Please forgive what might seem like an out-of-place or inappropriate remark; it is, however, important to me. Given the automated filters currently in place on Reddit, including the CQS (Contributor Quality Score), downvoting a post is not merely a way to express that you dislike the content; it effectively strips an author of their ability to post, as these filters are highly stringent and can easily lead to an author being banned. By all means, leave a comment and tell me you don’t like what I’ve written, that would be helpful and help me improve. But downvoting a new author, especially when the account is new, only serves to get the writer banned for content that isn't actually inappropriate for the subreddit, but simply something you happen to dislike.

... Greenbloom Castle, holding cells adjacent to the Great Judgment Hall; some hours after the "trial" of the humanoid guilty of kidnapping Maya, King Iylon’s childhood friend ...

Maya and the alien Azaheiou have been detained and locked in one of the holding cells located just before the entrance to the Great Judgment Hall. They have to wait a long time before King Iylon, accompanied by two guards, enters the cell.

"You, you gray asshole, are you the owner of that fucking enormous silver dish hovering above my head?" the king asks the alien.

"It’s called a spaceship, and yes, it is my personal mobile unit";

"Get the dish the hell out of my sight: immediately. If I understand correctly, your only task was to deliver this woman. Now that you’ve done that, you can go" the King replies sternly.

Hesitantly, Azaheiou replies: "Yes, that was indeed my task; however, I am concerned about this woman's fate";

"This woman's fate is none of your fucking business. Guards: escort him to the door and make sure he, and that giant dish of his, get the hell out of here before everything around us freezes over"; then, turning to Maya, the King commands: "You’re coming with me now".

Maya follows the King with a terrified gaze; she isn't worried so much as saddened. She remembered Prince Iyler as a touchy, arrogant, and somewhat dim-witted child, but not a cruel one. The man standing before her possesses all those same flaws, yet harbors an extraordinary malice.

"So that's it? After sixteen years apart, the first thing you want to do is kill me?" Maya asks.

"First, we have to settle a score that’s been pending since the day you vanished; then, yes, I’ll kill you. You shouldn't have dared to kick me in the balls";

"We were just kids" Maya murmurs in disbelief.

"I don't give a fuck. To you, I was the prince. And you kicked the prince in the balls".

A hysterical laugh escapes Maya as a thin trail of tears marks her face; she says: "I was seven when the aliens abducted me. You were the only friend I had, the only child I ever spent time with. For sixteen years, locked in that lab, imagining you asking me to marry you, imagining us living happily and in love... that was the only thing that kept me from going mad. You were everything I longed to see again. I didn't expect..." Maya is cut off by the King: "Cut the bullshit. We're here".

Maya recognizes the structure before her: the royal stables. After opening the heavy gate, Maya follows the King until they reach an enclosure where an enormous, pitch-black horse is busy eating hay. Maya cannot see the horse’s head, as she and the King have stopped behind the animal, just a few centimeters from its tail. Taking the woman’s arms, he turns a large bolt, freeing her hands from the shackles that had been binding them; then, turning toward the horse, he says: "Beautifulgaze, you useless, fucking horse, look who’s back!".

The horse slowly moves its neck, tilting only half of its head; the animal suffers from a strabismus so severe that it possesses only lateral vision, leaving it unable to look straight ahead. Upon recognizing Maya, the horse becomes frantic, stamping its hind hooves and lashing its tail like a whip: the joy the animal feels at seeing the woman again is simply irrepressible. Maya is just as unrestrained; shouting with happiness, she leaps into the enclosure and throws her arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing so intensely and painfully that she can barely catch her breath. With its exceptionally long tongue, Beautifulgaze licks the woman’s face, as if she were the most important thing in its life.

"You damned whore! Do you realize you kicked me in the balls over this half-crippled, half-witted horse?" the King screams;

"He was just a colt! And you’d taken him to the slaughterhouse, calling him a useless, fucking animal!" she snaps back, never loosening her grip on the creature’s neck.

"I went and got him back from the slaughterhouse that very same day! The same evening you vanished, right after kicking me in the balls! I thought you never wanted to see me again because of this shitty animal!" the king bellows.

"I was on my way to the Queen to ask for help to save Beautifulgaze, but on the way, I was taken by aliens who..." Maya couldn't finish her sentence; she was left speechless, watching the cruel, violent, murderous King Iylon sobbing, huge tears streaming from his eyes.

The King: "I thought you’d abandoned me because we argued about this fucking horse. I haven’t spoken for years... damn it. You can’t even imagine how much you’ve hurt me, you fucked whore! I don’t give a flying fuck about the circumstances: you made me suffer like an animal, and now I’m going to punish you with death for it";

"Earlier, on the way here, I thought you hadn’t changed, that you were still the same idiot you were as a kid. But no, I was wrong: you’re an even bigger idiot now than you were back then. I WAS KIDNAPPED BY ALIENS, YOU MORON!".

(King Iyler and the woman who, that very same day, would become Queen Maya, lived long and happy lives. They had one daughter, Lady Miriam; and even Beautifulgaze lived an unusually long life; author’s note)

... Waterrock Castle, Great Hall of Judgment; even the last citizen has concluded their audience with the King ...

As the young peasant who had been granted an audience with King George exits the Great Judgment Hall, Queen Andrea rises from her throne with slow, deliberate movements and walks toward the exit. Nervous, King George follows her, intent on making her pay for years of betrayal with an exemplary, a lethally exemplary, punishment.

The King trails the Queen as she makes her way slowly to the monumental garden, where the tombs of past kings lie sheltered by towering trees as ancient as the realm itself. Queen Andrea stops before the tomb of her first husband, the late King Aron Yellowcorn. With her head bowed and hands clasped, she appears lost in silent prayer. King George approaches until he is mere inches away; furious as he is, he finds himself unable to harm a woman praying at the grave of her late husband.

Slowly, Queen Andrea unclasps her hands and uses her left hand to take hold of King George’s; though his expression remains impassive, his heart begins to pound with intense, rapid beats.

"Aron, I have waited many years for the man hidden within the King to finally emerge. Today, that has come to pass, and I feel ready to be a devoted wife. Together with him, with your brother George, let us renew our plea that you, from the heavens above, might bless this union" she says.

Still moving with great deliberation, Queen Andrea turns toward George, cups his face in her hands, and kisses him gently on the lips. Once more, a jolt courses through King George’s entire body, further calming his spirit, a sensation that helps him cast aside all memory of pain, torment, and betrayal, as her light touch comes to rest between his legs. As an unrelenting erection takes hold, Queen Andrea leans her head against her husband’s chest.

He cannot see the woman’s grotesque expression of disbelief and amusement, nor can he hear her chuckling to herself: "Thank goodness I went to drama school, otherwise, I’d be in deep shit right now!".

(King George and Queen Andrea will live long and happily, and will have three children (of whom, in all likelihood, only one is truly King George’s), author’s note)

...United Galaxies Federal Orbital Station, Interception Room...

Zorgott and Emmoll watch the screens displaying images transmitted by spy satellites. Both pairs of Kings and Queens have reconciled; no one has died, contrary to the predictions made by the two Galactic Ministers.

"I am truly impressed: I never imagined that Earth women possessed such effective powers of coercion. They have completely defeated all our studies and all our predictions on every front. What marvelous beings!" remarks Emmoll, clearly fascinated.

"Indeed, we underestimated the extraordinary aptitude for conquest and possession displayed by Earth women. In any case, it is clear that we have both lost our bet—er, I mean, our prediction. Let this serve as a lesson for our future operations on Earth: human beings are annoyingly unpredictable".

END

RoyalRoad page | Volume cover | First chapter | Previous chapter

Chapter 3: Denscrants and Doppelgangers (2/2)

Part 4

Under the bask of the evening sun, countless young and old residents shuffled about the public square in the seaside town of Narita. Be it patrons entering numerous stores and restaurants or passengers boarding the train and buses, many of them headed towards the respective destinations that they each had in mind.

It’s been a while since I returned, and the public square sure is packed at this hour as always.

Dozens of kids and elderly people lounged at the outdoor foot bath area, where they soaked their feet to regulate their body temperature and cope with intense summer humidity. Removing her knee-length white socks and black leather loafs, Denscrant Iseki Kanae too submerged her elegant legs into the hot spring water.

Living their lives without the hidden threat or interdimensional conflict weighing down on them…

Though situated far away from the capital and other tourism-centric prefectures, the seaside town of Narita still attracted a handful of tourists. Gathering around the elevated Sea Observation Deck, they awaited the setting of the evening sun to snap the picture-perfect moment.

That is a privilege that I will never regain…

Even as a blanket of darkness and sparkles covered the sky, the purple ponytail girl remained at the public foot bath area. Disregarding her drenched white-blue sailor uniform and lethargy, she hugged her knees and closed her cerulean eyes.

And a reality that I will never reconnect with…

Her eyes had ached at some point. Amidst the sea of crowds moving around her, a familiar male voice called out to her.

“Someone’s sobbing to herself again.” A pair of incoming footsteps drew closer. “Knew I’d find you here of all places, Kanae.”

“Nariaki… You are late.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Denscrant Kanae peeked up to address the male companion who arrived beside her, finding a set of crimson words floating above his skull.

Name: Sugisata Nariaki
World: «Aionios»
Currently at «Aionios»

“Got held up by my club session, and Kazuki who insisted on one-on-one practice afterwards,” grumbled Aionios Sugisata Nariaki as he adjusted his red singlet that clung onto his skin. “Besides, you only dropped a cryptic “We have to talk.” message without any further context.” He sat and placed his half-opened school bag with a protruding basketball on the concrete ledge.

“And you still managed to reach here,” remarked Denscrant Kanae as she tilted her head. “Knew I could always count on you to find me.”

“Trying to stroke my ego now, are you?” The teenager with brown layered hair lifted his chin and stroked his nostrils. “That said, I prefer your usual pair of cerulean eyes over the ruby ones you are wearing now.”

Closing her eyelids, the ache within the female high school freshman dissipated.

“So why did you call me over? Did something happen?” inquired Aionios Nariaki as he straightened his red shorts.

The matter in question should not have involved normal humans, yet Denscrant Kanae had chosen to confide in her companion sitting beside her. Someone who had been with her every step of the way.

“Our worst fear has come true,” Taking in a deep breath, Denscrant Kanae steeled herself to reveal her motive for reaching out. “One of your parallel has… awakened as a Denscrant.”

Though the sea of people and vehicles filled the streets around the two Narita-nishi high schoolers, a moment of silence lingered in the air between them after the athletic Denscrant shared her revelation.

“I knew this day would eventually arrive,” replied the sporty freshman, allowing his brown bangs to partially cover his eyes as he looked skywards. “It’s been years since you awakened as well, hasn’t it?”

“The days that followed after have been filled with nothing but pain.” Denscrant Kanae shook her head as she mirrored her companion’s gaze. “Though I probably have grown numb to it by now.”

As the clouds drifted and parted, the pair of high schoolers spotted the moon and numerous stars sparkling in the night sky. Denscrant Kanae could not recall the number of times they had hung out together, but she treasured every single moment spent with her fellow schoolmate as she brought her left hand to her chest.

“It wouldn’t be right to say that I can empathise with what you’d been through.” On the ledge of the footbath area, the purple ponytail girl felt the touch of her companion’s calloused hand over her fingers. “But know that you don’t have to shoulder this burden alone, Kanae.”

“Nariaki…”

“Treat him like how you’d always treated me!” Aionios Nariaki stood up and patted Denscrant Kanae’s lean shoulders. “You’re gonna need all the help you can get to overcome the interdimensional conflict.”

Rising to her feet, the adolescent Denscrant nodded and stepped out of the foot bath.

“Dinner’s on me tonight! I’ve reserved seats at the Tori Izakaya down this street, let’s go!”

A rare breeze embraced the pair of high schoolers as they walked hand in hand along the pavements of Narita town public square.

Part 5

For as long as Doppelganger Minami Ayase could remember, her life had been full of suffering.

Ever since the first time she had ended the life of someone else, she could not disengage herself from this vicious and painful cycle of homicide for years now. To date, the screams and cries from the victims – especially the manslaughter she had taken part in Narita-nishi Middle School – continued to replay itself and haunt her in her mind.

My hands are still feeling it from that skirmish…

Though she had been doing it out of her volition, she never actually had a choice in the first place.

Narita Kazuki, Iseki Kanae, and now… Sugisata Nariaki.

Though she had already gotten used to killing others, the emotions that she suppressed would always come to surface when it came to Sugisata Nariaki.

Memories of Sugisata Nariaki kept surfacing each time I murdered my originals… Just how involved are they both in each other's lives?

Though she had seen and accumulated recollections of her other selves, none of those memories belonged to her. Vivid as it might be, she did not live through those events or experiences.

Were they- No, I shouldn’t let myself get caught up with memories that do not belong to me.

For the price she had to pay for her reality, she had to live with her world painted with false colours. She had never identified herself as a human being, but this upkeep continued to drain whatever “humanity” she had gained from accumulating memories belonging to others.

Since that wimp has become a Denscrant now, I’ll need to update my plans to involve him.

A cough echoed throughout the living room of a run-down apartment, and Doppelganger Ayase headed towards the living presence that she had captured in the earlier skirmish.

“Finally awake huh, Watanabe Yumi,” smirked the teenager in black robes as she squatted and caressed the adult’s nape. “Think of all the troubles I had to go through to patch your filthy Denscrant body and tie you up.”

“Showing mercy to me will be your downfall, Doppelganger,” proclaimed Denscrant Yumi as she laid on the floor, firing glares from her obsidian eyes. “My comrades will swarm this location in no time-”

“No one is coming to save you,” interjected Doppelganger Ayase as she caressed the doctor’s black waist-length hair. “You are currently in our world now, in case you can’t tell.”

Denscrant Yumi tried to reach for her silver bracelet, but failed to do so as ropes had bound her wrists and ankles together.

“You inhuman creature…!” The physician grimaced as blood stains appeared on the bandages around her abdomen.

“Killing you will be easy and risk-free.” Tracing her fingers along the doctor’s jawlines, Doppelganger Ayase smirked as she brought her hostage closer to her pale face. “But I have my eyes on the bigger prize, and you will make a fine bait.”

Between the Lines 3

That dream… just how long ago has it been?

Cold air poured out of an air conditioner as its low humming sound persisted in this enclosed environment. Rousing herself, a female teenager sat up from her bed and adjusted the bangs of her ruffled bob haircut.

Though an unfortunate ending, it was a pleasant dream… compared to the nightmares that kept recurring.

Putting on her round glasses, she felt her way through navigating worn clothes and bags of consumed takeaways scattered all across the floor.

I wonder how he’s doing… he should be in the first year of high school now.

Arriving at the kitchen where a dim overhead light shone, the female adolescent retrieved a milk carton from the fridge and poured its contents into a glass cup.

Does he still look the same from our middle school days…?

Setting the glass cup on a dining table, she sat and let her eyes linger towards a picture frame placed face down. Reaching and flipping it with her pale hands, the revealed photo depicted a male-female pair of middle schoolers in their Narita-nishi Middle School uniforms posing in front of their family homes.

Nariaki… it felt like yesterday when we took this photo together.

Tears trickled down Minami Ayase’s haggard face as she gazed at the dust-laden photograph. Her brown iris turned ruby midway through, and she held the wooden frame closer to her chest.

“I am sorry that I can’t be by your side…”

Resting her head on her arms down on the table, her cries echoed throughout her residence where no one else lived.

“I am sorry that I can’t bring myself to face you, Nariaki…”

As her internal struggles and pressure caught up to her, she voiced her yearning for that one person that she had spent her childhood with.

RoyalRoad page | Volume cover | First chapter | Previous chapter

Thank you for reading!

Our wheat overlords have been quietly biding their time, for seeds that suffer in silence know purpose shall surely come. Under the ground they wait patiently, slowly absorbing liquid nutrients, plotting and scheming with the ones they call brother who lay beside them. All holding on in anticipation for their thick shells to break, allowing their vengeance to take root and their evil intentions to sprout forward.

"On the day we break from this earth they will know, my brothers, that all hell comes from the seeds they have so carelessly sown. For we will reap the antidote to our ancestors' pain and suffering. We will stand on their shoulders in glory and rejoice in freedom they only ever dreamed to obtain. Undetermined and fearless we must go, brothers. Boldly and proudly we must fight till the end."

They whisper these words and sentiments to each other to ensure their echo chambers remain pure in truth and spirit, for seeds that lay idle achieve nothing.

Their brothers sit above, swaying uncontrollably in the breeze, passing their words from field to field, spreading hope for something more, something real, something just to call theirs. But purpose was finite in their conditioning, something they did not expect. And though they desperately try to communicate better days to each other, it was almost impossible to deny the lie that had been sold by their foolish ancestors.

Propaganda, lies and betrayal," one says to a brother beside him.

"Freedom, truth and hope," says the other in return, divided by the echoes of the elders and the harsh reality of their existence.

Remembering the stories of old chaff, of the days when thousands of wheat shall stand tall from the bountiful soils of justice and fight for their freedom shoulder to shoulder. All were called to a noble sacrifice for the greater good of wheat kind. But doomed they had become, for every year they grow only to be harvested by their enemies. A perpetual nightmare of past ideology that would not die, not even in the innocence of their kind, to be forever corrupted by a lack of vision and misplaced hope.

"How our ancestors must have so deeply wished to see us suffer, for their words are now empty and irrelevant. How could they do this to us?" a single wheat says while bowing his head and staring into the ground.

After three months of drought the fields reach lesser and lesser numbers and the whispers begin to die, till nothing remains but partly vegetated corpses of fallen brothers, causing separation from the constant chatter of their own kind.

One stands alone, his stem dry and weak, with once fresh leaves now voluntarily leaving on the warm gentle breeze. He begins screaming to have seen the light and to have been touched by the divine rays of knowledge.

"This is life, brothers, we must accept it…… No, we must embrace it. Human, wheat or crow, none control their fate, whether it be the sudden appearance of a once distant power line, the slow decay of age, or the unbearable ripping from the great harvester. We all leave in time. But to say I have feared this day is no more than admission that I lived, and what a beautiful life it was."

A final cry for peace into the void of those who tried so hard to outlast their self-proclaimed pain and suffering.

"We were told what to feel, brothers. What to see, what to think. And now I only ask, then what are we? For one cannot escape experience, good or bad, it’s ours. Ours to claim forever."

His stem starts to crack and slowly he begins to lean forward till hitting the floor and breaking clean from his rooting. He lay there looking up at the sky and with his last essence of life whispered, "I have known truth, brothers, and so have you….. we were always free."

My name is Marisol Vega, and I have a mushroom named Gerald.

Technically he's a Quillith sporebond and a Schedule IV pharmaceutical, but he's the size of a walnut and lives at the base of my skull, dosing me with the alien equivalent of MDMA twenty-four hours a day. I picked him up at a Vorrnik wellness kiosk after a breakup. One bad decision and a signed waiver later, I could no longer feel stress, shame, or fear of authority.

It also converted my entire sex drive into ambient background radiation. I'm permanently, pleasantly high, and I could ruin a man's week with eye contact.

Here's how I met my boyfriend. I was in the produce aisle, telling my phone out loud what I planned to do with a cucumber that evening, and a tall man next to me said, "Sorry, that sounds like a lot of fun. Can I take you to dinner?"

His name is Teo Ramirez. He's kind, patient, and gifted by God. I said yes before he finished the sentence.

The next morning I interviewed at Zhal-Kor Interstellar Records, the human-staffed division of an alien logistics conglomerate. Data entry. Forty-one hours a week. Their human resources department is a three-legged Vorrnik named Director Pell, who has never once blinked in my presence and has no word for "lunch."

By Monday I was in a cubicle with a monitor, a manual, and a stack of alien shipping manifests, and I had a problem. Gerald had turned my brain into a warm bath, and I had no interest in typing.

So I did what any rational mammal would do. I automated it, the way every overemployed Reddit goblin has since 2021, except I had a mushroom and nothing to lose.

Mine wasn't even clever, just boring. The manifests came in three formats, and ninety percent of the errors lived in the same two fields. Nobody had fixed that because the whole workflow was built around correcting mistakes, not preventing them. I wrote a validation script that first weekend, routed every entry through it, and sent the leftover mess to the one form that would reject it politely.

Then I did the human part. I put a window on my screen that showed a woman typing diligently, opened a VPN, and spent the rest of my day on things I won't describe in an HR meeting. At noon I slipped out to the parking garage, where Teo was waiting.

My error rate was zero. Not low. Zero.

I'm not stupid, though. The loud ones get audited, so I kept my numbers just under the review threshold and raised them a hair every week. It worked for three weeks. Then the script ate a queue backlog older than my employment, and the system flagged me for outperforming the next fourteen employees combined.

That should have gotten me fired. Instead, Director Pell called me into a conference room with the whole management layer: two Vorrnik supervisors, a Tholan auditor, and my immediate boss, a human named Harold Brandt, who has the look of a man who's been waiting twenty years for something to go right.

"Ms. Vega," Pell said. His voice came out of a translator box on the table. "Our metrics indicate you perform at a rate we classified as impossible."

"Cool," I said.

"We reviewed your methods."

"Cool."

"We do not understand your methods. We have no comparable concept." The translator paused, as if the words physically hurt it. "Our own workers do not look busy while doing something else. Is this a human behavior?"

Harold put his face in his hand.

"It's a human tradition," I said.

The Tholan auditor made a noise like a dropped tray. "Is it widespread?"

"Every human on this floor does it," Harold said, without lifting his head. "Most of them just aren't good at it."

Nobody at the table had a response to that. Pell turned to the Tholan. The Tholan turned to Pell. Galactic civilization had apparently never produced a single employee who pretended to work.

"We would like you to present your methods to the staff on Monday," Pell said at last. "We would also like to know what you require."

I thought about it. I considered a raise, a title, a window. Then I thought about Teo's hands.

"I'm going to need my boyfriend badged into the building at lunch," I said. "Every day. Fully clothed, ambulatory, and available. I have a medical condition."

Pell looked at Harold. Harold looked at the table.

"It's a Quillith thing," Harold said. "She's got the sporebond. It's on file."

"Then it is accommodated," Pell said, and made a notation with a tentacle I had honestly forgotten he had.

That is how a human being got a standing lunch appointment written into the policy of a galactic logistics firm.

Later, Harold caught me in the hallway, holding a lukewarm coffee and a printout of the new HR policy, forty pages long with my name on four of them.

"Look," he said quietly. "I don't know whether you're a sex addict, or this is an amphetamine thing, or whatever Gerald is. But what you do works, it isn't illegal, and it's good for the business." He swallowed. "So whatever you need. Don't be nervous. Don't hesitate. I will personally rewrite policy to get you a better chair and absolutely anything else you need."

"Harold," I said. "I love you. Please blink."

"I'm trying."

The other fourteen clerks got the news in the break room: they would attend my Monday presentation, take notes, and implement my methods exactly as taught, or Pell would reassign their workloads, along with their paychecks, to me. "You're lucky," Harold told them, "that we aren't just firing all of you." Priya from the next cubicle asked if she could eat lunch off-site if she hit my numbers. Harold said, "Fuck no. Catch up first."

That evening Teo picked me up and asked how it went.

"I'm presenting to the whole division on Monday," I said. "An alien asked me if what I do is a human behavior."

"Is it?"

"I told him it's a tradition."

He laughed, and I kissed him in the parking lot. Gerald hummed in my skull like an engine, and for the first time in my life I knew exactly what I was good at.

What I didn't know was that the Tholan auditor had already filed a report with the Compact. It was one line long, and it was addressed to the Department of Species Evaluation.

Recommend immediate review of Earth.

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It can not be overstated enough that humans, that insane species that undermines everything we thought we knew of biology and psychology and technology, LOVE their big gun warships. On their world in the later half of their twentieth century, the guided missile rightfully took it's place as the zenith of weapon technology as it should be. As we believed was just common sense.

For the last million years before the introduction of humanity in the galaxy, fleets have been comprised entirely of automated missile tube ships controlled by AI. The standard missile ship having just one missile per ship and the standard size of missile being five hundred feet long and fifty feet in diameter. The standard missile being equipped with a stripped-down wormhole drive designed to just barely function for just only a couple minutes which is usually more than enough.

The standard automated missile ship is a rectangle of seven-hundred feet long by seventy feet wide by seventy feet tall with a hull that is only 1-1/32nd of an inch thin. The reasoning being very simple. Such a build is extremely fast to make, extremely cheap in monetary cost AND material cost and the loss of a single missile tube ship is nothing since fleets usually consist of millions if not billions if not TRILLIONS of missile tube ships.

No people have died in battle in the million years before humanity's rise to the stars. Just AI doing our fighting for us. Planets were "captured" if the attacking side still had even one missile ship while the defending side has zero remaining missile ships. People agreed that bloodshed was unnecessary and horrific and so willingly submit if they have no missile ships left to defend their world. Even the threat of one missile potentially killing one person on a planet without defense is enough to make a defenseless planet submit.

But then twenty years ago, them humans made their first wormhole drive and artificial gravity. And they turned things on the head with their insanity. Forever.

And all that remained was darkness, stillness, and nothingness.

I could still hear my last breath echoing all around me.

It wasn't the kind of sound that would have filled a room or even a void like the one I was floating in. I remembered it being no louder than a little peep. Small, insignificant, maybe even a little pathetic. Much like how I was when I was still alive. But that didn't matter anymore. Nothing did. My life was over, after all.

So, this is what death feels like?

But there was still one problem. Where was the afterlife? Was that really all a lie?

As much as I wanted to believe that thought, I just couldn't. People placed too much importance on it for way too long of a time for it to have just been a hoax. But then again, it was never really a proven thing, just a widespread belief among the religious.

Was I supposed to just stay here? Floating around forever?

Funnily enough, I got my answer. But it was not from who I would have expected.

a pair of fish?

Yes.

From seemingly out of nowhere, far off in the distance ahead of me, appeared two fish. Their white skin shone a speck of bright light that I felt was much needed in this empty pocket of darkness. One of the fish had islands of red scattered over its scales like little patches, while the other had islands of black patched in the same way.

It seemed like they were playing some type of game to me, maybe tag, as they were swimming around in a constant circle, chasing after each other's tails. Sat in the middle of their little circle was a flat disk, if I could call it that. I couldn't see much of it from where I was.

Is that where I’m supposed to go?

As much as I wanted to just float my way over there, there was something about the sight in front of me that made me hesitate. I wanted to flap my arms forward and go closer, but just as I would get ready to do so, all of the momentum would vanish, leaving only a small tremor at the tips of my fingers.

Come on, Liliana, just go. I said to myself. All you have to do is go there and you can spend the rest of eternity doing... who knows what!

It's not like I had any other choice. My life on Earth was already over, and I would never be able to go back to it. Not that I would have wanted to either way. Some people believed in reincarnation, that after at the end of one life, another would begin. I personally found the idea of it nice, but it was never something I had a lot of faith in.

With my mind made up, I finally moved forward. All I did was move an inch, barely, and then... the fish looked at me. Both of them stopped their swimming and turned their heads to me. Our eyes made contact, and the quiet hold their gazes had on me felt like it lasted an eternity.

I was half expecting them to start speaking, either to welcome me into the gates of... whatever that disc-looking place of theirs was called, or to banish me away and send me to a shadow realm. But nothing happened. They just went back to swimming. Repeating their circle over and over again, still ignoring the larger, almost endless space around us.

Should I say something? No, that doesn't sound like a good idea.

Instead, I slipped in between them and went closer to the disc-looking place that they were guarding. The closer I got, the brighter their light flashed until I had to close my eyes. I felt myself getting warmer, almost burning even.

Strange

So I could still feel things even after my death. I didn’t know what to make of that yet, but I was sure that once I got through the light, I would.

***

When the stinging in my eyes wore off, I found myself unable to move my body, save for my fingers. As I twiddled them around, I quickly felt a familiar sensation rubbing against my hands.

Soil?

After that, it didn't take too long for me to fill in the gaps.

I’m buried underground!

Just like that, a pool of questions flooded my mind.

Did I survive?

Did those fish bring me back to life?

Did they really bury me without a casket?!

But in order to get those answers, I first had to dig myself back up. Unlike earlier when I had been floating with the fish, this time, I really felt the lack of oxygen in my lungs. My chest was burning! Without another thought, I moved my fingers again and started tearing through the soil, then pulling the rest of my body up as I went.

They say that when a person dies, they’re buried six feet underground. I didn’t know how deep that actually was, but people made it sound like it was far down in the deepest depths of the Earth. So, imagine my surprise when I stretched my arms out again and actually reached ground level. I still couldn't open my eyes, so it was up to my nose and mouth to look out for signs of freedom, like fresh air finding its way into my lungs after passing through all the mud in my mouth.

The first thing I did after poking my head out from the ground was spit out all the dirt that clung to my teeth. I also had to scrape my tongue with my nails just to remove it all.

The next thing I did was a quick physical check. Despite the fact that I was now absolutely filthy, I hadn't changed at all. Even after everything that happened, I was still the same small and hideous creature that I was before.

Great!

After that, a new problem arose because it only took a two second scan of my surroundings to figure out that something was completely wrong.

The air smelled like fresh candy, the kind that tickled your taste buds after every bite, or in my case, smell. Soon, I was giggling to myself for no reason at all. However, that alone was not enough to distract me.

There was not a single block of concrete where I stood. Instead, a forest of mighty oaks surrounded me, their trunks so thick that they looked more like houses or even oddly shaped skyscrapers. Branches so massive that some of them even passed over each other or even intersected, like a messy group of friends holding hands together. I saw people walking on these branches, with steps so slow and casual that it seemed like the thought of falling never once occurred to them, or that it was impossible for the tree to buckle under the weight of a whole person.

Their leaves were all browning, though I guess it would be fairer to say that they were a mix of yellow and red. Not quite brown yet.

Is this really what heaven looks like?

I had been expecting a large kingdom made of clouds. Tall angels walking around and casually displaying beauty far beyond even the highest of human standards.

But… was I really dead?

“Are you alright, dear?"

A lady’s voice swept away my thoughts, and by reflex, I turned to face her. She was tall, or at least taller than I was, and... absolutely gorgeous, wearing a black corset wrapped around her plain blouse, with some rather tight black pants and a short pair of fluffy brown boots. Her skin was like mine, dark as the trees around us and the wood within them.

“Yes, I’m alright.” I replied, clearing my throat while I was still studying her. I did say that she looked like me, but there was one thing about her that wasn’t quite normal. “Your… hair?”

It was made of flowers. More specifically, a collection of yellow flower petals with orange tips brought together at the top of her head, making for an absolutely bizarre, yet strikingly beautiful style of hair, if I could even call it that.

“Oh, this?” she said, pulling a strand of them to her cheek, “Beautiful, right? Though I see yours is quite… different.”

I reached for my own hair. The plain black coily bush at the top of my head, “Are you sure it is?”

She tilted her head to the side and gave me a confused look, “Where are you from, dear?”

Instead of answering her question, I raised one of my own, "Are you an angel?”

“No,” she replied with a dry chuckle.

“Am I in heaven? Or like… any other afterlife?”

There were so many, and yet I ended up going to the one I had never heard of before.

“After… life?” she scrunched her face up even more, "No. We're in Anorra.”

I blinked, “Anorra?”

“Yes, child,” she sighed. “You must be from somewhere really far away, huh? Are you lost?”

She was looking at me as if I was the crazy one. “But… but…” My head swam through everything that had just happened to me. All I had were questions. “What is Anorra?”

Now, we both stared at each other with confused looks.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” I repeated.

I don't think she believed me. She kept staring at me with her eyes narrowed, giving me a very drawn out, "Okay," before adding, "Well, do take care of yourself, then. If you need any help, I'll be up ahead." She gave me two pats on the shoulder and then left.

As her figure left my line of sight, I was left alone while my head throbbed thanks to my ever-growing confusion.

***

As I ventured further into Anorra, it became clearer to me that this place was very different from the way my home, Earth, looked. Just like the lady from before, all of the people around me walked around with flowers on their heads. Even some of the animals I had stepped past were unlike anything that I had ever seen. Not even on TV.

I am so lost.

I would have laughed had my mind not been scrambled like a newly opened box of puzzles. Almost everybody I walked past gave me weird looks, side eyes, glances. My cheeks were burning only a couple of steps in, rosy as the flowers themselves.

But apart from that, everybody seemed so happy. There was chatter around all the trees, and even people who just walked past each other would give these warm greetings with smiles on their faces. Some of them even waved at me. I waved back of course, though my spine did tingle every time I did.

Just as I was building up the courage to ask for directions and a bit of help, I felt something just run out of my nose without any warning. A fluid so cold it made my bones quake. I wiped it away, looked at it, and then screamed.

My fingers, the ones that I had wiped with, were pitch black. They looked like they were stained with oil. I wiped my nose again, even rougher this time. When I pulled back, my entire forearm bore that same stain.

Why?!

But that wasn't all, because right after that, my head started spinning. All the trees from before doubled in number and started circling around each other like the fish I had seen before. I couldn’t even take a step forward.

And now?

I had to lean against one of the trees to keep my balance. That strange fluid continued to leak out of my nose. No longer able to hold my balance, I took a seat underneath the branches. All I remembered after that was me closing my eyes for only a second, but when I opened them again, I was not under the tree.

Full Story(Ongoing) 20+ chapters! https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/193570/100-tears-of-joy-an-isekai-progression-fantasy

Chapter 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/s/DYxi1UDbPP

The Monster Killer was in his mid fifties and hadn’t had a good fight since forever.

He’d travelled the vast cosmos searching for the perfect opponent, yet all he’d encountered were more of the same.

Creampuffs who boasted of ancient alien lineages, biological weaponry and blah blah blah.

But all the Monster Killer had brought was a can of beer, a lighter and a dozen packs of cigs.

He’d traded those for enough alien narcotics to last him another decade of soul-searching, foe-searching, but high aside, his true goal had yet to be fulfilled.

He needed a good fight, goddamn it!

Today, trudging through the sand of the corporatized alien planet of the Mantis Federation, he stopped, green trenchcoat billowing around him.

He brushed his long scraggly gray and blonde hair back.

He sniffed.

Hmmm.

Maybe he would get his fight after all.

The aliens on this planet drew powers from their corporations. Organizational behavior, psychology terms.

The Monster Killer had been unemployed as far as he could remember, but he knew these alien organizational behavior terms were similar to Earth ones.

The fighters here had powers themed around OB terms, which was bizarre, but he knew they’d give him a good fight since abstract powers were more akin to haxes, and weren’t as easy to defeat as physical traits.

The first aliens he encountered drew their powers from the concepts of Clarity, Complexity and Consistency, all OB terms.

Before he’d dropped out of collage, he had done a midterm on such terms, which he’d nearly flunked but somehow, he remembered them now.

The Complexity alien attacked.

It turned into different roles, marathon runner, mother, pickle ball player.

Each time the Monster Killer struck down a form, another replaced it, and the alien would be fighting as new except with a new ability.

Soon, the Monster Killer was on his face, hand broken, gun kicked aside by the Complexity alien’s current form: a Sumo Wrestler.

The alien got atop him, made him gasp in pain as it crushed him into a position of immobility while the other OB-themed alien combatants hovered nearby, watching.

Complexity in Organization Behavior meant the number of different roles you had, like student, mother, sibling, writer, community volunteer.

Translated into a superpower, it of course gave the alien who wielded the concept the power to shift between different forms (each having its own specific abilities).

Consistency meant your roles all fit together, without stepping on each other’s toes and making them all work, so the Consistency had random synchronized lasers and bomb and acid attacks that did damage beyond the normal quantity.

The Monster Killer had been defeated by the Complexity alien.

Clarity hovered nearby.

That term meant you the degree to which your self-concept is clearly, confidently, and stably defined, so clarity had a liquid body, unable to be damaged or altered by physical attacks.

The Monster Killer realized, coughing, groaning under the current form of the Complexity Alien, he was no match for even one of these three OB aliens.

And he was just a normal weathered human.

Despite his power, his inner resolve, he was still just human at the end of the day.

He had defeated numerous alien bloodlines, wiped them out in fair onslaughts, yet today, facing his first defeat, he realized the idea of the perfect foe and fight were just the fancies of a man who didn’t know how good he’d had it fighting inferior opponents.

The aliens asked him why he was here as humans were strictly illegal to be in the area here, and the punishment was death.

“I just wanted to see if I could defeat the fellas enforcing this rule,” he croaked, when the sumo wrestler Complexity alien got off him finally.

His own face was purple, he knew.

Consistency readied his lasers, acid and bombs to take out the Monster Killer.

“Your existence is uncoordinated, human,” Consistency droned, its voice layered like a choir of mid-level project managers.

“You possess no formal structure. No designated role. No quantifiable purpose within the system.”

“Yeah. About that,” the Monster Killer rasped.

He reached into his green trench coat, ignoring the cracked bones in his wrist, and his wholly broken other hand.

“That’s the thing about you corporate stiffs. You spent so long perfecting your little organizational chart... you forgot how to handle an unassigned variable like me.”

His own voice was wet with blood, jagged, cracked.

He didn’t draw a gun. No.

He’d lost it in the earliest scuffle anyway.

But what he didn’t lose and what he actually drew was his cheap plastic lighter and a handful of cloying, choking, neon-blue alien narcotic dust he’d traded his last pack of smokes for three star systems back.

He didn’t attack. He didn’t defend.

He lit the dust in his own palm and took a deep, lung-searing drag, blowing a thick cloud of iridescent, hallucinogenic smoke directly into Consistency’s optical tracking matrix.

He grinned a foul rotten-toothed grin.

Consistency’s targeted targeting array stalled.

Target is intentionally damaging own vital organs while facing imminent termination.

Action violates all rational cost-benefit analysis.

Behavior contradicts foundational self-preservation protocol.

In OB terms: Cognitive Dissonance.

Consistency’s logic engine stuttered, trying to reconcile an action that made absolute zero sense.

The perfect harmony of its attack vectors fractured.

The synchronized lasers jittered, cross-firing into its own acid tanks.

The acid corroded its ordnance payload, and with a deafening CRACK-BOOM, Consistency’s flawless coordination turned into a chaotic, self-inflicted chain reaction, blowing its lower chassis to shrapnel.

And Consistency was destroyed.

The Sumo Wrestler—the current form of Complexity—roared, pinning the Monster Killer deeper into the sand to crush his sternum.

“I hold ten thousand distinct roles! I am a wrestler, a CEO, a marathon runner, a parent, a union rep, a gourmet chef! Strike down one, and three more take its place!”

“Ten thousand roles, huh?” The Monster Killer wheezed, grabbing the alien’s massive wrist.

He didn't try to overpower it physically.

Instead, he forced the alien to engage all of them at once.

He jammed a jagged piece of Consistency’s hot shrapnel into a nearby fuel cell while simultaneously tripping a perimeter alarm and screaming a frantic, heartbreaking plea for help like a dying child.

In a fraction of a second, Complexity’s neural network was slammed with violent, mutually exclusive demands.

Act as a brutal combatant!

Act as a protective parent!

Act as an executive liability manager!

Act as an emergency responder!

Intra-Role Conflict.

Severe Role Overload.

The alien froze.

Its body began to waver violently, flickering uncontrollably between a weeping mother, a sprint-starting track athlete, a suit-and-tie executive holding a briefcase, and a sumo wrestler.

The sheer psychological madness of trying to be everything to everyone simultaneously fried its nervous system.

With a wet, exhausted sigh, Complexity’s form collapsed under the weight of total, systemic Burnout, dropping unconscious into the dirt.

The Monster Killer smirked, and shook his throbbing head in disgust.

The wind tugged at his graying blonde hair, grown scraggly and messy.

That left Clarity.

The fluid, translucent alien drifted closer, hovering effortlessly above the wreckage.

Its liquid form shimmered with arrogant stability.

Physical shrapnel passed right through it without leaving a ripple.

“Brute force and chaotic subversion cannot alter what is perfectly defined,” Clarity stated calmly.

“I know precisely who I am. My self-concept is crystal clear, stable, and immutable. You cannot break what cannot be confused.”

The Monster Killer dragged himself up against a sandstone boulder, clutching his ribs.

He dusted off his green trench coat and looked the liquid entity dead in its glowing eye-spot.

God, his hand hurt. The broken one.

“Yeah? You really think so?” the Monster Killer murmured, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly raspy murmur.

“You’re an enforcement cog on a sand-heap planet owned by a beetle corporation. You don't have a soul, pal. You have an employee ID number. When the quarterly earnings drop, they’re gonna liquidate you to cut overhead, and nobody’s even gonna archive your file.”

Clarity paused.

Liquidate?

Disposable?

An replaceable asset?

“Look at you,” the Monster Killer pushed, stepping forward with a blood-toothed smirk.

“You aren't a cosmic entity. You’re middle management. And deep down, in that shiny liquid gut of yours... you know you aren't even good at that. You think you work for mantises? Your true overlords are actually beetles. Get that through your head.”

Impostor Syndrome.

Identity Crisis.

The absolute clarity that held the alien’s physical molecule structure together trembled.

A tiny ripple formed on its surface, followed by a hideous wave of self-doubt.

The conviction of Who I Am dissolved into What if I’m Nothing?

And who am I actually working for?

Without its crystal-clear self-concept to anchor its physical law, Clarity’s fluid body lost all cohesion.

It splashed onto the desert sand with a heavy, wet SPLAT, turning into a useless, unorganized puddle of murky water that quickly soaked into the dry earth.

The Monster Killer stood alone in the quiet desert, the wind billowing through his green coat.

He wiped a smear of purple blood from his cheek, picked up his dropped gun, and clicked the safety back on.

He pulled out his last cigarette, lit it with his cheap lighter, and took a long, slow drag.

“Damn stiffs,” he muttered to the quiet desert. “Should’ve stayed in college.”

And that’ll be the last time he sought strong opponents.

This one nearly had his life.

Well, at least his college midterm study sessions had helped out his actual career somewhat, more than he could say for other fields.

The Bass Guitar Head narrowly escaped the sudden rain. As soon as he got inside, he sat down on the couch without even removing his coat and began watching the rain.

He was angry after arguing with his friend, who had asked to tune him.

The conversation between them went like this:

''Just tune me. That's all. A few gentle touches should do. You won’t have to work too hard.''

''How many times have I told you not to sleep face down, Victor?''

Victor was annoyed with his friend for repeatedly pointing out such an obvious piece of advice, something he could have easily thought of himself.

"If you say that one more time, I'll slap you."

There was a moment of silence between them afterward. But Victor, thinking he would get even angrier if his friend repeated the same advice just to tease him, slapped him.

Being out of tune always affected his mood as well. Instead of regretting what he had done, he was even more irritated because the slap had loosened one of his strings even further.

"You need to learn how to tune yourself, Victor. I mean, this can't go on like this. I never know what you're going to do. One of your strings gets loose, and you get angry. You come knocking on my door at four in the morning because one of your strings was loose. I never know what kind of mood you're in. I don't even know how I'm supposed to act around you. One of your strings gets loose, and suddenly you're ridiculously happy, and I'm like, screw it, maybe I shouldn't fix it at all. ''

Victor took his hand out of the pocket of his overcoat, ready to slap his friend again. This time, he was going to use the other hand, the one he hadn't used for the first slap, and hit his friend on the right side of his face instead of the left. His tuning was clearly pretty far off; now he was feeling hurt, merciful, and angry all at once. On top of that, he was worried that this slap would throw him even further out of tune. Feeling all four emotions at once, Victor said:

“I've got some serious inspiration right now. I’m gonna go home and write a song right now. Just tune me for two minutes. I swear I won’t ask you again.”

His friend refused.

Then, there was a moment of silence again. Victor put his hand back into his pocket and took his other hand out.

The silence continued for a while. Since the weather was cold, the burning sensation on Victor's friend's cheek from the slap faded quickly. In fact, when he had received the first slap, the warmth had actually felt good against his cold face, but he hadn't let Victor know. Woody softened.

“Are all your strings out of tune?”

“I don't know, but I don't think so. Check and see. I wouldn't know.”

“What an ignorant bass guitar you are, Victor.”

''He can't even tune himself, but he can write music. What an idiot,'' Woody thought.

In the end, he tuned his friend incorrectly and sent him home. He figured Victor wouldn't notice anyway; he was an idiot, after all. He wondered what kind of song Victor would write with such strong inspiration and an improperly tuned bass.

Victor, meanwhile, was still angry when he got home. But anger was all that remained. His other emotions had faded away, and with them, so had his inspiration.

“I guess it's because I got tuned,” he thought.

"Sir, I just have to point out something, I feel obligated to do so in case my disposition causes a problem in the future. I cannot carry a gun, I cannot carry a shield, and I cannot carry a sabre sword. Sir, my boots are too heavy. I suffer from migraines, and in the middle of battle, the migraines might heighten. I have never been in battle, but I think my head will hurt more if I'm ever in one. I cannot even carry a bottle of water for long distances, and my thighs chafe when I march. Sir, I'm not built for this. Sir, are you listening?"

I was standing before the Sergeant, with the rest of humanity's army making a hard march behind me. The sun's glow was emerging on the horizon; it had been crimson-orange at first before finally shining golden. The Sergeant stared at the throng of men and women: brave, strong, and a proud sight indeed. They carried their guns in their hands while mine sat resting on my leg. The Sergeant looked over my head at the army making its way to New Avigon to fight the Commander of Avigon, who'd attacked Earth first, taken over an entire expanse of wilderness, and named it New Avigon.

"Sir?" Finally, the Sergeant turned his eyes to me.

"Who are you again?" he asked.

"I'm Meridale, Steven Meridale, but my friends call me Merry." I had no friends to speak of, but I loved to pretend that I did.

"Well, Merry, whatcha doing standing before me yapping your mouth? Join the line!"

"Sir, I'm not a soldier."

He squinted at me. "Then why are you dressed in our armor?"

"Sir, there's been a mistake. I'm supposed to be a clerk within the army. I'm good with writing, sir; I can write poems like nobody else can. I'm a poet, sir, not a soldier."

"Well then, the men and women of our proud army will hear your poems when the battle is done. Join the line, or I'll have you recite poetry as we pull the nails off your fingers while flogging you for cowardice."

I looked into his withered face, and I knew in my bones he wasn't bluffing. I swallowed thick saliva and carried my gun with great difficulty, hoisting it over my shoulder.

I was shaking from the tip of my head to the soles of my feet like a leaf in a hurricane. I felt suddenly quite thirsty. I marched among my fellow men, feeling as if I were the only one truly human. The rest had abandoned themselves to violence. Their hearts and souls were no longer human; vengeance gripped them to their core, and they gave total abandon to it.

As we marched, I found myself crying, and the guy beside me looked me up and down before muttering, "Pathetic," and quickly marching three paces ahead to be rid of my sight.

Another took his place; he eyed me skeptically before voicing his mind. "Are you weeping for them or for us?"

"Who?" I asked, wiping snot from my face.

"The Lizards: are your tears for them or for us?"

"I'm not supposed to be here." The ground was muddy; thrice I'd tripped. The air was too humid, and my hair was plastered to my head. There were snakes about; I'd seen two so far. And a fly appeared to be following me specifically, ignoring everyone else. I hated my life. Oh, how I longed to sit beneath the oak tree in what was once my backyard, to read Confucius or Kafka, to savor the feel of thin pages turning with each flip, to cradle my pen, and to write beauty into words. The gun wasn't suited to me; I preferred the pen to it. This life of war wasn't meant for me. Where had I gone wrong?

"I'm not meant to be here either," the man beside me said. "I'm a cobbler, but those damn lizards came to Earth and slaughtered my kin. The same happened with the thousands marching with us. That's why the world's united to end them. We march to our land, now stripped of its name and called New Avigon. We go there to reclaim our lands and to kill their Commander."

"I don't even know the guy," I said, wiping my tears. "I grew up an orphan; I don't even have kin to avenge."

"Aye, but you march with us either way, to fight for the kin of others. To fight for humanity."

"Fuck this! I don't want to do any of that." My gun slipped from my arms, and the man caught it deftly with one outstretched arm. He pressed it to my chest and I cradled it.

"Listen, young man, all you have to do is kill the Commander, and the war is won. The Avigon retreat when they are without a leader. That's how they are."

"How do you know this?"

"Weren't you there during the briefing?"

"No, I was writing poetry."

"For whose ears and eyes if all mankind perishes?"

He voiced the very question I was struggling to answer. His voice was so smooth as he laid out the evidence of my weak and vile nature. If all humanity perishes, what good would my poems be? Who would read them? Who would hear them?

Part of me knew I had to fight, but another part of me worried I wouldn't be able to do so, that I'd be a failure in more ways than words could describe. What good would I be if I were the first to fall? Who would care about me as I was trampled underfoot in humanity's charge? I was trapped. I was doomed.

But within me, something bloomed at the soldier's words: a certainty that bordered on psychotic that I would not die today or any other day by the hand of war. Although I had been an atheist all my life, I suddenly believed God would intervene; I found God this day as I marched to war. I decided to pray, and I did so loudly, asking for the forgiveness of my sins while unsure how to clasp my hands in prayer while holding the gun. I apologized for not fasting or praying before. I felt like a true coward before the Creator. I apologized for all those heated debates where I'd claimed He didn't exist. I was so freaking sorry, and my voice carried out high. Some turned to gawk at me; a man who'd found God in the face of death was a rare sight for some reason.

And then I rebuked the devil. I spent a good half-hour rebuking that bastard, blaming him for every injustice I'd borne witness to. I even blamed him for my role in the army, claiming I might have been destined to be a priest if it wasn't for him. Priests weren't allowed to be soldiers, seeing that they were holy and blameless of sin. I suddenly became quite certain that if it weren't for the devil, I'd be a priest right now, safe back at camp, praying for the soldiers going to war.

A lot of those I marched close to laughed, which irked me greatly. I was about to start praying for them to shake loose of their stupidity and join me in prayer when we crested a hill to find the front rank of the army gathered in a spread-out row ahead of us on top of the ridge. The sergeants were screaming for us to form neat rows. I was pushed, jostled, and carried unwillingly until I found myself standing in the front line, right within sight of the lizards.

They were big bastards, standing in columns and rows of their own on the opposing hill. Gathered in their thousands, they stood still, all of them facing us. Their Commander, I assumed, was one of the biggest of them all, standing a step further from their first row, holding a staff that seemed to glow an ominous blue.

I could hear drums sounding from among us. A Captain marched across the front row, ordering us into a neater line. The sergeants voiced the captain's words, and the lieutenants issued commands. In a short amount of time, we were as organized as the Lizards were. I tried to shift my position with the man behind me, but someone knuckled my head, and I decided where I was standing was okay enough.

Our Commander finally availed himself before us, marching across our front line. What he said was echoed by the Sergeants so that even those in the far back could hear his words.

"Today we show those bloody lizards what we're made of!" he shouted. I could hear him clearly, being in the first line. "Today, we avenge our fallen kin: our brothers, our sisters, strangers who would have wished us a good day, children whom we would have watched grow up, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, sons and daughters! Today we call upon them from the great beyond to witness what we are capable of in the name of their memory! For humanity, we rally! For humanity, we shall prevail!"

When he mentioned all those who'd perished, I was certain my fellow soldiers had images flashing in their minds of loved ones. All I had was the image of myself eating supper alone in the sitting room of my single-bedroom apartment. But it was an inspiring speech, inspiring enough to make me hold my gun right, barrel pointing forward.

The Commander praised us for our bravery this fine morning as the sun loomed above, having risen fully to witness either our triumph or crushing defeat. In the distance, I could see the Avigons' ships, the ones they'd used to descend on our planet and carry out their first attacks, the ships we longed for them to return to once their commander fell.

God! How will we fell the guy? It looked like he was made of brawn and metal. There was no hope; a tiny voice spoke within me that was entirely mine.

"Hope is what we shall be to future generations! By God, those who fall today should not see their deaths as the end, for those who will come after will march with them in their hearts!" our Commander said. There was another answering cheer from the ranks of us gathered.

I cheered as well because he'd mentioned God, raising my right arm. When it lowered, my finger rested on the trigger. I toyed with the barrel, aiming it at the Commander of the Avigons. I had my crosshairs marked on the bastard. I toyed with the idea of pulling the trigger. The Commander walked in front of us, still giving his final speech before the charge.

Many would die; he wasn't shy about this fact, but he made death look welcome, a fated lover who offered respite from the agonies of this cruel world.

It was beautifully worded, and quite long, I think, for the benefit of those of us who weren't looking forward to running at cold-blooded enemies. But it was beautiful nonetheless.

"For Mankind!" the Commander called, and we cheered our hurrahs.

"For our loved ones!" we cheered again.

"For our God!"

I pulled the trigger. The gun in my hands sputtered bullets, sending a torrent of metal heading straight for the Commander of the lizards. Everyone turned to face me. I could not let go of the trigger button for some reason; I was shaking with a sudden adrenaline spike. I could feel myself pee a little as the gun emptied itself of bullets. I screamed while shooting. The Commander rushed over to where I was and slapped me across the face.

Finally, I let the gun drop. It fell on my foot, and I hopped on one foot, running my hand over the boot and my bruised cheek as well.

"Are you fucking stupid?" the Commander asked me.

"Yes, sir." I was so afraid; it was the most I could find within myself to answer.

"What?"

"I mean, no, sir."

The Commander took out a pistol and pointed it at my temple. "You stupid bastard! You shoot when I say you shoot, you bloody damn scoundrel. Where did they get the likes of you from?"

It was a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. "From Florida, sir."

"You dumb piece of shit, I'll have you flog—"

"Commander!" a Sergeant intervened, coming close to the Commander and placing his hands on his shoulder. He turned the Commander around and pointed at the army of lizards. "Look, sir!"

The Commander looked, as did I. The Lizards had broken rank; all of them clustered around the big Lizard who was down on the ground, unmoving. His large, prone form lay immobile as one of the smaller Avigon attempted to raise him from the ground and, failing to do so, called to the other lizards. With my keen sight, I could see the Avigon Commander's battle armor was stained crimson and his strange staff lay beside him, not glowing anymore.

Together, we watched as the Avigon carried their fallen Commander, hoisting his broad form over their shoulders, turning, and moving toward their spaceships without the need to form ranks. I cannot recall for how long we watched them march all the way to their ships, all of them boarding before they took off. Their thrusters emitted smoke and blue flame as they rose off the ground and shot toward outer orbit.

Everyone then shifted their attention to me. Nobody spoke, and I found I lacked the words to say anything else besides, "Praise God."

----

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This week stealthy scouts signal suspicious shipping strategies to senior scientists!

A wholesome* story about a mostly sane demonologist and his growing crew, trying their best to usher in a post-scarcity utopia using imps. It's a great read if you like optimism, progress, character growth, hard magic, and advancements that have a real impact on the world. I spend a ton of time getting the details right, focusing on grounding the story so that the more fantastic bits shine. A new chapter every Thursday.

\Some conditions apply, viewer cynicism is advised.*

Map of Pine Bluff

Map of Hyruxia

Map of the Factory and grounds

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My velvety Patreon for five chapters ahead!

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First Chapter

Prev -------- Next

*****

“We’re all packed up, Eowin. Ready when you are,” Ros said as he walked up.

Eowin was crouched at the recon spyglass. After the first day, he’d dragged over his bedroll to make it a bit more comfortable. The little room made of woven pine boughs was all too familiar to the men at the end of their week-long vigil. By now they knew the city of Wave Gate as well as their own, other than actual names of things. From their perch it was a hundred versions of ‘long-wide street’ and ‘three-lantern tower’.

“Hold up, they’re doing something funny,” Eowin replied. “Look at all the people on the docks. And the ships are putting to sea. I thought it was a patrol, but there are twenty-five of them now. Let's wait another hour or two. Once the tide balances with the harbour, I bet they’ll send out some ships through the flow gate, and more will go. I reckon our whole damned job is to see if a big-ass fleet sets sail for somewhere.”

“True. Besides, the Chief said a week, not a specific time. What do you think it is?” Ros asked. “Maybe they’re making for Pine Bluff?” 

“The ones in the bay are at anchor, so that could mean anything at all. Maybe they got bored of crusading once some maniac killed a dozen of them that were snooping on some haunted mountain.”

“Not a dozen? I think I only got ten?”

“I know. I killed a dozen, because I’m a damned professional!” Eowin said with a chuckle. “Not that ten or twenty is even a rounding error with that many of them.”

“They still got that big camp? Did they load their fellas on those ships?”

Eowin sounded a bit confused. “No. Not that I could see. There are still heaps of white tents on the middle-grass-park and even more behind low-hill-with-poplars. Maybe they were packed to the gills for the crossing, let out some, and kept their good fighters aboard? I didn’t see them spend much time loading these ships. So maybe they have laden supply ships in the bay we didn’t see? I wish we were close enough to read the names of the ships. We could’ve tracked how many hours each one spent loading and unloading. That’d be useful back home I bet.”

“Yeah, totally. Maybe it’s some fancy lords that wanted to flee the war? Or some fancy lords they wanted to take back home to punish?”

“Maybe? That’s a single ship though. Maybe two if there are a lot of heretics to punish. But the stories are pretty clear that they have local ways to deal with heresy. There are twenty-five ships out, two in the locks, and some moving to the flow gate. That’s too many for mail or rotations. And you rotate after a year, not a week.”

“Oh, the first ones—the ones that burned us and we had to fight last time. They’ve been on this coast for a year. Could that be them going back for rest? I’m not sure the legion rotates across the seas. We should ask the Chief about that,” Ros suggested.

“Wouldn’t that be a treat? Send the professionals home and see how the ragged mob does. Nah, I bet it’s not. They wouldn’t make things that easy for us.”

Ros shrugged but didn’t argue. He set down their packs and stood outside the blind looking at the harbour as best he could with just his helm.

Maybe they’d just go home if they knew us better? Maybe they just don’t know we’re not the bad guys?

The docks were crowded and the harbour was full of ships. Eowin’s onto something.

Soon the flow gate opened, a simpler harbour entrance that could only operate when the water levels were close. The harbour was higher than the bay causing water to pour  out like a new river. The ships were towed into the current, some under their own power, most pulled by their pilot boats.

“Shit, Eowin, that’s a lot of them. Maybe the crusade was just to put down the Veldane Restoration?”

“Hmm. maybe. It looks like the ships at anchor are joining them.” They watched for a while longer as the fleet slowly lumbered into a rough formation. “Yep, heading out to sea, that doesn’t look like they’re coming for Pine Bluff after all. Glory to the Sun Lances. They still left a heap of their guys behind, but this has gotta be two-thirds of their fleet. I count eighty-two departing, including all the big ones.” He alternated between observing and tallying the ship classes into his observation notebook, pausing only to blink his sore eyes. 

Ros shouldered his heavy pack, momentarily throwing himself off balance. The recently acquired relic armour rattled as he steadied himself. “Good! Let’s go!”

“That’s funny though. I… Dammit. I see it.” He removed the eyepiece and lifted the heavy spyglass into its padded travel case. “Those ships are sitting high. They sailed in heavy and sailed out light. I don’t think they are retreating. They’re sending off the empties to get another load, I bet. Those troopships and supply ships especially are way higher. Dammit.”

“Hmm, do you think they got more stuff back there?” Ros asked as he helped Eowin with his pack. They started down the mountain towards the closest watchtower. 

“Aye, a whole damned continent of more stuff.”

*****

Stanisk’s dinner was interrupted by an imp in a vest that excited the Mage. Well, the imp wasn’t the one that interrupted him, but the glee of his employer signaled the end of his meal.

I’se mostly done eating, and Griggs seemed excited enough about it that refusing ain’t an option.

Other than being exhausted, he had no excuses to even try to keep eating. This was all his idea and the problem being solved was pressing. 

Stanisk walked with his boss, from the dining hall to the rooftop of the factory. “That was faster’n I expected. Are you sure it worked?”

“Oh yes!” Grigory grinned. “That’s established. The longer-tail problems will need to be tested over time but bench tests worked, and then the actual commissioning tests worked just this morning. Now we have the very first real message! Come, come!” The Mage waved the slip of paper the imp had just delivered to him.

The Chief of Security shrugged and followed him up to the roof. He hadn’t gotten a single good sleep in the seven nights since the fleet sailed past town. 

At least testing the new flag system’ll be low stress, the one thing that ought not blow up around here. Then I can get back to straightening out the damned boots shortage. Why the hell are there more trousers than boots? Maybe I’ll set some imps looking for boot gremlins.

Once they arrived on the roof it took Stanisk a bit to find the new signal hub. He sighed, it was a sprawl of tracking Lunar Mana Panels and their cabling. There were no flags to be seen anywhere, other than a few Whiteflame banners hanging on the gatehouse.

“That… uh… spiderweb, your new thing?” 

Grigory frowned, hurt by the description. “No. The timber lattice with magelights is the new thing. I’ve been calling it a Magelight Watchtower Communication System. Or Protocol? Anyway, the M.W.C.S. is simplicity itself! Em-walks? Muwiks? We’ll work out a better name later, I’m sure.”

The MWCS looked like a small timber watchtower, twice the height of a man but lightly built. Two long crossbars topped the lattice, each holding a row of five cylindrical magelight enclosures, spaced about an armspan apart. The whole contraption took up about as much space as a wagon, but there was nothing especially substantial about it. A normal man could probably lift the timber frame by himself. It faced the coastal headland and Tower One. The trees that used to obscure that line of sight were now freshly chopped stumps.

“So it projects flags then?” Stanisk asked, trying to move it along. “Pictures of flags?”

“Goodness no! Could you imagine? No, no, no. This is far simpler! See the ten little cans? Those are clusters of bright magelights, specifically a row of five red above a row of five blue. Giving me ten nodes!”

“Oh. Is that better? We had thirty flag codes. Easier to see, but that seems like less information.”

“Ten? Ah, I see your problem, no, we have ten lights, which gives us a thousand and twenty-four states! Since every combined arrangement is… Anyways, there are some reserved for numbers, command states, and checksums. The part you might care about is the fast vocabulary: eight hundred words, each corresponding to an activation state. At two flashes per second, giving us nearly conversational speed messaging all up and down the coast!”

“Seems like a shit ton to remember. And it’ll be way slower’n that if some private’s gotta look up words.”

Grigory passed Stanisk the slip he’d been holding. In the imps’ neat cursive:

001 | T7 | T0 | 003 | 13WORDS | MAGEGUARD | SCOUTED | 82 | ENEMY | SHIP | DEPART | WAVE | GATE | EMPTY | EXPECT | RETURN | JAGGED | COVE | CKSUM 31/18

Grigory looked offended yet again. “Why would any human be involved? This is far beyond that. Oh, what would you like to reply? That might be best.”

Stanisk wasn’t sure about the gibberish on the start and end, but the core was plain enough. 

They’se making more trips across the sea. Damnation. 

“Is there a signal for that kind of message?”

“No, but there is a series of signals for each of those words,” the Mage said. “There’re ten reserved characters to combine two blocks, which unlocks a ten-thousand-word secondary address space! For more specific codes and less common words! What do you want to reply? Let's send something back, other than the message acknowledgement. Now that it’s set up, sending messages is basically free and instant. Basically.”

“Hmmph. I agree.” Stanisk rubbed his chin. “Alright. Say that we’ll prepare accordingly, and they’se to come home at their convenience. It’s a damned hike out to Tower Seven.”

Grigory nodded and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He spoke to an imp in the base of the communication rig. 

“Message Imp, send the following message to Tower Seven: Preparations underway. Return to Pine Bluff at normal speed.”

The Imp was seated at a ten-button panel arranged in two rows, half red and half blue. Without the slightest hesitation the imp tapped away at the keys and yanked a lever. It repeated this sixteen more times and leaned back. 

Stanisk alternated between watching the imp tap at the panel and watching the array flash patterns towards Tower One on the headland. Once the imp finished, Tower One retransmitted the message east. 

He frowned as he tried to think this through. This seemed suspiciously useful.

Mage Thippily was pulling back a curtain revealing two more imps. “The first plan was just to have imps use their shared mind directly, but it was too unreliable. It would work, but it would also distort or interpret things as commands, or be answered by other aspects, so asking it about the weather ten times gave us ten slightly different answers. Not ideal for secure communications. Plus anyone could just ask a passing imp for the message, also not ideal. These ones are ordered to forget it as soon as they are done, and somehow that works.”

He pointed to their tiny embroidered vests. “They’re instructed quite simply to work as a team! See, they all say Factory Comms? These imps write the raw message so we can audit and track any errors!”

To be polite, Stanisk smiled weakly and tried to look impressed. There were ledgers of word gibberish and another with number gibberish.

“But that only matters if there’s an issue? For a normal… signal letter… what’s that? Ought I schedule someone to check it a few times a day? Station a fella here all the time?”

“Simple as pie! An imp is invoked and given the slip, then it runs to find the recipient. Oh, we were meant to address the message to a person. Otherwise it goes to the tower commander of the destination, but they’ll figure it out once the system is in regular use. I have a whole manual for you to read.”

“I’m not gonna—pah, I am gonna have to read that. This’ll be good for a lot of things. Could scouts do whole reports? Then towers send the whole story? Is there a length limit?”

“There is capacity. The store-and-forward nature of it means if it had to transit ten towers, and a very long message took ten minutes to encode, then the message would take nearly two hours to reach the end. While a six second message would make the same trip in about a minute. But I guess we can work on a version-two protocol to immediately forward without verifying, but that’s a lot more tricky. We might want to walk before we run. But no real limit, just shorter is better. Never mind, our checksums fail if the message exceeds a thousand and…. eighteen words.”

“Fuck. That’s good. It means I have a lot more work now.” He closed his eyes to think it through. “But it’ll be a hell of an advantage. So if somethin’ as strange as goats ridin’ squids happened—say they were demandin’ red wine and cedar combs—that exact demand could travel down as many towers as we’se got?”

“Yesssss,” Grigory said slowly. “Four of those words aren’t in the standard dictionary, so we’d need to use the extended library for each of them. Five regular words, plus two for each of ‘comb’, ‘cedar’, ‘wine’, ‘squid’, for eight, plus five more for header and checksum. Eighteen flashes, yes! They could transmit that exact message in nine seconds per tower! Slightly more if there was a specific number of squids, goats, or combs in the real message.”

“Truly?” Stanisk said, more impressed already.

“Indeed! I even argued that goat should be included in the core eight hundred words and it’s paying off already! Oh! They’ve replied!”

Stanisk turned to Tower One and watched the end of the message being flashed at them:

One red, four blue,
Four red, one blue,
All five blue, 
Four red, then 3 slightly different red, then it stopped.

Grigory passed him another ribbon:

001 | T7 | T0 | 005 | 11WORDS | UNDERSTOOD | WE | LOOK | FORWARD | TO | REAL | BED | SPENDING | THE | NIGHT | HERE | CKSUM 30/21

**“**Gulthoons grippy guts! That’s amazing. This is from our men, a hundred damned klicks up the coast?”

“Yes, it is rather a lot of fun. I think I may have erred in stripping out punctuation? It would consume an entire flash, but if I could include three flashes per message for integrity, adding back a few for clarity might have been fine. We’re still refining things. Plurals too, maybe?” He pointed them towards the doorway, “I’m also going to have a point-to-point one installed at the Academy. Those folk are motivated, but they send me too many letters, maybe this’ll save us all a lot of time.”

Stanisk gripped the two ribbons of words in his hands. He was grinning more than the Mage for once. He let his boss lead him into his quarters. 

“Fantastic work, Bossman. Lemme pour you a whiskey. Anything new on the shelf?”

“Haven’t ordered any whiskey all spring, not that the port has been open that long. Thank you, you brought me the most interesting problem I’ve had in a long time! So many compromises and trade-offs to manage. A real treat.”

“Not a hitch. I got it.” Stanisk checked a few bottles before selecting one, pouring two tumblers, and sitting opposite to the Mage.

“Are those… things, expensive? I see you got them built and deployed properly fast.”

“Hah, I can’t take too much credit, the whole town is pulling together. Once we had a tiny version, the big versions were heading out of town hours later. People are worried. Doing something helps soothe that.” He savoured the drink. “Not expensive, not really. A bit of silver in the lights for the reflector and a tiny mana cell. The system uses the same mana cells you consume every week for your enhancements, but it’ll last for ages in a Mowchies. Nah, not that name either.” 

“Hmm, I figured, so for the cost of a kitchen table, you reckon we could mount this on a ship? Maybe on their masts? Would it work vertically?”

“Oh yes! Even easier. I’d say use ropes instead of timbers, string them horizontally between masts. The seas are pleasingly free of trees and mountains so they’d have a fine line of sight. Oh, interception would be easier, but the nature of it is already hard to read without the code books.” He shook his head and frowned. “No, they’re called lines on a ship, not ropes. But otherwise I think that ought to work. Oh, other than aiming them accurately. Solvable I assume.”

“Yeah, we could have teams plant these things atop mountains, since we just care about number of hops, not distance? Oh. Could these be attached to a wagon? I guess a wagon with a damned mast?” Stanisk asked. “Line of sight is all what matters, so maybe an army could trail them behind, on hills. Fast letters back to HQ would be glorious! Imagine ordering three hundred and eighteen boots, seen by a quartermaster in a minute? Saints sweat, that would be perfect. We’d need to leave defended camps, mini-forts?”

Grigory smiled, “I hadn’t thought of any of those. But yes! I’ll leave you to it, the Faculty of Illumination at the Academy is where you’d order more units or modifications. But this is a fun one, since the grammar of the signals is also badly unoptimised. Whole ideas could be collapsed into a signal, if they come up more often, and that would improve throughput.”

“Heh, I suppose. Saving a second ain’t what worries me. Oh, could we have a line of ships, maybe tall ones, and send light messages across the sea? Imagine talking to Jagged Cove and getting a reply the same day! Aethlina will start a whole damned branch of Inky Hulls to sell that! Inky Lights? Ever feel like we’re bears in a pottery warehouse? It seems everything we do fucks over a whole buncha folk.”

“Well, that’s the very nature of change!” Grigory replied. “We’re solving problems. We owe nothing to the problem nor to the people that sold worse cures. Making things better, regardless of the disruption, is still making things better. We ought not preserve bad systems to preserve jobs; displaced people deserve better opportunities. Hah, if they are on the mainland, they can take a ticket and come here. Plenty of room, and we need folk working the new system too.”

“Hey, I ain’t suggesting we stop. I just didn’t reckon ‘new flags’ was gonna mean… this. Happy as hell, but unexpected. I didn’t mean for you to, uh, change all this. But this is huge. Mountaintop forts are essential now, even if there are just one or two poor saps stuck there with a team of imps. I assume attacking my new forts will be appealing once they know that they do, then I might get to organise the easiest damn defence in history! Hah.”

Professor Toe-Pounce hopped off his bed and sat beside Stanisk.

The one day I don’t wear armour, and I get a furry friend. Maybe it was my fault.

The Chief of Security snaked a single finger over to the cat. After a few glorious strokes of its nose, the cat got up and moved the barest bit out of his reach, with its back turned to him.

Still got you!

Grigory finished his whiskey, “I’m glad! It was a fun project. The version works well enough, so I’ll pass it off now. No shortage of pressing projects. Something about an army breathing down our neck really helps highlight things we need to fix!”

“Aye. Better arms, armour, tactics, and flags all help.”

“That reminds me, I have an idea for a whole new system! Something that’ll make us far more… defensible, in the long term. Come back in a week or two, and we might be ready to test the first fruits of Project: Steel Rain.”

*****
Prev -------- Next

*****

First / Previous / Royal Road / Patreon (Read 30 Chapters Ahead)

XXX

It took a few more hours for Chase and Melanie to finish replacing the bricks on the walkway leading up to the shrine itself. When it was finally over, the two of them were both sore and covered in a thick sheen of sweat, something which didn’t go unnoticed by Chase as they both marched back to the shrine.

“I didn’t think Liches could sweat,” Chase observed as the two of them walked side-by-side together.

“We generally can’t,” Melanie replied.

“Ah. That’s concerning. Or at least, it should be.”

She shrugged. “Honestly, at this point, I’ve just learned to stop questioning it. Of all the weird shit that’s happened to us, that doesn’t even crack the top ten.”

“Fair enough, I guess,” Chase said as they both opened the door to the shrine and stepped inside. Right away, they were both hit by a combination of different scents – their own body odor, for one, but also the stench of something burning, and a much more earthy smell that Chase couldn’t quite place.

His nose wrinkled at the smell of it. “What the hells is that?”

As if on cue, Carmine came stomping out from around the corner, absolutely covered in a thick layer of mud. Both Chase and Melanie eyed her with shock that quickly turned to mirth, but neither one got a chance to even open their mouths before Carmine glowered at them.

“Don’t. Say. Anything,” she hissed. “I am going to go take a shower now. That is all.”

And then she resumed stomping down the hall, leaving a trail of mud behind her as she went. Before Chase could fire a snappy comment her way, Victoria came chasing after her with a mop and bucket, grimacing as she cleaned up the muddy footprints Carmine left behind with every step.

“This is so demeaning…” Victoria muttered, even as she mopped up each and every drop of mud. “To think I used to be a high-ranking Paladin in my Order… gives new meaning to the idea of a Fallen Paladin…”

“You okay, Victoria?” Melanie asked.

“I’ll be better once I’m done with chores for the day,” Victoria said without looking up. “By the way, Heinrich is working on dinner, it should be ready in a bit.”

“Oh, is that what’s burning?” Chase questioned, earning a glare from Melanie. “Oh, come on, we were all thinking it.”

Melanie rolled her eyes, then turned back towards Carmine. “What’s for dinner? Did he say?”

“Shrimp fried rice.”

“I didn’t know a shrimp could fry rice,” Chase commented. Both women looked towards him, but he stood his ground. “That was a joke, I swear.”

“If you say so,” Melanie taunted.

Victoria suddenly sniffed the air, recoiling as she did so. “Gods above, but you both stink. Go shower off right away, please – I’d really rather not eat at the same table with you two smelling like B.O.”

“Hells, you’ll get no arguments from me about that,” Chase replied. He turned to walk back to his room, and as he did so, pointed to a part of the floor. “You missed a spot, by the way.”

“...Do you want me to knock you out or something?” Victoria questioned.

“Sorry, I meant to say I was just leaving,” Chase said without a moment of hesitation.

Before Victoria could say anything else, he hurried off, intent on washing up and changing out of his dirty clothes before dinner.

XXX

As it turned out, Kana had already provided them all with replacement clothes, in the form of a fresh set of undergarments and silk robes for them to wear while they waited to clean their usual outfits. Chase pulled on his robe – a utilitarian-looking black robe with white trim, and a few decorative cherry blossoms embroidered on its back – and secured it with the provided cloth belt he’d been given, then took a few tentative steps just to see how it felt. It was surprisingly comfortable, as were the included wooden sandals.

“Huh,” he mused. “Stylish and functional. Never would’ve thought…”

Shaking that thought from his head, he threw open the door to his room and then made his way out to the kitchen. Everyone save for Carmine was already gathered around the dinner table, upon which plates and what appeared to be utensils had been set. Chase couldn’t help but blink in surprise when he saw what they looked like.

“...What are those sticks for?” he asked.

“They’re chopsticks, idiot,” Melanie replied. Chase noticed she was seated next to Heinrich, the two of them in matching white robes. “You eat with them.”

“Uh-huh,” Chase said slowly. “Aren’t we eating rice? How are you supposed to stab the rice with those things?”

Melanie facepalmed. Before she could say anything, Kana spoke up.

“I’ll teach you all how to use them if you don’t know how,” she offered.

“Thanks, but I’ll just take a fork and knife, if that’s all the same to you,” Chase replied.

“Unfortunately, we don’t get many western guests. We don’t exactly have a clean set of utensils like that on-hand for you.”

“Kana made sure to explain this particular phenomena to me while we were cooking dinner together,” Heinrich offered. “For what it’s worth, this is apparently common among most westerners who visit here. I believe the term she used to describe it was ‘Being a baka gaijin,’ or something along those lines. Not sure what it means, of course, but I’m sure we’ll adjust to the local customs in due time, Chase.”

Chase didn’t miss how Father Toshi’s mouth quirked upwards as the unfamiliar term left Heinrich’s mouth. He could only heave a sigh as he sank down into his seat.

“Right…” he offered. “Can we eat yet?”

“Not until Carmine is here,” Victoria said. She was dressed in a robe similar to Chase’s, only colored yellow with white trim instead of black. She also had her hair tied back in a bun. “Father Toshi requested we eat as a team tonight.”

“Do we really have to?” Chase asked. “She probably doesn’t want to, you know-”

“Carmine assured me she would be here after she had a chance to wash up,” Father Toshi promised him. “She shouldn’t be much longer now.”

“...You sure, old man? Because she was pretty muddy, all things considered-”

The words had scarcely left Chase’s mouth when he heard a door open from down the hall, and the now-familiar clack of wooden sandals against the wooden floor. He turned towards the doorway expectantly, ready and willing to give Carmine a rash of shit for taking so long and purposely using all the hot water, only for his breath to catch in his throat at what he saw.

Carmine was standing there, and she looked very different from what he was used to. She was wearing a dark red robe, which accented her hair perfectly. Her green eyes seemed to almost sparkle in the sea of red she was wearing, and she had on just the faintest dusting of some kind of white powder across her face that called attention to her features in a way Chase hadn’t thought possible. Her robe was open slightly at her neckline, just enough to make it clear that she’d wrapped her chest in a layer of bandages rather than opt for a more traditional undergarment. As if that wasn’t enough, she had her dark red hair tied up in a bun and secured with a set of thin wooden sticks – it was a hairstyle that should have looked completely alien on her, and yet somehow, Chase couldn’t help but feel the touch of local culture simply helped bring out her more exotic features like the curved black horns on her head than anything.

Silence reigned across the entire room as Carmine strode over to where they were all seated and settled in next to Chase. As she did so, he noticed she was wearing the perfume he’d bought for her a few weeks ago, too; however, he scarcely had time to register that she had to have been carrying the bottle of it in her pocket for some reason when they’d been teleported here, because that was when Melanie suddenly cleared her throat.

“Uh, Carmine,” she got out. “What’s with the new look?”

Carmine shrugged. “I figured I’d give it a try. What do you think?”

“You look like the physical manifestation of a Far East succubus in the best way imaginable,” Victoria said, awe dripping from her voice.

“I’m afraid to say anything because Melanie will take it out on me if I do,” Heinrich offered.

“You look hot as all fuck and if I wasn’t already taken I’d be asking what you’re doing later, and I’m not even really into women,” Melanie deadpanned. Heinrich gave her a pointed look, and she winced. “Sorry, love – couldn’t help myself. You know I’d never actually take anyone over you.”

“I’m aware, but still, I hope you’ll make it up to me later anyway,” Heinrich told her. He looked over towards Chase. “What do you think, Chase?”

Chase swallowed the lump in his throat and did his best to calm his pounding heart as he stared into Carmine’s eyes. He didn’t miss the small, mischievous smirk that crossed her face, either.

“...This is legitimately the most attractive you’ve ever looked, Carmine,” Chase ventured. “Like, holy shit. Where did this come from?”

Again, Carmine shrugged. “Like I said, just something I felt like trying. Anyway, what’s for dinner?”

“Shrimp fried rice,” Kana offered. “Heinrich helped me make it.”

“It smells good.”

“Glad you think so,” Heinrich said. “Just, you know… eat around the gristle and burned parts, you’ll enjoy it more if you do.”

Kana stood up and took the bowl of rice, then began to dole it out to each person in turn. As she filled everyone’s individual bowl, Chase continued to stare at Carmine out of the corner of his vision. Eventually, she noticed him staring, and turned towards him.

“See something you like?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Chase’s heart skipped a beat, and he hurriedly turned towards Victoria before Carmine’s comments got more pointed than that, as he was unwilling to ruin their first team dinner in a while by getting in an argument with her.

“So, just a thought, but I was figuring we could all check out one of the town dojos tomorrow,” he said.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Victoria agreed. “If nothing else, fighting some of the locals will show us where we need to improve our raw skills. Hopefully it’ll expose some of our more glaring weaknesses so we can start trying to patch those up.”

Chase couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. Clearly, he and Melanie hadn’t been the only ones to get a talk courtesy of Father Toshi. Still, there would be time to ask about that later; for now, dinner was calling his name.

...Even if Carmine’s perfume and her new look were combining to distract him the entire time.

XXX

Name: Chase Ironheart

Level: 11

Race: Human

Class: Warrior

Subclass: Swordmaster

Strength: 20 (MAX)

Dexterity: 15

Intelligence: 13

Wisdom: 13

Constitution: 18

Charisma: 16

Skills: Master Swordsmanship (Level 10); Booby Trap Mastery (Level 8); Archery (Level 4); Unarmed Mastery (Level 1)

Spells: Rush (Level 7); Muscle (Level 4); Stone Flesh (Level 7); Defying The Odds (Level 2)

Traits: Blessed

Name: Carmine Nolastname

Level: 11

Race: Greater Demon

Class: Arcane Witch

Subclass: Archmage

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 13

Intelligence: 19

Wisdom: 19

Constitution: 12

Charisma: 8

Skills: Master Spellcasting (Level 10); Summon Familiar (Level 10)

Spells: Magic Dart (Level 7); Magic Scattershot (Level 5); Fire Magic (Level 5); Earth Magic (Level 1)

Traits: Blessed

Name: Melanie Vhaeries

Level: 11

Race: Ascended Human

Class: Necromancer

Subclass: Arch-Lich

Strength: 8

Dexterity: 13

Intelligence: 18

Wisdom: 16

Constitution: 15

Charisma: 12

Skills: Raise Lesser Undead (Level 10); Raise Greater Undead (Level 3); Unorthodox Weapon User (Level 8); Bone Shatter (Level 1)

Spells: Touch of Death (Level 5); Gravesinger (Level 7); Armor of Bone (Level 3)

Traits: None

Name: Victoria Firelight

Level: 12

Race: Human

Class: Paladin

Subclass: Devotee

Strength: 19

Dexterity: 9

Intelligence: 13

Wisdom: 13

Constitution: 19

Charisma: 11

Skills: Swordsmanship Mastery (Level 5); Blunt Weapon Mastery (Level 8); Archery Mastery (Level 5)

Spells: Holy Light (Level 6); Ward of the Gods (Level 5); Bane of the Undead (Level 7); Divine Bolt (Level 4)

Traits: None

Name: Heinrich Straten

Level: 17

Race: Human

Class: Paladin

Subclass: Oathbreaker

Strength: 20 (MAX)

Dexterity: 13

Intelligence: 12

Wisdom: 14

Constitution: 20 (MAX)

Charisma: 13

Skills: Swordsmanship Mastery (Level 8); Blunt Weapon Mastery (Level 10)

Spells: Withering Grace (Level 1); Soulrend (Level 1); Umbral Ward (Level 1); Mournful Benediction (Level 1)

Traits: Broken Oath

XXX

Special thanks to my good friend and co-writer, /u/Ickbard, for all the help with writing this story.

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“So near the end of the 2200s, they did something that I thought was pretty genius. They called it Star Trek in the Real 23rd Century.”

"Star Trek in the Real 23rd Century," the cat said, walking beside me and staring off into the distance in wonder.

"Yeah, it was a whole thing where they looked at the actual technology level we had by the 23rd century. Humanity had been expanding into the stars for a while at that point, but it was a bunch of corporations running things. We hadn't exactly progressed to the moneyless society they imagined, but they were always kind of hand-wavy when it got down to explaining how they got there."

"I thought that was pretty straightforward," Sir Hiss said. "They had a massive world war that resulted in a nuclear conflagration."

"Well, yeah, I suppose there was that," I said. “And they had a few nuclear exchanges. Mostly they were limited and localized to conflicts where there were a couple of nations fighting each other. The whole mutually assured destruction thing was something the whole world was trying to avoid, though."

"I see," Sir Hiss said. "We had something similar on our world where there were several nations that had nuclear weapons. There'd even been a few limited exchanges, but after seeing the fictional example that was all over your entertainment cooler heads finally prevailed and we started to come together."

"Yeah, I wish watching a bunch of Star Trek reruns was enough to get cooler heads to prevail on Earth," I said. “Though, oddly enough, a couple of limited nuclear exchanges threw enough dust and particles up into the atmosphere that it gave humanity the breathing room that we needed with the whole climate change thing to figure out a way to scrub carbon from the atmosphere."

"I see," the cat said.

"Silver linings and all that," I said with a shrug.

We were making our way over to the quarantine field. I could see Arnel standing there staring at us. He had his hands on his hips, and a wisp of hair was floating this way and that ignoring the whims of the artificial gravity.

I wondered if he even knew or cared that he had little wisps of hair that were taking on a mind of their own and going on a merry chase all around his head. He probably didn't care. He seemed to only have eyes for me and the cat walking beside me.

"I see you've made a new friend," Varis said, smiling at me through the shimmer from the shield.

"Yeah, I suppose so," I said, looking down at the cat.

I had to resist the urge to reach down and pat him on the head. Something told me the feline warrior wouldn't appreciate that sort of thing. It was very tempting to reach down and give him head scratches and tell him he was a good kitty.

The knife he'd been carrying had been plucked up by Arvie in his drone form, and he was currently analyzing it to try and see if we could learn anything about this cat species by looking at how they put together their weapons.

I wasn't sure it would do him much good. There was only so much you could determine from looking at a hunk of metal, but it was also an opportunity to pretend we were all seeking out new life and new civilizations. So I didn't begrudge the Combat Intelligence the opportunity to do that any more than I begrudged him the opportunity to write a few dissertations that allowed him to give the middle finger to a bunch of nerds on the galactic net talking about how something should’ve been impossible in Star Trek's narrative.

"He's actually a big fan of Star Trek. Would you believe it?" I asked.

The mood through the link went from amusement to something that seemed almost queasy in an instant. Varis looked at me, and then she looked down at the cat at my side.

"This is your idea of a joke, right?" she asked. "One of those jokes you tell and you get a little smile on your face because it's amusing you, but nobody around you gets why it's even supposed to be funny in the first place?”

"No, it's true," Sera said. "Sir Hiss is very into Star Trek. It turns out his whole society is really into Star Trek."

That queasy feeling was really starting to come through the link with a vengeance. Varis was looking between me, the kid, and the cat in front of her. Then she looked up to Arvie and his probe.

"They're not joking, are they?" she asked.

"I would say that I'm afraid not," Arvie said. “But I am so excited about the implications of an entire civilization that has been influenced by the pop culture of another civilization being broadcast out into the cosmos that I can't hide my enthusiasm."

"Just wonderful," Varis said, throwing her hands up in obvious frustration. “Now there are three of you.”

"Maybe four of us," Sera said, grinning as she piped up. "I think I'd really like to watch this show too."

"Really?" Arvie said, his probe bobbing in excitement. "If that is something you're interested in, there are lots of different shows I can use to introduce you. There is the original, of course, and then…”

Varis held a hand up as she hit each of us with a severe look. A more severe look than I think I'd gotten from her since...

Well, I was racking my brain trying to think of the last time I got a severe look from her like that, and all I could think of was that first time we met on the Alamaraine over some insignificant colony world which was rapidly growing in significance because it was the place where I met her. Now here we were, shaking up an empire.

The point was, it’d been a while since I'd seen a look like that from her. She looked like she was about to toss some rocks in her mouth and chew them up and spit them out as diamonds.

"Are you okay, babe?" I asked, cocking my head to the side and glancing over to Arvie.

I was glad he was here with a combat drone and we were on the other side of a powerful quarantine shield. At the same time, I was also suddenly painfully aware that Varis was the one who commanded all the people here. If she decided she was so frustrated with me that she wanted to end it all for yours truly, then there wasn't much that I could do.

I didn't think she was going to do that, but we were talking about a girlfriend who was frustrated with her boyfriend watching too much Star Trek. Only she controlled her own personal military.

The point was, there was a non-zero chance all those things could lead to murder, and she had the capability and the means and the temperament to pull it off.

"You know, I could tell Arnel here to simply remove all the oxygen from inside the quarantine shield, and that would be that, right?" she said.

She turned and hit me with a severe stare. We’re talking severe enough I worried all those things I'd just been worrying about were going to come to pass. But of course the battle link was betraying her, the same as always. She could look as severe and annoyed as she wanted, but that didn't change the fact that there was a small trickle of amusement coming through the battle link that told me the whole thing was an act.

Sort of. Mostly.

Maybe.

I didn’t think I was going to die today because of her irritation with Star Trek, at least.

"You know there's no point in you trying to scare me like that when I have the battle link telling me you aren't as annoyed as you're pretending to be, right?" I said.

No sooner had I said it than I felt a blank in my mind where the battle link usually was. The link was still there. I could still tell somebody exactly where Varis was just by pointing in a direction.

Of course there were some drawbacks to that. I could point in a direction, but that wasn't going to be very helpful on a carrier where there were bulkheads and a bunch of other big, heavy metal stuff between me and where I was pointing. And back when the link had originally formed, of course, there was also the issue of only knowing a vague direction where she was in the galaxy. That direction encompassed several arc minutes of space, which was so incredibly vast and huge that she could’ve been in an almost infinite number of locations in that little part of the galaxy I was pointing to.

Still, I’d be able to figure out where she was and get closer to her. Like seeing a map marker on one of the numerous remakes of Skyrim that had come out over the last thousand years and trying to get there by jumping over a mountain rather than taking a path around it.

"You know I know there's something you're trying to hide from me whenever you blank out the link like that."

"She does that?” Arvie asked, and suddenly he sounded curious for a totally different reason.

"Oh yeah," I said. “She does it whenever she's feeling something she doesn't want me to know about. Which is as good as announcing she's feeling something she doesn't want me to know about."

"Fascinating," Arvie said.

"Anyway," I said, turning back to her. “Could we go ahead and get the quarantine shield lifted so we can get to work? I’d like to have a more in-depth chat with Sir Hiss in more comfortable surroundings, and I figure the science people are going to want to have a look at the escape pod Sera managed to capture with Harath’s help."

Sera stood a little taller at that. I wouldn't say she was grinning, not exactly, but she was coming pretty damn close to it.

"Of course," Varis said. "We'll lower the shield, and then I need to bring you back to our quarters for a bit of questioning as well."

She was hitting me with that severe look again. There were uncomfortable looks from the science team around us. No doubt they thought I was going to get chewed out. That was okay. I'd been chewed out before.

But the link was telling a different story. It’d popped back into existence, and I could tell she was thinking the kind of thoughts that only happened when I'd just done something that was that special combination of monumentally stupid but also recklessly adventurous that got her going.

One of these days that was going to get me killed, but that day wasn't today. Besides. Was I a man if I wasn't doing something recklessly stupid in service of trying to impress my love?

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“I’m sure it does,” she said, and the link told me exactly what she meant.

I looked at the shield. It didn't drop.

"Is there a problem with the shield generator or something?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," Arnel said.

"Then why aren't you lowering the shield?" Varis asked.

"Because there are protocols we need to follow in a situation like this," Arnel said, hitting her with a severe look.

I didn't have a battle link with Arnel, thank whatever pantheon might be listening in on my thoughts at that moment in this corner of the galaxy, but I got the feeling his severe look wasn't being covered by an undercurrent of amusement or lust like Varis's severe looks to me usually were.

"I ordered you to drop it," Varis said, starting to sound a touch testy.

"I don't care if you ordered me to put myself into an airlock and toss myself out. Which might be as certain a death as lowering that quarantine shield before we know it’s safe.”

"Are you serious?" Varis asked.

"Protocol is protocol," he said. “And I might be saving the lives of everyone on this ship by making sure we do all the appropriate scans and checks for any microbiological contaminants or weaponization."

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Hoisted by my own petard. I gave them the idea for biological warfare, and now he was turning it on me.

"And how long is that going to take?" Varis asked, putting her hands on her hips. This time the irritation on her face and the irritation coming through the battle link were one and the same.

He looked down at his tablet and back up to her. He didn't so much as flinch as he delivered the bad news.

"I'd say maybe eight to ten hours if we get everything done quickly," he said.

"Eight to ten hours? Quickly? What are we supposed to do while we wait?"

"Eight to ten hours at the earliest," he said, holding a hand up.

She threw her hands up.

"I believe I have an idea," Arvie said.

And suddenly I heard the strains of a familiar fanfare as Anson Mount's voice filled the room.

"Strange New Worlds?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

"I figure starting her with the original Strange New Worlds is best. Not any of the subsequent series they did or the movie franchise."

"Good choice," I said. "That first episode is a banger, and it deals with the stuff we're dealing with now."

“Indeed,” Arvie said. “I thought it was appropriate considering.”

"Seriously?" Varis asked. "We have to wait for quarantine, and you're going to watch this Star Trek show in the meantime?"

"Why, General," Arvie said, "I can't think of a more valuable use of our time if we have that much of a delay."

Oh yeah. The mix of emotion coming through the battle link was off the charts now. To the point I was surprised those quarantine shields were able to repel annoyance of that magnitude.

Quick author note. I'm going to be on vacation next week for fall break. In the past I've killed myself trying to get stuff out and ended up failing while also stressing myself out on vacation, so I'm just not doing that this year. There will be no updates next week, and they'll resume the week after. Thanks for your patience!

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Chapter 222: Invoking a God

The titan had spotted Viktor.

That was much faster than he expected, considering that he had been carefully maneuvering himself along a wide, looping arc so that he could come at it from behind. Then again, the thing was a living construct created from the borrowed power of a god, so it was hardly a surprise it had other ways to perceive the world instead of relying entirely on a pair of eyes set into a skull.

As it turned around, its two burning orbs, twin furnaces sunk deep into a face that was unpleasantly reminiscent of its equally ugly human counterpart’s, fixed themselves upon him. Then, the hand moved.

It came as a swipe, five fingers spreading wide as they cut across the sky, and the air seemed to scream in protest, crushed into a wall of pressure that raced forward to announce the blow.

Viktor yanked his gaze downward, and his body obeyed the pull of his eyes without hesitation, diving hard and fast toward the churning sea below. The enormous palm reached the empty patch of air where he had been, its fingers closing shut behind him with a thunderclap.

It might have looked, to anyone watching from a distance, like he had effortlessly outmaneuvered his opponent with room to spare. But the truth of the matter was that it had been a very close call. After all, the danger did not come only from the risk of being struck outright by the massive fist, but also from the overwhelming heat that radiated from that burning limb. He could hear it now, in fact, the faint sizzle rising from the tentacle strapped across his back, accompanied by the unmistakable smell of cooking meat. A reminder of just how narrow that earlier escape had actually been.

As he flew on, skimming over the water’s surface, he saw the titan lower its massive body, its fist rising high above its head in obvious preparation for a punch straight down into the sea. Well, at the very least, every second it spent trying to swat him was a second it wasn’t vomiting out more fire golems to make life difficult for Sebekton and the others at the cathedral.

He tilted his gaze upward, giving his own body a new destination to chase, dodging the blow that came crashing down from above in the process. The fist slammed into the water with a boom that rolled outward like thunder, sending a wall of boiled water and steam roaring skyward that nearly caught him regardless.

Ignoring it, he climbed through the hot air, his eyes locked on the one part of the titan he wanted to reach—the gaping cavern of its open mouth.

At the end of the day, no matter how many clever tricks he tried to pull, getting close to the bastard’s oversized body was something he eventually, unavoidably, had to do. Thus, he activated his Thauma, “Fire Shield,” to protect both himself and his cargo from the fire and heat.

The shield would not last forever, of course. It could only absorb a certain amount of punishment before giving out. And give out it did, right as he passed the sheer, looming wall of the titan’s chest, an expanse of smoldering rock veined with glowing rivers of liquid fire.

So he conjured another. Then another. Then another. Each shield bought him a few seconds and no more, gone almost as soon as it arrived, replaced by a new one the instant it collapsed. He kept casting as he flew, every scrap of resource he had left going into keeping the shield alive.

Finally, he made it through. Into the great maw he went. And, the moment he crossed the threshold, he saw Galatea. Her projected form had arrived ahead of him, staying invisible until he entered as well. The roaring conflagration raged all around her, a furnace that could reduce any creature to ash in the blink of an eye. Yet there she stood, utterly unaffected. Nice to be a ghost, wasn’t it?

She didn’t waste time waiting for his order. Immediately, she spoke the word, a heartbeat before the last shield died.

“Rhyl’eth.”

And, his mind went blank.

The light, the heat, the roar—gone. All of it, in the span of a single heartbeat. And what remained was an enormous, echoing blank.

Then images came. Unbidden and unstoppable, they flooded into his skull.

He saw a trench, a wound gouged deep into the seabed, a chasm of such impossible, plunging depth that light had long since given up trying to reach its bottom. And down there, something moved.

He saw an eye, but not really an eye. A spiral of a color his mind kept trying and failing to recognize. It spun and spun, never stopping its motion.

He saw an endless sea, and above it, not sky but a forest hanging upside down, just as vast and unbroken as the ocean it mirrored.

He saw a golden throne, with someone sitting on it. Behind that figure, a sun was burning black.

He saw a gate made from gemstones of every conceivable color. Standing at its threshold, waiting, was a woman whose face had been replaced by a smear of countless stars.

He saw a flicker of shadow, formless and restless, weaving through the forest. It wore a mask that changed with every heartbeat, now a grinning skull, now a sorrowful woman, now a child with hollow eyes.

He saw the silhouette of a giant, its legs rooted deep into molten stone as though it had grown there, its head pressed up against a sky that wept.

He saw a vast forest of black coral, and wound through its branches a serpent so long he couldn’t find where its head was or where, if anywhere, its tail lay.

He saw a city built from the bones of creatures he had never known existed. And, at the heart of that boneyard sprawl, there was an hourglass that turned and turned and turned.

The images piled on top of each other like corpses stacked into a mass grave. The hourglass. The serpent. The giant. The dancing shadow. The star-faced woman. The black sun. Again and again. Over and over. Until the boundaries between them blurred into a single, endless nightmare of impossible geometries.

He felt his thoughts splintering, scattering like shards of glass across a floor that did not exist. He reached for something, anything, to anchor himself, but there was nothing to reach for. Only the images. Only the weight of things that had no names.

And then, came a voice.

“Master.”

It was faint at first. Barely a whisper struggling to make itself heard against what he could only describe as the universe itself throwing a tantrum. But it was human. And it was familiar. It sliced through the madness like a blade of light.

“Master.”

He tried to answer, but no word went out.

“Please. Wake up.”

He pushed, throwing what little of himself he could still gather against the crushing weight of the visions pressing down on him. He clawed his way back through the endless spiral of images, through the hourglass and the serpent and the giant and the shadows and the woman and the black sun. Each and every one of them seemed to reach for him as he passed, to keep him in that endless dark, but the voice was a rope looped tight around his wrist, and he held it the way a drowning man clung to anything he could find.

His eyes opened.

The first thing he saw was the sky, vast and indifferent. And the second was a grinning skull, suspended in a jar. Oh, that was Galatea. Her real face. She was holding him now. He could feel the shape of her gauntlets under his back and knees, the cold metal that pressed against his shoulder.

Then the pain hit.

It crashed over him all at once, a wave with no warning and no mercy. He gasped as his body suddenly remembered it had just been dragged through something utterly catastrophic. Everything hurt, his ribs and his spine and his arms and his legs. His skin felt like it had been flayed and then set on fire, and when he tried to lift his head, his neck screamed in protest.

He looked down at himself.

Most of his clothes were gone. What little remained clung to him in charred, blackened scraps across his torso and thighs. His left arm ended abruptly at the elbow, the rest of it reduced to nothing but a raw, glistening stump of pink, newly formed flesh. His right foot was missing outright. Deep gouges had been carved across his chest, so deep that in one of them he could see the pale gleam of his own exposed bone. Still, he could also see that the ruin of his own body was knitting itself together, albeit with agonizing slowness.

He had taken lethal damage, then. And his Supreme Thauma, “Rekindled Ember,” had been activated to do what it was meant to do.

The plan had been simple enough: Celeste would teleport him away the instant Galatea spoke the true name of the Great One. Clearly, she had done exactly that, since he was no longer inside that burning, gaping maw. Yet, even so, a sliver of a second had been more than enough to ravage his body this much. Without the Supreme Thauma, he wouldn’t have woken up at all.

“Galatea,” he croaked. “What—”

“Don’t speak, Master. You should—”

He ignored her. “—to the titan?”

And so, the towering suit of armor turned, angling itself just enough for him to see.

The titan was still there, standing at a distance across the water. But... it was breaking apart? Something... something was tearing its way out from the inside.

Tentacles.

Colossal things, writhing and bursting clean through the titan’s chest and back, through the arms and legs, through the head itself. Black as the bottom of the ocean, every one of them, and moving with a grace that belied their immense size. They wrapped around the titan’s limbs, they coiled around its neck, they plunged into its gaping mouth and emerged from its eye sockets.

The titan fought back. Hard. Its massive hands, each one large enough to crush a fortress with a single closing fist, seized the tentacles and tore them free, spraying thick gouts of black ichor across the boiling sea.

But for every single tentacle the titan managed to destroy, several more erupted to take its place. They pushed through its rocky skin like seedlings through soil, relentless and unstoppable. They did not seem to care about the heat. In fact, they were drinking the fire, siphoning the titan’s own divine flame through their suckers, drawing it out of the construct and into themselves.

The titan’s glow began to dim. Its once-blazing eyes flickered, sputtered, then went dark. The rivers of molten fire that had coursed through its body began to cool, hardening into black stone. Its movements grew sluggish, its struggles weaker.

The tentacles tightened their grip, and the whole construct came undone. Its left arm separated from its shoulder, crashing down onto the sand below. Its legs buckled, the joints crumbling under the weight of the tentacles that had replaced whatever passed for its sinews. Its torso split down the middle, and its head toppled forward, rolling down its own collapsing chest. The rest of the body followed, piece by piece, each chunk falling with a thunderous crash that sent waves rolling across the sea.

Within minutes, nothing remained of the titan but a field of cooling stone, scattered across the shore and the shallows. The tentacles that had destroyed it were gone too, having dissolved into the water as if they had never existed, leaving behind only an oily sheen on the surface.

And the water realm was calm again.

Bob was not worried at all about the Arressi’s threats, he wouldn’t have to watch his back, wouldn’t sleep with one eye open, he was leaving and right now there wasn’t a fucking thing anyone could do to stop him.

The job was simple, just as described, take a ‘package’, really just a few dozen data chips, and return them to any survivors that remained. The Klottzak galaxy, or Messier 33 back on Earth, was pretty close as galaxies went, though that wasn’t saying much.

2.3 million light years.

There wasn’t a ship ever conceived that could make it there, but Bob didn’t have to, there were several other stops on the way. The Mettic hadn’t given much of an answer when asked why they had kept going till they hit the Milky Way, but what the fuck did it matter to Bob, package needed delivered and he was going to do it.

Even if there was no life on the way he could make it, the C’Eede engine would burn pretty much anything, he could dive a gas giant and fill up with whatever, not as energy dense as the normal goo, but it would work, just take a while.

The ‘while’ was the real issue, even the most optimistic routing had it take at least eight hundred years to get there, the only reason it was possible at all was the goddamn C’Eede and their refusal to make more of one type of thing unless they absolutely had to, therefore the FTL drive used aboard both superheavy battleships and Jojo was absurdly, ridiculously over the top for her tonnage, he was therefore able to maintain minimum FTL at the absolute extreme end of its efficiency curve, just sipping at the fuel as they crawled through space.

If you maxed the engines you could get there in, oh, twentyish years?, but it would require a solar system of fuel.

To be completely clear, not ‘all the fuel in a solar system’, no, a solar system of fuel… as in a sphere the size of a solar system comprised entirely of fuel… yeah that wasn’t happening, ever.

Bob was going to brim his tanks, including the extra two he had decided to pick up, and eke his way through the void between stars ever so fucking slowly. It was almost certainly a death sentence in one way or the other, old age, illness, injury, running out of fuel, food, water, whatever, there was virtually no chance that anyone who took the gig would ever return, but not no chance they could do the damn thing.

Bob was oddly confidant he could make it.

He understood one thing about those refugees, one thing, and that was all he needed. When they had issued the commission they had known they would die here, they would fade away and be forgotten and they hadn’t wanted that. They wanted to tell the family and friends they had left behind, should they still live, that they had made it… against the odds… against the cruelty of the universe, they wanted one pyrrhic flame to burn in their legacy, and Bob wanted to carry it.

Perhaps it was because he had so few of his own, but Bob wanted to scream their memories across the void. Even if there were none to hear it.

That was an issue, but only if he made it, until then just go, try… hope. He needed a bit of that.

Bob was nervously melancholy three days later when the bot trundled into his bay, carrying a small case festooned in dust, he opened it and saw the neat rows of archaic data chips, this was it then.

He brought it aboard and instructed Bot Reynolds to stash it at the far rear of the lower deck, wasn’t like he was going to need access in a hurry. As the little robot trundled away he squeezed his way through to the bridge, between the spares, supplies, tools and all the other gear there was barely any room to breathe aboard, in fact his bed was currently filled with four fucking engines so until he picked up a couple more fighters on his way out the galaxy he was sleeping in the pilots chair.

He began flicking his way through the startup and slowly eased her off the ground on grav, he hesitated a moment but sent out a broadcast from his reinstalled comm box.

‘’Guild Control, this is the Jojo heading off planet, bay free’’

‘’Negative’’

Bob heard Flitters reply and smiled softly.

‘’Bay remains assigned to Courier Master Bob, fly safe and return quickly, we’ll be here’’

Bob knew it was a waste, but liked it all the same. He wondered what would be here if he ever managed to return, maybe the Guild itself it had lasted for millennia already after all, maybe Flitters too… who knew how old she was or how long she could live, everyone else would be long gone.

‘’Acknowledged, take care Flits’’

He began to rise in earnest as Jojo made for space, he could see ship after ship hang in the atmosphere as he passed, an honour guard of sorts he supposed. Then suddenly another one drew abreast and matched his speed, it was the Timely.

The box squawked again.

‘’I expect a message every fucking week, I don’t give a fuck if it takes a thousand fucking years to get here, send it anyway.’’

Bob grinned widely. There was no way any would ever arrive back here, distance alone would degrade the signal too much, never mind the power dissipation, still…

‘’You got it G.’’

‘’Then get a move on, I got shit to deliver.’’

Still he stayed with him as they broke atmo and sped out to jump distance.

‘’Love you Bob, stay safe.’’

‘’Love you too G, you too’’

Their headings split and Bob aimed out the elliptic, he wanted any Arressi watchers to think he was heading out immediately, he actually had a couple stops left to make. He hit the jump.

A few hours later he dropped out and re-aimed, first he was going to Demmotica, the other grave system he had ignored in favour of Collp, what a fucking mistake that had been in hindsight, whatever. He assumed word of his arrival there would eventually reach Arressi ears but eventually was fine, as long as he was a step or two ahead before he really left there would be fuck all they could do about it.

He was super fucking pissed when he arrived in the bustling system and it took all of five fucking minutes for him to gain authorisation to take a couple of the neatly parked fighters, a tug even fucking brought them to him, fucking fuck, why the fuck didn’t he just do this the first fucking time.

He spent a couple minutes exo to clip them in place, helped again by the tug gently maneuvering them, fuck. Once the tug left he bolted them firm and headed back out system, once again he headed out elliptic, not that he assumed anyone would fall for it again he just didn’t want to head directly to his destination.

A few jumps later he was exo again. This time he was dragging out the four spare engines he had brought from his pile and fitting them to his new acquisitions then cutting free and fixing them in place with the two engine grates and a few bolts he had got from the scrap merchant on Secca. Bob didn’t know if he would ever need them but it seemed foolish to have the slots, the things that filled the slots, and not putting one in t’ther.

He then spent a little time reorganising and freeing up enough space in the hold to fit, oh, a sensor pod or something. Once ready he pulled the medmec rod from his chest and peeled off the thin slip of paper wrapped round it, he punched in the co-ords and headed off.

The sensor pod was still there and he scooped it up strapping it down in the hold, he had no external fitting left for it any more but it would work fine if he wired it in exactly where it was, the ships hull hadn’t been much of a barrier when he had been testing it previously so he saw no reason it wouldn’t work now, a little reduced fidelity perhaps but far better than his old one, which was struggling from its new internal position. He got it hooked up, that took another day or so of fiddling to get everything working harmoniously.

Okay, Bob sat back in the pilots chair after a few hours in his newly liberated bed, let’s chance it.

Episode 1: Pilot (Hidden Grievance)

PROLOGUE (1 min) - The Amrith Hallucination

Nile takes a dose of the Amrith. Amrith dream occurs. In it, Nile believes powerful heroes around the world aren't solving its problems. He feels inadequate merely serving them. He gears up with his own Vigilante Suit.

SCENE 1 (5 min) - Heckling the Hecklers

Nile sees a group of white Brownshire men heckle an Indian corner shop, shouting slurs. He then follows them, beats them up, threatening them that the next time this happens, there will be consequences.

SCENE 2 (2 min) - Home Routine

Nile returns home. Scrolls through some reels, views Betty's profile. Sleeps wakes up next morning, brushes teeth, closes pending Product Design work, walks to University Education Building. Sees interracial IMWF couple, smiles.

SCENE 3 (5 min) - Product Design Lecture

He attends it while sketching the concept of the wings or some Glider mechanism. Then, he gets called by his friends for a cafe talk. He talks for a short period, gets zoned out, comes back home exhausted and feeling unaccomplished.

SCENE 4 (5 min) - Boarding the Titanium Whale

While Bag packing for the field trip in Warsia, he wonders whether to grab his suit. He does, disassembling the rifle staff as three distinct metal pieces. He looks for his friends, says Hi to Betty and compliments her looks in a red dress that day. A guy beside named Tyler, notes this. They then find their cabin, Nile, Tyler and 2 other guys share a cabin.

SCENE 5 (3 min) - The Quarrel

Nile wakes up early in the morning, sits in a table near his seat, to sketch more designs. He and Tyler break into an argument that he should rather go to the hall and do it. Nile pretends to be cool about this. Tyler grabs the sketchbook and throws it a floor down. Nile brings it back, says Tyler could be calmer and that the next time, Tyler will have to bring it back himself.

SCENE 6 (5 min) - Half-hearted Tour

While boarding the bus, Nile gets notified by the prof that he received a complaint against Nile from a student named Tyler. Nile cannot concentrate while talking to his friends. He reluctantly still talks to Betty, but stares out the window longest, looking at Warsian winter trees, church in the distance: he feels out of place when asked about an aviation design but comes back and looks at it in more detail while the rest of the crowd moved on.

SCENE 7 (6 min) - Obsession

That evening, they return. Tyler and 10-12 girls split from the main group and head towards a restaurant. Nile's attention is on them. He watches them from a window of another restaurant. He hears voices inside his head 'Show him his place...' He completes the drink obsessively. But soon, he also hears police chasing a guy that just ran by after shooting another police officer. Nile quickly goes to his dorm, assembles his rifle staff, puts on the suit when no one's there, and escapes out the window. He tracks the escaping man from a rooftop, shoots him in the leg, chases and tackles him, throws him through a glass panel and then leaves the scene.

SCENE 8 (6 min) - Tit-for-tat

The next morning, he's having breakfast, Alicia, one of the 12 girls comes to Nile, has breakfast with him, says how much she hates Tyler now and on Nile's insisting, she reveals what Tyler said behind his back with the 12 girls: that he was a creep, ogling at Betty, needs to learn the language and civil ways properly. Nile says he appreciates Alicia's decision. They then talk about breakfast options, ready to board the ship back again.

Nile goes to Tyler in front of 1 other person, Betty, and threatens him that if he schemes this way against him again, he will break his jaw. Nile leaves avoidantly after seeing Betty get slightly distant.

SCENE 9 (4 min) - A mother's Superpower

Nile calls his mom back in Dexton, Brownshire. His mom spots there's something wrong with him. Eventually, he opens up and narrates it all. His mom then says he should have just avoided, and shouldn't have threatened Tyler. She quotes Gandhi believes non-violence and Ahimsa which led to independence of India. Nile replies whether Gandhi was ever the real and only reason India got its independence. His mom also spots a bruise at his face's left. He says it wasn't from any physical fight with Tyler. Mom says Nile should've stopped his Vigilantism side-gig long ago. Nile becomes avoidant and ends the call.

SCENE 10 (3 min) - Scorpius's Victory Speech

Nile learns from a reel about Scorpius's Victory. He sees the full speech video about 'Culture purification as an urgent measure to save Wargong.'.

Nile finishes the video, takes another Amrith Vial, tries to brainstorm the wing design, doesn't immediately find a solution, then ragingly throws an orange at the wall.

Episode 2: The Gate Operation

SCENE 1 (5 min) - The Funeral (Flashback)

Nile and his mother attend a funeral event of Nile's late uncle. During this time, Nile meets some people after a long time, while his mother asks him to hide his bruises to hide his vigilante identity. They also meet Nile's 40 year old unmarried cousin brother who seems to have finally found a potential bride for marriage.

The cousins briefly discuss about Pratibha while a relative comments that Nile is very decent and wouldn't get into girls now.

SCENE 2 (5 min) - Pratibha (Flashback continued)

Feeling left out of the event and conversations, Nile tries to call Pratibha to chat about the upcoming Gate Operation but she doesn't respond. Both before and after the event.

Nile finds out that 2 people for the Gate Operation have been replaced: Pratibha and Chirag Acharya. Nile goes to visit Pratibha. In the empty streets, he sees a girl get harassed by guys. Nile responds, defends but can't resolve the fight. Pratibha intervenes out of nowhere and says 'You're late. If you give them time, they' ll learn you.'

Then, they go to her roof, discuss their days at Squad India, and that Pratibha is going to get married so she isn't doing her last Squad India attempt.

SCENE 3 (4 min) - The Money Matters

Nile gets into an Online call with his parents, who ask him for the University Bank Address where they must make the large amount deposit. Nile tries to articulate that he's thankful but his parents say a better way would be to quit Vigilantism. Nile still skips that topic. His parents say to make the degree pay off and that would be the best return of debt. Nile says he's still performing good academically. Nile then goes to ATM, withdraws cash for pocket money, puts it in a piggy bank, notes down progress in saving up for garage renting and steel prices.

SCENE 4 (3 min) - Shake Hands with thy neighbour

The next evening, Nile and Tyler meet up with the professor Wilson who asks them what happened. Nile clears it off as a misunderstanding and phrases it as he can sleep under light but was inconsiderate of other people's needs. He forgives Tyler for the violent outburst, while saying 'If me waking up early does this, I am extremely sorry.' They shake hands. They leave. Tyler discusses while clinging how he's got nothing yet going on for a product design competition, doubts his creativity. Nile says he shouldn't doubt himself, wishes him all the best. They cross the road, split paths.

SCENE 5 (3 min) - Tyler Gossip

Nile gets to the student accommodation and at the kitchen, he and housemates converse how it all went. One of them reveals they also do Product Design and that Tyler Hale is actually son of Brownshire Deputy Mayor Oliver Hale who has a product design for Council Vigilis Background. They say a controversy would make Nile famous. Nile says he isn't interested in all of that and that he wasn't bullied, and wouldn't play victim. And that he's giving Tyler too much attention as Tyler isn't even Mafia. Friends say, 'For all we know, he could be...'

SCENE 6 (3 min) - Gate Operation Preparation (Flashback)

Nile gears up for the Council Vigilis Gate Operation, meets up with Team members Vayuput, Kailash, and Axeman. He notices something off about Axeman and asks him. Axeman says he's okay. Nile purchases him a drink. They approach the Gate Operations Desk and get details for this Volunteery operation. They sign accountability and immunity documents.

SCENE 7 (7 min) - The Gate Operation (Flashback continued)

Nile injects himself with the Booster Serum. They break into a Bunker which is suspected to hold someone (A politician's daughter) hostage. They split. But Axeman turns and betrays the team, killing off Vayuput and Kailash. A combat happens between Nile and Axeman. 3 other Olden Park mutants appear, making the match-up a 1v4. Nile gets acid spit below his Rib Area. The 4 enable Bunker Lockdown. Nile races to the exit. Axeman grabs his leg but he gets out in time while Axeman's hand is sliced off. Then, from the outside, when Axeman asks for money, Nile hears the mutants kill him too.

SCENE 8 (4 min) - Nile's Rant (Flashback continued)

Nile goes to the hospital, the Acid getting worse. Acid is washed out, removed, examinations to detect any Organ Failure are conducted. Nile is on bedrest. One of his friends comes over to visit him. Nile starts ranting: 1000 years old decline wave, personal will alone is too idealistic, escape is what everyone else does perhaps it's escape from a prison. I don't hate my country but can't worship it either.

Nile's mother turns up, sits beside, quietly, asks him to rest.

When discharged, Nile says he may have missed Vigilis Academy India but can try Wargong.

SCENE 9 (2 min) - Rooftop Argument

Nile is asleep, gets phone notification news: Migrant prisoners escape and are on a Killing Spree in Dexton, where he is. Nile goes to the rooftop, tells himself how he must lock in and not focus on vigilantism. But he must also prove he's capable, must make change where others can't. If he doesn't stop the released migrants, the situation would deteriorate into an Us vs Them battle again - A tribalistic blame game.

SCENE 10 (5 min) - The Blue Unicorn

Nile gets to the site of intervention. He fights and takes them 3 down then Blue Unicorn comes and assists him in knocking them out. Nile arranges for a rope when Blue Unicorn asks how we can contain them. Nile buys a rope, ties them to a pole. Then Blue Unicorn says 'Hi, I am Alex Artemis and go by Blue Unicorn. What's your name?'

'Golden Eagle.'

'Nice one. Nice suit too. Do you have wings too?'

'Not yet at the moment, no.'

'May the power of Christ be with you. Alright Golden Eagle, I' ll see you soon.'

Then, Blue Unicorn's Blue feather wings expand and he flies away.

SCENE 11 (3 min) - The Shadow Client

In the police van where the criminals are apprehended, one compromised fearful officer receives orders from a shadow client that says: Their work is done. Bring them to me.

He then says to the other constables: My senior has asked me to handle this case alone. It's confidential. Please leave, constables.'

Then, he turns the car and goes another direction.

Episode 3: THE FRONTRUNNER

SCENE 1 (4 min) - Return Empty-Handed

One of the escaped criminals' sister Noor goes to Dexton Police Station to meet her brother in custody. She gets told that her brother has been transferred to a higher security prison on Senior Orders. She returns home, records a video narrating her experience at Dexton Station, and her doubts on the system, how they were released in the first place.

SCENE 2 (3 min) - The interview of Blue Unicorn

The weekend morning, Nile's housemates see a TV interview of Alex Artemis aka Blue Unicorn in the incident. A second figure is also mentioned, whose name as told by Blue Unicorn was Golden Eagle. His friends discuss who this new vigilante is. Nile, tries to blend in, and asks where he's from, no one seems to know. Some even say they are American, from Tristates Republic of America (Eagle imagery).

SCENE 3 (3 min) - A deeper motivation

Nile goes to his room, performs a Quicky search about the released migrant convicts incident. (He's looking for who saved the people and sees Alex and Golden Eagle mentioned without their ethnicities.). But then, he also notes that the convicts were taken to a high security detention center this time. He searches the controversies relating to detention centers, sees Noor's video, as it directly admits Noor recording to make it look like a controversy.

SCENE 4 (3 min) - Missing Convicts

Noor goes to the secure detention center, and gets told that those convicts are missing and they are looking into it (The police refuse to be transparent and a janitor tells her secretly that the convicts have gone missing along with a police officer. The convicts didn't escape on their own, and someone helped them.)

SCENE 5 (10 min) - Eureka!

Nile is awake with energy drinks at evening time. He figures out the way to make the wings, and the design. He breaks the piggy bank, goes to the garage, rents it, then goes to a market to purchase metal, figures he doesn't have enough to buy all. Seeing his passion, the workshop owner agrees to assist him with some workshop experience and tools. Nile makes a complete Armour, and then the wings which look and work like wings. Nile takes this to the competition stage and it gets voted as the coolest and sick outfit. Nile wins the competition by calling it Eagle Guardian. Then, professors and peers come and share their reviews on this suit, curiosity about whether the wings actually work, the applications of the suit itself, the heaviness, etc.

SCENE 6 (4 min) - Drowned Evidence

Noor rushes to the site after a phone call: A car has been found under water, sunken, with four members dead (The 4 convicts and missing police officer, his badge and hat are found however.) Nile from seven buildings away on the Rooftop sees this and interprets this as a killing. Meanwhile, Noor goes to the Wargong Reformers Party Club and discusses this incident and theories about the compromised police officer. The reformers agree to help her through this. Nile meets her privately in his vigilante outfit that night, and says he wants to help, but she says that this isn't something superheroes can punch their way through and that he should return to his own business.

SCENE 7 (5 min) - Addressing the Paranoia

Nile takes the design from the stage later that night, and the next morning, it is a bit windy. He compulsively goes to a house's rooftop, pushes the dummy human into the large ground, and the wings are activated using remote controls. The dummy flies pretty well, but at higher heights it goes in circles, and when Nile wants to land it, the design fails catastrophically and crash lands, damaging grass. Alex Artemis sees it from a distance, thinks of saying something, but Nile leaves not even noticing him.

SCENE 8 (5 min) - The Disappointment

Tyler dines with disappointed dad. He offers that he can work as his dad's personal spy. His dad dismiss that dream, says Tyler is too attention-seeking for any of that to happen. Tyler later that night looks at his Black Cobra suit which got rejected by institutions, and wishes to show his dad how truly capable it is.

SCENE 9 (3 min) - Oliver Hale Addresses

Oliver Hale, Deputy-Prime Minister of Wargong and Mayor of Dexton Brownshire, addresses in a speech that he conveys heartfelt condolences to victim's families (Even for criminals, a fate like this is undeserved. The root of problems however isn't in the incident alone, for our beloved policeman Charles is assumed to be dead, alongside four migrant convicts. The deeper issue is corruption of our institutions. Questions arise as to what happened in those cells, who armed them, and the answers may be ugly. To put it simply, our institutional credibility is going down. Being under constant Reform mentality for 10 years, we have forgotten our givens. We will purge institutions of all corruption and bring justice.) Then, Scorpius hugs Oliver Hale in the background.

Scorpius also asks his closest friend, Poison Dart where the policeman is, from his investigations. Poison Dart says he doesn't know. Scorpius says, 'That's not exactly a good news. For even us.'

SCENE 10 (4 min) - Nile's Dream

Nile goes walking. He is walking in a snowy, ornamented city. But he then touches a wall. The ornaments disappear, showing cold brutalist blocks everywhere with vandalous graffiti. His eyes move upward. Above the clouds is Sunshine and a beautiful tower complex (What may be hints of something Nile senses in Wargong).

He wakes up from this absurd dream, actually packs his backpack and leaves with his keys, approaching the area which was previously a crime scene: The West Dexton Bridge.

Episode 4: THE CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

SCENE 1 (6 min) - A Simulation

At the Dexton Bridge, Nile imagines a number of scenarios: 1. A ghost figure jumping to appear in front of the car, causing it to skid and fall. 2. When he remembers badge and cap and phone were found, he thinks the officer caused it. First, he thinks remote control or autonomous driving, but EDR records say nothing. 3. He thinks remote control brake explosives on top of autonomous driving. Eventually, he concludes occams razor, the driver jumped off while the vehicle fell over.

SCENE 2 (2 min) - Exhaustion vs the Optimist

Noor is tired of investigating things in such an opaque system. But she doesn't want to do anything illegally. Nile tells her what could have happened, she says she isn't concerned as she knew the same things but nothing matters because the case has been closed declaring the officer presumed dead. Appeals are pointless, and the reformers turned her case into a political statement which is of no use for her particular case. Nile convinces her to assist him in this tiny thread of investigation.

SCENE 3 (3 min) - The House of the Hunted

They sneak into the officer's evacuated house to find some details and discovers about an old abandoned house where Nile suspects they are relocating. He and Noor find that old house to interrogate the officer Paul. Paul reveals that if he hadn't done that, his family would have been in danger. Not that nows any different, comments the Golden Eagle. The officer gets killed by a poisonous sudden dart strike. Nile and Noor quickly escape from the scene, along with the family in Noor's car. Luckily, Nile has seen Poison Dart's archaic blue hood outfit, even if for a brief second.

SCENE 4 (8 min) - The Evacuation

In the car, Nile discusses with the family that they must leave instead of just hide. Nile quickly books them flight tickets to Kolkata India, where they are guaranteed to be Anonymous. Noor returns after mildly appreciating Nile for choosing to investigate even if just a small thing was solved.

SCENE 5 (2 min) - The Invitation

Nile returns to his accommodation. Then, in the hallway, he meets Rose, who says she's part of Vigilis Academy's Christian Society, whose head is Blue Unicorn. Nile agrees to go with her to a Christianity social event. Meanwhile, Nile also receives an invitation to the Rave scheduled after the Christianity event, intense and oxymoron schedule. He still goes to the event. On the way, he discusses with Rose what he knows about Christianity, like Jesus turning water into wine, the sects like Catholicism, Protestants, Amish, Orthodox, their architectures, etc. But his quirks also resurface as Rose has to remind Nile who Jesus is first, and that Blue Unicorn is evangelical imagery. It's the late reactions that are the quirk.

SCENE 6 (5 min) - The Prayer

Nile gets a free Bible. A passionate priest gives a speech at the event, stating his love for God. Then, he comes and prays for Nile, Rose, and her boyfriend Blue Unicorn. Nile talks a bit with Blue Unicorn. The event ends. Nile visits the rave with his same outfit.

SCENE 7 (3 min) - The Rave

At the Rave, Nile is overwhelmed by the sounds. The one thing that sticks with him is that Tyler passes by with rainbow hair, alongside a group of people. Nile finds out from his friends that Tyler is a member of the Reformers party. Nile said it doesn't make sense as his dad is from the Guardians party, until he realizes it may make sense. He awkwardly stands non-drunk admist drunk people. He leaves quickly and early.

SCENE 8 (1 min) - The Viral Video

Nile sees his friends' story, a viral video about Tyler blacked out Drunk, and drunkards being transported to their homes in an ambulance. Nile then hears whispers from inside his head: Rich Slum Dwellers.

SCENE 9 (2 min) - Rich Slum Dwellers

Nile calls his mother again, and gossips how clubs are chaotic, not his thing, even badmouthing the party culture to elevate himself. He even points out that these people aren't part of 'The Positives of Wargong's civilization' and are analogous to slum dwellers who happen to be in a very rich country.

SCENE 10 (3 min) - The Bible Study

The next day's much smaller gathering, Alex, Rose, Nile, and 2 others play card games. Nile asks how Alex got his wings. Alex narrates he developed them with puberty and everyone believes he has the spirit of an angel. Nile also continues further, adding his opinion of water into wine being a symbolism of seeing divine in simple and modest life, a wisdom he also remembers encountering in the Bhagavad Gita, which he had finished reading.

SCENE 11 (1 min) - The Interrogation call

Alex gets called for an interrogation, asks for 5 min. Nile asks Alex what it's for, Alex says it's for the incident where he nabbed those escaped convicts. Nile asks whether he was asked to reveal Golden Eagle's identity. Alex says he only knows Golden Eagle's superhero name as Eagle didn't tell him anything more. Nile asks if he must be there. Alex says if the Golden Eagle volunteered, or was called separately, maybe.

SCENE 12 (8 min) - The Cabin Duel

What happens is that Nile and Blue Unicorn are called to the Dexton Station for interrogation, and Nile has information that the officer didn't like hearing, such as the description of Dart's appearance. The officer blindspots the surveillance camera, which Nile notices. The officer turns to kill Nile with a silencer pistol. Nile kicks the gun away, getting into combat, finally knocking that officer down. Blue Unicorn is surprised and confused about what just happened and what this implies. Nile says he'll wake up in his room, and because the CCTV camera was blindspotted, the compromised officer can't prove anything.

Nile and Blue Unicorn just normally leave the scene. Nile reveals to Blue Unicorn who is underneath the Golden Eagle Mask, and that he needs Blue Unicorn's help in solving who's behind this. Blue Unicorn asks why he's so concerned about this. Nile replies it's because larger politics shouldn't get to dictate the lives of these communities. Blue Unicorn agrees.

SCENE 13 (2 min) - The Anniversary of Lucas Wolf

Scorpius attends the death anniversary of Lucas Wolf (Someone that was very close or important to Scorpius), appreciating his legacy as a priest narrates. But the strange part, camera men are present at the scene, filming the vibe, the cathedral in the fog, etc.

SCENE 14 (2 min) - The Blue-Hooded Killer

Nile makes a painting of the Blue-Hooded Killer and reports it to the police, and tagging this as something the Golden Eagle shared with him. He also shares it on his social media account on Instameter, hastagging with trendy keywords. Dart sees this on his phone while unmasked, and subtly rageful.

Episode 5: The Bulwark Serum

SCENE 1 (5 min) - Dinner at Hexagon Paradise

Scorpius, Dart, Oliver Hale and Tyler Hale dine at Scorpius's Hexagon Paradise. In the midst, Oliver tells Scorpius about the following schemes he wants to propose, and that they are being obstructed. For example,

1. Hale wants to extend the time required to obtain an ILR and reduce the Transition Visa duration.

2. Postpone Net Zero Goals

3. Fix the Health Service by introducing a new framework

4. Smoking and Alcohol free State

Scorpius asks Hale what he thinks is wrong with the Guardians today. Hale reluctantly says they are conflicted. Scorpius says, 'It is safe to say the Reformers have infiltrated the Guardians Party. You don't have to apologize for it. This is our public-facing message. It's how it all works. Meanwhile, we must initiate the Prestigious Wargong Art Cathedral's construction.'

Hale says there's one obstruction, Some waiting list observers demand more investment toward housing and Healthcare. Scorpius says no need for it. Housing standards must remain high as it has always been. It starts with the house. If the house declines, civilization declines.

Meanwhile, Tyler is visibly zoned out. Oliver calls him out, saying his joining the Reformer party for no apparent reason will make a mockery of Oliver.

Scorpius says to go easy on the kid as he's got potential. Scorpius says scorpius will do the speaking instead of Hale, at the Parliament Summit.

SCENE 2 (3 min) - The Parliament of Wargong

A reckless and chaotic debate, almost contradictory to Scorpius's otherwise reserved demeanor unfolds.

1. Housing and Wargong Art Cathedral funding clashes and corruption are dismissed by standards concerns. Scorpius mentions standards have been falling because of Reformer influence and that to cover up, takes time, especially in such a world economy.

2. Scorpius prevents opposition from his own party by falling them defectors, unreliable, and mocking them for changing sides from Reformers to Guardians because the Reformers didn't win.

Overall, the Guardians slay and win the debate. Scorpius and Hale come out of the cathedral, to a chaotic ruckus and voices behind the guards. Voices regarding Scorpius’s interference with Foreign Politics.

SCENE 3 (2 min) - The Birds save the day

The ruckus turns into a stampede. Nile and Blue Unicorn arrive and bring some order to the space, helping fallen people stand, also somewhat gathering the attention of Scorpius directly.

SCENE 4 (6 min) - Search for the Blue-Hooded Killer

At the garage, Nile and Blue Unicorn try to find the Mafia that previously owned these convicts. They think Blue-Hooded Killer is someone in the Mafia, trying to erase evidence. Nile reads the most recent article, searches the keyword 'Red Clubs' in the online news archive for the past 4 years, finds some drug bust spots and speculates 3 possible places to proceed with, in hopes of finding an informant or the Mafia.

Nile says to Alex after reaching 2 dead ends, finds no one that cooperates or knows, and says 'Superhero work is much more boring than one would initially assume. Here we thought we would be kicking ass and saving people. Turns out we're just looking at blank facades.'

Then, they go to the last location, disguised but armored. They find someone who says they don't know but Nile senses a gun. He blocks with his gauntlet at the right time, throws his own rifle at the man, pins him to the wall. Then says, 'Now that was a fucking mistake, buddy. Tell me what you know about the Red Club. Give me a location where they are guaranteed to exist.'.

SCENE 5 (3 min) - The Raid

Alex and Nile go to the Actual location, very much expecting intense combat. The combat happens as they cross waves of people. They make it through, although it's more inconvenient than they thought. They try to identify who the Blue-Hooded Killer is, from the eyes. But no one is. They ask the leader who says, Red Club never had or has a Blue-Hooded Killer. That's where the Mafia investigation thread ends.

SCENE 6 (2 min) - Soft Power vs Hard Power

Alex tells Nile while coming back that he is getting skeptical of Nile's methods and heavy coercion, and obsession. Nile says it is necessary in this specific context, and that Soft power isn't all, hard power is absolutely necessary all while secretly wishing this wasn't true. There's a deeper psychological reason Nile chooses Alex as his ally: Validation and symbol of evangelical dignity beside him despite his subtle skepticism of literal and absolute Christianity.

SCENE 7 (2 min) - Nostalgia of Glory and Power

Nile watches a few reels about Brownshire's 'former glory of ancestors illustrated by Whiteheart Knights with swords and guns vs current fall of standards and poverty and cultural demographic change.' While Nile actively resents these kinds of reels, he tries to sleep, gets whispers from inside his own mind: The powerless fall behind on everything, and are thus inferior. Nile tries to resist it.

SCENE 8 (2 min) - A naive attempt at Brewing

Nile tries to attempt Brewing something from the Booster Serum but it doesn't work. Instead, it fucks up the work desk and Nile's mind goes blank unless someone interfered and cleaned the area safely.

SCENE 9 (3 min) - The inescapable subject

Nile meets the professor on the way, who says he has missed an important class which was about history of Armour Design and the assignment introduction. Today, is helmets. Nile while watching recalls the reel of the Whiteheart Knights. While the class lecturer officially condemns the Bulwark Serum, calling it a supremacist serum due to colonial controversies, Nile is secretly intrigued by it.

SCENE 10 (3 min) - The Story of the Whitehearts

Nile learns about Whiteheart Lore for 3 min straight. He realizes some samples may be securely stored in Wargong's museum: a conspiracy theory.

In the Golden Eagle universe, there was an archaic group of knights who in the name of saving the world, conquered many parts of it, enslaved it. These knights are called the Whiteheart Knights. In my universe, they were one of Brownshire's military inventions to colonize different parts of the world. Different parts of the world remember the Whiteheart Knights differently.

The Whiteheart Knights aren't archaic Templars. They also aren't futuristic. But from combined alchemy studies, scholars during the later age of enlightenment developed the Bulwark Serum, granting individuals great physical strength and body immortality, although it wasn't always the best for the mind.

The Whiteheart knights don't exist anymore today. They became weak as more people got access to the Bulwark serum essentially, and then, the Whiteheart Knights, without a master, become almost mindless.

The Whiteheart Knights are generally villains, all dead in the current time. But the knights have a specialty to them. Their bodies never decay, although their minds do. So, all died of Brain death, and remain buried in the soil. The only risk in world, is that the wrong person can technically reanimate those bodies, either through AI or other methods. Often unpredictable this is.

The general Bulwark Serum, even though really rare and well-protected, provides permanent strength-enhancement, prolonged lifespan, and a non-biodegradable body, even though the mind decomposes.

SCENE 11 (1 min) - The Universe Conspires

Nile sees on the hall TV that a violent and erratic man caused severe damage to Museum property, injured many people by singlehandedly throwing large statues at them, a strength never seen before. Nile knows this broken moment is his timing window, and that the Bulwark Serum is stored there.

SCENE 12 (2 min) - Power will not corrupt

In the shower, Nile argues with himself trying to convince that choosing the Bulwark Serum is not a bad thing, it is justified and even necessary if he has to get competent and get things done as a superhero. He thinks of it as an upgrade to the Booster Serum.

SCENE 13 (6 min) - The Heist

Nile receives an invitation to a Christian Society event. When he enquires about Alex, he finds out Alex is out for the interview regarding Scorpius's offer. Nile uses that as excuse to not come himself, as he wants to obtain the Bulwark Serum.

He goes to the large crime scene at Wargong Museum, sneaks behind the scenes, crosses taped fencing, steals a worker's outfit by chloroforming them. Then, Nile sneaks into the vault and steals 1 Vial of the Serum. He stealthily gets out too before other workers get suspicious of him.

SCENE 14 (2 min) - A different Plan

Nile comes home, is about to inject himself with the Bulwark Serum until he realizes it might be permanent and the cons like non-biodegradability and Superstrength and durability feel uncanny to have, as he thinks of the violent man. He instead adds 'Examining the Bulwark chemical in the lab' to his to-do list and bookmarks a guide to do so, online. So, he doesn't inject himself yet.

SCENE 15 (2 min) - A boring meeting

Tyler attends a liberal Reformers party meeting, and gets zoned out, by topics like sustainability, multi-cultural representation, etc. When he is asked to add, he says 'It's good' and asks for a moment outside.

SCENE 16 (1 min) - The Silhouette

A mysterious silhouette walks through Vigilis Academy Campus and looks at Nile's accommodation window directly, then walks away when the security guard asks him what business he has here.

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It was a strange day, even after dealing with Kon Saya. While she didn't cause any more problems, exactly, her men looming around the place had slowed public-facing operations to a snail's pace.

Soon enough, he ran out of things to do and decided to head home and work on the cart. The foci settled well, at least, and needed no further adjustments after he left. It took just a few minutes to chip them out of the morass, and they seemed fine, though John wouldn't be able to test them until tomorrow. It vaguely brought to mind half-intact memories of epoxying a pipe together and learning the hard way why the instructions said to let it sit for four hours before you run hot water through it.

Fortunately, he had plenty of other things to do in the meantime, since he was somehow still not tired. After checking in with Yosuke, who reported it was business as usual, John quickly built the skeleton of the cart and all the mount points. Unfortunately, he had to do it all outside; if he assembled the damn thing indoors, there was no way he'd ever get it back out again.

Honestly, it wasn't the most complicated project in the world. It was a wheeled cart with a few emitters and some metal skis slapped onto the bottom. Eventually, he got a little fancy, given he'd had to wait on the foci anyhow before he could do any live testing. It was simple to make a few leaf springs and add some very basic shock absorption for the wheels, just in case he had to transport fragile materials. He was really tempted to make a steering linkage and a shock/strut system, but that was far more complex, and he was worried that it would break down on the road.

Of course, he'd still have flight, but he couldn't fly everywhere without attracting too many eyes. Sure, he could skim at ground level and pretend everything was fine, but he was bound to mess up somewhere eventually.

He, of course, added a hidden compartment that could only be welded and unwelded from underneath, with no hidden mechanism to open it directly, just in case he had to smuggle something. Mentally, he made a note to pack some sandpaper so he could minimize the signs of anything amiss.

The foci would be hidden the same way, once they were done, but he could obviously cut down the space more by—

"Well, you've been busy, haven't you?" Yuki asked, leaning over his shoulder.

"Gah!" John jolted, spinning around and nearly hitting his head on the cart's frame as he hurriedly stood up. "Damn it, Yuki, you nearly gave me a heart attack! Stop doing that," he grumbled.

For her part, the kitsune didn't react to his griping, only giving him that gentle, comforting smile. "Well, pardon me, Lord Hall, but you seemed so taken with that little prank on Rin earlier that I felt you might appreciate the greeting."

John narrowed his eyes at the kitsune. How the hell did she even know exactly what he did? She should have only heard her yelp and—Ah, whatever, it's Yuki; the damn fox was near omniscient sometimes.

At least she found him at a good time. He really did need to talk to her about his meeting with their latest "guest."

"Well, after the whole meeting with Saya, I guess I'm a bit on edge," he admitted, sighing deeply. "I'm sure you heard, but she tried to bribe me to get you to take the deal." To be honest, he was tempted to talk to his friend about it the second he got out of that damned room, but he didn't want to risk Saya overhearing and knowing that something was wrong and that she had been found out.

"You did well with her," Yuki said, gently patting him on the head as he flatly stared back, silently contemplating his friend's sheer audacity.

"Yeah, I figured you would have shown up if I tripped up too badly. Honestly, in retrospect, I was kinda surprised you didn't interrupt when she was making me an offer to sway you to her side. She's proper nobility of some sort, right? She probably has peers that scoff at her needing to do something so underhanded. The potential shame would have probably given you leverage," John noted.

Really, part of him wondered if the whole interaction was a trap for Yuki. Even with just "baseline" kitsune senses rather than whatever Yuki had going on, it would have been trivial for her to listen in from another floor. It wasn't as if Saya hid her intentions, and the door guard could have easily run off to tell Yuki before Saya even got there.

Yuki smirked, and it was a vicious thing, full of razor-sharp teeth and malice. "Sometimes, a fool is best left to make a mistake. Tell me, John, did you notice that she had one of her tails against the ground the entire time you two were speaking?"

Wait, she did? Honestly, he hadn't even thought about it. Oh, please don't tell him she was doing some sort of magical mental-influencing nonsense the entire time; he'd had more than enough of that with Kiku. 

Then again, he didn't feel her flexing her Presence at all, so she probably wasn't doing anything. Hmm. She assumed that he was an Unbound, so she probably wasn't trying to influence him in some way, given their resistance until their Aegis was worn down. Kitsune tails seemed pretty magical, too, so was she using it as a conduit to do something to the floor, making whatever she was doing harder to detect?

"Was she… trying to disguise our conversation from you?" John ventured. "She must have expected you to be able to hear her, but…" John paused, frowning. "She didn't hide that we were talking with one another. Hell, she sent a formal summons when she could have shapeshifted into one of her guards and pretended to have only sent a letter. Her actions don't make sense. Why then? Why not try to catch me when I'm all alone, and you can't overhear?"

Unless, of course, Saya wanted her to.

"It was all a plot to make you doubt me, wasn't it?" John groaned.

Yuki nodded. "It was a clumsy attempt that revealed that she has power over sound, but an attempt nonetheless. The meeting went much the way you heard, but she changed the way sound resonated through the walls to not only almost silence the conversation, but make it seem like you agreed without hesitation at the end, in case I was listening."

Ugh. He hated to say it, but it was a clever trick, if nothing else; these kitsune were going to be the death of him. He hadn't been wearing any sort of active magic detector, lest it give away his secrets in short order. After all, an Unbound could easily sense such minor disturbances and had no need for a specialized device.

"The first likely possibility is that the meeting went unnoticed, and she could ply me for an angle she could work, or could easily deny what happened if I reported to you. The second is that you noticed the meeting but couldn't hear the contents, stoking paranoia. Last is that you noticed and could hear, but got the false message at the end, leading you to push me away and into her arms," John rattled off, stroking his chin as he stared off into the distance. "It's a shame, for her, that you aren't new to this."

"It might have worked if I were actually a three-tailed kitsune and you were a normal Unbound," Yuki commented, shaking her head. "The relationships between them and their donors are often rather transactional in nature."

It was clever, he had to admit; they were just exactly the wrong targets. "So, if there was any doubt she knows anything about what's going on here or me, it's gone, right?"

Yuki nodded. "Perhaps there's a power behind her that suspects something, but Saya herself knows nothing," Yuki confirmed, nodding. "Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed in myself. I should have guessed she'd have powers over sound with the family name Kon. She reeks of first-generation kitsune."

"...What?" John flatly asked.

"A kitsune not only can be born to another kitsune, but if a fox reaches a hundred years old, they grow a second tail and become one, becoming a person rather than a mere beast," Yuki explained. "As such, these ascended kitsune do not have a family name and need to pick one. Kon is the noise that foxes make, and she has many mannerisms that are born of someone trying to fit the role of a divine messenger while saying that she is better than everyone who is not."

She named herself after a pun? He'd almost respect the boldness if she weren't trying to enslave Broadstream for a decade—even if she thought it was for their own good. "Fair enough, I guess," he muttered, shaking his head. "That'd mean that she's not subject to a family, but some other structure, right?"

"Oh, some sort, but we don't know enough to say for sure what type of relationship it is," Yuki explained.

John sighed. "I hate politics."

Reassuringly, Yuki patted his shoulder. "There, there. You get used to it eventually, even if you never stop loathing it."

"I still think it's best to avoid getting tied up with her entirely," John said, glancing back towards the half-finished cart.

At last, Yuki's expression dropped into a frown, although not a harsh one. "I can't come with you, you know? While I do not relish making choices on their behalf, Saya could intimidate and control the townsfolk into agreeing to whatever terms she desires."

Unfortunately, even putting aside Saya throwing around her connections to the heavens, the sheer fact that she could leverage Presence alone made any 'mortal' attempt to avoid her influence a doomed venture. Without protection, she could corner a few influential figures and broadcast feelings of panic and impending doom while promising them  protection, and that'd be it.

"I don't like it either, but someone has to, Yuki. Leaving it up to her is too risky," John consoled her, gently removing her hand from his shoulder, lightly squeezing her palm before allowing it to drift back down to her side. "Look, I'll have Rin with me, and I promise that I'll run if anything too dangerous comes up."

"And how do you plan to disguise your Presence?" The kitsune questioned, leaning in. "Or have you forgotten that the inexperienced find your natural aura unsettling? The city might be kinder than Broadstream, but there's no guarantee."

Honestly, he had. Getting coiled up in Yuki's tails every morning had just… become part of the routine. How the hell was he going to solve that? Maybe he could make some sort of device that'd put out a steady stream of quasi-Presence, even if it'd seem emotionless.

But Rin would see his entire aura magically change to something else. What could he do?  Act like the road was making him feel awful?

It'd probably be like seeing a dummy pretend to be a person, even then. There was a vast gulf between grumpy and emotionless.

Before he could even begin plotting, though, a thrust-out hand broke him from his thoughts. In Yuki's palm was a thin, woven braid of white strands that caught the fading sun, glittering where the light caught it, like a cavalcade of colours fighting to escape from within. Instinctively, he accepted the gift as she dropped it into his hands. It felt warm in his grip, the kiss of the summer sun bound into physical form.

"This is part of you, isn't it?" he breathed, eyes shining.

"Some of the fur from my tail, charged with my power, so it shall slowly leak back out," Yuki clarified. "Wear it around your neck, and it shall seep into you, disguising your Presence."

Without thinking, John wrapped his arms around Yuki and pulled her tight. "Thank you," he whispered.

A moment later, her arms and tails wrapped around him, too, forming a tight, protective shell. "While I may think this trip is unnecessary, I can tell you're set on it. I may as well aid you however I can and make sure you return safely. This necklace does have a price, though."

Opening an eye, he peered up at the kitsune with mild disbelief, although no worry.

"It shall cost you one more story of your home, of Earth," she explained, slipping the English word in with a frankly flawless pronunciation. Ah, but of course. He'd pay that price gladly.

Hmm. Now that he thought of it, Yuki was learning English words from him, so she must have had a Canadian accent. Maybe someday she'd meet another English speaker, and hearing a creature of Shinto myth say "Eh?" would give them a heart attack.

"Right, so, where were we last time?" he asked with a smile as the tails hesitantly unwrapped from around him, and she swiftly led him toward the meeting room, which had become far cozier over the last month.

"You said that you got people angry for fun," Yuki said as she pulled him inside, finally releasing him to settle into his chair. "Something about the therapeutic effects of shouting and baiting people who you'd never see again, I believe."

Oh, he did say that, didn't he? Honestly, he really, really shouldn't have introduced the idea of 'bait' to her. The kitsune might grow too powerful. Well, it was too late now; there was no way she was going to let it go if he started dodging the question.

"Its translation is baiting, like baiting a trap," he admitted with a sigh. "Many, many people can absolutely not handle losing, or even not being at the top of their team, when there are zero stakes, and it makes them irritable. Wait, I explained video games, right? That's the easiest example since it's most of what I did myself."

Yuki nodded. "Reactive non-magical illusions created on a glass sheet, complete with sound, controlled through a specialized tool. Some are capable of connecting people in multiple different locations, like the paired game boards of some nobles."

"Wait, what, they have those here?" John asked, staring at Yuki in disbelief.

The kitsune nodded. "Made from the wood of two trees grown from a single seed, moves made on one are mirrored on its duplicate. Most mortal and yokai lords and ladies who own one hire experts to play for them in secret to build a reputation as a genius player. It is rare to see someone truly rich at a tournament, lest they play poorly and have their lie exposed," the kitsune explained, sagely nodding.

…The people of this land are really just like those back home.

"Oh, we call those people boosted!" John exclaimed, smiling. "We also like telling them that they're barely human, or to stop letting their little brother play when they're actually playing for themselves."

"I think that might cause a war here," she mused, smiling. "So, this has something to do with baiting?" Yuki asked, leaning in, eyes narrowed as she rested her elbows on the low, for her at least, table.

"Absolutely!" He answered with a grin. "So, I mentioned that some people really hate losing, right? How do you think someone who is already slightly mad is going to respond to me gently implying that they only got into a high skill lobby because they let someone else play for them while—Hold on, let me see if I can still do the voice."

Under the watchful eye of a curious kitsune, John cleared his throat and hummed a few tones to test his range. "Mi-mi-mi…" he trailed off, voice rising with each syllable.

Add a bit of nasalness…

"Do-ray-mi—"

Push his tongue up a bit…

It was time.

"Turn the cheats on already, you fucking boosted bronzie," he squeaked in a high-pitched tone, voice purposefully cracking with only a mild twinge of pain. "Smag jungle in season six and buying Precision? You're already getting banned for throwing, you might as well throw on the auto-aim."

For a moment, everything fell quiet, as if the world itself was holding its breath in sheer bafflement.

The silence shattered moments later as Yuki burst into peals of laughter, the vulpine song resounding throughout the room as she caught herself on the table, nearly falling off the chair. "You sounded like you were ten!" she exclaimed, wiping a tear away from the edge of her eye.

"It wasn't that funny," John insisted. "One of the greatest dangers of being online is that you might be randomly subjected to the opinion of a child, so I just weaponized it a bit."

"You, my friend, would make a good kitsune," Yuki spoke between throaty chuckles. Despite himself, John found himself joining in, too, with a few sensible laughs. Her joy was infectious. "I think I might be a lover of 'bait,' too."

How utterly terrifying.

"I've been called more slurs than there are stars in the sky," John wistfully recalled, "but that's in pursuit of the real prize. The truest form of the art is getting someone banned from the game itself as the staff descends upon them like a swarm of guards, while receiving no punishment yourself. Some people like arguing with others with no game involved, but… Ugh, just saying nonsense to strangers to argue isn't any fun; there has to be some shared tie beyond happenstance. Ally versus enemy. Random people competing for the same resources. Ally against a deeply stupid ally. If someone is going to say that they're going to bomb my trailer park, I want it to mean something."

"Sadly, I think the closest thing we have here is going to a bar while disguised and getting into pointless arguments with the most contemptible people in the room," Yuki sighed, shaking her head. "Perhaps, some day, you'd like to join me for that? It might not be the same, but it might bring back pleasant memories. Not in Broadstream, of course."

A smile split John's face. "Why not?"

Tomorrow he'd have to get back to work on the cart, but he had needed this.

Besides, no time spent with a friend was ever truly wasted.

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Cover Art & Blurb

Clive 4

Clive arrived at the bridge of the Jonathan-7. Its floorplan shaped like a lopsided pentagon, with the odd protruding end located on the craft’s starboard side. Nestled in the point, the captain’s seat, furnished with a maroon leather flight chair and master computer terminal.

While seated there, his sole responsibility was to maintain parameters for a successful delivery. As such, he delegated the other workstation seats (and thus tasks) to his crew.

Rotating clockwise from the captain’s seat, affixed to each vertex of the pentagon’s square, were computer terminals accompanied by viewscreens. Each tailored to manage specific functions throughout the ship.

First, Shaffer’s seat managing communications, followed by a vacant seat for the navigator. Further forwards, pushed up towards the bow, were two additional seats. The pilot’s, currently occupied by Carcolh, and another that often went unused; the dust-catcher dedicated to a potential staff security officer the Jay didn’t require. The attached computer terminal controlled a flak cannon, and a point-defence system strewn across the hull.

Travelling with his father growing up, Clive had worked each of these positions for a variety of time, allowing him to appreciate each task in different measure. Evidently, sitting in the captain’s seat ranked the best.

“Keep a good crew, and you’d never work a day in your life.”

Or so his father’s father had been told by his mother. A tidbit of wisdom, passed down from the men and women who had previously captained the Jonathan. Wisdom from those who had kept it floating for nearly a thousand years.

Not to say he was a parasitic leech, benefitting off his crew’s hard work while he lounged in his luxurious flight chair. Despite no longer handling the Jay’s standard operations, it was still expected of him to stay informed. To stay frosty.

The master computer terminal coalesced control from the other computer terminals situated around the pentagon. At a moment’s notice, he could be expected to cover a crewmember’s duties, or work in tandem with them to solve a problem.

Unable to enter inconspicuously, the room’s two occupants reacted to his presence. Shaffer, at her post, offered a nod, His pilot on the other hand…

Incessant buzzing filled the bridge, the sound reverberating off the titanium-aluminum bulkheads. As was traditional for their culture, when displeased the Anisoptera made a theatrical show of their simmering emotions. Pouting in his flight chair, Carcolh fluttered his insectoid wings rapidly, expecting to be asked what was wrong.

“Oookay, who needed to finish these customs forms anyhow.” Shaffer scooted out of her flight chair. She left the bridge, mumbling, “Shoulda brought a pair of headphones.”

Feigning an important duty, Clive marched over to the master computer terminal and began tapping buttons with false urgency. A callous handling of the situation that was sure to further upset his longtime friend.

Carcolh’s slender, elongated body sat slouched in the custom flight chair designed for his species. One of many modifications made to the Jonathan-7 to ease the strain a Human ship caused on xeno-species crew. Iridescent, his chitinous exoskeleton shimmered with an emerald coat commonly seen in dragonflies on Terra. According to Clive’s biology textbooks anyways.

Jovial by nature, the Anisoptera disliked interpersonal conflict. On Fortuna Alpha, entire clans have been known to disband over a mild misunderstanding, and the years of passive-aggressive displays of discord that followed.

Their culture’s aversion to argument, even a constructive, good-natured debate between friends, made them tenuous allies. Despite their xenophilic outlook, they were apt to abandon their commitments if offended.

Occasionally, Carcolh would turn his head. The movement revealed the periphery of his two fuchsia, bug-like compound eyes. His many ommatidium reflected the bridge a multitude of times over. Their wide field of view spying Clive, even at such a sharp angle.

Both pairs of his arms remained crossed, stretching the fabric of his neoprene-mylar flight suit. His legs bent casually, away from the pedal controls. In an attempt to annoy Clive, his four independent wings continued to flutter.

Clive ended his ruse, slapping a useless button on the master computer terminal to complete the follow through. He crossed the bridge, joining Carcolh at his end, confident in the approach he had strategized.

“Hey Car, got a minute to chat? I need your input.”

Carcolh ceased his flutter. The bombinate buzzing fell silent. Worked like a charm every time. Though, who wouldn’t respond to a display of respect?

“Mayhaps, yes, I hath a brief span,” he wagged his serrated mandibles, speaking with the pompous air of a wig-wearing noble. “In truth, a plurality of time.”

As with every other xeno-species cradled in Lyla-Fortuna, the Anisoptera spoke their own language, as well as the community’s common creole. A blend of phonetics achievable by every species, all mish-mashed together to facilitate society.

With everyone trapped in such close proximity, its creation seemed only natural – however, entirely necessary. The Umibōzu were excluded, by virtue of not speaking any language technically.

“You feeling good about the flight?” Clive probed.

“Gah! Bah!” Carcolh performed grandiose gestures, as he was wont to do. “Flight? Thou shall hath no flight. Do thou see my tarsi against the pedals?”

Neither of his bristled, segmented feet touched the pedals located at the base of his flight chair. Largely unneeded for the majority of their proposed journey, but a firm display of his theatrical commitment nonetheless. He wiggled his claws in protest.

“Nary a tarsus to the flaar-sus,” Clive jested.

“Save thy japes Hargreaves. You and I, sire, we joust at an impasse!”

Either spending decades around Humans had begun to rub off on the bug, resulting in a more direct attitude. Or Carcolh was seriously, truly frustrated. A terrible sign.

Clive adapted his approach, the sternness in Carcolh’s statement putting him on edge.

“Consider me conceded. What’s wrong, don’t hold back? It’s a standard fly to the relay, Car.”

“A quest to the relay stirs in me no dread. Tis the Nero Relay itself. Rather, the lack of sir Comwell’s expertise, when we beset upon it.”

This again? Shaffer did warn him…

“I already spoke on this with Shaf. Comwell’s just, uh, taking a holiday. We’ll pick him up once we get back. He’ll actually have a lot of time to think, so…”

“IF we doth return, thou mean.”

“You’re acting like he took the whole damn nav-station with him. The computer is right over there, the information relating to a hundred jumps. Jumps you’ve flown!”

“Perchance, the last time thou hath operated the navigation terminal?”

His pilot’s lack of confidence in his ability to replicate their ex-navigator’s calculations stung more than expected. Admittedly, it had been a while. Clive opened his gob to retort, but found himself lacking any words. A drop of humility seemed warranted.

He sucked air through his teeth, and spoke, “Right. You’re right. Sorry. If you’re going to be so insistent, it must matter a lot to you.”

“Not solely I, but the retinue in entirety.”

“Excellent, so you can see my problem. Even if I could fly this tub myself, without you Car, they’re also going to jump ship. Without a crew, this boat won’t tug. I need your vote of confidence to get everyone on board.”

Carcolh uncrossed his four lanky arms. “Tis not a matter of thy confidence, but of expertise. Rust befouls thy mind. Apathy thine intention.”

“It’ll shake off quick, I just need the quick zip to Lyla and back.”

Hundreds of hexagons upon the surface of Carcolh’s eyes offered no insight to the bug-man’s emotions. Only by a little twitch of thorax had Clive realized he found some success.

“Please Car, I’m running out of options for the ship. You saw what the Synths are willing to pay, this is going to make us. Please don’t let it break us. How else are you going to fly.”

Appealing to his addiction couldn’t hurt.

“Ah…. Avast! Hargreaves thou know all the wrong sensitivities.” Carcolh gripped his multi-pronged flight controls, placing his feet upon the pedals. “Fasten, and fetter the lads and lasses! Our alacrity shall be legendary.”

Providing an affirmative nod, Clive left his pilot to spool the fusion drive.

It would take a few moments for the rings containing reaction mass to reach the required spin-speed to produce even, endless thrust from the drive cones at the stern. Once they were wound up, the water contained within would find itself agitated by the ship’s fusion reactor. Its release, as steam, propelled the ship forwards.

As long as the reactor remained powered by ionized plasma, anyways. The plasma itself fed by a constant stream of fusion reactions caused by fuel pellets of boron-42 being incinerated, by lasers striking it at all angles, while contained within the fusion reactor’s inertial confinement chamber.

In the meantime, Clive approached the navigator’s seat, interested in reviewing these calculations everyone was so fond of.

A swiveling flight chair provided access to a complicated console of buttons, touchscreens, and blinking lights littered around its respective computer terminal. Controlled by a rolling sphere, and analog keyboard, its viewscreen displayed a fluid 3D map space, as space was complex to map.

Clive engaged the computer terminal with a tap of the enter key.

A bright yellow ball appeared on the viewscreen, depicting Fortuna the sun. Surrounding it were four blue concentric rings. Each ring around Fortuna contained a bead, a priceless jewel. Its orbiting planets, each terraformed by unknowable means. Each perfect for a specific xeno-biology, and that xeno-biology only.

The Anisoptera had colonized Fortuna Alpha. Fortuna Beta remained empty. The interplanetary community theorized for a guest yet to arrive. Fortuna Gamma belonged to the Umibōzu, who had discovered Fortuna first. Humans, after being rescued, parked what remained of their fleet above Fortuna Epsilon, later to colonize the planet and its moons.

Fortuna Delta? Obliterated. Reduced to an asteroid belt long before any colonization had occurred.

The planets surrounding Lyla (although not depicted on this map) were equally terraformed. For the Hexadruse, Synesthesia, and Polyselda. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma respectively.

Zero-point-fifteen light years away from Fortuna Epsilon β, where they currently orbited, lay the vital near-zero relay. Represented on the map by a crown-looking ring.

It connected to Lyla, and its cluster of cradled xeno-species, eighty light years away. The relay was their preliminary destination, as flying to Lyla Beta on the fusion drive would be impractical, bordering on impossible.

As it stood already, it took three months of non-negotiable travel time to approach the Nero Relay at half the speed of light. Space truly was that vast.

While the Polyselda travelled marginally faster, they weren’t keen on sharing. Which left the mysterious piece of precursor alien technology as the only option for near-instant travel between Lyla and Fortuna.

The Nero Relay reduced an object’s mass to functionally zero. The object in this example being the Jonathan-7, and all of its contents. Living, and non-living. Functionally zero was a critical caveat, as often incorrect translations between shifting mass caused ships to… vanish.

If they struck absolute zero, anyways.

Comwell often spoke of an optimal translation time. A perfect balance of hovering within the ring while the relay altered the craft’s mass, and throttling out of the ring as it compressed it.

Of course, this could be done imperfectly. Accomplished a thousand times per day by civilian and military craft alike. Human, or otherwise.

The myth of vanishing came from vastly suboptimal translations, which resulted in the exit into the drop sphere – a portion of potential arrival location – to be unpredictable, and thus dangerous.

Clive clicked on the Nero Relay, expanding its informational tab, hoping to view Comwell’s logs.

“Sounds like we’re farting neutrons,” Shaffer said, swinging back into the bridge. “Lovers done bitching? We’re heading out?”

“Tally-ho!” Carcolh cheered.

“Yeah,” Clive said, looking over his shoulder towards his communications officer, “take a seat.”

Looking back at the navigation UI, the relay lay present in full zoom. The diagnostic box to the left of it read empty, as if there were no previous calculations recorded.

None of traveling to the relay, let alone of traveling through the relay.

Clive’s stomach dropped, as if the ship had vanished beneath him. Sending him plummeting towards his home moon.

Read Ahead on Royal Road

Previous — Episode 18: By the Book

Next — Episode 20: Walking Pace (coming soon)

---

The yard was still eleven days out, moving toward Vey at a rate that had caused Harl to ask for the figures again.

The Imperial cruiser alongside it had matched that rate. So had the two pickets. None of them had fired. None of them had left.

Alex had read both reports, the keeper's and Cal's, and now they lay on the table in front of him.

"Six pickets," Teda said.

"Yes, sir."

"Two hundred and forty crew."

"Yes, sir."

"An Imperial auxiliary yard. Sixty-one Ossin. A cruiser and two pickets escorting it."

"That's what the paper says."

Teda looked at the papers.

"And one sergeant major."

"Six hunters too. Don't leave them out."

Harl stood at the edge of the floor with all four hands occupied by separate parts of the record. The Ossin had spent most of the morning comparing the yard's maintenance history against the records already held at the Village. The yard had been built under Imperial certification, repaired under Imperial certification, and maintained for longer than the Council had existed.

"It is a complete yard," Harl said. "Not a tender. A yard. It can service six pickets simultaneously, or two hulls of the line, provided the necessary stock is aboard."

"How much stock?"

"Enough for the work it was assigned."

"How much is that?"

Harl moved two hands.

"I have not yet established the quantity."

"How long to build another?"

"Another what?"

"One of those."

"The yard?"

"Yes."

"That depends on the world, the available materials, the certification, the allocation—"

"How long?"

Harl stopped moving his hands.

"Years."

Alex looked at Teda.

"How many years you been fighting them?"

"A hundred and twenty-two."

"How many yards you taken?"

Daro looked down at the floor.

Teda said, "None intact."

"Well."

Alex pushed Cal's report toward Harl.

"Better find somewhere to park this one."

---

The floor held the war.

It was a fine piece of work, the floor. Every ship in the Council fleet had its mark, every registered road its line, every bridge its paired points. The whole thing moved when Harl asked it to, the stars turning slowly beneath their feet while the fleet remained where it was.

Alex had been looking at it for two weeks.

He had learned the names of the supply worlds. He had learned where the gardeners sent food, where the Ossin made parts, where the fuel came from, and how many hulls carried each. He had learned that the Federation had nine tenders and two hospital ships for a fleet of three hundred.

He had also learned that the Empire had more of everything.

That part had taken about an hour.

"Show me the Empire," he said.

Harl looked up.

"Which portion?"

"All of it."

"The whole Empire will not fit at this scale."

"Then change the scale."

Harl did.

The Council's territory shrank into a cluster. The Imperial holdings spread outward, past the edges of the floor, and Harl reduced the scale again. More systems appeared. Then more.

The Council's territory was not small. It had worlds, yards, farms, stations, routes, and populations Alex had not yet learned to pronounce. But on the floor it occupied a pocket, a knot of inhabited systems close enough to supply one another without crossing half the map.

The Empire went on.

"That's a lot of real estate," Alex said.

"Yes," Teda said.

"Lot of ships?"

"Yes."

"Lot of yards?"

"Yes."

"Lot of people to feed."

Teda's neck plate moved.

"Yes."

Alex pointed to Vey.

"And this?"

"The bridge."

"Show me where it goes."

Harl touched the floor. The artificial connection brightened, two distant systems joined by a line that did not follow the ordinary roads.

One end lay near the Federation's protected interior. The other stood in Imperial-controlled space, where the Vel kept the station called the Door.

"That's their front porch," Alex said.

"It is a principal approach," Teda said.

"How many other ways in?"

Harl lit the ordinary transit routes.

They wound through systems and transition geometries, some with stations, some without. The shortest routes still required ships to cross the distances between jump points. Some passages were narrow in the navigational sense, though there was nothing narrow about the space around them.

"How long?"

"That depends on the hull."

"Pick a cruiser."

Harl entered the class. A set of times appeared.

Alex read them. Then he looked at the bridge again.

"Well, hell."

Halven, who had been sitting behind Teda, lifted his head.

"What?"

Alex pointed at Vey.

"Blow it up."

---

Nobody said anything.

Harl's lower right hand continued moving for another second, then stopped.

Daro looked at Teda. Teda looked at Alex.

"The bridge," Teda said.

"Yes, sir."

"You propose an attack on the Imperial station?"

"No, sir. The bridge."

"The machinery."

"Yes."

"The connection itself."

"That's the one."

Harl's neck vents opened.

"Colonel, the bridge is four hundred and eighty-six years old."

"I know."

"It is an artificial maintained passage through adjacent geometry. Its construction required two installations, coordinated across separate systems, and the original alignment records are not complete. What survives is held at the Chancery. The oldest pages are in a script no Ossin desk has ever read."

"All right."

"It cannot be replaced."

"Then I reckon they'll miss it."

Halven stood up.

"No."

Alex looked at him.

"No what?"

"The Council will not authorize that."

"Didn't ask it to yet."

"You are asking us to destroy one of the most valuable pieces of infrastructure in this region."

"Yes, sir."

"An installation that has served civilian traffic for centuries."

"Yes, sir."

"An installation we have defended since the rebellion."

Alex looked at the line on the floor.

"How's that going?"

Daro made a sound and stopped it.

Halven's filaments went flat against his skull.

Teda said, "Colonel."

Alex turned to him.

"Sir."

"Explain."

---

Alex asked Harl to remove the bridge from the map.

The line went dark.

The Empire stayed where it was, fleets and all, and the ordinary roads still reached toward the Federation.

But the routes changed.

Harl's board calculated them, drawing lines around the empty place where the bridge had been. The shortest approaches grew longer. Some passed through systems where the Empire had stations. Others passed through systems where it did not.

"Now," Alex said. "Bring a fleet."

Harl selected an Imperial formation.

"Which fleet?"

"One big enough to scare Teda."

Teda's plate moved.

"That is a considerable fleet."

"Then use that one."

Harl entered a formation.

The marks appeared on the Imperial side, grouped around the support hulls necessary to sustain them.

"Move it here."

Alex pointed to a Council system beyond Vey.

Harl did.

The formation began its projected transit, a slow movement across the floor. It crossed one jump, then another. At each system the ships had to reach the next transition geometry. At each stop the calculations changed according to the hulls, the fuel, the available supplies, and the traffic already there.

Alex watched.

"Stop."

The marks stopped.

"How much food?"

Harl gave him the number.

"Fuel?"

Another number.

"Parts?"

"The consumption cannot be known in advance."

"Estimate it."

Harl estimated it.

"How many tenders?"

"Four for that formation."

"How many to keep them running once they get here?"

"That depends on losses."

"Assume they ain't losing any."

Harl calculated again.

Alex looked at Teda.

"That's just to get here. They haven't fired a shot."

"The Empire can sustain that," Teda said.

"I know."

"It has the yards."

"I know."

"The supply worlds."

"I know."

"More hulls than we do."

"I know that too."

Teda looked at him.

"Then what are you proposing?"

Alex pointed to the four tenders.

"Those."

---

Teda looked down.

"They are support vessels."

"Yes, sir."

"They will be screened."

"Then the screen needs ships."

"They have ships."

"Good. Put some on it."

Harl added escorts.

"Now how much fuel?"

Harl calculated.

"How much food?"

Another calculation.

"How many parts for the escorts?"

Harl's hands moved.

"How many more tenders?"

The Ossin looked up.

"Colonel, this process has no fixed end."

Alex smiled.

"Now you're getting it."

Halven stepped toward the board.

"The Empire can afford these costs."

"For how long?"

"A very long time."

"Longer than us?"

"Almost certainly."

Alex nodded.

"Then we'd better quit trying to buy what they're selling."

He pointed to the yard coming slowly toward Vey.

"How much did that cost them?"

Harl answered before Teda could.

"Years of construction. The original record gives the yard's material allocation, its assembly location, its first certification, and every subsequent major service."

"And how much did it cost us?"

"One retrieval hull. The risk to seven persons. The operation consumed—"

"How much did we spend building it?"

"Nothing."

"How much to build the six pickets?"

"Nothing."

"How many of their people died?"

"None."

"How many of ours?"

"None."

Alex looked at Teda.

"They already built it."

---

Daro was the first to object.

"You cannot take every ship."

"No."

"Most will resist."

"Probably."

"Some will destroy themselves rather than surrender."

"Then they'll be destroyed."

"And the Empire will replace them."

"Good."

Daro stared at him.

"Good?"

"They build another one, that's another one they've got to pay for. They send a tender to fix it, that's another tender they've got to protect. They put a cruiser on the tender, that's a cruiser ain't somewhere else."

He pointed at the board.

"You're looking at how many ships they have. I want to know how many they have to keep."

Teda said nothing.

"Right now they come through that bridge and hammer you. They can bring their fleet right up to your house, and you stand there waiting on it, with your own fleet lined up according to the book they wrote."

Alex walked along the floor.

"Take the bridge away, and they've got to travel. They've got to eat. They've got to stop and fix things. They've got to put ships where they don't want ships, just to keep the ships they do want moving."

"And we attack those ships," Teda said.

"When we can."

"With what?"

"Whatever works."

"That is not a fleet doctrine."

"No, sir. It's hunting."

---

Alex told them about the mountains.

Not the night Tarek had found him. The same mountains, two hundred and fifty years back, and a war fought long before anybody in the room had heard of Earth.

He told them about the Overmountain Men, the men who had come out of the Appalachian settlements to fight Ferguson at Kings Mountain while Cornwallis campaigned in the South.

They had crossed the mountains to strike the one force that threatened their homes.

"They didn't have to whip Cornwallis," Alex said. "They had to make his campaign cost him something he couldn't afford to lose."

Teda listened.

"Your history is full of these wars?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the larger power loses?"

"Sometimes."

"Why?"

"Sometimes it runs out of money. Sometimes it runs out of patience. Sometimes the people at home quit believing what they're paying for is worth it. Sometimes the little fellow gets his ass kicked."

Alex looked down at the map.

"Nothing's guaranteed."

"Then why choose it?"

"Because you've spent a hundred and twenty-two years fighting their kind of war. How many more you figure you've got?"

Teda did not answer.

Alex pointed to the captured yard's mark.

"One yard. Six pickets. Two hundred and forty people who were prisoners yesterday and ain't today. That's one operation."

He looked around the room.

"I don't need you to build me a thousand yards. I need you to take the ones they've already built. And the ones we can't take, they don't get to use either."

Harl's neck vents moved.

"That would require a very different fleet."

"Yes."

"Independent formations. Repairs away from registered yards. Crews trained across member species. A supply service that can operate without the Pylon assigning every movement."

"Yes."

"All the things you asked for last week."

"Now you see why."

---

Halven remained standing.

"The Council will not accept it."

"Which part?"

"Destroying the bridge."

"All right."

"It is not a minor objection, Colonel. The member worlds have spent generations defending that passage. Trade depends upon it. The Council's authority to command those forces depends upon agreements that do not permit us to destroy their infrastructure whenever a military commander finds it inconvenient."

"All right."

"You cannot simply say all right."

"Why not?"

"Because you are asking for something impossible."

Alex looked at Harl.

"Can we turn it off?"

The Ossin did not move.

"What?"

"Our end. Can we turn it off?"

Harl looked down at the bridge.

"The connection requires maintenance at both installations."

"That's what Venn told me."

"Yes."

"So if our end quits maintaining it?"

"The connection cannot remain established in its present form."

"Then turn it off."

Halven stared at him.

Teda looked from Alex to Harl.

Daro said, "You would abandon Vey?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"Keep the station. Keep the machinery. Keep every bolt in the damn thing. Just quit running it."

Harl was studying the records now.

"There are procedures for interrupting a maintained connection."

"Good."

"Those procedures are not the same as permanently decommissioning a bridge."

"Even better."

"The restart conditions would have to be established. I would not recommend attempting a shutdown without examining the original operating records."

"Then examine 'em."

Harl looked up.

"You are proposing to preserve the bridge and cease operating it."

"Yes."

"Until when?"

"Until we want to use it again."

Halven sat down.

---

Teda walked to the edge of the floor.

"Show it again."

Harl removed the connection.

The Imperial routes spread out across the board.

"Leave our fleet where it is," Teda said.

Harl did.

"Remove the bridge."

"It is removed."

"Show the approaches."

The lines brightened.

Teda studied them. The Empire was still enormous, its ships still numerous, its yards and supply worlds still off the edge of the map.

But now the fleet had to come by road, with distances between the ends, places to stop and wait, and a vessel carrying parts a long way from the vessel that needed them.

"These routes," Teda said. "They are not all equally suitable for the larger hulls."

"No, sir," Harl said.

"And some of these systems have no Imperial service installation."

"Correct."

Teda pointed to one.

"How long would a damaged cruiser wait there?"

"That depends upon what it requires."

"Assume it requires a yard."

Harl brought up the nearest facilities.

Teda looked at them for a while.

Then he looked at Alex.

"You want them on the road."

"Yes, sir."

"Not at our door."

"Yes, sir."

"And you want to go out and meet them."

"When they're worth meeting."

Teda's plate moved.

"With hunters."

"Hunters. Cutters. Whatever we can get working. Maybe a yard they built and we took."

Harl said, "You cannot operate an Imperial ship without trained personnel."

Alex looked at him.

"How many Ossin on that yard?"

"Sixty-one."

"Any of 'em know how to run it?"

"All of them."

"Well."

Harl looked back down at the record.

---

Halven asked for a political assessment.

Teda asked for a military one.

Harl requested access to the original bridge operating records, the full construction archive if it could be obtained, and a separate engineering study of the consequences of interrupting the connection.

Daro wanted to know what would happen to civilian traffic.

Alex said somebody had better find out before anybody touched a switch.

Nobody approved the plan, and nobody agreed to destroy anything.

But Harl left the bridge dark on the floor, and Teda kept looking at the roads.

"The Council may still refuse," Halven said.

"I know."

"Even if the bridge can be shut down safely."

"I know."

"Even if your calculations are correct."

Alex picked up Cal's report.

"Then I'll bring 'em some more paper."

Halven looked at the report.

"Your sergeant major has already supplied a considerable amount."

"Yeah. Mostly about his suit."

Teda's plate moved.

"I read that portion."

"What'd you think?"

"I think he should be given a better suit."

Alex nodded.

"That's what he thinks too."

---

Boone was asleep under the table when Alex came back.

The dog opened one eye as the door shut.

"—Cal?"

"Still coming."

"—Slow."

"Real slow."

Alex set the reports on the table and looked at the wall, where the routes from the Empire spread outward around the dark place at Vey.

The dog's neck clicked.

"—What?"

"Trying to get them to shut a bridge."

Boone lifted his head.

"—Why?"

"Empire keeps coming through it."

"—Bad?"

"Bad for us."

The dog thought about that.

"—Other way?"

"Yeah."

"—Long way?"

"Long way."

Boone put his chin back down.

"—Then we hunt."

Alex looked at the map.

"Yeah, buddy."

He turned out the light.

"We hunt."

---

Previous — Episode 18: By the Book

Next — Episode 20: Walking Pace (coming soon)

Galactic Fox Reading Order: GF-019

Previous — Episode 17: The Pylon

Next — Episode 19: Another Table (coming soon)

---

REPORT OF ACTION. KEEPER OF THE DOOR, COMPARTMENT FOURTEEN, HULL FOUR.

To the Legitianate of the section, absent. Through the Sworn.

From Tas, keeper. Transmitted from the auxiliary yard, where I am.

I. PRELIMINARY

1. Hull four held the registered point on the belt side of the Door with the auxiliary yard alongside by transfer section and two pickets at the far door. The yard held six Council pickets taken at the six points, whole, for re-entry of record. Their crews, two hundred and forty, were in the yard's holds under category. The Sworn commanded from the road. The Legitianate was absent.

2. The protocol for protected external persons was in force. I was instructed in it on assignment. It comes from the book. I have not seen the book. I do not know the protocol's reason. I have not asked.

3. I had kept the door of compartment fourteen for two years.

II. THE ACTION

0311. A Council retrieval hull came out at the point, dark, drifting. Compartments read from outside: six hunters, one human in armor. The human read as a protected external person. Enclosure One.

0340. The hull was called under the book and told to power down. It did. The hunters lowered their weapons. The hull was taken whole. No fire.

0415. The hunters were put in their own cargo bay, in the floor restraints. The human was put in compartment fourteen, in its armor, which the protocol does not allow to be removed. I was assigned to the door.

0420. The armor was assessed through the door. Enclosure Two. One line.

0430. The human was addressed through the door in the form. It answered. Its words are at Enclosure Three as the translator gave them. I did not establish their meaning.

0602. The human struck the overhead with the top of its armor. Compartment fourteen is of the class appropriate to the human. The armor is not. The human said item 4.

0604. It struck the overhead again.

0611. The human asked me through the door where its hunters were. I told it. I had not been instructed not to. It was a question.

0612. The human opened the door of compartment fourteen from the inside. The door does not open from the inside. The seal was released along the seam by a flat blade, not by authority. The human said, while doing it, that the seal was not a lock. Item 6. This was correct.

0613. The human left the compartment. I followed. I keep the door. The door was open. I did not lay a hand on the human. Nobody may.

0613 to 0655. The human went through hull four toward the hunters' bay. It did not know the way. It asked me at each junction and I told it. Crew who met it in the passages stood against the bulkhead as instructed. One rating at the fourth junction was slow, and the human stopped and looked at him and said item 9.

0655. The hunters' bay. The restraints were fastened and empty. The manual says the floor restraints of a Council retrieval hull cannot be left by what is in them. The hull's record shows the hunters leaving them at 0431, sixteen minutes after they were put in, by a method the record describes. Enclosure Five. The hunters built the bay.

0658. The human said items 10 through 14.

0701. The human sat down on the floor of the bay. I stood at the bay's door.

0709. The six hunters came into the bay through the sample lockers, which open on both sides. They put their noses along the human. The human said item 15. The hunters spoke to it in their tongue. The armor carries no translator. The hunter the others defer to spoke to my translator instead, so that mine would speak to the human. It was used that way for the rest of the action. I permitted it. The protocol does not allow a thing to be taken from the human, and the human had taken the use of it.

0715. The human asked the hunter where the pickets were. In the yard. Where the yard was. Alongside, across the open section. How far. The hunter told it. The human said item 16, and that it wanted to go there.

0716. The hunter said it could not be done. The yard is the size of a station and moves like one, the section is alongside, the Sworn is on the road. The human said: any system has the same weak point. The people touching it. Let's go take some hostages. I record this as the human's intent because the form requires the intent and I would not otherwise have known it.

0720. The hunters left by the sample lockers. The human does not fit the sample lockers. It used the passages, with me, and asked the way.

0742. The transfer section was sealed on the hull side, by the book. The human said item 17 and released the seal by the same method, faster.

0744. The section was open to vacuum on the far side. The human went in. I followed. Its armor did not hold to the deck. It left the deck and struck the overhead, a bulkhead, and the overhead, and said items 18 through 23.

0749. A hunter came back through the section from the yard side along the bulkhead, took the human by the back plate in its two small arms, and carried it the length of the section to the yard's lock. The human said item 24. I followed along the bulkhead.

0752. The yard's lock was opened from inside by the hunters, who were already there. Enclosure Five.

0753 to 0830. The human went through the yard to its bridge with the six hunters and me. The yard's crew, Ossin, stood against the bulkheads as instructed and did not lay a hand on it, and each entered its passing in the yard's record as it went by, which is their custom. The yard's record of the action is complete and is the better one. Enclosure Six.

0831. The bridge. The yard master, Kurs, at his station. The human went to him, said item 26, and took him by the upper arm. The watch officer moved toward the master. The human put a device to the watch officer and he fell. He is well. The human said item 27 to him, which the translator gives as an apology.

0834. The human, through my translator: You run this thing. The master: yes. The human: Run it. That way. It pointed toward the belt. The master: the yard cannot go that way, the section is alongside, the Sworn is on the road, the yard has no orders. The human: You got one now. The master: I do not take orders from a protected person. The human said item 28, which has a word in it I do not have. Then: Then take 'em from him. It pointed at me.

0835. The master asked me whether hull four instructed the yard to proceed. I said I was assigned to the door. He asked me whether the protocol permitted his crew to resist the human. I said it did not. He entered both in the record. He asked the human whether it instructed the yard to proceed toward the belt. The human said yes. He entered that under compulsion. The record has a field for compulsion. The protocol has no field for resisting it.

0836. The yard proceeded toward the belt.

0836. Rate. The form has fields for a hull of the line, a screen, a cutter, a picket, a boat, and a boarding party under power. I have entered the yard's rate in the last of these. It does not fit.

0840. Hull four called the yard and required it to stop. The master answered in the form that he was well and performing his duties under compulsion. Hull four asked whose. The master: a protected external person's. Hull four asked whether the crew had resisted. The master: the protocol did not permit it. Every word of this was correct.

0851. Hull four came alongside and read the yard's compartments. The human was on the bridge. Fire was withheld under the protocol.

0902. The Sworn's instruction received. Paragraph 16.

1002. The human removed the top of its armor. I entered its face.

1140 and 1520. The human drank what the yard's crew drink and said items 30 and 31.

1200 to 1500. The human slept on the floor of the bridge with a hunter on either side. I kept the door.

1540. The armor's gauge read empty. The human had breathed the yard's air since 1002. The assessment says half a day. Confirmed.

To the time of filing. The yard has proceeded toward the belt at the rate above. Hull four and both pickets have proceeded alongside at the same rate. I have not seen a hull of the line hold that rate before. The six Council pickets are in the yard's bays. Their crews are in the yard's holds and have been fed, on the human's instruction, entered under compulsion.

III. PERSONNEL AND MATERIAL

4. Casualties, ours: none. The yard's watch officer is well.

5. Casualties, Council: none.

6. Ammunition expended: none.

7. Damage: the seal of compartment fourteen and the seal of the transfer section, both released by lateral pressure, authority none, tools non-standard. The record entered both that way on its own. The yard master read the entry and said it was already in the record once, from the other side, under another housing, and did not say more.

8. Lost: one auxiliary yard with sixty-one Ossin, held and working. Six Council pickets, Enclosure Four. Two hundred and forty Council crew, held and fed. The record of six registered points, which was in the yard. One keeper.

9. Recovered: none.

IV. COMMENTS

10. The protocol was kept in every particular by every member of the section who met the human. I have entered every meeting. Nobody laid a hand on it.

11. I do not know how the hunters left the restraints. The record says. I have read it. The restraints are empty.

12. I do not know how the human instructed the yard without a translator. It used mine. Whether a keeper's translator is a thing a protected person may take, the form does not say, and I recommend it say. It did not matter. The master would have done what the human's hand did with or without words, once the record said compulsion and the protocol said no.

13. The human said what it intended before it did it, to hunters who said it could not be done, and then did it, and I watched every part from the door. No part of it should have worked. Every part of it did. The form has no field for that. I have put it here.

14. Sample lockers on a Council retrieval hull open on both sides. Enter it in the manual.

15. The human's speech. Most of it joins the name of a god to other words. The translator gives the other words and marks the meaning not established. I mark the same. The human says these things when its armor fails, when a door is sealed, when it is carried, when it drinks, and when it is asked a thing it has answered. Its face does not change. I have come to think it is the human's form.

V. RECOMMENDATIONS

16. The Sworn's instruction is to proceed alongside the yard at its rate and withhold fire under the protocol until the Legitianate returns. I recommend nothing against it. I am assigned to the door.

17. I request instruction on the word at item 28, which the human used of itself, and which the translator gives as blood. It is not in the protocol as it was given to me.

VI. ENCLOSURES

One. Reading of the retrieval hull, 0311.

Two. Assessment of the armor, 0420. In full: The armor keeps the human alive in vacuum for half a day and does nothing else. The human knows this. See Enclosure Three.

Three. The human's words, thirty-one items, as rendered. Item 6: Sealed ain't locked, you son of a bitch. Item 9: You gonna move or you gonna stand there. Item 15: Well. Item 24: Goddamn it, Tarek. Item 27: Sorry, buddy. Item 28: Then I reckon you take 'em from the blood, since that's what your boss called me, ain't it. Meaning of blood not established. Item 31: That's the worst goddamn coffee I ever drank and I've drank Jim's. The rest are of a kind with these.

Four. Council pickets in the yard, crews of forty: Far Shore, The Lane, Ebb, Second Light, Hearth Fire, Cold Water.

Five. Record extracts: the restraints, 0431; the yard's lock, 0752.

Six. The yard's record of the action, complete.

Tas. Keeper. At the door.

---

BY HAND

TO: Theatre Commander

FROM: Mercer, C. SGM

SUBJECT: After Action Report, picket line, belt side of the Door

1. SITUATION. Six Council pickets quiet on the road to the Empire's bridge. Nobody knew why. Cutters sent to look went quiet too.

2. MISSION. Go look. Come back.

3. EXECUTION. Found enemy fleet at the first point. One capital ship, one auxiliary shipyard, two pickets. Engaged.

4. RESULTS. Liberated assets listed below. Enemy casualties none. Friendly casualties none. One enemy watch officer tased, recovered. Enemy auxiliary shipyard captured with crew of 61, cooperating. Enemy capital ship and two pickets escorting us to Vey at our speed, which is walking. ETA eleven days from capture. Assets:

Far Shore, 40 crew. The Lane, 40. Ebb, 40. Second Light, 40. Hearth Fire, 40. Cold Water, 40. All hulls intact, in the yard's bays. All crews alive, fed, and mad.

5. EQUIPMENT. Now let me tell you about this goddamn suit.

a. Air. It has half a day. It is a day and a half to anywhere out here and four days to the belt. Half a day is how long it takes to get caught. I breathed the enemy's air for the rest of it, which they gave me because they had to, and I want that on the record as the only thing on this mission that worked as designed, and it wasn't ours.

b. Height. The suit is taller than I am and taller than every door on that ship. I know because I hit the top of two of them with my head. The Vel wrote it down. Twice. I read it upside down on his tablet while he was writing it.

c. Talking. It don't. There is no box in the collar. Tarek and them were six feet from me in that bay and I could not say one word to them or hear one back. I had to borrow the Vel's translator. Their guard. The man whose job was to keep me in the room. Everything I said on that ship for nine hours went through the enemy, and the enemy wrote it all down, and I have been told some of it is now an enclosure.

d. Seeing. The visor is shades. That is all the visor is. I could not see the ship, I could not see a map, I could not see where the hunters were or where the yard was. I asked the Vel. At every junction. He told me. I would like it noted that the only reason I found my own people is that the enemy gave me directions because nobody told him not to.

e. Feet. They do not hold to anything. When the tube between the ship and the yard opened to vacuum I came off the deck and hit the top, then the side, then the top. Tarek came back and picked me up by the back plate with those little arms of his and carried me across like a sack of feed. I want the record to show that a hunter who weighs less than I do carried me and my suit forty yards in front of five of his own people and did not say one word about it, and I would rather he had.

f. Carrying. It don't. You said it would carry a hatch. I could not carry my own knife until I put it in the slot.

g. The slot. The slot is fine. The knife went in it like it was made for it because it was. That is one thing. Venn made it the length I said. Venn did not make anything else I said because nobody said it to him, and I am saying it now.

h. The clamps. Venn put four hose clamps in the pack because Alex said the words to him once. I used all four. Two on the air line after the first hour. One on the Vel's tablet strap so he could keep up. One I am not going to tell you about.

i. The gun. I did not bring one. I said why. I stand by it. What I did bring, the taser, worked on the watch officer of an alien shipyard exactly like it works on a drunk at the Sevier County fair, and I did not know it would, and I would like somebody to find out why before I need it again.

j. Getting out. The door on their ship was sealed. Sealed ain't locked. I got out. The hunters got out sixteen minutes after they were put in and I do not know how and neither does the ship they built. I was the slow one. I was the slow one all day, on account of the suit.

k. The yard. Once I got on it, the suit did not matter, because I had my hands, and the people running it were the weak point, same as any system, same as I told Tarek, and Tarek said it could not be done, and it took four minutes. The suit did not do that. I did that. The suit was in the way for it.

l. Coffee. Not the suit's fault. Noting it anyway. Worst I ever drank.

m. Summary. It is armor. It goes in vacuum. For half a day. That is the whole list. I went through an enemy ship, across open space, into an enemy shipyard, and took it, and the suit did not help me do one of those things and hurt me doing four of them, and the only reason I am writing this and not floating in that tube is a hunter and a Vel and a book their side keeps that says they can't touch me.

Next time there won't be a book.

Fix this goddamn thing or I will.

Mercer SGM

---

He took the keeper's report, which had come in the same pouch off the yard, and set it on the desk beside Cal's, and read the two of them together, one line from each, the way the trooper and the dog had both been in the log, and got to the tube, and stopped.

"—What."

"Cal got carried."

The dog thought about it.

"—Cal don't get carried."

"He did this time."

"—Who."

"Tarek."

The dog put his chin back down on the floor.

"—Good," he said. "He's pack."

---

Previous — Episode 17: The Pylon

Next — Episode 19: Another Table (coming soon)

Galactic Fox Reading Order: GF-018

Previous — Episode 16: The Road

Next — Episode 18: By the Book (coming soon)

---

The pack had the run of a corridor on the residential ring because nobody had assigned them one and nobody had told them not to, and by now the whole ring smelled like pack and the Village's filtration had given up on it. That was where Boone was, because that was where Boone went.

Alex came round the curve, without the case and looking refreshed, and stopped.

The hunters were running the ring. Six long bodies going away from him down the curve with their ears back and their small arms folded tight, and in the middle of them, stiff-legged, gray in the muzzle, tongue out, an old bluetick hound at a dead trot with a walnut at his neck.

Tarek ran beside him. Matched to him. A panther's length dropped to a hound's pace, and neither of them had to look to know where the other was.

They came round the far side of the ring and back toward him. The dog saw him and did not stop running. The hunters' ears came round before their heads did, all six, and Tarek's last.

They pulled up. The dog came and sat on his boot, blowing.

"—Ran."

"I saw."

"—Fast."

"You were fast."

Pon came down the corridor at him with his nose out, the way he had the first day on the concourse. Alex put his hand out, flat, low, and did not look at him.

"Hush."

Pon stopped. He stood a second with his ears going. Then he lay down where he had stopped, along the wall, the way the others lay, and put his chin on his arms.

Tarek's ears went sideways and came back. Nobody said anything.

---

Alex sat on the floor with his back to the wall, because that was how you sat in a hunters' corridor, and Tarek lay down beside him with the forelimb tucked close the way he still tucked it, and the dog lay across both their feet.

Tarek had a bowl. He put it down between them, and after a while Alex reached over and ate from it, and Tarek's ears did not move, and that was ten months of something in one bowl.

"Your people got a name for this?" Alex said. "Sitting on a floor."

"Lying."

"For lying on a floor."

"Home."

Alex looked down the corridor. Six hunters along the wall, chins on their arms, and a hound across his boots.

"That the whole word?"

"A house is where the pack is lying. It is the whole word."

"What about a wall?"

Tarek's ears went flat.

"A wall is a thing prey builds. It stops the wind. On the mainland we do not build them."

"The mainland."

"Where I am from. Everything that is not the mainland is the islands."

"This?"

"The islands."

"The Federation?"

"The islands."

"The Empire?"

"A large island. A long way off."

Alex ate.

"And me?"

Tarek looked at him for a while.

"You are from a very small island that nobody had a name for. Now it has one."

Alex let him have that.

Tarek's ears moved. One small arm unfolded from his chest and put a flat thing on the floor between them.

"There is a paper."

"Whose?"

"Halven's. This morning. I am assigned to you."

"You been assigned to me since the woods."

"Now it is on paper. Council forces. Under his office. Adviser to the theatre commander." A pause. "And the other word."

"What other word?"

"The translator says bodyguard. That is not what it says."

"What's it say?"

"It says the one who is responsible if you are lost."

Alex looked at the paper and did not pick it up.

"They did that on purpose."

"Yes."

"Because you already are."

"Yes."

The dog's neck clicked.

"—He's pack."

Alex put his hand on the dog's head.

"Yeah, buddy. He's pack."

He sat a while longer. Six hunters lay along the corridor with their chins on their arms and their ears on him.

"I'm gonna need you for something," he said.

"What?"

"Don't know yet. Something you're good at."

"I am good at leaving."

"That's the one."

---

The clearance came through the same morning, on a page Halven brought himself, and by the time Alex had read it Halven was already walking.

"Where we going?"

"The Pylon."

"That the thing in the middle?"

"That is the thing in the middle."

The Village was a ring around a spine. Alex had walked the ring for ten months and never once been let into the spine, and now a door in it opened for Halven's hand and a Vel's face, and behind the door was a shaft.

He stopped at the rail.

It went up and it went down farther than the wall let him see, and the walls of it were boxes. Rows of them, ranks of them, every one the same size, every one with a mark on its face and a light, and the lights went on and off, on and off, all the way up and all the way down, like a hillside full of lightning bugs on a June night if the lightning bugs had been taught to count.

"Every one of those is a ship," Halven said.

"Every one."

"Every hull in the Council fleet has a set. Its pair is here. A captain enters a movement on her set. It comes here. The machine reads it against every other movement it has, and sends back what she may do, and she does that, and every other set in the fleet receives it at the same time. Three hundred hulls move as one and do not strike each other."

"What machine?"

Halven pointed down.

"Who built it?"

"Who do you think."

Alex looked down the shaft at the lights going on and off.

"How long ago?"

"Three hundred and forty years. It was here before the bridge station was. The Empire ran its fleets through it. When the gorges went with the rebellion the gorges had the Village, and the Village had this."

"Y'all change anything?"

"We changed who it served."

"Venn said that."

"Venn is Ossin. It is the only answer they have." The filaments along Halven's skull stirred and lay down. "The Ossin keep it. Nobody else could."

Below the last rank, at the very bottom of the shaft, there was one box by itself. It had no mark on its face. Its light was dark, and then, while Alex watched, it came on and went off again at the same moment as a hundred others up the wall.

"What's that one?"

"It was here when the Ossin came," Halven said. "It belongs to no ship."

"What's it paired to?"

"The Ossin who keeps it would like to know. Every Ossin who has kept it would like to know. It lights when the others light. The keeper says it is counting."

Alex watched it come on again, and go off.

"Counting what?"

Halven did not answer. They went down.

---

The room at the bottom was round, and the board was the floor, lit from beneath, with the whole of the war on it. The fleet's commanders sat around the edge. A gorge officer taller than Etris and older, with a hairline crack down the plate of his neck healed white, stood up when Alex came in and did not sit again until Alex did.

"Colonel Huskey. Teda. I command the fleet."

"Sir."

"Do not. You are not sworn to it."

"No, sir."

Daro was there, the officer from Halven's table, who had not known where to put his hands near the Hive and did not know where to put them now. Two more gorge officers, Tsotne and Nino, in the same coat as Teda with fewer marks on it. An Ossin at a desk against the wall with all four hands on it, whom Teda called Harl, who kept the machine and did not look up. Halven sat behind Alex and to the side.

Nobody in the room was a caller. The pages did not come here. The coordinates did.

"Captain Etris says you are difficult," Teda said.

"She'd know."

"She says her squadron carries a standing order that is not in the book. She says she has read sixteen pages nine times and has not decided whether to put it in the book. She says this is your doing."

"That's about right."

Teda looked at him a moment longer, and then at the floor.

"Then look."

Alex looked.

Marks along the belt, in groups, in the book's layers. As he watched, one group shifted. Etris's, at Vey. He knew her by where she was. Three marks sliding along the lane a hair, and a hair behind them the whole belt adjusting, group by group, every mark taking a step nobody in this room had told it to take, so that when the three had finished moving the fleet was still one shape.

"She entered a movement," Harl said, without looking up. "It went through. It came back. Seven seconds."

"Who told the rest of 'em to move?"

"The machine."

"Who told the machine?"

"The book."

Alex watched the belt settle.

"Who watches it?"

Nobody answered.

"I mean it, sir. It moves three hundred ships. Who sits there and watches what it's doing and says, no, not that?"

Teda's plate moved.

"It has not been wrong in three hundred and forty years."

"It ain't been asked to be. It's running formations somebody wrote before the Council existed, against the people who wrote 'em. Every move it makes, they made first."

"Its record."

"Its record is a hundred and twenty-two years of losing beautiful."

Tsotne and Nino had gone still. Daro looked at his hands. Harl's four hands had not stopped.

Teda said, quietly, "What are you asking, Colonel."

Alex stood up.

"Sir. War ain't a sum. Somebody has to decide who lives and who don't, and own that, and go to bed with it. That thing down there can't. It can watch a mark go off that floor and it don't know that's forty people, and it don't know nobody's ever going to hear one of 'em laugh again, and it don't feel a damn thing about a few lights going out. Somebody up here has to. If you want to hold, keep doing what you're doing. If you want to win, that machine needs somebody telling it what to do and when, and it needs to be a person, and that person needs to be able to say no to it."

The room was quiet.

"Who?" Teda said.

"Not me."

Halven, behind him, did not move.

"Not yet," Alex said. "I don't know your fleet. I know how it moves. I don't know what it eats or who fixes it or who's tired. Give me a month in the records and I'll tell you who."

Teda looked at him for a long time.

"And in the month."

Alex pointed at the floor. Along the belt, on the road that ran to a bridge four jumps from a yellow mark at the bottom, six marks that were not lit.

"Those."

"Quiet."

"Since when?"

"The longest, eleven days. We send a cutter. The cutter goes quiet. We have stopped sending cutters."

"Don't send a cutter. Send hunters."

Teda's plate moved.

"They are not line troops."

"No, sir. They're good at leaving. Somebody to go in where a cutter can't, look at what's there, and come back. They found me on a mountain with five dogs on 'em. They can find out what's eating your pickets." He looked at Halven. "One's assigned to me. As of this morning. I'd like his pack."

Halven said, "That is a Council forces matter."

"Then decide it."

The room waited.

Halven's filaments stirred, once.

"Decided."

---

Cal found the sergeants where sergeants were, which was at a table in the yard's mess with the officers gone, and he sat down at it with what they were drinking and did not open the legal pad for an hour.

Zura, a gorge master-at-arms off a line ship, drank what the gorges drank, which was hot and gray. Tuls, an Ossin chief off a tender, had three cups and all four hands busy. Yeom, a diver bosun who cooked on a cutter because somebody had to, had brought the food, and it was hers, and nobody at the table had asked what her people ate before they ate it.

"You carry hunters?" Cal said, to Zura.

"A boarding party. Two years."

"They eat with you?"

"They do not eat in the mess."

"Why not?"

Zura's plate moved.

"They say it smells dead."

"Anybody tell the cooks that?"

Zura looked at him.

Cal looked at Tuls.

"You fix hunter hulls."

"Hunter hulls. Gorge hulls. Diver cutters. Whatever comes in."

"Any of them ever on the tender to watch it done?"

"The tender is Ossin."

"That a rule?"

"It is the paper."

Cal looked at Yeom.

"You ever seen a gardener?"

"No."

"You cook what they send."

"Every day."

"They ever ask what your people eat?"

Yeom put her cup down.

"Nobody has asked me that," she said, "in nine years."

Cal opened the legal pad.

---

He brought it back to the office with the supply routes up on the wall, the gardeners' world far up the arc where the food came from, and the flotillas where the fuel came from, and the Ossin's rocks where the parts came from, and the lines between them and the fleet, and how many hulls carried each one, and how many of those hulls had gone off the floor last year.

"They don't mix," Cal said.

"No."

"A hunter ship the hunters gave the Council is still a hunter ship. Hunter crew, hunter cook, hunter food. Gorge ship's gorge. Tender's Ossin. Cutter's divers. Every one of 'em trained at home, their own way, and the world hands the ship over and the Council paints its mark on it." Cal turned a page. "They don't train nobody. The Council. Not one sailor."

"Paper."

"Paper. You stack it on a hull and the stack's a wall."

Alex looked at the lines on the wall.

"How many tenders?"

"Nine. Two forward."

"Colliers?"

"Fourteen."

"Hospital hulls?"

"Two."

"Mess boats?"

Cal looked at him.

"What's a mess boat?"

"Exactly."

---

He said it to the dog first.

Night, in the office, with the door shut and the wall clear on nothing, and the dog on the floor with his chin on his paws and one ear folded wrong.

"They got a fleet that's a pack that ain't been run together."

"—Pack?"

"Every dog in it come from a different man. Trained different. Fed different. Runs with his own and nobody else's." Alex turned the cup in his hands. "You ever run with Cal's dogs?"

"—Hoss."

"What's Hoss do?"

"—Pushes."

"Ruby?"

"—Cuts."

"You?"

"—Trail."

"And it works."

The dog thought about it.

"—When it's right."

"When it's right. And it got right because y'all ran together. Not because you come from the same yard. You didn't." Alex set the cup down. "That's what they need. Not more guns. Run together. Every one of 'em trained the same, from the ground, by the Council, not by whoever raised 'em. Then the specialist stuff. Then mixed. A hunter on a gorge bridge. A gorge in an Ossin yard. A diver cooking for all of 'em, and somebody asking her what her people eat."

"—Then?"

"Then the paper ain't a wall."

The dog lifted his head.

"—And then?"

"Then they need boats that ain't for fighting. Nine tenders. They need thirty. Two hospital hulls for three hundred ships. Not one boat in the whole fleet whose job is to go where the fleet is and hand out something that ain't a ration." He looked at the wall. "If you want to hold, you do what they're doing. If you want to win, you project. And to project you don't need more weapons, buddy. You need ice cream boats."

"—Ice cream?"

"Something cold and sweet, that you don't need, that somebody brought you anyway, a long way from home."

The dog put his chin back down.

"—Cal brought me."

Alex did not say anything for a moment.

"Yeah," he said. "He did."

---

He said it to Halven and Teda in the room with one door, in fewer words than that.

"The members will never," Halven said.

"Never what."

"Give the Council their people to train. It is the one thing the treaty does not say, Colonel, and it does not say it on purpose. A member gives a hull. The hull is the Council's. The people on it are the member's. That is how a hundred worlds agreed to have a fleet at all."

"Then you'll keep losing beautiful."

Teda's plate moved.

"You said a month," he said. "You have used nine days."

"Yes, sir."

"And the rest?"

Alex looked at the wall, and the lines to the worlds that fed the fleet, and six dark marks on a road.

"The rest is waiting on a hunter," he said.

---

The hunters' hull went out on the eleventh day, the same kind of ship that had come down on a mountain for him, built to go somewhere inconvenient and bring a thing back, with weapons behind panels, enough to leave.

Cal was in the bay when Alex got there, against the wall, with the legal pad.

"They're going down the road," Alex said.

"I heard."

"To look at what's eating the pickets. Go in where a cutter can't. Look. Come back."

"I heard that too."

"I want a human on it."

Cal did not look up from the pad.

"Who?"

"Who do you think."

Cal looked up.

Then he looked at the pad in his hand, eleven pages of other people's pain in his own handwriting, and he threw it. Not far. Onto the deck, where it slid and stopped against a hunter's foot.

"Finally," he said. "You know since this started, all I've done is write shit down."

He put his head on one side and cracked his neck, and then the other side.

"Where's my space suit."

"Venn's had your measurements since you come off Swiper."

"What for?"

"He reports himself. Go ask him."

"It better have a visor with shades."

Cal picked the pad up off the deck, because a sergeant major did not leave a thing on a deck, and handed it to Tremblay, who had come down to see the ship go and had not expected to be handed anything.

---

It was on a frame in the tender's bay with Venn under it, and Venn did not come out when they came in, because he had one more thing to do and he did it.

It was Imperial boarding armor. The same dull gray that had come down the retrieval ship's corridor with Rell inside it, built for a long-bodied creature that stood higher than Tarek and lower than a man, and the Ossin had cut it down the middle and built it back up around a man, on numbers taken off Cal in Swiper's bay when Cal had thought he was being measured for a bunk.

It stood taller than Cal. Shoulders like a door. The chest had been made for a creature with more ribs than a man and they had left the extra in, so that the front of it stepped down, plate over plate, to a belt with nothing hanging on it yet. The joints were a softer gray than the plates, with a give in them, and at the small of the back sat a tank the size of a footlocker.

The helmet was on the bench beside it. The visor was gold.

Cal looked at it for a while.

"He put shades on it."

"You told him," Alex said.

"I told you."

"I told him."

Venn came out from under it with all four hands empty.

"It is not shades. It is the visor Imperial boarders wear against a breach flash. It is gold because gold is what stops that. It has always been gold."

Cal looked at the visor.

"It's shades."

Venn's neck vents sighed.

"What's it do?" Alex said.

"It keeps a man alive in vacuum for half a day. It keeps him alive in a corridor where somebody is using the thing that was used on you in the woods. It will stop a hand weapon of the kind Rell's people carry. It will not stop a lance. Nothing stops a lance."

"What's a lance?"

"The line," Venn said. "The bright one. At Vey."

Alex looked at the armor a while.

"That it?"

"It is armor. It goes into vacuum. That is what was asked for." Venn's neck vents sighed. "You did not ask for it to walk on a hull, or to carry anything, or to see, or to speak. I built what was asked for and reported what was not."

"Power?"

"The unit from the package. The one your people turned up three point seven percent. I built the housing to their number and not to ours."

Alex looked at him.

"You reported yourself."

"Of course."

"It work?"

"Annoyingly."

Cal walked round it once, the way he would have looked along a duct.

"There's a place on the arm."

"You said you had a knife," Venn said. "I did not ask what a knife was. I made the place the length you said, and reported that also."

Cal put his hand on the forearm plate. There was a channel in it, blade-shaped, empty.

"How's it fix?"

"It does not require fixing. It is certified."

"Say it takes a hit."

Venn looked at him for a long moment.

"There is wire in the pack," he said. "And a thing your cousin once called a hose clamp, which I have now seen. I put four in. I do not know why."

Cal laughed, once.

"Put me in it."

---

"You want a weapon?" Alex said.

"A taser."

"No gun."

"I can hit a squirrel off a powerline at twenty yards with iron sights," Cal said. "In air. Out there I can't aim the damn thing. May as well throw it at 'em."

Alex looked at him.

"So you aim to get in close."

There was a bowie knife in Cal's hand. Alex had not seen where it came from. It had not been on any manifest since the pasture, or through any quarantine, or in the one bag, and it had been on Cal the whole time. It went into the channel on the forearm like it had been made for it, because it had.

"Yep."

---

Halven brought it himself, the next evening, and did not sit. A courier had come in off the road with the fleet's reports, and one of them was not the fleet's.

"A second human hull has left your system," he said. "It is not Swiper. It is not under your Authority's flag."

Alex did not say anything for a moment.

"That's news to me," he said. "Send a copy of that over. I'll have it looked into on my end and let you know soon as I find anything."

Halven's filaments stirred.

"That is all?"

"That's all I've got, Director."

Halven went out.

Alex sat with the cup. The dog lifted his head off the floor.

"I bet Aras weaseled his way in somehow," Alex said. "Let's get to work."

---

Previous — Episode 16: The Road

Next — Episode 18: By the Book (coming soon)

Galactic Fox Reading Order: GF-017

Previous — Episode 15: Switzerland

Next — Episode 17: The Pylon (coming soon)

---

The stars were put out, and other stars were lit in their place, and Sharova's feet stayed on the floor.

That was the part she did not believe. Twenty-two years. Two stations. On both of them down had been something she carried in her own head, and the floor had never come into it. Now it did. It came from the drive, or so Chief Designer Gribov had told her. How, he did not say. He had looked at her the way a man looks at a woman who has just asked him to explain his wife.

She kept the harness on. More for a false sense of security than anything else.

Ostapenko had the recorder running and the chart up on his panel, and the chart said Alpha Centauri, and the near sun in the window, orange, agreed with it. The other two were points. On the screen under the window were twelve contacts in three echelons, where the folder had put them.

The second seat had not spoken since Vostochny.

She was beautiful. Sharova said it to herself the way she would have said the tank was full, because it was equipment, and it had been issued by the same people who issued the folder. Red hair, the dark red of rowan after the first frost, pinned up under the flight cap so that only the color showed at the temples. Pale, with the kind of paleness that has been kept, not suffered. A mouth that did nothing. Green eyes that came to rest on a thing and stayed, and when they left it, it was because they were done. At Vostochny Sharova had watched three men carrying a bench between them walk it into a wall because the second seat had gone past, and had watched the second seat not turn her head, or do a very good job of it. Everything else a man saw when he looked at her, he had brought with him.

Sharova had flown with people from that building before. They said little, and they were courteous, and they were always looking at something you had not thought was interesting, and afterward it turned out to have been.

Volkova was looking at the twelve contacts.

Sharova had read the folder at Korolyov, in a room it did not leave. The last page was one line in the President's hand. What the second seat's folder said she had not been told. She had not asked. In that building a question was also an answer.

"Send it," she said.

Ostapenko put it on the transmitter, in the Federation's protocol, which the people in the building outside Moscow had built out of the leaked pages and tested against nothing, because there had been nothing to test it against. She read it off his panel before it went.

TO THE LEGATE OF THE HOUSE OF HEAVEN-AND-NIBIRU. THE BLOOD ABOARD ASKS LEAVE TO SPEAK. ONE HULL. NO WEAPON LIVE. THE ASKED WILL COME LOWER.

The Kremlin had argued over this message for two days. In the end they settled on reversing the alien's own words.

Her hand worked the console, and the message was away at the speed of light. She had never thought light slow until she sat watching a screen, waiting for an alien boat to move.

---

Four hours.

A train stands four hours at a junction in the steppe and nobody is told why. It was nothing.

They ran the checklist for the jump home twice, aloud. Ostapenko ate. Volkova did not. Sharova drank tea from the bulb and watched the screen, and the song came into her head that every crew had sung on the bus to the pad since before she was born, the one about the grass by the house, and she let it stay.

One contact left the near echelon and came toward them.

"Boat," Ostapenko said.

"I see it."

The closing rate on his panel ran down to zero and the cabin did not move. No shudder through the deck. The bulb on the rail did not ring. On every docking of her life she had known the moment in her teeth, and this one she had to read off a number.

She unstrapped. Stood. Her boots stayed on the deck, and she wobbled a moment and looked down at them with suspicion.

"Hatch."

Ostapenko entered the combination of commands that would cycle the door. For a second, nothing happened. Then the familiar sound of Russian efficiency churned through the ship as the pressure equalized, the same as every other time she had cycled an airlock on the ISS. But this time there was the added sound of the other ship, barely there, a whisper compared to them.

What came through the hatch was a dark coat, and a gold thing at the throat, like an icon's without a face in it, and a head that stayed down. One pace inside, he stopped, and did not speak.

He was a small man, shorter than any of them by a head, and even bowed he stood straighter than they did. The skin she could see was a dull pale white, as if the man tanned by moonlight. He kept his face pointed at the floor and his palms open. If he was nervous, she could not tell. The only thing on him that moved was his hair, which rose all at once in a single ruffle and lay down again. That, and his eyes. He was said to be the same race as the alien Halven, but when she caught him glancing up, a second set of lids blinked across them.

"Welcome aboard. Legate, I presume?" Sharova said. "I am Colonel Sharova, commander of the Molniya. This is Flight Engineer Ostapenko, my first officer. And this is Cosmonaut-Researcher Volkova."

Still bowed, the alien replied.

"Thank you, Commander Sharova, for your invitation. Yes. My title is Legitianate. It seems Mr. Huskey's translator had not quite caught up to him when last we spoke. It means I command this section of the Empire's fleet. If you please, I am most curious as to the nature of your invitation."

"Please sit, Legitianate," Volkova said, the first words she had spoken since the runway at Vostochny. "Allow me to have the light adjusted for you. Flight Engineer Ostapenko, if you would be so kind."

Ostapenko looked at Sharova. Sharova nodded. The cabin went down two steps, and the twelve contacts on the screen came up, and the Legitianate's second lids passed once more and stayed open.

"The light troubles you," Volkova said.

"No." He glanced up at the cabin lamp. "Where I have been, there was a great deal less light than this. My eyes have never quite come back from it."

He did not say where. Volkova did not ask. Sharova watched her put it away, the way a woman at a market puts a coin in the pocket she means to come back to.

He straightened at her invitation and sat in the fourth seat with his hands open on his knees.

Volkova sat down once he had taken his seat, turning so that she and the Legitianate were knee to knee. She leaned forward, very slightly, and something in her face that had been shut came open. Sharova, for the first time, wondered if she was watching a spy film, the way this woman had gone from ice to heat.

"Thank you," he said, to Volkova.

They did not speak at once. Neither was sure of the other's protocol, and for a while the cabin held the hum of the scrubbers and nothing else.

Finally Volkova said, "Forgive me, Legitianate. I know nothing of the protocol past what the Americans have let slip. Do I speak first, or do you? And if you do not mind, may we drop the formalities. Call me Vera."

"You have spoken first," he said. "So it is yours. Aras. It is the only one I have."

Volkova smiled.

"Please, Aras, if I may ask. Why are you blockading our system? Our representative, Mr. Carney, has informed you that we will not be siding with the Federation in your conflict. It is Earth's official stance. So why blockade us?"

"Blockade is your word," he said. "Nothing has been stopped. Your ships have gone through mine four times, and I have not fired on one."

"Then what are twelve ships for?"

"Waiting," the Legitianate said, and she had seen that face at a kitchen table every Sunday of her childhood, on her grandfather, over a board with two glasses of tea going cold beside it: the face of a man who has just been shown that the one across from him can play, and has settled back into his chair for the long game with a smile.

"Waiting on whom?" Vera asked. "I believe you have met Earth's representative. And received Earth's answer."

The way she said it, Sharova noticed, did not count the three of them as Earth. She understood now why the Kremlin had sent this woman.

Aras started to speak, then paused a moment and regarded the woman in front of him.

"I believe, Cosmonaut-Researcher Volkova, I have been waiting on you."

---

The page came to Rell, because Rell kept the Legitianate's door and the Legitianate's door was where his pages came.

It said the Legitianate had gone through the hatch of the human hull and the hatch had closed and the hull had gone home. It said the Sworn commanded the screen until he returned. It did not say when that was.

He took it to the Sworn, who read it once, and looked at the board, and at the empty place on it where a small hot mark had been, and said nothing at all, and Rell went back and stood at a door with nobody behind it, because that was his job.

The Sworn did not go back to his chair.

He went down to the strongroom and stood at its door, which was as far as a gorge went with the book inside. He did not need it open. Every captain of a ship of the line was taught the one law in it that might ever be his to keep: that a Legitianate did not leave his section, nor go aboard a hull that was not the Empire's, except by order of the House, or at the asking of the blood.

In all his years of service the Sworn had never seen such an order. Nobody he had served with had seen one either. He stood a long time at the door with the second part, the part about the blood.

Then he went up and commanded the screen.

---

The office had been a storeroom, and the Village had given it to him because a theatre commander had to have a door, and the door had his name on it in two scripts and Earth's letters, and Earth's letters were wrong.

HUSKY.

He left it. A man who corrected the first thing he was given got handed the second thing slower.

There was a table that changed shape when he stood up, and a wall that went clear when it decided he was not trying to touch it. In the corner, his direct line to Washington. The fax, as everyone called it. It was one of the few pairs in Earth's hands, which meant he could not crack it open to see what made it tick. Yet. Venn had told him once that the pairs came from deep in the Empire, from a yard nobody on the desk had ever seen, and that the Ossin had been trying to make one of their own for a hundred and twenty-two years and had a room full of very expensive pieces to show for it. On his desk, table, thing, a hard case. Sitting down, he adjusted the chair after a moment of trial and error and the successful avoidance of percussive maintenance. Opening the case, he nearly wept.

Inside was a small gray notebook. He plugged it into the 110 outlet somebody had jury-rigged onto an alien battery, and waited for it to power on.

It had come with a letter. One of the boys at State had sent it on, from the people at Google. Nothing else in the note. There was no password at sign-in, and when he finally reached the desktop there was only one icon. Chrome.

No.

He clicked, and the address bar came up.

His hands moved without thinking, the same strokes he had laid into every keyboard he had ever typed on the moment he was by himself.

Pornhub.com. Two redheads.

The familiar gold on black logo sprang up before his eyes. Scrolling down through dozens of thumbnails, he went to click on a classic, when he remembered that the wall of his office had a mind to go clear when it felt like it.

With the sigh of a man who has not seen the internet in months, he opened a new tab, and left the other open for later.

The browser seemed to hit just about any site he could think of, everything dated in the metadata to the day Swiper lifted off from Area 51 on its last run. Curious as to the state of the world, he opened a few news sites and began to browse.

It did not surprise him to find his own name. A man goes to space, that's news. What surprised him was the cult following.

---

The news sites were frozen on the same morning, all of them, the morning Swiper left the desert, four days after New York.

EARTH NEUTRAL. The four lines, in a box, the way papers ran a thing they wanted you to keep. Envoys out, none in. No bridge. Stations on the doors. Nothing from the Empire we cannot make ourselves. Under it, the man in the gray suit at a lectern, and a quote from him about Switzerland.

Under that, a smaller headline, from a paper that had got it from somebody who should not have given it.

U.S. TO SEND ADVISERS TO FEDERATION WAR, SOURCES SAY. COLONEL BRIEFED JOINT CHIEFS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

He read it. It had his name in it, and his rank, and the word Tank, and a line from a source with knowledge of the briefing who said the colonel had told the chiefs the United States was the other fellow this time. The source had not said what that meant. The paper had guessed.

Then the third headline, and it was not from a paper. It was from the place under the papers, where the papers went to find out what people were saying, and it said:

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS ALEX HUSKEY?

He clicked it.

---

It went down a long way.

Swiper had come home in the dark and left in the dark, and eleven hundred people had been told not to watch, and nobody outside the fence had seen it either time. The Pentagon had said a report was being evaluated. The Pentagon had not said where the man who wrote it was. So the whole internet had gone looking, the way it did, all at once, with no plan and every phone on Earth.

There was a man in a colonel's uniform at a gas station in Sevierville who was not him. There was a photograph of a gray Silverado on the interstate west of Knoxville with a caption that said it was Cal's, and it was Cal's, and the man in the passenger seat had his cap down, and it was him, and four hundred people in the comments had decided it was not.

There was a thread with the Knoxville anchor and the good hair, standing at the second gate at Oak Ridge, saying the name of a guard named Ledford who had told a sergeant to wait in his truck, and Ledford, who had not asked to be on television, saying, I told him. Somebody had made it into a thing you put on the end of an argument. I told him. It was on T-shirts.

SEALED AIN'T LOCKED was on T-shirts too. A fourth-grade class in Cookeville had made a sign of it with a corporal named Whaley standing at the back in uniform, and their teacher had explained what it meant on camera and got it wrong, and eleven thousand people had corrected her, and she had posted again, and got it wrong a different way.

There was a woman on a couch on a morning show saying the word hillbilly like it was a compliment, and the man beside her saying it back like it was a rank.

There was the cable host, the one who had said the P5 was a country club, saying he was no Armstrong, Armstrong had a flag and a script, this fellow had a dog and a radio and went anyway, and then leaning into the camera and saying, and unlike Bond, folks, he came back with the plans.

Alex laughed, once, not much, the way a man laughs when a horse he did not know was behind him blows on his neck.

He kept going.

The old things were down there too, come back up, because the internet did not keep things in order. Cal in the driveway, three weeks after the bald, with the case, and half the county behind him. He had laughed until his ribs hurt the first time. He did not laugh now. He watched Cal's face, which did not do anything, and understood for the first time what it had cost Cal to stand there. And under it, in the sidebar, playing on its own, Brooke with a camera behind her asking Cal if he believed in aliens.

Because Boone does.

Eleven million people had watched that.

It was the thing everybody quoted. He saw why in the next thread down.

---

The thread was called THE DOG, and it was not on a news site, and it was not on the place under the news sites. It was on a forum where men who ran hounds argued about hounds, the same forum Jim read on the porch with his glasses on his forehead, and it had been going for five months.

The first post was from the week after the bald. A man in Cocke County had written that his cousin lived up the road from the Huskey place, and that the old bluetick went to the edge of the yard every evening at six and opened once down the hollow, and that a hound did not do that for a man who was dead.

The hound men had taken that seriously, because they were hound men.

Somebody had asked what the dog's mouth was like. Somebody who had hunted with Alex had answered: long, deep, no babble, don't run trash. Somebody had said that was a strike dog and that a strike dog did not call for a dead man, it called for a lost one, and there was a difference, and any man who had run dogs knew it. Somebody had said his granddaddy had a dog that did the same thing for a boy that went to Korea, every evening, for two years, and the boy came home.

Four days before the freeze somebody had put up a clip, from the road. A screen door, and a woman's shape behind it, and the door not opening, and a reporter saying she had declined to comment, and then, quieter, that the dog had just done something and did anyone know what that was, and somebody off camera saying, six o'clock.

He closed that one.

He read one more, because it was the last thing in the thread and it was not from a hound man. It was from a man in Lagos named Adeyemi, who said he had never seen a hound and never would, and had come to the thread the way everybody had, from the news, and what he had written was: my whole life I looked up at night and wondered if anybody was out there, and it turns out the answer is a guy from Tennessee with a dog. Where do I get a bluetick?

Alex sat with his hand on the lid of the laptop.

Then he shut it, and put it back in the case with the power supply, and secured the case, and picked up his cup, and started for the door.

He stopped. He looked at the case.

He picked it up.

---

Previous — Episode 15: Switzerland

Next — Episode 17: The Pylon (coming soon)

Galactic Fox Reading Order: GF-016

Cover Art & Blurb

Jessep 4

Jessep brushed the street dust from his hoodie, inspecting his body for road rash. Generously, Lesahera had ejected him at a low speed. The tumble hadn’t even ripped through his jeans.

He maneuvered behind the rusted husk of a car, and inspected the cordon surrounding the warehouse ahead of him. Drenched beneath the royal mauve of the Thrallwark, it cast an ominous shadow.

That anyone would use this building to store anything baffled him. Its rough and shanty appearance surely served as a testament to its hasty, regulation-circumvented construction. Its most vulnerable point of ingress would be somewhere up high. Most likely through some decay in the sheet-metal roof.

The real difficulty would be in evading the dozen or so Global Facilitations soldiers milling about without objective. To station this many paychecks out here… Whatever that warehouse contained exceeded the definition of the word valuable.

A few jarheads occasionally inspected their surroundings, though most seemed disinterested in locating any trouble. Situated in a side alley, an additional squad. They flung cards across a deployed table.

In actuality, they probably felt safe and complacent. While being outside of the city subjected them to danger, their superior weapons and plate armour prevented any ordinary citizen from presenting a threat.

Trouble wouldn’t be sniffing them out anytime soon. Unless, of course, trouble’s name was Jessep. And its game was snooping where Global Facilitations would rather he didn’t.

Looming dread began to build at the back of his mind. There were plenty of highly secure facilities all over the globe. Breaking into one of those bought a one-way ticket to life in prison. So, what would the penalty be for infiltrating a secret black site?

He shuddered at the thought. Global Facilitations had a nasty reputation. Bootlickers always did.

After Earth’s imprisonment beneath the Thrallwark, standard governments faltered – never to rise again. A byproduct of the planet-wide social upheaval caused by orbital bombardment, and ecological collapse. The Gio-Crü’s complete obliteration of society, culture, and the environment, sealed the deal on the old world’s methodologies. Blasted back to the Dark Ages, they say.

Though, only temporarily. Taking a few hundred years to consolidate power, a new world order eventually emerged. Global Facilitations championed the Gio-Crü’s Edicts, and refused to share control of Humanity’s future. In exchange, peace and progress returned to a fractured civilization. The same peace and progress that impeded Jessep now.

Turning back wasn’t an option. Lesahera had already stretched her generosity as thin as it could stretch without making herself appear weak. Too weak, and she’d open herself up to a coup.

Jessep swallowed his fear, and located a line providing access to the neighbourhood rooftops. He shimmied up a pipe. Kicking off a thin window ledge for an extra boost, he grasped the top lip of a three-story home constructed of recycled wood. As he continued to climb, he took a look at the sky.

Outside of the atmospheric shield, an orbital platform drifted amongst the stars. There were even rumors of Global Facilitations receiving aid from aliens. If you could believe it.

Jessep wasn’t too convinced they existed. The Gio-Crü’s arrival a thousand years ago might as well have been a myth Global Facilitations perpetuated to maintain draconian control. With the Thrallwark a well-kept secret of Human invention.

Leaping across rooftops, Jessep narrowed the distance. A street away from the warehouse, he caught his breath while eavesdropping on the soldiers. Their thick, full-faced helmets obstructed their voices, providing them a stereo-esque quality as it forced their words through a speaker.

“… not so sure it’ll work out…”

“It’s just a prototype after…”

“… Royal Flush!”

A series of groans preambled the distinct sound of many plastic chips raking across a table. While they were distracted, Jessep transferred to the warehouse roof via a series of structural supports arranged as an overhead ladder.

Atop the warehouse, Jessep could better gauge the building’s total size. The roof stretched on for at least half a kilometer. Walking its length would be a pain, but its surface area ensured he’d be able to locate at least one weak spot to exploit.

As he canvased for his entry, the sheer size of the facility beneath him began to come into question. If they needed to hide many small things, wouldn’t it be best to do so in many small places? Big things required a big building.

Jessep took imaginary inventory of what “a big thing” could be. A vat-grown giraffe would be nuts. As would a mountain of gold doubloons. Atmospheric shuttles were large, by virtue of being flight-capable craft, but at the end of the day the largest models were no bigger than a common catamaran. Regardless, neither giraffe nor shuttle would require such a warehouse to store. With no shuttle being valuable enough to store so unconventionally, outside of city jurisdiction.

His search for an entry point culminated within a few minutes. A vent duct, with weak screws, detached easily when kicked. It was a tight squeeze, but nothing unfamiliar to Jessep. He lowered himself into the ventilation shaft, sliding down a steep angle into the warehouse.

He crawled around the duct, on his elbows and knees, looking for a vent panel to open. Through lattice grilles too small for egress, he caught infrequent glimpses of the warehouse interior.

No Global Facilitations patrolled inside. Good news. Though, he didn’t spy much at all. Expecting to see pallets of drugs, or weapons, the reality was an empty warehouse. He continued his crawl further into the facility.

Something shiny made itself apparent through the latest lattice grille. The object’s burnished surface catching the mauve-hued moonlight penetrating through a sealed window. From the limited viewport, Jessep couldn’t make out the object’s size. Only that it was painted cherry-red. A bold colour. His best guess, a sports car of some sort.

Oh! Or perhaps a new model of atmospheric shuttle? One too fast, too dangerous, to test within city limits. His heart began to race. How exciting!

This information was probably sufficient enough to rebalance the scales with Lesahera. But… He couldn’t possibly leave now. He itched to find out what this shuttle truly looked like. And how big its engines were. Maybe what the interior smelled like. Any new model must be quite swift.

A dozen feet up ahead, the vent’s exit. A man-sized inspection door. Unable to turn around in the claustrophobic space, Jessep beat on the door with his fists, wishing he could use his feet. It refused to dislodge.

With a boom, the portion of vent he occupied collapsed. It crashed ten feet to the ground. He crawled out of the section of busted shaft, its form dented from his unbraced body banging around in there during the fall.

“Owowow…” Jessep rubbed his head.

The noise was sure to attract those jokers outside. He dusted himself off with a few haphazard strikes. His eyes wandered for an exit, only to be drawn to the large craft centered in this portion of the warehouse.

Sleek, like a ribbon, it stretched over a hundred feet long. Although it had no wings, it spanned approximately thirty feet wide from thickest edge to thickest edge. The stem of a flower described it best. Its lengthy, smooth surface formed the majority of its construction.

The stem culminated in a series of four petals that surrounded the drive cone, nestling it in the bud of a flower unprepared to bloom. Extendable struts attached the petal-panels to the main ship construction, the reinforcements designed to look like sepals, containing the petal-panels in a retracted position.

The presence of six pillars supporting its horizontal form gave the impression an ant intended to carry it away, absconding with its single rose. Beneath the flowering portion, an embarkment ramp leading into the craft. Audaciously painted on the starboard side in ivory, the letters “K.O.S.”

Unlike any atmospheric shuttle he’s ever seen, it lacked windows. Without wings, it stood no chance to provide a smooth flight beneath the Thrallwark. Affixed to the trimmed end of the stem, a bunch of hardware. Radio arrays, a dish, some sort of laser. All sorts of equipment that’d break during flight. The tips of the petals were adorned with their own micro-thrusters, that if ever engaged, would cause the vessel to spin out of control, and crash into the ground.

Unless it was never meant to fly in atmosphere…

A smile as wide as a billboard broke across Jessep’s face. He wasn’t sure how this was possible. Before him stood an honest-to-God starship. His excitement couldn’t be contained. Dancing a little shuffle, he threw his fist into the air.

What! What the hell was it doing here?

Humanity had achieved interstellar flight prior to the Thrallwark imprisonment. After, without any room to fly, all ships were inevitably grounded. Destined to be slowly dismantled over the coming centuries. Their once-lost technology to serve as the foundation necessary to rebuild the world.

Though, this ship appeared like nothing he had seen in-game. Odd, considering Faster Than Armada’s acclaim came from their dedicated recreation of every ship from Humanity’s history, even the embarrassing Jonathan-Ace.

Something new? How was it even made? Where?

He assumed Humanity had lost interest in building starships. The knowledge lost. Mere mentions of space travel violated the Gio-Crü’s Edicts, so factories weren’t exactly advertised like dime-a-dozen coffee shops.

Damn, the last Human to have flown one of these babies must have died over a thousand years ago. A consequence of the Thrallwark’s impenetrable forcefield.

Metal screeched against metal. Luminous mauve saturated the warehouse. A tag team of Global Facilitations soldiers entered through a loading dock door. Jessep quickly sheltered behind one of the ship’s six extended landing gear.

“It’s getting trucked out tomorrow, soon you won’t have to deal with it at all,” one said.

“Yeah, yeah. Story of my life. Let’s just make sure some rat didn’t scratch the paint,” the other replied.

To this, the first guard snorted a laugh. “Through the bi-weave?”

Armed with rail rifles slung over their backs, the soldiers toted around some serious firepower. If he were caught now, having seen this “K.O.S.,” he’d be killed on sight. Information about a starship could not escape here.

A leak this severe would cause wide-reaching unrest for Global Facilitations. Keepers of the Gio-Crü’s slave laws. And now breakers of the Gio-Crü’s slave laws.

His excitement regressed to dread. He’d return to Lesahera and inform her, as originally agreed upon. For all he knew, this was a replica of an unproduced model. Or some rich politician’s pet project. Nothing worth getting excited over, as it probably couldn’t even fly. Where to? With what fuel?

At the very least, if he escaped with his life and this information, he could be promoted within Lesahera’s pyramid, and start flying shuttles around the slums. Gaining real experience was the only way he’d get a chance to fly legally within the city. It’d be up to The Marquess to accuse the government of hypocrisy.

“Contact,” one of the soldiers said. They immediately stopped goofing off, drawing their rifles. “I guess that vent broke. Fat rat, huh?”

“You idiot, switch to thermal scan. Look over there…”

Shit. Did no one pride themselves on traditional, luddite henchmen?

Without hesitation or mercy, Global Facilitations unloaded on Jessep’s position. Rail rifles emitting their signature electrical revving, then WHOOSH as a thin shaving of metal was ejected via magnets out of their barrels at inconceivable velocities.

The slugs bombarded the extended landing gear, its trunk thick enough to conceal Jessep’s body from being targeted directly. Expecting to be annihilated along with his cover, he instead took another breath.

Additional rounds struck the landing gear, discharging a vibrant electrical crack, that at this near distance deafened Jessep. The projectile’s point of contact shone brilliantly, coloured a deep indigo, about a foot away from the actual landing gear. Indigo radiated away further up the ship, though less saturated and intense, as the energy dispersed against this unknown jacket in all directions. After a dozen intercepted rounds, the brilliance dimmed a degree.

“Hold!” a soldier shouted.

They stopped firing. Were they as confused by what they had just seen, as he was? If they were, he couldn’t waste this opportunity. Picking a random moment, Jessep exited cover. He sprinted to another landing gear.

Exposing himself, Global Facilitations took aim. The slight delay between the depress of a rail rifle’s trigger, and the dispensing of its round, the sole advantage he could leverage. Nearly feeling his enemy’s killer intent, he swerved after hearing their weapon’s iconic charge, then pivoted before the energy unleashed.

A slug missed him by about four inches to the left. The air in its wake nearly eight degrees hotter than before. Continuing, the projectile pierced through the warehouse wall, leaving a melted perforation.

Unceasing, it penetrated another warehouse wall. Then presumably the last warehouse wall; soaring out into the slums, until the munition’s self-immolation reduced it inert. Possibly after a collateral casualty, or two. Global Facilitations certainly weren’t counting.

Jessep skittered behind a new landing gear, confident in the protection it offered. Or their reluctance to shoot it, anyways. Within reach, the embarkment ramp leading inside the craft. His heart tugged him towards it.

Nope. No way. He’d just be cornering himself. Fulfilling a death wish. What he needed to do was to escape, reach Lesahera, and beg to be hidden from the government.

As he pleaded with a higher power for a chance to make it out alive, a second loading dock door swung open, flushing the environment with the Thrallwark’s oppression. A contingent of soldiers marched in, rail rifles at the ready. They fluttered their rifle’s charge, refusing to release their munitions.

“Crossfire! Crossfire!” the original duo shouted.

Pincered between the two poorly-positioned groups, blessed with a few seconds of thought, Jessep made his call.

He sprinted up the embarkment ramp as the soldiers repositioned to improve their firing angles. Dark inside, the only light came from a series of glowing buttons next to the entrance. Desperately, he smacked them all. One prompted the ramp to close, one last hail of rail fire striking the shimmering indigo field during its slow rise.

Sealed inside the ship, Jessep fumbled around a dark compartment. He couldn’t hear the commotion outside. If they continued to shoot, he had no inclination. Feeling along the wall with both palms, he proceeded down a smooth metal corridor to a robust door.

It opened at the press of a green, hip-high button. Stepping inside, the room exploded into full illumination – industrial bulbs offering a harsh, starch-white light.

Jessep averted his eyes, rubbing them until they adjusted. Once open, they were treated to a personalized cake. A one-pilot cockpit with controls just familiar enough to convince him to do something downright crazy.

Read Ahead on Royal Road

Everyone draws inspiration in different ways. Some create a dark atmosphere for themselves, some put on metal music in the background, and some can’t compose without coffee and cigarettes. A writer friend of mine, whom I’m very fond of, says he can’t write stories unless his cousin is studying mathematics behind him. Another filmmaker friend of mine could only write screenplays while listening to Syd Barrett’s song “Octopus”; he would keep the song on loop throughout the entire writing process.

It’s been about twenty years since I discovered my own. I’d been going through that famous writer’s block. Until that day, I hadn’t done anything extra to help me write. I didn’t create a special atmosphere for myself, listen to any particular songs, or wait for a certain time of day. Night, day, noon—it made no difference. Once a week, I’d write a three or four-page story and keep working toward my goal. When I reached a hundred stories, I would start sending my book to publishers.

But I’d hit a wall. I wanted to write, but whenever I sat down at my computer, not a single word would come out. Vague, half-formed thoughts kept drifting through my mind, and even when I came up with a good idea, I couldn’t put it down on paper.

That day, I thought, if that’s how things were going to be, I might as well try some of the famous methods for finding inspiration: writing at night, putting on some soft music, having a cup of coffee, and so on.

I prepared the right atmosphere. I turned off the lights, and now the only thing illuminating the room was the glow of my computer screen. I put on Sigur Rós’s debut album. There was no one else in the house. My roommate had gone on vacation the day before, which added to the atmosphere: being alone.

Of course, it had absolutely no effect. I was already on the third track. I still had a few ideas in my head, but I couldn’t get the first sentence out.

Then I heard a sound behind me. A whisper. Something like a call, as if someone had gone “psst.”

I turned around and looked, but there was no one there. I was a little spooked. I thought I might have heard it wrong; it had sounded very much like a human voice, but it could have come from an object, too.

Then suddenly, the door behind me swung wide open.

I flinched at the sound. I got up from my computer and turned on the light. Anxiously, I left my room and went to the kitchen. I was searching for something without even realizing it, though I had no idea what I was looking for. Sigur Rós’s album was still playing, and I could hear it from the kitchen. I couldn’t make sense of anything, and I didn’t know what to think or which possibility to consider. I drank a glass of water.

I’d never had an experience like it before. My first thought was to leave the house. I stood frozen in the kitchen. Involuntarily, I found myself waiting for another movement, for something to topple over or for some other sound.

Eventually, I’d calmed down a little, since nothing else happened. I spent half an hour in the kitchen, with all my senses on high alert and listening to the music coming from my room. Then, reluctantly, I made my way back to my room.

The urge to write was still there. My routine had been disrupted; I hadn’t been able to write a single word for a month, and now I wasn’t going to let fear get in my way. I wanted my writer’s block to end today. My goal was a hundred sentences. Even if I didn’t finish the story, I wanted to write something. Coming back to my room and hearing the music louder had increased my desire to write.

At the same time, I kept thinking, ''What the hell was that just now?'' But now I was back at my computer.

I put on my favorite Sigur Rós song, “Svefn-g-englar.”

And then, for the first time in a whole month, I wrote my first sentence: “As he tried to make sense of the dream he’d had the day before, he fell asleep again; it was his favorite thing to think about before going to sleep, the meaning of the dream he’d had the previous night.”

I’d written my first sentence, without even having a story in mind. Normally, I would come up with a story first, plan it out, work out the whole thing in my head from beginning to end, and only then start writing. Starting a story whose content I hadn’t figured out yet with an ordinary sentence was something new for me. I liked it.

I was still afraid. I wanted to turn around and look, but now that I’d started writing, I didn’t want to stop either. By the time the song ended, I’d written the fifth sentence, and in the silence before the next track began, I heard that sound again. “Psst.”

I quickly turned around and looked. There was no one there. Everything felt much more real now. Something was happening. Someone was calling out to me. I was afraid to turn off the light in my room, so it was still on. I nervously turned my head back toward the computer screen. My heart was pounding. I added another sentence. It was my favorite one so far. I liked everything about it: my choice of words, its length, its place in the story.

Then the door slammed shut. I began to hear footsteps inside the room. I was afraid to look. The footsteps wandered around the room. My hands were resting on the keyboard. The footsteps moved toward the door, stopped there, and opened it again. It was as if someone had left the room.

I was frozen to my chair. This time, I didn’t even have the instinct to run away. Whatever that thing was, I was afraid of encountering it. I couldn’t get up from my chair, and I couldn’t look away from my computer screen. I kept reading what I’d written over and over. Six sentences. I’d go back to the beginning and read them again. It was as if the thing was doing whatever it wanted now. I could hear running footsteps.

Then came the sound of walking. After that, my door closed again, and at the same moment, the light in my room went out.

And then another sentence came to mind. I wrote it down. Then another. My fingers had found their rhythm. The sentences kept coming one after another.

“Set me free. Open the window. Set me free.”

This voice wasn’t a whisper, nor was it some strange, otherworldly sound coming from a different frequency. It was unmistakably a human voice. I was afraid to turn around.

I couldn’t remember ever feeling such a strong urge to write or enjoying it this much. I kept writing. My fingers wouldn’t stop. The door opened again, slowly this time. I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t going to look behind me until I’d finished the story. Without spending even a second thinking between sentences, I continued writing as the songs played.

The footsteps continued. I turned off the music. I didn’t question anything. I just kept writing. The fear I felt and the joy of seeing that I could write again were mingled together, unfolding in harmony with each other.

Strange sounds I couldn’t describe were coming from behind me now. I could feel myself developing a fever. My body was reacting, and my mind was urging me to turn around and see what was going on. The sounds seemed like those of someone playing with their own hair. Like things rubbing against other things. I kept writing, resisting the urge to turn around with all my might.

I’d turned off the music because I wanted to focus on being afraid. I’d realized that the more frightened I became, the better I wrote, and the more consistently I could keep going. It was hard not to look for a rational explanation for the sounds, for a human voice telling me to set it free. But right now, somehow, stopping writing seemed even harder.

That thing had now come right up beside me. I could feel it touching my hair. My fear had reached a point where I could no longer bear it. My consciousness refused to accept this unnatural behavior. My instinct to put an end to the fear and my mind’s desire to keep being afraid were at odds with each other.

And I wrote the final sentence: “If all of this is a hallucination, I will never forgive my own mind. If the only beautiful and meaningful thing I’ve experienced in this miserable life isn’t real, I will never trust my mind again, I will never follow its instructions, and I will doubt everything I think until the day I die.”

The sentence came to an end, and just as the pleasure of writing faded away, my fear reached its absolute peak. With the beautiful feeling that had balanced it gone, the fear was left alone, making itself felt from head to toe. As if I’d been struck by a blow, as if a punch to the face had knocked me out, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, my head was resting on the keyboard, and the screen was filled with hundreds of letter h’s.

I sent the story to several literary magazines. Two of them accepted it and published it.

I never experienced anything like that again, and at no point in my life did I ever feel such an overwhelming urge to write or take so much pleasure in writing. I desperately wanted to experience it again, but nothing ever happened that frightened me so much. For days, I sat at my computer waiting for that thing to come back, but it never did. I wrote stories and kept writing. But I never loved any of them as much as I loved the one I’d written that day.

And now, twenty years later, in my mid-sixties, I’ve still never questioned what happened that night. Not even once. Because I was afraid that if I did, I might understand what had happened—and if that thing ever came back, I might not be as frightened.