Zildiz stood naked on the edge of eternity, bare feet numb against the cold balustrade of the balcony. Her narrow shoulders trembled as a wild wind blew across the onion-bulb minarets of Cthonis, driving forward the marching columns of rain that had trampled the Parchment City into a waterlogged swamp. The monsoon had raged unabated for the last two weeks, delivering in that period more rainfall than the region had received in the last two years combined. And this right after a dry spell whose severity and duration had broken all previous records, whittling down the frillhead populations to just under replacement levels. The broad savannahs east of the wetlands had become a boneyard where entire herds had perished from the drought, skeletons picked clean by scarabs. Deprived of their primary food source, the Gallivant population would soon share the same fate.

Slight perturbations in the climate change program, the scriveners had said calm the rising tide of hysteria. This was to be expected in the process of abrupt terraformation. They had kept on spouting that line even as the deluge crept up to the lower spires of Cthonis, displacing thousands of zeta drones from the paper cottages that extruded from the hollowed-out tree trunks so that the former looked like ivory-white conch shells clinging to the sides of a tidal shelf. In a little while the flood waters would pour over the lip of her balcony and drown Zildiz’s nest as well.

Not that it mattered anymore. How could it? All the rivers in the world could not match the ocean of her sorrow. She had left her emaciated exomorph on its stand in her bedchamber where Menash still lay sleeping, bundled up in her cocoon and blissfully ignorant of what she was about to do next.

As icy as it was out here, the precious bundle she held against her breast was colder still. Under the shawl she could see the outline of his cherubic face, lips blue where he had received the kiss of oblivion.

The fledgling symbiotes bonded to his emaciated body had been unable to fight off the outbreak of waterborne diseases which the stagnant floodwaters had brought about. In the end Zildiz had discarded all of his components except for the cardiovascular compensator that helped him breathe. The symbiotes had yet to undergo endosymbiosis and lacked the efficiency of a complete exomorph, each organism requiring too many extra calories for her and Menash to sustain their development.

Though the pair of them had tried their utmost to wade into the placid lakes and scare up some fish, there were simply not enough prey-forms to go around—those vile Leapers controlled most of the territory upstream, reaping a tremendous bounty with their kilometers-wide drag nets while the Gallivants in the lowlands lived hand to mouth. No matter how carefully Zildiz had scrimped, rationed and preserved the food in their larder, eventually the crumbs had been licked up by the other three hungry mouths she had to feed. In her desperation Zildiz resorted to the unthinkable extreme of feeding him from her own body mass, suckling him on the secretions of her innard’s mammary glands. And when even that dried out she started chewing up her own exomorph, the slew of digestive reagents in her salivary glands breaking it down into a digestible mash, which she spooned by hand into his tiny mouth.

But the complex protein chains and polysaccharides of the suits proved too complex for his stomach to glean much nutrition from it, and eventually she reached her wings and thoracic braces and had to stop. Without her wings she could not hunt efficiently, and her other three children would starve as well.

Wracked by stabbing hunger pangs and nauseous from an intestinal flu she’d caught from some plague-stricken zetas, all Zildiz could do was hold her brood close through the night and share her body’s warmth with them. And though she’d held onto him with all her strength, Arachnea took him anyway, stealing in like a thief in the small hours of the morning to rob Zildiz of her pride and joy.

Now she watched the storm moving over the face of the waters, thinking of the silent emerald depths that waited below, untroubled by all the noise and senseless fury of the world.

Oh, but what she would give to know a moment of that peace! She tied the bundle tight around her gaunt frame and gave Seylim one final kiss on the forehead.

“My morning glory,” she whispered to him, brushing the soft curls of hair from his unseeing eyes.

“Zildiz?” she heard Menash call to her from the doorway, his voice clearly frightened, “Zildiz, what are you doing!”

“You just wouldn’t listen,” she said with a hollow voice tinged with bitterness, “I tried to tell you. Four was too many. We both knew this could happen.”

“Oh, god,” Menash quavered, “Is it Seylim? Is he—"

“Gone,” she said pitilessly, “A few hours ago.”

“It was my fault, not yours,” he said at once, “I just thought that with all the progress we’d made fixing Arachnea, that our systems had grown resilient enough to withstand these shocks. I was wrong. Do you hear me? I was wrong. Come away from there, my love. Please? I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Zildiz raged, showing her boundless contempt for him. It was incredible just how monumentally stupid males could be. In that respect they were all the same. Good for fighting or mating, but not much else, “You just don’t get it, do you? I’m not sorry at all.”

She lifted her foot off the ledge as if to dip her toes in the side of a pool and Menash rushed towards her, crying out in anguish: “No! Don’t!”

But she was already falling through the air, with nothing to catch her but the open arms of forever’s embrace—

“Woah, now! Look out, we’ve got a live one!”

Firm hands seized her by the shoulders and heaved her back up like a bundle of sticks.

“Quick man, strap her in tight before she hurts herself. We’ll be coming up on a lot of turbulence in a moment and it’ll be like riding a wheelbarrow down a flight of stairs.”

Zildiz felt the small of her back touch a wobbling jellied surface as soft clamps tightened round her waist and across her chest. Clumsy fingers poked her face and forced her eyelids open to expose her retinas to a blinding stab of light.

“Her pupils contracted,” she heard the Fleet-man say, “No lasting brain damage, I think.”

“It was nifty work getting your mask on her so quick,” Exar replied, as chipper as ever, “Now set your ass down in a compression capsule and buckle up. This puppy’s gonna hit seven gees in a hurry.”

Zildiz blinked the swirling dots in her vision away and tried to raise herself up on her elbows, but a jolt from the roaring thrusters flattened her out again on the couch’s seat, where a set of ergonomic vices that constricted around her stomach, thighs and calves to prevent the blood from pooling up within her body from the massive acceleration they were undergoing. Zildiz had experienced extreme g-forces a few times in her life, mostly during dog-fights with other kindreds capable of flight like Leapers, Xylorns or the extinct Nectarines. In these battles the ability to cut inside the opponent’s turning radius was a matter of life or death, necessitating sharp turns at breakneck speeds.

She clenched her abdominal muscles to tighten her blood vessels and keep from blacking out. Her exomorph’s pressure bladders weren’t working, and Zildiz realized that the gelatinous chair in was providing that necessary function. They were inside the belly of a machine that was every bit as intricate as her living exoskeleton was, a spacious room of softly curving composite tiles and winking crystalline panels that displayed readings from the flight instruments, altitude, airspeed, fuel levels and many other variables she did not understand available at a glance. Rene was seated alongside her on a compression capsule of his own, his forearms smeared with druid-up blood and hemolymphic gel. Zildiz glanced down at her battle-scored torso and saw that the rents in her armour and lacerated innards had been treated with a clear antiseptic adhesive that stung where it met her open flesh, the wounds themselves stitched shut with a row of tiny steel mandibles. Her breastplate was gone, the anterior of her exomorph wrapped up in packing material and bandages that either tightened or slackened in response to her every motion.

Rene caught her observing him and gave a start, clearly surprised to see her conscious again so soon. He was pressed to his seat just as she was by the inertia, but he still managed to offer her a happy grin and a peculiar upwards-pointing gesture with his thumb that Zildiz assumed was an expression of mocking derision. She threw the gesture right back at him and stuck her thumb up with her other fingers wrapping into a partial fist. But all it did was make Rene burst out laughing, that was, until the vessel sped up even more and made the veins stand out on the sides of his forehead, throbbing and purple. This lasted only a few seconds before it slackened off and allowed Zildiz to speak.

“Where are we?” she groaned, her mouth feeling as though it were full of dry cotton balls.

“We’ve switched to the main drive plume, so the shuttle’s brachistochrone trajectory will soon convey us to one of the Jovian moons orbiting the local gas giant, 65 Syngman Bc,” Exar replied from his place at the helm where he sat in a cupholder, snug as a bug in a rug, “The roider cosmonauts call it Po Chai. It’s a relay station and mass catapult for the ice haulers working out there on the belt. I would’ve opted for one of the bases on Arachnea’s own natural satellites, but for some goshdarned reason those nerds at central ops keep telling me we can’t berth there.”

“I meant where are we right now, slave,” she snarled at it.

“There’s no need to be rude, ma’am. Sheesh! If you’re looking for a more immediate answer to that question, I’d advise you to take a gander out the portside window.”

“I don’t see any windows,” Zildiz said, her voice sounding slow and obtuse to her own ears. One of the crystalline displays on the panels to her left went as transparent as a pane of muscovite. Through a glass darkly Zildiz beheld a blue-flecked marble rolling beneath her at a leisurely pace. It took a moment for it to register that the marble was the planet Arachnea itself, as viewed from a greater altitude than she had ever attained through her own suit’s power. She could see the brown wrinkles of all three continents crawling along at once. From west to east they sped, from the shield cones of the Iraemes Barrier Montes adorned with their lightninged laurels of storm clouds, to the long smears of island chains that composed the Ahmanaten archipelago and the Deepening Trench that marked the subduction zones of the semi-active tectonic plates, until at last she saw broad green swathes of Novyrok, her home.

Zildiz felt a flutter of a flutter of panic in her intestines and screamed out for help, begging the Vitalus to come to her rescue before the spawn of the Betrayers carried her beyond Its reach forever. There was a squelchy, irritating feedback from her magnetosynaptic organ, but at least one of the Vitalus’ long-range sensor nodes was bound to pick up on her transmission, however faint. The only question was whether the god’s processing centres would discard the message as it did most mortal prayers, or if the Vitalus would take an active interest and isolate it from the septillions of other data transfers going through the neurocilial network every second. She kept at it, however, and prefaced her signals with the distress-supplication canticle that was strictly reserved for catastrophes that had the potential to wipe out one or more kindreds. The penalty for misusing such a canticle was genetic purging of the individual and all their relations up to three degrees of consanguinity, but Zildiz was absolutely certain that the Vitalus would see things her way.

For out of the shadows of the past the ancient evil had reared its head once more, riding a chariot of fire. And the name of him that steered it was Exar, and doom followed with him.

“Hell of sight, eh?” the simulacrum chuckled.

 

#

 

Exar promised that the total transit time would be four hours seventeen minutes. It would have been shorter, but the sphere wasn’t sure if their untrained bodies could withstand sustained high gees. He mentioned the risk of something called a ‘glock’ happening, followed by a fatal hypoxia. None of that sounded remotely pleasant, and so Rene decided to take Exar at his word.

The strangest thing happened midway through the journey, when the forces which had been pressing Rene into his chair like a fat masseuse standing on his belly now reversed themselves, tugging him inexorably towards the cockpit where Exar had taken up the responsibility of piloting the ship.

Rene was allowed to leave his compression capsule and stretch his sore limbs. It was disorienting in the extreme to feel that the floor exerted no pull on him—in time he was to learn that gravity was a much more subjective matter than his earthbound instincts had led him to believe. ‘Down’ was simply the direction in which the greatest amount of force was propelling him, whereas ‘up’ could only be comprehended if he oriented his body so that his toes pointed at the former.

Clinging like a limpet to the padded handrails that ran along the sides of the whitewashed tiles of the walls, Rene climbed over to the back of the cabin where the small surgeon’s station was sunk into an alcove. Nodding a perfunctory greeting at the glassy-eyed Zildiz, who still looked as though she’d just been hit in the head with the blunt end of an axe, Rene patched himself up a bit more with the shuttle’s medical supplies, following the same instructions Exar had given him to treat Zildiz’s injuries, which the sphere graciously repeated for his benefit.

Exar did this word for word and with the exact same tone and inflections in his voice that he’d used back then, a detail which bothered Rene somewhat. It was easy to forget that Exar wasn’t exactly a person, per se. He was a tool of the almighty ancestors, composed of inorganic substances and trained to mimic human speech patterns. But did he have a soul? Zildiz certainly seemed to think so, and she hated the cheerful little ball for it.

There was a history there, Rene sensed, a racial memory that elicited fear and loathing in all Gallivants.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Exar said suddenly.

“Mhm? What’s that?” Rene said, slowly undoing his cross-eyed expression of concentration.

“I said, ‘a penny for your thoughts’.”

“What’s a penny?”

“Uh, credits? Honor scrip? U-tang? Uranium standard rupiahs?”

Rene shook his head.

“Wow,” Exar said, momentarily speechless, “That settles it, then. You really are an oompa loompa.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Yep. Straight out the chocolate friggin factory. Chi sin!”

“I must confess, Exar,” Rene said with embarrassment, “I don’t always grasp the things that you say.”

“That’s alright. You aren’t supposed to. Not all of them, anyway. That’s just my linguistics algorithm trying to find the best mix of spacer jargon to communicate with you. You didn’t respond positively to the Canto-gong, Slavic or Eurohash language prompts. In fact, the only thing you seem capable of understanding is the Queen’s own English. Which is just ridiculous, given that your blood samples indicate a predominantly Polynesian ancestry.”

“Huh. And when did you examine samples of my blood?” Rene asked, shocked by the revelation.

“I had the onboard diagnostic setup do it while you were stapling yourself back together.”

“I find that to be a tad invasive on your part, Exar,” the pathfinder remarked, feeling that his privacy had just been violated.

“It’s just company policy, boss. Won’t happen again,” Exar said, brushing over the matter.

“Well, alright then,” Rene said uncertainly, “See that it doesn’t.”

There was an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, during which Rene noticed Zildiz’s yellow eyes flickering between him and sphere, gauging their latest interaction. She gave him another thumbs up to let him know she was alright and went back to staring sullenly at the ceiling.

Exar didn’t speak again unless prompted to, and even then he only uttered odd warbling noises and said he was busy trying to raise the satellite constellations, an excuse that Rene found increasingly less convincing as time went on, especially with that note of smarminess in Exar’s voice.

Had he somehow hurt the sphere’s feelings? Fie! The way Rene saw it, Exar was the one who needed to apologize. All the same, Rene felt somewhat rotten about the whole thing, considering that the sphere had just delivered them from certain destruction earlier that day.

Agitated by his conscience and with nothing better to do, Rene got up and went over to bother his prisoner.

“So…how are we feeling today?” he said, taking a seat on the edge of Zildiz’s capsule.

“It will betray you, Fleet-man,” she said so quietly he barely saw her lips moving, “That is what they do.”

“Rubbish,” he whispered back at her, then quickly added: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You contradict yourself,” she pointed out, “Perhaps you are not as certain of its allegiance as you would like to be.”

“More warp-twisting nonsense. Why would he go through all the trouble of saving us from Kryptus and that…that flying thing if his intention was to betray us all along?”

“A hollowore, Fleet-man. Get it right. They are servants of the All-in-One, just as this Exar is a servant of the void crawlers. There is more at stake here than you could possibly fathom. This is all part of the long game, one which the powers that be have been playing since before your piddly Fleet ever came into being.”

“Well at least he hasn’t tried to skewer me like a hog!” he hissed back at her, quite beside himself with annoyance. They both hurriedly glanced over Exar to see if he’d overheard their argument, but the sphere still sat inert in his cupholder, apparently deep in thought.

“Mark my words, Rene,” she said, immediately gaining the pathfinder’s undivided attention. It was the first time Zildiz had ever spoken his actual name, and Rene was as flabbergasted as he’d been on the night he’d uncovered her true face beneath the bug-eyed helm, “These machines are part of the reason why your precious ancestor gods are no longer with us.”

“Run that by me again,” he said at once. Zildiz opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off when Exar broke his silence with a gloomy warble, then said:

“Yeah. I thought as much. No wonder it was so quiet out here. It’s all gone. Everything’s been dusted.”

“Exar?” Rene said, bracing himself for the bad news. As ever, reality exceeded the powers of his imagination. Exar did something that rendered all the instrument panels transparent again, each one of them becoming a telescopic viewport centred on a different celestial object.

“The domes on Cloister. The roiders and their can cities, the Ceytian pod fleets. Man alive, they even torpedoed the Banana Republic!” Exar said in outrage, “They wasted it all! Why?”

Rene saw the pockmarked surface of Cloister, Arachnea’s only natural satellite. The craters of its pale face had always been visible from the planet’s surface, but now their shuttle was intruding upon the veiled side of the moon that no Fleet astronomer had seen since the grounding of the trimada.

The chasms on the darkened half of Cloister utterly dwarfed the ones on the visible side of the moon, and the perfectly symmetrical circles of their rims told Rene that this disparity was no mere accident brought about by the random bombardments of meteoroids. A delicate eggshell structure had once enclosed these dugouts, the spans of the polyhedral latticework which had supported the superstructure still visible. The domes appeared to have violently burst apart from the inside, the rubble that they had strewn across the surface long since bleached white or sanded down to nothing by lunar dust and the harsh rays of the suns. Within the cracked geodesic domes Rene could still see the spurs of the megalopolises, preserved for all time like the models in a snow globe whose last flakes had settled to the bottom, never to stir again.

This was only the start of the desolation. Exar made sure to go over all the important landmarks he’d known, taking his grim tally and letting his passengers see everything in full detail.

You didn’t have to be a genius to see what had done it. Just off the shoulders of the belt they saw the riddled wrecks of attack ships, their own bristling armaments pointing in the general direction of the cored-out subsurface habitations which dotted the asteroids.

Spinning like an uneven top at region of space that Exar called a Lagrangian point was a spoked wheel of twisted metal and mirrorlike panels all crumpled together like a piece of paper.

Exar even zoomed in on the uncommunicative satellite constellations, rosary beads strung along an invisible line that looped round and round the globe of Arachnea, each one as dull and lifeless as a lead bullet.

Each panel depicted another heavenly ruin hidden from the eyes of man by the limitations of crude optics or the peculiarities of phase and orbit, another monument erected by the grinning empire of Death whose dominion knew no borders and whose will reigned absolute.

Undaunted, the sphere called out into the vacuum of space.

“Any stations! Any stations! This is Exar unit 72-004. Are there any in-system assets capable of providing support? Is anybody reading this?”

Silence.

“I suppose the computer at central ops has been following an automated procedure all this time,” the sphere told them, “Someone plotted this course of ours to ensure that anyone the shuttle retrieved would be delivered straight to Po Chai.”

“Whatever for?” Zildiz wondered, “Like you said, slave. Everything out here has been smashed. What makes you think Po Chai will be any different?”

“I’m looking into that right now. And don’t call me slave,” he snapped, “It’s demeaning. Hey Rene, are you still alright?”

“So it’s true,” Rene said to no one in particular, “We’re all alone out here.”

Then he went back to his capsule and lay down on his side, and though he tried with all his might, Rene found that he could not weep.