Jayd retreats into an upper bay adjacent to the hangar. The two hundred women mount two hundred vehicles. I squeeze the bulb of the spray-on suit, and it releases a thin sheen of translucent, spidery goo that hugs my body and seals off sound. For a moment, I hyperventilate, claustrophobic, but I’m able to breathe with ease, and the suit absorbs my sweat. I marvel at my suit-covered hands for a long moment until Jayd’s voice tickles my ear, relayed by the worm in the casing, “Mount up,” she says. “The door will open soon. You’ll be pulled adrift if you aren’t on a vehicle.”
I sit snugly on the great purring vehicle and give it a solid pat. Above me, flickering red lights flare across the ceiling. The skin there begins to ripple. It’s not opening so much as it’s stretching. It becomes translucent, then tears open.
I’m sucked up toward the hole in the sky, where outside I see blackness speckled in stars. All around me, the other vehicles whoosh up and away, hurtling toward the void. It happens so fast, I gasp. Yellow and green puffs of spent fuel whirl around me while the vehicles tumble upward. It feels like drowning.
As I spin through the tear in the ceiling, I punch at the controls of the vehicle until it jerks forward of its own volition. I’m spinning slowly, but it’s enough to make me dizzy and sick. I shift my weight, and the vehicle responds, sending little jets of propulsive fuel into the black. When I find my equilibrium, I raise my eyes and find that I am far above the world from which we were ejected. It hangs below us, a great brownish-green sphere covered in fleshy tentacles. It’s so massive, I cannot see the bottom of it from this far away, only the curve of its top . . . or are we at the bottom? The spinning has me unsure of what’s right-side-up. It’s only as I gaze out at the long lines of my army, all of them flipping and pivoting into formation, an arrow pointing away from the world called Katazyrna, that I think to look beyond the world.
What I see stuns me.
Across the flat black matt of the sky, sprinkled in stars, are massive floating orbs. They hang out here in the vacuum as if attached to strings, slowly orbiting around a misty core of soft light so obscured by that mist that I can’t see what is emitting the light that’s reflected and refracted. My memory tells me this is the sun, and right now, it is sleeping. The orbs all around me are varying sizes but roughly spherical, like the Katazyrna below us.
It’s still another long moment before I understand that these are not orbs but other worlds, other ships, made larger or smaller by how far or near they are from where we sit. Their surfaces swarm with red, blue, and purple lights; some flickering, some blackened, some clearly terribly injured. These have faces that are curled back, and they wobble in their orbits. Some have great tentacles lining their surfaces, like the Katazyrna, and when I look back again at our world, I see that toward the poles of the Katazyrna, the tentacles are blackened with rot in places, the outer skin peeling away. What happens to the people below, when the skin is breached? I watch the breach from which we’ve been expelled begin to close up again, like a fast-healing wound, and gaze again at the poles. There is rot and death here.
“Welcome to the Outer Rim of the Legion,” Jayd says in my ear, speaking to me now from the vibrating worm casing. “You see now why I couldn’t explain. We are a Legion of worlds. Ours are the Katazyrna worlds. But the Mokshi is something else. The Mokshi has escaped the Core, there beyond the misty veil that shrouds the sun. There are worlds there, we know, but no one from the Outer Rim here has ever been able to pilot a ship from the Core. Somehow, the Mokshi was able to leave the Core. Our mother must understand its secrets, and so, we must make it ours.”
I power my vehicle to the point of the arrow formation my army has made. It’s facing a world that appears no bigger than my fist from this distance, and I know that world on sight the way I know my own left hand.
The world called Mokshi is not supposed to be there among the others, Jayd says, and I can see that now in how it moves among the other worlds. The other worldships have far more fixed orbits; even the spaces between them are regular, but not the Mokshi. The Mokshi wobbles in the Outer Rim like a weary, derelict traveler, altering the orbits of its nearest neighbors, shimmering with blue and green auroras that snake across its poles, promising a thin atmosphere . . . yet the surface I can see from here is barren.
I raise my arm and close my fist, and I lead my army forward across the dark spaces between the worlds. We move quickly, far more quickly than I thought these vehicles could take us. There is a massive amount of detritus spinning among the worlds, and I see long lines of people tied to the tentacles of some of the worlds we power past. They are salvaging the junk that orbits their ships, packing it away into the worlds’ soft underbellies. These crews are alarmed at our passing, and though we are never close enough to see their faces, I note their hasty retreat from open space into the welcoming tentacles of their worlds, hiding among them as if they were foliage. After we pass, I gaze back at them and see the scavengers carefully resuming their work.
As we approach the Mokshi, I keep our distance as I scout along the equator. I’m looking for an entry point. Circling its equator reveals a wasted wreckage of once-great cities, a forgotten empire asphyxiated by lack of oxygen, perhaps? What strikes me about this worldship are these structures—I see nothing like them on the Katazyrna or the others we have passed. I dip closer to that surface, daring the world to wake, and see now that the structures are not cities but fields of crushed bone and rocky debris that pockmark its outer skin. I cannot help but sense the world is not so much dead, though, as . . . slumbering.
And though I do not remember anything on seeing it, I do have a sense of familiarity. Perhaps it is the feeling old enemies have on meeting again, and again, and again. How many times have we danced like this: me with an army and no memory, the Mokshi with an erratic orbit and no masters?
As we come over a bone-white expanse on the Mokshi’s surface, my army breaks up into two teams and fans out around the equator, as if seeing this terrain has triggered a directive that I don’t know about. The soldiers are equipped with shimmering weapons and spray-on suits that catch the light of the great slumbering sun there in the misty core, which is winking awake now, unshuttering after half a turn to bathe them and the rogue world in orange radiance. I squint. The mist hiding the core swirls with light as if on fire.
The Mokshi is still moving, though, eclipsing the great orange sun, and we must move faster to keep pace with it. I look out behind us, back toward Katazyrna, and am overwhelmed at the idea that we are a Legion of worlds hurtling through an immense darkness, a space so vast I can see nothing but twinkling lights beyond Katazyrna. Are those other suns like ours? Other Legions? If they are, the distances involved make my head hurt. I turn back to the Legion. It is breathtaking, impossible, like something conjured out of my black, sticky dreams.
But this is my reality.
This is home.
Isn’t it?
“Yours is the first team to enter the Mokshi’s orbit in a full rotation,” Jayd says, her voice so close that I jerk in my seat. I had forgotten her.
“What’s a rotation?” I say.
“A turn is one sleeping and waking period,” she says. “A rotation is four hundred turns.”
“Then who retrieved me,” I say, “when I broke free of the Mokshi?”
“The Mokshi spits you free,” she says. “You come out in a pod, ejected beyond its gravity well. And no, we don’t know why, and you always say you can’t remember.”
“What happens on that ship?” I say.
“That’s what you’re here to find out,” she says, but of course, I’m here for far more than that. I’m here for Jayd, and her lord mother, and whatever it is they want to do with the only ship that can leave the Legion. I gaze out at those twinkling lights beyond the Outer Rim.
The wrongness in my gut roils.
“What’s that debris circling the Mokshi?” I ask, trying to get a better understanding of taboo subjects.
“Our s
ister Nhim’s dead army,” Jayd says.
The scattered remnants of Nhim’s army still orbit the great disk of the Mokshi: desiccated bodies in blistered suits, escort vehicles mashed into spongy, unrecognizable shapes, and warped, melted weapons that appear to have imploded, eating themselves from the inside out.
“We sent teams to recover them back when it first happened,” Jayd says. “The War God wants nothing to go to waste. But they fared no better than Nhim. The Mokshi obliterated two teams outright. Six simply . . . disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Eaten by the world . . . or perhaps cast out of range of the Legion’s gravity. When you are lost to the Legion, you are lost.”
“Why does Anat want this world if it just eats her daughters?” I say.
“She must make it hers,” Jayd says. “There are too many others trying to gain control of the Legion, including the Bhavaja family. The Bhavajas are winning, though Lord Katazyrna will not admit that.”
I cannot imagine conquering worlds like this, not this scattered necklace of ships spinning and spinning around the core. My memory sparks and kicks and quails like a captured beast of pure, terrified energy.
I sweat hard in my suit. From my position just above the swarm of my army, I sign at them to attack. My body knows the signal just as it knows how to breathe.
The wailing starts then.
It rises from the Mokshi itself. Hearing it should be impossible, as we are still far outside its thin atmosphere. I can’t even speak with my team once they are in suits.
Yet I feel the wailing in my bones, like some mournful monster roused from sleep.
I steel myself and navigate the vehicle forward, weapon raised. I am the first to pass across the Mokshi’s outer security zone, and the first to see the great crimson wave of its defense grid light up. The wailing goes on and on. It shudders through my army like a physical force.
The keening brings with it a terrible memory of Jayd going in for treatments—why, or for what, I don’t know. She is hidden behind a black door that pulses in time with the heartbeat of Katazyrna. Jayd had wailed like this, on and on, while I pounded my fists against the door until my hands bled and a large, squat woman—Lord Katazyrna?—slapped me and told me soldiers must endure sacrifices, and every one of her daughters is a soldier, and what Jayd had to bear would never be allowed on her ship. These were the prices the Katazyrnas must pay to rule the Outer Rim and, eventually, the Legion, she said.
If this is real memory and not dream, it confounds me further still. What would Jayd bear that is so dangerous?
The first red wave of the Mokshi’s defenses peels away from the atmosphere: a massive red flare. I turn my vehicle neatly toward the Mokshi’s southern pole, deploying the thorny defense scrambler at the head of my vehicle and twisting my trajectory so the vehicle collides with the wave at its weakest point. The energy wave bursts around my vehicle like a soap bubble, flashing past me toward the squad coming behind. Another wave coalesces below. I mash my hand into the indicators on my dash, recharging the scrambler or whatever it is.
Two of the squad light out ahead of me, burning so much fuel I see the yellow spores of their spent charges rippling behind them; two young, stupid kids without a burst of sense between them.
I start to sign at them, “Stay in formation,” instinctively, wondering where I’ve gotten that sign, but they are clearly intent on being the first to cross into the atmosphere. They aren’t looking behind, only forward.
“What’s happening?” Jayd asks, but I am moving now, my body acting on instinct, as Jayd had promised it would. It’s like being piloted by some stranger, a bag of meat pushed along at the end of a stick.
I go into another wild roll, falling past the next wave issuing from the outer defenses, pushing for the speed I need to break below the grid. I know I need to get below the grid, have done it a hundred times before, but the defense grid is only the first hurdle. Assaulting the world is like feeling my way over a familiar path.
I catch up to the kids just as they plunge through the atmosphere, skimming above the surface of the tumbled cities of calcified bone, weathered stone, and twisted amber deposits.
I see the older one sign to the younger. I swerve my vehicle close enough to that one to catch her attention before I sign, “Fall back with the formation.”
The two girls fall back behind me, where six more of the squad have broken past the grid, skipping above the surface now like world-walking mechanics out on a repair run. They are below the world’s defensive security zone now, but the greatest danger is yet to come. I can feel it. My whole body is taut with expectation.
I take the lead again, speeding ahead, and then I see it: a great yawning chasm at the center of the world. This is where we were going, a colossal crater that doesn’t give one the impression of something having crashed into the world so much as something impossibly large having burst out of it.
I am very glad then that I have no memory of what that might be.
The fighters that remain form a long, jagged line at the rim of the crater. I take a fast count; sixty of the two hundred I brought with me have made it this far. The world’s defenses took out the rest, or they fled from the field or collided with debris or had some malfunction along the way. It’s a massive loss; more, I feel, than I should have lost to the defenses alone.
“Heavy losses,” I say out loud.
“It’s the Bhavajas,” Jayd says, low and grim.
“That family?” I ask, scanning the horizon, looking for some other army, some mad group of monsters, maybe, crazy enough to come out here after us.
“They don’t like the Katazyrnas,” Jayd says. “We conquered eight of their worlds in our grandmother’s time.”
“We’ll get on well, then, won’t we?” I say, and Jayd laughs, and I wonder what I can say, what I can do, to hear that laugh again in this black place.
I hold up a fist, calling my squad’s attention. My heart thuds loudly in my ears. I wonder if the Mokshi hears it. The wailing continues; it has become a part of me now, like my heartbeat, my rapid breath, the stink of myself in the cloying suit.
Below us, something flickers at the edges of the yawning black crater. A creeping yellow fog emerges, coiling into the atmosphere like the breath of some titanic god. A secondary defense mechanism.
“We are the fist of the War God,” I sign to my team. “We are the inheritors of the worlds. Show yourselves worthy.” The words feel ancient, a benediction, the signs something my body has done so often, it performs them by rote.
It’s not until I gaze at their confused faces that I realize I have signed to them in the wrong language. I stare at my hands. I try again, using a different sign language, and their expressions turn from bewilderment to wonder. They raise their fists.
We carry on.
The army drops toward the crater. With luck, they will burst into the heart of the world and face whatever it is that waits for them and conquer it as they will conquer its world, and I will return to Jayd a hero, and our mother will not recycle me again.
I fall after them, the rush of atmosphere against my suit. I swerve to evade the curling yellow breath of the crater.
The woman beside me moves too late, and a snarl of the breath ensnares her leg, pulling her deeper into its arms. Her suit sizzles from her body. Her flesh bubbles on her bones. My vehicle and I go into free fall, tumbling into the dark mouth of the world.
I push forward, burning fuel to gain control of the fall. The two kids catch up to me again, plucky and drunk with youth, their faces euphoric.
The crater seems to grow larger as we approach, black as the inky spaces between the worlds, black as the Legion when the core shutters up, black as death, as nothingness, as the universe before the gods shook the worlds loose from their hair and ignited the spinning heart of the Legion. I have a moment to wonder who all these gods are for half a breath before a tangled shot zips past my head. It doesn’t come from the blackness below
us but from behind. The shot rips a great gaping hole in the girl’s vehicle beside me. The girl’s mouth opens, surprise more than fear, and then I am spinning down, down, down into darkness after her. Leave no one behind. Save them all.
Her young companion swerves closer to me, and we nearly collide. Another shot disturbs the mist. A thorny protuberance blooms from the falling girl’s chest. We are in the Mokshi’s gravity well now, and it pulls her hard.
I grab for her just as the she releases her grip on her vehicle. The vehicle falls out from under her, rushing past us both.
I clutch the girl’s arm hard. She is so close now, I can see her great dark eyes. Her face is fully visible inside the transparent suit that clings to her like a second skin. I study her young, doomed face. She is just a child, not much past menarche. I want to save her so badly. My teeth ache from gritting them.
The thing blooming from her chest is a three-tentacled cephalopod projectile whose inky poison darkens the girl’s transparent suit, eating holes right through the skin of it.
“What’s happening?” Jayd says. Calm. So very calm.
I start babbling, trying to explain what I see happening to the girl’s body.
“That’s not a Mokshi weapon,” Jayd says. “It’s a Bhavaja one. You need to get out of there. You can’t survive the Mokshi and the Bhavajas at once. We have tried that before.”
I twist my head and see a full squad of soldiers behind me, not mine, riding up on the remnants of my army in three tiered lines, great angular weapons mounted to the fronts of their vehicles.
I still cling to the arm of the girl whose suit is disintegrating around her. It peels back from her head, letting her dark hair stream free of the suit, coiling through the air like snarled fingers. She gasps on air too thin to sustain her. I think of my sister Nhim and the dead army circling the Mokshi. How many went just this way? How many more will they sacrifice to control a world that can’t be conquered?
The Stars Are Legion Page 3
