Chapter 1

STUMBLE

Open a dictionary and look up terraforming. You’ll find Stumble there in ink and hologram foil print. It’s got all marks of what Humans do after they stay on a planet long enough. You got the multicolored plastic beaches with pebbles like tiny candies that your lizardbrain say are good eating but you know just cut your ‘tines to bits on the way out. You got the oceans right on the edge of boiling, full of dead reefs and acid. And you got the sky: The color of a comscreen tuned to the background radiation of the universe, smeared and crackly.

The people are, by and large, the folks near enough to bits of food that still worked and hadn’t gone extinct. They fanned out in smaller and smaller communities, playing off the tension between a need to eat and a desire to find Stuff that Worked – STWs. Maybe there’s a million of us. Maybe there’s a few hundred thousand, all scattered across the planet. No one’s counting but the Hegemony, and they don’t come out here often enough to be more than myths and legends.

But once you get past the census and the big picture stuff, you can see the same thing on each face: A sorrow-shock, like they got clubbed in the back of the head, as if they were asking, how could life be like this? What had we done wrong?

Stumble was my home.

Stumble’s where this story starts.

So, how’d Stumble get to be this way?

I dunno. It happened back when the Chain shattered, before the Machines left. Happened back when the Liminal Knights walked their lonely road in the company of others, and they knelt at the AI temple of Home and were anointed by those that had seen the true constellations: Orion, the Shepard, Andromeda, the Radio Antenna, the Sagan. That was, uh, I dunno. A long long long time ago, in a galaxy very far from home. All I knew was that Stumble was this way and it would be this way forever.

The Machines were gone and no Human was smart enough to make a patch-job. So, we just puttered along, doing what we could.

I was born nineteen orbits ago, though that could mean anything to you. I might be a baby by your orbits, or wizened and sage-mean. I might be grizzled and tough, like all those stories about astros and their sundivers. Eh. I like thinking stuff like that cause it gives me time before you have to hear about the real me. It’s as much fun as hearing about Stumble.

THE FAKE ME

When I was found by the Machine Temple by Tiar Junker, he named me 908-101g. 908 for the part of town I’d been left in, 101 for the day, g for, uh, girl. It was b for a good ten years before Tiar Junker, a man who knew bots better than he knew people, realized that I didn’t have an outie. So to speak. So, when someone calls me 101, or Gee, they’re talking the way Tiar does. People who call me that are those that run this place – Junker Port.

908-101g is a beaten down twig of a girl dressed in fake leather and cloth wrapping, with goggles two sizes big for her head and a scarf for keeping out razor-wind. She usually carries a walking staff for helping get around on the rubble hills, but it can also work pretty good for clonking people or some exogenics (fancy word for alien lifeforms brought in by the old Stumble citizens to try and patchjob their whirling out of control ecoclimate.)

908-101g lives in a niche in the hole of a stone building in the middle of Junker Port, but she’s most often in the outlands, looking for STW and bringing it back to Tiar so he could tabulate it, store it, and sell it whenever the sundivers came from on high to buy and to sell on the cheap while waiting for their ships to ... do whatever it was they did between arriving in Stumble’s system and leaving down or up the Chain.

THE REAL ME

My real name is Venn. I took it from an old crashed ship out by the acid sea. The nose crested the water like an island made of one huge knife, and the side had a big painted diagram with three cheerful circles – one in red, one in green, one in blue. They mixed together in the center to form a white overlap, with overlapping colors in the other areas which were all subtly wrong. Purples and golds and blacks where there should have been other colors if they were real mixes. And in the center was some old text I couldn’t read.

But I knew the circles. They made a Venn diagram. Things mixing, and overlapping, and making a single thing shared by all the other stuff around it? That was what I wanted to be. I wanted to take all the bits of my life and find the thing that made ... a...

Ugh.

Fuck! This sounds so stupid, so fucking stupid when I write it like that. Ugh.

Just.

My name is Venn. Okay? I have brown eyes and brown hair and lots of dots on my face. So, you know. Whatever.

But the real me did live somewhere nice. That crashed ship? I managed to get to it by using my staff as a pole and using a boat made of ship-sheeting I found flung onto the rubble hill by the ship’s crash. Once you get near the ship, you can see that the acid is piddling stuff compared to hull that is made to go sundiving. This, in a bit of weirdness, made it terrible for salvage. No one can do anything with it, it’s not like we can cut it or shape or it mold it or melt it. It just sits there. The only reason why my boat works at all is cause its not a boat, it’s a frigging raft.

And it gets me up by the ship where there’s an airlock that got pinged by something. Railgun? X-ray laser? The blade of a Liminal Knight looking to lay down a smack? I dunno. However it happened, I was able to get inside the ship and set up my home away from home. It’s not actually nicer than the niche. We’re away from Junker Port’s air processing, so I have to wear a mask to keep from breathing in razor-wind, and the sun heats the hull up something fierce since the insulation’s gone extinct too.

But ... sitting there in the acceleration throne of some long dead sundiver, looking at the curvy window and the brick consoles, I could imagine that I wasn’t here. That the smeary bits of sky were space, and that was crawling up the Chain.

THE CHAIN

Don’t ask me why, but Humans didn’t leave Home and go out in every direction. They built a Chain instead – Home went to Opal and Opal went to Thalestar and Thalestar went to Backgammon and Backgammon went to ... that was usually where I lost count of the names. On and on, link by link, forged by sundivers, until you got here. To the ass end of the Chain. Stumble was world Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine. There were count it Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine worlds between me and Home.

Each trip took a dive into a sun.

Again, don’t ask me why or how. That was just how the Chain worked. You take a sundiver ship and you fly it into a sun as fast as you can go. Faster than fast. And it flings you out of another sun – burnt and crispy and hopefully alive – and you are there. I tried to imagine that, curled up on my acceleration throne. Here, I could be alone with my thoughts and my dreams and my portions, without anyone trying to take them from me. But eventually, I’d run out of portions and start to go crawling crazy inside the hotbox, and I’d go crawling back to Junker Port for my day job.

DAY JOB: DAY 3,702

I kept count from the year that Tiar Junker started making me work to the very last day. And the very last day was like all the others, so, I might as well begin there. It was after I’d come home from my real home and woke up my niche to the sound of a bell rattling. One of Tiar’s goons, a burly scaled human named Gigor, shouted: “All right, you pieces of shit, get your asses in gear. We’ve found a new tech field and the Peeper’s spotted a thrust plume coming right out of the sun, so we gotta get good shit!”

A thrust plume meant a sundiver ship was coming. It meant that Tiar would make more mana than ever. But it didn’t actually make any of us go bustling any faster, since we were paid in food portions, and those were always set, so ... it wasn’t like we’d get any richer. But then Gigor snarled and snapped his very sharp teeth and we all hurried.

I decided to skip going with a group. Groups had to share their portions, and I was tiny enough that I could get into tech that most people didn’t even try for. I took a winding route towards the tech field that Gigor mentioned. It was north of Junker Port, near some territory that no one had been in for a good century or so. The legends from back then, before Junker Port had needed to retract and focus on keeping people alive in the face of fifty eight hurricanes in a row, said that it had been Stumble’s old starport.

Which could mean ships – which could mean cargos.

I let myself picture some of the cargo. Maybe still working cryotanks full of Chain citizens, all blinking and bleary from their eon long storage stint. They’d come out and gasp at the ruin, but then square their shoulders and get to work. Oh! Maybe I’d find a cargo hold with treasure that’d make me richer than Tiar and I’d get to buy a ticket on a sundiver and crawl up the Chain. Or maybe there’ll be a ... a ... sleeping prince. My cheeks heated and the image got way too detailed, way too fast for my own sense of dignity. He’d be dark skinned and warm lipped and he’d have eyes the color of the stars on a clear night.

Uhh...

I came to the tech fields still blushing. Like most things on Stumble, they had their own beauty. Hulking shapes the size of mountains, buried underneath collected up dust and dirt and grit. They formed canyons, and there were sloping ramps made by wind and by shifting trash, meaning someone could (if they were real eager to die) walk on the surface of those hulking, cylindrical shapes. They were ships, but who knew if they were sundivers. Sundivers would be entirely intact, but ships built without the sun in mind might be flimsy as Tiar’s ego. But then I started walking and realized I hadn’t actually come to the tech fields.

How long does it take for awe to sink in?

For me it was three hours of walking, seeing the figurative mountains become mountains in truth, vaster beyond imagination, sweeping up and up and up, big curving structures that became the whole wide world as I walked between them. The rear end, which I was walking by, were huge cones made of plating and rib-like struts that were slowly rusting away under the sun that crept past the sky. The wind picked up faster and faster the further in between the two hulks I got, driven through it like a wind tunnel.

My robes flapped around me and my scarf trailed like a red slash in the air – a spot of color against gray dust on gray plating. I found an opening a few minutes later, a jagged rent in the side of the hulk. Walking inside, I saw the whole thing wasn’t just a tube shape. It was a tube in truth. Looking back, I could see that the big cone I had walked by was the mouth, and the floor was covered with shiny plating, set into a mosaic pattern that ringed the entire tube. I tried to knock one lose. Using my staff didn’t work, but some scrapper jell did it with lots of acid burning around the edges.

Once the acid was cooled down, I picked up the rectangular chunk of spaceship and eyed it. It looked like super-conducting material, that was what gave it that shimmer. Well, the only thing that made sense to me to make a whole tube-cone shape with superconductors ... it’d be if you wanted to make one serious magnetic field, right? I shook my head slowly. Why would the ancients spend so much mana and sweat and blood to make this?

-Ramscoop field for automated intra-cluster travel, common during the Domain Era of Chain Expansion-

Someone had just said a thing in my head. Clear as crystal. Echoing from the deeps. My fingers opened in nerveless shock and the superconductor plate nearly smashed my foot to goo.

THE VOICE IN MY HEAD

“Hello?” I asked, the echoing fierce loud in my ears.

The voice didn’t say anything back. So, a thing about that voice? It hadn’t had a gender or a tone, really. It wasn’t even what I’d call a voice. That was just the best word I had for it. It was closer to just ... knowing something instantly, deep inside and out. I knew that the superconducting tile was for a ramscoop field for automated intra-cluster travel. I knew it was common during the Domain Era of Chain Expansion. What I didn’t know was what any of that meant or why I knew it.

Prickly fear was burning through me. Panic. I stepped back to the gash and felt sharp metal tugging along my robes. I jerked and the robes tore and I nearly slashed up my skin. But it was enough to set me running, heart hammering. I ran and ran and ran and ran – sprinting away from the tech field and away from the voice. I got out of breath at the same time I got to the ridge of scrap metal that sheltered Junker Port from the harsh, killer winds of the Big Empty to the south-west. I stood on the ridge, panting through my breather mask, looking down at the port itself.

My stomach knotted – and not just in fear. Hunger gnawed at me as I realized with a sinking, awful feeling that I hadn’t gotten a single piece of salvage. No portions. No food. I groaned. And if I said I’d come home cause there was a voice in my head? What was Tiar gonna do then?

Strap me down?

Cut my head open?

I was standing on that ridge, trying to figure out which and what and where and why ... when the sky split with a thunder and a flame bright enough to sweep aside the clouds and the grit. Wind blew past me, making my robes flap out behind me. I nearly dropped my staff. The firestorm that stretched across the horizon broke and the streaks that were drawn by the thing falling onto our planet only served to accentuate the shape. It was a conical shape, long and tapered, and easily the size of those ramships that I’d been salvaging. But where those were dead and husked, this was alive and flying. It droned as it hovered above the acid oceans, frothing up waves and causing plastic beads on the beach to rattle and jump and clatter.

I started to skid down the incline towards Junker Port. Cause even if we hadn’t seen ‘em for a century or more, everyone knew that color. That hard edged orange and black, and that single reaching U shape for the symbol – a U containing seven stars. Scrawled along the sides of the cones, written in a dozen languages including the one we spoke and read on Stumble, was a name: VICTRIX IMPERITA

It was a Hegemony Worldkiller.

For the first time in a century, the Hegemony was back.

THE HEGEMONY, IN STORIES

The Gentek Hegemony. Shocktroops in black and orange trim, marching down street on boots that clunk and thunder, with railrifles and chainbayonets gleaming. Worldkillers soaring above planets and doing as their name implied. Their emperor, the Philosopher King Rehoboam, seated on a throne made of jacketed neutronium, holding the scepter of lordship in one hand and the ceremonial USB in the other, his beards coiffed and his head shining and bald.

The Hegemony. Planets bustling with factories and temples to the Machine, row on row of vats for breeding the perfect human stock. Lists of mating records and eugenic control.

The Hegemony. Plunder and tax from a hundred worlds heaping inside of moon-vaults and buried in the cryonic oceans of gas giants.

I didn’t even know what some of the words meant. But I tried to imagine them as Rhales the tale spinner told the stories when the suns had set and the moons tried to peek through the slurry of Stumble’s sky. I tried to picture what Emperor Rehoboam might look like and it always came out as being a statue of pure and clean plastic, with eyes like the glimpse I’d caught once of Tiar’s river of mana, glowing with promise and shifting, iridescent colors.

That was the Hegemony – a mixture of awe and terror, able to kill a world and save it as easily as winking, but endlessly hungry and endlessly preening and endlessly sure. Old Rhales always added in some rebels, or another empire, or some kind of great enemy from beyond for the Hegemony to be fighting. Some reason to say why they need tax and treasure and Worldkillers. But Rhales never said who the rebels or the enemy were the same way twice, so I figured he was just making it up.

But there was another thing about the Hegemony, from all those stories: They were very far away.

THE HEGEMONY, IN REAL LIFE

The first thing the Hegemony did was fire a salvo of needles out of the belly of their Worldkiller and into the oceans of Stumble. They shot by so fast that I barely had time to register their shapes – flickers across my vision as I came up to the wall of Junker Port. But I heard the report of the impacts, and heard the roaring crackling noise that followed. By the time I got to the port of Junker Port, the Worldkiller had put out huge ropes and cables, which reached into the water. The curve of the horizon hid exactly what they were doing, but then the ropes and cables began to grow taut, then a great grinding noise filled the air. After a few moments, bricks of water the size of the whole of Junker Port started to rise into the air.

Water. But ... a brick. The water didn’t look frozen solid. It wasn’t ice or nothing. It was just water, wobbling and jiggling like some fatty tissue. Everything I knew said that the water should just fall back down, not remain pierced by the huge hooks that were at the end of those ropes. The water started to slide into the yawning hanger bay of the Worldkiller, while three gnats flew out of the mouth-like opening that slid the conical tip of the Worldkiller open.

Those gnats got bigger and bigger and a screamy, howling noise filled the air. Two gnats looked like what scrapper legends called Veetolls: They had gull wings and tube shaped engines strapped to either side of the wing. Two wings, two engines each, four engines in total. Their bellies were angular and painted midnight black. Stubby protrusions on the front in blisters made me think of death and fire. Guns. Guns.

Guns had been nearly extinct on Stumble for, god, who knows how long. Now the Hegemony was bringing back enough to melt the whole continent to slag. The rest of the crowd on Junker Port’s piers whispered and murmured, and cried out in shock as the Veetolls came closer and closer. But it was the ship that flew between them that drew my eye. It was a sphere shape, black as the rest, with two rings set around it. The rings didn’t touch one another, and they didn’t touch the sphere. Instead, they interlocked and spun wildly, creating a blue-white field around them.

Veetolls, I could imagine how they flew – engines were in the old stories.

But how did the sphere fly?

“They’re coming right for us!” Someone shouted. A panicky, male voice, loud enough to carry and filled with enough fear to set the whole crowd stampeding backwards. My feet got stepped on, the small of my back got jammed by an elbow. I tried to keep my own feet, gripping my staff in my hands, and got pulled back by the crowd as they cleared away from the pier. My breath came short and gaspy, dragging my own mask against my face. I felt the same panicky fear filling me as the Veetolls came closer and closer, and the sphere’s rings shifted around so that they sat around the sphere’s belly like a pair of loose belts. The sphere settled down on the pier itself, the scrap metal creaking and groaning under its weight. But the sphere looked maybe big enough for one man, or two if there was nothing but tinfoil in the sphere’s construction.

The Veetolls, being beefier, settled on the loading docks proper, where ships would unload food from Agrisland up north. The sides opened and out came the Hegemony shocktroopers. They had their railrifles, but they didn’t aim them at the crowd. They instead used their hands – and considering each was in a kind of armor that covered them from head to toes, their hands were more than enough. They shoved and pushed, shouting in our language. “Make way, you locals, make ways.”

The sphere bubbled open.

And out came the Liminal Knight.

THE LIMINAL KNIGHT

The Liminal Knight stepped from the sphere with regal disdain. He was clad in black quilted armor, fitted for easy movement and grace. His shoulders had metal woven among it, stapling a cape that billowed as long and as stark as a starless sky, cracking and snapping in the boiling hot wind blowing off the acid seas. His boots were polished and his gloves were tight and tipped on each fingertip with silver claws, sharp enough that I felt them cutting the skin even from here. His head was concealed behind a mask – a flat plane of featureless black. It didn’t even reflect back. It had no eyes, nor mouth, nor hair. It slowly swung from side to side as he walked – click click click – up the pier towards the crowd, which the shocktroops were pushing back to make way.

Tiar Junker had come out of his home in his best outfit. Tiar himself was a Human whose ancestors had gotten jiggered around to work on a world with crushing gravity and fierce pressure. His body was blob fat and hardened, short and squat. Despite that, he carried himself like a handsome man and he dressed the part too – and so, kind of made it true. His hair was slicked back and he emerged from his home with two of his bully boys flanking him – both carrying chests full of tax. Did they know how totally stupid they looked, trying to swagger while men in powered armor stood to either side and a Liminal Knight walked forward.

Except...

Was he?

I didn’t know. I craned my head, my neck prickling as I tried to see if he was or if maybe this was just how Hegemony taxmen dressed. But in all of Rhales’ stories, Liminal Knights were the ones in the sleekest cuts, leading the fray, with fate roiling around them like a storm. And there it was. Right on the black-clad man’s belt: A silver hilt. The hilt of a Threshold Blade. The weapon of a Liminal Knight. My whole guts knotted and I wondered; Was he a true knight? Had he been to Home and knelt in the AI Temples? Had he walked all the worlds in the Chain between his birthplace and here? How many suns had he seen? How many constellations?

And why, after seeing all of that, had he bent the knee to Emperor Rehoboam?

It was so very easy to start to hate him, without him even done a thing.

“Sire,” Tiar Junker said, his voice carrying in the sudden silence – silence save for the wind, the snap of the cape, the shift and clink of armor in soldiers standing at attention.

“Tiar Junker,” the Liminal Knight said, voice made robotic and husky by the mask. “I didn’t come for your paltry offerings.” His hand waved and the casket that Tiar’s right man held went flying. For just an instant, I saw three shimmering lines in the air, catching a chance light of the sun and the voice that wasn’t a void spoke in my head.

-Monomolecular wire, extruded from a nanofactury, launched by microdarts and embedded in the casket. Piezo-electric effectors used to impart lateral motion and-

The casket hit the ground, spilling open, and I saw the tax that Tiar had collected: The best bits of plastic, the most shiny STW. Comptech, a gun, a few USB sticks. All of them tumbled and clattered and the Liminal Knight stepped on the comptech and ground it into the ground with a twist of his heel. I had to admit. I kinda loved seeing Tiar’s face widen, his jaw go slack, his knees go wobbly.

“S-Sire-”

“Enough,” the Liminal Knight said. “We shall discuss this inside. If you have done as I asked...”

How had the Knight asked anything of Tiar? My eyes narrowed as the Hegemony shocktroops followed after. The crowd started to mill about, whispering in awe – they’d never seen anything like that before, no sir-ee. Rhales was going to get a lot of portions and credit for being right, for saying that Liminal Knights could make gravity and inertia their bitch. Except that he was wrong. All wrong. It had been a trick of wires, like a stage show. Except those wires hadn’t been there before the Knight got there. It was like a trick without a trick.

I started forward, gripping my staff to my chest, trying to not think about my plan too much. My eyes were locked on the cape billowing behind the Knight as he and Triar headed for Junker’s home. The cape flipped aside and just for a moment, I could see the Threshold Blade and-

-Micro nanofactury with unlimited production routines and internal reservoir of-

I shook my head. Get. Stop. Out! Fuck! I put my hand to my temple, feeling a twinging sense of pain. And just for a moment, the Knight glanced back. Like he had heard. I ducked as hard and as fast as I could, rolling behind one of the air processors that made walking around inside of Junker Port halfway close to livable. My back pressed to it and my heart jackhammered. I peeked around after a while minute dragged by and saw the Hegemony soldiers were all around Tiar’s house. No way I could slip into the alleyway and listen in.

Or ... was there?

GIDDY’S HOUSE OF ILL REPUTE AND LISCENTIOUSNESS

The only building that was close to Tiar’s and high enough to make this maybe work was Giddy’s House of Ill repute and Licentiousness. People kept threatening me with her back rooms – if you don’t shape up, Gee, you’ll go work for Giddy.

And? If she took a twiggy girl who didn’t even turn heads in the communal showers, then she either was crazy, or had a customer with a really specific want in mind. And even that’d be easier and faster and safer than going out scrapping. Also, unlike Tiar, Giddy treated her girls good. People had funny ideas about that, but I’d actually, like, talked to them. Since I knew better than a lot that when someone said ‘everyone says’, that everyone was usually full of bile and snot.

So, I sidled into Giddy’s house and tugged off my mask and was almost immediately assaulted by Giddy herself. Giddy was a four armed human with purple skin and...

Um...

Lots of ... you know. Uh.

My eyes darted away as she walked forward, saying: “Venn! Darling, did you see those awful Hegemony creatures, surely, they gave you such a fright!” And then her arms wrapped me up and crushed me right up against the you know and my whole face flushed. I squirmed and tried to make a noise beyond a choked ‘gurrrph’, but Giddy’s hug was relentless and unstoppable. She squeezed and squeezed until she heard my bones crack. Then she let me go, clucking her tongue. “They didn’t trouble you, did they?”

Giddy always worried about me.

“No,” I said, grinning shyly. “No, I’m good, Miss Giddy. But, I was wondering...” Who was on the second story? “Is Techne in? I, uh, I found something that she might like. Um, while I was out scrapping.”

“I think she is,” Giddy said. “And she was asking about you – ever since you fixed her knee, she’s been practically singing your praises, Venn.”

I grinned, shyly and my cheeks went all red and my dots got real obvious. They always did when I blushed. I looked away and rubbed the back of my neck, but the sick part of me that lived deep in the gut and at the base of the spine grumbled – rumbled really: Oh, yeah. You fixed a busted pneumatic tube, so fucking special, Gee. Applause! Applause!

Giddy gestured me to the stairs and I headed past all the tables for drinking and past the sitar that rested against the wall, waiting for Rhales to come and start playing it while speaking his stories. Behind me, I heard other people stepping into Giddy’s – it sounded like other people wanted to get away from the Hegemony that had come stomping down on our town. I heard one person say, loud enough to carry to the stairs: “And he made Tiar beg. God, I never thought I’d see Junker do that in my whole life.”

Then I was up the stairs. I took the switchback past the first level – since it went ground floor, first floor, second floor in Giddy’s, don’t ask me why – and then stepped out onto the second. My plan was to just go past Techne’s room and use the hall window to scramble onto the roof. But as I walked past Techne’s room, I noticed her door was closed. My brow furrowed a bit. Techne never closed her door. Even when she was, uh. You know. With. Someone. Uh.

I paused, then put my ear to the door, just to make sure ... you know ... safe. I bit my lip, but rather than the squeak, groan, moan, slap and tickle I’d, uh, definitely hadn’t wanted to hear, honest ... I heard only a soft murmuring. It sounded like two voices. My brow furrowed. What the fuck? One of those voices was Tiar, I had gotten good at hearing his jowly growl through walls and around corners, just so I’d be able to hide.

I tried the knob. It was locked. But I accidentally dropped a single bit of scrapper’s jell into it using my glue-gun and accidentally set it off. The tiny puff of smoke reached my nose, but Techne’s sense of smell was garbage. The knob opened up smooth as butter and I swung in and saw Techne, sprawled on the bed, a gun in her hand and aimed right at Tiar’s roof, a pair of headphones on her silvery head, and a look of deep, focused attention on her chrome face.