Still, we got at least a patchy idea of the world we were about to descend toward: pre–sect wars it had belonged to a rich monarchical sect, the Jaliad, who had set aside dozens of livable worlds for the private, personal use of their ruling class, a few light years away from the star systems they controlled. Jalia Preserve V had been one such world, terraformed to precise specifications, then painstakingly populated with flora and fauna from across half a dozen different spectrums of life: forests from the Reetha homeworld, living crystal colonies from the Mahren planets, all sorts of different predator and prey species from the human and Reint and Wulf homelands, some segregated by continental divides, some mixed together, just to see what would come out on top, like a forced evolutionary experiment.
The point hadn’t been scientific research, though—it had been a kind of retreat for the monarchs of the Jalia and their chosen retainers and sycophants. Basically, a nature preserve for the rich to go vacationing in, somewhere they could while away their hours far from the teeming masses they were meant to serve, spending their time sightseeing or hunting or just screwing around in the elaborate private villas dotting the world.
There was very little information about what had happened to the planet after the sect wars had broken out. The Jaliad ruling class itself had been toppled fairly early on in a grisly coup—Scheherazade’s databanks had information about something called the “Display of the Bloody Angels,” which I very specifically did not open in a new tab to learn more about—and infighting within the population on the Jaliad homeworld had led to Jalia Preserve V pretty much falling off the map.
According to several of the data-broker reports, there were still automated defenses set up in orbit and on the world’s surface; if someone wanted to claim the world, they would either have to be a distant blood relative to the former Jaliad monarchs—which, given that the ruling families had been torn out branch and root by their justifiably pissed-off subjects, seemed unlikely—or they’d have to come with a couple of dreadnaughts, and be willing for those craft to take a beating. Apparently nobody wanted a fancy nature preserve that badly, or at least nobody who might have had any idea it existed did, because the world was still spinning all on its lonesome, which was impressive, given that it was non-pulsed.
The only other way to descend safely into the atmosphere of Jalia Preserve V would be if one had access to the codes for the defense network, which Jane unaccountably did. There were no notes in her files on the world about where she’d retrieved those codes; a constant, low-level paranoia was a hallmark of Jane’s personality, forged in her twin lives as a sect soldier and a Justified operative, and some things she just kept to herself, not even trusting them to Scheherazade.
Still, I understood Jane’s reasoning for selecting the Jalia Preserve as our broadcast world: as far as the databanks told us, it was unpopulated, and it was non-pulsed, which meant the Jalia monarchs may have left behind broadcast towers we could use to get our signal out, towers that wouldn’t have been reduced to uselessness by pulse radiation. We could send out the signal, then set down on some spectacular vista, nurse our wounds, and let Schaz decrypt the data I’d pulled out of the blue fucker’s ship—I’d asked, and it was cooking away merrily in her background processes. Then, all we’d have to do was wait for the cavalry to arrive. Preferably somewhere with a beach. I’d never seen the ocean.
Sho and I crowded into the cockpit when Schaz announced we were about to drop out of hyperspace; there wasn’t actually any difference between what we’d see out the window and what we’d see if we’d just pulled up the forward camera views on the holoprojector in the living quarters, but somehow it felt more real, seeing the system splashed over the slightly curved screen ahead of the pilot’s chair.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its lineage, Jalia Preserve V was an incredibly beautiful world, its atmosphere stained with the lightest of violet tinges, as if some clumsy godling had spilled pale pastel ink in shades of lavender and orchid into the sky. The continents below—peeking through slightly vermillion-tinted cloud cover—were lapped by pristine turquoise seas, and the varying foliage covering the landmass shifted in waves from deep greens to bright oranges to glittering golds. The entire edge of the visible hemisphere gave off a light blue sheen, thanks to the glow of the massive star at the center of the system.
And because none of that was pretty enough for the long-deposed rulers of the Jaliad (who I was beginning to gather wouldn’t have ranked “understated” as their favorite form of decor), the planet was encircled by a spiraling Möbius strip of rings, coiling and feeding into themselves like a lithic river of cosmic sediment. Whether the world had come that way, or the terraforming engineers had painstakingly engineered the gravity of the planet’s orbit in order to generate that delicately twisted ribbon of broken stone and ice, I had no idea. The universe was a place of marvels, after all—whether forged naturally or willed into being by sentient creatures, they were wonders all the same.
“Oh, wow,” Sho breathed, staring at the awesome spectacle of wonder ahead of us.
I nodded mutely. That about said it all. As one of the four moons rotated toward us, I could see where the Jaliad ruling class had fucking carved their family crest into the lunar surface in a massive, miles-wide art installation, where it would doubtless reflect the azure light of the system’s sun and shine down on the world below, a glowing reminder of their wealth and their legacy and their history.
Rich people were fucking weird.
“Beginning our descent,” Scheherazade announced. “Jane laid in a very precise vector I was supposed to follow in the event that she was . . . unavailable for our approach.”
“You mean like ‘snoring off a sedative in the medbay’ unavailable?” I asked wryly.
“Quite,” Schaz agreed, the planet dipping toward us in the viewscreen.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea why she’d want us to descend to a specific spot on this particular world,” I asked.
“None whatsoever!” Schaz replied cheerily. I was going to ask her to elaborate—though how she would have elaborated on “none whatsoever,” I really wasn’t sure—but I got distracted as Schaz’s cameras picked up the floating defense platforms in orbit, absolutely bristling with guns. Somewhere below us, the anti-orbital cannons would have perked up as well, tracking our passage toward their fiefdom across that lovely pastel sky. Just the thought of those giant cannons being trained on our little ship made my gut tighten involuntarily.
“Have you transmitted Jane’s access codes to the defense net yet?” I asked Schaz.
“I knew there was something I was forgetting!” Yes, she still sounded cheery when she said that. I don’t know why—it’s not like she would have survived either, if that defense network had decided to wipe us out. Wouldn’t that be an anticlimactic ending to our latest adventure; burned out of the stars by a long-dormant anti-orbital cannon protecting the territory of a long-dead monarchy just because Schaz was occasionally absentminded. “Codes transmitted now,” she said. “We’re all clear!”
I didn’t respond to that at all; I was too busy trying not to have a heart attack. The staving off of my inevitable demise wasn’t helped when Schaz’s speakers came to life, blaring a blast of brassy fanfare. “Welcome to the Jalia Preserve V, Duchess of Ancraid,” a bright, Reetha-accented voice followed the off-putting music. “Your dacha is undergoing maintenance—”
“If I’m scanning along that suggested flight path correctly, her dacha has fallen off a cliff and into the sea,” Schaz interrupted snidely.
“—so I’m going to redirect you to one of your family’s common holdings. If you’d like to change this flight path—perhaps to the Baron of Levighal’s alpine villa; I know you’ve enjoyed your time there in the past—please just let me know, and I’ll—” I reached down and cut the transmission off. Even if the Jaliad ruling class had been wiped out by their own subjects for being resource-hoarding assholes who spent their money carving things into m
oons rather than feeding their people, there was something unaccountably sad about the thought of the defense net’s controlling AI just waiting for another arrival of the ruling family it was meant to serve, a family that was never going to return.
“Good.” I turned; Jane was awake, and standing in the doorway. She looked . . . well, not “better,” given that she was covered in bandages and healing foam, but at least steadier on her feet. “We’re here.”
“The Duchess of Ancraid?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow.
She shrugged, stepping between Sho and me to take her seat in the pilot’s chair, still moving somewhat gingerly. “Don’t ask me—I didn’t steal the codes.” Instead of taking the stick, she opened another comm channel, reaching for the microphone. “Mo, if you’re near your radio,” she said, “put out the good china; you’re about to have visitors.” That was it—that was the extent of her communication before she leaned back in her chair. “Schaz, loop that message,” she ordered.
“Mo?” Schaz asked, her voice excited, as if someone had just told her we were getting a puppy on our next rotation to Sanctum. I mean, a puppy other than the Wulf adolescent currently on board. “Mo’s down there?”
“If he hasn’t been eaten, yeah.” Jane nodded.
“You’ve known where he is for . . . for . . . for however long, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Remember when you were secretly receiving messages from Javier behind my back? Remember when that could have gotten us exiled? No, Schaz, I didn’t tell you.”
“Oh.” She mulled this over for a while. “What’s he been doing?”
“It’s Mo. Looking for God, I suppose. And likely failing to find Him.”
Sho leaned into me. “Who’s Mo?” he whispered.
“I have no idea,” I whispered back. “Jane’s a hundred and eighty-seven years old, after all; she’s bound to have some acquaintances she’s never mentioned.”
“I’m not a hundred and eighty-seven, Esa.” Jane raised her voice. She had very good hearing. Also, Sho and I were barely five feet away.
“Fine. One hundred and eighty-six. It’s not becoming of a woman your age to get so defensive, you know.”
CHAPTER 3
Schaz kept us on our current, Jane-mandated approach as we waited for a response to my partner’s message, the different landmasses and changing climate zones of the various preserves below meaning the view out the window changed nearly every time I looked. “So you’re not going to tell us who Mo is,” I said to Jane.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she shrugged.
“Again—unless he’s been eaten.”
“And if he’s been eaten, it won’t matter. We’ll just set down somewhere, and avail ourselves of the—”
The comm crackled to life. “Jane?” A voice, deep, like a thrum through stone; a Mahren. “Is that really you? Finally come to visit after all these years?”
“You know me, old man, I’m all about diligence,” Jane replied; she was smiling. I figured that was a good sign.
“Otherwise known as you’re in deep shit, and this is literally the only place you have to turn.”
“Maybe I just wanted to check on you, make sure you haven’t gone senile in your old age.”
“So you’re in really deep shit, huh?”
“Yep.”
“I’m sending Schaz a flight path; I’ve moved camp since I last sent you my coordinates. Hello, Scheherazade.”
“Hello, Mo. It’s good to hear your voice again.” Schaz sounded . . . almost girlish as she responded.
“You as well, my dear.”
“Schaz is running a deep decryption program, Mo,” Jane said. “I’d like to let her engage soak protocols to speed up the work. I take it you’re by an ocean?”
“You know me too well. That flight plan will set you down in a clearing a few miles away from the shore, but she can reach the water regularly from there. I’ll hike out to meet you and see you when you set down.”
“You don’t have to do that, Mo.”
“Sure I do. You’ll never find me otherwise. Unless something has drastically changed in the last half century, you were always a fantastic urban scout, and fairly shit at wilderness pathfinding.”
I snorted a laugh at that; Jane turned a mildly annoyed glance my way. “You are.” I shrugged, then turned to Sho. “She is.”
The comm crackled to life again. “There’s someone else with you, Red,” the mysterious Mo said. I had no idea why he called her that—there was nothing “red” about Jane at all, and I’d never heard anyone else call her that before. “You haven’t come to kill me, by any chance?” He didn’t seem perturbed to be asking it—he might as well have been politely inquiring if she’d brought him some extra cinnamon or other basic household goods, because his supplies were running low.
“Come on, Mo,” Jane replied. “If I was here for that, I wouldn’t let you see it coming. I owe you that much.”
“Fair enough. You always were a good girl.”
Jane smiled at that. “Except when I wasn’t.”
“Except when you weren’t. I’ll meet you in the clearing; looking forward to meeting your friends there. Mo out.”
Jane shut off the comms, leaned back in her chair, still staring out the viewport, not really looking at anything in particular. Schaz gave a lurching shift as she matched the new flight plan, dipping us closer to the landscape below.
“You’re really not going to tell us who this guy is, are you?” I asked Jane. Without waiting for her response, I turned to face the living area instead. “Schaz? Will you tell us who this guy is?”
“He’s Mo,” she replied simply.
“Yeah, I’d figured that much out for myself, thanks.”
“He’s—he was Jane’s—”
“Leave it, Scheherazade,” Jane said. “Let her put it together for herself.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “Another test?” I asked.
“Another test,” she nodded, standing up from her chair. “I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee.”
“You’re nervous,” I said, almost awed at the concept, even as I unbuckled my flight harness and followed her, pushing Sho’s wheelchair along with us. “You’re nervous about meeting this guy again after . . . however long.”
“Not nervous. Maybe a little excited.”
“Plus, there’s always the possibility that he’s gone crazy,” Schaz put in. “He has been alone for a very long time.”
I frowned at that. “Jane, if we have to fight a rampaging Mahren, I’d rather we just set down someplace else, thanks. Mahren are very hard to kill.”
“Mahren are the big rock people, right?” Sho asked. “We didn’t have any of them on my homeworld. Or at least, not that I ever met.”
“Big rock people,” I nodded. “Stupidly strong, very long-lived, naturally resistant to ballistics. And energy weapons. And fire. And pretty much everything else.”
“He hasn’t gone crazy, Schaz,” Jane said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Isolation was always where Mo thrived.”
“A trait he passed—”
“And if anyone can put together . . .”—she waved a hand in the general direction of the holoprojector, meaning “all the weird shit that had happened to us over the past week or so”—“it’ll be Mo. He’s forgotten more about galactic esoterica than the four of us combined will ever know.”
“That’s a nice word for the invulnerable energy monster that’s trying to kill us.” I nodded. “ ‘Esoterica.’ I like that.”
Jane took a sip of her coffee, wrinkled her nose at how hot it was. She was weird like that. “Why don’t you two go back into the cockpit?” she suggested. “Keep an eye on our descent; take in the sights. Jalia’s a very . . . interesting-looking world.”
“Come on, Sho.” I spun his chair around by the handles, pointing him back at the cockpit. “Jane wants some time alone.”
“Because she’s nervous?” he asked.
“Because s
he’s nervous,” I confirmed. “After all, at a hundred and eighty-five, it takes her a minute to collect herself.”
“Not a hundred and eighty-five!” Jane shouted after us. “Not a hundred and eighty-six, either! Or a hundred and eighty-four!”
I grinned, and wheeled Sho into place. We were passing over a vast plain of shimmering grassland; on the viewscreen at magnification, we could make out herds of . . . something down below, massive beasts with armor plating and three protruding tusks. “What are those?” I asked Schaz.
“Talmisau, from the Klite homeworld,” Schaz told us. “Very important in Klitek mythology—beasts supposedly possessed of vast, ancient knowledge.”
“And those smaller . . . things, running with them?”
“Giraffes, from the human sphere. Apparently the two species have reached a kind of symbiosis.” She shifted the view; we watched the herd approach a massive tree, growing all on its lonesome on the sweeping savannah. The larger talmisau grazed on the foliage well above the reach of the giraffes, which had the possibly unintentional side effect of their razor tusks slicing some of the other branches free, dropping them low enough that the giraffes could get to them.
“Beautiful,” Sho breathed. I wondered when the last time he’d seen wild animals had been, if ever. Beyond rats, and other vermin. My homeworld had been the recipient of a fully functional—if mostly domesticated—Tyll ecosystem, for reasons no one had understood anymore, and even I found the sight of the great beasts below pretty impressive.
We passed over a sprawling estate on the savannah; Schaz saved the image, and expanded it for us to peruse. “A hunting lodge, most likely,” she explained.
For some reason, that struck me as sad—almost pathetic. There was a note of something like disgust in my voice when I said, “So the nobles of the Jaliad could shoot the talmisau, and the giraffes. For sport.”
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