It was another arid day on Demeter-12. The kind of day that made it abundantly clear why even hearty Atlantean staples like the much-loved turba root struggled to survive here. Not that Lena was surprised as she stepped out of her climate-sealed quarters into the hot sun, morning-baked clay soil crunching underfoot.
Sometimes, hostile environments were just the cost of keeping their beloved Empire rich in all the rare metals and heavy elements required for places like Olympus and the Triton shipyards to continue functioning.
Lena took a stifling breath through her filters and looked around at the dusty prefab sprawl of her desert home “town.” She momentarily allowed herself to indulge, as she did each morning, in the fleeting fantasy of seeing this place after a few decades’ worth of work from the terraforming engines. She smiled at the brilliant, dusty horizon, sharing an inside joke with an old friend.
The engines would never come to this place. Demeter-12, otherwise known as Tarkaminen Colony Outpost D-12 to the outside world and as “the tenth hell” to some of their less enthusiastic colonists, was far too arid in both climate and reputation for the Empire to ever bother with a full terraforming effort. Not when there were more temperate choices a few dozen lightyears in any direction.
Demeter-12 had begun as nothing but a rich dig site. It had grown into a convenient staging ground for the burgeoning mining operations taking shape in the expansive and aptly named D-12 asteroid belt. And so it had reached the apex of its cultural development.
Not that Lena had felt any particular qualms about having been promptly assigned here after her vat birth and mandatory socialization period back on New Atlantis. Everyone had to learn their trade somewhere, after all, and the Castors were wise. They’d spliced her in vitro with every genetic advantage she’d need to tolerate the dry, brutal heat and the long shifts at the probe controls.
The Empire was wise. And life wasn’t bad.
“Get hopping, dig-whig,” called a voice that set her smile to widening. She turned to show that smile to Gurrin Soldiercaste as he passed her by on his morning patrol, like he always did. His handsome face wasn’t smiling this morning.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He shook his head, clearly in a hurry. “Dunno. Console jockeys probably just jumping at ghosts again, but uh…” He finally paused, glancing back at her. “Just keep your head down over there in your hole today, yeah?”
He was gone before she could give him so much as a nod. It was only then she noticed the other Soldiercastes marshaling in the barren town square with hurried movements and serious looks. Something was going on. But that something was probably little concern of hers, she reminded herself. Especially not when she was already flirting with being late to the pod.
Five minutes later, she was roaring across the open desert in her dune skimmer, relishing the freedom of speeding across a land so thoroughly unpopulated. They couldn’t do this on the overcrowded city-world of New Atlantis, she told herself, even as the rational side of her brain pointed out that that was a clear exaggeration. But so be it. She drove on, enjoying the ride, already forgetting the odd exchange with Gurrin and beginning to look forward to another day of scouring and cataloging D-12’s finely-stocked innards. Enjoying the ride so much, that her brain simply wasn’t ready to process what it saw as she roared too fast over the next high dune.
A ship.
A big, looming black ship like nothing she’d ever seen, hanging too low overheard. She gasped, mind reeling. Too late, her eyes fell back to the sands and registered the dark figure kneeling ahead, dead center in her path. Too late, she slammed the brake jets. Time seemed to slow, her senses cutting out completely but for the lasting glimpse of a sinister, jet-black helmet turning her way, capped against the pale desert sky by a streak of blood-red plumage.
Then, impact.
For one furious moment, there was nothing but the jarring crunch ripping through her bones, and the crushing push-and-pull of her restraints fighting to save her life or collapse her chest in, whichever came first. Then time lurched from stand-still to too-fast, thoughts jumbled, ragged breaths too loud in her ringing ears.
She’d hit him at nearly full speed.
She gaped through the spiderweb-cracked windshield, shaken brain taking in the details one at a time, attempting to fit them together. The skimmer’s smashed hood and shattered plates. The pattern of crumpled internals, imploded in around the extended dark gauntlet that had somehow just stopped a speeding skimmer. The horrible black mask watching her now through the cracked windshield, watching her with a quiet weight that left her breathless.
The engines were dead, she realized numbly—the skimmer hovering not under its own power, but solely by the dark stranger’s hand. Dimly, she registered that his other hand was still resting on the interface display of the data relay node he must’ve called up from its subterranean housing along the ground lines.
A data scavenger? Here?
The thought was preposterous enough on its own, but it paled laughably next to the sight of the dark titan setting her vehicle calmly down to the sands by the power of his arm, casually as if he’d just caught a small pup from running over the edge.
“You are a prospector.”
She gasped at the sound of his voice, some part of her jarred brain having convinced her that this was no mortal man, but rather some dark, voiceless demon of the Synth, conjured straight from the old ghost stories.
That part of her wanted to point out that she was merely a fledgling apprentice. Somehow, the detail felt suddenly paramount. But her mouth wouldn’t move. Not until the towering mountain of dark armor and sharp edges stooped down closer, and a soft whimper escaped her lips.
“Do you know what it is you truly seek here, child?”
“R-r-resources,” answered a thin, airy voice. Her voice. Her hands shaking on the restraint buckles she couldn’t undo, mouth refusing to obey. This was no mere data scavenger. She didn’t know what he was, only that she’d never been so frightened in her life.
“Resources for the Empire,” she finally managed breathlessly, hoping that was enough. Hoping this unflinching dark god wouldn’t simply crush her then and there for having struck him.
He didn’t even seem to hear her, his menacing black helmet scanning the horizon, settling on the direction of the homestead. Her eyes trailed to the dark fortress of a ship hanging overhead, casting them in shadow.
“There are navigators and historians in the village beyond?”
“The… the Starcastes?” she heard herself asking, not understanding.
That dark helmet bowed once, red plumage sweeping the air like a bloodied scythe blade. “And the Chronocastes, yes. I have need of their archives.”
It occurred to her that she shouldn’t answer. That to do so may well be betraying her friends back in the homestead. What she needed to do was warn them somehow. Get free. Get out of here. But she couldn’t seem to do anything but tremble as he fixed his eyeless gaze back on her and leaned in close. She flinched as he reached out with one jagged-finned gauntlet and tore the warped skimmer door free from its hinges like plucking a flower from the stem. He idly tossed the carbon weave plating across the dune. She sat there uselessly, paralyzed with the fear that he would turn back for her next. Pluck her from the skimmer, aboard that frightening ship, and off to gods only knew where.
“Please,” she heard herself whisper, eyes falling shamefully to her lap.
Something heavy settled atop her head. His hand, she realized. The same hand that had just palmed a speeding skimmer to a halt. It was enormous. Big enough to crush her skull like an overripe chelsen berry. She waited, too frightened to look up—hating how frightened she felt. Hating that this could be the end.
She closed her eyes, closing out the world.
“Lady’s Blessings be your way, sweet child,” said that deep voice. “This will all be over soon.”
And then… nothing. Nothing at all.
The world simply went dark, so quick and unexpectedly that she barely had time to wonder if death could really be so painless. Then her eyes cracked open a moment later, head throbbing with the familiar ache of heat exhaustion, skin hot, shallow pulse racing. She felt like she’d been baking in the sun for hours. But she was alive.
And he was gone.
She squinted out at the empty desert stretch. He was gone, and so was the ship.
She raised her arm to check the wrist display of her omni, found her suit’s water reserves were all but gone, and that she’d been out for hours. There were missed messages, too, but no active comms. For a long moment, she sat there, head throbbing, thoughts churning like reconstituted gravy. The fear lingered, clutching at her insides like a physical thing even as her business-as-usual brain tried to tell her that there’d been some mistake—that she’d simply imagined the whole affair.
But she wasn’t imagining the imploded front end of her skimmer. Nor the freakishly unprecedented levels of atmospheric radiation currently ravaging the comm lines, as if the hells themselves had reared up in the wake of that dark titan’s arrival. She turned in her crash-tightened restraints, telling herself to be reasonable, scanning the dunes for anything out of the ordinary.
Her breath caught at the dark plume of smoke on the eastern horizon, lingering fear spiking to urgent panic in her chest.
The homestead.
“No,” she whispered, her voice a parched rasp. “No.”
She clawed at the crash-warped restraints, wild emotion mounting, bursting from her burning lungs in a string of gasping sobs as she fought to escape. Fought until she tumbled out of the skimmer into the hot sand, scraping her palms on the way. There she lay shaking, gasping through her filters, staring helplessly at the rising smoke as her mind screamed on to tell someone. Get help. Do something. Too late.
Too late.
“No,” she sobbed, again and again, the prayer useless, the realization as tangible as the burning sand beneath her. She pulled herself upright anyway, nose running, checking her omni and trying to gather her wits. Comms still down. Hardline node slagged.
She rose to shaky feet, looking from east to northwest and back again, gauging distances to the pod and the homestead, trying to think of her next steps. A sound split the air, harsh and keening. It was a sound she’d never expected to hear outside of training drills, resonating through her skull with its long call before reeling slowly back down for another crescendo.
The invasion alarm.
She looked up breathlessly, not sure what she was expecting. Pirates. More black ships. An entire fleet of them. What she saw instead was a great dark cloud descending on the arid planet that rarely formed clouds of its own, and never ones so dark.
No cloud at all, then, some clinical part of her brain informed her, as she dialed her omni’s limited optics in for a better look at the descending cloud of… not ships. Not like any she’d ever seen.
It was a swarm.
A veritable ocean of what looked for all her uncomprehending shock to be nothing but trillions of rocks and accumulated space dust, descending from the upper atmosphere under some kind of external drive, moving with a singular coordination. Like the D-12 asteroid belt had grown a blackened will of its own and decided to fight back.
She staggered backward as the first brilliant column of emerald destruction lanced out from the homestead’s surface-to-air batteries, slagging through countless tons of rock and ore and showering the desert far below in a red-hot rain of superheated metals. The swarm continued on, perfectly unperturbed, filling the hole like so much shifting sand. To the east, she could just make out the tiny blips of ships rising from the homestead. Their colony transports, she realized, with a twinge of disbelief, were evacuating.
This was really happening.
The thought echoed again and again, like a challenge daring her to look away or to prove it all wrong as that impossible swarm shifted and morphed, hurling untold tons of asteroid deluge at the rising ships with a supersonic roar. She watched in horror as the attack brought the entire evacuation down in one fell swoop. Uncomprehending. Numb. The bright desert day pulsing brighter with another blast from the defense batteries, and another. The clatter and distant winks of smaller weapons joining the fray as the swarm descended and punched into the planet’s crust like a force of nature, bound for the homestead like a landborne tsunami.
This will all be over soon, that blackened voice echoed in her mind.
Tears streaming down her cheeks. Her body frozen in place.
Too much. It was all too much.
But someone was still alive, said the next brilliant emerald flare.
Her people were still fighting.
So Lena Minercaste set her sights for the impossible wave of destruction sweeping toward her home, and she started running.
* * *
“Justicar.”
On the other side of the galaxy, roughly three light minutes outsystem from the Golnak relay, Malfar allowed himself one centering moment before turning from his main display to face his incessant first officer. He already knew what the perpetually-frowning Atlantean was going to say.
“G-Sec is asking for an update.”
G-Sec is asking for an update, SIR, some civilized part of Malfar wanted to correct him. The rest of him, the part that was native-born Troglodan to the core, spotted runt or no, longed to do the more sensible thing and simply squash the good lieutenant’s tiny head to a fine meat paste.
“Then update them, Lieutenant Shelton,” he said instead, turning back to his displays in a clear invitation for Shelton and the rest of his crew to piss right back off.
Perfect silence reigned as the lieutenant debated whether to press the issue and ask (yet again) what exactly he should tell G-Sec—what it was they were actually doing out here at the edge of the Golnak system, other than wasting fuel and manpower.
“Justicar,” the Atlantean finally murmured, turning back to his console.
Lieutenant Shelton Soldiercaste knew damn well what they were doing here. They all did. While their presence here was admittedly something of an impromptu detour from their expected return to Forge Station, it didn’t take an Alliance justicar to deduce that the uncertain glances behind his back had more to do with his hide than with his orders. He could practically smell their growing unease. Ripening suspicions that they’d come all this way for nothing. That this was the time he’d finally prove he was naught but a savage brute, unfit for command.
How his native people of Trogarra would’ve raged to see the way the civilized galaxy balked at being ordered about by a Troglodan. How they would’ve howled for obedience from these sneering Hobdans and these coldly disapproving Androtta. How they would’ve bayed for the punishment of this damned Atlantean—this weak, fragile little vat clone—with his constant second-guessing.
And how they would’ve turned that teeming disgust right back on Malfar the moment any such perceived injustices were rectified. For such was the life of a spotted runt.
It didn’t matter that he was one of a very small handful of Troglodans to have ever ascended to the rank of justicar. At the end of it, Malfar’s so-called kin cared no more for his accomplishments than his own crew cared for the fact that he’d never once led them astray, or that he held one of the most decorated case records in recent history for any justicar of his career age.
He’d always be a thick-hided brute in the eyes of his crew, just as he’d always be a blighted reject in the eyes of his own people. But it hardly mattered. His so-called kin could kindly see fist to ass. And respectful or not, his crew would do their duty when the time came. Just as he’d do his.
It was to that end, with Lieutenant Shelton obstinately reporting to G-Sec in the background that they were “still waiting,” that Malfar returned to the preliminary report he’d been scanning from the Tarkaminen sector, where one of the Atlantean mining colonies had gone comms dark a few hours ago, mid-distress-call.
Pirates, his bridge of fools would’ve guessed, had he put it to them. Partly because they’d just finished putting away a particularly slippery ring of such brigands out in the system’s rim. Mostly because they always said pirates, no matter what. So much so that he’d stooped to making the use of the phrase by Blackthorne’s tits punishable by imminent filter scrubbing duty in a feeble attempt to rein in the verbal flatulence. Not that it had made much difference.
Malfar frowned at the Demeter-12 report a few minutes longer, feeling that familiar behind-the-brain tickle of something not quite adding up, then finally flicked the report closed and shut his eyes to think. He had more than enough to worry about without beleaguered Atlantean colonies.
A rumored, full-on illegal incursion on Terra, for instance. Thrice-cursed Excalibur Knights running wild, slagging one another’s ships and the all-precious mining installation that was home to the one thing keeping the Golnak sector in relay proximity with the rest of Alliance space. And now—
“You lot see this Atlantean colony what went dark out T-Sec way?” muttered one of the Hobs over at weapons, clearly thinking he was being quiet.
“Blackthorne’s tits if it isn’t pirates muckin’ about,” muttered his fellow Hobdan turret jockey, like clockwork. Agent Azjgar, if memory served.
Spirit of Justice, he needed to speak with Central about ironing out a more permanent crew. Preferably one less obsessed with pirates.
“It’s probably just a solar flare,” said the Atlantean female at comms, looking at least marginally worried about her distant kinsmen. “That’s all.”
“A distress call was logged,” pointed out their Androtta voice of reason over in systems, making no attempt to lower his mechanical voice.
“That’s what I’m sayin’, ain’t it?” Azjgar said, more loudly this time, emboldened by the stirring conversation. “What else but pirates, eh? Blackthorne’s t—”
“Agent Azjgar,” Malfar rumbled, tapping one murderous finger at the universal translator chip by his ear, dimly wishing the thing could somehow just momentarily eradicate his brain’s intrinsic ability to understand their low-spoken Common.
The Hobdan looked around like a child who’d just been caught at the sweets. “Yeah, Boss? Sir.”
“The waste filters.”
“Aw, but Boss, I was just—”
“Go.”
Agent Azjgar went with all the brimming moodiness of a petulant broodling. The rest of the crew, with a few level-headed exceptions, looked no less surly about the exchange.
Children.
He was surrounded by impulsive children, more enamored with departmental politics and galactic hijinks than they were with the sober, disciplined pursuit of True Justice. But that was no surprise. Such was the way of the Alliance—more and more, it seemed, with each passing year. They might as well have emblazoned such words across the recruitment banners.
Malfar turned back to his displays, dismissing the disgruntled looks and focusing his thoughts back on their outsystem progress, and on the matter at hand.
They would come. He had no doubt of it. No more than he doubted his already short leash would be promptly yanked tighter by C-Sec, or perhaps removed completely, if he was wrong. But he was not afraid. They would come, these so-called Knights, fresh from whatever worldly catastrophes they’d wrought amid their power-drunk squabbles.
The only question was when they would arrive, and what they’d have to say for themselves when they did.
Which one would be first, he wondered: the Gorgon or the Troglodan? The legendary Huntress of Kalyria, or the one they called Dread Knight—the simultaneous pride and shame of the Troglodan people, depending on whom one asked.
That hardly mattered either.
By their precious Lady’s Light, they would come.
And by all of the True Justice in the galaxy, Malfar would be waiting.
