Chapter 4

The door to the American shuttle rattled open and Vidya stepped from it to the surface of an alien world. She stood for a moment, looking out at the seemingly endless beaches and green. The beaches spread outwards in both directions from the chosen landing spot – a patch of nearly level ground that was right near the Pacific ocean – and the jungle or marsh or everglades or whatever they were spread forward. The distant sounds of birds and insects were beginning to creep back into audible ranges now that the shuttle had landed and the noise had become nothing more than the faint tick and clink of cooling metal.

The beach itself was strewn with pale sand – pure and clean, without a single plaspebble or cone crab to be seen. Tufts of grass peeked between the sandy beaches, and she did see a small family of crabs scuttling by, each bearing a natural shell. She stepped away from the shuttle and saw the four USMC soldiers standing off in a defensive position. Though the Enterprise was not a boarding focused ship, it still carried enough heavy rigs for their space born soldiers to be of use, even down here. Each soldier held a rifle in their hands and had their helmets on.

Vidya was also in a helmet – the only thing marring this perfect moment. She wanted to breathe this pure air. But the memory of the first Columbian exchange had dogged the Americans to this day and they had a sheepish concern that felt a bit like too little too late ... until now. Now, they had the chance to do things properly. She also didn’t particularly want to die of some unknown fever that her biology had never had a chance to adapt to.

Behind her, the rest of the naval technicians – including their pilot, one Ensign Trevor – were beginning to move off the supplies. They worked with a quick efficiency, taking advantage of the unloading equipment to set out the cache of supplies that they had moved down from the Enterprise. After the first drone had been shot down by locals, the decision had been made that the Enterprise needed to get more water for her reaction mass tanks ... and she needed to do it as far from civilization as was possible to be.

So, they had landed on the Florida coast, which was significantly further away from the mainland on this Earth. And now, the techs were beginning to get out the system that would turn water into fuel. It was nothing more complex than a solar powered pump and a collection of filters – the nuclear thermal rocket that ran the Enterprise (and the smaller version that was used by her shuttles) didn’t like things like salt or sea weed or fish clogging things up. Vidya tore her eyes from the crew inflating the nanocomposite tanks that would be filled with water, then loaded into the cargo hold in lieu of the purification station.

Captain DuBois had been argued into allowing her to come along with this mission to get some hands on samples. The science team had leveraged her Indian citizenship to force the issue. She could still remember Dr. Mann’s oh so sheepish expression and the barely concealed amusement in his voice: I’m sorry, sir, the Republic of India has insisted. I would wish to leave her back on the ship with us, but ... well, they are putting their foot down. Despite their being from different countries, they both shared a desire to begin to dig into the mysteries of this place.

Mann might have preferred to immediately land near the sites of civilization and begin observing them up close and personally. But Vidya wanted to get at the soil. At the earth. She wanted to study the geological differences and similarities. Was there anything to be found here that was different? An excited thrill shot through her as she knelt down and ran her gloved fingers through the sand. Imagine what could be done with an entire Earth’s worth of petroleum, untapped and unused. If it could be extracted cleanly, safely, they’d have millennia of plastics and petrochemical byproducts to use. And they could save an entire planet the extinction worthy hassle of getting hooked on a fossil fuel energy schema. She chortled at the thought.

“Hey, Doc,” Ensign Trevor said, walking over to where she was crouching. “You need any help?”

Vidya stood. The young ensign had been given the assignment to give her some experience with flying in a safe location. Captain DuBois, it seemed, was beginning to worry that they’d need more pilots in a hurry. For her part, the rainbow haired woman looked like she was walking on the clouds. Her smile was so broad and so bright that Vidya was shocked she hadn’t polarized her own helmet. “No, no, thank you,” Vidya said. “Uh, actually, I could use an escort – I need to take actual soil samples now that I’ve got some sand.”

“Sure,” Helen said, patting her hip, where a heavy slugthrower was looped. Then she touched her helmet, her lips moving silently – speaking on the soldier’s com band, Vidya was sure. She flicked her finger and went back to their private com-link. “Lets go.”

The two of them crested the ridge and startled a flock of birds into the air. The sudden motion caused Helen to start and clutch at her chest through her spacesuit.

“Fuckin’ sky rodents!” Helen snapped.

“Ensign Trevor,” Vidya whispered.

“Yeah?” Helen asked.

“Those were ... those were passenger pigeons,” Vidya tapped at her wrist, spooling the footage on her suit cams backwards, snatching a picture of one and running it through her database. “Yes, they were! Gods, those were passenger pigeons!”

“ ... so?” Helen asked.

“They’re extinct on Earth. On ... our Earth,” Vidya said.

“Ooooh!” Helen nodded. “Cool.”

“Cool?” Vidya shook her head. “Do you know what this means?”

“More bird shit on the NYArc’s walls?” Helen asked.

Vidya rolled her eyes. “If one extinct species is intact here, we ... we can begin transporting others back. Rhinos. Whales.” Her voice was nearly giddy. “Imagine the reconstruction efforts that can speed up! No, not speed up, that can even start.” She rubbed her gloved hands together. “Come on!”

And with that, she grabbed Helen’s hand and surged forward towards the border where everglades met sand. There, Vidya began to hunt out the places she wanted to get sampling data from. She imagined, every time she knelt down and dug her collector into the dirt or loam, that she was on par with Buzz Alden or Neil Armstrong. For the first time, India would get a first over the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese. That was something. That was more than something. She paused after her third sample, her eyes closing.

“So, Doc, can I ask you a question?” Helen asked.

“Uh, sure,” Vidya said.

“You, uh, seem pretty chipper,” Helen said, her voice growing coy and playful. “And I noticed that Moe is pretty fucking hot.”

Vidya slowly turned her head, craning her eyes to peer at Helen out of the corner of her helmet’s visor. “Moe?”

“Yeah, you know? Tall? Dark? Handsome? Killer ‘stache?”

“Did ... you just call him Moe?” She asked.

“Yeah, short for Mohammad!” Helen said.

“You can’t just call him Moe!” Vidya said, standing fully up. “It’s incredibly rude!”

“My neighbor let me call him Moe,” Helen said, sounding irritated. She put her hands on her hips. “And you can’t deflect me that easily – I gotta know. Are you, you know, sharing formulas with him?” She wiggled her eyebrows. The dyejob she had gotten for her hair hadn’t extended to her eyebrows, which were two thin black lines on her rapidly paling skin. It made the wiggle and waggle look extremely obvious, even through the faceplate.

Vidya bristled. “I’m a widow, Ensign Trevor.”

Helen’s face fell like she had been stabbed in the back. “Oh.”

“My husband-” Vidya looked away. Her excitement tasted like ashes in her mouth. “He died at Janus.”

“ ... oh...”

Conversation took a nose dive into silence from that point on as Helen paced a few steps behind Vidya. The one advantage of wearing a space suit on an Earthlike environment is that it added a few walls of remove between people. All Helen had to do was shut off her radio and she felt miles and miles away. Guilt gnawed at Vidya – guilt and a growing uncertainty. Because she felt as if she had only been half honest with Helen. Or maybe even a quarter honest. But to be fully honest felt too close to admitting that she was losing her godsdamned mind.

Every three, maybe four nights, of the voyage from Janus to this Earth, she had had a...

Dream.

Her cheeks heated.

The dreams were always intense. Always shockingly real feeling. And they involved her husband Sukhdeep being with her. Oh, no, that was a lie. He was never merely with her. He was usually making love to her, more passionately and desperately than during her honeymoon. Her cheeks heated more and her nipples hardened underneath her suit as she remembered the last visitation – it had come right when the Enterprise had entered orbit, and it had been the most divine thing she had ever felt in her life. She swore that, in death and dreams, Sukhdeep knew her body better than she did.

And it felt insane to even bring this up to anyone else. How would she phrase it: Oh, I feel rather close to my husband, two days ago, he fucked me so hard I could barely walk?

She shook her head.

They were just ... dreams.

Right?

She was still chewing on that when Helen’s voice broke into her radio: “Doc!”

Vidya turned. “What?”

But she saw that Helen had pulled her slugthrower. “Marines,” she said, not bothering to switch channel. “A humanoid figure is running our way.”

Vidya snapped her head around so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. The figure she spotted after a few frantic seconds of looking about – they were sprinting through the swamps, stumbling and shifting from side to side. They were clad in a dun colored brown robe, splotched and dirty with long wear. The fabric looked as if it had been patched many times, and the hood was thrown up, shielding their head and face. Why, she had no idea – it wasn’t particularly bright in the shrouded everglades. But something in the way they moved made her brow furrow: Their feet were too close together, stumbling. And then the figure scrambled onto a set of roots and she and Helen both saw at the same time: His feet had been hobbled together by a set of ropes. The ropes almost glowed under the passing light of the sun.

The robed figure splashed forward into the water and Helen holstered her pistol.

“You sure that’s wise?” Vidya whispered.

“He’s an escaped prisoner, we should help him,” Helen said.

“You don’t know it’s a he, you don’t know they’re a prisoner, you don’t know anything about what is-”

The robed figure was struck, then. Vidya didn’t hear the impact, but she did hear a very masculine cry of pain – a very human sounding cry of pain – from the figure. The stumbled and threw out their hands, which vanished into the muck. Their back arched as they hunched forward, and Vidya could see that a wooden shaft, with four bright tufts of fibrous material thrusting from the back, was protruding from his shoulder blade. Her brain’s gears locked and refused to define the object for a few moments as another sound reached her ears – the thundering, splashing sound of heavy footfalls in the marsh.

“The fuckers shot him in the back with a goddamn bow and arrow! Bastards!” Helen started to surge forward. “Dangerous game hunting people bullshit!”

“Ensign Trevor, wait!” Vidya cried out. Since she didn’t have access to the soldier’s com-band, she had no idea if they were close or quite far. She started to splash through the water, which felt thick and murky, as if she was in a nightmare. Helen surged ahead of her, clearly better at handling this kind of terrain. She reached the figure, who had managed to stand back up again despite the arrow protruding from his back.

The thundering hooves became closer still.

The moment that happened next was seared into Vidya’s mind for the rest of her life.

Through the bushes and the branches, a massive stag leaped. It had pale white fur, with horns that had been painted in gilt gold. The horns caught the light of the sun that speared through the canopy, while the stag itself seemed to hang in the air. It had no saddle, no bit, no sign of being tamed at all, save that a figure seated upon it. The figure was humanoid and clad in armor that was a confusion of greens and golds and reds, curling and twisting in ornate patterns that flashed by in an instant. A bow as long as the figure was tall was held in one hand, while a second arrow had been drawn and knocked. It shouldn’t have been possible – the bow was far too large, the figure too slight – but plausibility felt as if had been suspended.

Helen, bull dog fierce, surged forward and put herself between the robed figure and the stag and its rider.

The arrow struck her shoulder and glanced off, skittering away from the armored space suit. Helen, meanwhile, snapped her pistol up and fired three times in rapid succession. The slugthrower was used chemical propellant – designed to work even without oxygen – and the sound was harsh and sharp. The bullets caught the figure on the stag and stopped them dead in the air. The stag finished its leap, then kept sprinting away, the figure splashing into the muck and the water at Helen’s feet. Helen staggered, then clutched at her shoulder.

“I ... think the fucker broke something,” she gasped.

“Helen!” Vidya screamed. It wasn’t a ‘oh no, you’ve been wounded’ scream. “What the ... what have you done!?”

“Uhh...” Helen stammered, as if she had just realized the severity of the situation she had landed not only herself but the entire American and Indian delegation into.

Vidya finished her surging motion and came to the corpse, the robed figure, the stunned astro. The corpse was floating on its back, looking up into the heavens. And for just a moment, Vidya stood and gaped at it. She hadn’t seen a dead body before. She hadn’t seen an alien before. To have both first marked off here, in this moment, struck her as entirely excessive. Now that they were no longer moving, the alien’s armor resolved into a complex interweaving of designs: Snarling dragons, bold headed stags, nude and detailed women, all of them covering different parts of his body in an ornate set of carvings. The material itself looked almost like polished wood, and from the way the bullets had splintered it, Vidya was nearly certain.

Underneath the armor, the figure had all five limbs that humans had – two arms, two legs, and a head. The fingers were the familiar four and one thumb. They had hair as well – shimmering, blond hair that fanned outwards in the mucky water. Their eyes were blue and stared into space.

And their ears came to two fine, narrow points.

“Holy fuck,” Helen whispered, her hand still clutching her wounded shoulder. “I just shot Celebrimbor.”

The robed figure, panting heavily, seemed content to watch them. If he was bothered by the arrow in his back, he didn’t show it. Then, hurriedly, he sloshed over to stand behind Helen, as if she was going to be his shield. That was when, almost at the same time, the rest of the alien delegation arrived and the marines arrived. The marines formed up, taking cover in a half circle around Helen, who looked as if she had absolutely no idea what to do. The remaining aliens rode their stags into the clearing and stopped dead. Each one was dressed in similar armor as the one that Helen had shot – but each had a different weapon. One had an ornate looking crossbow, with snarling lion heads marking the crossbar. Another had a spear held in one hand, with a curved blade that seemed to glow as if it was under direct sunlight, despite being in shade. Another had twin swords, which he sheathed as he leaped off his stag and landed.

No.

Off her stag.

Vidya could see her breasts as very slight bumps carved into her armor – a move that seemed impractical and silly. But the rest of their armor was impractical and silly, so ... she shook her head slightly as the female alien stepped over to the corpse. She pointed at it, then looked up at Helen. Her mouth opened and she spoke something in a musical trill. Vidya’s mouth went dry. Of course, they spoke a different language.

Helen, her voice hoarse, turned on the external mic. “Ensign Helen Trevor. USS Enterprise.”

The alien frowned. She made a hand gesture – bending her fingers so that the tips almost touched. Light flared along her palm and Vidya tensed, the marines tensed, and Helen tensed, then hissed in pain. The light glowed, flashed, and then the alien said, in clear, unaccented Hindi: “Who did this? Who killed Lord Winsom, Hunter of the Easterlands, King of the Plains, Slayer of the Etten King Jal’Koh?”

Vidya was not sure where to begin when it came to parsing those titles.

Helen gulped. “Uh, that would be me?” She asked.

“I thought you didn’t speak Hidni,” Vidya hissed.

“I don’t?” Helen hissed back.

The woman nodded.

Then she bowed to her knee and the other aliens slipped off their mounts to bow as well.

“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Winsom, Hunter of the Easterlands, Queen of the Plains, Slayer of the Etten King Jal’Koh,” the alien woman said, without missing a beat.

“I beg your fucking what?” Helen squeaked.

Kaleb of the Plains had known that the majile had been a foolish thing to purchase. But it had gleamed, so bright, so fetching in the market stall, and he had just gotten out of the bathhouse with enough silver and gold to burn. And, after all, he had wagered to himself that it would come in handy the next time Branton’s Bastards marched out, once Galzon had gotten them a new contract. The Bastards weren’t the oldest mercenary company in the Sur – those companies tended to become legitimate army units under the Black Kings - but they had a respectable reputation and a steady stream of incoming hunting monsters and putting down brigand camps. The income had been enough that Branton, the bastard son of a noble house who had founded the band, had been able to retire, buy some farmland in the Faewild, and rut a bored elven housewife until he dropped dead.

For Kaleb and the rest, there was still marching and fighting and dying.

And today, it looked like dying was on the menu.

The two oni guards that dragged Kaleb towards the jail in the center of town weren’t particularly rough, but the iron hard strength in their red limbs made it clear to Kaleb that fighting back wasn’t going to work. He might have tried arguing. How was he to know the magile had been stolen? he’d just gotten into town! How was he to recognize the local Surlord’s favored weapon, which had been snatched from his house two weeks before? But the oni would have responded to that as oni did from the Sur all the way to the distant Dragon Empire down south.

With a lot of kicking.

And so, the two oni shoved him into a cell, slammed the door shut, and left him there.

Kaleb sighed as he sprawled on his back, then stood. “Bastards,” he muttered, looking around the cell proper. Graffiti – most of it in elvish script – had been carved into the walls. The walls themselves were ricket stone bricks, slapped together to form an even more rickety jail. The barstuk, who made up the majority of the Sur’s population, could build quite excellent stone structures if they wished. They, after all, sprang from the same family as knockers, brownies, and dwarves.

They just didn’t wish when it came to their jails.

Kaleb paced the walls, kicked the bars gently, then finally leaned against the wall and shivered. Snow dusted the window sill – which was easily ten feet off the ground and barred with cold iron and likely salted too when an elf was thrown in here. He glared at the bars and started trying to figure the angles.

“Psst!”

The voice came from the cell across from his. Kaleb frowned and stepped over. “Yeah?” he asked. He focused and tightened his eyes ever so slightly, trying to get them to narrow. Once they did so, the colors of the world bled away, and the figure in the cell bloomed with the karshko – the colors of darkness. The number of times he had seen karshko moments before some goblin son of a bitch leaped into some boarder fort he had been paid to guard went well into the hundreds and left Kaleb’s stomach tightening and spine prickling. He wished he had his sword. As it was, he simply clenched his fists under his armpits.

The figure in the far cell was shorter than he – so, not an orc or oni or elf. There was enough shrouding around his head for him to have quite a bit of hair and a serious beard, but what tipped Kaleb’s guess about him was the nose. It was huge.

“I see you too have fallen prey to our Draconic overlords, eh?” the gnome asked.

“What’s it to you?” Kaleb asked.

“I was the mine foreman,” the gnome whispered, his voice husky. “I was, until the Surlord bent his knee to the jade throne.” He spat on the ground. “Then the Surlord stole my red hat.”

“Your ... red hat?” Kaleb asked, his brow furrowing.

The gnome nodded. “That’s where I got my power.”

Ah, Kaleb thought. The closer one was to the fey, the more ... odd things got. The more complicated they got. The more easily power could slide from one grasping hand to another. It was one of the few things that made him glad to be born with green skin.

“If we work together...” The gnome whispered.

Kaleb laughed. “What? Do you expect me to kick the bars out with my ferocious, barbarian strength and wrest your red hat from the Surlord’s offices?” He shook his head. “Have you ever seen an orc in a rage?”

The gnome stammered. “I’ve heard-”

“An orc in a rage is the most easily slain warrior I’ve ever seen,” Kaleb said, leaning against it. “I’ve been in my merc band near on five years. I’ve seen two dozen hunks of fresh, green meat. Each time a battle starts, if they go into their battle rage, they break ranks, run forward, and guess what? They get cut to fucking ribbons by people who keep their shields up and their spears at the ready.” He shook his head.

The gnome crossed his arms over his chest. “Well.” He scoffed. “Well!”

“I know you feylings hate it when stories don’t work out,” Kaleb said. “But get this: Orc’s in a rage are useless in a fight, oni can be bribed if you’re lucky, and humans don’t come soaring out of the sky in the nick of time to save you except in old stories and legends.”

Which was when the unearthly scream roared through Kaleb’s ears. The gnome cried out and clapped his hands over his ears and Kaleb stuck his fingers between his ears. His teeth clenched and he scowled. “What the fuck?” he snarled, turning around and craning his head upwards to look through the window, trying to get some idea of what the fuck was making that noise. He saw it a moment later: A broad, gull winged bird. For a second, he thought it was a dragon – but then he saw that the flames were coming from the wrong end. Then it was gone, flashed right past him. It hadn’t beat its wings once.

“What was that!?” The gnome cried out.

Kaleb tugged his fingers out of his ears. “I ... don’t know,” he said, slowly.

And what he didn’t know definitely could fucking kill him.

Kaleb wasn’t sure how long he stood there, gaping at the slowly drifting smoke-streamers that the not-dragon had left behind. He just knew that the first thing that drew his attention from the window was the sound of the guards levering open the bars in his cell. One of the oni stepped to the side and then a figure that Kaleb recognized as the local magistrate stepped up. He was dressed, no matter the weather, no matter the culture, in the outfit used by all magistrates used by the Dragon Empire: The flat topped cap, the large jade gemstone set in the middle of it, the silken robes. These were red and gold and emblazoned with coiling dragons. Under the robes, the man looked a great deal like his oni guards: Red skinned, horned, black haired. His eyes flicked over Kaleb and he nodded. “Do you wish to have your sentence commuted, thief?”

“Yeah,” Kaleb said, with the same feeling he felt when Galzon asked for a volunteer to go scouting in woods filled with webnachts.

The magistrate nodded. “Our visitors have asked for a hostage. You shall serve.”

Visitors? Kaleb thought. Hostage!?

“W-Whoa, wait, I’m just a merc, you can’t use me as a hostage, you won’t give a fuck if I get my throat slit!” Kaleb stammered, while the two oni dragged him out of the cell with the same indifferent strength they had used before.

“ ... yes, that ... that is exactly the idea,” the magistrate said, with the brutal honest that typified the Dragon Empire. “You are quite clever for a greenskin.”

The oni dragged him through the city – past the crowds of people who were out, pointing at the smoke trails, muttering to one another. Several elves, as nearly naked here as they might have been in the Feylands, were already beginning to strum on lutes and play flutes. The jaunty, cheerful tune and the snatches of their song made Kaleb feel as if he was in an even more terrible nightmare. Then he was dragged past his shield brothers from the Bastards: Torin, Yark and York. The three other orcs, still clad in their street clothes, gaped at him. Yark was holding a large chicken leg in his hand, his mouth still poised open as if he was about to take a bite.

Kaleb shot them a desperate look – but then the oni were pushing him out of the front gates.

As always, the first thing that struck Kaleb when he left the walls of any city in the Sur was the vastness of the place. Endless, endless plains, endless dark forests, endless stretches of nothing between the scant few cities. It made marching through it an absolute bitch – and also, kept up a constant stream of income for mercs. There was always room for wild brigands, monsters, and worse to find places to hide, and always a burgher or a mayor or a Surlord who wanted someone other than themselves go out and clear it out.

But today, under the cold light of the sun, something new had come to the Sur.

About half a mile from the city, the not-dragon had landed. And as the magistrate, riding a snorting, slightly panicky horse, and the oni guards advanced, dragging Kaleb with them, he saw more and more detail. The not-dragon was clearly some kind of ... well, it had been built, like armor or a sword. Yes, the wings were almost like a living creature, but they were more sturdy, more solid than any wyvren or roc that he had seen. The belly had opened and figured in full armor emerged. For a moment, he tried to rank them on par with noble knights: Face concealing helmets, bulky armor plating. On horseback, unstoppable. On foot, terrifying. On their backs, deliciously easy prey. Not that Kaleb had ever actually gotten a knight on their back – but old Finon loved to tell the story of the time he knifed one of them through the visor and the whole of the Bastards had sold the plate armor for more than the entire mission’s purse.

As they came closer, Kaleb adjusted his attitudes down.

Then up.

Because one of the men in the heavier, bulkier armor – which looked as if it left a great deal of the arms and legs exposed between the strange wires and tubes – lifted a crate that looked as if it might have weighed a ton or more. He swung the crate out of the belly of the not-dragon and set it down, while a trio of the lighter armored figures stepped forward. Their leader was the only one not wearing a helmet.

And Kaleb immediately ... instantly ... fell in love.

That was the only word he could use to describe what he felt, looking at that face.

She – for she was clearly a she – had hair as blond as an elf, but the jawline and build of an orc, or something close. Her eyes were clear blue, save that one had turned milky white thanks to a massive, furrowed scar that covered her entire face. It looked as if she had faced down boiling pitch or been struck in the head by a firebolt and ... was not only living, but walking. That meant she had to be the toughest bitch that Kaleb had ever met in his life. He felt utterly unmanned, imagining the infection, the fever, the sweating she had to have gone through – magic healing would have left no scar, after all. The fact she approached the group unarmed and flanked by only two guards, who were also ... no, they weren’t unarmed. He couldn’t quite make out the weapons slung over their backs, but he was fairly certain they were some kind of majile.

The magistrate rode to within ten paces, then stopped their horse. He made a gesture and magic flared – and even someone as magic illiterate as Kaleb could recognize the most familiar cantrip, the translation spell used by half the Sur to understand the other half. The magistrate spoke, loudly and clearly: “We, of the Dragon Empire, welcome you to Cuzjagi. I am Magistrate Feng. You wished a hostage?”

The beautiful, exotic woman nodded curtly. “I am Captain Zlata Lyudmila Markova of the Russian Federation. We have come a long way to visit this land.” She lifted her chin. “We desire one of your people who you are willing to part with. In exchange, we offer some trade goods that our leaders have deemed appropriate for exchange – in hope of better relationships between our two great nations.”