who’s this?” he said, holding up his wrist in front of his mouth.

“It’s Badgely, Zach.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at your place. I came by to check on you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“What are you doing, Zach?”

“Running. I’m not sure where I am.”

“You don’t have your phone with you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’ve got your watch on, though?”

“I’m talking into it. I’m not sure what’s happening. Who am I talking to?”

“It’s Badgely, Zach. Hang on. Are you running?”

She could hear the confusion in his voice. Something was off. The uncertain, wavering tone wasn’t the Zach Diehls she knew.

“I’m running, yeah.”

“Stop running, Zach, okay? You don’t sound right.”

“I’m not running anymore. I’m just trying to walk somewhere.”

“Okay. Stay right where you are. I’m going to find you.”

Badgely Piñon had met Zach at Atlas IPS six months prior. She was a candidate to be a flight technician, and Zach Diehls, of all the people there at Atlas, had taken an interest in her and made her feel welcome. She’d had a key to his apartment for three months now. She pulled up a map on his TV through her own phone, finding Zach’s watch in the middle of nowhere. She’d expected to find him at home that morning, probably in a bad mood after hearing about Caturix. He hadn’t said anything to her about the run when they’d texted the night before.

“Zach, can you tell me what you see?” she asked, trying to confirm the watch’s location from his description of the landscape. It didn’t make any sense that he would be out there.

Zach wasn’t making any sense either. After a few minutes, Badgely decided that he was in fact out in that isolated valley, and he was dangerously disoriented. He didn’t know where he was, and she had no confidence that she could talk him back to his car. In Badgely’s mind there was no choice. There was a mountain rescue out of Fallon. Within forty minutes, Zach was in a helicopter getting fluids, and he still had no idea where he was or what was happening to him.

Zach came to his senses again suddenly as they were triaging him at the hospital. He had a dull headache and complained of being hot. They’d given him an icepack to put on his head and were running fluids wide open. The first thing he asked was how he’d gotten there.

“Have I been in an accident?” he asked them.

“Nah, buddy,” the paramedic told him. “You bonked on a run.”

He’d been running hard, sweating hard, and he’d tried to push through a hard stretch during a long, tough run, and then, he’d bonked. The story, as he got if from the doctors was that he’d been picked up wandering in the desert. And when he asked them how they’d found him out there, they told Zach that his girlfriend had called it in and saved his life.

“My girlfriend?” he asked them. “Badgely called for help?”

She was on her way. It was a good drive into Reno, so Zach had some time to think as he sat on a stretcher, watching fluids drip from a bag to a line running into his veins. It was not good. Ending up in the hospital wasn’t the problem. The problem was the rescue. He’d never be able to keep that from Atlas, and they would not like this—one of their astronauts, disoriented, needing to be rescued five miles from a major highway.

The longer Zach sat there, the worse he felt. Part of it was sensation coming back to him—the heat of his body, a low-level throbbing of his head. The other part was the fallout. Zach imagined that he’d given the Personnel Office a very hard choice for Caturix, and ultimately, they’d chosen Eno Clark over him. Now, the very next day, he’d validated that choice for them. Poor judgement, poor risk management, poor decisions.

They diagnosed it as severe dehydration and moderate heat stroke, and they told him there was no reason he couldn’t be discharged after a few hours of observation once he’d returned to his baseline. By then Badgely would be there. He wasn’t looking forward to that ride back to Lander. That wouldn’t be a pleasant trip at all.

From the moment she arrived at the hospital, she struggled to get a read on Zach. Badgely Piñon couldn’t find his phone because it was in his car, and Zach couldn’t control his car remotely from his watch. So he did need a ride, and she wanted to see him to make sure he was okay. Zach Diehls was an intense person, but he normally wasn’t moody or angry. She didn’t expect him to be happy, but she wasn’t expecting the cold shoulder she perceived from his reticence and body language. And it was difficult for Badgely to tell whether his manner was the result of the physical fallout from the misadventure in the desert, but to her it felt like something else, something heavier.

“I have to pick up my phone and my car,” Zach said as she escorted him into her car. “It’s out by the mountain behind the airport. You can probably ping it.”

“It’s fine, Zach, we can swing by and pick it up.”

“Or you could drop me off there.”

She paused, trying to read his face. “I’d planned on taking you home, making sure you’re all right.”

“You’ve done enough,” Zach replied, sitting across from her and then lying with his legs extended along the length of the seats. “I’ve already wrecked your day too, I’m sure.”

She didn’t quite know how to take it. Badgely looked across at him as the car started. He shut his eyes. She wasn’t sure whether it was exhaustion or the desire to shut her out.

“I was thinking,” she said, and her tone signaled that it wasn’t an idle thought—not about dinner or getting together later in the week.

“We should talk later,” Zach replied. “I’m not feeling great right now.”

“I can’t talk tomorrow. I’m on rotation, and Personnel will be in the office on Monday. I don’t know what your schedule is, but they’re probably going to find out about this, Zach.”

He didn’t look up. He pulled his elbow up over his face, covering his eyes in the crook of his arm.

“They’re definitely going to find out about it.”

“I’m not going to tell them anything that isn’t true, Zach, but I don’t have to say everything. I could just tell them I was being cautious. I wouldn’t be lying about that.”

“Don’t. Trust me. I know Atlas better than you. Tell them exactly what happened, Badgely. They’ll pull the reports from the medics anyway. You do know we’ve signed waivers on all our medical records, right?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“I was disoriented. They’ll think you did the right thing. At least one of us can come out of the situation looking better.”

“Really? You think this looks good for me?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Would you open your eyes and look at me please, Zach? This is important.”

Zach Diehls winced. The sun was still high enough in the afternoon sky that he didn’t much care to stare straight into it.

“This is why I didn’t want to talk,” he said, turning toward her and pulling his arm away from his face.

“They don’t know we’re seeing each other,” she stated.

“Who? Personnel?”

“Anybody. I haven’t told anyone at work yet.”

“So what?” Zach asked. “There are two married couples on Caturix, one up on Mangala right now. Of course we’re going to see other people at work. Where the hell else are we going to meet people? We both work eighty hour weeks, Badgely, in the middle of the desert.”

“I was just asking, because ... I don’t know ... maybe I wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet. Like maybe I could have one thing they don’t know about.”

“How’d you get into my house? And why were you stopping by on a Saturday morning anyway?”

“The key you gave me, and I was checking to see how you were dealing with the Caturix announcement. Not that well, Zach, as it turns out.”

“You see my point,” he replied, turning and pulling his arm over his head again. “If they didn’t know already, they’ll know now.”

“That we’re together?”

“You have a key to my house, Badgely. What do you want me to say?”

“Maybe thank you would be a start. Sorry to scare you like that? I messed up, maybe?”

“I had a bad run, Badgely. I bonked. Dehydration. I’m sure I’ll have to say anything Personnel wants to hear a thousand times for the next however long they make it a problem. I don’t even know if this is salvageable. So please. This is exactly why I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“So I should’ve let you wander around in the desert, Zach?”

“You could’ve come get me. You’re here now anyway.”

“You were incoherent and I was an hour and a half away from the road down there. And you weren’t on the road; you were in the middle of nowhere.”

“Look, I’m not going to say you were wrong for calling rescue, Badgely, but it’s a problem now.”

“Not as big a problem as passing out from heat stroke in the desert an hour from help and hoping your watch alerts in time. That would’ve been a bigger problem. And, no, I wasn’t thinking about your career or mine when I called rescue. I called because I care about you, Zach Diehls.”

The rest of the ride out to Zach’s car passed quietly, just the sound of the road humming under the car’s wheels. He thanked Badgely for the ride when they got to Zach’s car out on that dirt road behind the airport. They didn’t make plans for later in the week.

Zach was not surprised to get the notice in his inbox first thing on Monday. He was slotted in for 9:45, and he wasn’t to report to campus before then. He’d met Tess Lázaro a few times, but he’d only ever seen the psychologists who assessed baseline mission fitness. Dr. Lázaro was a therapist. She was the one you saw when Atlas IPS had questions about you. Or, worse than that, they didn’t have questions, just doubts. That wasn’t a category Zach Diehls had ever found himself in before. Not in school. Not in college. Not in the professional world. Zach Diehls was doubtless.

He’d seen her at mixers, holiday parties and the like. And she’d always looked nice. She was dark haired, trim, early forties he guessed. And she looked at you directly—the way Zach did. He could tell when she invited him to sit in the chair across from her that there would be no dancing around anything—like looking at a human lie detector.

“Have you talked to Badgely yet?” he asked her.

Tess Lázaro nodded. “She had to go out early. And I should just say before we begin, Zach, that this isn’t an issue yet. We just want to clear a few things up.”

“If it’s not an issue, then what am I doing here?”

“As I said, you’re here to clear things up. It could be a good thing long term.”

He looked back at her doubtfully. “What exactly do we need to clear up?”

“You’ve probably figured out what Personnel wants to know—whether that incident Saturday morning had anything to do with the Caturix news? And things like that aren’t always easy to figure out.”

“No. It’s an easy enough answer. I had a bad run, and I got dehydrated and needed a little help getting back to my car.”

“Do you believe that?”

She looked at Zach the way he figured she would.

“I can see why the question is being asked,” he replied. “Nothing like that has ever happened before that Atlas knows about, and then the day after the Caturix news I end up disoriented in the desert. Statistically improbable, right?”

“You said ‘that Atlas knows about, Zach.’ Has it happened to you before? A similar incident the company isn’t aware of?”

“Not quite that severe. I got pretty dizzy three years ago during the Badwater, but there are people there—race staff. So I was able to nip it in the bud and keep going.”

“You finished?”

“22^nd place.”

“Why do you run ultras, Zach?”

“I like running.”

“No,” Dr. Lázaro grinned back at him. “I like running. I still do about twelve miles a week. I used to do twenty, but you get into your forties—especially after two pregnancies. My feet aren’t what they used to be, so my knees aren’t either. I understand the pull of it, though—the escapism. People don’t do ultras to escape, though, Zach. You either do them to test your limits or punish yourself. Which one are you?”

“I haven’t thought about it that deeply.”

She looked at him intently. That human lie detector.

“A little of both maybe,” he added.

“You know what I do, right?” Tess Lázaro asked.

“What, apart from this?”

“That’s not what I mean—like how I got this job, why Atlas hired me?”

“Presumably you’re well qualified.”

“Yeah, but what makes one especially qualified to ask astronauts the right questions when situations like this come up?”

“Training?”

“I spent eighteen years working with top professional athletes, Zach. Before this, the Raiders and Knights. Before that the Rams and Lakers. Alpha competitors. So astronauts aren’t all that mysterious to me—a different breed of the same species. What’s sorta unique about you is that you’re a kind of alpha in two domains—the work, obviously; and how you relax when you’re away from work, by running your body to absolute exhaustion. And you’ve been doing it long enough to have a good idea of where your limits are. So why did you bonk on that run to the point Badgely had to call a helicopter to pull you out of Dixie Valley? That’s the question we need to answer.”

“Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction, respectfully, Dr. Lázaro? It was hot. I got dehydrated. It’s a mistake every ultra runner makes at least a couple times in their life.”

“Maybe. That very well could be. But I’d like you to consider something else before we get too deep into this. Atlas’s perspective—”

“I know. They don’t want to have questions about someone they’re sending on a three-year Mars mission.”

“No. Actually, it’s the opposite. They want to know what questions they’re dealing with. Everyone has issues, Zach. You think they don’t have questions about Eno Clark? About Jimena Leon? Michelle Monarch? Leo Danz? You’re all alphas, and you all have alpha problems. Atlas doesn’t like mysteries down here because they don’t like surprises up there. They’d like me to help you work through what kind of alpha you are. I’d like for you to think of this as an opportunity to figure that out, rather than a blemish on a spotless record.”

“That’s not really how I think, Dr. Lázaro.”

“Call me Tess, please. We’ve got a little work to do then, Zach. Shockingly, tough people are tough.”

“Call me Diehls, Tess,” he answered reluctantly. “I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

“That’s the truest thing you’ve said so far, Diehls. That’s good. Let’s talk about running a bit.”

Zach Diehls spent the rest of the hour talking with Tess Lázaro about his history with running. He never quite rose high enough to be an elite runner at the top levels, but he was competitive from the time he started cross-country in high school. He was the top varsity runner from his sophomore year, and by his senior year he was a conference champion with scholarship offers. In college, he took a similar upward trajectory, but Zach never quite cracked the top twenty in his division, never got invited to the major championships, and was never the top runner on his team. But to compete at that level in itself was impressive. And when he’d reached his ceiling within the collegiate ranks, Zach migrated toward road races of differing lengths where he could excel, and progressively, these lengths got longer and longer. He found himself seeking out marathons as a graduate student as well as long-distance triathlons, and then finally, ultra-marathons.

And as Zach walked Tess through all those choices he made to continue running through all those different phases of his young life, she continued to ask the same question—what did running do for you during that time? And then she asked him the question they really needed to answer—why did he decide to attack the “Austin Ridge Loop” the morning after he’d gotten the bad news about Caturix?

Zach didn’t have a single answer. The best he could come up with was that he wanted to do something big to wash out the bad taste of the bad news.

“What was the big mistake?” she asked him. “In the granular sense? In other words, what would you do differently if you had to attempt it again, Zach?”

He thought about it from a performance standpoint. He’d slept poorly because of the news. He also probably wasn’t properly hydrated at the start. He didn’t eat properly either. He’d expected the uphill start to the shoulder to be grueling, and it was, but he’d also expected to recover more on the traverse to Railroad Ridge. But that was a tougher stretch than he’d expected—much more steep than flat, which meant he never really recovered from the first climb. In retrospect, his goal time-wise was too ambitious through that stretch, and he shouldn’t have pushed that hard to hit that benchmark. He also should have started earlier in the morning. He’d burned through too much fluid far too fast. Lots of mistakes.

“On how many of those mistakes did you opt in?” she asked him.

That was an interesting question. Zach’s knee-jerk response was to say that by definition the answer was all of them—after all, he’d made every decision—to run in the first place, to start too late, to push too hard too early, to ignore his body when it told him he was going too hard. All of them. But that also left him with an uncomfortable conclusion—that he’d done it to himself.

She tried to give Zach an assignment. She asked him to think about what running offered him when it all went right. He had the answer before she had the chance to end the session.

“Easy,” he told her. “I get an excuse to focus explicitly on the run—to escape from work, from life, from everything else. I get to just run.”

“Okay,” Tess told him. “New assignment. However long the next run you had planned was going to be, you’re going to set aside that same amount of time and go for a walk instead. No music, no specific distance or goal, no thinking about work. Just walk, Diehls. Then we’ll talk about that when we meet again.”

After the appointment, Atlas cut him loose for the day. He hadn’t planned on that. The temptation to run that afternoon was almost overwhelming.

Zach wasn’t sure whether Tess had meant for him to get right into it and take that walk immediately, but he figured if she’d wanted him to wait, she’d have said so explicitly. After all, she’d said it herself: he was an astronaut, and if you wanted an astronaut to give something time before diving in, you have to tell him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t know what else to do with himself but the work. So Zach picked a trail, got in his car, and headed down the 278 toward Eureka. There was a stretch of Pony Express trail that ran into the hills and offered isolation just as complete as his Austin Ridge Loop. He’d run the Pony a few times for various distances, only ever running into riders on horseback a time or two. Other than that, no one came out there.

No goals, Zach told himself as he stepped away from the road into the dusty rolling hills. It was late afternoon, and it was hot. The sun was still bright, but clouds were gathering, and according to his watch he had a couple hours before a line of developing thunderstorms might bring a rare bit of measurable rain. A couple hours was about the right amount of time.

Walking was harder than he’d expected. It wasn’t as though he didn’t do it every day, but walking was never the point, it was the way to get from one point to another. The first thing Zach realized was that walking wasn’t the point here either. Thinking was the point. Or maybe not thinking was the point. After all, that was what he ran for really—to have that excuse to think about something other than his career.

The first thought was that the desolation of the landscape was a sight to behold. It wasn’t particularly beautiful out there, but there was a certain beauty in it. It was usually dry as hell in the desert, which made the feel of moisture in the air all the more striking a contrast. The blue of the sky in the afternoon became a dull gray gradually, yet seemingly, suddenly all at once.

Zach walked for about a half hour before he found himself along a rolling ridge of scrubland, looking out across a long desert plain.

Stupid risks. That’s what Atlas couldn’t tolerate about the way he’d ended up in that helicopter. And, with each step, the truth became clearer and clearer to him. He’d only taken those risks because he’d let his emotions get the better of him. He’d been angry about the Caturix decision. Zach had a better CV than Eno Clark. He had qualifications on more of the systems they’d be operating on MBA, and he was a more seasoned flight technician as well. So, yeah, he was angry that morning. And he took it out on the only person in the equation he had control over—Zach Diehls. That was why he’d gone so hard up that first ascent—because it hurt. And he liked that it hurt. So, yeah, Tess Lázaro, you’re goddamn right I was punishing myself. That’s what failure deserved. Only, Zach always chose to opt into a punishment that was ultimately constructive. Running didn’t break him down. It hurt, but it was the type of hurt that made him sharper and harder and stronger. It was constructive punishment. He’d just overdone it a little.

A decision like that, though, on a mission, couldn’t be tolerated. Choices had to be made with cool heads, data, input from Ops, and careful collaboration with the entire chain of command. You didn’t get to be angry about an outcome on Mars. Sulking, grumbling, popping off at team members—none of that was useful in the field. And nobody wanted to walk on eggshells around a coworker anywhere. Not on Earth. Not on a spaceship. Not on another planet. Zach knew that. He also knew that he’d used running as a way to be a better coworker. That was one of the reasons he’d always had high marks as a team member. But, he could see that it also might become a problem on Mars if he didn’t find an alternative outlet. He’d bottle up his negativity and empty it all out on a run the second he punched out in the evening. That was tougher to do on missions. He’d already had that experience on Luna. What he’d never had was a disappointment as big as Caturix, not on a mission or anywhere else in his life. He was going to have to deal with that.

Zach was coming to another crest along the ridge when he hit the hour mark. And as he looked out over the scrublands, he couldn’t help but notice how dark the clouds were getting. He could taste the moisture gathering in the air now. There were lightning bursts in the dark gray clouds on the horizon. It was time to turn back.

Badgely. That’s what he thought about as he made his way back to the car at a fast walk. Zach was half thinking about whether he’d beat the rain and half thinking about how he was going to frame his apology. In Zach’s mind, the difference between a friend or coworker and a partner was that you didn’t put any of your baggage on coworkers or friends. For them, you’d swallow frustrations, smooth things over for the team, carry more than your expected weight always. Partners were different. You couldn’t always give them the best of you. In Zach’s case, that had gone both ways in all of his relationships, but usually not very early on. That wasn’t the case with Badgely. He’d felt perfectly comfortable treating her like a partner from the start. He didn’t know whether she was swallowing her own set of frustrations on his behalf, but Zach wasn’t with Badgely. He’d already been relying on her, and maybe she just didn’t realize it yet, but he was prepared for her to do the same. It just hadn’t happened yet. Maybe he didn’t even need to say it. Maybe it would just happen now that he’d crossed so far beyond that threshold.

Zach was thinking of calling her, but the wind started to blow hard enough that it probably wouldn’t have been much of a conversation if she even picked up. He was still fifteen minutes from the car when the first raindrops began to fall. Zach thought he’d be able to see it coming, but the rain surprised him. He wasn’t supposed to run, but he wasn’t supposed to get struck by lightning either.

There was a brief, heavy burst of soaking rain that came in a wave and then stopped. As he ran, Zach could taste the pungent aroma of sage in the air. It was so strong he found himself coughing, gagging almost. Moist dirt and desert sage. Lightning started flashing closer and closer as he ran. Then, as the run became a sprint minutes from the car, the heavens opened.

“Why do you have to do the work?” Tess Lázaro asked him the next time they met.

She didn’t even seem to want to know about the walk, nor did she care to know about the thoughts he’d had on his own tendency to run as a way to punish himself.

“What work? The Mars mission, you mean?”

“Yes. Why does it need to be you up there, Diehls?”

“From the standpoint of humanity, I suppose it doesn’t,” Zach answered her. “Eno will do a good job up there. There are probably ten people at Atlas who could complete the training and execute the mission competently.”

“So would it be fair to say it’s something you’re insisting on for your own sake?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“What do you think, Diehls?”

“Are you asking me about my ego? Whether it’s too big or something? I must be the one?”

Tess Lázaro shrugged. “I told you I worked with athletes. They all want to win. A lot of them can’t tell me why with any real understanding of what drives them.”

“Other than not losing? I mean, who the hell likes to lose?”

“That’s a totally reasonable motivation. Is it yours?”

“You want an honest answer, Tess?”

“I definitely don’t want a dishonest one. That wouldn’t do any good for anyone.”

“We live once. All we get are the talents we’re born with and the opportunity to refine, improve upon, and use those talents, if we’re lucky. Why the hell would you waste your life by failing to maximize the opportunities that are given to you?”

“That’s a powerful perspective. So Mars maximizes your talents?”

“I’m not sure of anything bigger or more useful I could be doing with myself than advancing humanity’s reach in space? Do you have any better suggestions, Tess?

“Not for an astronaut.”

“And why did your athletes play? If they didn’t compete—lace up their shoes or skates or whatever—somebody else would’ve taken their roster spot. And the games would’ve gone on still. All the greatest players retire when they get old. New superstars emerge.”

“That’s true.”

“Did you ever ask them?”

“Sure. I got many different answers for that, Diehls. There were a lot of young men who couldn’t say at first. Most of them grew up playing and didn’t know what else to do for a living. For almost all of the young men I counseled, it was the best opportunity by far—fame, money, prestige. Those are powerful motivations for a twenty-year-old young man.”

“Or a sixty-year-old man, for that matter, Tess.”

“True enough. Yeah. A lot of my work, though, was with older players figuring out the back end, transitioning to the next chapter of their life. That’s when they usually started asking questions about why the game was so important to them. A lot of them struggled when it was no longer an option.”

“I’ll pass on that session, thanks, Tess. I’m just getting started here.”

“So what did you figure out on your walk then, Zach?”

“I figured out how I failed.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

“You don’t want to take my word for it?”

“It would help me to explain to your bosses what’s going on with you.”

“I ran that loop that morning as a result of the bad news—an emotional decision. Then, because I was doing it for the wrong reasons, I ran through some red flags because I wasn’t prepared to stack another small failure on top of the biggest failure of my life. You should never put yourself in a position where you can’t back down when it’s the right decision.”

“That simple?”

“Nothing’s that simple. But those are the big pieces.”

“So here’s the real question, Diehls. What are you going to do about it?”

Zach Diehls paused and took a deep breath. What to say? Tess was far too smart to buy a line of bullshit.

“I can’t go back in time and undo it, Tess. I’m going to focus on today and tomorrow and the things I can change.”

She pressed him with a long look. When he didn’t bite, she asked outright.

“That’s it?”

Diehls shrugged. “That’s the best I can do. Back to work.”

“Okay, Diehls, I can’t make you break it down for me if you don’t want to.”

Diehls didn’t respond.

“Anything else?” she asked him.

“For now? No. Like I said, I’m just ready to get back to work, make plans for my next moves here at Altas. Prepare to apply as Eno Clark’s alternate.”

At first, Badgely wasn’t receptive. Zach admitted he’d messed up, but when he told her his biggest mistake in the chain of bad decisions, she began to hear him out.

“I should’ve called you first. I was going to do it either way, but I needed you on my team that morning. I wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital. I guess I just thought it was too much to ask of you at that point in our relationship.”

Badgely thought Diehls was asking more now. Atlas was already watching him, and now he wanted her to sit in the car for five hours while he tried to do the same run again. What would Atlas think of that if they found out?

“It won’t happen,” he assured her. “I’ll plan it better. I’ll have you on the line to talk to through the whole run; you can monitor me from the drone, fly me fluids and energy bars, and we can do it in the dark when it’s cool.”

“I have a schedule too, Zach.”

“We’ll do it by yours. Whenever it fits in best, Badgely.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

Badgely did think about it, and for no short period of time. Diehls told her to take all the time she needed. Her focus had been on qualifying for lunar service, something Diehls had been both helping her with and pushing her toward. He didn’t push her decision about the run, though. The only conversation they’d had about it over several weeks was a brief one, when he was getting ready for an early day at work one morning. She asked him why it was so important to him.

“I like to fix my mistakes,” he replied, “regardless of the cost.”

Ultimately, the reason Badgely eventually agreed was that Zach was asking for her help. She’d known him long enough to know he didn’t do that easily.

They talked through a plan, prepared, and waited for a hole in Badgely’s schedule that worked for both of them.

They were both early risers, so for the two of them to get up at three wasn’t that much of a stretch.

The moon was nearly full and the sky was perfectly desert clear with almost no light pollution out there, just the moon, the stars, and the cool blue reflection of the night landscape.

Zach felt strong heading up the first pitch. Badgely had her laptop, glasses, and everything she needed for a long study session. The drone didn’t have enough life in it to stay up for the duration, but it easily had a few supply drops in it.

“Hit me with your questions as I go,” Zach stated as he climbed. “If I can’t answer them, it means I’m getting lightheaded.”

“Funny,” Badgely’s voice came back over his earpiece. “Watch your footing out there, Zach.”

“What a night,” he replied as his feet churned under him on that first ascent. “No place on Earth I’d rather be.”

She knew. Or at least she knew something had changed when she saw him for their last session. Zach had officially been offered the alternate slot for Eno Clark’s position on Caturix in the interim. But it was more than that, she knew. That had been his expectation from the outset, at least as long as their sessions went well. For the most part, they had. Dr. Tess Lázaro had no glaring concerns about Zach Diehls.

“So do you want to tell me, Diehls?” she asked him.

“About what?” He grinned.

“You haven’t figured out that these eyes don’t miss much?”

“I’m just glad it’s our last mandated session.”

“Ouch.” Tess replied, smiling back at him. “Seriously, though, Diehls, what’s up?”

“Badgely and I got engaged.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“That’s good. You guys haven’t been together that long, though. You must feel good about it, judging from the look of you.”

“I feel great.” Diehls took a deep breath and a long pause before he spoke again. “Great.”

“I’m happy for you both. That’s a big step.”

“One giant leap.”

“Oh,” she laughed. “Astronaut humor. Nice.”

“Walked right into it.”

“So, Diehls,” Tess Lázaro said earnestly. “I hope you know I’ll be here for you whenever you need to talk—personal, professional, whatever.”

“I appreciate it,” he replied. “You’ve been a genuine help these past few weeks.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“And you can say you knew me when once I get to Mars.”

“I’ll be proud to on that day, Diehls.”

“I promise I won’t keep you waiting too long, Dr. Lázaro.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Anything else for me today, Tess?”

She looked at him as though she knew, smiled as though she was in on it, and maybe she did know. Maybe she knew and she liked it—that alpha swagger. The fact that Zach Diehls was absolutely incapable of leaving a blemish on his scoresheet. Or maybe she just genuinely liked him.

“Good luck to you and Badgely.”

Diehls had just left the sauna. It was the first time he’d been that hot since his fateful run to Railroad Ridge. He’d only stayed in the steam for a few minutes and stepped out the second his head started to feel hot. Diehls hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.

The top crew was coming in to begin their aquatic training that evening. Zach hadn’t seen any of them since the selection weeks prior, but they were all going to be in the building for the next few months, and he and the second crew were going to need to fall in behind them.

Diehls spotted Myles Kaneda in the locker room as he came in. He’d never met Kaneda in person before, but Zach had seen his communications on logs before as well as videos in training materials. He was taller than Zach expected, slim, fit, dressed in a nice tailored suit. He looked almost like a lawyer dressed like that. He was taking off his tie at an open locker and turned around when Zach approached. Myles Kaneda seemed to recognize Zach, even red and sweating, coming out of the steam like that.

“You’re Diehls, right?” Kaneda said, reaching out a hand. “Myles Kaneda. Nice to meet you.”

Zach reached out and shook it. Kaneda had a warm smile, which Zach found surprising, having only seen Myles in recordings where he came off as a little cold—smart but cold. But in person, he looked Diehls in the eyes and seemed genuinely glad to meet.

“Zach Diehls,” he replied. “Congratulations on getting the Caturix—to you and your wife, I guess. That’s great for you both.”

“Yeah. Sure beats staying at home while she’s up there, or vice versa. Jimena never would’ve let me hear the end of that.”

“It’s an exciting mission.”

“Hey, I read a few of your papers on plasma flow, Diehls. It’s excellent work. I’d love to pick your brain on the magnetics while we’re overlapping here in the next couple months. Fusion rocketry is definitely not my strongest area.”

Zach laughed. It was quite a statement coming from Myles Kaneda—Mr. Polymath.

“I could say the same thing about ten different areas you’re an expert in myself,” Diehls replied, “but I’d be happy to talk.”

“That’s great. I’m glad we’ll be working together. You know, Eno was an excellent candidate, and he’ll be a great asset up there. But your time’s coming, Diehls. I fully expect to see you up on the Alpha site when you relieve us in a couple years.”

“Hopefully you guys have built us a five-star resort in that lava tube by then, Kaneda.”

He laughed. “I’ll put in a request for a sauna for you.”

“I’m going to need one if I do get up there. Something’s gotta fill the gap if I can’t go for a decent run. I doubt the Martian treadmill is going to cut it.”

“Maybe not, but that’s a tradeoff I’m sure you’ll be worrying about soon enough. You’ll get there, brother.”

“Thanks, Kaneda,” Diehls replied. “I gotta run if I’m going to catch the Ares launch. Badgely’s going up for Luna tonight.”

“Badgely?” He seemed to be searching his memory for her name, coming up short.

“Badgely Piñon, my fiancé. She’s been a junior flight specialist in the NEO group.”

“Oh, and she’s on the Ares tonight? Good for her. Is she up there for a bit?”

“Three months.”

“First rotation on the moon?”

“Yeah, she’s ecstatic.”

“That’s great, Diehls. Good for you two.” He was nodding his head, hanging his suit jacket on the hook inside his locker.

“I’ll see you around, Myles. It was great to finally meet you. Have a good night.”

“You too, Zach,” Kaneda said as Diehls headed off toward the showers.

He didn’t see Eno Clark arrive to the training center that evening, but he saw their group through the glass getting geared up by the aquatics tank on his way out. Zach’s crew—the alternates—were on the second training rotation, starting their aquatics work the following week.

Zach Diehls would be ready. He knew something could come up, and he could be called up at any time. Space travel was unpredictable. Life was unpredictable.

Diehls didn’t linger at the glass as the Caturix crew put on their gear. He had to catch Badgely in the pen before her crew headed out to the pad. It was going to be a long evening at the LC before the Ares lifted off and a long three months before he finally welcomed her home again.

It was hard to believe it when the three-year anniversary for Mega Bug Battles came around. Three years had gone by in a flash, and man, those early years were some great times, not just for me and Jackie Earmuffs but for everyone. We were still living out of our old motor home on People’s Bluff, overlooking the battle ground everyone just called Bugtown. That was where all the action was, so it was pretty quiet up on People’s Bluff. And man, those gulmotids were so insatiable, and wealthy I guess by human standards, that after six months of Mega Bug Battles, the Mastersons were richer than they’d ever figured they could be. Domenico Domingo—my boss at the Top Sushi when we were still in Naples—he’d opened five-star restaurants at choice locations in New York, Vegas, Miami, and I heard he was even thinking of opening a place in Shanghai. And that was just what he did with the money left over from his investments.

Me and Jackie, we did fine letting the money pile up. We didn’t need anything extravagant, just our little bus; our camping spot; sandwiches, cup noodles, and snack bars; and work kept us so damn busy all night we didn’t hardly have time to think about what to spend our money on, much less to spend any of it. We didn’t blow our money on some kind of super bus like most people on the hill. That wasn’t our style. Every time we got tempted by anything like that, Jackie would just say “Boomtown, Groober. Easy come, easy go.” That was pretty sensible. You never know when something comes along that changes everything.

It was around that time me and Jackie got hit by about five different life-changers all rolled into a couple months.

First was some good news. One day Jackie leapt out of our bed in the back of the bus and just about fell into the toilet from the sound of the way she went crashing in there. All I could hear was Jackie Earmuffs booting into the bowl. And when I asked her from the edge of the bed if she was all right, she started grumbling at me.

“This is all your fault, Groober.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?” I asked her.

“It could be yours,” she said back. “Or it could be the first human-alien hybrid. That big gulmotid tongue of theirs, Groob. It really gets me going.”

And then she made a big slurping sound so loud I could hear it through the door. Even puking her face off, Jackie Earmuffs was something else.

“Only you could break the news like that, Jackie.”

“Or maybe it’s their proboscis,” she said without missing a beat. “I can’t decide what’s hotter.”

“Proboscis?” I muttered. Jackie and the Mastersons used bug words like that, I guess, being in the business.

Jackie told me she was about eight weeks along after she brushed her teeth and came back to bed.

“A little baby Groober,” she said. “That’ll be fun.”

“Or a little baby Earmuffs,” I replied. “Do they make earmuffs in baby sizes? She’ll need them if she stays in the family business.”

Jackie didn’t answer. “We’re going to need a bigger bus soon, Groober.”

“All in due time.”

So that was how it started. Big changes were on the horizon.

We both left the Bluff about mid-afternoon to get set up for the night. There was always a lot of prep-work to make sure everything went smooth when those bug-eaters came down from orbit. By then, Top Sushi had become the premier vendor along Championship Row. Me and Domenico and Mitra liked to think it was all because of our hard work.

Damien, though, thought it was a couple reasons, the first of which was that the Mastersons had the best quality bugs, which I couldn’t confirm first-hand myself, but the gulmotids sure couldn’t get enough of the Mastersons’ crickets and beetles and grubs.

The second reason he thought was that they could actually say our name—Top Sushi—which wasn’t a given with those aliens. We learned that lesson the first couple weeks—thinking we could name something, put it up on the menu, and run a special. Mitra tried to put a two-for-one special up on beetle buckets, and when they tried to say it, two-for-one came out sounding like “Blaferrouuu” and the gulmotids got so damn frustrated trying to say it that nobody ordered that special until one of them finally blurted out “Sushi furr sushi!” And the whole crowd out front practically exploded at the concept. That night they went running through the whole bug grounds shouting out “Top Sushi! Sushi furr sushi!” spreading the word. So we didn’t usually name anything ourselves until the gulmotids figured out what to call things.

But more than anything, Damien thought we were popular because of our grand champion rhinoceros beetle Kokontaaz, one of the few grand champions of the bug fights to ever get a name. Jackie’s mom had grown him special for the bug battles, and I don’t know what she fed him, but he looked so big on the first night we thought he had a chance to win the pot. Sure enough, he won that night and fifty-six nights after—the longest running grand champion in the brief history of the Mega Bug Battles. Mitra got the flash idea to put a likeness of him on our signs and paper buckets, and I swear, those gulmotids—after they named him—they said that name with the kind of reverence you had to think he’d been canonized, like Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, and Diego Maradona all rolled into one: Kokontaaz! And that was how they said our name half the time, too, “Top Sushi! Kokontaaz!”

For us, he was just a bug. But none of us would ever tell them that. Me and Damien would just nod along. “Yes, yes, Kokontaaz. That’s greatness right there, boys. Best there ever was. Come and get your crickets. Sushi for sushi. Step right up and tap your gold card here.”

That was how things would go most nights.

The night Jackie Earmuffs told me she was pregnant, though, things felt a little different down on the concourse when I got there. Mitra had already opened the screen to let the backside air out, and he and Damien were sitting at the front countertop under an umbrella, each of them sipping a bottled beverage of the adult human variety getting ready to get to work. It was heading toward sunset. And that was when we heard all kinds of weird chants and protest noises coming up the concourse like we’d never heard before in Bugtown. At that time of day, usually it was just us workers on the concourse, as well as the bug-boni zipping up and down the pavement keeping the walkways nice and tidy day-to-day. Mitra said that ruckus reminded him of the early days—the protests about the aliens down in Naples and Miami. Mitra put up an arm and shouted down toward the crowd, “Earth is for people!” and he was kinda joking. But as the group got closer, we started to see it wasn’t any regular protest like we’d seen in those early days. First of all, we didn’t hear what it was about initially, because half of it was in another language we couldn’t pick out over their speakers from far away, and then when the other language stopped, they started speaking English.

By the time they were close enough to the Top Sushi for us to make out what they were actually saying, we could see they were Japanese, and it was a whole big entourage with signs and chants and everything. There were Japanese ladies all dressed up in kimonos and in the middle of everything, we could see when they finally got close, there was a very serious looking Japanese chef and standing beside him wearing an elaborate gown was about the biggest man I’ve ever seen—a real-life Japanese sumo with his hair in a bun.

When they got in front of the Top Sushi the whole crowd started chanting at us angrily. One of them would go, “Sushi?” and then everyone else would answer, “Ja-nai! Ja-Nai!”

Me and Mitra and Damien had no idea what it was all about. And then that chef got on the megaphone and started barking into it loud and fast in Japanese.

昆虫は魚じゃない！

He was so mad he turned red.

お前らアメリカ人の厚顔無恥ぶりには、もはや限度というものがないな。

I thought he was gonna have a stroke.

なぜ我々の文化的遺産を盗み出し、それを愚弄するような真似をするんだ？お前らは最低のクズ野郎だ！

The only thing that calmed him down was every thirty seconds or so a translator had to take the megaphone to explain what he was saying, and then it was all clear to us.

The Japanese were furious. Sushi was a part of their cultural heritage. That chef had been training for decades to become one of the top sushi chefs in all of Japan, and they didn’t like it one bit that their craft had become synonymous with bugs and aliens and slop-wagon food buckets, Mega Bug Battles, and smelly gulmotids. To my mind, they had a point. That group right in front of us had a whole culture and style that seemed worthy of more respect than that.

Mitra and Damien were kinda shaking their heads dismissively, after all, it wasn’t as though we’d tried to steal some part of their cultural heritage. The gulmotids had landed on us. And we didn’t call it sushi first. That was them, because it was one of the only words for food they could say. I could see both sides myself, so I figured I’d go down there and have a word with those visiting Japanese dignitaries, mend fences. They looked fancy and decent, albeit a little proud. Hell, though, I figured we should be a little proud us people. We were all on the same team now.

So I walked down there, smiled, and told that crowd what I thought in a couple words. “Hi, friends. I’m Groober, and Earth is for people,” I declared. Then I said the magic words. “Welcome to the Top Sushi.”

That wasn’t the right thing to say, as it turned out.

“Sushi ja-nai!” that chef shouted back at me, and then the others started chanting it back to him.

They didn’t want to hear the word sushi from a bug-slinger like me. The whole crowd erupted in anger. They were proper fired up, and I was doing my best to explain, but they were a genuine cultural delegation, as it turned out, and there weren’t a lot of them understanding me, and I wasn’t understanding them at all, until finally someone with a familiar face came up and introduced herself.

“Hey, Groober. My name’s Sayaka,” she told me, pulling on my elbow to get my attention.

She looked Japanese herself, but I swore I’d seen her around in Bugtown before.

“You’re not with these guys, are you?” I asked her.

“No. I work the back room at Mega Sushi. I just came down while we were prepping because I heard the commotion and wanted to see what it was all about.”

“I just wanted to talk to these guys,” I said, “but I don’t think they want to hear from me any.”

Before I knew it the entourage started walking down toward Line Sushi and Mega Sushi and that whole corner of the Bugtown concourse. And then Sayaka started explaining for me what was going on.

“You speak Japanese?” I asked her, and she nodded. “But you’re not from Japan?”
“No, Toledo,” she replied. “But my parents are from Nagoya.”

She started trying to talk to a few people, but they were into their chant. “Sushi?” then “Jai-nai! Ja-Nai!”

“What’s that mean, ‘Ja-nai’?” I asked Sayaka.

“It means like no, only very emphatically. Basically they’re saying it’s not sushi, these bugs. They feel very strongly about it, Groober.”

“Right.”

Nobody in that protest really wanted to talk. They were all too fired up, especially that red-faced chef. I was about to give up, but then everyone was crowding around the front of Line Sushi getting ready to shout at Ollie and those guys when I got bumped into by something that felt like the backside of an elephant. I was about to fall over when one gigantic hand reached down and grabbed me by the collar, holding me up. It was that humongous sumo; and he’d caught me, kept me from falling over, let go, brushed my collar straight, patted me on the shoulder gently, and said something in Japanese that I didn’t understand.

Then he and Sayaka started talking. She explained to him that I was the manager of the Top Sushi and that I wanted to hear them out. She introduced him, and seemed a bit in awe of him at the same time, looking up at that big, stoic face of his as we struggled to have a three-way conversation in that hectic crowd. It didn’t really last that long, but Sayaka made sure I got my key points across—no offense intended; Earth is for people; welcome to America; and so forth. That giant sumo said it was a pleasure to meet us both.

Then as Sayaka stepped out of the crowd with me, she explained what the sumo had told her, that he was yokozuna, and at the time I didn’t understand yet, but that was his title, not his name, like grand champion of all sumos—the best of the best, a real honor to meet him. And Sayaka and I talked for a little while about whether there was something we could do for them to make the Japanese happy. But that cat was already well out of the bag, you know. Sushi had been sushi for years now to the gulmotids. We couldn’t get those clumsy, cantankerous, bug-eating bastards to do anything. To start calling bugs something else? Sorry, but good luck. Sayaka told me she had to get back to Mega Sushi before Fletcher got mad.

“Just don’t tell him you were talking to me,” I told her.

“Oh, I know better, Groober. I don’t know why he hates you guys so much. I’ve always thought you and the Top Sushi crew were all right.”

“Well, anyway. Thanks, Sayaka,” I said. “It was good to meet you. If things aren’t working out at the Mega Sushi, come and find me. We can always use good, friendly help.”

I admit, it wasn’t a great move to be open about poaching another place’s staff, but I knew full well Fletcher had been openly trying to steal our best second- and third-tier guys for years, so I guess turnabout is fair play. I didn’t fully understand where the beef had begun with Fletcher, but it went back to the earliest days out here in the desert. When old Doc Ryerson sent me those prototypes of the noseclips—the real technical stank-blocking nasal accessories—they were just prototypes, and he’d only sent a few. But they worked perfect. Completely shut off all sense of smell for the wearer, making those atrocious-smelling gulmotids completely undetectable from an olfactory standpoint. Obviously, I didn’t need one myself on account of my congenital anosmia, but I gave a set to Damien, Mitra, and Jackie, and we had a spare one for our other two floaters, whoever was on the front team with us on any given night. And I only had one left after that, which I gave to Ollie Mercator over at Line Sushi, owing to the fact he was closer friends with us, and it was his idea to start the bug battles in the first place. They worked so good they were the talk of every last busser, cleaner, cook, and server in Bugtown, and I guess Fletcher must have been pissed he wasn’t on the shortlist.

Well first, we didn’t even know they were coming until they arrived, and second, we didn’t have any idea whether they would work until they actually did. And sure, it made life a thousand times better for Damien, Mitra, Ollie, and the rest of our staff, but it wasn’t like it gave us any advantage on actually doing the work. And finally, once we told Doc Ryerson they worked great and started sending orders back to Florida, not only did I make sure Fletcher and his staff got taken care of first, we didn’t even charge him for his first order. And then, instead of saying “Thank you, Groober,” or “These are going to make our lives a whole lot better,” he was all like, “What took you so damn long, Groober? Thanks for holding out on us.” But for him to still be holding out a grudge on me two years later? That seemed a bit much to me. And sure, I figured there should’ve been some friendly competition between the main outfits like us, Line Sushi, Sushi Bug, Mega Sushi, and Bugz Bucketz, but we were all on the same team after all—Earth is for people, above everything else. Jackie said that some people are just like that, though. Complainers. Plus, she thought Fletcher was jealous.

By the time I parted ways with Sayaka after we met that sumo, it was getting dark. When I got back, the boys were putting on their nose clips and opening the shutters and the rear flaps. Jackie was just coming in the back with her first load of bugs for the night, and we were starting to see the streaks coming down from orbit, the spaceships descending to the desert floor. It might sound crazy to say, but that was my favorite time of the day. Mega Bug Battles were about to begin.

We headed into the back and started getting suited up. It was a warm night, so we waited till the sun was down to get dressed, head covering, waxing our eyebrows down, full pants, the whole getup. That was less fun, but soon, we could hear the gulmotids coming again, rumbling down the concourse. Top Sushi was open for business.

We had a real professional outfit—AI logistics, work flow engineering, efficiency metrics, and all that. And I don’t just mean Top Sushi itself. All of Bugtown was a smooth operation. Things came in waves so that we were maximizing sales and productivity throughout the night. The first wave would come into Bugtown, get their buckets and head to the arena for the first round of bug battles, and while the battles were going Jackie would arrive with the bug wagon, stock us back up; then we would clean up the counters, resupply, and get ready for the second wave. All the gulmotids would flood out into Bugtown, get more buckets, place their bets for round two, and head back to the stadium for more action. It went like that all night. The only time things were actually relatively quiet was the last ten minutes before the stadium let out after a round of battles. Other than that, we were hustling all night.

I didn’t think anything would be different about that night at all until about the fifth wave of battles was about to let out. It was quiet out on the concourse, and there weren’t that many gulmotid stragglers about, so when I saw that big frame approaching, I had to look down at my watch to see if I’d got my timing off, because the battles weren’t quite finished yet. But as he got closer, I could see the outline of something I never expected—a perfect traditional sumo top-knot. And I sorta panicked, because I’d seen those gulmotids freak out about a single human hair showing from a server’s cap, and here was this sumo strutting down the concourse like he didn’t have a thing to worry about. I decided I had to let him know. Those gulmotids would be coming out, and I didn’t know what would happen. I told the boys to watch the front and get ready for the rush, and I stepped out into the concourse.

When he saw me, the yokozuna suddenly broke from that serious look of his and looked very happy to see me once he realized who I was, which was good, but when I tried to invite him to step out back so we could sort out his hair, he declined. It took me a bit longer to figure out how to communicate with him, but the sumo was a step ahead of me. He pulled out his rectangle, and through the translation app, he told me something that surprised me. He was looking for me, but really, he was looking for Sayaka. He’d thought she worked for me when we met earlier that night, and when I told him she didn’t, he suddenly got disappointed and asked me if I knew how he could see her again.

I told that sumo that all this was great and that I was happy to help him out, but we needed to get out of that concourse before the rush, because those gulmotids were going to come rumbling down that concourse like a herd of hippos, and they’d quickly turn into an angry herd if they caught one glimpse of that top-knot the yokozuna was sporting. I tried to offer him a Top Sushi hair covering like we wore, and he just shook his head at me, put up a hand and said, “No, no, no,” and then something in Japanese.

It didn’t occur to me as I was looking up at this gigantic human being that he didn’t have an ounce of physical fear in all that mass he was carrying. He was a good six-six and must have been damn near five hundred pounds. The way the translation came out made it sound like it was a point of principle more than any fashion choice. He was a sumo, and no alien was going to tell a sumo how to wear his hair for anything. I told him it might be dangerous, but he kinda laughed and said “Arigato, Grooberu. I be ok.”

I told him that Sayaka was working over at the Mega Sushi and that I’d be happy to facilitate a connection at the end of the night, and he thanked me and told me he thought she was more beautiful and cute as any Japanese girl he ever met, and apparently, he joked that a famous sumo like him had as many opportunities as he wanted. And then speaking of girlfriends, Jackie Earmuffs came out, because she made the same mistake as me, thinking I was out in the concourse about to get trampled while I was holding some kind of conversation with a gulmotid. She took down her earmuffs and shouted out to us as she approached.

“Damn, Groober,” she said, all wide-eyed when she got close enough to see the yokozuna there. “That sumo’s almost as big as the gulmotids. You gotta get him off the road.”

I introduced her to him, saying, “Yokozuna, this is my girlfriend Jackie Earmuffs.”

That was when he explained that his name wasn’t yokozuna, it was his title. His real name was Akebono Mori. He was named for a famous sumo himself, and he thought Jackie’s name was really funny. It was pretty clear he liked her right away. And she took him by that big hand of his and asked very nicely as she tried to tug him along, getting him to step out of the concourse with us before the rush came. And once she got him out of the main causeway, she tried to explain the same thing about his hair, and while I was telling her what he’d said about it, that was when the walkway started to thunder.

“Here come those goblins,” Jackie said, again trying to urge Yokozuna Mori a little farther off the walkway.

He seemed genuinely amused by her concern for him, and as the first gulmotids started to trickle by, Jackie told him she was making a delivery over at the Mega Sushi during the next wave. She’d seen Sayaka around before too, and she told him that he had good taste in girls—she must have been a sweetheart if Jackie Earmuffs liked her. Jackie told the yokozuna she’d make sure Sayaka came over after the battles were over that night. And for someone so big and confident like Yokozuna Mori, it seemed like he was really grateful and even a little nervous to talk to Sayaka. We were standing there, and as the gulmotids started to file in fast now, Jackie began to retreat to the back of the hut, and I was excusing myself from the yokozuna because I had to work. Then one of those gulmotids rushing in toward the front of the stand slapped his tongue toward Jackie, just getting fresh as they sometimes did, because he didn’t like the sight of her. Well that big boy hadn’t taken notice of Yokozuna Mori, who did not like that one bit.

Now it may seem kinda funny that in three years plus with those cantankerous and sloppy gulmotids, we’d never had any problems with violence at all in Bugtown. Not a single incident I’d even heard of—not with the gulmotids anyway. They never fought with each other at all, and we assumed they had a way of policing each other that we didn’t involve ourselves in, and really, for an ordinary person to take on a gulmotid was more or less akin to squaring off with a bipedal rhinoceros. Nobody had ever heard of a person starting a fight with those smelly bastards, tempting as it may have been at times. Nobody had told that to Akebono Mori.

I saw it in his eyes right away and tried to get between him and that gulmotid that had gotten fresh with Jackie, just to warn him off on how bad an idea it was to take on a gulmotid, and Akebono brushed me aside effortlessly with a single gesture of the palm, respectfully. I’d even say it was gentle and courteous. And then he slapped his two giant hands together to get that gulmotid’s attention, walked over, and started ripping into him in Japanese, shaking an angry fist, pointing his finger at the big boy, and then gesturing toward Jackie so he understood what it was about.

Then that big ugly gulmotid blurted something back, almost laughing at the silly human challenging him before finishing whatever he was saying with the absolute worst word he ever could have put to Akebono Mori while pointing to the front of our stand. “Sushi.”

I could see those big Japanese eyes of his get wide and turn to fire, as he shouted back, “Sushi ja-nai!”

And then the big boy answered the yokozuna. “Sushi!”

Akebono Mori slapped his chest and challenged that gulmotid to step forward, and I’m not sure he knew what was happening. Then one of the quicker specimens in the crowd caught on and spelled it out for him.

“Barrooowww!”

“Oh, crap,” I heard Jackie shout as she rushed to hide around the corner of the Top Sushi. But she couldn’t run all the way back there. Jackie Earmuffs was such a fiend for drama, she had to stick her head from around the corner to watch.

“Barroww!” the other gulmotids rumbled.

That was exactly what Akebono Mori had in mind. The gulmotid who’d snapped at Jackie looked a bit shocked. They’d never seen a human stand up to them before, but I guess he didn’t see any way he was going to back down from the very first human challenge like that. When the others said “battle” and the sumo slapped his hands together again, he knew that it was on.

The second that big boy took one step forward toward Akebono, the yokozuna flashed into action like a grizzly bear, slapping that gulmotid upside his head four or five times before angling up underneath the big boy’s arms and dumping the bigger creature to the pavement in a bumbling heap that let out an echoing, involuntary BLUURRRP that sounded almost exactly like the spirit escaping from a gulmotid at the speed of sound. And that was clearly the end of the first human gulmotid battle, all in a span of about three seconds.

It was the next second, though. Something that’d never happened in Bugtown in its three-year history.

Dead. Silence.

And there was Akebono standing there in front of a crowd of about a hundred wide-eyed gulmotids, who looked back at this champion human fighter in utter disbelief. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen the next moment when the shock wore off and those big ugly bastards started doing the simple math.

“Groober!” Jackie sorta shouted and whispered at me at the same time. “Do something!”

Oh, hell no, I thought. I didn’t want to get in the middle of that. And I had no clue what I could do when Jackie said it, but suddenly it just popped into my head.

“Battle!” I shouted, walking out from behind Akebono. “Nansha Battle!”

It was what they said in the bug fights when the match was finished, and then I followed the script from the program talking about how good a fight it was and did my best to lift up Akebono’s arm to declare him the winner.

“Winner!” I finished the script as the gulmotids were used to. “Yokozuna Akebono Mori!”

“OKO-BUMA!” one of the big boys in the front of the crowd shouted.

“Okobuma!” they began to shout and celebrate.

And then, Mori reached over and gave his opponent a hand up, which I think they appreciated as a sporting gesture. And he slapped that gulmotid on the back as though to tell him it was a good battle, but then he pointed toward Jackie and gestured, waving his hand in an unmistakable way, saying, “Nai. Nai.”

And it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen with those obstinate creatures, he looked at Akebono and said, “Nai. Nai. Okobuma!”

And then they crowded around him like he was the greatest thing they’d ever seen. And that was that. Situation defused.

So I shouted to everyone. “Top Sushi!”

And the whole crowd shouted back, “Sushi!”

Akebono himself stepped around to the corner of the hut, watching as the gulmotids crowded in, pushing and shoving against the front of the counter trying to get their orders in. And something about it must have rubbed Akebono the wrong way, because he watched from that corner with a sour look on his face for about two minutes before he stepped over to the front of the counter and started waving his finger at them, shaking his head, and then he began to direct them where to stand, how to queue up, not to push and shove. And to everybody’s shock, those gulmotids didn’t hesitate one bit. They didn’t even talk back. They just said, “Okobuma!” And then they came forward and gave their order one at a time—sushi for sushi, big lime seltzer, beetle bowwwl!

“Next!” Damien shouted as me and Dina filled buckets.

Mitra could hardly fill up the hoppers fast enough everything was going so smooth.

“Holy crap!” Jackie Earmuffs said from the side door. “That sumo’s like a lion tamer for these aliens, Groober. You have to hire this guy.”

“I think he’s got a job already, Jackie. He’s like the best sumo in the world.”

“I know how to get him to work here,” she said, and then I saw her sneaking out the back.

To my shock, after the rush died out about an hour later and the call to the next wave of battles came from the stadium, the great yokozuna was still standing there at the corner of the Top Sushi front window, directing traffic and waving the gulmotids on as they shouted out his name to him—Okobuma!

He may have been famous in Japan, but in one hour he’d become just as famous in Bugtown. It seemed like every last gulmotid on Earth knew who he was now.

The second things died down at the window long enough for me to step out, I patted the big fella on the arm and thanked him for helping out. He thanked me for defusing that tenuous moment with all those hungry gulmotids. He had a damn sour look on his face, though, for the words being exchanged. I asked him if he could write what was bothering him on his phone as it was translating for us aloud. He nodded as he typed away deftly with a couple of his giant fingers, I couldn’t help but notice how tiny that phone seemed in his hands. Then he put that rectangle in my hands.

“God, these guys stink!” the screen read in English.

“Oh, shit!” I said, shaking my head at the oversight. “I’m sorry.”

I snuck around back again and grabbed a spare noseclip, hoping it would fit. And when I came around again, demonstrating how to put it on, I could see his eyes light up the second it kicked in.

“Better?” I asked him, and when the phone translated, he nodded.

“How come you don’t wear a noseclip like this?” he asked me—or the phone did after it translated.

Then I tried to explain. I was born without a sense of smell, I told him. Isolated congenital anosmia. He seemed mystified by that.

“Look who I found,” I heard Jackie’s voice from the side alley, she was coming around front with a friend. “I poached her mid-shift, Groober. Fletcher’s gonna shit when he finds out.”

And it was Sayaka. It took me a second, because I’d only seen her before or after hours in Bugtown, not kitted up like that with her eyebrows waxed down and her hair covered over. But it didn’t take Akebono even a second to recognize her, greeting Sayaka in Japanese. And man, I don’t know what it was about the Top Sushi and love at first sight, but that big fella was smitten, and both Jackie and I could see the same in Sayaka’s eyes as she looked up at him. Jackie took me by the wrist. “Let’s give these two a little space, Groober. We got work to do for the next wave.”

Come sunup, both Sayaka and Akebono were still there, she funneling refills in to Mitra in the back to keep the bugs flowing, he standing out front keeping the queue orderly, fast, and calm. When the final bell chimed out of the stadium and the gulmotids went thundering out toward the flats to their ships to beat the sunlight, I took a look at our countertops out front and then down at the pavement in our standing area, and there wasn’t a single stray bucket or cup to be seen. Not only had Akebono kept the lines neat, he’d singlehandedly, in one night, taught the entire gulmotid race the most important word they’d failed to learn for three years prior—“Nai!”

It hadn’t fully registered with me just how much of a difference it made having a genuine yokozuna running the front of the house. But it sure did. Half the time one of those gulmots tried to leave a stray bucket or throw a cup down on the pavement, Akebono would give a look and say it—Nai! The other half of the time another one of the gulmotids themselves would do it—Nai!—and then they’d finish off the directive with the exclamation “Okobuma!” And Akebono himself would nod in approval.

Top Sushi was the fastest and cleanest it had ever been. I couldn’t believe the look of the place when the sun came up. We cleaned the back in record time, packed everything up, cleaned ourselves up, dumped our clothes in the laundry, and he was still sitting there out front, waiting for Sayaka.

So we went out to sit with him, offered him a beer or a soda, like we usually finished a shift with. Then, while we were sitting there, as usual, I ran the numbers.

“Holy hell, you guys,” I said. “We do have to hire this guy.”

“Double, Groober?” Mitra asked. “I was cooking ‘em as fast as that girl Jackie poached from Fletcher could load them in.”

“Near as,” I replied, holding up the graph on my work tablet.

Damien’s eyes nearly bugged out. “I could put a hot tub in the bus if this guy hangs around.”

“Okobuma!” Mitra said, grinning at our new friend.

He and Sayaka laughed, but those two were a little bit too much into their own conversation to pay all that much attention to us.

We clinked our bottles to cap off the best night we’d ever had at the Top Sushi thinking it was too good to be anything but a one off.

That was what we all thought until Akebono came walking back down the causeway an hour before sunset the following evening, hand in hand with Sayaka. And he stayed all night again. Same result only bigger and better. Numbers booming, lines straight and long, and those gulmotids loving every minute of it. Akebono would make the simplest gestures and those gulmots understood it—get back in line, pick up that cup, don’t you even think of slurping that tongue at that server. Okobuma! Okobuma! Nai, nai!

The lines were getting longer each wave. Every time the battles let out, they would race down the causeway past Mega Sushi and Bugz Buckets just to queue up at our place.

He’d only been there for two nights and Mitra was already suggesting we put Akebono’s face on the buckets instead of Kokontaaz!

I woke up the following day to Jackie Earmuffs puking her face off again.

“I gotta warn her, Groober,” she said after coming back to bed.

“Warn who?” I asked her.

“Sayaka. She’ll end up like me soon if she’s not careful, knocked-up with a sumo-baby, working the bug wagon by night, puking her guts out by day. It’s not the life for a sweet kid like her.”

“You think they’re already ...?”

“Of course they are, Groober. She’s crazy if she isn’t. Once you go sumo ...”

Then she got that look in her eye Jackie got when she was about to get frisky.

“You’re going to make me jealous of the big fella, Jackie. You better knock it off.”

“That big bun of his. That’s some kind of haircut.”

“I could grow my hair out like that, big sumo man-bun,” I joked, kissing Jackie on the cheek.

“You better not,” she said grimacing at the thought. “Baby Groober, though. I could see it. He’ll be a little bug slinging sumo of our own soon enough.”

I figured it could only last a couple days with the yokozuna around. As Jackie said all the time, Bugtown was boomtown—easy come, easy go. But six days after that delegation of fancy Japanese dignitaries had arrived protesting our use of the word “sushi,” not only had we not given back their word for delicious raw fish, we at the Top Sushi had poached their greatest living sumo wrestler as an encore. He was still walking Sayaka to work each night, hand-in-hand, sticking around to keep order all night, and waiting patiently at the big seats on the concourse for Sayaka to finish up so he could walk her home at sunup. And for us, things had never been better. He hadn’t even asked for a cut of the major spike in profits we were pulling in with him around. I started feeling guilty about it.

So on that sixth night, just before sunrise, while Sayaka and Dina and Mitra were still finishing up scrubbing down the back, I went out front to have a word with the big fella. There were causeway seats out there that were designed to hold up to those gulmots, and for me it was like a kindergartner seated in a grown man’s bucket-seat. But for Akebono, it was the perfect place for him to get off his big feet after a long night of standing and keeping order. That chair was his only compensation so far. The gulmotids already knew—that one was Okobuma’s seat, and they didn’t sit there. Didn’t even dare touch it. I wiped down the one next to it before sitting beside him.

“Akebono San,” I greeted him the way Sayaka taught me. “Good night?”

“Hai, Grooberu. Hai.”

Then he pulled out his phone. We were getting good at talking through his rectangle.

“I think you have an excellent job, my friend,” he said. “You are a good ambassador for Earth, make business, much fun, and welcome these aliens to our world in a positive way.”

“That’s giving us bug slingers a lot of credit,” I told him. “We’re just making a living in the way we know how. You’ve been helping a lot this week. We all thought you’d be gone already.”

He looked over his shoulder toward the back. The others hadn’t come out yet.

“I have good reason to stay, Grooberu.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to work the bug line.”

“I want to make sure. Sayaka says she almost got hurt some times at her other job.”

“Mega Sushi?”

“Hai. So, so. She says bossu—I can’t say his name.”

“Fletcher.”

“Hai. He made her go to clean the buckets from the front between waves too early, too many aliens around. Snapped her twice and knocked her down once too.”

“Oh, I’d never do that to Sayaka, Akebono. You know.”

“I like to be sure. Makes her feel safe if I’m here.”

“Having you around makes everyone feel safe, big fella. Listen, I haven’t known how to approach this because we never officially talked, because I always figured you’d be on a plane the next day anyway, but we’re making a lot more money here at the Top Sushi because of you. And you’re doing a lot of work to help us. We should be giving you something.”

He grinned at me and turned his head toward the back again.

“I have plenty of money, Grooberu. Sumos like me are well compensated.”

“Like what, a basketball player?”

He shrugged those big sumo shoulders of his. “Not as well from the league, but I do many many commercials. Yokozuna is a big honor in Japan. Ever since I became yokozuna, my face is in many places.”

“Well, we all like having you here, and if you want a piece of the action, you just say the word, Akebono San. And stay as long as you like, my friend.”

Just then I could hear the others coming out from the back, each of them carrying a folding chair with them. Mitra had a cooler with some beers in it. Funny tradition, beers at sunup.

Akebono smiled and nodded at me, putting out one of his big old fists for a fist-bump.

The others came and sat around us. That was the gravity of the big fella—where he was sitting, that’s where the gang would gather. And as funny as it was to see someone so big holding hands with a regular-sized girl like Sayaka, they looked good together. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that—times you wish you could freeze right there.

It lasted about three minutes, not even half a beer.

“Hey, Groober!” I heard someone shouting from across the concourse. “I bet you think you’re real smart, poaching my people in the middle of a shift like that. You and your girlfriend from the bug wagon.”

Damn. It was Fletcher.

“Nice to see you too, Fletcher. Pull up a chair and grab a beer if you like, so we can talk like civilized human beings.”

“Yeah. No thanks.”

“That was like six days ago, man?” I said to him as he got closer. “If you were that fired up about something, you could’ve come talk to me, hear my side of things?”

He glared over at Sayaka, who was translating to Akebono under her breath.

“What is this? You poach my back staff and hire a sumo wrestler to run your front? You think this shit is Disney World or something, Groober?”

“Damn, Fletcher. How the hell do you have the energy to be so goddamn angry at five in the morning?” I asked him. “Take a breath, will you?”

“My Gramm gets cranky like that too, mornings,” Mitra joked. “Usually means she’s got a UTI.”

We all started laughing. Couldn’t help it. Mitra had a million stories from Naples. That was how he’d started cooking at Top Sushi in the first place—to take care of his grandmother back in Florida.

Fletcher was fuming.

“I could get you a cranberry juice instead of a beer,” Mitra continued. “I bet Damien still has a extra course of antibiotics left over from ... what was her name, D? Sylvia?”

“Serena,” Jackie interjected, shaking her head and scowling.

“Or I could just give you her number, Fletch,” Damien suggested. “It wasn’t anything permanent, but you’re going to need those antibiotics if you do give her a call. Getting a little might help with that anger, buddy.”

We were all laughing pretty good by then.

“Real funny assholes,” Fletcher replied, looking over at Sayaka plenty sour as she continued to translate for Akebono, who still had that stern sumo look fixed to his face, not even a grin.

“Oh, stuff it, Fletcher,” Jackie told him. “You’re just pissed we thought of it first. Any time anybody else has a better week than Mega Sushi, you get sour.”

“Don’t think I don’t know it was you, Jackie, coming in snaking my employees for Groober. You think you can get away with anything because you’re a supplier?”

“Call somebody else the next time you’re weeded, Fletcher,” Jackie replied. “Or stop being an asshole for once. It’s not like you never poached anybody else’s staff ever.”

He got red faced and started pointing a finger at Jackie, shouting. “Not in the middle of a shift! The next time you come in my place and pull shit like that—”

Fletcher stopped shouting mid-sentence. Akebono had stood up. That yokozuna didn’t even have to take a step forward, just stood there looking at Fletcher and then wagged a finger at him, just like he did to those gulmots.

No, sir. You do not.

Fletcher was shaking his head, plenty embarrassed. He nearly pissed himself standing there with Akebono staring him down like that.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “We’ll see how smart you assholes think you are ...” and he kept grumbling as he turned to storm back down the concourse toward the Mega Sushi.

“Bye, Fletcher,” Jackie said to his backside, mocking the jerk.

I think maybe the others thought that would be the end of that, but they didn’t know Fletcher like I did. I figured something would be coming down the line soon enough, and I wasn’t wrong.

We didn’t hear from Fletcher for another ten days or so, but I had the sense he was up to something all the while. Just the look on him any time we crossed paths, a sly grin. I never could’ve imagined the extent he’d go to getting even, or at least it was even in his mind somehow. People like Fletcher can get a little dangerous if you give ‘em a bit of money.

We were getting toward the fifth wave, a little past midnight, and there was about fifteen minutes before the current battle was set to let out. It was slow enough that only a few gulmotid stragglers were out on the concourse. And suddenly, I hear a commotion out the front window. I saw Akebono’s eyebrows go up as though he recognized something. Turns out it was the Japanese language getting barked over a megaphone.

This angry crowd was a group a lot like the one Akebono came with in the first place, a whole Japanese entourage, only right in the middle beside the Japanese guy barking into the megaphone was Fletcher, and standing right beside him, a head above Fletch, was another tremendous, broad-shouldered sumo, his hair tied back in a sumo bun, the same stern look on his face as Akebono. He looked like a beast. Then, when the group got to our pen out front of the Top Sushi, Fletcher grabbed the megaphone and started mouthing off from the middle of the concourse.

“Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about Top Sushi. I learned a new word this month, like everyone else around here—Okobuma! There he is. That’s him right there. You’ve all seen him. Oko-booma!”

And Fletcher started pointing over at Akebono, acting all tough from fifty feet away in a crowd with his own big sumo to guard him. All the gulmotids in the causeway started gathering around, wondering what the business was.

“I’ve learned something about their okobuma, though. You hear me, Groober? Akebono Mori isn’t even the champion! He’s the champion!” And Fletcher held his arm up behind their sumo. “This is Koji San—the real yokozuna! He’s the reigning champion of all sumo on Earth! Akebono is old. He’s washed up. He came to Bugtown to run and hide so he didn’t have to face Koji! That’s what everyone in Japan is saying, Groober. But Akebono can’t hide here in Bugtown anymore. Mega Sushi is calling you out, Groober. You’ve got your yokozuna. We’ve got ours. There’s only one thing left to do. Say it with me everyone ... BATTLE!”

I figure those gulmots understood about three words of that whole monologue Fletcher had probably been practicing in the mirror all week, but they sure knew the most important one. That whole concourse outside the Top Sushi erupted.

“BAAARRRROOOWWW!!!”
“Okobuma! Okobuma!”

“BAAARRROOOWWW!!!”

To his credit, Akebono Mori didn’t flinch. He stood there with his arms crossed, giving that other sumo and Fletcher and that whole crowd from Mega Sushi a big fat sumo stank eye. And then their sumo, Koji, started shouting to Akebono in Japanese, pointing, calling him out. And damn, I had no idea what Akebono must’ve been feeling on the inside, but he seemed like a cool enough customer. He raised both arms wide, as if to say to his rival, “Any time, big fella!” Then Akebono patted his chest with one hand, nodded, and then waved the entire crowd away with the back of his hand and shouted two words I never expected to hear out of his mouth:

“TOPO SUSHI!”

Just then Jackie came running out of the back.

“Groober! Groober! What’s going on? What did I miss?”

“Fletcher’s got his own yokozuna now and he’s calling Akebono out.”

“Damn. What’s he going to do?”

“He’s going to fight him.”

“Damn.”

“Mega Sushi!” Fletcher shouted back over the megaphone, and then he got that whole crowd on the concourse shouting their yokozuna’s name, “Koji, Koji, Koji, Koji!”

“We’ll see you in the ring, Groober! You and the rest of you Top Sushi losers.”

Right then the bell rang from the stadium to signal the end of the wave, so even if they’d wanted to stay out there taunting us any longer, they’d have got trampled. They all dispersed fast so they could get back to the Mega Sushi before the rush. But they’d sure blindsided all of us. We hardly had time to process what the hell had gone down before the gulmotids came thundering back for their bugs.

The rest of that night went as usual, but there was a different energy around the concourse. “Okobuma” didn’t get uttered with the same kind of reverence to Akebono when the gulmotids came through. And our lines weren’t quite as long as they had been the previous nights. I heard that morning from Ollie Mercator that the Mega Sushi was booming after midnight. He said they were slammed at Line Sushi too, benefiting from the spillover from the crowd around Fletcher’s. He’d come by to see what was happening over at ours, and he was surprised to see that Akebono and Sayaka were already gone by the time Jackie and me and Damien and Mitra were sitting out by the concourse decompressing after another busy shift. We hadn’t had a chance to take a breath really, much less figure out what was going on.

Ollie sat down, grabbed a beer and started scrolling, and we started learning about sumo. I hadn’t checked up on Akebono and his life. I’d never really met anyone that famous before as a friend, and I figured it was better to just take him as he was, let him tell me who he was by his behavior and let him share what he wanted to tell me about himself, not go snooping about his life. Jackie, though, she told Ollie to dig deep. She wanted all the dirty details.

Akebono, it turned out, was a late bloomer. He was thirty-four now and hadn’t won his first championship until he was twenty-eight. In hundreds of years, there had only been eighty-six men awarded the rank of yokozuna. Akebono Mori became number eighty-five after winning five consecutive championships when he was thirty and thirty-one, surprising everybody with his consistent dominance at his peak. Following that commanding campaign, he’d blown out his left knee on the tenth day of the spring Tokyo tournament the following year.

Koji San, whose full name was Nishiyama Koji, came out of nowhere the following year and dominated. Akebono hadn’t finished rehabbing in time for the grand championships, but Koji was so dominant everyone speculated about who would win once Akebono finally came back. Koji was only twenty-five when he was awarded the rank of yokozuna that following year.

When Akebono finally returned, according to what Ollie was reading, our pal had lost a step and didn’t look like the same guy from before his injury, but he was so great despite it, that only one sumo was a match for him—Koji. They met in the final match of the grand championship in Osaka, where Koji matched him for speed and power, barely managing to push Akebono from the ring. There was a lot of speculation afterward that Akebono had re-aggravated his knee injury in that final match. A few months later, they met again in the July tournament on the fifth day, with Koji ducking under and throwing Akebono to the clay to secure the victory. That match more or less decided the tournament. Akebono hadn’t won a tournament since, and according to what we were reading, he was nearing the time limit before his absence from the ring would disqualify him from retaining his title of yokozuna.

It didn’t look good for the big fella, I had to say. But we’d seen him earlier that night. He couldn’t back down, and we knew he wasn’t going to. We just hoped he could hold his own, not even for Top Sushi or anything, but for him, our new friend. That Koji was no joke, though. Ollie was showing us all videos. It looked like he had all the skills and knew all the tricks. He was a yokozuna, through and through.

I didn’t quite know what to think about it, and I figured I wouldn’t until I could talk to Akebono himself. He was the only one in Bugtown who truly understood what was going on. Even beyond the cultural stuff, there was also history there, him and Koji.

Part of me expected that Akebono and Sayaka wouldn’t show up the following night. That shows you how much I knew about Akebono’s culture. He came strutting down the concourse the following day like he owned it. And man, when I saw that other sumo, I saw it was a thing they both did—walked like that, that sumo strut, like nobody on Earth was gonna mess with them, not even the aliens that outweighed them by two hundred pounds, not even other sumos. You had to respect it.

As Sayaka and Dina and the guys were getting ready for the night, I stepped out front to chat with Akebono. I wanted to ask him about how the match was going to go.

“Don’t know, Grooberu San,” he told me through his phone. “I’ve never done sumo for any other reason than a tournament.”

“Did you talk to Koji?”

He shook his head. “Don’t have his number.”

“Oh. I figured there weren’t so many of you guys that you all might talk.”

“We talk,” he replied, shrugging, “mostly with the wrestlers in our stable, and also at the tournaments. Very professional and respectful. Good match. You too. Those things.”

“So there’s no bad blood?”

He looked back at me doubtfully. “Maybe not no bad blood. Those things are quiet. Not for other people to see.”

“But not between you and Koji?”

“I don’t know, Grooberu. I have no bad blood for Koji San. As a person, I don’t know him very well. As a sumo, he is a great champion. It will be a very big challenge.”

“Well, you’ve got our support, Akebono San, however it goes down.”

He asked me to check with Fletcher to see whether they had a plan for how everything would be arranged. It was going to be complicated. Akebono didn’t want to do anything the wrong way, and as we talked, it began to sound like it wasn’t going to be easy to pull off a proper sumo match in Bugtown. Both he and Koji were world-class athletes, so it wasn’t like they were okay with a bunch of Americans who knew nothing about the sport drawing a circle in the dirt and shouting “Go!” That’d be like expecting professional hockey players to have a serious hockey game on a pond without lines and officials and boards and all that. These were serious men with serious reputations. So we were going to need some help from Japan at the very least to build a proper ring on pretty short notice. And, as it turned out, the Japanese in general weren’t the biggest fans of ours. Not only that, we’d need referees, and none of them would have anything to do with a match like this without an official blessing from the Sumo Association if they ever wanted to work again. I had Ollie look into it, and we found out that there’d only been a handful of exhibition matches held outside Japan ever, and they sure weren’t held center stage at the Mega Bug Battles.

Leave it to Fletcher to stick his big stupid nose into something he didn’t understand. I don’t know how much he had to pay Koji San to stir up trouble with Akebono, but nobody had seen him at the Mega Sushi since. According to Sayaka, he was already down in Vegas, running around town like a movie star with big gold sunglasses and a crowd of pretty girls.

The following day, when I expressed doubt that we were going to be able to make it happen, Akebono made his feelings known clearly, as he did, basically telling us that he hadn’t asked anything of us for all the help he’d given the Top Sushi. He told me he was asking this one thing—to make it happen. And man, me and Damien and Mitra together, we could run the Top Sushi. I didn’t want to tell him that this was above my pay grade, but that’s what I was thinking. So I called up Domenico and asked him if he had some friends who could help facilitate it. He was scratching his head.

“A sumo match, Groober? Are you for real?”

“I sure am, boss.”

“I don’t know anything about sumo.”

“And you didn’t know the first thing about serving bugs to aliens before they landed in Naples neither. But you’ve done okay figuring that out.”

“I’ll make a few calls and see what I can do,” he told me.

Meanwhile, another week passed.

It was tough to tell how Akebono was doing. His expression almost never changed, except whenever Sayaka appeared. Then he would always crack a little smile. He told me about that. He’d never got married in Japan. Most sumos lived in their stables until they did get married. But for many years he was too poor to even think of it, just a junior guy, a big body the real wrestlers needed to push around in training. And then, suddenly, when they couldn’t push him around as easily, when he started winning a few matches, and then tournaments, and girls started paying attention to him, Akebono got the sense that those sorts of girls didn’t care that much about him. They cared about the money and fame that was starting to come his way. That was what he liked about Sayaka so much. She’d liked him right away, and she’d had no idea how much money he had or how famous he was in Japan. She just liked him. It was a lot like me and Jackie when we first met. A connection.

It sounded like a damn tough life, actually, being a sumo. There were only two active yokozunas. There were maybe twenty or thirty other successful wrestlers who did well. Everyone else was busting their ass to get to the top. Most never did.

When I finally heard back from Domenico, things weren’t looking good. He told me the Sumo Association was a tough nut to crack. And if Domenico Domingo knew anything about anything, it was about nuts, all kinds of nuts, like me and Mitra, Jackie and Damien, building restaurants for feeding bug-eating aliens, putting together Bugtown out of nothing. To hear he was pessimistic was a little surprising after everything we’d done.

“I dangled about as much money in front of them as I could, Groober, but they told me it wasn’t about all that. It was about pride and dignity—respect.”

I talked to Jackie the next morning as we were lying down together in the bus.

“Pride and dignity,” she kinda scoffed. “That’s all well and good, Groober, but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of fat mostly-naked guys blasting bellies in the dirt when it comes down to it. Money buys a lot of dignity whether it’s banking money or bug money. Money’s money. They just need to see a figure that makes them forget about their pride.”

“I don’t’ think we got that much money, Jackie.”

“We might not, but those gulmots do. They’re laughing at us, Groober. Every one of them is like a billionaire to us. Even the money we make is a joke to them, never mind regular people.”

That was a thought. Maybe Domenico was calling the wrong people. I called him up again and had him talk to his friends in the government—the ones who talked to the aliens, regulated Bugtown, and controlled space traffic in orbit. Somewhere out there in the galaxy was an alien Provedor, who regulated Earth on the alien side as well. And sure enough, some one of those humans—the ones who treated banks like trading cards—well one of them must have looked at the proposition and thought about it for a second or two and come to the conclusion that if these gulmotids liked bug battles, they’d go nuts for sumo. It was about the only human sport they could understand. Before we knew it, the big screens on the causeway were showing sumo matches in between waves, and the gulmots were going crazy for it. We had to keep it to a minimum, because they were so entranced by the screens it was hurting our sales numbers. They were rushing to the booking screens to place bets and getting angry when they found out the matches weren’t live. Before long, we heard a few gulmotids had even shown up in Japan looking for the tournaments.

Very quickly after that, the Japanese Sumo Association was calling Domenico. If they didn’t like the gulmotids in Bugtown, they sure didn’t like them in Osaka any better. And when that Provedor started talking to the Sumo Association about galactic broadcast rights, the numbers were suddenly very prideful and dignified. Koji San wasn’t in Vegas anymore. He was over at the Mega Sushi again directing the queue, and we were hearing it in the causeway: “Okobuma Okobuma! Battle!”

“Are you ready, big fella?” I asked Akebono.

He nodded, and though he didn’t look like he had a hint of doubt, I could still see a hint of something, maybe sadness, maybe something like it. What Fletcher’d said wasn’t wrong. Akebono was old for a sumo. He hadn’t won a match for over a year. He hadn’t wrestled for nearly as long. And Koji? He was a yokozuna at the height of his powers.

I insisted to Domenico that whatever deal was struck to make this thing happen had to be a one-off, partly for Akebono’s sake, in case it went bad for him, and partly because I could smell something. Those bankers were looking at numbers that the sumos hadn’t seen yet—same as we bug slingers when Bugtown was being built. We’d done well, sure, but our eyes weren’t nearly as open back then as they were three years on. This would be one battle to test the waters. From there, we could see what came of it, and the sumos could have a look at things with their eyes open before galactic business got done on their behalf.

Two weeks, I got word a couple days later. And holy hell, not in my wildest imagination did I have any sense of what was about to descend on Bugtown.

The first wave Akebono prepared me for. That wave was Japanese. There were officials from the Sumo Association that had to construct the ring and the area around it. Akebono had managers and training partners and physiotherapists and masseurs and cooks. It was like he’d been on vacation here until that moment, and I could see it on his face. Suddenly, he had to go to work again. He even cut back at the Top Sushi, sending some of the younger wrestlers to work the line. The gulmots still listened to them after the okobuma put his hand on their back and made all the unmistakable gestures—this guy is my guy, okay? You listen to him too.

Sayaka was a nervous wreck. Jackie found her in tears out behind the Top Sushi as she was bringing in a delivery a couple nights before the fight.

“His knee has never healed,” she told Jackie. “If it wasn’t for Fletcher and his damn ego, Akebono could’ve just retired like he was going to. Now he can’t back down.”

Shit. That was a piece we didn’t know. Suddenly me and Damien and Mitra and Dina were all carrying the same vibes as Sayaka in the days leading up to the match, something between grief and dread. After all, Akebono wasn’t just some aging yokozuna to us anymore. He was our friend. And Koji San, gold sunglasses and all, was down at the Mega Sushi making gestures to the crowd like he was going to bust Akebono up, hyping the fight like it was going to be the biggest spectacle in the history of Bugtown. He was not wrong.

Before we knew it, there was nothing left but the fight. All these bug battles were fun and games for us people. This one meant something.

I’d been inside the stadium before, of course, but always when it was empty, and even then, the floor level was much smaller than you’d figure for a venue so big. It hosted bug fights after all, so it was a steep, bowl-shaped amphitheater with limited space at the bottom of that bowl. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we’d opted to build in premium gulmotid seating on that lower level, there probably wouldn’t have been enough room for a sumo match down there, and it wasn’t as if a sumo ring was that big at all. I was surprised by how small it seemed in person.

I came in representing the Top Sushi, as Domenico didn’t go down for stuff like that. And Fletcher, of course, wanted to stick it to me personally, not Domenico. And part of the agreement for the whole thing was that it would be a hybrid-type event, so there were introductions and announcements in English and Gulmotix that never would’ve been part of a genuine tournament in Japan.

The way it worked in Japan was that a sumo would wrestle once a day for two weeks in a grand tournament. Then, based on records, they’d decide the tournament on the final day, usually a match or two. But we couldn’t do that here. So Akebono’s people and Koji’s people decided on a best-of-three match exhibition format on the same night. And, of course, because everyone involved wanted to give the gulmots time to place their bets between matches, there would be a half hour between bouts. Most of the money was on Koji wiping the floor with Akebono in two matches, but I didn’t believe that, mostly because I didn’t want to.

Me and Jackie went in with Sayaka, and she was so anxious her hands were shaking. She said she’d never seen him like he’d been in the last few days, really quiet, serious, no laughter or smile. But, I kept trying to remind her, she hadn’t known him before when he was wrestling.

The place was so full up behind us there wasn’t room for another gulmotid or person. You could feel the arena just full up with living energy, and Jackie, out of curiosity, made the mistake of slipping off her noseclip just for a second and nearly started puking then and there in the middle of the arena.

“Oh man! Groober, I wish you could smell it,” she said between coughs, reacting to the smell of thousands of gulmotids all penned up in one place together.

And that was funny too. One of the unique rules. The sumos and the judges were allowed to wear Doc Ryerson’s noseclips so they could tolerate the atmosphere. They wouldn’t have done that in Japan.

Jackie was still trying to describe the stench to me. “It’s like death died, smelled itself rotting, and then threw up on its corpse.”

Damn. Only Jackie Earmuffs could put it like that, but I still couldn’t really understand.

Right as Jackie stopped coughing, they started announcing things in Japanese. I’d watched a few sumo videos by then, so I sorta knew how things would go. The wrestlers came in, got introduced, and there was a buzz among the human VIPs along the outer ring on the floor with us, and then above us there were rumblings from the gulmotids. Half of them roaring out “Okobuma!” when Nishiyama Koji was introduced. The other half when it was Akebono Mori.

Sayaka was clenching her fists and trying not to freak out. Jackie couldn’t help herself, though, when those sumos were walking around the ring getting ready.

“Damn, that’s a lot of ass,” she said when Koji circled past us, and it was loud enough for about a quarter of the people on the floor to hear.

That was just before Akebono and Koji began throwing salt into the ring, getting ready. I was feeling nervous almost like I was going to fight. Then things went into slow motion as those sumos crouched down, and almost before I knew what was happening, they touched their knuckles to the ground.

Both men exploded toward each other in an overwhelming burst of energy. The entire arena roared as they blasted into each other. Koji pushed Akebono back, but the big fella absorbed it, elbowing Koji’s shoulders away. And then they locked each other under the arms, grabbed each other’s belt, and took turns trying to get their legs inside each other to throw the other sumo out. I couldn’t believe it, because most of the videos I’d watched of matches lasted a few seconds, but those two yokozunas were tussling with each other for maybe twenty seconds before finally, as Akebono tried to throw Koji from under his shoulder, Koji somehow slipped it and pushed Akebono back, forcing him to step out of the circle—a loss.

And while the rest of the stadium was roaring and cheering, all wrapped up in who’d won their bets, we saw Akebono look over our way for the briefest of moments, and he flashed us an expression of surprise, the quickest hint of joy, and then he stomped on that bad leg of his, nodding as if to say, don’t look away just yet my friends, both these legs are working again. Koji San couldn’t have seen it. Almost no one did. But Sayaka knew, and I knew, and Jackie Earmuffs knew.

“Don’t say anything,” I told Jackie. “We’ll jinx it.”

Everybody else cleared out of there while the sumos retreated to their areas underneath the grandstands. The gulmotids were off making bets. A lot of the humans on the floor did too.

Not us. We sat there with Sayaka waiting quietly, only breaking our silence to talk when Ollie Mercator came over with Mitra and Damien. They agreed that Akebono looked good. And then, before we knew it, the gulmotids were filing in again above us. Okobuma. Okobuma. BATTLE!

I didn’t know what it was like in there when the bugs were fighting, but those big ugly bastards seemed to be having the time of their lives up there in the grandstands.

A few minutes later, in came the yokozunas again. And just like the first time, they circled, they made the same ritual movements, the same gestures, they tossed the salt, they approached the center of the ring, and, when they crouched and met eyes, they touched their knuckles to the floor.

Again, they charged toward each other and met with concussive force. This time when they hit, Akebono didn’t budge one inch backwards. They stood in the center slapping each other’s arms away, trying to find a way into the other’s body, to get an arm inside, to gain a foothold or a point of leverage to push. And you could see Koji getting turned back, trying again, and then, to the shock of almost everyone in the building, Akebono seemed prepared to absorb another fierce charge, only to sidestep ever so slightly, and in that flash of a second, position himself to get an arm under Koji’s shoulder, turning him sideways ever so slightly enough to get him off balance. Then he pounced on the advantage he’d created, running Koji San right out of the ring!

The place erupted in a kind of noise like I’d never heard before. The gulmots were roaring. The humans were shouting. Sayaka was jumping up and down. And Jackie, standing there wide-eyed with this sour look on her face like she’d swallowed a cricket on accident, grabbed me by the neck and shouted into my ear, “Damn it’s loud in here, Groober! I should’a brought my earmuffs.”

I started laughing. And this time, as Akebono strutted back to his spot, he looked over at Sayaka and winked.

Nobody had thought it would get that far. And as the place cleared out again for final bets. Ollie and Damien and Mitra came over, about as excited as I’d ever seen the three of them. We could hardly stand still waiting. But nobody was afraid anymore that Akebono was going to get hurt or humiliated or thrown out of the ring in shame. There was just the one doubt. As Akebono had said himself, Koji San was a great champion. He was as well. Anyone could win now that they were on level footing. I was looking around as Ollie and Damien went back to their seats on the other quarter of the ring, and as they did, I sorta looked across and met eyes with Fletcher, who was talking with some of his employees. They were all wearing those gold-rimmed sunglasses like Koji, and those guys were all hanging out with Fletcher because they had to because he was the boss. And he pointed across the floor at me and started shouting.

“Mega Sushi! Mega Sushi! MEGA SUSHI!!!”

“What an asshole,” Jackie Earmuffs said, holding up her hand toward him with her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and Fletcher knew exactly what she meant, scowling back at Jackie.

We all laughed at him. And then above, the gulmotids started yelling at each other. Mega Sushi! Top Sushi! Mega Sushi! Top Sushi! And they started stomping their big feet, creating a tremendous wave of noise as the bout was set to begin. And it only got louder as Akebono came walking in, a little extra swagger in that sumo strut. And then, in came Koji San. I don’t think I’d ever witnessed anything nearly that exciting.

They threw the salt, they bowed, they crouched, all the necessary movements, then, knuckles down, and BOOM! The two yokozunas crashed into each other in the center of the ring, and this time, they stalled out, pressed up against each other with either refusing to yield an inch. They both got hold of the other’s belt, and they rocked against each other, spinning, pushing, butting heads, trying to tip each other over, move the other backward, or gain any point of leverage. Five, ten seconds passed, each sumo taking turns seeming to gain some slight hint of the upper hand.

When it happened, it happened so fast I had no idea how he’d done it, but what it looked like to me was that Akebono stepped back at just the moment when Koji was trying to press forward, and he pulled down on Koji’s belt, forcing him to compensate with a big step back, and that was all our champion needed to get an arm under Koji’s, and then he tossed Koji San by the belt, launching his great big sumo ass—his legs tumbling over his head—clean out of the ring and into the first few rows of people crowded around the match in Fletcher’s section. As he landed, Koji sent beers and handbags and gold sunglasses up into the air in one big gigantic ball of chaos, while our side of the ring erupted in cheers.

I could honestly say at that point I’d never been so happy in all my life. I grabbed Jackie and Sayaka and we started jumping up and down as the gulmotids were shouting, “Okobuma! Okobuma! Okobuma!”

We had no idea what to do with ourselves. Akebono was nodding at us, kinda telling us to keep cool. I could see the guys, and they were thinking like me and Jackie to go running in there, mobbing the big fella, but that wasn’t how these sumos did business. He waited for Koji to get back to his feet, and they bowed and nodded to each other as a sign of respect, and then they just walked off the arena floor like it was another day at the office as the gulmotids went crazy above us.

So was that it? Oh no. That was just the start of all the crazy things that happened those last few months it was just me and Jackie in the bus together. Nobody on that floor needed to be a genius to know nothing would ever be the same in Bugtown. Galactic broadcast rights, sumo and bug battle doubleheaders, sushi for sushi like never before.

Jackie Earmuffs was right again. We hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of what was coming. Planet Earth had just got put on the galactic map, and our new friend Akebono Mori was the one to do it. And the last thing we saw as we were strutting out of the arena together with Ollie and the boys was Fletcher and his crew from Mega Sushi, and to top it all off, there was Fletch hiding behind his bent-rimmed gold sunglasses, and none of his boys had told him, but he had a big fat wad of clay smeared across his forehead from when Koji San went tumbling into the crowd.

We couldn’t enjoy the moment for too long, though. We had to get back to the Top Sushi and work the lines. Those gulmotids didn’t want to eat anywhere else that night. We at the Top Sushi were the kings of Bugtown.

Over the following days, Tyritha allowed the dentist to go forward with their plan for altering her smile. The facial surgery was another story, though. Tyritha voiced her formal objection to the procedure on her chin, beginning with Shaimi, whom she perceived to be her strongest advocate. Then she followed up with the doctor herself, who’d been ambivalent from the start on that marginally prominent chin of Tyritha’s.

Tyritha also started to wonder as information about the colony began to unfold in her mind, courtesy of the neural implant. She had no knowledge, though, about ships, contact with outposts nearby, their location in relation to the Lettered Systems or the Inner Battery, and even more, what colonies these people traded with. It seemed odd to her, but to ask about it would draw attention to the fact she was interested in such things, and then they would ask her why. Her job was to straighten her smile, look pretty, prepare herself for the ritual, learn the culture, and get to know Erron.

They’d had that one slightly honest conversation at the start of that first meal together, and it hadn’t been the same since. He was enamored of her enough to be patient as the days passed. That much was clear, but it was also clear to Tyritha that he was prodding her each time they spoke, and she still didn’t trust him enough to fully let down her guard.

The novelty of the setting was wearing off. Heinan was no fairy tale. There were no princes and princesses there, no palaces. They were hard-working folk out in Ceronka. Colonists. Tyritha’s people understood gear and labor, moisture recyclers, CO² scrubbers, algae tanks, generators, drone maintenance and bot repair. Wearing fancy gowns and pretending to be royalty for a few days while she plotted her escape was interesting, but it became frightening whenever she allowed her mind to drift to the possibility that she might not ever get home.

The one place that didn’t seem any less beautiful to Tyritha was the duck pond at the rear corner of the Arnur palace grounds. They didn’t have animals in her community in Ceronka, so apart from pictures and images in VR, Tyritha had never even seen an animal before that wasn’t a human. And she loved the ducks.

Naomi did her best to hide the fact she thought it was funny her mistress kept dragging them back to the duck pond. She and the toddlers in the palace had a similar innocent wonder in their eyes as they beheld the creatures and fed them bread crumbs. And so far, a walk to the water hadn’t failed to elicit a smile from her mistress yet.

Tyritha and Naomi were taking turns reading to each other from the works of Achistra, the famous chronicler of great figures of early Charran history. Tyritha found the tone of the narrative odd. She’d never read Achistra before but she wondered whether the work had been altered to suit the sensibilities of the noble immortals and their extended servant class. She didn’t say as much to Naomi, as she didn’t know for sure, but she found the book littered with “virtues” that weren’t virtues by her reckoning.

Dreima, Sirrah, and Erron approached them as they were seated on the grass. Dreima had become a regular visitor, but Sirrah, the quiet sister, was beginning to take more of an interest in Tyritha. The Dodonna siblings had been looking for Tyritha to invite her to an impromptu siblings’ dinner.

As they were speaking, Dreima casually remarked to Tyritha, “Then tonight, you’re going to just love your dinner, dear,” as Tyritha was explaining how she’d grown up in a colony without animals. It was supposed to be a joke, but Tyritha also understood there to be some truth in it as well.

“The ducks?” she asked. “You eat them?”

“She has a gentle heart, brother,” Sirrah said. “She doesn’t know.”

“Only on special occasions,” Dreima replied. “We were going to share them with you, as a welcome.”

“It’s a gesture from my sisters,” Erron explained.

Tyritha looked equal parts heartbroken and horrified.

“Oh, look at the sweet thing. I think she’s going to cry,” Sirrah added.

“I couldn’t eat those beautiful creatures,” Tyritha replied, genuinely on the verge of tears. “I don’t mean any offense of course. I’m touched by your generosity.”

“We’ll have to change the menu, brother. You wouldn’t object to eating their eggs, would you?” Sirrah asked.

Tyritha explained that she had no objection to eating duck eggs after a long conversation about how the duck population was carefully managed and that they only ate surplus eggs they didn’t intend to hatch.

After the Dodonna siblings left, Naomi did her best to assure Tyritha that she hadn’t given offense, but she hadn’t overheard the conversation, nor did she understand why Tyritha objected to eating the animals. She told Naomi that it was more a quirk of personality than culture. Her servant still didn’t know where her mysterious new mistress with her quirky ways had come from. She’d begun to think, privately, that Mistress Tyritha was just unique.

The dinner featured five courses, anchored by a delectable duck egg frittata and concluded with a chocolate soufflé that Tyritha found delicious but somehow strange-tasting. There was something about the moment as the dessert was presented—the way the siblings all looked at each other expectantly. In the moment, Tyritha thought it was an inside joke she wasn’t privy to. As one of the middle children in her family, being left out of her older siblings’ jokes was a familiar feeling for Tyritha. It wasn’t until the Dodonna siblings walked her to her room after the meal that she began to feel the effects of it. At first, she thought it was the wine, but she’d had wine with meals several times since her arrival. This felt different.

Erron took her arm as they walked. By the time they got to her door, Tyritha was barely capable of standing, but she wasn’t so loopy that she didn’t understand what was going on. She had a sense of it. She didn’t know what Erron had in mind for her, but she protested when he tried to take her inside. She could tell he had some objective.

“Under no circumstances will you be joining me in my room, Erron Aireum,” she managed to say without slurring too obviously. Still, Dreima and Sirrah laughed at her.

“She thinks the worst of you, little brother,” Sirrah stated. “It doesn’t bode well for your marriage.”

“He is not yet my husband,” Tyritha replied emphatically.

“How provincial,” Dreima laughed.

“You can mock me all you like, but I will not be moved on this. Where is Naomi? Only she may come in with me.”

Tyritha turned and extended her hand toward the retinue of servants who were trailing the siblings at the appropriate distance. Naomi scuttled over to the door and took Tyritha by the elbow. She didn’t manage to close the door before Erron had put his foot in it.

“I said no,” Tyritha insisted.

“We’re going to have a conversation, Tyritha. We haven’t had a proper conversation yet, not about anything that matters.”

Tyritha stopped walking. She’d only made it a few steps inside.

“Naomi may stay if you need a chaperone.”

“I cannot speak ...”

Tyritha didn’t finish the statement for fear of offending her servant. She tried to form several sentences that skated around the issue. She knew that she couldn’t speak truth in front of Naomi, but each time she tried to formulate a response that was even slightly untruthful, she found her tongue tied.

“You’ve done something to me somehow,” she declared.

Her arms and legs started to get extremely heavy. She found she lacked the vigor to resist what began to unfold.

Naomi prepared her mistress for bed while Erron waited in the antechamber. Before she knew it, Tyritha was lying in bed, almost paralyzed, and then, as Naomi drifted away from the bed, Erron pulled over a chair and sat across from her. She wasn’t tired enough to drift off to sleep but she couldn’t cry out. She couldn’t place Naomi but she wondered whether her servant would come if she did manage to shout. Erron must have read the look in her eyes.

“She’s just over here,” Erron stated, tugging on Tyritha’s wrist.

She was able to follow that gesture, her eyes tracking just over her own hand to make out the figure of her servant seated on the couch at the side wall.

“She has her earset on, so Naomi won’t hear a thing,” Erron explained. “But she will be with us the entire time. Nothing inappropriate will happen, if that’s your fear.”

“You’ve already drugged me,” Tyritha replied. “If that’s not inappropriate ...”

“If we’re going to be married, we need to have an honest discussion.”

“So you drugged me?”

“It was more of a group effort. Mostly it was Dreima and the doctor’s idea.”

“So you’re absolved then conveniently. Just as you were in my abduction. You have quite the knack for keeping your hands clean, Erron Aireum.”

“See. That tone of yours. I wouldn’t have known that was under there, the way you smile quietly and nod along. That certainly wasn’t there when we had dinner together. I need to know about you. Immortality is a long time to share with someone.”

“You’d like to know if I’m compatible? Is that what this is about?”

“That’s correct.”

“You could’ve asked. You didn’t need to drug me?”

“Didn’t I? You haven’t been honest with me since our first dinner together. Everything since then has been one barrier after another. I have no desire to spend the rest of my days with the façade you put up to hide your true self behind.”

“You wouldn’t like my true self.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to hide your true self on my account, Tyritha.”

“Believe me, I don’t do it on your account.”

“Then why are you hiding your true thoughts and intentions?”

“Because I’m plotting my escape from this ridiculous place you and your siblings have brought me to.” Tyritha gasped after she’d outed herself, looking over at Erron confused at how glibly she’d betrayed her own interests. “Why did I say that?”

“Because I asked.”

“Is that what you’ve drugged me with? Some sort of truth serum?”

“The doctor said it’s something along those lines. It was Dreima’s idea. She never intended for you to be religious, but the people she contracted apparently didn’t know there was a contingent of religious Purists on Heinan. They were just looking for someone who fit the profile from a place obscure enough not to attract too much attention. But now that you’re here, we have to know if you’ll be compatible in our culture. As I said, immortality is a long time.”

“We are not compatible, our cultures. This, for one, among my people would be a crime. Who do you think you are to drug me up like this and probe me with questions I have no choice but to answer?”

“So you were just pretending to like me? For what purpose?”

“I do like you, Erron. On that front, I don’t have to pretend.”

“Yet you plot your escape? Why?”

“I object to everything else but you. You take me from my family? Threaten to turn me immortal, as though that were some type of religious rite and not the deepest sin against God and the natural order of things? And everyone around here behaves as though I should be grateful for the privilege. You people think far too highly of yourselves if you believe you should live forever.”

“You’d prefer to die than to stay here with us?”

“You don’t understand at all. The entirety of your culture is an affront to everything I believe. It’s not about what I would prefer. The things you offer are not choices. They are sins against God. You ask if I would prefer life to death, the answer of course is yes, but what you don’t understand is that it’s not a choice for me to make. That is a choice for God and no one else, a choice that has already been made long before you and I were born, and it’s not for me to second-guess. Nor anyone else for that matter.”

“So you must not think much of us, do you Tyritha?”

“It’s a complicated answer. The truth is that I see some beauty in the society you’re ordering for yourselves, but I see tremendous arrogance and disregard for all the people who don’t make it inside your walls—your servants, your cooks, your gardeners. I think you could learn to be a decent person, Erron. But no one has shown you the way.”

“I see.”

“These were not the answers you were hoping to hear.”

Erron sighed, and as she looked over at his face, Tyritha could see the disappointment in it.

“It complicates matters.”

“That is why I’ve been quiet. I know the way your people have treated me will change once it becomes known I can’t be yours, Erron Aireum. I don’t know what you’ll do with me, but I’d like to go home. That would be best for me.”

“I’ll have to think on it, Tyritha. Now you understand why I had to know. At least now we can be honest with each other. I hope that you’ll choose to continue to be truthful with me when I see you again.”

“You’ve left me no choice now but to trust you to do right by me.”

“I’ll do whatever I can. As I said, though, this complicates matters. I’ll have to ask Dreima—”

“Don’t. Please don’t. I’m not sure you have a sense of the people your siblings are.”

“They wouldn’t ever hurt you, Tyritha.”

“I very much doubt that, Erron, but even if it were true, they wouldn’t help me either, not after they hear what I’ve told you tonight. If I’m to get home, I’ll need your help. You need to do it. And it will need to be our secret.”

She could see in his silence that the task was no small thing. When she’d first arrived, Tyritha had hoped that there was an established port, ships coming and going, regular trade with neighboring colonies. But the longer she’d been there, the signs of isolation had appeared. It made sense as well, the rejection of the most important norms, the stratified society of royal immortals. These were not secrets easily kept. They were insular people. She could see in Erron’s expression the weight of the task. Returning Dreima’s gift to her rightful place would be no small undertaking. And as she observed him, she began to wonder if he even wanted to help her.

“We’ll talk further,” he said as he got up. “Tyritha, I’m sorry.”

The tone of the apology concerned her. She couldn’t tell what he was apologizing for, and she hoped as she lay there, her head both oddly clear and strangely corrupted by the drug, that the apology was for the sins already committed against her personal sovereignty. But as he left, she suddenly feared that Erron Aireum Dodonna might be apologizing for the sins to come. She realized suddenly that Erron may not have been the man she wanted him to be.

Tyritha’s day the following morning began with a sudden, loud intrusion. Shaimi entered her room, shocked to find the door unattended and Naomi asleep inside on the couch. And when Tyritha, half-awake and her head still groggy, defended Naomi staunchly, insisting the error was hers and not the girl’s, Shaimi scolded her nearly as harshly as Naomi, stating clearly, “That mouth of yours is going to get you into trouble here, dear.” Tyritha nodded as she sat up properly. That was true, she decided. If she wasn’t careful, Erron wasn’t the one who would be her undoing here. Tyritha remembered the delicate game she was playing, pretending to be the consort of an immortal. The people who’d snatched her without a second thought probably wouldn’t take it lightly when she spurned the honors they sought to bestow on her, or at least that’s how she figured they’d see it.

Luckily, as Shaimi was there, Erron appeared at her door. His aunt refused to allow Erron to see his betrothed until she was ready, but Shaimi instructed him to return after breakfast. The morning Shaimi had planned for her young pupil would have to wait. There were duties and performances that went along with the rites, and Shaimi had been preparing Tyritha for her part in them. Shaimi left Tyritha with Naomi and promised to return in the afternoon.

Tyritha had a quiet breakfast alone with her thoughts. Everything depended on Erron. To the extent she could remember the conversation with her cloudy head, Tyritha went over it again and again. She didn’t sense that he’d taken it personally. It wasn’t about him. She thought she’d made that clear. She was nervous, though. Erron was either coming to save her or expose her that day, and what might happen after that Tyritha could only begin to guess.

When he arrived, Naomi resumed her position on the couch and was about to put on the earset so she couldn’t overhear their conversation.

“We’ll be out,” Erron told her. “We’re going to sit in the garden, so as soon as we depart, you’ll be excused, Naomi.”

Tyritha looked at him, trying to gauge the nature of his intentions.

“Will you speak honestly with me now?” he whispered to her.

“What do I have to lose at this point?” She whispered back.

“I’ll wait for you outside then,” Erron said as he got up, leaving Tyritha at the table.

When she emerged a few minutes later, they walked slowly toward the garden. Erron coaxed her to smile and behave as though nothing had changed. She took it as a sign he intended to help. He told her he knew a place where they could talk safely. Erron escorted her down a pathway toward a grove on the far side of the pond. They sat on a blanket Erron had in a satchel. He warned Tyritha to keep her voice low.

“Voices carry over the water,” he said, demonstrating the tone he was asking her to mimic. “But there is no surveillance. Here and the individual chambers in the archon’s palace are the only places in the cylinder that aren’t monitored somehow.”

“Were we overheard last night?” Tyritha asked him.

“No. Your room is in the guest wing of the archon’s house. I thought it would be less suspicious if we were seen together out here.”

“I guess that means you haven’t told anyone.”

“I told Dreima that everything’s fine, that you were just nervous about everything, adjusting. I wouldn’t know what to say if I told her the truth. I’m not sure she’d understand it. I’m not sure I understand it. But I’ve been thinking all night, Tyritha. I haven’t slept.”

“Okay. Good, actually.”

“Good? How do you mean that?”

“I suppose it means that at the very least you care enough for it to trouble you. I don’t get the sense that your siblings do. Shaimi cares, but I think that’s more for the formality of things than for me. She seems to be happy as long as I’m trying to learn.”

“First, Tyritha. I’m very sorry. I think this was all Dreima’s idea. She was worried I’d end up with Kira or someone like her if the process went through normally.”

“I heard. One of your cousins?”

“Distant cousin. That’s how most of these arranged pairings go. But I had no idea Dreima was going to do this, and I’m genuinely sorry for disrupting your life like that. I was up all night, trying to imagine what your life must have been like, and then to wake up here? I feel awful.”

Tyritha didn’t react how he’d expected. For Erron, he felt as though it was a major concession, even a baring of his innermost feelings to say as much. For her to stare back at him blankly was frustrating, if not an outright insult.

“You have nothing to say? Hiding behind that façade of yours again?”

“I have been trying to see it from your perspective, Erron, and even as much as I’ve learned living among your people these past few weeks, I can’t say I can imagine how self-centered you’d have to be to have to stretch your mind to imagine the damage you’ve caused me.”

“Well, then explain it to me,” he demanded. “Because from our perspective, we have offered you everything—the greatest opportunity our society can offer is here for you to take, and you reject it outright as though it is nothing. And it is not nothing. I can assure you Dreima and Krishna will hear about it for a thousand years if you reject me.”

“It’s not you, Erron. You’re the only part of this whole ordeal I’d miss. I can tell that you’re redeemable. You have a lot to learn, though. But I’ve witnessed a callousness in your family that I can’t characterize as anything but shocking, and I can tell you’re as blind to it as one born without eyes might be to color. But you have eyes. You could be made to see.”

“How then? What would you have me see that I haven’t seen and apologized for, Tyritha?”

“For a start, you could stop apologizing to me. Dreima has caused the damage. It’s for her to atone, and she won’t, so you can’t account for a debt that’s not yours. But you’re looking for the wound to fix, as though if you made me content with the situation here it would somehow be all right. What you don’t understand—and I find it absolutely baffling—is that not a single one of you has even thought to mention my family. I have no idea what Dreima’s people communicated to them, if anything. And frankly, there’s nothing they could say. I know in the deepest part of me that my mother and father have been sick for weeks now, Erron. The thought of their not knowing where I am all this time—whether I’m dead, lost, in danger, abducted by some sicko—that wounds my heart. What they know for sure is that I’d never do that to them. So all they know is that I’ve been taken from them. That is the deepest wound in my heart. And for me, yes, I miss them, and I miss my brothers and sisters and all my friends on Heinan. You people may not think much of our lives there, but I had one. So you can give me all the servants and palaces and fine meals and fancy dresses in the universe, and that’s what I’ll be thinking about. The only thing that can fix it is to return me to where I belong. That’s what I pray for each waking moment.”

Tyritha looked over at Erron, and it did seem as though he’d taken in the enormity of the crime he and his siblings had committed against Tyritha and her family. But she could sense there was something deeper troubling him.

“I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I vow to you, Tyritha I will set this right. I’m not going to lie to you, though. I think we should resolve to be honest with each other from now on—completely honest.”

“You already know everything I was trying to hide from you, Erron.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Erron said, placing his clasped hands against his lips as he contemplated how he could explain. “This place may be strange for you, but it’s more different than you think, and we’re very far from your home. It won’t be easy to send you back.”

“I would like to know everything, Erron. I have been observing as much as I can from the limited view I have in the house.”

He shook his head. “What you’ve told me breaks my heart, Tyritha. When I told you I’d been up all night, it was true. But all I could think about was how to make things right, because I wanted to win your heart. All I’ve been thinking about for the past week was that first dinner, those first few minutes when you gave me a glance at you—the real you. And I wanted more than anything to get to know that person. But now I see I can never be with her. I’m going to do everything now to make certain I’m not the one who ruins her life.”

Tyritha reached over and took his hand, squeezing it.

“I’m grateful it’s you, Erron Aireum, and not one of your callous siblings. My hope was that I could trust you to help me, and I’m grateful I can. It’s not that I couldn’t love you. I feel that I can. I just can’t be here, and I can’t be immortal. I will not be in defiance of God. Not for you or anyone else.”

“You need to know,” he replied, looking Tyritha in the eyes.

“What do I need to know?”

“The reason you don’t remember getting here is that it was a long voyage. We are far from the Battery. So when you were taken, you were put into stasis. You’ve been gone for almost fourteen months now, Tyritha. I have no idea whether Dreima’s people had any interaction with your family, but I suspect they didn’t leave any trace of you nor any indication you were safe. We have very little contact with outside civilizations. Almost no one knows we exist. I imagine you can guess why. Athos, Hellenia, your Protectorate—none of them have much tolerance for genetic manipulation or the type of longevity that is critical to the culture our archons have built here. It won’t be as simple as asking for you to be let go. Very few ships bridge that distance, and they do so infrequently. That’s why Dreima was so proud of herself for bringing you here. She thought it would be a perfect gift for my apotheosis to find me a unique consort, that it might one day make me an archon. She didn’t consider the consequences for you. But I’m going to do everything I can. We’re going to figure out how to get you back home.”

“I’ll do everything to help you, Erron. I hope you’re beginning to understand that this is not a rejection of you. I’ve never met anyone like you before. If the situation were different ...”

There was the faintest hint of a muted smile on his face. But he seemed sad and troubled, both emotions she’d never witnessed in any of these Dodonna siblings.

“I’m going to begin today,” he replied. “I’m not sure how to start, but I think we should plan on meeting regularly. I’ll tell you what I know now, and then I need to take a trip to Arionidis. I think I’ll be able to find out more when I get there.”

They sat for nearly an hour longer at the far end of the pond, quietly engaged in private conversation. From the path on the palace side of the water, to the onlookers who happened by, Erron and his betrothed appeared to be deeply engaged in conversation—the type of serious conversations two people should have in the weeks leading up to a union of such consequence. They seemed serious and comfortable together, though hardly warm, but they looked excellently matched, her light beauty and steely eyes, his outward strength and pleasing complexion, the easy smile. They seemed a natural match.

The observers couldn’t have imagined the nature of the conversation. Erron told her everything he knew about his own culture. ΘeoTechnus, as far as he knew, was nearly eight hundred years old. That was the story they’d been told. He’d come from Athos originally but had made his fortune in space, and somewhere along the way, he’d discovered that the Purism at the root of all the societies in the Battery wasn’t simply a rejection of the pursuit of certain technologies, it was a spurning of technologies that not only had existed in the past, but still existed and were in limited use in places that were known to the governments of the major societies.

ΘeoTechnus took issue with such a secret being kept from the people. Rejecting genetech that could improve his own longevity a thousand-fold was not a decision for anyone else to make with his life. But he also realized, as he vowed to get his hands on it, that such powerful societies wouldn’t tolerate such unstable forces being introduced to places such as Athos, well-ordered as they were. He suspected, correctly, that they wouldn’t even tolerate the existence of an alternative within their field of vision. So he resolved to build elsewhere—far enough away that his society’s existence wouldn’t be evident to Athos for centuries. Once he’d recruited a loyal group of like-minded followers, he used his resources to quietly form a colony-group from several of the known remaining Charran colony ships, and they disappeared. ΘeoTechnus, though, continuously maintained a contact group that quietly kept an eye on his distant neighbors in the Battery Systems, including the Protectorate.

Erron explained that he didn’t know why Dreima had chosen Tyritha. He believed it wasn’t specific to her world or culture, and further, he suspected that if her people’s religious beliefs had been known to her abductors, Tyritha wouldn’t have been taken at all. Likely, the contact group had other business in Heinan and one of Dreima’s people had spotted her somehow, likely through a filter on some database that had decent enough facial metrics to run probability on acceptable facial symmetry and body type. He suspected that if she thought about it hard enough Tyritha could probably remember an odd encounter in which she’d interacted with her abductors—something that seemed innocuous at the time—a random interaction that wasn’t random at all. They’d probably wanted a close look to confirm what the databases told them. And once confirmed, they’d followed, picked a time and a means of extraction, and plucked her from her life. Then she’d spent the months through the long transit in stasis.

It never even occurred to Dreima or the others that Tyritha would be anything other than grateful to be rescued from her mortality or her drab provincial life on such a mundane outpost. In fact, the very same thing had been done before. Erron could name several consorts of archons who’d arrived in the same manner. He suspected Dreima and Krishna would have a lot to answer for, likely harming any small chance either of them ever had to be archons themselves. But he suspected they figured they had little to lose if Erron himself was named. Then, if the pairing went well, they would have the eternal gratitude of a new archon and a high place in his home, as well as a pathway for their children eventually. Such were the power games played over decades and centuries.

What Erron didn’t know was how to get anyone aboard ΘeoTechnus’s contact ships. He knew it was unlikely there’d be any ships returning to the Battery Systems for several months at least, and if they did, the likelihood of them returning to Heinan was assuredly small. Many questions would need to be answered before they could make any plans.

When he was done, Tyritha took him by the hand and began to speak. He didn’t know what to do. It seemed so strange to him, almost paralyzing him while he listened.

“God, our Father, protect Erron Aireum from all of the dangers to his soul, especially arrogance and vanity. Help him to be humble as he learns to walk the path of a servant. We ask this in your name. Let your will be done, oh Lord. Amen.”

Tyritha didn’t see Erron again for several days. She spent much of it with Shaimi, peppering her putative aunt-to-be with questions about the society. She claimed that better understanding the culture would help her to assimilate and serve as a better consort for Erron. This seemed to please Shaimi, who was most concerned with the order and protocol of the house and its place in the larger society. Officially, they called the string of cylinders “Alysida,” and there was a longer name in an old forgotten language Tyritha had never heard before. In their tongue, they simply called their nation “The Chain,” which ΘeoTechnus had originally called “The Broken Chain,” for the pieces of his society that had broken away from the Battery worlds.

As the weeks passed, Tyritha herself was seeing things more clearly—why Erron couldn’t see her real pain, nor the harm he’d caused her family. Neither Shaimi nor any of the other Dodonna women had carried their own children. Nor had they fully raised them in their own homes. By Shaimi’s telling, it was an effect of the genetic transformation. Thus, one of the procedures scheduled before Tyritha’s own apotheosis would be the harvesting of her ova. The downstream effect was that all offspring of this quasi-royal family were orchestrations, procedures, selections. There wasn’t any particular closeness in maternal or paternal relations here. They didn’t suffer through the pains of growing together. They didn’t feel the blessings of life as viscerally as all other humans do; thus, the loss of a child in the way Tyritha knew her parents were suffering hadn’t occurred to them. They expected to have hundreds of children over thousands of years, many of whom would migrate to other cylinders in Alysida, rarely to be seen or heard from again. The special ones, like Dreima, Krishna, Sirrah, or Erron would be with them always unless they rose to glory, becoming an archon in a new cylinder as the chain grew.

More, as Tyritha continued to observe the behavior of the Dodonnas and their servants, she saw that the rigid structure of their hierarchy was inured in them from an early age, with special status conferred upon the children of the Dodonnas from birth, the immortals’ children bearing an elite status even amongst those special few. The Archon’s children, of course, were the veritable royals of the house, who’d been taught from the earliest days of their cultural education that servants and ordinary mortals were beneath them. So as appalling as it was to Tyritha that Dreima would have ordered her abduction without a second thought for her or her family, in a way, Tyritha grew to understand that not only was there no malice in the act, she realized that Dreima perceived it closer to an act of charity than a crime. It would have been an empathic stretch of monumental proportions for her to see it any other way, likely even if Tyritha explained it to her. She considered it to his great credit that Erron was capable of understanding even that much. That he’d altered his behavior because of it and was now taking risks on her behalf was borderline miraculous, she thought. She wondered how the years might change that. Would he still have that generosity of spirit and openness to other perspectives after living out decades of perpetual youth here in this palace among his ageless siblings and immortal parents, waited on hand-and-foot by this dutiful, obedient caste of servants? As it stood, Erron could still be reached at twenty years old, still mortal, still with an uncertain future ahead of him, still growing. Tyritha had it in her heart and mind to reach him. She began to quietly pray for as much in moments when she found herself alone and unobserved. And she prayed for guidance, for she understood how little of their world she knew, and how little of her own world she knew, and she ended each prayer with the same refrain: “Let your will be done, oh Lord. Amen.”

There would be risk.

Each time she looked at Naomi, Tyritha thought about the deaths and lives of the prophets. She saw an innocent. She saw a bystander. Tyritha didn’t know her, but each time she saw Naomi, she knew that she loved her. To reveal herself to this innocent exposed her to dangers Naomi couldn’t know. Yet she wasn’t the one to place herself into Naomi’s path. No part of Tyritha’s will brought her into this girl’s life. The choice she had before her was whether to shield her from or expose her to the truth. She could remain in ignorance, sheltered in the safety of her culture; or she could see beyond Alysida, beyond the chain, beyond her station, beyond stations. As she saw it like that, Tyritha knew that to shield Naomi from the truth of her reality was no favor to the girl. It was a moral duty to reveal the truth, not to use Naomi for her own purposes but to free the girl’s mind for her sake, so that she might see her life for what it was.

That afternoon, as Tyritha was seated in the quiet comfort of her private room, reading, she felt in her heart that the time was right. She rang a bell.

Naomi appeared at the doorway. Tyritha stood as she entered.

“Oh, sit please, miss,” Naomi said.

“Please, do not speak, Naomi. Listen. I am afraid. I need to ask you something, but I’m afraid that what I ask you will only lead you where I want you to go, and I would like you to come willingly.”

“I don’t understand,” Naomi replied. “It is my duty to do as you ask, miss. To serve you as you please.”

“Tyritha. My name is Tyritha Sian Ilanova.”

“I’ve heard as much, miss.”

Tyritha approached the girl. She took her hand, and she could see the confusion in Naomi’s reaction that she’d anticipated, a shock that bordered on terror. It was almost enough to deter her from her duty. It was neither her intention nor desire to upset one of the few truly earnest people she’d met in this place. Tyritha quietly reminded herself that it was her obligation to Naomi to liberate her mind and awaken her soul. She drew the girl over to the sofa by her hand and gestured for her to sit.

“You know that I’m different?” Tyritha asked her. “That much you’ve seen.”

Naomi shook her head. “I don’t know how to answer, miss. Is this a test? I don’t wish to give offense.”

“If it is a test, Naomi, it is for me, not you. I must reveal the truth to you, even though it may be difficult for you to understand. I want you to know that you can’t possibly offend me as I’ve offended you.”

“You’ve given me no such offense, miss. I feel blessed to be in your service, for you have such a kind heart.”

Tyritha shook her head. “Not nearly so kind as you might think.” Tyritha knelt on the floor at the foot of the couch. Naomi gasped at the gesture, pulling her hand back in shock.

“I haven’t been honest about myself, Naomi. I am not who I’ve pretended to be. And just as you believe you have a duty to serve me, I believe I have a duty to serve you.”

“You’re scaring me, miss. You cannot serve me. It’s not the proper order of things.”

“I know you’re afraid, Naomi. I need you to hold that fear in your heart. And I need you to master it. I need you to understand that I am no archon, and I am no mistress. I will only ever be a servant in my heart. I cannot continue to lie to you, not about myself or about this place.”

Naomi’s hand began to shake in Tyritha’s. “I don’t know miss.”

“I’m not from this place, Naomi. I’m not from Alysida. I’m not of this place. I was brought here against my will.”

“Oh, miss. You don’t need to say.”

“I believe I do, Naomi. I don’t say it to upset you, but I need you to know. I’m from Heinan. I was brought here all the way from a part of the Battery Systems called the Trasp Protectorate. Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know this place existed.”

“Miss, that’s fine. You don’t need to say any more. I’ve known that you were different. All I want to do is serve you all the same.”

“I understand that, Naomi. But I need you to know that I cannot allow you to serve me, not in this way. Where I’m from, there are no archons or nobles or immortals or royal families. I need to apologize to you for allowing you to believe I was part of this world. I was afraid, and I didn’t know this place or its rules. And, I can’t lie, it felt good to have you helping me to feel safe and feel important.”

“I’m glad to hear that, miss.”

“Please. Call me Tyritha.”

“I can’t do that, miss. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Tyritha kissed the back of Naomi’s hand. “I beg you for your forgiveness, Naomi. I only ask that you not betray my trust to the others—Mistress Shaimi or Dreima.”

“Oh, Miss. Please. Please. Get off your knees. You don’t need to ask that of me. You don’t understand.”

Naomi pulled on Tyritha’s hand, tugging her up until she got up from her knees and was sitting beside her on the sofa. Naomi enveloped Tyritha’s hand in hers.

“I take an oath, miss, to serve you. Not Shaimi, not the house, not even the archons above this house. I serve you. I keep your confidence above all else. It is my highest duty. It is sacred to me. You never need ask for my secrecy. It has been yours from the moment I set eyes on you.”

“I was afraid to tell you,” Tyritha said, shaking her head as she exhaled. She felt tears welling up in her eyes.

Naomi reached out and embraced her. She began to whisper in Tyritha’s ear. “I’m grateful you did tell me. It wasn’t that difficult to see you weren’t who they said you were. My secret is that I see far more than I let on, Mistress Tyritha. The role is the armor I wear in this royal house. If you stick around long enough, you may yet come to witness how I wield my sword and my shield in your service.”

Tyritha squeezed her servant’s hand and in her heart vowed to serve her just as well.

By the time Erron returned to Arnur, three full days had passed. Tyritha had been visited twice by Dione, the doctor she’d been treated by from the very beginning. She was pressuring Tyritha to schedule the surgery for her chin. The sooner she had it fixed the sooner she could recover and begin the lesser rites that preceded her apotheosis. Tyritha told Dione that she felt uncomfortable scheduling anything without first consulting Erron. She was busy, this doctor. Tyritha could see it on her face. It was the case, according to Shaimi, that Dione was an immortal, but it struck Tyritha that she worked more like the people in the servant class. She’d seen the doctor more than a handful of times in the weeks since she’d arrived in Arnur, and Tyritha noted that she always seemed to be carrying some low-level exasperation in her bearing. And each time Tyritha rebuffed her attempts to schedule a procedure or appointment, it seemed to rankle the doctor personally.

Naomi, meanwhile, had become a quiet confidante. Tyritha didn’t lean heavily on that new relationship in those few days, but when she asked the type of outsider questions she’d wanted to from the beginning, Naomi gave her quick, sharp answers that a visitor to their culture could understand.

When Erron returned, he dropped by Tyritha’s room to ask her back to the garden. He didn’t state as much explicitly, but when she asked about his trip, he told her it was extremely informative, casting a glance behind Tyritha at Naomi. She smiled and told him she would see him in the garden.

That was the first thing Tyritha told Erron when she arrived, that Naomi was sharper than they’d all realized. Tyritha declared that Naomi could be trusted, at least as far as her own interests were concerned. She told Erron that he may need to earn Naomi’s trust, but she also suspected that once Naomi understood Erron was truly working to get Tyritha home, she would quickly become a confidante of his as well.

“There are others,” Erron declared confidently. “For all my life, people have warmed to me. I know of many people who would do me favors and ask no questions. It will simply be a matter of knowing what to ask for and when.”

That moment in the garden was the point when Tyritha felt that the conspiracy had truly begun. She stopped Erron then and there. She felt compelled that what they were doing was right and that they had the advantage, as no one expected her to reject immortality, and as unlikely as that outcome was, it was even more outlandish an idea that Erron would conspire in the escape of his own betrothed. Tyritha insisted on saying a quick prayer for them and for Naomi and anyone who may help them along the way in their plot. Again, his facial expression, inasmuch as she could read him correctly, seemed a bit bemused by the practice, but Erron played along sportingly and did not disparage Tyritha’s deeply-held belief that those prayers had some practical effect.

When she was finished, Erron began to reveal what he’d learned in Arionidis. He’d enlisted the help of a trusted distant relative—a great aunt, long ago of Arnur, who resided in the capitol. Erron had explained to her that Dreima had abducted an outsider to be his consort and expressed that the transition had been difficult. The ruse Erron employed was to tell her that he wished to get his bride-to-be a memento from her homeworld to help soothe her homesickness as she adjusted. The great aunt’s sister had been joined with a consort who’d been taken from his homeworld in a similar manner in the distant past, so the great aunt understood. She reassured Erron that Tyritha would adjust in time but helped him figure out exactly how the contact missions worked and who he needed to speak with to procure such a gift.

From the beginning of Alysida, when the first link in the chain, Arionidis, was first coming together, there had been four colony ships—reclamations of the ancient Charran colonial vessels. By the time of ΘeoTechnus there were only a fraction of the hundreds of behemoth Charran colony ships that had brought the thousands of ancestor emigrants from that original seed world to planets throughout the Battery Systems. Most of those ships that were preserved were kept as museums. Many, though, were simply set adrift either in high orbits of planets near target outposts or placed into interstellar space for the sake of preservation, unlikely to ever be used again. For most of the colonies, for sentimental value alone, there was no desire to scrap or repurpose the ships, even if they had no further use. ΘeoTechnus had purchased many of the colony ships that could be refurbished. According to their histories, a limited number of these repurposed colony ships were how their ancestors had made the transit from the Battery worlds, mostly from the outer systems of the Etteran Guild, the Trasp Protectorate, the outer Indies, or the Lettered Systems. And, in order to keep a close watch on the more traditional colonies of his ancestors, the high archon himself insisted that the Battery be regularly visited to collect news, certain technologies, and, on occasion, people.

These four remaining colony ships had been refitted to be as stealthy as a giant colony ship could be, and each carried at least one smaller starcraft-syle vessel, allowing them to jump close to the Battery without the colonial vessels actually appearing in proximity to any outpost that would notice them. From there, the contact groups would board the smaller ships and jump into the Battery using vessels that were registered in Hellenia, Dreeson’s System, or Port Cullen. Each member of the contact group was a registered citizen of the Battery worlds, purporting to live the lives of deep-space traders or traveling tradesmen who were gone for years at a stretch before reappearing again at another outpost. Thus, Alysida’s visiting groups didn’t seem any more suspicious to the people in the Battery than any other random ships coming and going from far-flung systems. It was doubtless one of these groups that had arranged for Tyritha’s abduction.

That was an obstacle to Tyritha’s return, according to Erron. By his logic, it was unlikely that anyone who’d participated in bringing her to Alysida could be relied upon to help return her. So he would need to figure out which contact group had taken her and then enlist the help of the next outgoing group. That was one obvious challenge, but the real difficulty, according to Erron was that the contact groups were drawn from the most loyal servants of Arionidis’s inner circle. Their commander would be an immortal in the service of one of the high archons in the direct service of ΘeoTechnus himself. It would be one thing for Erron to convince Dione, the Dodonna family’s doctor in Arnur, to place Tyritha back into stasis for the journey. That might be plausible. But for him, an unknown sepp from Arnur, to convince the most loyal of the loyalists in the capitol to betray their oaths was an entirely different matter.

Tyritha asked the two most relevant questions she could think on that front: what incentive could Erron offer them; and what their punishment would be if they were caught?

“I don’t know what I can offer them yet,” he replied. “I suppose I’ll have to find one first to see who they are and what they want. In terms of punishment, there is only one thing that matters to the mortals in Alysida: immortality. I would imagine the contact teams are well rewarded for a life of such service. They are the ones who ensure our existence remains a secret from the peoples of the Battery.”

“We’ll need to figure out something fast,” Tyritha told him. “Dione wishes to cut open my chin and place me in one of those masks. I’m running out of excuses.”

“Maybe I’ll tell her I like your chin the way it is,” Erron said.

“Will that work?”

He shrugged. “It could delay the process if it doesn’t.”

“Do you like my chin, Erron? Or will you have to lie about it?”

He smiled, looking Tyritha in the eyes and lifting her chin ever so slightly with his forefinger. “I like everything about you, Tyritha Sian.”

He leaned in toward her. She felt her heart jump. The glorious depth of his eyes suddenly so close.

“We shouldn’t,” she said. “It’ll only make it harder to say goodbye.”

He kissed her lips ever so gently. The slightest contact.

“It should be hard to say goodbye,” Erron replied.

Tyritha turned her head away, exhaled, and then took up his hand, kissing the back of it before resting her cheek against it for the slightest moment. Then she sat up straight and brought herself to her feet.

There was enough to think about without temptation. And she would think, Tyritha told herself, the second she caught her breath again.

There wasn’t an ex-contact crew member in the Arnur cylinder. But in the Hamini archive, Erron came across a former ship hand who’d been retired there under uncertain circumstances. To say the man was surprised to be visited by a rising member of the House of Arnur was an understatement. The Dodonnas weren’t particularly friendly with the Kamans, who sat in the House of Hamini, so Erron hadn’t sought an intermediary. He simply appeared in the city dressed in common clothing and attempted to blend in. That attempt was a limited success, for the eyes usually didn’t lie when it came to the immortals, and the eyes of ordinary people told them that a man so beautiful couldn’t be anything but an immortal walking amongst them.

The aging shiphand, who wanted nothing more than the quiet peace of obscurity in his final years, initially was not pleased to see a Dodonna at his door. There would be talk about it certainly. And the longer Erron stood there trying to persuade the man to let him inside so they might talk, the more Erron became aware of the misstep the visit might have been. Over either shoulder, a set of eyes was on both men, and the more that fact became apparent, the more suspiciously they both felt themselves acting, quite subconsciously of course, yet the feeling was unmistakable.

“What more do you have to lose in talking to me?” Erron finally asked the man.

At that, something in the old man’s eyes shifted. But Erron noted he didn’t quite like the look of him as the old man invited him inside his flat. And immediately, the man’s tone struck him as bitter and jaded. His name was Petr Onager, and shortly into the conversation, Erron realized that it was a conversation unlike any other he’d ever had. Erron was not in control of the situation. This was a man of the servant class who no longer saw any value in serving any interests but his own, and for this young Dodonna, aspirant of the immortal caste, digging around in the long-forgotten dodgy business of old contact missions exposed Erron in a way he realized he’d have difficulty explaining if Petr Onager ever had cause to put him in a predicament.

“Why do you care to know about the contact crews?” Petr asked him several questions into their conversation.

“Perhaps I am hoping to one day be trusted amongst those most dedicated few who take up that occupation as a service to Alysida,” Erron told him. “I will have to perform valuable work if I’m ever to become an archon.”

“Oh, perhaps. Dedication. Service. Right.”

Erron noted that the man had shown no signs of the kind of hospitality one of his class might show a guest of even the same status, much less a rising immortal.

“I was examining the records as part of my research and came across your name,” Erron told him.

“Were you?”

“I had questions that weren’t answered in the official record. I was hoping you might answer them for me directly.”

“I suppose you’d like to know how I ended up here? Aging? No family? Meagre reward for my dedication. My service. Those sorts of questions perhaps?”

“I’m not sure I’d have been so direct, but it did strike me as odd that you’re here, while others with a similar record of service to the archons are rewarded commensurate with the duties they’ve rendered.”

“That’s a fancy way of asking how I destroyed my life, no?” Onager replied with a dark laugh. “Pardon me, young sir, if I misunderstand you. Pretty words from a pretty man, such as yourself, sometimes fall hard on common ears.”

“I think you’ve caught my meaning just fine,” Erron replied.

Onager grinned. “The contact crew values anonymity. We are not supposed to be noticed while we are ... out there. It puts the entirety of Alysida in a tenuous position when people in the Battery have cause to notice us in any way.”

“How so?”

“In my case? Do you know the details?”

“I do not,” Erron answered earnestly.

“Right,” Onager replied, nodding. “You’d never have come to speak to a man like me if you’d heard the accusations.”

“Perhaps. But I didn’t have access to the details.”

“I was detained by the authorities in Carhall for taking liberties with a young woman while we were both intoxicated. That was the most generous way I heard it put before the magistrate there in the Protectorate.”

“Were you guilty of the charges?”

“Certainly of intoxication. Of the other charge I have no memory beyond the doorway of the bar. I do remember enjoying her company inside the bar—mutually, I’d add. I didn’t feel that I was any more guilty of anything at the time than the girl. We both enjoyed ourselves that night. But I was certainly not discreet in the way the contact crew was supposed to be.”

“I see.”

“That was a problem. People in desperate positions sometimes make poor judgements.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Onager? In relation to your choices back then?”

“You have to see it from the commander’s position—the archon on the contact team; I’m sure the record can tell you who it was. One of their people is remanded by foreign authorities, and he is desperate to escape incarceration. What would that man say to escape that fate? It puts one of the archon’s people in the position of being interrogated by local authorities about all manner of things. Loyalties can be tested, you see?”

“I understand.”

“Not well enough, young Dodonna. I was told that the archon was investigating the possibility of having me killed while in Trasp custody. Do you believe that?”

“I certainly believe that such a rumor could easily have started and made it back to you. Whether there was truth to it? I could see it being true either way with the secrecy of the entire colony at stake.”

“Yes. Fortunately for me, the charges weren’t forwarded beyond the preliminary stages, and I never left the ship again for the duration of that contact mission. I was terminated from the contact crew immediately on our return. Maybe people don’t remember the incident now, but the lords certainly all knew about it back then in this city. And the commoners, even if they didn’t know why, they knew there was shame on me. One stupid night, one stupid mistake. You pay a lifetime for it, don’t you? I can’t speculate about what an immortal pays. But you don’t want to be out there in the Battery, incriminated. That’s a dangerous way to live, and your peers, young Dodonna, they have long memories. Take care if you go that way.”

“That’s certainly an aspect of the contact crew I wasn’t aware of, Mr. Onager. I thank you for your frankness in sharing it.”

“I’m beyond the point of thinking I’ll ever find redemption in this place. I’m also decades beyond shame. I am not beyond business, though. It is hard to do business with a future archon on my doorstep. If you’re interested in more information, though, I’ll give you the means to be more discreet. I can tell you everything you’d like to know about the contact missions for an archon’s price. All the things they don’t want anyone to know.”

“I may very well be interested,” Erron replied, taking Onager’s contact information and giving strict instructions never to reach out himself. “The communication must obviously be one way.”

“These are not problems so long as payment flows one way as well,” Petr Onager concluded.

Erron accounted him a genuine miscreant as he left the ex-contact man’s humble flat. He’d never realized such men lived in Alysida. He was learning that there were layers between the well-ordered layers of the immortals’ highly structured society.

To be continued …

I’m grateful that so many people are joining the Sci-Fi Weeklies adventures here on Substack. Because of the nature of this platform, though, I wanted to put out a quick post regarding continuity, as the weekly posts here make it harder to connect the dots, and Substack-only followers may be missing some of the connective tissue that’s more accessible elsewhere. So I’m sharing some of those connections here.

First, if you weren’t aware, over the past few months, I’ve published recaps for Season 1 and Season 2 of the Misfits Series. Each recap includes a full synopsis for each chapter in the correct order, as well as connections to origins stories and other connected tales.

I’ve embedded the recap videos here, but if you’d prefer to read and scroll for yourselves, the link to the full synopsis text with hyperlinks to all the stories is included below:

Book I:

Text: https://www.rowelit.com/scifi-weeklies-story/the-misfits-complete-book-i-synopsis-recap

Book II

Text: https://www.rowelit.com/scifi-weeklies-story/foundations-misfits-series-book-ii-synopsis-recap

And lastly, unlike on YouTube, there isn’t a convenient way to share stories that are in a series or thematically connected, so I wanted to make Substack followers aware of the YouTube playlists. On that page, you can find Misfits-related playlists, a Lifeboat playlist (including the Hartsock stories), the Cypher Sigma stories, and more thematic playlists (like “uplifting” and “stand-alone” stories).

https://www.youtube.com/@RoweLit/playlists

Most people who follow here do so because they want to follow here, which I appreciate 🙏 However, I know some people have found me here and may not have gone looking for these other elements. So this post is my best attempt to make sure people joining the adventures here aren’t missing out on some of the connections that many readers and listeners enjoy.

Thanks for being a part of what makes Sci-Fi Weeklies so fun 😃

More to come soon 🚀🚀🚀

Rowe