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.