PART TWO: THE HEIST

Takemura levelled the aerodyne. Through the canopy shone the burgeoning lights of the equatorial city; the arcologies had yet to bloom, and in the misty distance, they surged as dark needles, inches away from piercing the cylindrical embers of the sun.

“You can still turn around if you don’t feel it,” Takemura said.

“I wouldn’t have boarded your flitter otherwise. Luna knows what she’s doing. I am fine, and the idea of robbing a billionaire from the industrial age is enthralling enough. Now, shush. I need to slip into the skin of Ishi Sindris, antiquarian extraordinaire.”

Talasea leaned back in her seat. A strong wind washed over the canopy and the arcologies lit up all at once, candles cutting the skies in half. Harrow’s tower was the least luminous: its base, emerging from a blackish marsh, gleamed in pale blue, while the needletop pulsed in dark purple. The intermediate section remained unlit like a mausoleum. As the flitter closed in, Talasea noticed flocks of seagulls and terns on the prowl in the damp air, squawking as they descended on the unsuspecting fish of the delta below. Their young nested in a multitude of niches, carved into the sheer wall of the arcology by wind, rain and disrepair. There was nary a drone nor an airship in sight, and the only human lights she saw in the intermediate section belonged to a minuscule camp, hanging from an exposed beam at the one-kilometre mark. Repairfolk? Scavengers? Mountaineers? She could but guess, as the local networks, displayed on her augmented reality lenses, were as silent and empty as the arcology: it remained a tomb in all planes of existence. The flitter kept ascending in the annoying whine of its ducted fans.

“The bastard loves his peace and quiet,” said Takemura. “He’s been influential enough to prevent any further development of his arcology.”

Talasea wanted to contradict him: any spacer born in an O’Neill had a natural eye for megastructural engineering, and from the state of the tower, she could tell that it had never been intended for habitation. Not only were the innards empty (it was easy enough to see through the holes left by blown-away panels) but the exposed volumes did not show nearly enough beams to support the cities and gardens of a kilometric arcology. This sharp pyramid bore all the external and internal characteristics of a monument, of a show of force and architectural prowess never envisioned for human presence. It was meant to be admired from the zero-g maglev terminal at the north end, where the space-bound carriages transported thousands of Terran visitors a day, who would then wait for their shuttle to the equatorial city, gazing at the cylinder with enthralled eyes. Such statements of grandeur were always the first to go when a station fell into the routine of disrepair. As the flitter made its way to the last intact section of the tip and the ducted fans went to sleep, Talasea understood: Harrow wasn’t a king in his castle, but a barnacle that the sea had yet to dislodge.

A platform emerged from the darkness and lit its beacons up in response to Takemura’s hails. The flitter tilted its ducted fans to transition to horizontal flight, Takemura relinquished the controls to the autopilot, and the wheels made contact with the pad. Another, identical flitter was parked nearby.

“If that’s the rest of the guests, I’m going to a very private auction,” said Talasea while checking her makeup in the rear-view mirror. She wore dark blue lipstick and a faint touch of eyeliner: a distinguished Pleiadian connoisseur of Terran relics did not need more. She was here to see, not to be seen, and Harrow surely knew the difference.

“One sec, I almost forgot,” Takemura said, as he handed Talasea an engraved currency card. “There are three standard salaries on this, referenced in an anonymous account at the Zenobia bank of Alcyone. If you see something that would make sense for a Pleiadian emissary to buy, get it. Play the part. It’s important.”

“Let’s do a radio check.” She tapped her necklace. “You hear me?”

“All clear.”

She switched frequencies with a flick of her index finger.

“Luna?”

“I’ve got you. I’m well into my ascent, my ETA on the vault is twenty-five minutes. Don’t rush it, I can hold.”

Talasea nodded and hopped off. The canopy slid shut. A monumental door opened in the wall of the arcology, letting a blade of golden light seep through. A humanoid frame stood on the threshold. Upon seeing Talasea, it initiated a ponderous walk towards her, like a cursed statue noticing the daring adventuress in one of the dime novels they printed on Alcyone. Talasea shifted her necklace slightly to the right, ensuring that the concealed laser was within reach of her dominant hand. As it approached, the humanoid frame revealed itself as the white linen-coated skeleton of a drone, whose twin, bulbous cameras found Talasea’s eyes. The humanoid bowed. Its servos engaged, but did not whine: they were perfectly maintained, the motion of its powerful arms nigh frictionless under its semitransparent shroud. The hands were five-fingered, and the uncanny valley was kept at bay by the copious application of a gaudy silver coating that evoked the smooth finish of Merope-made porcelain bots.

“Welcome to the mansion, mistress Sindris,” the drone said in a deeply textured male voice that seemed to come out of thin air, for it possessed had no visible speakers, and the lipless faceplate remained impassible. “My name is Delos. I am a Tivulan-class personal living space assistant, in service of Mister Harrow.”

Talasea bowed in return, her palm flat against her heart.

“Thank you for receiving me. Your make is rare.”

“As is yours.” The drone tilted its head to the side. “And you are wearing a colour-shifting sari. Quite a bold fashion statement in our day and age, if I may say so myself. Would you give me a demonstration?”

Talasea thought it safer to oblige and pulled the string. A moving front of fibre-optic light ran from her ankles to her head, and the gold fabric turned blue.

“Quite pleasing, indeed. Come.”

Beyond the threshold lay a tall-roofed hall, where fossilised palm trees reached towards foggy heights in a cascading avalanche of glittering gold. Talasea’s heels clicked on the marble slabs; they seemed authentic. After a few steps, Talasea began feeling ill-at-ease. This display of lavishness had an alien quality, not unlike the out-of-place beauty of a Sequence palace, this delicate ode to genocide. Alcyone and Merope possessed countless houses of wonders, cyclopean fields and sea gardens that teemed with whitewood, coral, limestone, blooming world-trees and solid sunlight, but these marvels were always public, in design, construction, maintenance and practice. They were not the domain of a single man. They were not seats of personal wealth.

A sharp-dressed, green-eyed and white-haired man walked up to Talasea. He did not look entirely there, and the disconnect between his calculated swagger and his shifty eyes made her think of a malfunctioning android until she noticed the faint scent of lavender that floated around him. He was high on golden lichen, and not the cheap kind: a pure Vyirangan strain, one of the few that allowed a seamless transition between the waking and dreaming worlds.

“Mistress Sindris, here is mister Pavus, who came all the way from the Traverse to attend this auction,” said Delos. “I think he has you beat by about a hundred light-years.”

“Sixty, to be accurate,” corrected Pavus, while giving her a loose handshake. “But close enough. Now…” he massaged his forehead. “Can we get on with this auction?”

“Yes. Please follow me.”

Delos sauntered through the many-pillared hall, Pavus and Talasea in tow, in the direction of a marble arch surrounded by a legion of mechanical birds that had long ceased to chirp, but tried to regardless and their thousands of beaks laboured in silence. Talasea and Pavus passed under the arch. Delos slammed the door shut, then clapped, and a ring of blue light rose from the marble slabs, outlining a table upon which it had arranged a vase, a flag and a human skull. Talasea’s necklace buzzed to signify that it had lost connection. Pavus tapped his ear.

“Sorry,” said the bot. “But this is a private auction. We do not object to recordings and outside communication, except inside this room. There will be no calls to handlers or long-distance bidding. Only outgoing comms will be for financial transactions. Now, shall we begin?”

“Aren’t you waiting for more guests?” Talasea asked.

“Mister Harrow approved seventy-eight guests this week. Seventy-six opted not to come.”

“Is this rate of non-attendance common?”

“You are the first guest to attend an auction in three years and fifteen weeks. I suspect most of the reservations are spam or jokes.”

“I want to see the old man,” Pavus said. “I need to size the seller up before making a purchase.”

“Mister Harrow feels unwell at the moment. I have full power to prosecute the sale in his place. May we begin?”

“No, I don’t like this,” Pavus insisted. “I came here to see Harrow specifically, and I will not take part in the auction until he steps down from his castle and shows himself in this room.”

“Mister Pavus, you arrived here for an auction, not for a chat with mister Harrow. Now, shall we?”

“Fine, go ahead,” Pavus agreed. Delos extended its right arm above the table, like a magician showing his new trick. Talasea wondered. Was Delos an AI avatar? It looked like a drone through and through, but appearances could be deceiving with unknown makes.

“This auction concerns three objects from Mister Harrow’s private collection,” Delos announced. It tapped the table to highlight the vase: it was transparent and perfectly mundane, the kind that could be found by the millions on any planet bearing the ruins of a recently extinct civilisation. The fact that this household ornament came from the only known world where a complex technological had *survived* its collapse did not make it anymore interesting in Talasea’s eyes.

“This urn was unearthed in 2256 from the ninth layer of the inverted metropolis of Lyon. It sports the characteristic mass-produced look of industrial-era vases, and was likely used to keep flowers in place. Centimetre-scale engravings at the bottom show the name of either a manufacturer or an owner. The auction for this artefact begins at a tenth of a yearly salary.”

“It’s glass, right?” Pavus asked. Talasea tried to follow the motion of his eyes and began feeling sick.

“The outer layer of the vase is indeed made of glass,” Delos answered. “The astute connoisseur will without a doubt recognise the crude, yet endearing make of this savage era.”

“It ain’t worth shit. We have billions of these. I’m not buying.”

Talasea shook her head. Delos moved to the flag, which it unfolded with care, displaying the washed-out colours of a national emblem: red stripes and white stars that evoked, somewhere at the back of Talasea’s romantic mind, the soft rustle of the wind in the endless, scorched plains of a dying continent. Was it…

“The flag of the United States of America,” Delos said. “Recovered from the remains of an AUSCOM drone taken down above Mexico in 2389, pristine condition, albeit UV exposure has taken its toll: it’s been used as a bar decoration for two centuries and only recently removed from display. The fabric is made of soft linen, and…”

“It’s fake,” interjected Pavus. “The flag of the United States had fifty stars. This one has forty-eight.”

“It is from a later era.”

“Only Florida was removed after it sank. Modern AUSCOM flags have forty-nine stars. Still fake.” He grinned. “I took an industrial era course in uni. OK, what about the skull? Who did it belong to?”

Delos seemed lost for a moment; then, presumed Talasea, the next pre-recorded presentation began.

“This human skull was radiocarbon-dated to the 2070s, and DNA analysis shows it belonged to a person assigned male at birth. It was retrieved on Mars, near the Pavonis Mons historical site. A square-shaped hole on the right temple hints at some manner of now-removed neural implant. I should note that another skeleton was found near this skull. It belonged to a lower-class individual and held an industrial cutter, which was employed to remove this head from its original body. It is a thrilling piece of early solar settlement history! The auction begins at one yearly salary.”

Pavus sighed.

“I’m not paying for a skull. Look, just…just lead me to Harrow, I want to talk to him.”

Delos pivoted his twin cameras towards Talasea.

“Is Mistress Sindris interested in the skull?”

“I may be.”

“One yearly salary for the skull. Mister Pavus, do you wish to…”

With his eyes still on the artefact, Pavus unfolded his dominant arm, and a two-shot, gold-plated laser derringer spawned from his sleeve and into his palm. The lens chimed against Delos’ torso panel.

“Bring me to Harrow. Now.”

“Warning,” Delos said. “I am fully optimised for close combat. My protection plate is rated for…”

Talasea closed her eyes for a split second before Pavus pulled the trigger twice. A pair of muffled bangs saturated the room, followed by a loud thump as Delos collapsed, a burning hole in its torso.

“Yeah, yeah,” Pavus said, as he cleared the smoke with a pocket fan. “You were manufactured five centuries ago. Keep up with the times, buddy.”

He pivoted in Talasea’s direction, still holding his now-empty derringer. Glassed dust on the lens gleamed like the half-lit end of a cigar.

“Now, who the hell are you working for, mistress Sindris, or whatever you name is? You don’t look like an Alcyone thug. The sari’s too old-fashioned for an Eloran nightrunner. I’ve never seen the Martians hire a Pleiadian. So what? Solar envoy? I really hope you aren’t a Laniakean goon.”

“Astropostale, actually.”

“What did Harrow even do to you?”

“Killed two of our people a century ago. We are returning a favour.”

“Look. I really don’t want to kill the mood, but you’re way in over your head and I work better alone, so I’m going to take a pair of cuffs from my pocket and you’ll kindly put them on and wait for the Babylon authority to show up while I explain to the old guy that scamming us isn’t a good idea, okay? Don’t worry, the shackles are lined with world-tree wood; they don’t hurt. You can just tell the cops the truth, I’ll be long gone when they find you.”

“An interesting follow-up question would be: why do you have cuffs at the ready? Leisure?”

“Do I look like a policefolk? Besides, you’re Pleiadian, so you know that *leisure cuffs* can’t be actually hard locked, it would be unsafe otherwise. It’s just nice to have ties at the ready in my line of work.” He let out a deep sigh. “Why…why am I discussing this? Please, just…go sit in a corner.”

“I have another question.”

“Fine.”

“How will you coerce me into doing your bidding, exactly? Your derringer is empty. I don’t see a blade on you.”

“I can reload.”

“You’d have to be fast.”

“You’d have to be faster.”

“Bet.”

“You’re wasting my time. I’ll just knock you out.”

Pavus twitched: he clearly intended to hit first, thought Talasea, and it made sense if his only knowledge of Pleiadian close combat were the complex dances of Alcyone martial artists. She had no intent to give a demonstration, so she struck Pavus in the stomach, then the neck, and headbutted him. He fell, and she caught him before he impacted the ground, then carried him to the table. He breathed still. From his pockets, she retrieved two chemical oxygen iodine cartridges, a bag of premium quality golden lichen, and a ring stamped with the seven-branched sun of the planet Vyiranga. So Pavus worked for the golden lichen cartel: had Harrow angered them? Or had he treated one of their crews like the mailmen of the Theodora?

She tapped her necklace and found the line still unresponsive, which meant the jamming did not come from Delos.

Unless…

The whirr of servos echoed under the dome, followed by the grinding of tungsten fingers against the marble slabs. Delos’s torso slowly rose up, its head turned one-eighty degrees, and its cameras surveyed the room. Talasea curled up on the other side of the table, unfolded her sari and pulled the command string. A shimmer washed over her as she dissolved into transparency.

Backup mode engaged flashed an emergency LCD screen in old English at the back of Delos’ head. No ROE master file detected. Switching to default. Terminating active hostiles.

The drone stood up with great slowness, unable to find its balance, collapsed, and resumed its efforts. It clenched its hands: titanium claws screeched as they exited the sheaths embedded in the knucklebones. They pierced through the table with unsettling ease, as Delos used them to stabilise its posture. It examined Pavus and left him alone, seeing no threat in him. Talasea made a dash for the door leading to the hall, escaped the watchful gaze of Delos’ cameras, but found the heavy steel wings sealed shut, with nary a switch nor a handle in sight; she only managed to break a fingernail, and the ghosting following her swift movement was enough to allow Delos to target her. It tried to rush her, tripped, planted its claws in the marble slabs, stood back up again. She sidestepped and ran for the other side of the room with little concern for her invisibility. A sign pointed to the bathroom: she followed, hoping Delos would take time to notice and catch up with her.

The clanking of machinery followed her as she ran through a half-lit hallway and inside a lavatory that looked as if it had not been used in decades: the washing jets hanging from the toilets were mouldy and the mirrors covered in dust. The clanking intensified. Talasea found the access hatch to the ventilation duct behind a maintenance shack disguised as a spare toilet, punched the grid open and slipped inside just as Delos’ shadow began to loom through the threshold. She retracted her heels, crawled just enough for her feet to disappear from the view of the drone and froze. Was it sharp enough to understand where she had gone? Could it even perceive the three-dimensional layout of the room? If Pavus’ boast was accurate, then Delos was a tool of the industrial era, of the age of large language models and nuclear weapons, of this incomprehensible decorrelation of capability and thought. And perhaps, she hoped, the same logic was at play in Delos’ make: perhaps it could pierce through solid oak with ease, and paid for this strength with a blissful ignorance of the concept of a ventilation duct.

Delos stopped. Servos whirred once more as its head performed a full rotation on its neck-pivot and utter silence fell upon the bathroom.

The clanking of Delos’ feet back towards the hallway came as deliverance. Talasea waited until she couldn’t hear the drone anymore, then resumed crawling. Halfway through the duct, she tried her necklace again.

“Luna? Can you hear me?” she whispered. “I’m in the pipe, moving towards the airlock. There’s been a problem; a golden lichen cartel member was here, I knocked him out, but Harrow’s personal drone activated and is hunting me down. How did we miss its actual nature?”

No answer.

“Hideyoshi, can you hear me?”

The external grid of the conduit slowly came into view, and with it the first camera; Talasea switched her optical camouflage back on. Three input vents led inside the vault and, through the carbon mesh that protected them, Talasea could make out thick roots and smell the rich scent of humus. Had the cameras not been in place, it would have been trivial to cut a hole in the mesh and send a drone through…alas, it made little doubt that the vents were rigged to close, or worse, in case of detection. Leaving them unguarded would have been foolish, and the robot aptly showed that Harrow was a man of precautions. Talasea faced the ground to further minimise her visual footprint, and, centimetre by centimetre, managed to reach the exit without triggering the cameras. It took her a good minute to unhinge the grid and drop inside the maintenance hallway that led to the external airlock. There were no more cameras in sight: she decloaked with two minutes of battery left.

“Luna? Do you hear me?”

Someone knocked on the outer plate of the airlock twice.

“Luna?”

Same answer. Talasea detached the laser stylus from her necklace and shot the hinges open. The door hissed as the damp air of the arcology rushed inside, bringing a stale odour and a thick fog. Talasea slid the airlock to the side and waved.

Luna hung right beneath the airlock, her harness secured on the safety handles of the door, held at gunpoint by a jumpsuit-clad woman with the same haziness in her eyes as Pavus.

“Don’t utter a word or you see the inside of her brain,” she said in Sanskrit. “Give me that stylus.”

Talasea obliged. She had no reason to doubt the quickness of the henchwoman’s draw (flying high as a stratospheric kite had not prevented Pavus from getting the jump on Delos) and her gold-plated antique seemed more than able to kill.

“Good,” said the henchwoman while pocketing the stylus. “Now, hoist her. Slowly.”

Talasea grabbed Luna by the hand and helped her inside; the henchwoman kept tracking her with the gun.

“Are you hurt?” Talasea asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Luna was out of breath. “She caught me just as I was about to enter. I suppose she was covering for a colleague.”

“Speaking of!” The henchwoman peeked through the airlock; the laser sight of her gun shone on Talasea’s forehead. “What did you do to Pavus?”

“He attacked me,” Talasea answered. “He became agitated during the auction, claiming he wanted to see Harrow, and drew a laser on the security drone. He then intended to knock me out, so I defended myself.”

“Hmmmm.” The henchwoman climbed in turn. “Hmmmmmmmm.” She sat against the wall and munched on golden lichen kibble taken from her pocket. “So you have no idea why we are here?”

“Pavus mentioned a debt.”

“Yeah. Ten years ago, Harrow bought a lifetime of golden lichen from us. Premium quality. Unfiltered. No questions asked and, crucially, no customs tax. Wanted to live the rest of his days in a dream palace, I guess. The problem is that we were supposed to receive cocoa beans in payment. The bosses hoped to grow the trees on Vyiranga. Harrow promised the shipment within the year. Two years passed. Three. Then five. We called. We demanded explanations. No answer. Not even a bogus excuse. But the lichen had already been delivered. Stealthily. In due time! We’re professionals. So we decided to size up the man. See what was what. And if needed be, get the beans ourselves. Now. Your girlfriend has a modem, I suppose the scheme was to hack the vault open? That’s good. We’ll do that.”

“What was your plan?” Luna asked.

“Get it open at gunpoint. But if Harrow refuses to come down from his ivory tower, a hack will do the trick. Now go.”

“What about Pavus?”

“Can you drag him through the conduit?”

“I can,” Luna said.

“Yeah I don’t doubt it, but if I dispatch you there, you won’t be here to crack the door. And I’m not sending miss invisible sari alone.” The henchwoman tapped Talasea’s shoulder. “Yes, girl, your Luna snitched. She’s quite talkative.” She cocked the gun: pure theatrics, as it looked to be an automatic. “The vault connects to Harrow’s apartments, which then loop back to the hall. I’ll get Pavus there, load him into the flitter and leave. You have someone waiting for you?”

“Yes. Solar envoy.”

“Then once we’re out of range of the drone’s jammer, you’ll tell him to fuck off. Now, move up.”

A harsh light fell upon the hallway that led to the armoured gate of the vault, whose biometric reader blinked like the red eye of a fallen giant. The henchwoman gestured at the cameras on the ceiling.

“How did you intend on dealing with these?” she asked.

“I can hack the door remotely. The cameras are on the same intranet. I take both at once.”

“The eyeball is not on the net.”

“The biometric system has an active lens, it’s enough for me to get in.”

“Adversarial input attack?”

“I’m not an amateur. I’ve done this before.”

“Yeah. And there’s no need to be subtle anymore.” The henchwoman blinked once for each camera, then pushed a button on the side of her pistol and pulled the trigger. The gun swivelled automatically, three flashes followed and the cameras exploded one after the other. “Problem solved. Rig the door.”

Luna grabbed a portable modem from her backpack, unfolded its laser emitter and aimed at the biometric eye. Talasea twitched.

“Don’t,” the henchwoman said. “You’ve seen the autotargeting at work.”

Luna blinked twice, out of the henchwoman’s view. Her lips spelled out: keep her talking.

“Tell me,” Talasea asked. “What do you plan on doing while you’re in front of Harrow? Kill him?”

“What manner of question is that? Do I look like a murderer to you?”

“You have a gun.”

“Because you’re dangerous.”

“How so?”

“Both of you look like you can knock me out cold. Not taking any chances, especially with Pavus down. I have my eyes on you, blue lady. You know your way around a hectic situation, you could probably strangle me with ease, and you’ve got an invisible sari. You are a threat. I value my personal safety over that of others. So yes, Talasea. I’d splatter your brain on the wall if I had to.”

“For cocoa beans?”

“For the ghosts of the Earth. Open a history book. Worse has been done. Worse will be done. Now, shush.”

Luna tapped numbers on her modem.

“You said I could strangle you with ease,” Talasea continued. “How do you know that? I punched Pavus, did not choke him out. I'm not that visibly strong, am I?”

“No. Your girlfriend clearly lifts, though.”

“Alas, Pleiadians don’t build visible muscle mass easily, especially in the upper body.”

“A shame. I don’t think you’d look bad with Luna’s muscles. Not that you look bad right now. With or without the sari.”

“Would you, by chance, be hitting on me?”

“That is neither here nor there.”

“You *are* hitting on me.”

“I’m not.”

“Are you ready to shoot a girl you’re hitting on?”

“I don’t want to shoot anyone.”

“Yet you’re waving that gun around.”

“You’re trying to get me to lower my guard.”

“Why? You clearly don’t want to shoot me.”

“Ah!” The henchwoman massaged her temples with her freed hand. “Shit! I’ve never killed anyone, alright? And I don’t want to begin today! You weren’t part of my plans! I had to improvise! I’m… I’m not really sure what I’m doing. But I have a gun. Don’t…”

Luna pressed a button on her modem. The gun buzzed. The slide recoiled even though the trigger remained inert, ejecting the ammunition already engaged the barrel, then the magazine dropped.

“Hey! Piece of crap!”

Talasea kneed the henchwoman in the stomach, sidestepped behind her, locked her arms in place and forced her to the ground: she knew she couldn’t hold her for more than a few seconds.

“Luna! I need help!”

The Selenite rushed to Talasea, grabbed the struggling henchwoman by the hips and twisted her arms, so that the Pleiadian could use Pavus’ cuffs to finally hold her wrists in place. The henchwoman kicked Talasea, sending her against the wall, and Luna quickly dragged her companion in crime to safety. Talasea recovered her laser stylus: she expected a stream of expletives and a desperate struggle, but the henchwoman gave them a disappointed grin and a sad look.

“This was my first time holding someone at gunpoint. You could have let me enjoy it a bit longer. Fuck. I told the armourer their smart guns weren’t secure.” She spat blood. “You may now understand that neither Pavus nor I are assassins.”

“Don’t move,” Luna said. “Tal. We’re getting the beans. We went too far to come back home empty-handed.”

“What about the drone?”

“No change of plans, we hack it. You need direct contact with my modem. Like hull to hull. Tal, do you feel like you can do it?”

“If you distract Delos long enough, I probably can.”

The henchwoman snorted.

“You can use my gun.”

Luna recovered the weapon and the spare magazine, engaged the ammunition, racked the slide and turned the smart module back on with a push of a button. Talasea got the henchwoman on her feet, but kept the cuffs on and gently pushed her forwards as Luna returned to her modem. The biometric eye blinked: Luna flicked a switch and the door opened with a whine. A loud clanking echoed on the metallic deck beyond the lock.

Delos emerged from the smoke; its servos whirred as it prepared to lunge forwards. The henchwoman froze. Luna squeezed the trigger. Three bullets crashed against the robot’s armoured torso: the crushed projectiles rang as they rolled on the floor. It staggered.

“Tali! Modem on the drone, now!” Luna yelled.

Talasea cloaked and dashed towards Delos, modem in hand, keeping as close to the wall as possible. Delos saw through her ghosting trail at the last second, pivoted its head like an owl’s. Talasea put the modem against its back, a loud buzz filled the portable speaker, and –

Delos stopped, its limbs locked in place like the hands of a dying clock. Then it prostrated itself, its cameras blinked, and its communicators buzzed.

“Ident required: Delos-class termination unit model seven-five-niner, serial number zero-zero-six-alpha-charlie-zero. Elapsed time since last shutdown: five years, five months, three weeks and two days. Elapsed time since last factory reset: overflow error. Reset to factory settings in progress.”

The drone stood upwards, its joints clicking as they slid into a non-threatening configuration, with the legs fused together and the arms in a T-pose. The tungsten claws hissed as the knucklebones swallowed them.

“Factory reset effective. All rules of engagement set to: no engagement. Warning. This is a transportation mode only. This unit should be kept at your local ROE whenever possible. Inquire with a Eurofront official for guidance. Warning: memory was not reset. Warning: no available Eurofront networks found. Please see a technician for wireless card maintenance. If beyond the border, please set this unit to independent mode. Warning: in independent mode, this unit will auto-target unapproved phenotypes. If there are Eurofront agents nearby with unapproved phenotypes, please tag them properly before engaging independent mode. This unit stands by for orders.”

“Luna,” Talasea asked. “Can you kill it?”

“Yeah.”

Another buzz filled the room and Delos collapsed; a spark ran through its ravaged chestplate, its leg twitched, and the frame became inert.

“Thanks.”

“What…what did it mean by *targeting unapproved phenotypes*?” Talasea asked.

The henchwoman shook her head. Luna let out a prolonged sigh.

“Take a long, hard look at human history on Earth, and guess.”

“I...”

“Now you see why Terrans are sad. Come. Let’s abandon this monster behind us, and tackle the one we have left.”

Talasea tapped her necklace. The signal was back up.

“Hideyoshi, this is Tal. We’ve had a few complications, but we’re heading for the vault. Any movement on your end?”

“None, do you want me to get inside?”

“No, we’re exiting as planned.”

Luna stepped through the smoke, empty gun in hand.

The vault reeked of rot and moisture and fungal spores: the decaying stagnation of a long-deceased garden, anathema to the station dweller. The clogged up qarez exhaled a faint ground mist. Ten diminutive trees stood in a hallway lit only by emergency lanterns, their bare branches dancing in the obstinate flow of grinding fans; dead leaves, the colour of rust, lay scattered at their feet. Harrow sat by the door to his apartment: more man than corpse or more corpse than man, it mattered little, now, as hungry centipedes had devoured his eyes and ants scrubbed him clean, leaving nothing but a sterile tunic, impossibly white bones, and a mummified head through which poked the copper tendrils of a centuries-old neural implant. Harrow had died clinging to the chair. At his feet lay a defibrillator case, still locked. Harrow’s last conscious gesture, noted Talasea, had not been to try and open the case, switching on the autonomous mode that may have saved his life. It had been to shove his entire stock of cocoa beans through the shredder-granulator hybrid resting near the door: the machine had collapsed and burned out, not before spewing out a pile of fine grey powder, and scrubbing the innards clean with a laser. Talasea went to check the apartment, a precious nest of gold and marble and copper that was covered in dust and reeked of stale wastewater. Harrow’s laptop remained plugged in and wasn’t locked, but a script had scoured the hard drive clean, leaving a single set of instructions for Delos, five years prior: Scare off anyone who enquires. Set up a meeting and trap. Kill only if they persist. And sell everything. And that he had: the shelves, wardrobe and storage closet were empty, save for a lone chocolate tablet, that Talasea pocketed before heading back to the vault.

“Why didn’t Delos tend to the garden?” she asked.

“This heap of scrap?” Luna sighed. “It was a robot. A fucking genocide assistant! Do you think it knew how to garden? Back in the day, Eurofront used bots like this to walk through settlements in the Jordan and rip out all the olive trees they found, then build resorts in their place. Fuck me if it even knows what gardening is.”

“What a waste.”

“Waste? It’s not waste! It’s intent!” Luna grabbed Harrow’s corpse by the shoulders. “You old, decrepit bastard! If you couldn’t have it, then no one should, right? You could have given Babylon the cocoa trees! You could have allowed the exports of the beans! You had a nigh-extinct species in your palm and you used it, squeezed it, and buried yourself with it! Like you did with everything else you couldn’t copyright, back on Earth! Did you even feel anything? Did you even think about anything? Did you have any vision or idea beyond self-preservation? Why were you allowed to live? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Harrow’s head detached from his corpse under Luna’s violent shaking, and Talasea grabbed the Selenite’s wrist, gently pulling her back.

“Luna. He’s gone. It’s over. We aren’t getting anything from his vault.”

“No, that we aren’t,” the henchwoman scoffed. “Now, could you please uncuff me? You can keep the gun, and I keep Pavus. Do we have a deal?”

Luna sighed.

The thin drizzle that had accompanied Talasea’s arrival to the arcology had turned into a downpour. Pavus slept soundly in the henchwoman’s flitter, kept under by his monad as it repaired the damage from Talasea’s punches. The rain clicked on the half-open canopy, dripping on the landing legs and joining the rivers that fell towards the deep darkness of the forests; the sun tube was a blackened spear bisecting the world.

“I insist,” the henchwoman said when Luna tried to hand her back the pistol. “It’s ruined anyway. Now, you two watch yourselves. We know your faces. Next time you’re on Vyiranga, go visit us. Good travels.”

The henchwoman waved, closed the canopy, and the flitter took off in the synchronised whispers of its ducted fans. Takemura sighed.

“Serves me well to think myself a vigilante when a shitty pacemaker already avenged my dad.”

“Are we clean?” Luna asked.

“There were no outgoing alarms. As far as Babylon is concerned, nothing happened tonight. I’ll ring a friend to clean up the mess and give Harrow a grave. I...need some space. You can take my flitter down. I’ll call another.”

“You won’t get one until sunrise.”

“It’s raining and the arcology is cold,” Talasea said. “Are you sure you’ll be fine?”

“I don’t mind, Tali.” He looked at the needle top of the tower, at the mould and rain and dark coral. “In fact, I don’t think I care about anything in particular tonight.”

They sat by the Akiva lake, Talasea, Takemura and Luna, and they watched the cirrus clouds that curved and bent and moved along the great tube of the world. Luna had brought a beer, Talasea a cup of tea, and Takemura a glass of sake: the breeze carried the scent of grilled vegetables and steamed fish from Luna’s portable cooker. A pair of flitters darted about. One of them was an ornithopter with thin, transparent wings that drew an iridescent haze as they caught sunlight.

“It’s all clean,” Takemura said. “All records of my flitter’s ascent were erased, and a convincing report of Harrow’s death from natural causes just arrived on the Babylonian Authority’s desk. It’s only half a forgery.”

“What did it cost?”

“Many phone calls.”

“What are you going to do?” Luna asked.

“I’ll take the Hashima Maru to Mercury. My dad wanted a sky burial, so I will launch him into the sun.”

“You want me to come?” Talasea wondered.

“It’s kind of you to ask, but I’m fine. And I do not want you to bother with Terran affairs.”

“Then I invite you to stay at Charon’s Den,” Luna said.

“Invitation accepted. You have a lovely place and, despite what you might tell me, I think there are many things to say and many things to hear on this station.”

“That’s because you haven’t lived here for the past thirty years, but I don’t judge.”

They all took a sip of their beverages. Talasea’s tea was dark and bitter: just as she enjoyed it.

“You ever considered we were indeed in way over our heads?” Talasea wondered.

“Not more than the Vyirangans,” Takemura said.

“True.”

She took another sip. A seagull darted back and shrieked.

“How many are left, you think?” Luna asked.

“Cocoa beans?”

“Prehistorical billionaires.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Harrow had been the last,” Takemura sighed. “But you never know. AUSCOM is still there, after all.”

“Does anybody want the gun?”

“What would I do with it?” Talasea asked.

“Trash it,” Takemura concluded, and Luna threw the firearm to the pikes. Talasea took the chocolate tablet from her pocket, broke it into three chunks and shared them with the Selenite and the solar envoy. She found the taste disappointing: the treat was neither sugary nor bitter enough, and was hard as a ration tack. She did not finish her share of the tablet.

“Luna, would you have a spare swimsuit?” she asked. “I’d happily take a dip before lunch. The day is nice.”

And they were on Babylon Port, the place where all the days were nice, for there was no winter nor summer to complain about, and the sun hung in the sky with the resolute immobility of a bored god.

THE END. 

Illustration by Viktor Titov for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

PART ONE: LIFE IN BABYLON

Tali Talasea fell. All around her extended the curved world wall of Babylon Port and the sun was a funnel stretched across the thirty-five kilometres of the zero-g spine. Her acceleration remained low; she estimated that she had about six minutes before reaching the middle layer of the cylinder, where the centrifugal gravity would become too high for her terminal velocity to be survivable. In a split second of morbid curiosity, Talasea wondered if her splat on the ground would be more red or blue, on account of her purple blood, and how the light would diffract through her dead eyes, open and aimed at the elongated sun. Down below stood the white domes and aquamarine pools of a polyclinic for retired astronauts: what a way to go. She exhaled. In her youth on Alcyone Port, in the distant Pleiades, she had learned the intricacies of O’Neill skydiving, of the subtle transition between zero, limited and full gravity as one descended through the atmospheric layers. A familiar vertigo took hold of her stomach. She knew of more unpleasant ways to die, but today would not be the day.

The wind caught her. It ran counterspinwards. It was born of the thermal gradient between the cool equatorial mangroves and the warm sun above, an artificial creation for skydivers, kite dancers and other amateurs of the tubular firmament. Talasea began drifting towards the nearest world-tree, which towered many kilometres above the ground, and aimed for the thick leaves of the uppermost layer, hoping that the branches and sap pouches would cushion her impact.

The greenery swallowed her, and she smashed into the spongy trunk beneath. Pain seared through her ribs. She started to fall again, ripping her shawl on a dead branch, managing to tilt herself upright, and her feet finally touched the cragged body of a primary fork. She checked herself: no blood, no haematomas. Her monad remained silent. She looked around: the branch was as large as an oceangoing boat, and formed a small, self-contained dominion, from which protruded thousands upon thousands of secondary limbs, like the trees of a deciduous forest that would have decided to become both linear and rotund. A thick fog covered the base of the plant in a pearlescent shroud. Talasea made her way towards a maintenance staircase and hoisted herself down with the railing until she reached a platform that hung from a secondary branch and linked up with the flitter network that criss-crossed Babylon Port. A cleaning drone interrupted its vacuuming of the benches and rolled in her direction.

“Hello!” the drone said, in a reedy voice. “You seem lost. May I be of assistance?”

“No, thanks. I’m just waiting for a ride back home.”

“Are you hurt? You look like you’ve fallen.”

“Yes, I come from the sky. Nothing serious. I am alright. You can return to your chores.”

“Oh. Okay. Good day!”

The drone whistled and went back to its dutiful cleaning of already-pristine furniture. A flitter buzzed in the fog, oriented its ducted fans downwards, landed on the platform at the end of the station and opened its canopy. Talasea limped inside and typed an address in the equatorial city. The drone beeped.

“Hey, hey, hey, are you sure you’re alright?” it asked one more time before the glass bubble closed and the flitter departed in the comforting murmur of its electric engines.

Oh, yes, she was alright, as much as one could be after their first assassination attempt in fifteen years.

Walking the streets of the equatorial city, Talasea could still feel the railing cracking under her weight, along the delicate, nigh-invisible fault line drawn by a low-powered laser. Beginning the day with an assassination attempt had not been part of her agenda, but neither had been the letter from the Astropostale urging her to investigate the gnarly incident of the Theodora. The affair was most odd: a postal ship from the early interstellar era, a big machine with engines and radiators and not much else, found drifting in the Kuiper belt, the hull pierced by a crude coilgun, the two pilots murdered, and, in a secured case, fifteen desiccated, radiation-sterilised cocoa beans. The techies from Pluto had managed to trace the ammunition to a former arms dealing outfit, once owned by one G.S. Harrow, a distinguished Tideless from Babylon Port. The Astropostale had sent a letter and received a polite response: Harrow had been very adamant he needed not to be seen, and had to meet Talasea in the world-tree forest, far from prying eyes, on platform seventeen at the five-kilometre mark.

Was it truly murder, though? As a denizen of Babylon, Harrow had to be familiar with the physics of spin habitats, and surely aware that Talasea’s fall would be a protracted affair, giving her ample opportunities to recover and escape unscathed. In this light, the scenario seemed cohesive enough. Harrow had gunned down the Theodora a whole era of human history ago, killing the crew to satisfy some obscure Kinetic Age feud, and the inquiries from the Astropostale had startled him enough to try and scare the mailfolk away. Talasea had already been roughed up in service of the interstellar post office, and an impromptu skydiving session looked meagre in comparison to sword-fighting atop a burning submarine or battling the Eloran tax ministry. Yet, the morning had left the taste of blood in her throat, and a lingering question: why such wanton violence?

Talasea sauntered towards the downtown convent, where she had found a room. The equatorial city of Babylon Port was no exception to the tortuous urbanism practised in Sol-based spin habs, some of which predated the civilisation of the Pleiades by a good century. Babylon was a mishmash of Terran influences, from the Art Nouveau fantasies of the Kinetic Age to the brutalist excess of the early interstellar era, when Saturn, once the glorious vanguard of human expansion, had become a mere stop for outgoing spaceships in search of cheap reaction mass. The Babylon Republic made no effort to organise the resulting tissue, and this sprawling mass of history impeded Talasea’s attempts at understanding the station. Still, she found her way back to the convent. The sisters of the Outer Church were hard at work in the apotropaic garden, raking gravels to form delicate pathways that swirled between thyme and cypress trees. Talasea bowed to the mother superior, who was busy pruning a rebellious wisteria.

“Ah, mistress Talasea. Your friend Takemura is waiting for you in your room. You know, the solar envoy?”

When she entered her chamber, Talasea found Hideyoshi Takemura sitting by the window that overlooked the bustling boulevard on the other side of the convent. The Astropostale’s solar envoy had a Martian shape: thin, but not slender, and with his long dark hair tied in a high bun. Yet, the air of distant sadness in his eyes was unmistakably Terran. He turned around and shot a smile at Talasea. She bowed in the Pleiadian fashion, palm against her heart.

“I came from Phobos as fast as I could,” he said in Japanese, which Talasea spoke fluently. “I have parked the Hashima Maru outside.”

“I’m surprised you’re still flying it.”

“The old beast is getting long in the tooth, but she’s computing interplanetary translations in seconds flat. She’s enough for me.”

“And she’s sporting a gas-nuke on an open core. Does Babylon tolerate such an engine?”

“It does, after a generous donation to the directorate of transportation.”

“You can do that?”

“I can do that.”

The statement was not prideful, merely matter-of-fact. In truth, the entire man had always been matter-of-fact. His tailored shirt had this allure of practical elegance that belonged to bureaucrats and genocidaires alike, and Talasea had never seen him wear anything else.

“My encounter with Harrow did not go well. He didn’t show up. For good reason; the railing we were supposed to meet on had been sabotaged. The wind saved me.”

“Alas, it doesn’t surprise me. I took a look in Laniakean files. Harrow is part of a Saturnian smuggling cartel. Dark lane business. Small fleets of hydrogen steamers. You know what these are, right?”

“Thermal stealth ships, cigar-shaped, almost invisible on scopes, perfect for ferrying illegal cargo. Please. I’m a navigator. The Babylon Authority will investigate, yes?”

“Likely. The maintenance teams will find the sabotaged platform sooner or later. This man is an enemy. We have to move fast.”

“We? What do you have in mind, Hideyoshi?”

“Not here. We need to discuss this in a more secure place. Come, I have a boat.”

The tramway hissed and a faint aquatic breeze entered the carriage. Talasea and Takemura disembarked. Five kilometres north of the convent, the equatorial city scattered into a myriad of villages that stood atop bamboo pilings in a vast wetland, built to mimic the biogeography of a river delta. Birds flocked in the warm air: most were extinct on Earth, and the thought tainted Talasea’s contemplation of the sprawling treeline and meandering riverlets at her feet. This place was a mausoleum. As it continued northwards, the suspended railway dissolved into a sea of ghosts, the coral stilts supporting the bridge like the ribs of a fallen titan. Talasea and Takemura made their way towards the pier that lay beneath the tramway station, and reached a diminutive ship that looked like an asymmetric teardrop pierced in its middle by a turbosail.

“Hop on,” said Takemura, shooing a seagull away. “Don’t get weird ideas as to my personal wealth; this is not my ship. I am merely borrowing it from the marina, but it has all the implements to prevent spying.”

“Eh. I’ve never been one for watercraft. In the Pleiades, if you want to go somewhere, you fly.”

“I have refreshments.”

“Ah, I see. Corruption.”

She followed him inside. The innards of the watercraft consisted of a single room, which folded unto itself like a cocoon carved into the whitewood hull. Talasea tapped the wall, which gave back a muted thump. Soundproof. The half-submerged bay windows had the characteristic tint of one-way mirrors, treated with an additional layer of transparent coral to prevent laser spying.

Takemura’s lie as to the provenance of the boat was a childish game, and the Pleiadian opted not to press the matter: the vessel was probably just another toy from the deep bag of tricks the Astropostale’s solar envoy possessed. She sat on the sofa. Takemura served her a glass of Martian rum, with an orange quarter instead of lime, which did not agree with a Pleiadian’s stomach. Takemura snapped his fingers. The boat raised anchor and began drifting towards the nearest riverlet, attracting the attention of wide-eyed pikes that crowded against the bay windows.

“Alright,” Takemura said. “Harrow is older than the Astropostale, older than Laniakea, older than the Low Age itself. He is a necrocapitalist.”

A man from before the collapse: a god, a monster, a fiction fished from the mud, whispers from across the unbridgeable abyss.

“Babylon Port does not care,” Takemura continued. “He is a citizen of Saturn, and like everyone else has a right to a long and peaceful existence, even if he shot a ship down a century ago and killed two innocent fellows.”

“We’re not going to try and press charges?”

“For what? It’s been a century. The prescriptive period for murder in the solar system is forty years.”

“He tried to assassinate me.”

“It would take months to prove. I do not have the time for that.”

“It is personal, isn’t it? There’s a glimmer of rage in your eyes.”

“Do you recall the names of the *Theodora*’s pilots?”

“James Evans and Hajime Okoda, why?”

“Hajime was my father. I took my mother’s name out of practicality. He was one of the founding members of the Astropostale. His name was hard to bear for a son who found little affinity with space. I admired him, despite everything. He did not deserve to die like this, suffocating in a tin can at the edge of the solar system. For decades, I believed he had died *after* the *Theodora*’s translation to Tau Ceti, that the geometry drive had malfunctioned and stranded him and Evans in interstellar space. To discover that he never left Sol and that I can bury his body is a relief, but it is not enough.”

Takemura tapped the wall twice and a safe emerged from the centre of the room. The armoured recipient contained a pair of large, dark seeds. Cracked and odourless, they looked as ancient as Terran ruins: Talasea realised they were facsimiles made of plaster.

“Cocoa beans. You know what Terrans used to make with these? Chocolate. A tasty, often sugary sweet Europeans stole from the freshly genocided Americas, before flooding the Earth with it, and destroying a fair few tropical biomes attempting to grow it. The culture of cocoa died a few decades before the entire industrial civilisation collapsed. It must have been a shock for the first world to see chocolate tablets and beverages disappear from their supermarkets. They sure loved their treats. Now, Harrow owned an agribusiness megacorp. That’s how he made enough money to get a ticket on a hibernation program and a straight trip to the twenty-fifth century. His personal legend is that he woke alone and impoverished, with nothing but his rags and a bag of cocoa beans. I don’t know if it’s true, but he did manage to get cacao trees to grow on this very station.”

“Hence the dark lane business.”

“Yes. He’s trading chocolate for favours. Free passes and illegal ownership titles, in exchange for the most exclusive treat in Sol.”

“So your dad…worked for him?”

“Quite the opposite. My father stole from him. He sought to accommodate cocoa beans on other worlds. At the time, no one had found Elora yet, and the closest Earth analogue was Tau Ceti. I don’t know if Dad would have succeeded, but it was worth a try.”

While habitable and host to complex life, Tau Ceti had yet to house a true human colony: five hundred light-years out, a heartbeat in the age of the geometry drive, the superhabitable worlds of the Traverse had sucked all the air from the settlement effort.

“And your father died for defying the mummy of Babylon Port.”

Takemura stared intently at Talasea. The boat kept sailing downstream. A dancing line of lights shimmered on the horizon, revealing the slow procession of cargo ships en route to the boreal sea.

“I don’t strive for revenge, Tali. It’s been ninety-seven years. I do not hold grudges for that long. I merely seek to fulfil my father’s mission.”

Takemura tapped the bay window. His index rested on the kilometric towers that surged over the northern city, faint and overly stretched pyramids whose tips grazed the tubular sun.

“Harrow lives up there, in the Ardent Pyramid, his arcology. Although he theoretically does not *own* anything. He has a vault, which holds the last cacao trees in the galaxy. I want to steal the seeds and spread them to the rest of human space, settle this affair once and for all. Are you in?”

“This goes way beyond our functions as Astropostale operatives.”

“This wasn’t my question.”

“Look. I do not know the solar system. I do not know the industrial era. But I know people like Harrow, because we have battled them in the Pleiades for decades: the founders, the great centenarians, the tideless who think wisdom comes with age and right comes with wisdom, we have many and we’ve squashed them all, we’ve curtailed their ambitions with the bludgeon of communal democracy. I’ve been a little cog in this beautiful machine and I wouldn’t mind revisiting this part of my past. On a moral level, I’m in; I’ve always been in. But do we even have a plan?”

“I know someone who does. Her name is Luna. She’s a bartender at Charon’s Den, in Akiva Harbour, at the southern end of the maglev lane. We have an agreement; she expects somebody, but people know my face on Babylon Port, so I can’t risk seeing her in public. Could you make contact tomorrow?”

“Alright. Bring me back ashore.”

Takemura clapped his hands, the turbosail revved up, and the boat began the slow process of cruising upstream and back towards its pier. As a crimson twilight rose in the circular sky, the reeds came alive with the eyes of a hundred muskrats.

Travelling to the south tip of Babylon Port proved a pleasant affair. Four maglev lines linked the two ends of the cylinder in fifteen minutes flat: Talasea slept for five and disembarked one stop away from the cap, under a narrow sky that curved towards the webbed superstructure supporting the tubular sun. The air was clear and dry, the maglev station perched atop a ridge. At Talasea’s feet lay a quaint town made of brick houses, vertical windmills and red-leaved world-trees. A placard showed a name, Akiva Harbour, and a founding date, Interstellar Era 0.08, three years after the opening of Babylon Port to human settlement. Akiva had seen a lot of life and done a lot of living; now it looked exhausted, the streets empty and nary a boat on the shallow lake that gave the city its epithet. Talasea took the stairs down.

She quickly found Charon’s Den, on account of it being the only open building in town, as the rest of Akiva had closed for the day, month, or perhaps century. A tall communal house, the bar rested on stilts by the lake, and a roaring dragon hung from the balcony of the second floor. The beast was the winner’s trophy from the 0.56 edition of the twenty-four weeks of the Trojans, a sublight endurance race between Mars, Jupiter and the asteroids. Upon pushing the revolving doors of Charon’s Den, Talasea became acutely aware of how foreign she looked, with her laced shirt and pleated skirt and ocean skin, this allure of the Pleiades she carried with her, and expected the patrons to stare at her in disbelief.

The bar, however, was empty. When Talasea reached the counter, the bartender materialised out of the delicate glow of plant candles and gave her a bow.

“Hello. It is always a joy to see a new face. What do you fancy?”

The bartender towered a good head above her and wore her mass of silvery hair piled high and free of the bangs and curls that plagued Saturnian fashion. Her aquiline nose hinted a Terran origin, but the gold in her eyes was unmistakably Selenite. She spoke a delicate branch of Sanskrit.

“Morning,” Talasea said. “My name is Tali Talasea. I am looking for one Luna.”

“And who sends for her?”

“Takemura. It’s about Harrow.”

The bartender let her glass rest on the counter.

“Help me with the dishes and we’ll talk.”

Noon closed in on Akiva Harbour. The tubular sun gleamed in gold and sapphire. Luna and Talasea sat by the lake, looking at the seagulls that came and went in the breeze. The bartender had freed her hair, whose silvery strands flew in unison with the discoloured flags of a half-sunken boat left by a rotting pier.

“So,” said Luna. “I’m a ring diver.”

“What’s this? A syndicate?”

“Yes. We used to be the third or second-largest anarchist organisation in the outer solar system. Our mutual aid network went from Europa to Triton. Now, humankind stretches thinly across the plane of the Milky Way, the solar system is asleep, and we barely have the membership to exist. Mutual aid becomes irrelevant when Babylon Port keeps all the stations from there to Rhea fed and content. The people of Saturn gave up and so did we. A century ago, I would have been at the helm of a ship, running interference against the High Fleet on Iapetus, or coordinating emergency relief on Titan. Now, we barely ever see a USRE ship, and no one lives on Titan anymore because they grew fed up with this methane-drowned hellhole. So I work as a barkeep and, sometimes, as a fixer.”

“How do you know Takemura?”

“Often run errands for him. He pays well and doesn’t ask questions.”

“The dragon on the façade…is it yours?”

“Yup. I ran the twenty-four weeks back in 125 and came third. Ran again in 132 but my ship broke and I haven’t been to space ever since. I’ve never felt the need to visit more of the world. I know it’s the same everywhere. Anarchy settles the stars, then the state comes, and its coffers are deep, and its bureaucrats are talented, and a constant shower of treats makes us all into sycophants. It happened on Earth at the end of the Low Age, and it will happen to your islands in the sky. I do not exclude myself from the docile horde. My electricity comes from Babylon’s fusion core, my water from the lake, my food from the hydroponics, it’s just convenient, and convenience is where utopias come to die.”

“But you still fight.”

“I take what I can from people who have too much. Takemura was only the catalyst. I’ve had my eyes on Harrow for a while. I have the plans of the arcology, and I know how to get there from the inside. Like all towers on Babylon, the Ardent Pyramid was built with catastrophe in mind…”

“Like an emergency cylinder braking.”

“Yup.”

“So the designers of the arcology intended for it to bend to absorb the ripples that follow a brake manoeuvre. It must have a hollow spine, filled with springs and beams. If you have an access point in the lower area, you can climb up. The higher you get, the lower the gravity, so it’s much easier than it looks.”

“But Harrow isn’t an idiot. He sealed his habitat off from the inside, even the emergency access hatches. That’s why I need someone else to open the section from the vault side, allowing me to get in, hack the security systems and steal the beans. So, I have a question for you, Talasea. Does Harrow know your face?”

“I see no reason for it. Sol is not my usual playground, and the letter we sent him wasn’t in my name. The Astropostale doesn’t like its mail inspectors to become public faces, so we take precautions. I had no idea whom he would meet, only where and when.”

“Perfect. Then, you can help me. See, Harrow holds weekly auctions for his Low Age baubles. The next one is in forty-two hours. It’s a flawless point of entry for a saboteur, except he’ll never invite me because everyone on Babylon knows about the anarchist fixer at Charon’s Den. And Takemura is a public person, at this point. But you’re unknown. A *pièce rapportée* from the Pleiades. I can provide you fake papers, cool clothes, an invite, the works. Do you want details or are you out?”

“Give me the full breakdown.”

“Follow the guide. My workshop’s in the old gym.”

The gym of Charon’s Den was as spacious and empty as the bar upstairs. Thick dust layered the benches, tatami mats and boxing ring. A television sat in a corner, tuned to an Enceladian sports channel. The laser-com feed was weak and missed a few colours, thus turning the boxers into ghosts, followed by the remnant image of their own silhouette from a heartbeat ago. Shouts, whistles and the heavy thumps of gloves against faceplates echoed in the dusty emptiness.

“Why are you keeping this on?” Talasea asked.

“Sometimes, when the night becomes too cold, I take the stairs down and sit here with a beer. The channel always broadcasts a match, and the public is unruly. They cheer, they scream, they dish out insults like they’re watching two kids having at it in the kindergarten. For a moment, it feels as if the other ring divers are here with me, that the boys from Dione and Pan managed to drag me to the arena once again, and we’re shouting at the dastardly Martian champion who almost KO’d me last season.” She smiled. “These old plasma screens have a mind of their own. If I switch it off, I’m not sure it will ever turn back on. And, hey, if you want a beer, be my guest.”

She gestured at a large fridge beneath the television.

“I’m fine, thanks. What happened to your friends?”

“Nothing dramatic; they just stopped coming. One day, your sparring partner, a guy you’ve spent years working with in the rings, goes up to you and says, hey, Luna, I’ve just met this wonderful man from Dione, I think we’re gonna have kids together, but he doesn’t feel like moving, so I’m moving, don’t worry, we’ll keep in touch. And then, we don’t keep in touch. Repeat that a few dozen times, and that’s it. Life just caught up with us. We’ve become unnecessary. Our little anarchist cliques, our little spaceships and our little hidden stations are just hobbies. And hobbies are the first casualty of a busy adult life.”

“What about the retired folks?”

“They have better things to do and I do not blame them. Even without rejuvenating treatments, they’re gonna live to, what, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and sixty? Enjoying every waking moment of their life because we killed most diseases and aging is more of a pleasant way down than a cliff. Why would they bother with a cabal that’s been out of the game for almost half a century? So, yeah. We’re gone. I’m just keeping the lights on. And when that TV dies, I’m out. Shit, Talasea, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

Luna took a tablet from a countertop and roused it from sleep. The radiation-hardened device complained with a loud whirr of its fans, but the Selenite managed to coerce it into displaying the schematics of Harrow’s arcology. The thin pyramid topped at two kilometres above ground, with the vault and living spaces located at the one-and-a-half kilometre mark. Harrow’s den adopted a hexagonal shape, with a reception hall at the top and the vault and apartment at the bottom.

“Does he *manage* the place?” asked Talasea.

“No. This part of the arcology is a historical monument, and he’s merely keeping the lights on, not unlike me.”

“And it’s legal to build a house in a historical monument?”

“When you’re four centuries old, the list of people and institutions in your pocket becomes a serious asset. I wouldn’t just say that he’s been pulling strings: his whole life is a bed made of strings. That’s why I’ll never convert into a tideless. I don’t want to hold that much power.”

Luna waved to highlight a pipe that ran through the arcology and bisected Harrow’s den.

“Here’s where I plan to enter. The conduit connects to a ventilation duct that takes air from the outside and blows it into the vault to oxygenate the trees. There’s a maintenance access in the toilets. The idea is that I’ll ascend through the arcology and wait right under the vault. You go to the toilets, enter the ventilation duct, and open the hatch for me.”

“I can fit in there?”

“Yes, it’s man-sized to facilitate maintenance as per Babylon regulations. But Harrow isn’t an idiot. The vault-facing part of the duct is rigged with cameras. They probably trigger an alarm.”

“Can you deactivate them?”

“Not from the outside. Harrow’s vault is airtight on the net. You’ll need an optical camouflage suit to slip in front of the cams.”

“I don’t have one.”

“I do. Once you’re at the airlock, you’ll be outside the cameras’ gaze. Then, you’ll just break the hinges with a laser stylus. After I’m in, we both get to the vault. It’s sealed with a biometric lock, standard model, I know how to hack it. From there it’s a smash and grab. We take the beans and exit through the conduit. Less than five minutes on the clock if you move fast enough.”

“What about security?”

“There’s no outgoing alarm, Harrow lives and works alone, but it is better if we startle him as late as possible. He has a butler drone, an antique, pre-Low Age. It should not be an issue. If push comes to shove, I can neutralise it.”

“I’m surprised you have all this intel at the ready.”

“Remember the guy who left us for his husband on Enceladus? Name was Zhao. He is now the proud father of two kids, but in his youth, he was a thief, and a damn good one at that. He’s had his eyes on Harrow’s vault for a decade. I helped him spy on the old man, I even went to an auction once, before getting thrown out when Harrow realised who I was, though I had time to recon a good part of the building. I told you I’ve been setting this score up for years. Takemura just gave me the incentive to actually do it. And a recruit…you’re still in?”

“I want to see your gear.”

“Follow the guide.”

Luna led Talasea to a warehouse on the Akiva lakefront, where a pair of containers waited under a crude neon light that erased shadows and turned the room into a textureless void. Luna opened a chest stamped with the screaming firehawk of the Titanian marines: an institution that Talasea had never heard of, lost in the depths of Saturnian history, and with a logo that looked more like that of a fantasy sports team than an actual military unit. In a way, it made it more authentic: she knew the solar system had always had an inclination for the oft-dreaded cult of the operator, of which edgy insignias were a core element that fed into the masculine urge to collimate into a regiment of expendable mooks.

Talasea was mildly surprised when Luna pulled a veil and a sari out of the crate. The design was Terran, with intricate ornamentation and a modest cut, suitable for a megalopolis as well as a classy restaurant. However, the material came from an orbital factory: smooth pseudosilk with superconducting loops. Luna pulled a string and the sari went from white to dark red, then blue, and finally the shimmering transparency of visible/near-infrared optical camouflage. The effect was not perfect, noted Talasea; she saw minor ghosting around the edges of the fabric, but good enough to fool a surveillance camera, especially the low-end models available on Babylon. Luna pulled the string a third time, and the sari returned to its original state.

“The first two hue changes are for deception,” she said. “There is no way you are going to get a visual camouflage sari through a security checkpoint; however, when this thing was manufactured, colour-switchable outfits were all the rage, and the technology was close. A modern, milspec optical camo suit would give you better gamma coverage, shape rendition and virtually zero ghosting, but it would be immediately flagged because you can’t pass it off as a normal item of clothing. Old tech is much more likely to pass for high fashion.”

“Old? Where does this sari come from?”

“Same place as the Titanian marines. Ten years ago, Zhao and I discovered a Kinetic Age wreck in the rings, a corvette disabled during the Titan-Enceladus war of the early 2480s…the ship bore civilian markings, but we found booby traps and killer drones inside, I believe it belonged to a spec ops unit.”

“What happened to the crew?”

“Five mummies. The hull was all scorched on one side, so the likeliest option is that they got a glancing shot from a Casaba. These marines were a good two metres tall, though, and the sari is tailored for a Terran baseline…so I don’t think you’ll be wearing a dead woman’s clothes. At least not a dead woman I saw.”

Talasea unfurled the sari and began wrapping it around herself.

“How is it powered?”

“I replaced the original batteries with a string of SMES beads embedded in the fabric. They are opaque to scanners, so they look like pearls. I tried the sari myself a few times, a full cloak lasts for five minutes with moderate physical activity.”

“Hmmm. It’s not too heavy, so I’ll be able to wear it normally… I’m taller than a Terran, but a Nivi drape should do it.”

“Great. There’s a necklace with the sari, internal pocket, right side. It’s got a throat mic, pretty much invisible, linked to an intra-auricular earpiece. Effective range is two kilometres on an encrypted channel. Now, the laser stylus.” Luna removed a pair of guns from the crate, then a guided dagger, and finally threw Talasea a heavy, pen-shaped emitter covered in gold and rubies. A removable sapphire covered the lens. Talasea weighed the contraption, found it too thick to rely on biological batteries, and too small to be powered by superconducting chips like a modern stylus.

“Chemical laser,” indicated Luna. “Blue light, high kilojoule range. You have three charges.”

“Glare protection?”

“Initial low-power pulse to trigger the blink reflex.”

“Where’s the trigger?”

“Biggest ruby.”

“Do you have spare charges?”

“Plenty.”

“Can I try on the crate?”

“Be my guest. I removed all the valuables.”

Talasea uncovered the sapphire, aimed the beam at the firehawk logo and pressed the ruby. She heard a high-pitched thump, like a kettle whistling, then the loud crack of heavy metals vaporised by a high-power laser impulse; a thumb-sized hole appeared in the crate, still warm to the touch, and the scent of white-hot aluminium filled the room. Talasea put the sapphire back in place and gave the laser back to Luna with a nod.

“Are you sure this will get through screenings?”

“I wore a similar stylus when I went to Dione for my son’s birthday last year. Got through customs twice, the drones did not even flinch. The Titanian spec ops knew what they were doing.”

“And yet this kills a man at short range.”

“You think the Titanian marines intended to rob a casino or something? Optical camouflage sari, high kilojoule contact laser, unmarked guns, this crate belonged to an assassin.” She placed the weapons back inside the chest and closed it. “Come on. We are putting this equipment to better use.”

The wind whistled around Akiva Harbour: four kilometres above, the colours of the tubular sun died as they carried Babylon Port to the edge of night. Luna fished on the shore, her legs dangling from the half-buried pillars of a ruined pier, watching her net undulate in the muddy waters below. As Talasea sat down next to the Selenite, she tugged on the fishing apparatus and reeled a pike in. The animal had eyes like a pair of gleaming lanterns, and Luna quickly sent it back to the lake.

“A year ago, I still found trout, now I only get these weirdos,” she remarked. “They come from the equatorial wetlands. Our biologists say that they shouldn’t dwell here, but the pikes don’t listen. Old O’Neill problems, I suppose. The biomes are settling in, and in ways we can’t always predict. You’ll see, one day it’ll happen to the Pleiades as well. Your cosmic gardens will begin to breathe. But in the meantime, I miss my trout pies.”

“Couldn’t you eat the pikes?”

“They taste like mud. They’re terrible. Terrible!” Luna unanchored her net and shifted it to the other side of the pier, then resumed her watch. “I used to cook for the patrons at Charon’s Den, too. You should have seen my gratin and salads! I jest. They weren’t great, but ring divers who’ve spent two months straight in space would eat anything. I’m going to order takeout. There’s a good restaurant two stations north, they deliver via the maglev. I’m thinking of getting rice, fried vegetables and falafels. You vegan?”

“Vegetarian.”

“Surprising for a Pleiadian.”

“The folks on Merope are vegan, but on Alcyone, we eat dairy and eggs. Even though our stomachs don’t really agree with lactose. It is a matter of pride because cheese and goat milk used to be luxuries in the first years of settlement, and Alcyone is the paradise station, while Merope is the industrial centre.”

“So you’ll eat dairy even if you can’t digest it? Your parties must be fun.”

“Provincialism makes you dumb.”

“It’s better than whatever deal we have here around Saturn.” Luna rolled to the side and lay on a bench, watching as the tubular sun switched from violet to deep purple, heralding a nascent shutdown. Talasea joined her in the contemplation of the last minutes of twilight.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re on Babylon Port. First deep solar system O’Neill, home to six million inhabitants, the political and cultural heart of Saturn, the great city in the golden sky, and yet…have you discovered something, *anything*, that you couldn’t find on another world? On Earth? On the Moon? On Mars, or even on Elora? We didn’t have time to build a culture, a language, and a civilisation. Our ancestors colonised the Cronian moons, had their petty squabbles, and didn’t get the time to catch their breath, because bang, the interstellar age began and we morphed from the nascent capital of the outer solar system into a backwater with deep negative population growth. People come in, do their thing, and leave. Like you, like Takemura. We’re a megalopolis of imports. And one day someone’ll board the last shuttle, and they’ll leave the world-trees and sparrows and pikes in peace. You ever wondered when an O’Neill dies? Is it when the last human leaves, when the hull breaks, or just when you stop thinking about it? I’ve seen the broken cylinder at Earth-Sol L1. Fifteen kilometres of silence and hard vacuum, but it’s not dead. Terrans and Selenites visit the ruins, play zero-g games in the walls, or paint the beams so that they bear the images of Jesus Christ, Saraswati, Allah and the stars know who else, I don’t remember the names…but no, it’s not dead. Yet, when Babylon dies, I wonder who will mourn us.”

“I may, for one.”

“Why?”

“We spacers have forgotten too much. We look at Sol and spot a memory of the Earth, but we do not know what it means, the hopes and sorrows it carries. We understand nothing, in truth, beyond the image, and if I did not live with a Terran, I would be as ignorant as the others. My love told me about the cities and plains and mountains of their youth, about the rains and the winds and the scents of spring, about the ruins in the marshes and the skeletons in the soil, and they gave me a glimpse of a world I will never observe, because the Earth is deadly for me. Likewise, you told me about the ring divers, you welcomed me into Charon’s Den, you got me to see this city, this lake and the weird pikes under the water, and it counts for something. So no, Luna. I don’t think I will forget Babylon Port.”

The tubular sun blinked and turned into a beam of darkness that bisected the peaceful night; on the opposite side of Babylon, factories and fisheries and coastal towns gleamed in faint caresses of white and gold, following the smooth patterns of human settlement. The whitewood of the pier remained warm to the touch, and Akiva’s windmills creaked all around the lake. The last maglev passed with a hurry of birds and the whistle of superconducting rails, then the carriage dissolved in the foggy distance of the wetlands. Talasea yawned and, as Luna opened her arms for her, she cuddled against the Selenite.

“You are comfy,” Talasea whispered. “That’s good. More people should be comfy.”

“But our bench isn’t…do you want me to carry you to your room?”

“I have a room?”

“You do. Charon’s Den, second floor. It’s free.”

“Then I would not mind.”

Luna stood up and caught Talasea in her arms with a gentleness that surprised the Pleiadian. The Selenite was far stronger than her, and yet handled her with joyful carefulness; as they made their way back to Charon’s Den, Talasea found herself not quite sure whether she was a damsel carried by her knight, or a drunken friend who had half-passed out in Luna’s arms, but this uncertainty did not bother her. As she gave in to sleep, Luna held her closer.

“Hey. I’ll tell Takemura you’re in. Your dinner will be downstairs. Breakfast is at nine. Guaranteed without dairy.”

Talasea smiled.

The night was peaceful; a chorus of birds saluted Talasea in the morning, and she took her bath watching the slow ramp-up of the tubular sun. A cool breeze flowed in from the north.

“Come!” Luna said after breakfast. “We have to rehearse. Would you mind getting dressed?”

“Give me a second. I need to remember how to put on a sari.”

Sharp daylight fell through the sun wells when Talasea entered the gym under Charon’s Den, wearing her sari arranged in a loose Nivi drape and using the remainder of the fabric as a headscarf; she had adorned her neck and arms with golden jewels, among which she had artfully hidden the laser stylus. Her high heels clicked on the parquet floor as she bowed to Luna. The Selenite answered in kind. Talasea sized herself up in the mirror, looking for a flaw in her posture or a minute detail that would betray the optical camouflage embedded in the sari. She found none.

“It is perfect,” Luna said. “Though the heels may be a problem if you need to run or jump.”

“Do not worry. No self-respecting spacer would ever wear non-retractable high heels. We know too well how dangerous sharp protrusions can be for your surroundings when you move in zero-g.” Talasea tapped the floor twice, and her evening shoes shifted shape: the heels collapsed and the platform merged with the sole, turning it straight and flat without impairing the Pleiadian’s balance. “This is a pure gadget, and I can find alternatives. I just assumed it would fit my character better. Tali Talasea is a fancy Pleiadian who’s come to see Harrow’s famed auction, and she dresses the part.”

“Oh, about that. I filed an invitation for you, but I decided not to use your real name.”

“How am I called, then?”

“Ishi Sindris. You’re an antiquarian from Merope. I hope the name is accurate, I asked a blue friend.”

“It is!”

“Oh, I was afraid it’d be too exotic. I mean, it sounds like the name of the main character in a soap opera. Ishi Sindris, last heir to her family’s fortune, meets a dark and sexy pirate lady in the Serene Sea. Will she give in to lust, or defend her honour? All episodes are on Pleiades Seven, airing daily.”

Talasea chuckled.

“Soap opera heroines are precisely how we are named.”

“Even you?”

“There’s a good reason why I use a diminutive of my family name, and not the first name my mothers gifted me.”

“Am I allowed to know it? Or is it too dreadful?”

“It *is* dreadful. But one day, I may tell you.”

“I’d pay for this information, you know!” Luna sidestepped in front of Talasea and filled the mirror. Her outfit was several orders of magnitude less fancy: a reversible high-visibility vest, stamped with the seal of Babylon’s maintenance department, a hard hat and a tablet.

“This is how I move around Babylon’s underbelly.”

“No one’s asking questions?”

“Look. I’m two metres tall and look like I bench press spaceship engines for breakfast. If *you* saw me in a dark underalley with my high-viz gear, muttering something about a gas leak in sector seventeen, would you interfere?”

“Excellent point.”

“Once in the conduit, I’ll switch to a jumpsuit; it’s more practical for the ascent. I can carry a change of clothes for you.”

“That would be great.”

“Now, let’s make sure this drape works for you. Tali, please, show as little skin as possible.”

Talasea unfolded the sari in a few strategic places, as to cover her ankles, forearms, neck and face, leaving only a slit for her eyes. The folds dropped with a natural straightforwardness: the sari had been designed for a quick transition. She pulled on the command string, transitioning from gold to red, then blue and finally dissolving into a shimmer of pixels. She walked, bent and dropped to her knees before jumping back up: the camouflage held with a surprising regularity for such an old piece of technology, only showing noticeable ghosting at the folds when she mimicked a strike to the back of the neck with her fist. Luna parried her with ease and massaged the sari, allowing the screens to reconfigure.

“Watch out, you are not supposed to fight with this sari. No kung fu. Or…do you have martial arts in the Pleiades?”

“We have dances, but they are for show, even though they may mimic the allure of lethality. In the Astropostale, I got to learn a few tricks, but martial art is a generous term here. I was taught gutter fighting.”

“If everything goes smoothly, you will not have to fight. Now, let’s review the plans of the airlock. I need to show you where to apply the laser impulses, then we’ll go over the maps of the arcology until they’re drilled into your mind.”

The afternoon was quickly consumed, and at five in the evening, Talasea called it quits: she felt prepared enough. At six in the evening, Luna packed her gear and left for the maglev station; Talasea followed soon after and, by seven, was waiting for Takemura in an empty airfield, two kilometres spinwards of the equatorial city. She was not surprised to find herself perfectly calm, in the same state of mind she entertained before a risky flight. Takemura’s flitter touched down soon after. She climbed in. 

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO: THE HEIST

Illustration by Viktor Titov for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

“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.”