“How fast are you going?” asked Talasea.

“A little north of Mach two,” answered Isaac-Isabeau without averting their eyes from their screen. Dark, towering pillars criss-crossed the landscape, stretched along a line of dead sunshine. High above, a pale thing gleamed, dessicated O-class star drenching the cirruses in photonic snow. Hundreds of kilometres long, the vaporous structures barely moved, and yet Talasea knew she could trust the airspeed indicator – indeed, the aircraft moved at two thousand six hundred kilometres an hour in the hydrogen-nitrogen atmosphere. The rest was alien. Though Talasea had already piloted trainers and Karman skimmers alike, she had never taken a joyride in the atmosphere of a gas giant, and for good reason. Not only were most of these planets too far from their parent stars for Talasea’s Pleiades-attuned eyes to catch enough ambient light without night vision goggles, but winged flight in their turbulent environments was universally considered unadvisable at best, suicidal at worst. Apocalyptic electrical discharges and potent winds made gas giants one of the worst settings to coerce heavier-than-air machines into powered flight. Only Terrans felt at ease there. They had training. Hypercanes had been plaguing their oceans since the beginning of the Low Age, with airstream speeds exceeding five hundred kilometres in the eye wall. Isaac-Isabeau’s mothers had been flying weather drones in these moving hells for decades. No wonder the pilot thrived.

“Passing Mach two point five,” whispered Isaac-Isabeau. “I’m having trouble keeping us level.”

“Crosswinds?”

“No.” They struggled with the stick. “It’s the lower cloud layer.”

Just below their wings was the tabular summit of a gaseous plateau, swirling winds shaping frigid formations into an army of hungry maws.

“It’s very dense,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “Ice particles, mostly. We hit them at our current airspeed, we kill the engines. But if I gain altitude, I’ll enter the crosswinds and break my wings. We’re boxed in.”

Talasea held on to her seat. A deep sensation of powerlessness seized her, but no fear came following, for when they sat together in a cockpit, her trust in Isaac-Isabeau was absolute. They stood a monarch in their queendom. Yet, Talasea could feel it, the gas giant was pushing them to their limit. The irregular asperities of the cloud layer below forced Isaac-Isabeau to pull gravities in steep turns, always an inch from punching through the aircraft’s envelope.

“I can’t hold it,” whispered Isaac-Isabeau. “Either I hit the clouds or we lose a wing.”

They pushed the stick all the way to the right in a last-ditch evasive manoeuvre. The aircraft pitched up, bucked and broke. A heartbeat later, its wings careened off in the crosswinds and it began a death spiral towards the dark underbelly of the gas giant. The screen flickered to black. Isaac-Isabeau tapped their spectacles, turning the cockpit back into a wood-panelled room, where the dancing lights of an electric candle mimicked the glow of a distant star.

Another sim run down the drain.

Quiet sunlight poured through the bamboo curtains of Anita Elke’s field office. From the third floor of the northern aisle, she oversaw the VR dome, the surface-to-space antenna and the airstrip of the Astropostale training centre. Two gliders sat parked by the control tower and a two-engine drone flew overhead with nary a whisper. Elke gestured at the bicycle leaving the complex.

“It take it your partner has had enough?” she said. “It’s a shame, they’ve already beaten my score. I’m sure they could crack the gauntlet with a few more runs.”

“Don’t worry, Isaac-Isabeau will probably get right back to it after they clear their head.”

“I suppose, yes. A pilot’s ego always wins.” Elke smiled.

“Isaac-Isabeau has been hard at work taming theirs, but it is far from contained,” said Talasea. “I think your stupid gauntlet has reignited their taste for competition. I’m not congratulating you for this! I’m on vacation and the last thing I need is a frustrated pilot in my bed.”

Talasea glanced at the label on Elke’s instant teacup. Vat-grown ersatz. Awful. Probably tasted like oil and moss.

“What is the point of this sim, anyway? You’re training mailpeople, not fighter pilots.”

“I doubt transatmo fighters are sent to gas giants…”

“I wouldn’t know. I grew up on an O’Neill cylinder. Go fly a jet in there; you’ll reach the world-wall way before you even switch your post-combustion on. Regardless, my point is…” Elke’s fake tea annoyed her. Couldn’t she buy imported Terran tea, like everyone else on Elora? USRE-grown leaves came dirt-cheap, hell, they were probably cheaper than the ersatz. At this point, avarice became a statement. “…alright, I mean, what is this simulation preparing your trainees for?”

“Nothing and everything.”

Talasea sighed.

“Let me explain. The sim is, indeed, senseless. No aviator would fly in such conditions, which are as contrived as a tunnel run level in a vintage arcade sim. But it is this senselessness that makes the gauntlet universal. It pictures an absurd situation that requires exceptional piloting skills, and that you can quit whenever you want. I’m not interested in whether you’ll crack the sim, I’m interested in how you react to it. I don’t rate my trainees on how they perform in the gauntlet, I’m just watching how they take it. It’s such a good test of character. Most of them rightly think the sim is absurd but try one or two runs, just because I told them to. Some quit halfway through. A few don’t even engage with it. I like these. They’re good navigator material. Knowing when not to proceed when given illogical orders is a crucial skill aboard a spaceship.”

“And what about those who persist?”

“Fools, the lot of them.”

“She’s calling you a fool.”

“I know,” said Isaac-Isabeau as they leaned against the olive tree planted in the shadow of the control tower. “She gave me that speech, too.”

“Can’t you just quit? You’re one of the finest pilots in the Astropostale and Elke knows it. You have nothing to prove.”

“Regardless of what you may guess, it is not a matter of ego. Not directly. It’s just that Elke planted a thought at the back of my mind and I can’t. let. go. She provided me with a mathematical problem, because that’s what piloting is, deep down, an optimisation issue with n variables, and I need to solve it. I’m not like you, Tal. I can’t leave it at that and wander into the sunset.”

Isaac-Isabeau sighed, then glanced at the skies. A glider hummed overhead, sharp white wings cast against the daystar.

“I need more air. Let’s take flight.”

The two gliders moved with gracile swiftness over the countryside, carried by the afternoon thermals. Isaac-Isabeau flew in front, hunting for warm winds, while Talasea followed. No trainees were in flight, as their course was concerned with the brutal and theoretical matter of fusion candles. Isaac-Isabeau and Talasea had the skies to themselves. Talasea found the plains eerie and serene in equal measure. The Land of Parvati was Elora’s southernmost continent, and enjoyed a warm oceanic climate. The thin blue ghost of the great Panthalassa gleamed to the north, molten sapphire poured over the horizon. The plains filled the rest of the world. To the untrained eye, they appeared artificial: a patchwork of coloured squares like wheat and corn and soybeans, the grotesque dream of industrial agriculture transferred to the virgin canvas of a foreign planet. Yet, the quiet flight of a glider allowed for a better perception, unimpaired by the screams of titanium blades. Following the thermals, Talasea soon began to see the seams. The squares weren’t perfect; they had corners and tendrils protruding into their neighbours, like an army of tiny arms hanging on to the rest of the plain. Under the wind, they moved and bumped into each other in a dance filled with intent, the back and forth of kilometric amoeba seeking uneasy coexistence inside a Petri dish. Following Isaac-Isabeau’s lead, Talasea dove into a cold gap, enjoying the brief thrill of freefall before recovering and dashing for the nearest thermal. As she angled her wings, she noticed the finer texture of the landscape. The flatness of the plain was an illusion, caused by sunlight diffusing in the sea of pseudo-grass and abolishing shadows – it wasn’t a sedimentary basin, smooth as all marine mausoleums were, but a collection of overgrown boulders, regolith and basalt caps spread at random intervals as if a bored deity had emptied a bucket of gravel from the skies. Through which quirk of its bizarre geology had Elora birthed such a location, Talasea had no idea, but now, she understood why the gliders carried ejection seats. Even Isaac-Isabeau would have failed to find a place to land in this chaos.

A great thermal grabbed the gliders and they rode it further inland until the Panthalassa disappeared from view. A glimmer caught Talasea’s eye – a man-made structure surged from the plain, fifteen kilometres to the south. Talasea grabbed her binoculars and saw a basalt needle that stood upright in the plain. A statue perched atop it: a man on his horse, fifty metres tall, bronze glistening under the sun, holding the reins, fist turned skywards, and with the stern face of a conqueror. Terran. Of course he was Terran, and yet the hooves of his stallion were about to trample the dark soil of a planet he had never seen. For his dust coat, his mariner’s cap and the carbine by his side belonged to the depths of the Low Age, to the Time of the Blue Sword, to the bloody decades that had shaped the early USRE in its westwards conquest. It was Kaj Mahev! The horse lord of Kandahar, the killer of Bukhara, the man who had carved himself a savage path towards the heart of the necrocapitalist world! Slain at thirty-eight on the battlements of Fortress Europe, his ashes scattered by the first USRE nuclear bomb, Kaj Mahev, blessed and cursed and blessed, reborn on Elora.

The radio crackled. Three pings, priority channel.

“This is Baseline for Astropostale gliders. You are entering airspace controlled by the USRE embassy on Elora. We are monitoring your airspeed and trajectory. Approach within five kilometres of the statue is strictly forbidden. Acknowledge.”

“This is Tali Talasea to Baseline, whom am I talking to?”

“You are talking to automated air defence platform KM-01 Baseline. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “We are veering away and descending, over.”

The channel died with a beep. Soon, the statue disappeared from view and the gliders re-entered Astropostale airspace.

“Baseline is indeed a USRE callsign,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “As far as I know, we have no military presence on Elora but there are bluffs I do not fancy calling in a glider.”

Their white wings touched down in the golden arms of sunset.

“I’ve heard that Baseline pinged you,” said Elke as she brought Talasea and Isaac-Isabeau back to the hangars on her EV. “My bad, I should have warned you, I didn’t think the thermals would be strong enough to carry you all the way to the statue.”

“Why do you permit such reckless appropriation of public airspace?” asked Talasea.

“I am not tolerating anything, alas! The USRE embassy forced the exclusion zone upon the Astropostale. The paperwork is in order, trust me.”

“The statue encroaches upon wildland, how is the permit even compliant with the constitution?”

“The USRE embassy discovered the only basalt tip the pseudograss never conquered. Apparently, the needle consists of aberrant rock, perhaps from a meteorite. Wreaks havoc on Eloran biology. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single lichen colony up there. Of course, they built the statue from above, using an airship, so the pseudograss remained untouched. At best, Kaj Mahev dislodged a few amoeba populations. Hardly enough to sue…” Elke smirked. “Note that this is the first time Mahev conquers a place without resorting to ethnic cleansing. The irony is not lost on me.”

“Kaj Mahev is not a hero, that I readily admit,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “But he lived in a bloody, chaotic era and played according to its rules. Without him, Fortress Europe would not have been breached.”

“Why should I care? I’m a Selenite, Isaac-Isabeau. My first memory of the Earth is a customs officer telling my mum she couldn’t leave her shuttle because authorities had flagged our great-grandfather as a terrorist for throwing a rock at a USRE cop one day. I do not care about your heroes, whether they bathe in the blood of infants or not. What I do care about, however, is that a bureaucrat from New Delhi decided to sully my plains with a monumental rendition of a Low Age warlord and I can’t do squat about it.”

“I’m surprised no one tried to deface the statue,” said Talasea.

“Embassy marshalls patrol the plain, so you can’t just walk to the needle and throw some paint at Mahev. Saraswati anarchists attempted an airstrike last season. They flung an improvised cruise missile from the Panthalassa. As it approached the statue, it vanished from radar, crashed, and the marshalls recovered it. The embassy claims they jammed the drone, but that’s bullshit; it was autopilot-controlled with inertial navigation, so nothing needed jamming. Baseline took it down.”

“What happened to the anarchists?”

“Nothing, the embassy didn’t sue. Why bother when you have CIWS protecting your bronze abomination?” The EV screeched as Elke stopped in front of the control tower. “Anyway. See you tomorrow for your eighth attempt, Isaac-Isabeau? Or are you calling it quits?”

“Not a chance.”

“Yes, yes, see you tomorrow,” said Talasea. “Don’t wait for me, Is. I’ll take a stroll around the airstrip.”

Talasea sauntered along the main runway, which ran for two kilometres northwards. Golden clouds turned to dark red above the horizon, and the pseudograss shimmered beyond the fences. A trainer roared above her, turned around and began its approach. Tac, tac: the wheels made contact, the brakes whined and the plane came to a halt with half a kilometre of concrete left. It was a Kingfisher. A simple two-seater, Earth-designed and Elora-built, running on algae biofuel, with a bubble canopy and the allure of industrial-era aviation. Talasea knew the plane well; she’d learned the art of planetside flight on a Kingfisher a lifetime ago. The controls were simple, the aerodynamics even more so. The plane was fast, yes, it could reach Mach two on afterburners, but it had none of the purposeful instability of modern transatmo fighters. A trainer had to be sanitised. Contrary to Algorab, the Astropostale did not enjoy scraping students off the runways.

“Hey! Mistress Talasea!” yelled the trainee who had just disembarked from the Kingfisher. They were barely an adult, and their green skin identified them as a Mercurian immigrant. Talasea walked up to them, expecting a handshake, and was met by a gentle bow, which she answered in kind. It was refreshing to see a Terran – seen from the Pleiades, Mercury was close enough – practise proper Pleiadian etiquette.

“And to whom do I owe the pleasure?”

“My name is Mina. And this is Mona.” Another, greener student waved from the cockpit. “Elke told us on the radio that you had received Baseline’s greetings. Don’t worry, it’s kind of a rite of passage around these parts. Elke never warns newcomers in advance. Our theory with Mona is that she *wants* one of our trainers to get painted by Baseline’s targeting radar. That would provide her with a juicy legal case.”

“So she is using you as bait.”

“Indeed. But it’s harmless.”

“Until someone gets a missile on their tail.”

“Come on, it’s just a statue. No one’s ever been shot down for a statue.” Mina turned around and gestured to Mona to move the trainer towards the nearest taxiway; the other Mercurian obliged and soon the Kingfisher was on the move, leaving Mina and Talasea alone on the tarmac.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t discuss the topic too much with Elke,” continued Mina. “If she had a nuke, she’d happily drop it on Kaj Mahev’s head herself.”

“I’m perhaps too *Pleiadian* for Elora, but I can’t understand why she even bothers. We are in the middle of the largest contiguous biome in human space; there’s pseudograss as far as the eye can see. What is a single statue?”

“I don’t know. I am a Mercurian, sister. I’ve never seen the Earth, why would I care for one of her long-dead warlords? But who knows, the Low Age was a mess. Maybe Mahev wronged Elke’s ancestors.”

A low-pitched howl echoed over the runway; Talasea ducked as a delta-winged drone buzzed the landing lights and darted towards the sea, vapour surging around its wingtips.

“Good stars, what is this thing?” exclaimed Talasea.

“Oh, it’s Little Rose! One of Elke’s pet projects, a liquid-fuelled rocket drone from a defunct Astropostale program, she’s trying to repurpose it as a mail mule for high-g planets. It’s cute, fast and nimble, but the autopilot seems trained on air war pulps; it’s itching for dogfights! Almost collided with my glider once. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to help Mina refuel the Kingfisher.”

“You’re going back?”

“No, no, it’s just that Elke wants the jets to remain fuelled at all times. Sometimes, she calls unplanned drills. Says it builds skill and character.”

“Are you *certain* Elke isn’t just out to kill her trainees?”

“I am reasonably sure. Let’s say ninety percent confidence. Eighty, maybe. At worst. Oh, hey, look!”

A murmur rippled through the air. Green pillars surged from the stars, pinging the plains in sequence. At the points of impact, the pseudograss rose up like the enthralled crowd in a stadium after a spectacular goal; a sudden mustering of troops in the face of the daring offensive of light, as the mature symbionts protected the younger roots. The ruckus quickly died, but Talasea had had time to gauge the height of this newly collected army against the vastness of the plains – at the apex of the wave, the tallest pseudograss had stretched thirty metres above ground.

“Lidar satellite?” asked Talasea.

“Yes, Elke’s,” answered Mona. “She likes to have up-to-date maps of the plains. The pseudograss doesn’t react well to lidar pulses, biologists aren’t sure why. At least they can’t reach into orbit, ah! I wouldn’t want to use the Kingfisher’s own lidar at too low an altitude, though. Getting shot down by *grass* would be humiliating.”

With the night came a cold seabound wind, which murmured around the sleek superstructures of the vertically landed Courier Seven. The Astropostale spaceport was barebones – only three landing pads, like concrete plates in the pseudograss, two of which remained empty, cold eyes turned skywards. Isaac-Isabeau and Talasea dined together in the tiny kitchen of their ship. Isaac-Isabeau’s soup smelled of carrots and leeks, but Talasea was reasonably certain they had only bought local vegetables before departing for the Land of Parvati. She blamed fungi, flavour enhancers and a healthy dose of Earth nostalgia for the shape and flavour of the dish.

“Too much salt,” said Talasea as she finished her bowl. “You never fail a soup, Isa. It’s the gauntlet, isn’t it? It’s still on your mind, gnawing at it.”

“Elke is dangerous.”

“Indeed, and not just because she managed to capture your attention better than I ever did. Did you know she uses her trainees as bait for Baseline? She’s trying to get the USRE defences to lock on to their gliders and jets. Even if only harmless fireworks protect the statue, I find this behaviour in very poor form. It is not befitting of a flight instructor.”

“Alas, Elke is neither the first nor the last of her kind. My instructor back on Earth was very much like her. He saw his trainees as malleable clay to fit into neat boxes: here, you’ll be a fighter pilot, here, you’ll be a liner pilot…under such a mindset, you have little qualms using your students.”

“And what were you fated to become?”

“Oh, in me he saw an effeminate boy – his words, not mine – with a tendency to become obsessed with minor technical problems, a knack for rough landings and a love for neat, regular schedules and so on, like, my first week, he said: Isaac, you’ll be a transport pilot.” They smiled. “He also said that I wasn’t gay enough to become a spaceplane pilot.”

“And what would he say, now that you’re flying cargo spaceplanes?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea. The poor idiot died five years ago in a crash. He wasn’t even flying the plane, for a pilot, that’s a pathetic way to go. But it’s weird that we’re talking about him right now, because he also happened to be a big Kaj Mahev fan. It was a generational thing; my mothers too were raised with these sprawling book sagas about Low Age warlords.”

“Were they good, at least?”

“It’s been a while since I reread my collection but yeah, most of them were fine. Formulaic, but fine. I would say they’re among the best in the giant pile of state-sponsored fiction our schools were showered with. A statue of Kaj Mahev stands in the Round City of Toulouse, believe it or not, overseeing the Jacobins convent. I’m not sure what to make of it. He was a war criminal. There is no denying this fact, but without him, I’m not sure Europe could have liberated itself so early in the Low Age… I understand that’s ironic for a man who died in Istanbul, right at the gates of the continent and so far from my home, but I feel like I owe him and his ilk my life. Had the USRE not breached Fortress Europe, we would have likely turned into another AUSCOM, I would have lived as an outcast in the borderlands of the greatest algorithmic citadel of our time. It feels strange, owing your civilisation to a brute. Damnit. I never considered Kaj Mahev from this angle.” Isaac-Isabeau sighed. “I wish Bubbles didn’t daydream on Vyiranga. I could enjoy one of her witty aphorisms right now.”

“I realise I’ve never thought about Mahev at all. He’s just a footnote in our history books.”

“You’re lucky. You don’t have to live with the Earth’s history. Hey, I just remembered. I think I know why the embassy built this statue.”

“Do tell.”

“An old story says that Kaj Mahev knew the day he would die…had known for decades. Folk tales say it was a gift from Saraswati, or that a fortune teller in the streets of Delhi uncovered his future. Modern USRE propaganda has it that he was just a very wise guy, the idealistic prototype of the socialist man, and what’s a little bit of supernatural prescience for the greatest general in the history of humankind? Regardless, before the attack on Istanbul, he brought his mother, Evgenia, to the front. Then he boarded a helicopter, rode in with the first paratrooper spearhead, took a bullet at the break of dawn and fell from the Bosphorus Seawall. The medics brought his broken body to Evgenia and she promised him that, should the USR ever reach for the stars, he would walk under skies yet undisturbed by man. He expired soon after, with a smile on his face. And now, Kaj Mahev rides eternal under Elora’s sun.”

“How does it make you feel?”

“I hope he’s cold at night. But I also hope the stars are sweet to him.”

“Come, Is. Let’s forget the Low Age.”

“Let’s.”

Faint rays of golden sunlight peered through the curtains of Talasea’s hab module on Courier Seven. Isaac-Isabeau yawned.

“Good Earth, it’s terrible… I live with a blue lady from outer space and she makes me commit acts of unspeakable depravation.”

Talasea kissed Isaac-Isabeau on the lips.

“See?” They kissed her back. “My first mother always told me to steer clear of Pleiadian beauties.”

“And what did your second mother say?”

“Go and ask her out, child, you don’t run into such a wonderful girl every day.” Their smile widened. “Alright, mom said this twenty years ago about the daughter of a soybean farmer. But! She’s had very kind words about you.”

“She said my rice pudding was to die for.”

“Which is true.”

“You gave me the recipe!”

“She doesn’t have to know.”

“You never told me about the soybean farmer’s daughter.”

“She’s named Josie.”

“Oh, yes, the Josie from Toulouse?”

“The one.”

“Isn’t she a pilot, now?”

“Not everyone likes soybeans. Speaking of…”

“Soybeans?”

“Pilots. I had an epiphany in your arms. I think I can crack that gauntlet. It’s only a matter of timing, and I have a very good sequence of turns in mind. This time, I’ll show Elke!”

“One day, Isa. One day you’ll understand that sometimes, it takes nigh sainthood to stay with you.”

Isaac-Isabeau disappeared in the gaping maw of Elke’s simulator; Talasea, left with neither work nor intent to find any, wandered the airstrip. The skies were clear, the sun high and warm, and Isaac-Isabeau's sweetness had left a sweet afterglow in her stomach. Their night had been a dance – they had barely touched, instead using the close-distance link between their monads to pleasure each other, with silent kisses and the temptation of caresses enthralling enough to unleash tides of shared ecstasy under scattered starlight. Now, with Kingfishers roaring overhead, radiotelescopes searching the zenith and the faint curve of a rocket launch far eastwards – with the cold murmurs of aerospace all around – her whispered pleas and poetic offerings felt tiny, ridiculous even, but she cherished them regardless.

Elke’s EV was parked behind a small shack soldered to the control tower like a steel barnacle. Curiosity pushed Talasea inside, where she found the instructor leaning over a small aircraft – Talasea recognised the drone that had buzzed her.

“Don’t come any closer,” said Elke, who wore a respirator and held a pipe-laden apparatus. “I’m refuelling the creature.”

“What are you feeding this drone?”

“Methanol-hydrazine and high-test peroxide.”

“Oh dear. How many trainees went hypergolic with this abomination in the vicinity?”

“So far, none. And despite my radar antics, trust me, I don’t like teaching classes to little piles of ash.”

Talasea took a cautious step back. This fuel-oxidiser combination was the matter of nightmares – a ridiculously dangerous mix, drawn from the depths of the Low Age and perhaps even older than that, forged in the fires of the mythical industrial wars of the twentieth century – and the drone guaranteed to end in an apocalyptic fireball should the trainees, or Elke, miss a turn on the taxiway. It offered a stark contrast to the stable, mundane Kingfishers parked on the other side of the airstrip, and even to Courier Seven’s less-than-ideal mix of high-potency batteries and metastable nitrogen. Was the methanol-hydrazine-peroxide circus a statement? The USRE embassy had brought the Low Age to Elora, so the Astropostale would unleash a world-war-two antiquity upon its unsuspecting skies?

“You may wonder about the point,” continued Elke. Yes, that she did. “The point is that there is no point. Is my drone ridiculously dangerous? Yes. Are the fuel and oxidiser stupidly outdated? Also yes. Will my trainees be allowed to even dream of flying this contraption? Not in a million years. Some people go bungee jumping on high-gravity planets, others go ice skating on icy moons with crevices the depths of the Mariana Trench, well, I fly a drone that may kill me upon landing. And refuelling. And by existing in my broad vicinity. So what? We live in an age and on a planet where you can spend an entire life without ever worrying about *anything*. I find this perspective boring as sin, so I choose to operate a drone fuelled with Satan’s blood not because I have to but because it’s a very fun airframe to tune and tinker with. There’s a guy who understood the meaning of such fundamental freedom, by the way. He was called Kaj Mahev.”

“Not sure I follow.”

“Yeah, USRE schoolbooks usually elude this chapter of his life, but he wasn’t born a warlord, you know! New Delhi-approved historical fiction says he was a pauper, the son of a goat herder and an herbalist, who rose against his oppressors to spread the light of socialism, blah blah blah good stars, what a bore! Nah, the truth is that Kaj Mahev was born into a wealthy family. His dad was an opium magnate, his dear mom a concubine. He could have chosen to live in luxury until the end of his days, and yet, fast forward thirty years and you find him ordering every state bureaucrat in Bukhara lined up against a wall, shot and buried in a ditch. Think that’s because of *ideology*? Ah! Kaj Mahev had none! He just woke up one day and realised, ‘Hey, I’m as healthy as a Low Age guy can be. I’ve trained in the matters of war. I love that split second when the blade of my sabre detaches a head from a neck. I’ve got a thousand well-armed thugs in my retinue, five tanks, plus a few stunning concubines. Why wouldn’t I just become a warlord? Not because I have to, not because the inherent savageness of the Low Age forces me to take up the sword and defend my lands, no! Not even because I support the great socialist project! Just because *I can*. Because it’s *fun.*’ And see, the only difference between Kaj Mahev and I is that I don’t get a kick out of watching people die.”

Talasea lunched with the trainees – Isaac-Isabeau remained in the simulation room. She traded stories of Courier Seven, but they merged in a blurry, senseless hour. Her mind was on Kaj Mahev. Elke’s words, regardless of their inherent truth, made her realise once again how poor her knowledge of Terran history was. This ignorance was, in part, voluntary. Seen from the Pleiades, the blue planet was a crumbling cathedral of half-truths, semi-remembered tales and propaganda, a towering temple of lies built atop the decaying ruins of the Low Age and the modern band-aids – shining cities with a dark heart – applied by Laniakea and the USRE. Kaj Mahev? Who the hell was even Kaj Mahev? Talasea was surrounded by formidable figures, by Rani Spengler who had discovered the geometry drive, by Valys Alcyone who had teleported her home station across four hundred lightyears, by the thousands of spacers and explorers that had built her island in the sky, and the Time of the Sword was already three hundred years old. She was a daughter of this kinetic age, born under a twin blue sun…would have Kaj Mahev even *envisioned* the eventuality of her existence? If, by some twist and turn of the geometry drive, she was to meet him in his glory days, leading the charge into a nuclear barrage, what would happen? At best, he’d probably turn her into a slave – a curiosity forever confined to Mahev’s nomadic palace, yes, she had seen Low Age dramas too, not Isaac-Isabeau’s censored epics, but the truth of the peasants and artisans caught in the wake of the USRE’s westwards anabasis, she knew the temporal trip would likely end in a golden cage, in a ditch or against a wall.

And in the middle of the shifting plains, a devil in bronze looked at a foreign sun.

Isaac-Isabeau’s bicycle screeched; the front brake failed and they almost rear-ended Mina’s tricycle, which Talasea had borrowed to survey the taxiway.

“Tal! Tal! I’ve done it! I’ve cracked the gauntlet!”

“Elke will be disappointed. What manner of spell did you cast on her computer?”

“No spell, just skill. I had gauged my approach wrongly. I was diving too late, I was taking too much air. The key was to skim the clouds like a maniac. On the ninth attempt, it worked. Perfect trajectory. I exited the gauntlet at Mach 3, I never went higher than five metres.”

“You look even happier than last night.”

“Yes! I…” Isaac-Isabeau sighed. “Sorry. Sorry, Tal, I shouldn’t have spent so much time in that room, I should have told Elke to sod off, I should have…”

“It’s fine. You’ve spent two days running a stupid simulation programmed by a trainer who fuels her pet drone with human-hypergolic fuel. I’ve spent two days walking along the taxiway and chatting with trainees. We’re on vacation, no one is keeping count and certainly not me. Now, where is Elke? I want to see her face.”

“I don’t have a clue. She congratulated me, downloaded the data from my last sim and ran to her EV. Something about a weather station that needs fixing. I suppose she’s in the plains.”

“Do you have any plans for the afternoon?”

“I wanted to take a glider.”

“How about we grab some clouds in a Kingfisher? I’m itching for a real flight. And with a bit of luck, we’ll get to buzz Elke.”

Long strings of cirruses criss-crossed the sky and drenched the Kingfisher’s wings in icy reflections.

“See? It’s not going fast enough.”

“Is, I’m barely at two thirds of thrust and pushing Mach 2 and you complain about going too slow? This is a trainer, not a fighter!”

“I know, but you hear that roar when you move the throttle just a tiny bit forwards? These engines want to go higher and stronger. They’re constrained by the fuselage. Another frame would have them sing at Mach 3 without breaking a sweat.”

“I’m starting to see why Elke doesn’t want her trainees to succeed in the gauntlet. Now, shush, Is. You’ve spent two days doing edge-of-envelope manoeuvres. Let me enjoy a stable airframe in its comfort zone.”

Talasea banked and went inverted. Indeed, she could feel that the aerodynamics constrained the engines, but it felt comfortable, not frustrating – one would have to *really* work to put the frame into a flat spin, stall or create an engine flameout. The workmanlike nature of the Kingfisher was deeply reassuring, and if the price to pay was a reduction in performance, so be it. Talasea reverted to normal flight and throttled down to Mach 1.5, before waking the radio from sleep.

“Kingfisher to Mina and Mona, do you hear us?” she asked.

“Mina here, in the control tower, yeah, I hear you!”

“Do you have any idea where Elke went? I’d like to say hello.”

“Well, I’m not keeping tabs on our boss but…” A whisper in the background. Mona? “OK, right, apparently, she fuelled her drone and loaded it on the EV, so she’s not going off-road. Do you see a dirt trail, north of your position?”

“Yep,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “We see it.”

“That’s the only road in the plains, it leads to a rocketsonde launch site. Elke likes to fire her creature from there.”

Talasea lost altitude and aligned the Kingfisher with the trail. Fifty kilometres northwards, she came across a dusty wake – Elke’s EV! She throttled down to subsonic speeds, then accelerated again to pass the sound barrier right above the car.

“She doesn’t look happy!” said Isaac-Isabeau, looking back. “She stopped and I think she’s flipping us the bird.”

“How dignified.”

“To be fair, buzzing her wasn’t classy either.”

“She stole my partner for two days straight, so I deserve a sliver of payback.”

“Er, Tal. She’s unloaded the drone.” A flash blinked in a corner of Talasea’s field of vision. “It’s airborne!”

She circled. The creature went straight up, then unfolded its wings and lost altitude, hugging the cluttered landscape as it took up speed to follow a northbound vector. Talasea followed, accelerating to Mach 1.2; she wanted to see the contraption in action. The bronze candle of Kaj Mahev’s ghost appeared on the horizon.

“KJ-01 Baseline to Kingfisher trainer. You are entering a controlled airspace. We are monitoring your airspeed and trajectory. Please remain above three hundred metres and do not exceed five hundred kilometres an hour. Approach within five thousand metres of the statue is strictly forbidden. Acknowledge transmission.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Tal. Tal!”

“Yes?”

“The rocks. Look at the rocks.” Talasea lowered her visor to filter the harsh sunlight out.

“What’s with them?”

“I recognise them. The shapes, the geometry and the disposition. The clouds, Tal. The clouds in Elke’s simulation match the relief around us to a T.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve spent twelve hours in this simpod. I am certain.”

“The clouds weren’t dynamic?”

“No. They were the same. Every single run. The same, and I’m looking at them right now.”

The drone banked, increased its airspeed, lost even more altitude and began to push directly towards the statue, hugging the pseudograss.

“Tal, trail the drone, trail the drone!”

She performed a U-turn, feeling two gees punch against her chest, then switched to afterburners.

“KJ-01 Baseline to Kingfisher trainer, please lower your airspeed to subsonic.”

“Kingfisher to Baseline!” said Isaac-Isabeau. “You have a rocket-powered drone heading your way! I repeat, you have a rocket-powered drone heading towards the statue at Mach 2!”

“Baseline to Kingfisher, negative, negative, no contact on radar. Lower your airspeed and bank away.”

“Step outside your bunker and use a pair of binoculars, damnit!”

“Baseline to Kingfisher, negative, negative, lower your airspeed and bank away.”

“It must be an automated system,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “There’s no one at the statue and the drone is lost in ground clutter, it’s going too low for the radar to pick it up! That’s why Elke insisted on having this arbitrary ceiling restriction in the sim!”

“Aren’t modern radars designed not to fall for this trick?”

“Do you think the syndicates would tolerate sophisticated USRE weaponry on Eloran soil? Baseline must be an antique, straight out of surplus. It’s dumb and blind and Elke is playing it like a fiddle. Give me the controls.”

“What for?”

“I want to match the trajectory of the drone before picks up too much airspeed, meet up with it and tip its wing to send it off course.”

“You will *not* drive us this low and this fast.”

“I’ve done it in the sim!”

“With an unmanned aircraft and it took you eight tries. I keep the stick.”

“Tal! We can’t just turn around! I don’t – look, you told me the drone was fulled with hydrazine, right? It’ll hit Kaj Mahev with half a tank. I don’t have the headspace for mathematics, but rocket fuel *does* melt bronze.”

“Do you care about this man that much?”

“I care about not being manipulated!”

“Point taken.” Talasea engaged the afterburners. The drone was but a fiery candle, five hundred metres below.

“KJ-01 Baseline to Kingfisher, you…”

She killed the channel.

“Right. Is. Do you recall your flight pattern?”

“By heart.”

“Is there a moment when the drone is vulnerable?”

“Yes. Halfway through, I’m temporarily lowering my airspeed below Mach 2 and going on a hard right turn. That’s the only way to go over the first ring of basalt formations without crashing nor breaking the ceiling – every time I tried to punch straight ahead, I ate the clouds. That’s an intercept window right there. We need more air. Take us up.”

Talasea pulled the stick and the Kingfisher soared. They needed to trade altitude for speed. Where did the Kingfisher’s operational envelope end?

“Go,” said Isaac-Isabeau. Talasea went inverted and entered a dive. The Kingfisher passed Mach 2.5 halfway through, as the drone banked to circle around a spread of toppled basalt needles, and further reduced the distance between the two aircraft. When Talasea recovered from the dive, the Kingfisher neared Mach 3 and she felt strong vibrations at her fingertips. An airspeed alarm blared.

“Aborting!” yelled Talasea as she broke her vector and throttled down. “The airframe’s falling apart.”

“Tal! The drone’s getting away! We’ve missed our window!”

“It wasn’t reachable to begin with! Not in a Kingfisher!”

The drone had now entered the end of its turn and was veering back towards the statue. Baseline was probably screaming on the general channel, but Talasea had no means to check if the Kingfisher had been radar-locked.

“No, no, no! You can’t let it escape, give me the stick!”

“I’m not risking our lives for Kaj Mahev!”

“It’s my honour as a pilot that’s at stake!”

“Is, do we have a lidar onboard?”

“Yes, front section pod.”

“Switch it on and light up the drone’s path.”

Isaac-Isabeau obliged.

“Lidar on. Do I light the wake or…”

“No, send pulses in front of the drone.”

Isaac-Isabeau flicked a switch. A greenish diffraction blinked in the drone’s axis of movement; a heartbeat later, the pseudograss mustered its ranks and rose up. The drone did not evade. As it impacted the pseudograss, the front section folded, the wings broke, fuel and oxidiser mixed into the tank, a miniature sun occulted the statue and a loud thump rattled the cockpit. Talasea saw no debris, just a wide circle of scorched vegetation and a trail of white smoke. She reopened the general channel, heard an uninterrupted stream of expletives from Baseline, killed the radio again. Of course. Expecting gratitude from an anti-air defence computer was a fool’s game.

A tiltrotor with USRE markings was landed on the taxiway; when Talasea disembarked from the Kingfisher, she was met by the grey uniforms and stern faces of embassy marshalls. Elke’s EV was parked near the shack, and its owner seemed to have vanished. Mina, Mona, and the other trainees watched from the safety of a fence.

“Mistress Talasea,” said the oldest marshall. “Mistress Elke has retreated to her control tower and doesn’t want to answer our questions. It is, of course, her constitutional right as a resident of Elora; however, your companion is a USRE citizen and as such we have full authority to…”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” said Isaac-Isabeau. “It’s just an incident.”

“You flew a Kingfisher through a restricted airspace.”

“We warned Baseline that we were pursuing a drone,” said Talasea. “We got no answer.”

“A drone launched by mistress Elke. Don’t deny it. A spy satellite picked up the EV, the pre-take-off ejection and the engine ignition.”

“You’ve seen our respective trajectories, right?” said Isaac-Isabeau. “Mistress Elke was testing her drone and we were the chase plane. She sent the drone on a northbound trajectory, well away from restricted airspace, but the inertial navigation betrayed us. The drone banked towards the statue, at too low an altitude for Baseline to spot it. We gave chase to try and override the controls from the Kingfisher, but the drone didn’t answer our hails, so we had no choice but to destroy it, using a lidar to agitate the grass below. I readily admit that our actions were rash, but, once again, Baseline wasn’t picking the drone up and there was enough unburnt fuel in this aircraft to…well, you’ve seen the crater. That’s it, marshall. I think *you* owe us one.”

“There will be an inquiry. You may be asked to repeat this testimony under oath, comrade pilot.”

“And I will. Thank you, marshall. Have a nice trip back to Saraswati.”

The night was young. In the half-light of her office, Elke’s cigarette gleamed like a drop of molten bronze.

“You two are a menace in a cockpit, you know that? I should have waited until your departure. Eh.”

“We saved your ass,” said Isaac-Isabeau.

“You did and for this you have my thanks, but even if you had remained silent, the marshalls wouldn’t have had anything to hurt me. The reason why I recorded your sim performance was to avoid using a flight computer. The drone only contained punched cards that would have disintegrated after impact. No blackbox either. I have a good lawyer. Without hard evidence, the case would have been on very shaky ground. And, say, Talasea, why did you even bother? Kaj Mahev is no one to you.”

“You used my partner; that was reason enough. How did you know Isaac-Isabeau would crack the gauntlet?”

“I didn’t, but their psych profile gave them a good chance of obsessing with the sim until they solved it, and I bet on that. Isaac-Isabeau, dear, you’ve gotta work on these fixations of yours. But in the end, I’d say we’re even. I’ve played a trick on you. You’ve played a trick on me. And the bastard in the plain still has his head. For my next attempt, I’ll make sure to have my acolyte’s consent. And that you’re a galactic arm away from Elora. Now, get out of my office. I want to smoke in peace.”

A quaint starlight fell upon Courier Seven’s prow. The concrete remained warm, and beyond the fence the grass whispered.

“Why didn’t you throw Elke to the embassy?” asked Talasea as she unfolded the ladder to the hab module.

“And why did you help me stop the drone?”

“You’re very sexy as a pretend fighter pilot.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

“You can also consider the following: I am hopelessly romantic, I have read too many pulp novels, I don’t like when people lie, but I don't want the superpowers to win.”

“That makes two of us, on all counts. And I suppose that makes me a bad patriot.”

“What did you get us for dinner?”

“I forgot to cook anything.”

“Bubbles would have set a reminder. I miss her already.”

“Me too.”

The Milky Way reigned supreme: a string of luminous islands that glittered across the darkest sea.

“Come on. We should get going again.”

The organic blast door closed shut with an eerie whistle, sealing the external platform behind the two women, one of which wore a white-and-blue Starmoth Initiative suit and the other a simple coral-like voidsuit. One of them was indubitably human, though her skin was the colour of a deep ocean. The other had a less firm grip on reality, or perhaps it was the other way around; when she walked on the dust-covered floor, the small particles falling from the decaying structure of the Sequence ruins seemed to remain undisturbed as if she had been a proverbial holographic projection. Heavy thumps echoed from beyond the blast door.

"Talasea, how much time do we have?" asked the coral-wearing woman.

"I am not sure, but I would say not much, sadly. These organic doors are strong, but they can't hold that thing we're trailing behind -- even if it was just a shambler, I would not bet on the door. They can't interface with these ruins anymore but they can just, you know...punch through."

Another heavy thump echoed in response.

"No word from the Al-Andalus?"

"No." Talasea checked the q-aug on her palm again. "Last communication was the one we received in the atrium. I've got an automated shuttle coming down, but it will be too late. I, well..." The irenian took a glance at her laser stylus, a trusty tool, but even at its highest power settings, no more than a flashlight against a Sequence combat organism. "I guess I'll have to start talking with the monsters."

Another thump. The organic door was about to give way, artificial muscles strained to their very limits, stretching like rotting roots under a powerful wind.

"You, alone?"

"How come you're still there? Fly away, you beautiful lady. Go away, Kalisa. You don't want to see me crushed to death by a Sequence lifeform. You haven't seen the Algorab tapes. I have. It's not very pretty."

The coral-wearing woman looked up, towards the wide, blade-blue sky of the fractured Sequence world, with derelict bio-arcologies reaching towards the twin stars in the shape of skeleton trees. Down below, there was nothing but five thousand meters of cold emptiness.

"You've always had such a detached attitude towards death, Tali."

"That's typically Irenian, I guess. We choose hedonism, so we don't have to worry about anything when it all ends. Or that's just scientific curiosity. Now go."

A final thump. Two muscles broke, spreading dark artificial blood on the cobblestones.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"You can literally cross the entire galaxy in the blink of an eye and you are telling me right here, right now, that you don't want to be going anywhere?"

"What can I say? I think I like you. And there are things...I have always wanted to say."

The door finally gave way, splattering in a shower of dark fluid and shattered organic particles, spread into the wind as soon as they found themselves freed from the shackles of artificial muscles. The Jeweller followed immediately in the wake of the destruction it had inflicted on the door, a swirling cloud of transbiological particles that evocated images of self-aware baroque paintings to Talasea. The Jeweller spread its tentacles to mirror the two suns above, then moved towards the two women, poised for the kill -- or perhaps, if their biological material was deemed adequate, absorption into its complex transbiology, that had been starved of new inputs for so long.

Kalisa winked, then stepped forward, calmly, gently. It lasted only a second or two, perhaps three at most. The Jeweller froze in time, then extended a tentacle towards Kalisa. The white-haired woman poked it with a smile, and Talasea assumed they spent the following second exchanging information. Then the Sequence lifeform quickly folded its tentacle and slithered away through the remains of the door with a quickness that felt almost like a fear reflex. Kalisa dusted her shoulder, where the lifeform had left a bit of golden dust, then turned towards Talasea again.

"Well, that was interesting."

"What did you say to each other? Ok, I am rephrasing my question...what part of a dialogue between a Lady That Wanders and a Sequencer can my puny brain understand? Couldn't you tell it to just...stay for a while, if it wasn't determined to kill us?"

"Oh, I am afraid it was very much determined to murder both of us. We are, after all, trespassing on its domain. To say that I talked to it would be a bit of an overstatement. I just, well, told it who and what I was."

"And it slithered away, just like this?"

"Yes."

"Bedding you was a terrible mistake."

1985, Northern Afghanistan.

Jyothi held her breath and crawled under the trees as two Mi-24 helicopters zoomed above her head, their blades mincing the cold morning air. The aircraft looked like oversized insects with bulbous eyes gazing at the dusty landscape. The low-pitched vibrations from their engines shook the very ground as they reverberated through the valley. As they turned around and gained altitude to climb over the cliffs, Jyothi allowed herself to leave her precarious hideout and crawled towards the edge of the hill, among the juniper trees and hawthorn bushes. She grabbed her binoculars from her backpack. She had smeared the lenses with engine grease to avoid reflections that could easily give away her position. In the past few days, the only human presence in the valley had been the soviet helicopters on their way to the nearby plateau, but Jyothi did not want to take any chances. She was a ghost, here. A presence roaming the hills and valleys of a country some western scholars had named "Graveyard of empires" - but of which empire? The British one? The Soviet empire? The Bactrian empire? The Mughal empire? Or perhaps even Alexander's foolish but oh-so-fascinating endeavour? Strangely enough, thought Jyoti, Afghanistan's historical role as a crossroads, much more than a cemetery, was the real reason for her presence here.

Her binoculars swept across the valley, finding dust, juniper and cedar trees, then a dry seabed and, finally, an ancient Bactrian-style arch lost amidst hawthorn and gooseberry bushes. Here it was. The entrance to the Butterfly Garden. Jyothi watched the skies once again, but the helicopters were not coming back. She stood up and slowly crept down the valley, towards the dry forest growing against the limestone cliff. She wondered what she would have looked like to a distant observer. With her well-worn jacket, scarf and ancestral Lee Enfield rifle she would have been easy to mistake for some kind of operative, perhaps even a KGB one, but her veil clearly identified her as a woman. She spoke acceptable Pashto and, maybe, could have had been mistaken for an afghan person. Maybe. In a very dark alleyway.

It felt strange to walk under this time-battered arch, stepping on an ancient path taken over by the overgrowth. Maybe, she thought, some of her ancestors had fought near this valley, in the Mughal Empire's bid over what was yet to be the state of Afghanistan. Perhaps even a few drops of familiar blood had soaked the dust and sand of this very place, unbeknownst to her. Jyothi entered the garden. She felt better now that she was under the relative cover of the trees and bushes. The air was colder and less dry, emboldened by the nearby springs. A few dozen meters away from the arch were the ruins of a small building she could not identify; it could have had been anything, she thought. The pillars of a small mosque, the pedestal of a Buddha, the last stones of a Hindu stupa, the entrance of a long-lost church, the last remnant of a pagan temple, maybe even everything at once, in a strange summary of Afghanistan's history. Graveyard of empires but crossroads of civilisations...Jyothi kneeled in front of the ruins and sent a short prayer to the clear skies above, a prayer that could have been addressed to any deity, then slowly, gently, started to work the stones loose.

It took Jyothi a few hours to finally reach what she was looking for. A small wooden crate, the size of a jewel box, carved in butterfly patterns, wrapped in white cloth in memory of a loved one. She opened the box with great care and unwrapped the jewel that it contained. It assumed the shape of a moth with its wings spread to the wind, made of small crystal fragments sewn together with half-decomposed linen strings. To the untrained eye, it barely had any value, and indeed no self-respecting pillagers of ancient things would have even considered seeking for this thing. And yet, to Jyothi, it was one, if not the most precious artefact in the world. It came from Ethiopia, by way of Cairo, Jerusalem, Tbilisi, Moscow, Baku and all the civilisations in-between. A strange relic, assembled by scholars, peasants and wanderers from fragments found at the heart of old deserts under an ancient sun.

It was made of one hundred and twenty-seven four-dimensional crystals, shards of self-repeating symmetry both in time and space. 

Rani’s Diary/Unfinished autobiography.

Fragment retrieved by a deep network sweep on [DATE AND LOCATION ERASED FOLLOWING USER REQUEST].

I have vivid recollections of the evening where we realized what the geometry drive could actually do. We had spent the last two weeks eliminating every single potential bias in our measurements, every single human or technical error that could have fooled us into feeding false data to our computers. Hell, I had even scoured pre Low-Age papers on physical storage to make sure I had not missed anything we could have taken into account. But there was nothing. We had submitted the results of our experiments to the thermonuclear version of Occam’s razor and all that was left was the original interpretation.

Ten times out of ten, the geometry drive would beat light in a straight run by a factor of nearly one billion.

I remember sending a group message with the latest results attached and something like let’s take a few days for ourselves and our families and discuss that in a week, then closing my laptop and letting my eyes wander towards the ceiling. That’s it, I thought. Our society. Our civilization. Our Earth. This, right here, right now, is as good as we are going to get. We’ve won. Game over. Within a few years, we will be an interstellar species. Give it a decade or two, and we will have our first settlements outside the solar system. A century and we will be a true multi-stellar species. We’ve passed the Great Filter. Not through technological prowess, not through hardship and sacrifice but through sheer, dumb luck.

Then I took another look at the drive. The crystalline cube was lying on the table, still wrapped in the apparatus I had used to protect it during our translation experiments in cislunar space. It gleamed slightly albeit there was no power running through its structure at this moment. For a moment I considered its mundane shape as if I had been looking at some kind of rubble left alongside the road. And then a shiver went down my spine and another thought burst through my mind.

This has the potential of breaking physics in half. If what the geometry drive does is indeed spontaneous faster than light travel then we are going to run into a massive wall of problems. Relativity and causality, one of these has to go. Calm down, Rani, and think. After all, we could get rid of relativity. That’s an option. If relativity indeed doesn’t work, it won’t have tremendous consequences for slower than light physics. But what if relativity stands the test of the geometry drive? What if it’s the other variable that breaks? What if there is no preferred frame of reference? Then causality paradoxes can exist. Then we can have causality loops. Out of sequence events can happen. Time travel can happen. Magic can happen in the most literal sense of effects that have no causes.

I pray that relativity doesn’t hold.

That prayer was never answered.