CHAPTER THREE: The Birth of Fate

The Pit hung, ebony jewel in the Uranian sky, like an obsidian vise, its empty jaws gaping at the gargantuan cyan vortex around which it spun.

The Pit had been a construct, built by the Ancients or the Daedalus Concordance, to house the Uranian Gravity Pyre. In fact, rumor had it that all of the mysterious Pyres, designed to keep the Peregrine out of the Drift, had been constructed in the Pit, making it the forge in which the hope of Humanity had its fires stoked; without the Pyres, the Peregrine would have driven Humans, and probably a number of other races, to extinction in a matter of decades.

While Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all had moons massive enough to sustain the powerful Pyres, Uranus did not, and thus the use of the Pit as a substitute had been deemed necessary. Through time, the Pit also became a military staging area and a frontier trade outpost, maintained by the colonists of Titania, Ariel and Umbriel.

Untold millennia ago, the Peregrine had yet again attempted to escape his self-made prison in the Periphery, and slipped past the two outermost Pyres in his huge Starship. He was intercepted by a human fleet, which forced him close enough to Uranus to be trapped by the Gravity Pyre housed in the Pit. Cornered by the fleet, and with mere days to spare before the weapons of the fortress world of Oberon came into range, the Peregrine had one of those moments of sheer, blinding brilliance that can only be brought about by advanced desperation.

Launching a feint at the human flagship, the massive stone dreadnought Leap Of Faith, he drew it to within five thousand miles of the Pit. Then, utilizing Power Cores stolen from the Outer Reach outposts he habitually raided, the Peregrine fired the huge warship directly at the Pit, dislodging the Gravity Pyre and sending it spiraling into Uranus’s aquamarine depths, while the Leap Of Faith went on a wild gravitational ride, eventually coming to rest in orbit around Titania.

Unfortunately for the Peregrine, his fight with the fixed-ground installations on Oberon progressed less smoothly, and he was forced to limp back to the Periphery, his only consolation that he had successfully destroyed one of the only five devices in the Drift of which he had no technological understanding.

But even in this, he was thwarted. The Third Pyre was thought lost for probably hundreds and possibly thousands of millennia, until methane prospectors (for methane was highly prized as a catalyst in plasma weapons, and as a narcotic by the Demons of Venus, although few were brazen enough to trade with them) stumbled upon an amazing find: a floating island of organic life, suspended deep in Uranus’s troposphere, with the Gravity Pyre at the center. It seemed the Pyre’s power had somehow given birth to life within the oppressive murk of the gas giant, with interlocking expanses of vaguely stable microbial plant life forming a muddy base, hundreds of thousands of miles wide.

The prospectors had welcomed this: instead of risking their often rather ramshackle flitters in the strong Uranian winds, they could set up shop in the relative comfort of the marshland, harvesting gas that could then be floated to the surface with power cores and picked up by flitters running out of Ariel and Umbriel. A hardscrabble settlement was founded, with disastrous results.

Emerging from the diluted methane fog like nightmarish horrors came the Pus-Tra, massive, green-skinned primates spawned out of the Energy Pyre’s accelerated evolutionary arms race. Although not as vicious as the Saurians, as powerful as the Demons, nor as technologically advanced as the Glyphids, the Pus-Tra more than made up for this with their brute strength and bitter hatred of Humanity. They eventually founded their own kingdom in what came to be known as the Tightrope. Violent regime changes and wars with the Human Worlds were frequent.

Throughout all this, the Pit had kept a silent vigil over Uranus, forgotten for the most part, except as the occasional staging area for missions to the Tightrope when the Aether Gate was not an option. Transients, weapons smugglers and refugees had been a near-permanent presence, and underhanded goings-on had the norm.

That is, until the Saurians took over. After the Last Peregrine War, the Pit had been ceded to the Saurians as part of the armistice, and had become a steady source of income and racial pride for the reptiles ever since. They used the station’s twin Power Cores to siphon methane from the gas giant below, either directly or through independent contractors of various races, and then selling or trading it, with a Trademaster, or Kannok, appointed every local epoch.

The current Trademaster-Kannok was a striking, emerald-scaled warrior by the name of Skreeok. He was a thirty-year veteran of a grand total of eight wars of various lengths, three of them fighting for the Peregrine, two for the Concordance and the last three for his people. He bore numerous scars, the most horrid of which was undoubtedly the one that began on the rear right of his cranium and continued on down his back, across his shoulder blade and to the ribs under his right arm.

Skreeok calmly, patiently strode into the Pit’s conference room, a domed space at the station’s apex. The room’s ceiling was a massive concave viewport, carved by Saurian artisans to replace the original ceiling, an opaque slab of the enigmatic obsidian alloy that the Ancients had constructed all their space stations out of. The view was largely blackness, with the rich white speckling of a starfield, but the meeting that was about to take place had been carefully timed to coincide with the rise of Ariel, that most distinguished of Uranian moons.

The individual who had engineered this timing was the Human woman already seated by the large, oval table that dominated the room. Lady Chloe, a Huntress of Ariel and High Sylph of House Termagant, cut a striking figure. Her translucent bodywear, cut of the finest Crispissan cloth, contrasted with her alabaster skin in a way obviously reminiscent of stars against space, and her severe black-on-white face paint, an homage to her days as a Salamander in the Puck War, drew attention to her piercing gray eyes and small mouth. The bodywear did little to hinder a display of the finely toned body of a woman in prime physical condition; the muscles of the thighs and abdomen were plainly visible through the cloth, and while her underthings were more than dark enough to conceal her privates, their form-fitting nature left precious little to the imagination.

She cast a satisfied glance upwards at her homeworld, the glitter of Mystic City a cluster of yellow pinpricks on the dusk terminator, as Skreeok and his host of Snarrel and Rantor dignitaries filed in and placed themselves on cushioned stools specifically designed to support the reptiles while leaving their muscular tails unobstructed. Lady Chloe's own entourage, Sylphs, Salamanders and Nymphs, remained standing in the noblewoman’s presence.

“My greetings to you, Lady Chloe of the Protectorate,” Skreeok snarled, referring to the loose alliance of Human governments Ariel belonged to. “I speak on behalf of the elders of the Pit and my people throughout Gavelor when I say how proud I am, and we are, that these talks will be held here. I did not have to consider the request for more than a heartbeat, before acceding to it.”

Chloe flinched internally, but kept her features blank. ‘Gavelor’ was a term used by the Concordance to refer to the Drift. She did not care much for the Concordance, and their meddling with worlds they had no business even being on. And the way this… reptile was insinuating he had any authority to deny her access to the Pit made her fume. The Pit was Ariel’s by right, as were all of Uranus’s moons.

Out loud, she said, “And my greetings to you, Kannok. Allow me to express my deepest condolences for the loss of your son,” but even in this she gave no ground. Mourning the dead was considered the height of disrespect among Saurians, and two members of Skreeok’s retinue visibly bristled. Furthermore, it told the old lizard in no uncertain terms that Ariel’s intelligence network didn’t miss much.

“Thank you. I trust your own offspring will soon begin killing each other to assert dominance. Whom do you favor, Cynthia or Clarissa?”

Touché. “Soon,” Chloe replied curtly, not risking the loss of face she would suffer by correcting him. “And I have not come to favor one nor the other, Kannok.”

The Kannok bared his teeth in an intentionally ambiguous smile. “But I am sure you did not make your way here to trade pleasantries. While we wait for our esteemed friend to arrive, perhaps you could… assuage my curiosity regarding this meeting of yours. What is it you hope to achieve with your negotiations?”

“My friend, I do not ‘hope to achieve’ anything by negotiations,” Chloe said, pouring water from a flagon on the table into a stone cup. “Sa’Til is a war criminal, and the only business we would conduct with him would end in a trial and an execution.” She took a long sip, glancing out of the viewport as a shipping flitter passed by it, its hold no doubt packed with spin-sealed methane bound for the markets of Titan or somewhere closer to the Interior. “It was he who initiated this discussion, not my government, nor I.”

“Perhaps he seeks to amend this rift in your relations. Perhaps he seeks legitimacy.”

“That or another hand-out, in exchange for something he thinks we want. I hear he lost one of his bases in a Glyphid raid recently,” Chloe offered dismissively, brushing something off the tabletop.

Chloe expected the old reptile to inquire about the raid, but he merely approximated a shrug and said, “Your government’s trade with his soldiers is to be commended. I doubt there are many others who would so brazenly defy Concordance edict.”

That, Chloe had to admit, was a clever blow. Ariel had on occasion traded with the warlord, offering him food and ammunition in exchange for weapons and metals pilfered from the Interior. The Concordance did indeed frown upon this, as in fact did the Protectorate, and Skreeok’s comment left little doubt as to the Saurians’ opinion of it. This strongly limited her options in the unlikely event that Sa’Til did have something Ariel wanted or needed; whatever transpired here would likely be reported directly to the Concordance. You little snitch, Chloe thought as she smiled benevolently at the Kannok.

“Thank you,” she said. “We believe the government he represents is innocent of the charges he faces. To hold an entire populace accountable for the actions of one man would be… infantile.” This neatly summed up the Saurian elders’ way of thinking.

“My people agree. That is why I lament that the man himself will not be present at the meeting, only his indentured servants, whom harming would be in breach of Concordance law.”

What? Chloe silently panicked. He’s not coming? “Yes,” she said out loud, masking her surprise with a contemplative smile. “Hopefully, they can provide some semblance of an explanation.”

At that exact moment, a red-and-blue-armored Glyphid Drone burst into the room, trailed by a hodgepodge of armed and armored Humans, Pus-Tra, Saurians, cyborgs and other Glyphids.

“An explanation? Of what? To whom? And what, precisely, would be so hopeful about it? Hmm?” the Glyphid known as Slave screeched a barrage of questions at the Human and Saurian delegations as he marched toward the table. “We have no need to explain anything,” he continued, taking an awkward seat in a chair not designed for his slight build. “It is we to whom explanations are owed, such as one pertaining to your refusal, your unwillingness, your obstinate bias, your exclusion. Why do you not share with us your knowledge and your technology? Are we not all servants of Gavelor, risking our lives for her glory?”

“If you are referring to our refusal to grant you a seat on the Protectorate council, then the answer is simple: you are not a unified planetary government, and your leader is a warlord, and an enemy of the Concordance,” Chloe answered flatly.

“But so are you, are you not? Yes? An enemy of the Concordance? And yet you sit at this table, unmolested!”

“So do you, Slave,” Skreeok grumbled as if to a difficult child. “You would be strongly advised to maintain a civil tone, if you wish to have your voice heard here.”

“You would not admonish a Pus-Tra, a Human, a Saurian or even a Blind One so,” Slave retorted, cocking his head self-righteously.

“You are right, I would not, for they have not given me cause to.”

“Of course they have. Who are they to challenge your race, your mighty warriors, to soil your precious Pit with their filthy footsteps? You should deny us all passage, and make war on your Concordance,” Slave scoffed, jabbing a claw at Lady Chloe.

“And see peace disintegrate before our very eyes? The peace we created?” the Kannok bellowed, truly incensed.

“Peace!” the word was a mocking laugh from Slave’s mandibles. “You speak of a peace purchased with your people’s dignity! Where is your pride? Your purpose? Your preference for the preservation of past power? Your p-“

“Very well, Slave!” Chloe barked, losing her patience for the insect’s grandstanding. “First you beg for inclusion and membership, and then you sow dissent and argue for dissolution! Make up your mind!”

“My begging, Lady Chloe, was merely to prove a point,” Slave sneered, slightly calmer as he slouched laconically in his chair. “The point being that Humans have subjugated the other races of the Drift since time immemorial. When will it be time for Saurians to decide their own fate? Or Ophions, or Stoneskin?”

“Is this really what you came here to discuss? The Ophions lost the war, as did the Glyphids and the Pus-Tra and everyone else who sided with the Peregrine.”

“But the Saurians did not! Did not their reversal of loyalty save the Human race from certain doom? They turned on their master, their very creator, risking life and limb, and you do not even reward them with their own homeland? You consign them to this floating hunk of metal?” Slave gestured at the station around them.

“Excuse me, but the Saurians did not ‘side with the Peregrine’ any more than you ‘sided’ with Humanity, Lady Chloe,” Skreeok interjected. “We were his servants, and turned on him when his true face was revealed to us at the Battle of Wicked Dance.”

“You’re not actually buying into all this crap, are you?” Chloe inquired with raised eyebrows.

“No, merely discerning your attitude on the subject. It is important we all know where we stand.”

Chloe actually rolled her eyes at that, and stood. “Look, if both of you are quite done with your history lesson-“

“No, not quite. Where do you stand on all this, Lady Chloe? Do you believe the Saurians should be granted equal status on the Concordance council? Granted a homeworld, perhaps? SIT DOWN, Lady Chloe.”

In the short silence that followed Slave’s outburst, Skreeok thought he heard something. Only one person in the room knew it, but a button had just been pressed.

“No,” Chloe said, visibly perturbed. “No, I don’t think I will. It is evident we have precious little to discuss here, and my presence here is of little purpose. Call me when your master wants to talk about something real.”

“Lady Chloe, forgive me for intruding, but it seems presumptuous of you to simply leave. Slave is merely trying to establish a dialogue here, from the ground up, so to speak,” the Kannok ventured, gesturing to the Glyphid. “Am I not right, Slave?”

“So to speak, yes. Our master feels it is time for a more… results-based approach to his problems.”

“His problems?”

“Yes. Namely the Protectorate’s unwillingness to include him in their decision-making process. This… preference for Concordance law and regulations is weakening your stance in the Outback and in the Interior, and it smacks of cronyism. We reach a hand out to you in particular, Lady Chloe, because your people have, on occasion, traded with us in the past, and perhaps you could assist us in building that bridge towards legitimacy.”

Skreeok and Chloe exchanged glances, but Chloe remained standing. “Legitimacy?” she scoffed, incredulous. “Your master is a warlord who took power by force, and moreover-“

“Shht! Do you hearrr that?” Skreeok growled.

They all fell silent, straining to hear.

“I hear nothing. What are you playing at, Kannok?” Chloe barked.

“That. There. What is that?”

And then they all heard it: a slow, hoarse, moan, like a cold wind or gate on a poorly-oiled hinge. It had been too low, too indistinct, or perhaps just too horrifyingly surreal to take heed of, but now that they heard it, it was unmistakable.

“What in the Shining Rows is that?” Chloe said, barely keeping the tremble out of her voice.

“Deadmen,” Skreeok said, his voice low and unkind. He rose from his chair, powered up his gauntlet and barked an order to one of his Snarrel batsmen.

“Deadmen? Here?” This time, Chloe was unable to keep the fear out of her voice, but she was somewhat surprised to find that the soldier within her was already on her feet, had already cocked her 60 Cal.

“It’s true!” Slave squealed. “I remember those sounds… you set us up!”

Chloe spun to find the diminutive Glyphid was pointing an assault rifle at her. Skreeok’s batsman had by now given the Kannok an assault rifle of his own, which he was quick to train on Slave.

“Gentlemen,” Chloe said, voice level. “Let’s not get unduly agitated. If there are Deadmen on the Pit, there are ways of dealing with them that I’m sure you’re both familiar with, yes? Ways that do not include training guns on those who would fight them beside you!”

“Hurrrnt. Very well,” Skreeok said, lowering the rifle. Slave did the same, albeit much slower. He kept his unreadable insect eyes trained on the Kannok, however. Their respective lackeys remained tense.

“Now, Kannok, if you’d be so kind. What’s the best way out of here? And do we have any idea where the intruders are?”

Skreeok touched a button on his gauntlet, and conversed tersely with the tinny reptilian voice that greeted him on the other end of the transmission.

“The Eastern Docks,” he said. “My chief of security says they have already killed four guards and are heading here through the transit tunnels.”

“Here? How could they be ‘heading’ anywhere? Aren’t they mindless beasts?” Slave asked.

“Generally, unless someone is calling to them with a blood mark.”

“That means the being responsible for bringing them here is inside this very room.”

The tension built as Chloe, Skreeok and Slave regarded each other with increased suspicion. Chloe did not think of herself as a terribly religious person, but words from Ariel's sacred texts came to her sometimes. A passage from the second canto rang in her head:

With beating hearts the dire event they wait,
Anxious, and trembling for the birth of Fate

Slave finally exploded. “You!” he squealed, raising his rifle at Chloe. “You wanted this meeting held here in the Apex! It’s close to the docks, and you saw the opportunity to off us while protecting your own –“

“I did nothing of the sort! You and your ilk –“

“Beings! Stand down before –“

But that’s as far as Skreeok got before the first hole appeared in the deck four feet from where Chloe was standing and a Deadman hobbled out. Little more than a walking corpse, it had evidently been a Snarrel at one point, but now, its skin had rotted off and its bowels had dried away, leaving fading, dried musculature attached to yellow bones. Horrid lidless eyes saw nothing as the Deadman groped blindly in Chloe’s direction.

Chloe brought up her Cal, but one of the Sylphs in her retinue dived between her and the undead warrior, only to shriek in terror as the Deadman’s claws punctured his chest, spraying it with dark arterial blood. The Sylph whimpered, drowning in his own fluids. The Deadman again reached for Chloe, but its skull exploded from a Saurian hollow-point, peppering Chloe’s face with bone fragments.

It was Skreeok’s headshot that had taken the Deadman out, but more had appeared. The alchemy of Deadside could turn any material into a portal, and through the portals came Deadmen; six more were now in the conference room with them, wreaking havoc as Slave’s mercenaries poured bullets and superheated plasma into them, unaware that they were impossible to truly kill.

Some of the Deadmen still had vocal cords, and snarled hellishly as they ripped their opponents to shreds. One of Slave’s human mercs emptied an entire clip from his pistol into a Pus-Tra Deadman. The merc was still trying to put a fresh one into the gun when the zombie literally ripped the man in half. The torso was flung onto the conference table, scattering water flagons and cups as its arms flailed uselessly; the man lived long enough to watch most of his insides dribble out of his ribcage. More Deadmen came.

Skreeok’s warriors were a bit more on the ball. Simple precision shots from their gauntlets splattered two of the Deadmen, leaving them useless piles of meat on the deck, before Skreeok pointed at the former Pus-Tra and barked an order. The Rantors directed their fire at the designated target, securing its attention while Skreeok drew his RA flare gun, charged it to 600% and fired. The resulting flare was volleyed into the Deadman’s chest.

The former Pus-Tra warrior, which had bounded onto the stone table by now in its mad lunge at the Saurians on the other side of the room, howled in agony as the purple-glowing radioactive charge immolated its flesh and melted its bones; even Deadmen were not immune to pain. More Deadmen came.

Slave’s mercs were all dead by now, and Slave had retreated onto the tabletop, spraying bullets from his assault rifle into a horde of at least a dozen strong as they came for him, clambering over chairs and corpses. One of Chloe’s Salamanders peppered the horde with darts from an inflator rifle, creating horrid, balloon-like blisters whenever they struck skin. A bullet or two from Slave’s barrage managed to find the pockets of superheated gas, popping them like firecrackers and sending ropes of dry, long-dead flesh flying around the room. Still more Deadmen came.

A portal opened on the wall behind the Rantor immediately to Skreeok’s left as he was inserting a new clip into his assault rifle, and the emerging Deadman, an eviscerated husk that had evidently once been a Glyphid drone, raked the Rantor with its claws, peeling the skin and muscle off his abdomen and ribs as his intestines bubbled to the floor with horrifyingly wet plops. Skreeok whirled, assault rifle in each hand and fired blindly, making sure he caught his warrior in the head before pouring his wrath into the Deadman. Yet more Deadmen came.

“We need to get out of this room,” Chloe cried desperately as she fired, fired and fired some more. Tears ran freely down her cheeks; Chloe wore them with pride.

“Agreed. The topside hatches from the apex kitchens and maintenance rooms open into a foyer behind you,” Skreeok roared as he finished off the once-Glyphid.

“Got it. Fall back on my mark.”

Skreeok spared her a look. “Rantors do not ‘fall back,’ milady. They die, at the hand of another Rantor, preferably.”

“But this battle is lost, and you are unhurt. Live to fight another day, Kannok, so that your people and your station can survive. They need you, and we would all die pointlessly here.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a blood-curdling shriek as Slave’s arm was severed from his torso, ripped off by a Deadman whose head and chest were riddled with arrows. Slave, his rifle ammo depleted, had switched to his crossbow, which now laid useless at his feet as the insect clutched his stump in agony.

The Deadmen around him held back, as if momentarily bewildered by Slave’s outburst. Slave looked up, glared at the throng for an instant, and then bounded into them with a crazed Glyphid war cry, slashing furiously with his remaining talon. He felled three of them before they overcame him, severing his remaining limbs.

“Pleeeeease,” he whimpered, and Skreeok put a bullet through his eye.

“Your point is well seen, Lady Chloe. I will lead the way.”

***

Slave’s death cries were still ringing in her ears as Chloe bounded through the transit tunnels to the station’s western dock, where her flitter sat. Two Rantors stood guard at the end of the tunnel; Skreeok waved himself, Chloe and the five other survivors from the meeting room, a Snarrel, an Rantor, a wounded Sylph and two Nymphs through to the dock.

The dock was a massive, flat triangular field that sat under open space, protected from the elements (or lack thereof) by the station’s upper power core, located a dozen decks below them. Over the edge, Chloe could see Uranus, turquoise and teal in its indifferent glory.

A variety of flitters lay scattered across the dock. Word about the attack must have been spreading: already, beings of all races were hurrying to their flitters, emerging from the lower levels through the deck hatches that lay at regular intervals, carrying valuables and essentials.

“It’s an exodus. Everything my people and I have worked for…” Skreeok heaved his shoulders as the flitters took off, whooshing silently into open space. Chloe felt indebted to the old reptile, or at least an obligation to learn the truth.

“Whoever did this must have visited Titan to capture the Deadmen. We could go there and investigate, bring the culprits to justice.”

But Skreeok turned his head to look at her, a growing fire in his eyes. “No, Lady Chloe. Still you do not understand. The Pit is our ground. Our home. I fight here, or I fight nowhere.”

“But –“

“Go and investigate, if you must. But I have a station to protect. And perhaps, when it pleases you, you can return to our home with the fruits of your investigation, and together we can deliberate on what to do with them.”

And then, Chloe understood. The Saurians did not seek to conquer, they simply sought to equal. They had discovered only a few years ago that they were not truly a race, but a genetic construct, a bio-engineered army bred to do the Peregrine’s bidding. They had never before understood what it was to protect something, fight for an ideal they believed in; they had only sought to destroy and steal from their enemies.

No, thought Chloe. Not their enemies, but the Peregrine’s. They’ve never really had enemies of their own.

But now they did. And as Chloe’s flitter sped toward Titan, she watched the Pit shrink behind her, knowing that the being who sought to make Skreeok and the Saurians his or her enemy was either very foolish, or very powerful. Very powerful indeed.

CHAPTER TWO: The Siege of Mimas and the Common Good

Mimas was little more than a dirty snowball, sailing through space around Saturn at about a mile a second. It had no valuable resources to speak of, and was, like most of Saturn’s satellites, notoriously tricky to get to, as it required circumnavigation of the billions of chunks of rock, ice and dust that constituted the gas giant’s ring system. It wasn’t terribly difficult work, as the rings moved predictably and relatively slowly, but it was tedious, demanding many hours, sometimes days, of minor course adjustments wherein one mistake could easily spell doom.

Nevertheless, the denizens of the Drift had, over time, found reasons to fight over the petrified ice ball. Mimas was one of the innermost of Saturn’s inhabited moons, and during one of humanity’s many, many wars with the Peregrine, some particularly bright person had come up with the idea of carving an airlocked base into the ice to serve as a fallback location if the Saurian Vanguard managed to take all the other moons in the Cronian System. Not surprisingly, this never came to pass, as the Cronian had never fallen during any of the wars, its myriad bases and tricky-to-navigate ice rings proving more than a match for the Peregrine.

A select few held that he possessed an illogical and incurable fear of the planet, something primordial from deep within it that permeated the moons and protected them from the ancient alien’s wrath. Others pointed out that this made no sense, as he had thoroughly and successfully invaded Titan in one of the first battles of the Last Peregrine War, decimating its population in a horrifying and indiscriminate slaughter that the world was still recovering from, nine and one-half years later.

Whatever one’s position on the matter, skeptic or mystic, it was difficult to deny that the presence of Saturn was nothing short of overwhelming, especially when viewed from the surface of Mimas, a scant one hundred and sixteen thousand miles from the seventy-five-thousand-mile-wide globe of hydrogen, helium and nitrogen. Its sandy, shadowy murk of clouds reflected more than enough sunlight to bathe Mimas and its sisters in a mesmerizing ochre hue strong enough to cast stark shadows on their surface.

But the eighty Glyphid Drones trundling over Mimas’s surface took no notice of the gas giant. Recently emerged from a slick, organic-looking flitter since abandoned to the elements, they shuffled determinedly forward toward the entrance of Fallout Base, their insect exoskeletons impervious to the cruel cold. Not once did any of them glance up at Saturn, marvel at its greatness or ponder their place in the universe, as many of the Drift’s races are apt to do. Not once.

Reaching the obsidian airlock, the lead two scouts took covering positions on either side of the door and unslung their weapons. They waited ninety seconds for the first soldiers of the column proper to reach firing range of the door, and waited for another fifteen seconds as a purpose-specific Drone hastened to the doorway. Latching a three-fingered hand onto the door control, the Drone broadcast a wide range of frequencies, most of them inaudible to the human range.

When a specific frequency was hit, the vibrations of the simple lock-and-slip mechanism keeping the door in place became strong enough for the insect to reach an obvious conclusion. A simple message was transmitted to his hive-brothers, and within a hundredth of a second, they were all humming at that same frequency, increasing in volume until the deadbolt vibrated backwards on the lock. The breech slipped, and after that it was a simple matter of gaining purchase on the moon’s surface and pushing.

Fallout was currently within the domain of Sa’Til, a human warlord who had once been Terat. Ironically enough, Sa’Til had deemed the base best defended by Glyphid soldiers of his own, twenty-three enslaved members of the Soldier caste. Soldiers were, ordinarily, huge and powerful warriors with genetically engineered nodes on their back capable of spewing huge amounts of evaporated plasma at the Hive’s enemies.

These Soldiers, on the other hand, were malnourished slave soldiers. Away from the hive and its nutrients, their plasma nodes had atrophied and deteriorated into useless sacs, and their stature reduced from the hulking twelve-foot monsters that roamed Pluto into growth-stunted six-footers. Sa’Til had armed them with any weapon large enough for their clumsy hands to wield: human antipersonnel projectile weapons like miniguns and shotguns, as well as radioactive flare guns, Umbrielian Inflator Rifles and Executor-made grenade launchers intended for mounting on bull lizard saddles and assault robots.

Once the Glyphid Drones had breached the door, they found themselves in a carved foyer with three slave Soldiers, armed, respectively, with two shotguns and an Inflator. They were slow to respond, and two went down instantly in the opening plasma barrage. The last one got off two rounds from his shotgun, catching a Drone in the torso, before going down in a hail of plasma.

The Drones left two of their number on rearguard as they progressed into the base. The altercation in the airlock had put the Soldiers on high alert, and the narrow corridor which connected four of the compartments in the west half of the base suddenly became a firestorm of Inflator charges, bullets, grenades, plasma and buckshot as the Drones were pummeled from the west armories and the night watchman’s post, which two Soldiers had been sleeping in.

Eight Drones went down in the subsequent firefight; six to gunfire, one to shrapnel, and one exploding spectacularly when a plasma bolt from one of its rifles hit a hi-ex grenade less than two feet from its face. The senior Drone made a tactical decision, sacrificing one member of his team by sending him charging into the armory while four others made use of the distraction and stormed the watch post.

Instead of going straight in, however, the four of them slathered the booth and surrounding corridor with napalm gel, which they then set alight with chalk-seal detonators. The two Soldiers in the booth burned, screaming, as the Drones continued north up the corridor, under cover of orange flame and black smoke.

The Drones burst into the supply hangar and immediately came under fire from minigun emplacements on the windowsill of the quartermaster’s office in the northeast corner of the hangar. Finding the office shielded, the Drones whitewashed the shield with low-power plasma barrages while another purpose-specific drone crept around the hangar, hiding behind crates of nutrient paste and flitter construction kits when his brethren needed to change clips.

Eventually he found himself directly under the office window. He unsheathed a wicked-looking six-bladed Glyphid thrown weapon known affectionately among human soldiers who were lucky enough to appropriate them (or not-so-affectionately by those who had survived being on the wrong side of one) as a Boomerang. The Drone depressed a stud on the Boomerang’s center, and sent it flying into the window with a perfectly curved throw. There was a bracing whuppa-whuppa sound, followed by a series of disgustingly wet shlicks, and then more whuppas as the Boomerang returned, dripping with ichor, to the Drone’s hand. The quartermaster's office fell silent; the button was pressed again, and the weapon tucked away.

Very soon, the base was down to three defenders and their commander, a surly Ophion known as Ravage, locked away in a briefing room in the eastern sprawl of the base. The two weapons he had left were a human 60 Cal and a Peregrine-made Freeze Gun; he regarded both, and tossed them away, disgusted. The Drones chose to simply blow up the door this time. Ravage raised his hands. The Soldiers put up no fight, but were shot anyway.

The senior Drone had been killed in the fight for the east armory, succumbing to a shotgun wound as his brothers ignored him. His immediate second had been splattered across the ceiling of a service corridor by a Soldier’s Inflator Rifle shortly after that, so it was the third eldest Drone who led eighteen of the fifty-one survivors of the assault into the briefing room.

Ravage’s echolocation told him that the being was small, slim and light, but the smell of ichor and plasma-scorched iron wafting in with it made him very aware of the instant death the insect could dish out. Ravage was quite nervous.

“{I surrender,}” Ravage said. It was common knowledge Glyphids were capable telepaths, so Ravage spoke his native tongue.

That is obvious, Ravage heard a cold voice say in his head. Your Soldiers are slain, and now you will accompany us as we seek greatness on behalf of the Hive.

“{You’re… taking me prisoner? That’s not very Glyphid of you.}” Ravage had been expecting the Drone to send him to Sa’Til with some kind of ultimatum, or at least an explanation. The Glyphid hive was on Pluto; they’d hardly make their way this far into the Expanse unless they had a very specific reason for it, and they certainly couldn’t be interested in Mimas. Ravage was, or rather had been, the ruler of the moon, and he’d hated every inch of it.

We require you. We require you to find the Device.

“{The Device?}”

Yes. We know that you have seen it. It has nestled in the bowels of your home for eons, and three of your people have come across it. You are one, and you will help us find one other.

Ah. The Device. So that’s what they were calling it. Evidently, the Glyphids wanted it for something, but Ravage could not for the life of him think what. It was useless, a millennia-old compass for pointing the way toward the five Energy Pyres, and everyone knew where they were.

Or was it really useless? Was there something more to it? The Ancients were, after all, powerful indeed.

“{Oh yes. So, you’ve learned the truth, have you? Well,}” Ravage bluffed. The Glyphids either thought the “device” was powerful, or they had discovered it really was. One way or the other, the bugs had knowledge Ravage needed to survive.

It is imperative you assist us. You know the being we seek?

There were only two options, and choosing between an aging weaponsmith with no real reason to leave Triton and a cunning, secretive mercenary with a distinctly modern concept of the words “loyalty” and “common good” was not really a choice at all.

“{Guardian. Shouldn’t be much of a challenge. I’ve tracked the infidel before, you know.}”

Oh, we know. We know.

And for a time Ravage felt there was more the Glyphids knew, or thought they knew, and that whatever it was did not bode well for the Drift.

CHAPTER ONE: Flesh & Blood

An Ophion stepped over a hole in the rock under his feet, and cursed his being home.

It had been said of Guardian that he was not the bravest of beings. A hulking brute over six feet tall, he certainly looked like he could take a beating or two, but that was, rather unlike most other members of his race, something he strove hard to avoid.

Guardian was an Ophion, a ruthlessly intelligent, if somewhat technologically primitive race that dwelt beneath the surface of Triton. Whether it was their original home or if they had come from afar was a mystery lost to time, but they had always been there, as far as anyone Guardian knew could remember. Violent and territorial to the extreme, they tended to shoot anyone foolish enough to enter their dank, labyrinthine home and never ask any questions at all.

Guardian could never be quite sure if this courtesy would be extended to him or not, as he was not generally well-liked among his people, which is why he hated coming home to Triton. In recent years, Ophions had been venturing off Triton more and more. Some had become successful merchants, trackers, hunters or had entered other, less upstanding employment.

But Guardian had been ahead of the curve. He had left Triton a little under a decade ago, after the end of the Last Peregrine War, which had seen most of his people trapped beneath Triton’s surface and a decent number of them buried alive in a botched, unnecessary operation to protect an item the Ophions barely even knew existed.

The Last Peregrine War had been fought over the Gravity Pyres which supposedly kept the Peregrine imprisoned on his Starship, tumbling through the outer reaches of the Drift. There just so happened to be one on Triton, far beneath the surface, and known to but a few of the Ophions. The select few who had ventured that far beneath, past the underground lakes and the fiery lava kingdom of the Stoneskin were very few indeed. In fact, Guardian could name all three of them.

The wealth of information in his head gave him comfort as he trod the rocky marshes: if anyone was going to kill him today, the chances were anywhere from good to excellent he’d know of it.

But it was the ones you couldn’t predict that he was afraid of. From predatory silverfish the size of his beefy arm to massive, acid-spitting spiders twice his own size, Triton was a veritable variety show of horrifying ways to get killed, well over half of which involved being eaten alive in various states of consciousness, ranging from a dim, venom-induced haze to full-fledged wide-eyed adrenaline-charged terror. There was a reason Ophions were intelligent, belligerent and not too numerous.

The marsh he strode through stretched on through kilometers of rugged terrain, separating Triton’s Aether Gate from the weapons forge known as Retaliation. After the Last Peregrine War, some of Guardian’s kinsmen had discovered a market for sentinel blades, the five-feet long scimitars his people had ceremonially crafted for centuries. After some enterprising businessmen tapped a vein of Triton’s rich liquid ore, a small stone complex was erected around one the mysterious Power Cores that dotted the Drift, and a settlement of sorts had come up around it, the Ophions’ first above ground. But Triton was a cold, bleak place, permanently blanketed in thick, sulphurous fog, and not many ventured across its surface without good cause. This suited Guardian just fine.

He approached the bunker-like stone of Retaliation and the rounded clay domes surrounding it. The somewhat scrawny warrior guarding the main building spoke to Guardian in his native tongue.

“{Be still, and bleed true.}”

Ophions were completely blind, having lost their eyesight untold eons ago. Whether or not they had ever had eyes was a subject of some debate amongst those few who cared, but what was certain was that their senses of hearing and smell were superb. Guardian was over a hundred feet away from the sentinel, and yet he was addressed at a level humans would normally use to soothe a crying infant. They could identify each other from the scent of their blood, and could bleed at will from their gums for expressly this purpose.

Guardian bled and bared his teeth. The diffuse azure glow of Neptune filtered through the fog and made his fangs and the base of his tusks glisten: a feral sight if anyone with eyes had been there to see it.

He nervously clutched his hide bag, hoping it was pungent enough to hide the smell of its precious contents. “{I am a blind brother, a merchant, come for your fine swords. Is Cyclops still putting chips of his own horn in the hilts?}”

Guardian had expected the joke to establish some form of camaraderie with the sentinel, but as he came closer, he could hear the young guard’s unwavering, guttural growls of suspicion.

“{He still cuts sword here, but whether his horn finds his way into his work or not is between the old one and his horn.}” So he had a sense of humor. The sentinel sniffed a shallow, wary sniff. “{You stink like Human}”

“{Ah, that would be the leaper I ate when I arrived. Serves me right for catching something so close to the Gate, it must have come through from one of the Human worlds.}” Guardian silently prayed the guard was not in contact with the small outpost by the Aether Gate; he had not arrived here through it.

“{No… you smell fresh. Warm.}”

Oh, well. Bribery it was.

“{Indeed… of course, the smell could be coming from my hide. Why don’t you smell it and find out}”

Guardian slipped the hide cover from his bag, and the heady smell almost overpowered him; certainly it affected the sentinel, whose throat rasped with animal hunger as he caught the scent wafting up.

“{Is that…}”

“{Oh, yes. And quite fresh.}”

* * *

“[What in hells kept you?]” Maw barked out of the side of his mouth as he tore into the raw Human flesh from Guardian’s bag. Blood spattered onto Guardian’s arm, and he resisted the urge to lick it off.

“[Security trouble. I’m surprised how tight they lock this place up nowadays.]”

Maw’s hiding place was somewhere in the space between a storage keep and a scrap metal heap, a hot, dry stone room deep in Retaliation’s lower basement. It was filled with bent, unusable hilts and blades, as well as assorted blacksmith’s equipment Guardian didn’t fully recognize as he felt his way over it. Ophion hearing was sensitive enough for them to measure out the dimensions of whole caverns just from one echo, but they liked, when possible, to physically touch their surroundings.

Maw stood, finished with his meal for now. He and Guardian spoke Saurian, long the staple trade tongue of the Expanse. Maw’s accent was horrendous.

“[It’s the Humans, my friend. To be caught dealing in Man flesh is no longer trivial. The apes control the space lanes and the Aether Gates now, along with their Concordance allies. They demand fealty from your people, just as they demand the fresh fruit of mine.]”

“[The what, now?]”

“[Fresh fruit?]” Maw said, slightly confused, then tried again with a different pitch.

“[Death. They demand our death. What was I saying?]”

“≤Fresh fruit,≥” Guardian tried in Pus-Tra.

Maw was still confused.

“Fresh fruit?” he finally said in Human.

A pause, and then Maw let out a vicious series of barks and snarls. Guardian was about to reach for his gun when he realized the Carnean was laughing.

Maw’s race were mysterious, technologically advanced carnivores whom Guardian had once held in awe, but the more he got to know Maw, the more he had come to realize that the Carneans were little more than xenophobic religious zealots with an unquenchable taste for raw meat. As intimidating as Maw could be, he could also be, well, quite jovial. In fact, some times he almost seemed nice.

He certainly didn’t look it. Seven feet of ocher-armored warrior, cadaverously slender and yet lain with so much wiry muscle that his skin looked tougher than his armor, his single red eye boring into the souls of those he hunted.

Guardian of course knew nothing of this. He had no idea what Maw looked like.

When Maw was finished laughing, his tone turned serious, mournful. “I suppose we must resort to speaking the tongue of our oppressor,” he said in Human. “Ironic, yes, yes. Now. How are you going to get me out of here?”

“Well, provided there are no serious incidents, Makemake should be smooth sailing. It’s within flitter range now, and hijacking a power core from this outpost shouldn’t prove too troublesome.”

“Have you ever built a flitter?”

“No… how hard could it be? The Power Core will keep us alive and warm… just don’t fall off.”

“I have ridden a flitter before, you know.”

* * *

Snatching the Power Core proved easy indeed. The cathode was located at surface level in an unguarded room, save for a sleeping raptor someone in the forge obviously kept as a pet. Maw sedated it with a tranq gun, just to make sure.

“Where did you get that?” Guardian asked him, indicating the tranquilizer rifle.

“I killed a trader and took it off him on my third day here.”

“What did you do with the body?”

“Remember those tools in my hiding place?”

“Yeah?”

“They weren’t tools.”

When Maw removed the Power Core from its invisible perch in midair a foot above the center of the room, Guardian reached out to touch the vortex, a tiny black dot of intense coldness in the hot chamber. Sure enough, in a few seconds, a new Power Core suddenly appeared, its quintuple crystals materializing from nothing and gently but firmly pushing Guardian’s hand back toward him. The core floated, slowly rotating.

“Always wondered how they did that,” Guardian said to no-one in particular, but then realized Maw might actually know the answer.

But no such luck. “The Ancients were powerful indeed. Now, let’s see this flitter of yours.”

They were jogging across the swamp when Guardian heard it: gunfire. Plasma weapons and 60 Cals, coming from the west, soon accompanied by the unmistakable aroma of bullets, blood and death.

“What’s happening?” Guardian asked. Maw dropped onto his knee and aimed a plasma rifle west, scope snapping into place over his eye. Carneans could see well into the infrared range, rendering the fog irrelevant.

“It’s a battle, alright. Troopers are pouring out of the gate… I count nineteen of them. Your people aren’t putting up much of a fight.”

“An invasion army?” Guardian asked, more curious than worried. Maw lowered his rifle, and the scope folded back automatically.

“The first element of one? Could be. Whatever it is, we’re not staying around to find out.”

Guardian had decided that the best place to build the flitter was a small forest north of Retaliation. He had used war blades and one of the scimitars from Maw’s hiding place to cut down the trees, and bound it together with roperoot, which grew freely all over Triton and several other outer moons.

The base of it was wood, while the shelter was armor-plating and crate parts Guardian had bartered from traders visiting Retaliation over the past few days since he’d gotten there.

“Impressive. I had no idea you had such modern tastes in interior design,” Maw quipped when he saw it.

“That’s what you get for hiring an Ophion.”

“Will it fly?”

“The Ancients were powerful indeed.”

Taking off was simply a matter of getting on the flitter, sitting inside the shelter, and turning the power core over on its head. The gravity steadily reversed until Maw and Guardian finally floated into the crate-lid roof of the shelter, and the flitter floated upwards into the sky. Like a rock sinking to the bottom of a lake, the flitter pushed the fog aside for long minutes. Guardian realized they were falling upwards at an astronomical speed, but the power core rendered him unable to feel it on his skin. He just heard a dull, watery roar.

Later on, they were in space, the massive emptiness looming before them as their wooden raft coasted towards Makemake at a thousand miles per second. Maw consulted a wrist computer, making calculations and adjusting the power core as it floated indifferently at the center of the flitter.

“Who do you think was the first guy that said ‘I’m going to take this Power Core, turn it upside down and try to fly through space with it?’” Guardian asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“Fine.”

Maw closed his wrist computer. “Well, we should get to Makemake in a matter of weeks. I hope you brought a book.” Maw sat down on a hide bag stuffed with Triton grass and closed his eye.

Guardian was completely disorientated. He had no reference points for his echolocation, and could not smell anything outside of freshly cut wood, oiled metal and Maw’s cold, tangy scent and the occasional fetid rankness of his breath.

“Maw?”

“Yes?” the Carnean said rather irritably.

“Why do you need me?”

“What?”

“Why do you need me? I mean, I already found the device for you, and you could have gotten this flitter into space by yourself.”

“I need you for the cause. For fighting. The Humans must be stopped, and the device is the tool to do it with. You’re with me because I need every ally I can get. You want power? I can give you power. The device can give us power. Anyone who wants power enough to do anything for it can be very dangerous, and I need dangerous beings on my side, by my side, just as you need me to achieve that power.” Guardian heard Maw open his eye. “I need you because you need me.”

A silence. Maw closed his eye again.

“Maw?”

“Yes?”

“Can I have it? Just to touch.”

And later, as Guardian held the device, touched it and smelled it, he thought he sensed power beaming from it, glowing forth from it in a harnessing way, as if it pulled the stars around him closer together and made him the focus of something. Power was unmistakable, and he felt the tables had turned.