CHAPTER ONE
Jei
Sometimes we blur the lines between prodigal sons and rebel heroes returned.
Tonight, my sparring partner would come home. I paced behind the line of combat tanks facing into the jungle dusk; I couldn’t stand still. All my senses strained for signs of arrival. The low, distant chatter of other soldiers trickled to me in the dusk like the murmur of a stream as people made the best of packaged dinner conversation from the open lids of gunnery pods. Someone’s tinny wristband transmitter leaked thin strains of music. Everything in the siege line smelled like damp leaves, metal dust, and motor oil.
I was anxious. I didn’t know if she was returning for punishment or reward, and after all this time I didn’t know how to help her or just—I just wanted to see her alive. I leapt to crouch on the nearest tread, peering into the coming darkness. But the shadow slinking through the underbrush wasn’t her. Or an enemy soldier, either—just one of those weird, feathered cats.
Bloodseas, after four months apart I hadn’t figured the last twenty minutes would be the worst. How she planned to break through the siege, or why she’d left in the first place, I didn’t know, and I tried to brush my other questions away like I batted off the flying bloodsuckers flitting around my ears.
Like the bloodsuckers, the question persisted.
Maybe she disappeared because of what the slave said.
Four months ago
The last time I’d seen my fighting partner, four months ago, we were running a sabotage mission on the northernmost continent of my homeworld, Alpino. Seemed simple enough: break into the weapons manufacturing plant, steal its last shipment, arm the slaves, and blow the place to bloody stardust. The Growen slavers wouldn’t expect us—their segment of the continent sat surrounded by neutral territory, and you can’t get a military force worth talking about past those neutral zones without breaking a few treaties.
You can, however, get in two teens with electromagnetic powers in a small one-man spaceship.
“You’ve just got ugly all over your face, man.” Lem gestured in a washing motion over her own disguised holographic visage as she scowled at mine. Her gloved finger traced invisible lines on the window as she turned her gaze to the stars outside. She shivered. “It’s freaky, even if we’ve done it before, you know?”
I nodded. She looked unnerving, too, at least from a human point of view, with three fuzzy spider-leg-like growths sprouting from each corner of her mouth and coarse, black hair bristling across her skin—but I looked worse: with the orb-shaped helmet and tight-fitted human body armor, I looked like a Growen soldier.
“You can’t just nod, man, you gotta talk,” Lem said. “You just nod, and it’s like I’m stuck in this tiny space with a real live blitzer.”
“What do you want me to say? Yes, I look like a child-killer.” I smirked, knowing full-well that whatever she might say, neither of us minded cramming into a one-man fighter together. It wasn’t like that. Just … when you had something as infinite and—and swallowing as space around you, it was good to huddle against another warm body. It was not good for a man to be alone.
“As long as you say something. The hologram’s just so freakin’ realistic,” she said.
I glanced away from the compuwall—the small, pad-like computerized control system in front of me—to my reflection in the window. The globe of silvery helmet, the shadowy muscular gray armor, the make of the weapons strapped across my chest—it all screamed Growen blitzer. Lem and I could thrash these guys now, easy, but that didn’t mean we’d forgotten the terror of watching hundreds of their number march through the flaming ruins of our homes as the faces of our dead and broken family members reflected in orange on the glimmering orbs of their masks …
“Did the bounty hunter ever ask us to give these disguise projectors back?” I asked.
“No …” Lem paused—the imaginary spider-leg-lips pursed together and twitched as something new occurred to her. She looked at me. “Actually, wait, yes. You better gimme yours when we get back from this mission. I’ll give it to her when I see her.”
“That’s too bad.” These sweet disguise generators had been the first of our secrets as Paradox Warriors. Command didn’t even know we had them.
A tan-white dot appeared in the distance. The white mohawk of feathers on Lem’s head bobbed as she nodded toward it—as if she needed to remind me where my home planet was. In seconds the dot grew to the size of a marble. Lem checked her reflection and adjusted the short mace that hung in staff-form from her waist, bracing for atmospheric entry as my hands slid down the compuwall before us, guiding the ship toward its landing course. Slow. Even. Smooth …
Lem sucked in her breath.
I stiffened as her muscles tensed against my side: a shadow blocked the light from the stars against our port window.
A Growen ship floated beside us.
Lem spoke low through a tense throat: “Get into neutral airspace. Go!”
“If we run it gives us away.”
“Man, we’re in a Frelsi Blastercraft, I think we’re about as given away as it gets!”
“We’ll follow protocol.”
“Why didn’t they show up on our screen before we saw them? They’re hiding. Hunting!”
“We’ve got Growen entry codes. They won’t chase us. Command intended for us to go incognito.” We could already see the shimmering pale white rings of a Growen Maggot as it floated, compact like an oblong striped egg, toward us. I could’ve thrown a stone at it. “Our heat tracker probably didn’t pick them up because they’ve got signal scrambling on. Like we do. They probably don’t want a fight either,” I reassured her … and myself.
Right.
Except the Maggot popped into attack position. Weapons burst like pustules out from between the sliding rings; the egg hatched as its plates separated to elongate the ship into a worm—a Growen Feierspitter.
Lem reached over me and slapped my computer. Fire flashed around us as we jerked into high-speed and my head slammed against the seat behind me and the stars screamed past us and Lem’s elbow dug into my gut as she urged the ship onward with her palms on my compuwall, and we careened toward the planet below and the Maggot spiraled after us in pursuit and “Bloodseas, Lem, slow down! We’re going to crash!”
“No stopping now, my guy, you gotta land this thing.”
“I can’t land at this speed!”
“Well you got a better shot than I do!”
The tan dot was a circle, now a sphere, now a detailed pearl streaked with bands of flax and blue, a wide expanse of nation-shapes, now a flash of brain-rattling atmospheric fire, now a snowfield smashing toward our windshield oh shyte oh shyte the Maggot was still right behind us—
I shouldered Lem to the side and swiped my palms up the compuwall. Our ship swooped up—a treetop snapped off on our underside—Lem yanked the eject tab—cold air sliced across my face and my stomach plummeted into my pelvis as we burst out of the ship. A metallic crash, and then a heavy boom, sounded behind us; heat singed the back of my neck as a shock wave rocketed me across the frigid sky.
My automated jetpack deployed with a whoosh and an awful, startling halt. I turned to see the debris filtering through the air with the scent of sulfur and burnt rubber … the Maggot had crashed into us. We’d pulled up too sharply for it to stop.
Well.
Without Lem around to screw up my driving I eased my jetpack to a soft landing in the snow. Then I sighed, brushed myself off, and sat down on the warm shell of a sleeping snowturtle to eat a protein bar and watch as ash flitted down around me like black snowflakes. An engine smashed into a tree in front of me; thundering hooves, and then whinnies and the pounding of enormous wings echoed over the snowy expanse as a herd of woolly pegasi took off. The protein bar was Smungwurm-flavored, and I wasn’t even mad.
This was how Lem did things. I rolled with it. It was funny sometimes, and at any rate this particular mess was probably inevitable. I didn’t see any pilot eject from the Maggot, and it’d attacked us without a single attempt at contact, unprovoked. And orbiting in silence over a neutral nation on a contested planet like this? It had to be a Ghost. These rogue robot-piloted ships haunted quiet regions throughout the galaxy, shooting first and asking questions never to take out saboteurs like us and keep the civilians afraid to travel. Locals around the universe had different legends and scientific “singularity” explanations for Ghosts, but Lem and I had seen the Growen manufacture them. At any rate, Lem’s fault or not, a Ghost wouldn’t have given up chase until our ship was destroyed.
Bloodseas, though, what a mountain of paperwork awaited us at home now. Ghosts are the homework-eating dog of off-planet missions gone wrong. “Uh, um—a Ghost did it!” This could mess with my spotless record.
For now though, I didn’t care. I was busy smiling. Space-ninjas who grow up on jungle worlds don’t often see snow, and the first time Lem saw snow was now as she tumbled ten meters on a broken jetpack, spinning out of control to—ooooh, ouch—smash into a deep bank.
Powdery white splashed up around her impact. “Jei, holy shyte man, you okay?” sputtered through her lips as she sank and tried to “swim” and found herself flailing. She righted herself somehow—drew her neodymium mace—and yelled for me again as she swung to smash and slice the material around her, only to watch it pack and melt instead of breaking.
“Welcome to Alpino,” I laughed behind her. She whirled and looked up to where I stood above her on the ivory turtle’s back.
“Shyte, man, what is this place?” she asked.
“Dunno. I’ve never been here. I don’t own the whole planet.”
Lem scowled and threw snow at me. “Man, look at you all joking when I don’t even know if I need a gas mask on. Is this shyte poisonous?”
I laughed, shying away as her unpacked snowball sprinkled over my tunic. “Let’s go,” I said, hopping into the air a good distance away from the turtle before igniting my jetpack.
She stood back, still sinking into the snow far below me. “I gotta walk,” she said.
I landed beside her to check—yeah, there was no fixing her pack in time. We’d find the nearest slave caravan faster on foot.
“So you do,” I said, and so we walked, carrying the wings that should’ve carried us.