Chapter 7

BIT OF A PROBLEM

An arrow fsst through the air and thudded into the grass about five feet to the right of me as I sprinted pel mel through a forest. To think, like, two months ago, I didn’t even know what trees were. Now, I was wishing there were more of ‘em.

“Venn!” Techne’s voice crackled in my ear. “Venn, what the bloody hell is going on?”

“We have a bit of a problem!” I managed to get out between my gasps as I stumbled on a large branch that had fallen across my path. The trip, fall, grab ended with me pressing my back against a tree. Two more arrows thocked into the bark, quivering and twitching. Ya’d think that being a tech using species for so long, we’d have given up the old bow and arrow. Mal had told me that there were lots of reasons why the old goldies kept coming back. Humans had made – and Machines had perfected – agrav and areofoils and who knows what else – but we still used wheels cause anyone could make ‘em, anyone could understand ‘em and anyone could use ‘em.

And we still used bows cause at the end of the day, they were a good way of poking holes in someone when you weren’t standing right next to them.

The first shiny to come around the bend and into the copse of trees I was in had a dragon on his head, a dragon on his shield, and armor the color of burnished bronze. His shield was nestled in a kind of carrying harness that was slung off the side of his four legged, black and white spotted canid. The shiny himself was carrying a bow in his armored hands and had knocked another arrow. I ducked back behind the tree as Techne said: “Why are you almost a click away from Rossk?”

“About Rossk...” I whispered. “That’s a bit of the problem.”

HOW’D WE GET HERE?

With our frigging spaceship. Don’t ask stupid questions. We’d stopped in this unnamed system to reice and I’d gotten curious about the habitable planet that had once been home to Human civilization in this system. The Tiamat didn’t have logs on any landings, and they’d skipped it on the way down the chain. So, we’d landed in the shuttle and started poking around.

I and Rossk had made first contact with the shinies.

About five minutes later, they were trying to murder us.

THE SHINIES

The shinies were humans, but dressed in real good armor. Well, good for a world that had hit a tech-collapse on par with Stumble’s. Though from the orbital survey we’d done, there were some southern continental regions that were still glowing in the frigging dark. The armor was full of clever, tiny bits that fit together to let them move and swing their arms nice and easy, while still being thick enough to turn aside swords and maybe even arrows. Their helmets were done up with fancy dragons and bats and scowling eagles and other exigenic critters. It made telling which shiny was what a lot easier, I’d tell you that. But they had also been in the middle of what seemed like a kind of battle or something: Most of the shinies were standing near their spotted mounts, watching two other shinies who were on their mounts. They had long spear things and, as we had watched from the treeline, the shinies had kneed their mounts into movement.

Wham. The spotted canids had sprinted at one another as fast as you could please. It wasn’t a spot on tech, but it still made me whistle in a kind of awe. Then the shields and the spears had met. A spear shattered. A shield was jarred. A shiny went sprawling on the ground. The other shinies cheered and they went around again.

Rossk and I had glanced at each other.

ROSSK AND ME

So, I’m sure you’re burning up wanting to know about some things that happened between Em and Em and here. Well. Between Rossk and me, nothing much. He was always busy doing calculations and engineering and stuff. I’d maybe learned how to peer through...

Nevermind! Forget I said anything.

THE PROBLEM

“Should we say hi?” I had whispered, trying to think real hard about the shinies and the planet we were on and not peering through security cameras. Rossk, as stolid as ever, shrugged.

“They might be hostile,” he said.

“I’m a Liminal Knight!” I said, grinning. “I’ve shut down armor before, it’ll be fine.”

And with that, I stood up and waved at the shinies.

The shinies had taken some time to realize I was waving. They turned and pointed, and then shouted to the ones who hadn’t noticed. They spoke a language I didn’t recognize, and nothing magically turned what they said into interlac, the tongue that the Tiamat crew claimed I spoke. (‘A corrupted variant, but still, it works, hah, yes, uh, bye!’ Mal had said while trying to not meet my eyes.) But they started to wave me over, and seemed friendly enough. I gave Rossk a thumbs up, then started forward.

The first shiny that I met face to face was the one who had just won the little spear smashing contest. He rode his huge mount over and, well, since it was a canid, I offered my hand for a sniffing, then started to pet its head. The canid might have been big enough to ride and smash with, but, you know. It was still a frigging canid. You always pet canids when you get the chance! As my palm ruffled the fur, the shiny said something in a language that sounded subtly different from the previous one. I shook my head, tossing a hand up like ‘no idea, man.’ Then he said: “Verily, doth thou spaketh this tongue, fair princess?”

I blinked up at him. “Fair what?”

He chuckled. “Ah, yes, you speak the tongue of the stars, princess,” he said, bowing his head with a clink and rattle of armor. “It is mine upmost pleasure to introduce you to the order of cheinvaliers. I am Durriac. These are my brothers in arms.” He gestured to the other shinies with one arm, and I waved at the lot of them. My brow furrowed ever so slightly as I noticed that the rest of them didn’t wave back. Instead, they were all looking back at the bushes I had come from with a kind of intent focus. I looked back my own self and saw Rossck stepping out, his rifle slung over his back.

“Gods wounds!” the cheinvalier Durriac exclaimed. “A dragon!”

I looked back at Rossck, then back at them. “The buggery what?” I asked. “That’s not a dragon! That’s my crewmate, Rossck.” I nodded. “We’re sundivers. Ya know. From another planet?” I smiled, then tossed my head a bit. “I’m also a Liminal Knight, you know.”

The last three planets we’d visited, that’d gotten us free rounds of drinks.

IT DIDN’T

“Heretic!” Durriac bellowed. He drew a sword of his own – a classic model – with a rasp of metal and leather. His canid mount barked at me, growling and snapping, while the other cheinvaliers – or, as I’d call them from here on out, shinies – drew their own weapons, or sprinted for their mounts. I stepped backwards, lifting up my hand.

“Whoa, hey, wait, Durriac!” I said.

Rossck ran up to my side, his hand sliding to the strap of the rifle. I didn’t want to draw my threshold blade, since ... I mean. It was, according to Mal and Thale at least, a weapon that made a monomolecular blade that could cut through anything. And that was on the lowest setting. I hadn’t even begun to unlock all the ways that it could be formatted. These fellows were riding mounts and carrying hammered swords – I wasn’t about to hack them to pieces over a misunderstanding.

Durriac, though, was very intent on misunderstanding. He swung his sword at my head. I ducked low and Rossck sprang backwards. For such a big, burly guy, Rossck could move damned fast if he wanted. He landed, poised and ready, his rifle already in his hands and his tail lashing from side to side with a whip crack speed. He flicked it to the turbo-kill mode I’d see him demonstrating in the Tiamat’s shooting gallery.

“Rossck!” I hissed. “No disintegrations!”

Rossk shot me a ‘seriously?’ look while the other shinies started to ride towards the scrum. One of them had his long spear thing at the ready and angled it right at me. His spotted mount beat the ground with its paws, then leaped at the last second, to add some extra oomph. I threw myself to the side, rolled, came to my feet with my threshold blade in my hand. Fine! They wanted a fight? I’d just remembered I had a fucking stun setting. I twisted my hands around my blade and the edge hummed to life. This was the same mode Thale had shown me in our first spar – rather than being the normal ruby red color of my more ... lethal blade, this one was a pale blue-white. It wasn’t actually made of energy, though. It was a kind of solid electrostatic mesh that could deliver a real serious spark whenever it hit someone.

The guy with the lance had lost the lance. But he had gotten his sword free. He swung himself around and drew his sword. He bellowed. “For the Castle and our Lord God, Atomic!”

His mount charged. Rather than doing the leap, he simply barreled at me, looking fair ready to run me over. The shiny banked hard to the left and swung his sword at my chest. I parried it with my threshold blade. The electrical charge ran along the steel of the blade, sparked along his armor, and did absolutely nothing. I hissed. “Fuckery,” I muttered. Rossck, meanwhile, had aimed his gun low and fired it into the ground before three shinies that were coming at him. The rapid fire impact of high energy projectiles sent up a spray of dust and grit and bits of rock. The mounts reared up on their hind paws and let out whining barking noises. I started to back away.

“Rossck, lets get out of here!” I said.

“I told you we should have brought Glory!” he snapped.

GLORY

Glory was sitting on the Tiamat, in Mal’s lab. The great ape had been poking and prodding at her to figure out all the secrets he could. And I mean, lets be fair here, she was a shrinking, deplotable, transforming, multipurpose hover chariot. I wanted to figure out all her secrets. But I wasn’t a crazy smart brain like Mal, so he was the one doing the poking.

But sadly, that meant she wasn’t here. Ugh.

NETS

Durriac began to shout in his native language. The shinies that had been driven back by Rossck moved around – fanning between us, penning me back and away. They used their long spears, but rather than charging and stabbing, they poked them at me, forcing me to step hurriedly backwards, slashing them away as my feet skidded on the grass. They didn’t really try that hard to stab me. They were herding me away. And past them, I could see that Rossck was being harried in the same way – and then suddenly, Durriac darted forward, swinging his sword. Rossck grunted and went down. But there was no spray of blood. Instead, I saw that Durriac had whacked him with the handle.

Then the nets. Then Rossck was going that way – towards the sunset – and the shinies drew back, giving me room, ceding way to my threshold blade. I lifted it up, glaring at them.

“Where are you taking him!?” I asked, stepping forward. “Give him back!”

The shinies drew their bows. I lifted my hand, grinning. Ranged weapons were an easy trick – I’d practiced shutting them down in the Tiamat’s armory. That had been when Rossck had shown off the way his rifle could strip things apart, atom by atom, if he wanted it too.

The bows loosed and arrows shot past my shoulder, thumped into the ground, and one skittered along my left arm, slicing open skin and leaving a bright red slash.

“Fuckery!” I hissed.

Right.

Bows. Fuck bows.

BRAVELY RUN AWAY

Arrows kept zipping by me, shooting through the air as I ducked left, ducked right, trying to put trees between me and the canid riding shinies. Behind me, I heard their barking, their shouts, their cries of ‘Atomic!’ Then I came to the clearing where Techne and Mal were waiting at the shuttle. They had the gangplank down and Techne was standing at it, dressed in her corset and tricorn hat and bloomers. She waved at me, shouting. “Run faster, Venn!”

“I am!” I shouted.

-Cut-

The voiceless voice spoke and I reacted instinctively. I spun and slashed – and my threshold blade sliced an arrow from broadhead to fletching – the names popped into my head in the same instant. The arrow halves hit the grass and the shinies all stopped. Their helmets meant I couldn’t see their gapes. But then I was on the gangplank, sprinting past Techne, who hurried on with me. The gangplank started to whir shut.

“Up! Up! Up!” Techne shouted and we huddled into the conical cockpit, looking through the forward screen, which lit up with camera views of the outside of the ship. Arrows kept pinging off the hull, while Mal’s feet and hands worked in a quick pattern.

“Where is he?” I asked. “Do we still have his comlink on the scanner?”

Techne nodded, then pointed at the scanner on the dash. Mal nodded. “We still have a lock, but he’s not responding,” he said. “His life signs are stable – mild concussion, but his variation on the human standard is fairly tough.”

“All the scales,” I muttered.

Through the screens, I could see the verdant forests, the stubby remains of old skyscrapers covered in moss, the depressions in the land that had been kinetic craters a hundred years ago and were filled in now. Mal banked us over a set of low laying hills and there was where the shinies had been going: It was a stone structure with tall, narrow walls, circular towers at each corner, and a big blue lake around the middle of it. A wooden bridge was lowered over the lake, and I could see the shinies and Rossk heading inside.

My brow furrowed. “So, how are we going to get him back?”

“Still thinking about that,” Techne said.

Men on the walls started to fire arrows at us. The cameras picked up the sounds of the arrows slapping and skittering off the metal. As they fell down, an idea struck me. I could see that the shinies were dismounting and that Rossk was struggling. A woman in red robes had emerged from the keep, and she pointed at Rossk. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I figured letting them do what they wanted to the ‘dragon’ who was friends with the ‘heretic’ was a bad idea.

“Okay, I got an idea!” I said, nodding.

‘What is it?”

I looked at my threshold blade.

FORMATTING

The gangplank of the shuttle extended into the open air. Wind roared through the opening – and arrows began to clatter against the edges of the armor plating. One hit the gangplank properly, sliding along my feet. But then I hooked my blade into the metal – the curved hook I had formatted bit into the grated metal sheeting nicely. Then the blade began to play out, dropping me through the air as I clung to the handle like a crossbar, grinning as it spooled out more and more and more length. Finally, I hit the ground between Rossck and the woman in the red robes.

I slammed the handle of my blade into the ground, breaking off the wire with a twist. My blade automatically slammed a piton in, rooting the wire, so we had a direct line from shuttle to ground. Mal kept themselves hovering up there, while Techne leaned out, her pistol in hand.

“Let him go!” I said, holding up my threshold blade. The red, killing light of my standard formatting came to life.

The shinies advanced.

Techne fired and puffs of dust exploded between them and me. The shinies stepped backwards. The red woman laughed.

“You think you can face me, heretic?” she asked, then reached into her voluminous red robes. Her hand drew out a sleek, silver cylinder. A blue-white blade exploded from the tip with a furious hiss and she hefted her own threshold blade in her hands. Her eyes gleamed with a fanatic’s light and she beamed. “This is my planet, st-”

The girl exploded. Fragments of red robes and red bits splattered all the shinies standing around her and everyone sprang backwards, including me. I gabbled, looking at the pair of boots that was all that was left of her – even her blade was so much vapor and dust – and then, behind me, Rossck stood, the net he had cut off his body tumbling away in the wind. He lowered his rifle, then grinned at me. A very toothy grin.

“Sorry,” he said.

YES, THEY WERE ALL LIKE THAT

And that’s basically how most of the steps between Masque and the Hereditary Monarchy of Hydra went. Yeah, not every one had us running away from local savages. Sometimes, we did just get beer and back slaps. But more than one had some kind of adventure.

There were the crystal caverns on Gallius, inhabited by spider-squids that crawled through the tubes with a fluid, liquid grace, like they were underwater, despite us breathing normal air. There were the dead asteroid cities of ZT-9081, populated only by screaming ghosts of machines and VR sim-stims that left me quivering with nightmares for days afterwards, even as we burned hard towards the pale white sun, chased the whole while by a fleet of grim-silent, gray painted reaper ships, populated by crews of clone cannibals worshiping dark gods. There were the hanging cities on Thait – suspended between trees the size of mountains, whose breathing could be heard like a distant grumbling giant, where people lived in the cracks between bark and interior, and where the monkey tenders of the arboreal temples were more than willing to pluck sacrifices from the unwary who visited back-alley taverns.

It was more wonders in three months than ten thousand lifetimes on Stumble.

It was more nightmares than fifty thousand, too – there were so many ways for worlds to fall or to fail.

On Zhi-Zhon, there were the trade caravans on massive steam powered walkers, who thundered perpetually across the ever shrinking glacier, pumping carbon into the atmosphere with every step. Two were lost to ice flows that had become rivers in the time it took for us to reice and refuel and restock supplies – and more were poised to do it, if the caravans didn’t change. And on this world we were just on, you could still hear the ghostly click click click of the Geiger counter from orbit and see the kinetic kill strikes in the overgrown ruins of the northern continents.

This was what sundivers saw.

This was why, I realized now, they never stopped, they never settled, no matter how much your ribs ached after a week in the acceleration tank on happy juice. No matter how close the shave got when you came out of the tubes to find half the ship on fire and one of the antiproton tanks five minutes away from rupturing. No matter how much you had to scrape by on side jobs and gigs to just buy replacement parts in scrapheaps on worlds where more people had died than were alive currently.

Who could possibly go back to their home after seeing this?

The fact we were fighting for a good cause helped too.

ODD JOBS AND GOOD DEEDS

Not every planet we stopped on had an Alliance plant, but enough did to give us tips about the shape of things to come. They’d spied some kind of fancy Hegemony ship climbing up the Chain after us. It either was or wasn’t the Victrix. Some people said it was the Victrix, that she had been seen on Em and Em only a few weeks after we had been there. Some people said that it was some new devilry. Either way, the need to keep going, to keep up the pressure, weighted on us like a few extra tons of ballast in the cargo hold.

But the Alliance always had a reason to ask us for help in the systems where it existed. Sometimes, it was as easy as swinging by a listening post and updating some firmware. Sometimes it was as knee knocking scary as trotting me out to a crowd of Alliance sundivers and supporters, rebels who all wanted to be told that their cause had a point, a purpose, an end.

Getting a drink because you were a Liminal Knight was one thing.

Seeing people – scruffy, desperate people, people who’d been on the run from or fighting against the Hegemony, for literally their entire lives – look at me with awe. Whispering the name Wotan Hohmann and reaching out, gingerly, to touch my blade.

That gave me more sweats than the corpse cities.

MEN

But there were things between the ticks.

And those things made me all ... tingly. And blushy. And red.

Mal and I kept a careful distance. Like two orbiting planetoids, neither wanting to crash into each other. Since I’d kissed him on the cheek, he hadn’t brought me hot chocolate again. But I’d asked for hot chocolate at the mess and did so at the same time he was getting hot chocolate, and then we’d both gone and sat in the lab, looking at Glory and his diagnostic machines, with him seated in the control couch, and me perched like the world’s most friendly can-crab on the far shelf, trying to not knock over all the wrenches he had stacked up in orderly piles.

We’d talk about stuff. Glory, the latest planet we’d seen, the history of the Domain – what scraps had survived to the modern day – the history of the Hegemony, the history of his home Atom. How he’d been raised, where he’d learned what he’d learned.

We did not talk about kissing.

We did not talk about how soft his fur was.

We did not talk about laying on his belly and nuzzling his chest.

We did not talk about him being hung like one of the canid mounts the shinies had used.

But by Jesus and all her saints, I thought about it.

Rossck was his own kind of special blushy guilty squirmy excitement. But to explain that I have to explain Thale and ... oh ... oh Thale. So, Thale came to me in my dreams. He sometimes wasn’t in the mood to talk. Sometimes, he’d sit and he’d brood and he’d look out at whatever dreamscape we were in. Sometimes, were clothed. Sometimes, we weren’t. When he was in a brooding mood, I never had the courage to talk. Instead, I’d just ... come up to him. I’d lay down beside him and gently put my head right up against one warm thigh and I’d lean into him and feel his clawed fingers gently, so gently, slide through my hair until I fell asleep while sleeping and woke up, feeling warm and glowy and so rested that I sometimes could hardly believe it.

But when he wasn’t brooding, Thale taught me.

He showed me the thrust, the parry, then pirouette, the counter, the void. He’d taught me how to actually meditate. How to sit and think and let the brain slowly empty out, until you can feel the thrumming voiceless voice of the machine. Of the Djinn. He had taught me how to focus my will and ask the Machine to do things for me. The first lesson had been simplicity itself – jamming a gun and changing a targeting program. Anything with a bit of tech in it could be whispered to, could be convinced that maybe today wasn’t the day to kill a Liminal Knight.

That was how Knights survived so many battles in the end. Artillery didn’t land where they were. Missiles went off target. Cannons hit somewhere else. Oh, there were still ways to get it in the neck, Thale told me. He told me about indiscriminate virus-crystals, who shattered and filled the air with uberanthrax and melted people into puddles of viscous, screaming goo. No hack or slice in the world would get you past that. He told me about the solid shellfire of the Big War on Oopse – fifteen thousand thousand guns firing every day, using scratched out arithmetic and hand cranks to change the angles. No convincing a Djinn to intercede through that.

But then the lessons got more complex.

While sitting naked on rocks underneath a vast, starry sky on a planet that had three moons that danced in infinitely slow, azure patterns ... Thale showed me how to clear my mind and allow the Machine to show me what was there. I would open my eyes and see through the optical lenses of the interior cameras on the Tiamat. I could peer through grainy chaos that my brain translated into corridors and crew – and I could feel the thrumming conduits that spoke of doorway and comptech and the ancient brooding mass of programming code that was the main comp of the ship.

Thale could not go there. He could but tell me how to reach it, and listen as I described – sometimes bubbling over with excitement – what I had visited during my snatched meditation between repair shifts. I told him about the mental image of the engineered architecture that linked codex to hard drive to actuator to magnetic field inducers. I told him about my mind-body, striding through tangled cables that tasted of music and song, and finding a trove of text that spooled out when I touched it. Books writing about worlds and kings and gods that had never been and never were.

But the one thing we did not was make love.

Oh I wanted it. I wanted to crawl onto him and shove him down and slide him into me. I wanted it so badly I could taste it during my waking hours. But Thale never made the move. And with me and Mal and Rossck being so close and tingling, I never had the guts.

What Thale taught me led to Rossck.

MY GUILTY SECRET

It was between the crystal caves and the void cities – but before the shinies - that I tried it out. I was sitting on my bed, hot coco in my hands, drunk half down and feeling just warm enough to be pleasing. I was breathing in and breathing out, and letting the sounds of the ship wash through me – and I felt the tech around me, glowing to life. My eyes closed and I reached out, touching cameras with my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I peered out at the bridge. Techne was there, humming a song to herself as she checked on our burn.

“We really need to change out our magnetic bottles...” she muttered, flicking a screen with one finger. Once twice three times – a light changed from red to green and I smiled eagerly, then swam through the electrical currents to the next camera I found. It was in one of the acceleration tanks. Rossck stood there. He was shirtless, because he was busy taking apart the ceiling units and changing out tubing that had gotten too stressed out for its own good. The shirtless part had an obvious reason: A tank or two of acceleration jell waited in the ceiling, and it dripped. It was slicking his back, pattered along his shoulders, gracing his muscular forearms.

The end result?

Every inch of his muscular, broad back was glistening. Like he’d been oiled. The movement of his arms caused the glisten to catch the light, shimmering and rippling, accentuating the already graceful motions of his body as he tightened a gasket here and loosened a bolt there. I sat there, an electronic ghost, watching him and gaping and feeling a flush heating me. Where I wanted to nuzzle into Thale, and where I wanted pet Mal, I wanted to chew on Rossck. It was a crazy impulse. An urge to run by teeth along those green scales and nibble.

Rossck nodded as he stepped away from the tube. “All right, we won’t die this time,” he said, grinning at Techne, who snorted.

“Who is we here?” she asked. “I’ll be fine.”

Rossck flicked his tail at her, whistling as he walked down the corridor. Almost without thinking, my vision blipped to a different camera. Since each camera came from a different world, from a different era, and had a different set of patches that made it work with the rest of the Tiamat’s programming, it meant that each shift required a twist of focus. It was like hopping from pole to pole across a roiling river.

And each view had a different set of colors. A different resolution. A different zoom capacity.

The same Rossck each time.

Then he came to his quarters and the door slammed shut between my camera and him and I knew that I should stop. But by that time, the reflex of hopping to the next camera had gotten ingrained and that was my excuse and I was sticking too it. When I focused again, I was looking through a security camera that hadn’t been activated in nearly fifty three years. The last time this sucker had been on, the Tiamat had had a different crew. A different set of sundivers, soaring to a different place, on a different mission.

I had questions about this previous crew.

Because the pure, clear, full color image was straight down in the shower, above the water head, which sprayed warm and clean onto a completely buck naked Rossck. My virtual cheeks heated and I gulped, slowly, as I watched Rossck whistle to himself and slide soap along his shoulders. Soon, his scales were covered in frothing suds, adding white to the mixture of green and gold that made him so ... uh ... evocative. I wished I could crane my head or move it around – but the view was singular and directional. Not twisting. No zoom, even.

Which meant that I was mostly viewing his shoulders and the back of his neck and the top of his head and, sometimes, his face, when he rolled his head back to spray water onto his blunt muzzle. He gargled water in his mouth and spat it down the drain, laughing to himself. His tail flicked from side to side and I gulped slowly.

S ... So, uh...

Just the shoulders was good too.

Then Rossck grabbed onto a bit of the metal wall and tugged it out. The wall unfolded with a whirr and rattle and click and suddenly, Rossck had himself a place to sit. I grinned. Was our comptech and astrogator, fearless disintegrator of villains and sundiver veteran, getting tired? Rossck sat down, leaned back, and I could see his cock. His huge. Black. Cock. He was leaning back against the wall, and had grabbed onto his member and I noped right out of there.

I came back to my body and sat there. Blushing.

And that was why everyone was awkward because I was a pervert peeping tom bitch!