Not A Chapter — New Story Poll

  Hello everyone! For my next story, I’ve found I have a number of stories I want to do, but I am not certain what order to do them in. Most or all of these will be written eventually, but I’m curious to know what people are most interested in right now.

  These are just a first chapter. Once more is written these will likely change a little bit, smooth out rough edges and alter some details. So this is not a final product, just an idea of what’s going on.

  Below are four chapters from four different stories, as well as a blurb/author’s notes on what is planned for the story. Please select the one you’re most interested in seeing, and of course any comments you might have.

  Casual Blasphemy

  Blurb:

  Years ago, Antoq made a deal with a god.

  Now his service is ended. Powers returned, oaths fulfilled, he no longer walks with conquerors and kings. Instead he is simply a stranger out of place, who wants to go home.

  But home is a long way away. A long way to go without the prestige or ability he used to have, and with people who remember him when he came through with the fire and the fury of a god’s chosen. The world looks very different from the shadows, and just because Antoq is done with the gods doesn’t mean the gods are done with him.

  Author’s Comments:

  This is meant to be an adventure story, the back half of the hero’s journey. There should be more character development for the protagonist than progression as such. It’s set in a mostly low-fantasy world, but with some occult-style elements in the vein of Chasing Sunlight — though the world is more familiar than that setting.

  Chapter 1

  Antoq put his pipe between his teeth and lit it with a bit of casual blasphemy.

  The heretical flame danced along his fingertips before he flicked it onto the blood-soaked front door of The Glory Institute. Gouged-out panes of stained glass windows stared brokenly over the dense fog shrouding the crumbling moor, just above the disemboweled ribs of the second-story beams where certain forces had reduced walls of the sprawling manor to dust. Fire bit deep into the ruined wood, spreading with startling swiftness as the smoke from his pipe curled upward to join the dark clouds billowing from the shattered manse.

  The clicking of gears and the sharp sound of steel on stone heralded the arrival of the local constabulary. Antoq turned to look, exhaling smoke in a long sigh, for while he should have been long gone his old bones were no longer as suited to fast movement, especially in the wet chill of the moor’s pre-dawn gloom. He had wished a moment to recuperate, but as the world had not seen fit to grant him that much respite he shifted his coils to face the newcomers.

  Sharp-faced men in white and red, atop the thin-legged mechanical mounts favored by the Olstoi, emerged from the pre-dawn mists. Olstoi always reminded Antoq of the small jaguars that roamed the lower slopes of his homeland, cast in metallic shades rather than black ones, and the leader of the squad was a particularly rumpled example of such. Long, thin whiskers like spun gold protruded from a pinched silver face, and the world-weary slump of every public servant called from their bed at an ungodly hour. Even his sergeant’s badge was askew, the points of the inscribed hexagram tilted from their proper orientation.

  “Gods, what is that!” One of the men shouted, lowering his needle-thin shocklance to point at Antoq. The sergeant was somewhat brighter, raising a hand to halt his squad, sharp gray eyes studying Antoq’s no-doubt alien form and maybe even recognizing him. Naga were not exactly common in their part of the world.

  “Well, lads, you’re a bit late,” Antoq said, smoke curling out from between his fangs as he looked at the sergeant, ignoring the pointed weapon. Without divine favor, the local tongue was harder to pronounce, but he made do. Behind him, fire licked across ancient wood and dried plaster, crackling as it consumed The Glory Institute with gleeful hunger. “If you had been here earlier, perhaps you could have taken some of them alive.” The sergeant opened his mouth, closed it, gave Antoq a sharper look, and then nodded to himself.

  “I remember you. Godridden, right. Two months ago?” The man’s voice was as gruff as his look, a growl that came from a mouth used giving orders. “Did y’have to do all this?”

  “Mm,” Antoq said, puffing on his pipe. “In my defense, they involved me, not the other way around.” He waved a lazy hand at the burning spawl behind him. “You can try to take a look, but I would not advise it.”

  “It’s on fire.” The man that spoke was the same one who still had the shocklance pointed at Antoq, some young and hotblooded recruit with delusions of competency.

  “It is,” Antoq agreed, and pointed again, this time directing their attention upward above the main doorway, where the flames had already peeled away the paint to reveal a malevolent sigil embedded in the beams of the Institute’s venerable walls. “For the best, I think.”

  The sergeant flinched at the sight, though several of the others merely gawped like landed fish, unprepared for the sight. It spoke well of them, for Antoq would not wish familiarity with the dread signs of a dead god on anyone. That was the burden of the godridden — something he no longer was, but it seemed that is old occupation hadn’t truly left him behind.

  “Be that as it may,” the sergeant said, tearing his eyes off the burning building, whiskers twitching as he stared at Antoq. “We need someone to answer questions about this.” Antoq considered him, the look in his eyes, the set of his jaw, the lines around his face and mouth, and let out a long exhalation of smoke.

  “The people inside did not begin their debauchery out of nowhere, and tracking their movements should not be difficult.” Antoq told him, drawing his coils up under him and rising to a level with the still-mounted constabulary. “They were very important people and there will be similarly important relatives for whom your questions will be more than inconvenient. There will be a certain pressure to make of me a goat, and avoid all that inconvenience.” Embers flared in the pipe as Antoq pulled in more smoke, meeting the sergeant’s gaze.

  “Aye,” the sergeant said at last, eyes narrowed at Antoq. “Can’t say there’s much I can do ‘bout anyone that outranks me.”

  “Of course not, sergeant,” Antoq replied, slithering to one side as a piece of flaming balcony plummeted from above, scattering sparks across the flagstones in front of the Glory Institute. “I propose that instead of taking me as a suspect, you send me down to the Duke with one of your lads. Sidestep all the problems in one go.”

  Antoq had no actual desire to speak with the local nobility, and would far rather have slid off into the night, but without the protection of his former station or the resources to sidestep the kingdom’s wrath he had little choice. Better to take control of the situation himself, and prevent the trouble from becoming more than he could handle. He was familiar enough with taking control of situations, as well as being in more trouble than he could handle.

  “S’pose that’s fair enough,” The sergeant replied after a moment, his eyes straying to the burning sigil before twitching back to Antoq. He turned to his squad, raising his voice to a sharp bark. “Oi! Harrison! Give th’ godridden your ‘patic. Miyash, you escort him down to th’ Duke.”

  The youngest and least experienced of the squad, obvious both by physical size and a softness in their expression, looked rebellious for nine-tenths of a second before saluting and opening the door of his peripateticon. It unfolded into a small staircase, and Harrison took two steps down, stepping well aside to avoid Antoq’s massive bulk.

  Pouring himself into the narrow bucket seat of one of the mechanical mount was a complex operation, but he managed to rest himself on his own coils as he worked the levers and depressed the pedals with his tail. Miyash was clearly the second-in-command, almost as aged as the sergeant and, impressively, radiated boredom despite the Glory Institute’s indiscretions.

  The Olstoi was a compact fellow, the muscle of someone half again his size compressed into a frame only just large enough to drive a peripateticon. It overflowed his diminutive form, bestowing a distinctly swollen impression upon the unfortunate man as he manipulated dials and levers, turning the peripateticon around and leading Antoq back out into the mist. It was tempting to use the obscuring vapor to lose his guide — but the clanking and clacking of Antoq’s mount discouraged stealth, and besides Antoq couldn’t outrun an Olstoi on the hunt. Naga had many talents, but endurance was not one of them.

  Only when Antoq was shrouded from the sight of the rest of the constabulary did he let himself slump, all the myriad cuts and bruises, broken ribs and crushed scales making their presence known in an all-over ache. He was far too old to be dealing with unhinged elites scrabbling after powers no mortal was meant to wield. Antoq didn’t even have the support of his god any longer, with only a searing black calm in his heart where the presence of a deity used to rest. Nor did he have any companions at his back, for they had gone their own way once their duty was complete.

  They always did.

  He nudged the controls as he steered the peripateticon along the road, following Miyash toward the city below. Lights shone blearily through the morning mists, and he regarded the blurry line that marked the marina with a wistful dread. Boat travel had never much agreed with him, but it would be faster than going overland, and he was a long way from home. Alas, any such arrangements would have to wait until the unfortunate affair of the Glory Institute had been settled.

  Several times Miyash turned back to look at him, whiskers twitching as the Olstoi opened his mouth to ask some question — then thought better of it and looked front once again. Antoq was willing enough to make the journey in silence, with only the mechanical noises of his vehicle and the tapping of metal on stone for company. The contents of his pipe slowly turned to ash, smoke vanishing into the hazy white of the surrounding mists, growing whiter as the first reaching beams of dawn stole across the moor.

  Antoq was glad enough of his pipe once they reached the city itself. While Sien was cleaner than many places he had endured, the press of people created unavoidable filth. The woody bite of smoke drowned out the smell of the city outskirts, the peripateticon freeing him from the need to slither through the muck and the mud. There were certain downsides to having a tail rather than legs and feet, and the cities of the more bipedal races contained many of them.

  He attracted startled looks from the few people up at that hour — lamplighters, window-knockers, urchins and thieves slinking in alleyways, occasional couriers or merchants carting goods. The presence of one of the constabulary prevented any incidents more than a few muffled oaths at the sight of a blue-scaled snake-man perched precariously atop an official peripateticon. At least, until they reached manse the squatting at the center of Sien, a towering confection of quarried white stone and brass ichor-craft, where a quartet of guards barred the way through into the manor grounds.

  “Halt!” Said one guard unnecessarily, pushing his mount forward with a jolt. Antoq peered out at the man from under the brim of his hat, upending the pipe and tapping ash onto the road as he waited for his escort to explain things. The guards were the usual mean-minded leg-breakers employed by powers everywhere, their eyes shallow and dull and their very skins bloated with their own importance. Dangerous, in a certain sort of way, but nothing that Antoq feared.

  The highest-ranked of the guards glared at Antoq while engaged in muttered conversation with Miyash, and Antoq responded by tipping his head to the man. Idly, he removed his scraper from an inner pocket and carefully cleaned out the bowl of his pipe, further incensing someone to whom the greatest sin was not recognizing some imagined authority. It was a petty enough provocation, but Antoq had never got along well with worldly authorities — or divine ones, for that matter.

  “Come on,” the guard said at length, beckoning Antoq forward, and he put his pipe and scraper away in an inner pocket before nudging the controls. Brass legs rang against flagstones, then thumped against grass as he was guided, not to the front door, but to the carriage-yard and stable illuminated by small glass lanterns. Given the early hour and the less-than-favorable circumstances of his arrival, it was perhaps the best that could be expected.

  His tongue flicked out of its own accord, tasting the cloying rot of corruption, faint but recent. The same scent that had suffused The Glory Institute. Perhaps he no longer had the demands of a god driving him forward, but a life of hunting the creeping vermin of creation had left him with habits that were hard to break. He was not here for a quarry, but it seemed they would collide nonetheless. There was an inevitability to it; the machinations of the divine, perhaps, or just the nature of cleansing fire seeking out something to burn.

  Antoq brought the peripateticon to a staggered, stilted stop in front of the side door there, sliding out of the machine as it sighed into stillness. The mist-touched grass was cold against his scales, threatening to turn to mud under the tread of too many boots and machines. The guard glared at Antoq and dismounted the proper way, crossing to the side door and pressing a panel there.

  It was an ichor-driven device, the honey-gold stuff shimmering in channels along the jamb as it swung the heavy steel outward with nary a sound. Antoq made sure to study the windows, which were far less defended and, should he need to make an exit in haste, would be of more concern than a guarded portal. It was the sort of thing that had been drilled into his head years ago, when he was but a young godridden and more experienced types had been drawn to his side.

  “You’ll need to surrender your weapons,” said a stiff-faced majordomo holding a lantern just inside the vestibule, doing a credible job of not staring at twenty feet of snake-man. In reply, Antoq spread open his coat, showing that he carried nothing that might be classed as such, only small sundries in pockets and a purse filled with coins taken from dead men. The last was something nobody needed to know, as corpse robbing was generally considered uncouth behavior, even when the corpses in question certainly deserved it.

  “What, you go around without weapons?” The man stared at Antoq as if he was expecting the long-coat to be holding an entire arsenal.

  “Never much needed to, lad,” Antoq drawled, and the guard’s face pinched as he clearly struggled to imagine what that meant.

  “This way,” the majordomo said, opening a door into a long hallway lit by some form of oil sconce, low blue flames inside mirrored globes set at intervals along the walls. It illuminated intricate paneling and a rich burgundy carpet that, admittedly, was quite pleasant under his scutes. Antoq had to quash a wave of weariness that tempted him to simply stretch out to his full length on the soft, short-piled stuff. He could sleep later, or when he was dead.

  The reek of repossessed god-stuff grew stronger as he slithered past doors and halls, noting each turn, each staircase and each house bell. Years ago, a skilled investigator in a far distant city had guided him to a particularly well-hidden cabal, and Antoq had taken time to learn from the young woman. The resulting eye for detail was not as good as his teacher’s, but it had still stood Antoq in good stead — either to find things hidden, or to understand that which was in plain sight.

  Inevitably, the trail of corruption passed through the same door the majordomo opened for him, revealing a room lined with books, the shelves tall enough to require a ladder. Several chairs faced a long, low couch across a table in the center of the room, the furniture gilt and cushioned in dark blue. Antoq slid inside, noting the paunch of the copper-gold man on the couch; clearly the duke, with books at his left hand and papers at his right, weighted down by a jeweled letter opener. The reek came not from him, however, but from the thin man perched upon one of the chairs, an older fellow in fine purple and possessed of a nervous energy that set him nearly toppling off his perch at the sight of Antoq’s entrance.

  “That’s him!” The older man screeched, jabbing a finger at Antoq. “That’s the one!”

  “I can see that, Mikel,” the duke said with far more calm, studying Antoq with clear recognition. The guards stationed in the room were less relaxed, hands going to weapons. Shocklances and swords were readied, though not drawn. “The firesnake,” the duke said, invoking the hated diminutive that had somehow pursued Antoq across three continents. “I can smell the smoke from here, but no knife?” He looked to the majordomo, noting the lack of any confiscated weapons.

  “No knife,” Antoq rumbled, slithering inside and keeping an eye on the dispensation of the guards. He stopped a reasonable distance away from the table, coiling his tail under himself. “I passed that off to the young prince of Takahil some years ago.” That was an old bit of business, and Antoq misliked someone taking an interest in it, so he moved past it without further comment. “If you know who I am, then that vastly simplifies matters.”

  “But you —” Mikel began to screech again, only to stop as the duke held up a hand.

  “You say that, but Mikel here claims that you have attacked the Glory Institute. Godridden or not, I cannot simply let that pass.” The duke’s tone was not as outraged as it ought to have been, revealing he was either unaware of the full extent of the Institute’s destruction, or all too aware of its dealings.

  “It is burning as we speak,” Antoq confirmed, clasping his hands behind him to prevent his fingers from taking out his pipe of their own accord. “They condemned themselves by delving into the forbidden teachings of The Door In The Moon. Though I would not have known if certain of their members had not abducted me from the road — and I doubt I was the first. How many travelers have vanished into the Institute, Mikel?”

  “I have no idea what you mean!” Mikel lied poorly, that much was clear even to a non-Olstoi like Antoq. The reek of corruption grew stronger, the scent of long-dead gods filling the room. Nobody else seemed to notice, but there was a reason why Antoq had stopped where he did. What seemed a safe distance for an Olstoi was striking distance for a naga.

  “There were too many people involved for it to be a true secret,” Antoq remarked, keeping the duke’s gaze. “Of course such a personage of yourself would not be directly involved, so all those minor nobility would be, perhaps, conspiring against you. Seeking the power of a dead god to usurp the proper state of affairs.”

  His tongue flicked out, then back in scenting the emotions on the air. The duke himself was to free of the taint, but more nervous than he looked. Antoq knew that the Glory Institute had at least the duke’s tacit backing, and when he was younger, Antoq would have been far heavier with his hand — but he no longer was a true godridden, and he had found out it was easier to provide people excuses to do the right thing.

  “Yes, of course,” the duke replied, seizing upon the implied offer. “The Church is the proper authority to investigate —”

  “No!” Mikel shrieked, scrambling out of his chair. Antoq regarded him without pity as the stench of corruption reached a peak and something began to unfold itself from within Mikel’s frame, a presence old and hungry, its wrath cold and distant as the stars. The Door in The Moon was no less dangerous for being dead.

  Antoq struck before it could manifest fully, coiled muscle sending him blurring forward. His hand snatched the jeweled letter opener in passing, flipping it around as he drove the point through Mikel’s left eye with all of Antoq’s weight behind the blow. It was like hitting a tree, Mikel’s body bending but not yielding despite how thin and frail it was. The decorative hilt bent around the eye socket, and what emerged was not blood or gore but invidious shadow, a frozen exhalation as Mikel shrieked in a multiplicity of voices.

  Then Mikel was just meat once more, collapsing bonelessly to the floor. The guards belatedly stirred into action, readied weapons pointed at him long after the danger had passed. Antoq turned to the duke, who had turned a burnt bronze in fear from his first contact with the supernatural. Or simply with murder; Antoq often forgot that most people had not seen as much death as him.

  “You should get someone in here to take care of this before it ruins your rug,” he said. It was, after all, a very fine rug.

  “Heresiarch take the godridden,” The duke mumbled, clearly not meant for other ears to hear, and Antoq laughed without much humor.

  “Any man could have done that,” Antoq replied. Before, when he succeeded in purging such cults, he would have drawn some satisfaction from it at least. Now he just felt tired. He still knew what kind of disaster he had averted, but without the god in his head the task wasn’t something he enjoyed or wanted. Antoq just wanted to go home, not slog through the three continents getting into fights.

  “Then you…” The duke trailed off, his whiskers twitching as he glanced around and signaled for his guards to stands down. “Will you liaise with the Church on this? We have a Bishop of the Thrice-Born —”

  “No,” Antoq cut him off. Even when he had been godridden, he hadn’t bothered with any such diplomatic niceties. Now that he was merely Antoq, he had even less desire to deal with any local factions. The sooner he could leave, the better. “I have done you enough favors by removing this issue for you. But you can tell me who informed you about the knife.”

  That Antoq had a particular blade entrusted to him for safekeeping, however temporarily, was not entirely a secret. It was also not well known outside of certain circles, and certainly was not the kind of news that should have made it to a minor Duke in an entirely different kingdom. Perhaps it was innocent, but Antoq had learned never to believe that.

  “Ah?” The duke leaned forward, his gaze flicking between Antoq and the body on the floor. Political to a fault, he was clearly calculating how much he could get away with not saying. Wordlessly, the naga slithered back to the table, projecting diffidence even if he was exhausted. The illusion of strength was just as important as strength.

  “A merchant came by after you passed through the first time,” the duke said at last. “Bechsel, blue type. Had a bunch of exotic animals, said he’d seen you a while back. I just thought he wanted to know where you come from since, well…” He gestured at Antoq, who was very much not a local.

  “Name?” Bechsel weren’t exactly common in the kingdom of the Olstoi either, as the ant-like people hailed from the far coast, but they weren’t unknown. Antoq had made landfall at a port in their territory years ago, but he’d already handed off the blade by then.

  “Venable Kellek,” the duke said after a moment, which meant nothing to Antoq. A Blue Venerable was exactly in the middle of the caste hierarchy, and the name was so common that it might not even be a lie.

  “I see. Well, lad, I’ll leave you to clean up,” Antoq said, having no desire to get dragged into local politics, and whatever connection the Venerable Kellek had was far out of time and space. Best to simply move on as quickly as possible and leave it behind, as he so often did. As he always had. Gods demanded much from their mortal hands, and he’d rarely slept in the same place twice.

  The duke hesitated and Antoq began considering the options if his hand were forced. Offense, defense; allowing himself to be imprisoned and escaping; simply burning the house down. Something of it must have registered to the duke, for he hastily waved at one of the guards.

  “See the godridden out,” he said. “And fetch the Bishop. We will have to address this before overlong.”

  Antoq slipped out the door of the library before anyone could think better of it. At some point, the question would be asked why he wasn’t acting like a godridden anymore, and he did not dare lie about his status. He’d had a god in his head and he well knew what could result from any pretense he still represented them. And without the backing of a god, he was as subject as anyone else to the mercy of men.

  Something there was very little of in the world.

  The majordomo hastened after him, relatively short legs working hard to keep up with the deceptive speed a naga could achieve. Those who relied on their feet found sinuous movement disconcerting, and Antoq took enough pity on the man to pause at the outer door. Though that was at least half because he’d outpaced the news and the guard stationed there was eyeing him askance and letting his hand rest on the shocklance at his waist. Given how much larger Antoq was than any Olstoi, he had to give that particular guard credit for a certain aplomb.

  “Fare you well, honored godridden,” the majordomo lied politely, clearly glad to see the last of him. Most people didn’t appreciate a corpse in their house, much less one that would bring the scrutiny of any god’s representative. Antoq touched a hand to the brim of his hat and slithered out the door.

  The peripateticon was, sadly, gone, forcing him to traverse the city of his own accord. Always an unpleasant, dirty process, but one he’d long resigned himself to. There was no point in subterfuge, and Antoq made purchases with dead men’s money as rapidly as he could. Food, smoking materials – those two were of nearly equal importance – some replacements for supplies that he had expended, lost, or had taken since the last time he was in civilization. And passage downriver, again openly. Departure time was not for hours, but he still crawled into his assigned bunk.

  The noise and motion of departure pulled him from a too-short sleep, and Antoq made sure he had all his belongings properly stowed and in waterproof casings. Had there not been such trouble with the Glory Institute, had there not been some strange Bechsel asking after him, he might have actually taken the boat downriver. Might.

  He ignored the knocking at his cabin door and the call to dinner; he’d eaten at least ten pounds of meat earlier and that would take some days to digest, even were he of a mind to meet fellow passengers. Instead he watched the color drain from the world as night fell, then he slipped out the cabin window once it was dark. The water was cold, but he slipped into it with nary a splash, his tail braced against the window as he lowered himself in, then began to swim.

  While Antoq didn’t have the endurance to keep it up for too long, he was more than quick enough in the water to make it to the banks of the big, lazy river, sliding up and into a dense and gnarled forest. He could feel the age of the place the moment he entered the canopy, a deep and abiding patience stretching down into the earth. It wasn’t like sensing the presence of gods or their touch on the world, but rather an instinctive reaction to the deep and old places of the world.

  An excellent place to lose himself, at least for a while. Perhaps by the time he made his way south, whatever furor was coming would have passed. Or at least would be less damnably tired.

  He slid deeper into the ancient forest, finding a place where roots had displaced rocks and forced them to the surface, and gathered wood. Fire was, of course, easy, as he blasphemed once again with the one small understanding he had taken from having a god in his head for so long. A spark lit from his fingertips and caught the kindling.

  So long as he kept the fire small, he did not believe the forest would mind. Most people would not believe that a forest, even one so deep and ancient as the one that stretched below the moors, had things it liked and disliked. Years of experience had disabused Antoq of any such notion. Even after all his experience there were still powers in the world he did not understand, and he suspected ones even the gods could not explain.

  The longcoat was still drying by the fire when he sensed it. Some ineffable change in the way the wind blew through the stout trees, then a faint sound from without, indecipherably liquid. His tongue flicked out and caught the scent of something acrid and dark. Not The Door In The Moon, but something else, something familiar. He sighed and packed a particularly flavorful blend into his pipe and lit it with a splinter from the fire, setting his hat aside as it came out of the darkness.

  Bones and driftwood heaved themselves forward, formed into a massive feline shape that seemed to be coated in tar. Each movement was accompanied by cracking, popping, and a raw bubbling breath, as if motion itself was painful for the thing. It seemed unfair that after so long Antoq was still capable of fearing such things, but the frailties of mortal flesh could not be so easily discarded.

  “Well, come on then,” he said, plucking a burning brand from his fire and holding it ready. Instead of a roar or growl or any normal monstrous sound, the thing rushed forward in silence. He dropped flat, darting forward under dripping ivory talons and raking his lit torch along the underside of the monster. The burning wood hissed, almost extinguished by the black, reeking stuff that bound the detritus together.

  The monster slammed a leg down, claws drawing a burning line along his scales where he hadn’t quite avoided it and adding to the catalogue of aches and pains. Antoq darted off to the side, winding his way up one of the trees as the monster whirled, darting for him much faster than anything of that size should move. It tilted its head, looking up at him and taking those horrible, bubbling breaths, sounding as if it were drowning.

  Antoq slipped through the canopy, head down and arms to the side, but didn’t dare stray too far from the firelight. The creature followed, despite the lack of apparent eyes, pacing him below and with a sudden rush crashing against the trunk of one of the trees. It groaned and held, but shook hard enough to rattle his fangs, numbing scales where his coils wrapped around the branches.

  In another time or place he would have had people with him. Or, if not, he would have had a god riding along in his head, lending him power and purpose. Now, he had just himself and a few small understandings. It would have to be enough.

  He lifted his hand and once again called for the glimpse he’d had of terrible truths, the cleansing flame which burns away the dead wood of the world — then dropped down on top of the thing. The thick, tar-like stuff clung to his scales, his coils sinking into the bulk of the thing as it reared back in surprise as he wound himself about its neck. The tar simply gave under his scales as his squeezed, sinking into the muck, so instead he thrust the flame against its head.

  The spark caught. With it came a glimpse of something cruel and cloying, impressions forcing their way into his head as the fire found fuel. Not in anything physical, but in the unnatural threads that wound around the thing and tied it together. A curse.

  With that understanding the monster went up like dry tinder, and Antoq wrestled himself away, scales smarting from the heat as it burned, small flickers of flame consuming any clinging residue. He breathed heavily, pulling hard on his pipe and feeling the smoke flow through his mouth as the focus of combat gave way to the cold weariness afterward. The monster itself vanished into smoke, rising up among the trees — and leaving behind on the ground a naked woman, a human, slumped unconscious on the ground.

  Antoq stared for a moment, finding that he was still capable of surprise, then slithered over to her. He could smell the curse still lingering, sunk deep into her bones. In times past, that would have been it; the god riding his head would brook no corruption. Instead, Antoq picked her up and carried her to the fire, removing blankets from his pack and wrapping her in them before bandaging his own wound.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Antoq muttered to himself, settling into his coils and staring at the fire, smoke curling from his pipe. The affairs of gods and monsters and curses should be behind him. He was no longer godridden, his deal was complete.

  All he wanted to do was go home.

  Objects in Motion

  Blurb: Superheroes are defenders of law and justice, protectors of the meek. Supervillains are those who abuse their power for their own gain and terrorize the citizenry. To those on the ground, there isn’t much difference between the two; the ant suffers when gods war. For Isaac Hartson, supers of either variety are violent, dangerous, and subject to no consequences to their actions. He’s out to supply some.

  While a metahuman himself, he’s not anywhere near the upper reaches of power, so his desire requires more than just fists. It takes a little bit of caution, as well.

  Author’s Comments:

  In some ways this is in the same vein as Paranoid Mage, with a small skillset exploited to the utmost and a contest against The Power That Be. However, this isn’t The Boys where everyone’s a psychopathic murderer. Nor will it be like Callum where Isaac flat out refuses to work within the system. So, superhero urban progfantasy with more emphasis on fighting smarter than punching harder.

  Chapter One

  “Quake in fear under the might of Dimetria!”

  A girl in bubblegum-pink armor landed on the hood of the armored car, denting it heavily and sending the engine into a grinding, sputtering halt. Dimetria laughed aloud as the security immediately opened fire — and the bullets hit the armor, only to simply fall onto the hood of the car. With another bound she jumped to the rear of the armored car, bringing the wrecking bar in her hand down on the locked door. The length of steel gouged out the lock and latch mechanism both, and the door swung open.

  Inside the armored car were racks after racks of softchips in padded cases, and another guard whose bullets hit the pink armor and clinked to the ground. Dimetria grabbed two of the cases, one with each hand, and then turned and left with a mighty leap, vanishing into the tangle of buildings, railways, and roads with only a few more desultory gunshots. The car didn’t have any meta security because, really, softchips were not valuable enough for any real villain to waste their time on.

  Dimetria jumped several more times, attracting some attention from ordinary folks on the ground, and then ducked into the stairwell of a parking garage. Off came the painted, printed foam of the armor, as well as the radioactive blonde wig, which were stuffed into the bottom of a burn barrel. The first appearance of Dimetria would also be the last.

  Isaac Hartson had no desire to actually be a supervillain. The ones that had any success were powerful, ruthless, and terrifying, all things that Isaac was not. All the rest were either independents who were quickly squashed by either heroes or other villains, or simply employed by the bigger names.

  Superheroes were cut from the same cloth, even if they were nominally playing police rather than predator. Violent and dangerous to everyone around, impressed with their own power. Growing up in the foster care system had shown him that the people in charge were mostly out for themselves. Even the foster housing had turned out to be a coldly calculated public relations campaign.

  The waiting shopping cart had a bottle of water and some wet wipes, which were used to get rid of heavy makeup, leaving a young man in rumpled, mismatched clothing instead of a supervillainess. Isaac opened the cases, dumping the contents into a garbage bag, which went into the shopping cart, and then tossed the cases into the culvert outside the stairwell. When he emerged from the stairwell himself, he looked like any other homeless man in Star City.

  He pushed his shopping cart through the parking garage, which was old enough to lack the ever-present surveillance in the nicer parts of the city, and when he was satisfied that he was alone he opened the trunk on an old beater car and shoved the garbage bag in. Closing the car again, he continued pushing the shopping cart. His route took him out of the garage and around to the intersection where he took out a cardboard anything helps sign.

  The whim he’d had to try out theatre as a kid had turned out to pay dividends. Acting was useful, as was being able to spot people who were, themselves, acting. Isaac wouldn’t consider himself any great master at it, but a surprising number of people just never bothered looking past the obvious. Which was why he was making himself obviously harmless.

  The disguise wasn’t entirely safe; not because he thought he’d get caught but because homeless beggars were organized. Isaac didn’t know which supervillain it was, but it was obvious the moment anyone took a closer look at their too-uniform signs and mysterious ability to get to high traffic areas at peak times. His chosen corner, on the other hand, was out of the way and only needed to serve for a few hours.

  A pair of heroes flashed past as he was still trying to get comfortable — or as comfortable as he could be in thirdhand clothes on a street corner. One flying, one on the ground, both far faster than human speed. They completely ignored him, no doubt searching for the brand-new villainess that had been in no database. There were certainly supers who could have tracked him, but he hadn’t even robbed the whole truck. Most of the top level heroes had better things to do than account for some idiot villainess grabbing a few hundred thousand credits worth of softchips.

  Isaac stayed on the street corner for a good three hours and accumulated exactly zero donations, despite his hangdog look and rough clothing. The closest he came was a trio of gangers shoving him over and upturning his shopping cart before going on their way. Acting like a harmless, homeless bum turned out to be harder than acting like an idiot teenage villainess. He could have easily thrashed the gangers, but that would have just made his life harder. Maybe even gotten a low-level meta called in, either hero or villain.

  Once the shadows stretched all the way across the street, he returned the shopping cart to his beater car, popping it apart by taking off a few screws. Even if he had just robbed an armored truck, he wasn’t about to litter the streets by leaving a cart out where someone could drive into it. Isaac wasn’t that much of a villain.

  The car clattered and grumbled on the way home, the old ‘832 Odelle rattling with the same not-quite-disrepair as it had for the past decade. Twice on the drive he saw supers, once on the streets and once in the skies, going about whatever it was that had caught Star Central’s attention. Distant sirens blared, then fell silent, but the car’s radio had long been broken so he could merely wonder.

  He pulled into the cramped parking lot of his apartment complex, taking a moment to shove the garbage bag into a more normal-looking gym bag and then hiked up the stairs to the third floor. Letting himself in, he took a moment to breathe and ensure he was carrying himself normally before crossing into the common room where his roommate was tapping away at a computer. Isaac probably didn’t need to, given how deeply Cayleb was involved with his work, but there was never telling what a tinker talent might notice.

  “Hey, man,” Isaac called, finally relaxing. It actually took some effort to not seem too giddy, as he’d finally taken the first steps he needed. Planning, thinking, and hoping were one thing, but actually crossing the line into action was another. Though admittedly, it was only a small bit of action, the robbery serving only to empower his brother in all but name.

  Cayleb swiveled his entire body around on his padded chair; the tinker’s superpower had also given him a double-sized head, so he couldn’t actually turn his neck, not against the brace that supported the oversized cranium. He gave Isaac a broad grin, clearly in a good mood even for him.

  “Yo, man!” Cayleb said, lifting a hand. “You just missed a super fight.”

  “What, someone fighting here?” Isaac said, a sudden flush of alarm running up his spine. One of the reasons he’d chosen the apartment block was that it was near to territory run by one of his targets, but he had thought it was far enough away to avoid the low-level supervillain gang wars that were a constant feature of the rougher parts of Star City.

  “Nah, over by your hospital,” Cayleb said, swiveling back to poke at his tinker-rigged computer setup, a nest of wires and monitors. A video came up of several flying supers slugging it out with floating mechanical spheres in the sky, energy beams drawing blue and white lines. It didn’t last long, but a blur at the bottom of the screen showed one of the spheres leaving the hospital at high speed. Whoever had sent them clearly got what they came for.

  “Professor Mechaniacal’s work, but not his modus operandi,” Cayleb enthused, waving a finger at the monitor. “It’s too loud and too small-scale. Someone must have found one of his stashes. Bet they’re going to get in so much trouble when Mechaniacal finds them.”

  “Don’t scare me like that man,” Isaac asked, slapping Cayleb on the shoulder. “I know we’re both metas but any real superfight is going to crush us.” Cayleb swiveled slightly to look at him and made a slight movement of his head, the good humor in his eyes dimming for a second.

  Both of them were just one of hundreds of children who had ended up orphaned by one particular superfight, almost twenty years ago. The school panic rooms had remained intact, but not much else had in a twenty-block radius. It was one of the biggest death tolls in Star City’s history, but the villain in question had never been caught. Instead, Blacktime and his people still flouted Star Central’s rule and, pragmatically, controlled most of the crime in the Five City Alliance.

  Unlike Isaac, Cayleb didn’t let the thought get him down for long. He just shrugged and continued onward, an attitude that made it clear Isaac was right not to actually read Cayleb in on future plans. Frankly, the guy was a born hero, easygoing and positive, and not at all cut out with the sort of skullduggery involved with supervillains. Such as how Blacktime was actually the lover of the other member of that superfight, at least according to rumor. Glorybeam certainly seemed to hang around the area Blacktime operated more than she should, at least.

  “Anyway,” Isaac said, brushing aside his own comment. “Who’s this Mechaniacal? Never heard of him.” That was actually true, despite Isaac knowing a lot about Supers — admittedly, not as a fan in the way Cayleb often was.

  “Mechaniacal is an old school villain, his tinker stuff doesn’t even use electricity! Complete mystery origin, people think he might even be extradimensional.” Cayleb laughed, rubbing his bald and oversized head. He had no hair at all, despite being actually younger than Isaac. “Man, his stuff is slick. I’d love to pick his brain.”

  “I can just bet,” Isaac laughed. “Hey man, lemme grab a shower, then you can run the footage for me,” he said, hefting the gym bag as an excuse. Cayleb waved a dismissal, turning back to his monitors, and Isaac ducked into his own room, shoving the pilfered softchips under his bed.

  Much of the room was taken up by scraps of material and a few full costumes — a couple reproductions of fictional metas, and one game character. Some people liked to cosplay as actual supers, but Isaac had always thought that was just asking for legal entanglements. Star Central was understandingly protective of its superhero images — and aping supervillains was just not a good idea regardless.

  He grabbed his towel and bypassed his costuming work to pull out some ordinary clothes before heading to the shower to complete his cover story — and chew over his next move. Isaac wasn’t so dumb as to think he had a chance of actually taking out Blacktime or anyone at that level, since ultimately he wasn’t that powerful a meta. The local gang leader and one of Blacktime’s lieutenants was another matter.

  Crash Hardiron – and didn’t that just say everything anyone needed to know about the guy – was, so far as Isaac could tell from his research, an old friend of Blacktime’s. Someone who would have dirt, connections, and other things that Isaac could use against people. Not himself necessarily, but selling it to rival gangs or the media would be enough. It wasn’t necessary to kill Blacktime or Glorybeam to topple them.

  But to even think about touching someone like Crash, Isaac needed support. He wasn’t going to pull Cayleb into his actual activities, but tinker work was necessary for someone with a low-level talent like Isaac. Armor and weapons were obvious, but transportation, communication, and fabrication were probably more useful. Isaac had already spent years on costume work, so leaning into that was probably for the best.

  When he opened the door again, he heard voices out in the living room, ones he didn’t recognize. Despite the fact that it was probably nothing, given that there was no yelling and Isaac was pretty sure Cayleb’s chair had weapons, it was still unexpected enough to send a jolt down Isaac’s spine. He held onto his towel, charging inertia into it just in case it was needed and walked out the short hallway into the room, then froze.

  There were two supers in full uniform. He vaguely recognized them, but the uniforms had an insignia everyone knew; Star Central’s signature golden-rayed icon. One was clearly a tech type, an albino man with a cybernetic slimsuit and what seemed to be mechanical eyes, while the other was probably a bruiser given her oversized gauntlets.

  “Isaac Hartson, D-Class Strength-type power,” the cyborg muttered dismissively, returning his regard to Cayleb. The bruiser eyed him a moment longer, but also didn’t seem much interested.

  “Hey, Isaac!” Cayleb said, completely oblivious to the super’s attitudes. “Cyberlocution there snagged my drone from the hospital fight and thinks I’ve got what it takes to work for Central!”

  “Oh, wow, bro!” Isaac forced himself to speak as normally as he could, now that it seemed that they weren’t there about his earlier theft. The mask he used at work slipped into place, something less confrontational and slightly duller than he was at home. A slight slump of the shoulders, a bit of droop to the eyes, and a certain set to his jaw made people see him as quite a bit dimmer than he actually was. It was especially hard since he had to force down his frustration at the timing; he never would have risked the robbery if he’d known Cayleb was going to get that kind of offer. “That’s a hell of an offer. Congrats, man!”

  “Heck yeah!” Cayleb said cheerfully. “Imagine all the toys I’ll get to work with!”

  “You would be beholden to a certain degree of security, Mister Ruston,” Cyberlocution said to Cayleb, as if in an attempt to repress Cayleb’s usual cheer.

  “Oh, sure, sure. Not a problem,” Cayleb said. “When do I start?”

  “Immediately,” the bruiser grunted. “We’ve got a van inbound.” Isaac nearly rolled his eyes at the word choice, figuring that the super was ex-military. Or maybe she just read too many books.

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” Cayleb said, his cheer disappearing as the potential suddenly became immediate. Isaac pursed his lips for a moment, then crossed over to clap Cayleb on the shoulder, not missing how both supers tracked him very closely as he did so.

  “Hey man, it’s going to be great,” he said. He personally didn’t trust any of the supers, no matter what their designation was, but a tinker just couldn’t get by in a cramped, low-income apartment. Cayleb was practically a brother, and Isaac wasn’t going to let him ruin his chances with cold feet or just because it was personally inconvenient. “They’ll probably have something better than a neck brace for that giant noggin of yours, too. Just remember your pal Isaac when you’re tinkering up supercars or something, eh?”

  “Hah! Yeah, don’t worry about that, man,” Cayleb said, thumping his chest in a salute that he’d picked up from one of the Tech Legion’s commanders. “I’ll make sure I make you some good stuff.”

  Cyberlocution politely waved Isaac away and produced a small packet from a pouch at his waist, eyes glowing before he pressed it against Cayleb’s chest. In a moment it expanded outward into a cybernetic suit, but one that wrapped around Cayleb’s oversized cranium. Cayleb blinked, and then stood — something he didn’t do often. His grin somehow got even wider.

  It didn’t take much more time from there. Some very professional movers bustled in, secured all of Cayleb’s belongings, and bustled out in less than five minutes. Cyberlocution and the bruiser whose name Isaac still didn’t know stood impatiently as Cayleb shook Isaac’s hand, looking about as numb as Isaac felt. They’d been roommates for over a decade, even back when they were teens in the system, and it was all over in the span of maybe twenty minutes.

  The two supers bustled Cayleb away, leaving the apartment much emptier. Isaac retreated to his room and dropped into his bed, letting out a long breath as he tried to relax. Cyberlocution had probably marked how nervous he was the entire time, but hopefully only the amount of nervousness anyone would have with two members of Star Central invading their personal space.

  Without the constant hum of Cayleb’s machinery the apartment was eerily silent, but Isaac couldn’t sit and stew. Things may have changed instantly for his roommate, but Isaac still had work the next day, bills to pay, and rent to make. Not to mention a hundred thousand credits of stolen softchip to somehow liquidate.

  The last thought really made it hit home, for some reason. He’d planned the heist in secret for months, tested his powers where nobody was watching, and planned on ways to present the loot to Cayleb. Yet it had turned out to be entirely useless; his first great crime rendered without a point.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told himself aloud, making a tossing-away gesture with one hand as if he could physically discard his worries. “I’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

  His shift at the hospital was just the same as any other. Saint Anne’s served supers in addition to normal, and so it had some exceedingly heavy equipment that it was his job to move around. Isaac was little more than a glorified janitor, allowed to handle the megacredit machines simply because his so-called strength power came with a lot of finesse. He ran no risk of breaking anything when he moved it around, even when he was irritated.

  “Come on, Isaac, we don’t have all day!” Mister Graham said from the doorway of the freight elevator, as if he weren’t responsible for scheduling and sending people out to shift equipment. Graham was a C-class psychometry super, something verging on technopathy, perfect for making sure that none of the scanners or bracers or regenerators were damaged or broken. He was also an A-class pain in the ass, taking all the credit and none of the blame for the maintenance and janitorial department and resulting in Isaac’s nearly-nonexistent raises.

  In a way, Isaac was fine with that. Janitors were invisible, and that gave him more latitude to move around — and access to the hospital gave him more opportunity to find out about supers. But it wasn’t like he would had much of a choice, either. Just being registered as a meta, even D-grade, closed a lot of doors, requiring overhead most normal employers would wish to avoid, and as a low grade super with, at least to the assessors, a simple strength ability, he didn’t have any talents in great demand.

  The only other place he might have found a use was in construction – there was plenty of that, thanks to the occasional destruction wrought by supervillains – but that didn’t appeal to him. More, it might expose his actual talent, which he certainly didn’t want. Not only did he want to avoid being recruited by either heroes or villains, but that kind of scrutiny would make it harder for him to operate. Lacking any kind of stealth ability, he had remain anonymous.

  “Coming, Mister Graham,” Isaac said patiently, in his persona as just another dumb strength meta, maneuvering the empty shell of a one-ton energy scanner through the halls so it could be returned to the maintenance area. The ruined device was one of the casualties of the previous day’s supervillain raid, which had scavenged the components of a number of medical devices, most of which he was slowly ferrying down to the workshops in the basement.

  The ease with which he could move the shell around was thanks to his power, which wasn’t actually strength. It was inertia, the resistance of something to a change in motion. Speeding up or slowing down. He couldn’t do anything about gravity, since that was a constant acceleration, and the fact that he couldn’t lift anything big was why he was a solid D-class power. But dropping the inertia of something huge down to near-nothing meant he could push heavy things very easily, put them around corners without effort, and wouldn’t hurt a wall or a person if he rammed them.

  Even better, he could treat anything he invested with inertia as possessing either its original inertia or his changed amount. If push came to shove he could brace himself against the scanner shell as if it really were five tons, rather than the far lower inertia he’d given it. Or when it came to things like his painted foam armor, he could move it as foam rather than push against the sheer amount of inertial resistance he’d invested into it. The temporary borrowing and redistribution of inertia had no such benefits, and he rarely used because it was just so troublesome.

  Isaac rode the elevator down and maneuvered the shell into the maintenance bay, where Graham would almost certainly complain about it for some reason, and then went off to shift some tinker-made traction frame into one of the secure rooms. Someone was bringing a supervillain into the hospital, it seemed, as that was all those rooms were meant for.

  It wasn’t his business though, so he just kept his head down and went about his work. It wasn’t worth getting noticed, even by his immediate superior, and it wasn’t like there was a lack of scut-work to do. Sweeping, mopping, polishing, and general fetching and carrying. Stuff that kept him essentially invisible, which was how he liked it. He’d seen how often metas got picked up by one group or another, with very little choice on the part of the man or woman being recruited, and his goals were too important for that kind of thing.

  His job kept him busy for the next few weeks, during which he went about the ticklish business of fencing the softchips while he waited for word from Cayleb. One of the advantages of being near gang-controlled territory was that black markets were sure to exist, though he hadn’t ever engaged with it himself. Fortunately, he did know some people from the foster home that had gone in that direction, and a few calls to some old contacts set up a meeting.

  Isaac dug through his clothes and costume scraps, putting together the proper outfit. A heavy jacket, even if it was starting to get warmer as spring wound onward; pants with chains. The blue and white armband that gangers used, even if he wasn’t one. He even used some gel to slick back his short, dark hair, which he thought made him look like an idiot but was the style the local gangers used. Finally, he used one of his cosmetic pens to give himself a fake tattoo along his jaw; nothing fancy, but enough that he didn’t look entirely baby-faced.

  Only once he was fully equipped did he set out, pushing inertia into his clothes as he walked the streets with the adolescent swagger of the ganger. He was a little older then most, a few years past twenty, but still could pull off the young-man’s sneer. A few loitering pedestrians glanced his way, but nobody dared to bother him as he strolled up to the run-down gas station where he was supposed to meet his contact.

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  Kevin was a former friend and a meta with the very unfortunate feature of having metal blades for forearms. It was the kind of thing that made him practically unemployable and so Isaac didn’t much blame him for falling in with a supervillain gang, even if it was an obviously stupid decision. At least with the gangers he had some kind of worth and something like an income.

  The other meta was easy enough to pick out as Isaac approached the gas station, steel-colored arms bare despite the colder weather. Compact, wiry, with a long face framed by dirty blond hair, a weak chin, and the twitchy, glazed look of the drug addict. Isaac was glad that he’d figured out a way to make himself resistant to things like bullets and blades, since he didn’t trust that Kevin wouldn’t jump him. Or even accidentally hit him with razor-sharp edges.

  “Yo, Kevin.” Isaac strolled up, getting all the way into Kevin’s personal space the way a superior ganger might and looking down at the man. Kevin took a step back, eyes clearing from the drug-induced haze and taking in Isaac’s posture. “Long time, no see,” Isaac continued, barging forward and keeping the posture of the arrogant superior. Not that he had anything against Kevin, but there was no trusting anyone in the employ of a supervillain.

  “Hey, uh, Isaac…” Kevin trailed off, not sure how to deal with Isaac’s sneer. For his part, Isaac had to ruthlessly quash any empathy. If he wanted to sell off the softchips in any kind of timeframe, he needed to deal with criminals, and criminals were dangerous.

  “Y’said y’had a contact.” Isaac loomed over Kevin, even if the blade meta was actually an inch or so taller. Clearly Keven was a bruiser, not a leader in the gangs, otherwise he might have actually stood up to Isaac’s swagger.

  “Oh, uh, yeah!” Kevin nodded convulsively. “Yeah, I can introduce you to Kleppy.”

  “By all means, lead the way,” Isaac said, not budging from where he stood. Kevin blinked at him again, then seemed to get the hint and circled around Isaac, glancing back two or three times in the span of a couple seconds. Isaac strolled after him, hands in pockets. He kept his back straight, acting like he owned the street, but his hands were wrapped around a couple of brass knuckles that he’d stuffed into his jacket. With his abilities, he could pack a pretty mean punch.

  A few minutes of walking along dirty streets brought them to a pawn shop with bars on the windows and a bright sign proclaiming that they bought anything. Which was a place Isaac could have found himself, but hopefully with an actual introduction he could do more than just try to liquidate the softchips at one-tenth cost. Inside, it seemed the proprietor was ordinary enough, but not all metas were obvious and Isaac kept the inertia invested in his clothing just in case.

  “Heeey, Kleppy. Got someone who wants to do business,” Kevin said, trying to match Isaac’s swagger as if he were actually important.

  “Oh yeah?” Kleppy squinted at Isaac from a tanned and wrinkled face, the guy looking like he’d been dealing with shady customers for at least sixty years. “What have you got?”

  “Softchips,” Isaac said, withdrawing a sheet of the stuff from his pockets. They were packaged like pills, in perforated eight-by-sixteen plastic trays. He’d only brought a quarter of what he pilfered, just in case, and the way that Kleppy’s deeply-lined face lit up with avarice confirmed that was the right choice.

  “How many you got?” Kleppy asked, holding out a hand. Isaac didn’t hand over the merchandise. A thug might, but Isaac was playing a smart thug and should be more careful.

  “How much are you paying?” Isaac countered, returning the sheet to his pockets and looking down his nose at Kleppy. It wasn’t just an act either, since the entire point of the trip was the money. There was definitely a point at which it would be better to sell them at an online auction, even if it would take a very long time to offload them if he wanted to avoid suspicion.

  “Ten per,” Kleppy said, and Isaac just turned around. Kleppy wasn’t taking things seriously, since softchips were usually closer to a hundred and fifty creds secondhand. More, when they were fresh in the packaging like they were. He’d gotten two steps toward the door when Kleppy’s voice came again. “Hey, I’m just kidding! I can pay ninety for them.”

  Isaac paused, turning around to look at Kleppy and raising his brows while Kevin hovered uncertainly. After a moment Isaac extracted two sheets from his pocket and held them up, showing them to Kleppy.

  “One-twenty,” Isaac said, no humor in his voice.

  “Best I can do is ninety-five,” Kleppy said, eyeing the softchips.

  “One-ten, but I’ll provide a minimum of four sheets at once.” That was half a box, five hundred twelve, as softchips were sold in powers of two. Kleppy chewed on nothing in particular for a bit, focused on the softchips in Isaac’s hand, then shrugged. “One hundred, and four sheets at once.”

  “Done,” Isaac said, able to do the math easily enough, and the two boxes would net him enough for a reasonable nest egg without breaking into the amounts of money that would draw serious attention. He took out the last two sheets from his pocket and held them out, although he was still expecting some attempt to cheat him. Maybe Kleppy would just grab them and refuse to pay.

  Surprisingly, the shifty-looking man actually unlocked a cabinet underneath the counter and extracted the required credsticks, placing them on the counter and stowing the softchips in the same place. Isaac figured that Kleppy was used to dealing with metas, who wouldn’t be particularly forgiving if Kleppy welched on them. Or maybe it was just the promise of future product.

  “Hey, you gonna have more?” Kleppy asked, while Kevin hung on every word for some reason.

  “Probably,” Isaac said, refusing to make a commitment, and turned to leave. This time nobody stopped him, though Kevin tagged along behind. For all that Isaac had known Kevin once upon a time, he definitely didn’t want a drugged-up meta following him around, so Isaac popped a couple of tabs off the smallest credstick and tossed them over.

  “For your help,” Isaac said. “Enjoy.” Kevin pocketed the money, looked at Isaac and worked his jaw for a moment.

  “Hey man, I got — I got a dealer for Fasttab. Makes everything seem so slow, like whoosh.”

  “No,” Isaac said, giving Kevin a scornful look that was mostly real. There was just no way he was going to join a junkie on a drug run. “I stay clean,” he said, and waved the other meta off. Kevin frowned but scurried away after a moment, heading down the street deeper into gang territory. Isaac went the other way, keeping up the swagger so nobody thought about jumping him after clearly doing some business with the fence. Even if he looked like a ganger, that didn’t make him safe, and it didn’t require meta powers to slip a knife in someone’s ribs or hit them over the head with a pipe.

  His brisk, purposeful walk deterred any scavengers from trying to approach him, and marching into a slightly better area of the city shed the pair of gangers following him. He ducked into an alley, taking a plastic bag from his pocket and removing his jacket and the chains from his pants, shoving them both in the bag and then ruffling his hair. An alcohol wipe got rid of the tattoo, and he relaxed his stance to the slight hunch of his janitor persona. When he emerged a few second later, he was obviously not a ganger, and was then more comfortable headed home.

  Some might have thought he was being overly cautious, but Isaac had been at the hospital long enough, and done enough research, to know how dangerous supervillains could be. Or for that matter, superheroes. They were all, without exception, brutal mercenaries who didn’t think twice about destruction and death.

  When he got home, he checked his network accounts once again, still finding nothing from Cayleb. Which contributed to the growing unease and a gnawing feeling in the pit of Isaac’s stomach, something that made his sleep restless and his job more irritating than ever. He went to work, returned home, went to work, returned home. Isaac had few friends outside his former roommate, and with Cayleb’s status in flux it was hard to make any plans.

  Isaac returned to Kleppy’s pawn shop three more times over the next two weeks, liquidating the remainder of the softchips. He used his ganger persona each time, sauntering fearlessly down the street, and nobody dared mess with him. Nobody called his bluff, either, which was fortunate since he wouldn’t have been able to really fake being in Crash’s gang.

  At the end of the third week after the superheroes recruited his friend, Isaac finally got a message from Cayleb. Yet he just felt a sense of foreboding as he clicked the item in his inbox, which had the header of whoops!

  Hey Isaac! If you’re reading this I haven’t been around to stop my dead man’s switch from going off, or maybe I just forgot. If I forgot, feel free to slap me about the head. If I’m not around, well, I’m sure you know more about what’s going on than I do. On the off chance someone needs a will, just send all my tinker stuff to Techbro, and you can have everything else.

  Isaac stared at the message, simple as it was, and felt the bile on his tongue. He rose from his computer, went to the bathroom, and spat, washing out his mouth and then chugging a glass of water. His thoughts spun pointlessly for a few minutes, his hands pouring himself another glass of water of their own accord, which downed before he turned to leave the apartment. There was only one thing he could think to do.

  In all his time in Star City he’d never visited Star Central. Even when he was a kid at the children’s home, despite Star Central actually funding the home, there’d never been a trip out there. The enormous tower loomed in the middle of the city, taking up a full block and fifty stories tall, a pillar of white metal and dark glass, housing the superheroes that protected Star City from villains and the depredations of the world at large. For all that, the lot where Isaac parked his old, beat-up car was just like any other, if occupied by a higher class of vehicle than he normally saw.

  Isaac looked both ways before crossing the road and headed for the front doors, noting that there were more metas – or properly, supers – in evidence than anywhere else in the city. A sentinel inside, figures flying to and from balconies high up on the building, and there was almost certainly a tinker or two behind the slick, low-profile camera bubbles that were dotted all over the building.

  He was in his janitor persona, hair slightly unkempt, with a hunch to his shoulders and a droop to his eyelids. It put him at the bottom-most rung of the kinds who frequented Star Central, who seemed to be mostly individuals in suits or designer dresses. Or, of course, costumes.

  A gust of wind hit him just before he went inside, cold air seeming to blow right through his jacket. The interior was warm though, perfectly climate controlled as might be expected, spotless and populated with more metas than Isaac had seen in one place before. Mostly they were clustered around a desk with a sign above it labeled Tasks and Bounties, presumably loitering to wait for something they could fulfill, but many were entering or leaving a personnel-only area at the far side. Isaac ignored all that and crossed to the information desk, standing in line and tapping his fingers impatiently against his pockets.

  “Can I help you?” A listless meta drawled, a third eye on her forehead managing to look just as bored as the rest of her.

  “Uhh..” Isaac affected uncertainty, even if he’d rehearsed dozens of lines in his mind. “So, a friend of mine was recruited a few weeks ago? And I haven’t heard from him,” Isaac explained, although he very much doubted that he’d get anything useful from the receptionist. “His name’s Cayleb. Cayleb Ruston. Is he doing okay?”

  “One moment,” the secretary said, still bored, and tapped at her computer. Then tapped again, as Isaac bounced impatiently on his feet, trying to ignore the taste of anxiety in his own saliva.

  “Mister Ruston is on a classified project.” The voice came not from a secretary, but from a woman that had somehow appeared at Isaac’s back. He whirled around before he could suppress his own reaction, eyeing a tall, busty super in a faceless black-and-gold armor with the icon of Star Central on both her shoulders. Glorybeam herself. “You are Isaac Hartson. You work at Saint Anne’s Metahuman Hospital.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Err. Yes.” Isaac said, gawking at the S-Class super and clinging desperately to his cover as a slightly dim janitor.

  “Initial appraisal put you at D-Class, Strength type,” the woman said. “I believe that may no longer be accurate. Methysia, schedule a follow-up appraisal for Mister Hartson on Monday.”

  “Of course, Glorybeam,” the secretary replied, followed by the sound of keys rapidly striking a keyboard. “Monday at noon.”

  “Monday at noon,” Glorybeam said. “Be there, Mister Hartson.”

  “I, uh, okay then,” Isaac replied, although he was already trying to figure out how to get out of it. Whether Cayleb was perfectly fine and just isolated, or had been consumed by something terrible within Star Central, Isaac wouldn’t be able to do what he wanted if the supers got their hands on him. No freedom, and certainly no accountability for either the supervillains or Cayleb. Not that he was going to give up, but for right now, it was time to leave.

  Isaac Hartson needed to disappear.

  Body of Words

  Blurb: Marcus and Cynthia, historian and linguist, are explorers of ruins – the ruins of civilizations thousands of years old, out among the stars. Arriving on a new world isn’t unusual for them, but that world having magic certainly is. The goal is straightforward: get back home. The path there certainly is not. The pair to contend with the native civilizations, which are powerful and dangerous in their own right, as well as the relic technology of the civilization that opened the way to this world in the first place.

  Author’s Comments: In some ways the protagonists are from the same world as SDE, posthumans with some flourishes. But unlike SDE, we’re working with magic. This is a breadth-oriented progression fantasy with some scifi elements. The magic system is pretty discrete and relatively low-powered, to avoid some of the inevitable cultivation world elements it’d otherwise create.

  Chapter 1 – Tipler

  “This should really be a black hole.”

  Marcus stared through the viewscreen of the runabout Where There’s A Whip There’s A Way as it approached what looked to be an ordinary human habitat in the classic O’Neill mold. A pair of counter-rotating cylinders, looking like they were made out of some silvery-matte metal hung in space, far from any star or planet. The visual was misleading, since the gravity readings they’d taken from some light-years out confirmed there were thousands of stellar masses there — except none of it was in evidence close in.

  “There’s only one thing I can think it’s made of,” Navigator Merle said over the commlink, pausing dramatically. The rest of the crew back on the main ship, the exploratory vessel The Well Known Jones, jeered at Merle’s theatrics.

  “Well?” Cynthia asked, Marcus’ wife being the only other one on the Whip. “We’re the ones who are headed in there, Merle. Don’t tease me!”

  “Fine, fine,” Merle said, waving a tentacle from the viewscreen. As a four-ton cephalopod, her gestures were always expressive, by sheer scale if nothing else. “I think it’s a cosmic string.”

  “I’m not a physicist, but even I know that’s silly,” Marcus said dryly. A cosmic string wasn’t even a physical object as such, just a one-dimensional flaw in spacetime from the birth of the universe.

  “That might explain the spectral analysis though,” Pilot Meck said with clear reluctance, his two-dimensional avatar pacing across the viewscreen. “It’s the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen, flat all the way across.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel so much better,” Cynthia said with a laugh. She wasn’t physically present in the cockpit with Marcus, but rather resting in a small implant in the brain of bioengineered body Marcus was wearing. Unlike the rest of the crew she wasn’t actually biologically based, but rather a natural-born AI.

  “Mysterious megastructure, made out of impossible materials, which can’t be explored remotely?” Marcus laughed, as the material blocked the signals from the drones they’d sent to survey it, meaning it required more than some simple programming to map the interior. “It’s exciting, but there’s a reason we use backups.”

  The pair of them were not just on the Whip, but also back on the Jones. Nobody explored relics left behind by human – or alien – civilizations without at least that contingency. For all that they loved their work, everyone on the Jones knew how dangerous relic technology could be. The Jones had explored hundreds of ruins over thousands of years, and had run into lethal response more than once. Captain Dromall had even needed to rebuild the Jones from scratch – and restore everyone from backup – twice.

  “True, but keep yourself safe,” Dromall ordered. “And make sure you take plenty of recordings, dammit. I don’t want another incident where there’s only some EyeCam footage of a priceless historical relic before it falls apart.”

  “Hey, you try keeping focus when you’re being assaulted by fish!” Merle protested. “Besides, it was your idea for me to be the first one down to that ocean moon!”

  Marcus chuckled as the crew of the Jones continued to bicker good-naturedly, steering the Whip with gentle taps on the controls. This close to the Jones and to unknown artifacts, the only propulsion they dared use was cold-gas, meaning the trip between the exploration vessel and their target was not a short one. Nor was it purely ballistic, as despite entire suns worth gravity being somehow offset so close to the artifact, there were still some bobbles here and there that he had to correct for.

  “I wonder if it was never decorated, or all the decorations got worn off the cosmic string material?” Cynthia mused as the shuttle drifted toward the habitat. “I imagine it’s practically indestructible.”

  So far there hadn’t been a need for either his or Cynthia’s specialties, as there were no markings or symbols for either an historian or a linguist to decipher. While Marcus had a thorough knowledge of much of humanity’s spread across the stars, something as simple as an O’Neill cylinder didn’t tell him much, especially one so shorn of details.

  “Merle, was there a supernova or something in the area in the past, oh, twenty or thirty thousand years?” Marcus asked. There was no telling how old the artifact might be, but he had a sneaking suspicion it was human. One of the problems with being some fifty thousand years behind the furthest frontier of expansion was that many of the ruins and artifacts they came across were relics of some long-ago colonization effort, from megastructures to cave drawings. Not that the galaxy was abandoned, but it was an extremely large place and active civilizations were few and far between.

  “Looks like there could have been a nearby gamma-ray burster four thousand years ago,” Merle volunteered, and Marcus gestured triumphantly at the frosted-silver surface of the habitat. Even if such cataclysms wouldn’t dent cosmic strings, they would certainly strip the paint.

  “Well, hopefully we aren’t looking at an artifact built by Sufficiently Advanced Morons,” Dromall said. “Remember the Nothing Factory?” Everyone groaned. That particular relic was one of the most frustrating they’d run across, as it was a clearly functioning machine, but there were no control surfaces, no symbology, no intake or output. Just something grinding away with no hint as to its true purpose.

  “Well, at least this one opens up,” Meck said, as the habitat grew in the Whip’s viewscreen. “I’m going to laugh if you can’t get past the airlock, though.”

  “Fair,” Marcus admitted, but that was why he was in his current body. Base human for the most part, some seven feet tall with long vantablack hair and electric blue eyes. Just a touch of engineering, enough to make it comfortable. Importantly, it was human, as many of the sensors left behind after thousands of years were at the lowest level and designed to detect a human presence.

  Of course, that detection could be anything. From basic mass and shape to heat, to electrical signals or genetic markers, respiration products, or acoustic analysis for heartbeat and blood flow. Everyone used different ones for different reasons, and the easiest way to try and trip them was simply to use a human frame. Of course, that wasn’t a guarantee, but it worked often enough for a first try.

  “Bah, if there’s a network I can at least give it a try,” Cynthia said, as it wasn’t just spoken languages Cynthia specialized in. It wasn’t like anyone expected her to be able to compromise a clarketech system, but it was surprising how often just being able to ask work for things worked.

  Meck eased the Whip into place by the airlock, which was large enough to hold the little runabout and didn’t require any of the extensive adaptation mechanisms the Whip carried. Marcus took it over for the final approach, as once it was inside the doors closed and cut them off from the Jones and their primary selves. The exterior cameras showed that there were markings on the walls of the airlock, and a set of squares that probably denoted tether areas for craft similar to the runabout. Lacking reason to do anything different, Marcus nudged the whip forward to align with one of the squares and shot out the Van der Waals tethers to hold it in place.

  Once the ship was stationary, air began to hiss into the sizeable airlock, and Marcus made a face at the composition.

  “Oxy-nitrogen, bang on for base human. Dangit, I really was hoping for an alien relic this time.”

  “What, clarketech isn’t alien enough for you?” Cynthia asked with a laugh, her current avatar – a leggy blonde kemonomimi of a species he didn’t recognize – lounging in the corner of his vision. “Whoever produced this was probably about as far from normal human as any alien is likely to get.”

  “You say that, but I say that we’ll still find swear words and lewd graffiti in the corners if we look,” Marcus challenged.

  “I’ll take that bet.”

  “You haven’t won it yet,” Marcus warned her.

  “Hope springs eternal,” she sighed.

  Lights on the far side of the airlock illuminated a set of doors, and Marcus unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat as Cynthia coaxed the Whip to disgorge their drones. A few dozen small, flying types were racked on a larger, mobile box that used Van der Waals tendrils to move itself about, able to operate in any environment. A surprising number of their excursions had been in microgravity.

  Marcus studied the symbols above each of the doors, concluding they were probably some sort of sequential designation – not necessarily numbers, but something similar – given that they were each denoted by a single glyph. Everything was recorded to the drone memory storage, to be eventually puzzled out. Choosing one at random, he stepped up to it and it opened for him, sliding sideways in a needlessly complex way for an airlock, but he couldn’t complain too much.

  The hall beyond was off-white with bright blue stripes on each wall, lit by some indirect glow from the ceiling corners. Nothing special, so Marcus hurried along, drones in tow. At least the inner hull didn’t cut off the signal the way the outer one did, so he still had a link back to the Whip. When he reached the end of the hall though, there was an elevator – the design of which was similar no matter what technology was being used – so he had one of the drones abandon its charges, smaller flight drones buzzing into the air as it stayed to be a relay point.

  “You’d think that after thousands of years, we’d find better technology than push-buttons,” Cynthia mused as he poked the elevator call button, and the doors slid open.

  “It’s a little odd to see no digital screens anywhere,” Marcus agreed as he pulled himself inside a blue-striped box, finding that there were only two buttons, one above the other. “But at least it’s easy to interpret.” He poked the bottom button, the small aerial drones buzzing around him as the doors closed. There should have been holdfasts to keep from bumping into the ceiling of the elevator as it moved, but there was nothing — but neither did the elevator seem to accelerate.

  “Is it broken?” He wondered aloud, which wouldn’t be surprising given the age of artifact.

  “Ping time to the relay is increasing,” Cynthia reassured him. “We’re going down, so I don’t know what’s going on. Something clarketech-related, I’m sure.”

  “If they have artificial gravity, you’d think they’d use it on the residential areas,” Marcus mused, as the elevator slide along with nary a vibration. The strangeness continued as, despite descending toward the rotating inner surface of the cylinder, microgravity continued, all the way and including when the door opened again.

  There was no grand habitat, no central living area. Just another long hall, silver with blue stripes, stretching out however many miles. More doors lined the hall, each with a five-character code, but the codes themselves were unlit. It was the strangest habitat he’d seen for certain, not fitting either residential or industrial uses, but there was clearly some purpose behind it.

  “Definitely alphanumerical designations,” Cynthia mused as he floated forward. “In fact it matches —” She was interrupted by both of them suddenly getting a slew of strange errors from the network, and he froze for a moment, clutching onto the handhold of his helper drone, while Cynthia worked at it.

  “That is odd…” Cynthia muttered. “Move forward a bit more?” Marcus complied, steering the drone another few inches along the hall. In response, Cynthia made grumbling noises as she worked before finally sighing. “I think I know what’s going on, but I also don’t really believe it.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Marcus observed, not really worried, because if it were serious the conversation would be much different. And likely be inside the Whip, having bailed on their current body.

  “I don’t have all the math for the theoretical framework of a Tipler cylinder, let alone this version of it, but so far as I can tell it’s a little like the inner boundary of an event horizon. Space is time and time is space; relative time to the Whip and thus to the outside is almost entirely determined by how much space we traverse down here.”

  “Huh,” Marcus said, chewing that over. He didn’t know the equations either, and most of his knowledge of physics was merely by-the-way, but that didn’t mean he was dumb. “And we’re floating because somehow offsetting the rotation is how the artifact keeps us from being flung about by our own relative time passing. I guess?”

  “Or we could just be just making things up. This is all weird super-tech stuff,” Cyntha said with an exaggerated shrug. “I sure couldn’t say, and I won’t even try. Just have to tweak the code a bit to account for the issue.”

  “So long as it’s nothing too bad,” Marcus said, drifting forward. The first dozen or so doors were closed, dark, powered down, but after that their alphanumeric labels were lit, and they opened at his approach. Each one opened into a truly enormous room that was, despite its side, devoid of anything but two features. Each of them had, side by side, two massive floor-to-ceiling pillars, one active, one inactive, to judge by the lights. After poking his head through seven active doors and finding the exact same features, he figured it was time to enter one.

  After making sure the pair of them were backed up on the Whip, Marcus pulled himself through the door and into the room, which had the same illumination as everywhere else. The drone pulled him along the floor toward the pillars, both of which were dark gray and decorated with white illuminated panels that probably had some sort of meaning, but looked abstract to him. Before touching either of them – which was probably a bad idea but was why he had backups – he circled around to inspect them. Each of them had an obvious, man-sized alcove at the rear, along with some genuine writing. While Cynthia still couldn’t translate the writing from so few samples, the lines on the floor made it obvious that the active column was an entry and the inactive one was an exit.

  “Shall we?” Marcus drifted toward the entrance alcove, ordering the other drone carrier to stay as a relay and directing a half-dozen of the atmospheric drones to attach themselves to his harness.

  “Oh, let’s,” Cynthia said. Marcus grinned and pushed off the drone, floating into the alcove. He expected some sort of elevator transport, perhaps even a clarketech version of the same. Instead there was a flash, and gravity returned — but everything else was different. Marcus fell five feet onto a slate roof, and rain washed over his helmet.

  “The hell?” Cynthia said, a fast-forward warble as she shifted into a higher framerate. Marcus couldn’t do that, but he slipped into crisis mode anyway, crouching down on the slippery stone as he looked around, trying to assess the surroundings for information and threats.

  While Marcus wasn’t really a dedicated combatant – they had Captain Dromall for that – he wasn’t an effete scholar, either. Crawling around the decaying remnants of ancient, spacefaring civilizations – human or not – was a dangerous task. His suit noted an oxy-nitrogen atmosphere, trace organics in line with human-base biology, while his eyes saw a dark, rain-swept village out of some old novel, tongue-and-groove wood with slate roofs. The rain and darkness blocked anything further, as it seemed to be night — and the only light came from burning buildings.

  “HEAP,” Marcus said to Cynthia. “We’ve been dropped in a scenario.” Hostile Environment Adaptation Protocol was the somewhat oddly named collection of approaches meant for the astoundingly common situation of getting stuck in a virtual simulation, angelnet, or otherwise artificial construct of a world. It was a flip of a switch to consider everyone and everything in the environment as being purposely constructed to elicit particular behaviors from anyone inside it; essentially, a paranoia about the world’s malevolence that presumed an intelligent agent controlling it all.

  “Yeah, but I think this one might be real,” Cynthia replied after a second. “Had connection for three nanoseconds after we arrived, which is about right for the timing delay of the alcove with. Space is time and time is space, after all. I think we got shunted into a Tipler Oracle, because all the timing issues just vanished. We’re sideways to spacetime here.”

  “Assuming that’s true, that’s actually really neat,” Marcus said, thinking it over. A Tipler Oracle was, at least theoretically, a pocket universe generally designed to run some infinite-computation problem in finite time, but there was no reason something else couldn’t be done with the technology. Anyone who could weave cosmic strings into habitats could likely make such miracles if they wanted, and with the oddity of the Tipler Cylinder, make even more of a mockery of linear time.

  The exit, wherever it was, probably would put them out at the same moment they’d entered; after all, space was time and time was space. The entrance had been probably been precisely sited specific point in spacetime, which implied some awful causal problems, but the Tipler Cylinder had already put them there so that was nothing new. “All moot if we don’t get back out of here to report back.”

  “So let’s see what’s out there,” Cynthia said. They each took control of a drone, which were not exactly built for gusty, rainy weather, but smart enough to compensate. A feed popped up in a corner of Marcus’ vision beyond the range of what his eyes fed him, linked into his visual cortex as the drones flitted out over the village.

  The buildings were laid out in concentric circles, with an honest-to-goodness outer palisade, and the buildings on fire described a wedge outward from an obvious entry point in the palisade. That was the broad overview, but Marcus was more interested in who actually lived in the village. His drone followed the sounds of shouting and splintering wood to the front of the band of burning buildings, where the cameras captured a number of what seemed like homo sapiens serthentis – save for the wrong type of horns – defending against someone much larger and more bestial. Gorilla sapiens lupathicas was the closest thing he could think of, but to put it more pragmatic terms, a giant gray-furred ogre was attacking a village of a bunch of deer-horned humans.

  While it wasn’t guaranteed that the larger and less human-looking thing was, in fact, in the wrong, Marcus felt pretty confident in thinking that it needed to be taken care of. The serthentis were defending with, of all things, wooden spears, the efficacy of which was demonstrated when the lupathicas conjured a ball of fire and set one alight. Marcus sucked in a breath as he saw that.

  “Angelnet, do you think?” Marcus muttered, not a stranger to some of the weirder simulations, emulations, and attempts at mysticism created by people with who found technology alone to be insufficient to the human spirit.

  “Nothing on any spectrum I can reach,” Cynthia said. “If there’s any tech here, it’s not using principles I know.”

  “So, HEAP. I guess we’re supposed to deal with this invader.” By the Protocols, in an artificial environment it was generally supposed that everything was fundamentally hostile, whether by direct physical violence or by manipulation and removal of choice. But until the parameters of the environment were obvious, following the given plot was the best choice. Not that Marcus would have been inclined to sit and watch a bunch of ordinary people get slaughtered by something three times their size that could, apparently, wield magic.

  “I’d help, but…” Cynthia’s avatar waggled her fingers. “We’d need to figure out a way to get me into a frame.”

  “You’re already helping, dear,” Marcus assured her, as she took over the drone piloting and he started running across the roofs. “Just run overwatch.” Cynthia never did like combat, at least, engaging in it. Even though as an AI she ought to be able to run fast enough to out-think and out-maneuver most humans, she’d just never had the knack for it.

  Rain slid off his suit as he jumped, surefooted despite the light and weather. While his frame was mostly normal human biology, it was still at the peak of what normal human biology could be after a few tens of thousands of years of tinkering. There was no point in going around in a frame that was less physically capable than was reasonable.

  In a matter of moments he’d reached the buildings near the invader, and after a brief instant of consideration, he pulled a slate tile free from roof he was standing on. He gripped it like an ancient Olympic discus thrower and spun, arm snapping out. Ten pounds of pointed stone whirred through the air and smashed into the ogre’s face.

  Marcus wasn’t really a fan of combat, but Dromall had made sure everyone ran the sims enough to be able to function adequately, and some real world experience had cemented the need to act rather than dither. So when the first improvised projectile failed to actually bring down the ogre – even though it would absolutely have dropped any unaugmented human — he had a second tile in the air while it was still staggered from the first.

  Two hefty blows to the face left it reeling, and it roared, summoning flame once again. Just in time for a tile to mangle that hand, which seemed to be a signal to the defenders. There were shouts and whistles and they suddenly mobbed the thing with their spears. Which fulfilled the long legacy of a pointed stick, and a puncture through the ogre’s throat sent it down for good. Marcus winced at the gore, though he’d seen worse.

  “No ideas what they’re saying yet,” Cynthia mused. “I can guess the general gist, but I’m going to need to hear a lot more to give you anything near an accurate translation. Phonemic, not tonal, and nothing unusual for human speech. Definitely larynx and not a syrinx.” That was reassuring, as the more divergent people got from base human, the harder it was to understand them.

  “I’d say they’re a neo-primitivist civ, but the conjuring fire throws me. Also the, you know, pocket universe,” Marcus replied, watching as a few people who were clearly more wary or intelligent than the others looked his way. He’d technically done them a favor, but he was also twice the height of any of them, definitely not their species, and of course dressed in a white pressure suit with his name stenciled across it, complete with clear helmet. Nothing like the plain cloth the deer-people had.

  “So, odds that they attack?” Cynthia asked, not particularly worried. With the drones flying overwatch nobody could sneak up on them, and at worst Marcus could simply run away.

  “Absolutely even.” On one hand, there was the recognition that he’d contributed to their defense. On the other, there was the unavoidable fact that he was an outsider, an alien, and likely even more threatening than the thing that just burned down a swath of their village. Which way they’d jump depended on too many factors to list.

  One of the men shouted at him, a few short, sharp syllables. Cynthia couldn’t provide a translation, but Marcus could well guess what was meant by them. The angry, demanding tone conveyed quite enough all by itself.

  “I have no idea what you’re saying,” Marcus replied in a calm tone, spreading his hands to show he was unarmed. He was happy enough to talk, but wasn’t the same as putting himself in the hands of a bunch of frightened people holding weapons. He and Cynthia might be backed up aboard the Whip, an entire universe away, but that didn’t mean he had a death wish. Besides which, if he died he could never lord his little adventure over the rest of the crew.

  The man repeated the syllables, sharper and louder, thumping the spear he was carrying against the loose cobble of the village roads and then aiming the point down. Once again the meaning was clear enough, but Marcus wasn’t that trusting. Especially when all the other people still clutched their spears, and the drone feeds showed more arriving through the curtains of rain.

  “Still no idea,” Marcus said, keeping his voice calm and friendly. “If you want to negotiate something, please calm down.” Of course the native had no idea what Marcus was saying either — Marcus spoke a few hundred languages but the Galax East he was using certainly had no connection with the Tipler Cylinder. It was the tone of voice and cadence that was important, and Galax East was a very soft sounding language, soothing to listen to by most human standards. Sadly, it did no good. A third repetition of unhappy instructions, and everyone’s spears came up in very obvious threat.

  “Well, time to leave,” Marcus said, and sprinted off into the rain-soaked night, rain smearing over his helmet. Cries came from behind him, but leaping from roof to roof in the darkness, he far outpaced the natives, and even leaping over the palisade was no problem. In fact, it was almost too easy.

  “If this is a contrived scenario, there might explicitly be different routes,” Cynthia mused. “If the builders of the Cylinder shared a language with them, then saving the natives and negotiating would be easy. A dark, rain-swept night is something a normal person would want to be out of, but it’s also perfect for vanishing without a trace.”

  “Seems right for a digital scenario, but if this all alt-universe…” Marcus mused, running through wet grass. An additional pair of drones detached from his suit and buzzed ahead, sending him a feed of the nearby terrain. “I guess the architects could just search through time and space to find a good entry point.” Considering the absolutely ridiculous nature of such a thing staggered even a bad imagination, but so did somehow turning a crack in space-time into a functional material. “Which means there’s an actual history here, whether artificially seeded or just something from an initial population.”

  “Gotta get past the natives wanting to stab you if you want to do any digging, dear.” Cynthia’s avatar waved her finger at him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Marcus laughed. “That’s going to be your job. Gotta be able to talk if we’re going to get anywhere here.” As lighthearted as their banter was, figuring out the local culture was a genuine concern. He would eventually have to eat and sleep, and if this was an artificial scenario, there would almost certainly be barriers to any such sanctuary.

  “I’m listening, don’t you worry,” Cynthia said, popping up an audio feed from the first pair of drones, left behind in the village and eavesdropping on conversations. Without a base station they had a limited range, but Marcus wasn’t planning to go that far. At worst, he could use other drones to relay the signal, but they were a limited supply. And relatively fragile, even if the microfusion energy source and general design was meant for a good decade of operation.

  “Let’s find somewhere to hole up for a bit while you do that,” Marcus said, sending the scout drones out in a wider circle. There were stretches of fields outside of the village, of course, with what seemed to be storage sheds or the like visible through the rain. A muddy road stretched off in one direction, but Marcus was more interested in the looming shadow of what was probably a forest.

  Sprinting for ten minutes was no issue at all, and soon enough Marcus passing stumps of felled trees, then was in the forest proper. The actual species was unfamiliar; almost certainly deciduous with coarse bark and round, bowed leaves like green dishes. He jumped up into the lowest branches and then started making his way through the canopy. Just in case.

  “Lest we forget that humans are monkeys,” Cynthia murmured grinning at him from the corner of his vision.

  “This whole universe might be the result of monkey business,” Marcus said, with false aplomb. “I would think you’d appreciate the heritage.”

  “I’d appreciate it more if there was a clearly marked exit,” Cynthia said, and Marcus had to agree.

  After making his way a little deeper into the forest, he settled himself into a joint between a few branches and accessed his biological control system. While the frame he had was very close to base human and couldn’t pull the kinds of tricks that Captain Dromall or Pilot Meck could, he could still adjust things so he’d leave less of a scent trail and be less susceptible to poisons and toxins, though at a loss to efficiency.

  “What in the stars is this?” Marcus asked, metaphorically staring at something that certainly was not part of his normal biology, icy fear running down his spine at the idea that someone had messed with his mind. In the meditative space of the control center, an entire extra area had been added on, containing something like the Vitruvian Man. Himself, then extended outward from it, skin, muscle, blood, bone, organs. The weirdest part though were the points of potentiality that proprioception assured him were currently empty, but could be filled.

  One on each hand, one on his feet, one each on skin, muscle, blood, bone, organ. And one that was filled, placed on his head, and containing a sigil that was visually unfamiliar but which expressed its meaning to him in an unmistakable manner. It was Cynthia.

  “Not code,” Cynthia said, dropping her normal cheerful demeanor. “No countermeasures activated or even noticed. Neuron trace says that there’s no new additions. Looks to be some form of esoteric physical feedback. So far as I can tell my housing is still physically in your brain, but I have no idea what would happen if you tried to unequip me.”

  “So now we know at least one thing that’s different about this universe,” Marcus said after a moment, silently agreeing with her nomenclature. He took a breath, manually dialing down the panic response and waiting for adrenaline to stop flooding his system. “The question is — what does it mean?”

  Bootlegger Leviathan

  Blurb: Sam O’Doule was a bootlegger, rum-runner, and speakeasy owner — until some rivals murdered him and he ended up in the body of a horrific monster in a world that was very much not earth. Taking it not as a second chance, but as a challenge, he sets out to be better in his new life — though the fact that he has been put into the body of the world’s greatest evil makes that a touch difficult.

  Author’s Commentary: This is kind of a weird wildcard. In a way this would be closest to Blue Core, in that it’s a larger-scale kingdom-builder type. Progression elements for certain, as though Sam starts out in an incredibly powerful body, he lacks any of the knowledge that the original inhabitant had put together. In general, a high fantasy monster progfantasy.

  Chapter One

  Sam O’Doule died twice in the same minute.

  The first time was those bastard Rambau Boys putting a couple dozen bullets through the front door of Sam’s speakeasy. One got him right in the ticker, and that was it. The second time, his still death-addled mind found itself in the body of something vast and tentacular, floating in the blackest sea and facing a group of oddly-attired figures casting forth strands of light that gathered together into one vast and blinding sword that came down and cut him in two.

  In the void that followed, Sam had to wonder what the hell kind of purgatory he’d earned for himself. Now, he wouldn’t exactly consider himself a bad person, but flouting the law and operating a speakeasy in defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution came with a certain amount of gray. He’d never knocked over anyone else’s place; never had the nerve for it, really, but playing at the same table as Brownie York and the Rambeau Boys required a certain amount of rough and tumble. Truth was he’d always thought he’d have time to deal with the whole repentance and bettering-his-life thing later on in life, after he got out of the bootlegging game.

  Accordingly, it made sense that the Almighty hadn’t welcomed him through the pearly gates with a chorus of trumpets and angels singing, but Sam Jones was intended to end up in the Other Place, he would have expected a bit more in the fire and brimstone department. Maybe some pitchforks for flavor. Not whatever sort of nonsense he’d just gone through, which didn’t make the slightest lick of sense.

  Sam reached up with an arm he no longer possessed to remove a cap he wasn’t wearing and got down on knees that didn’t exist to do the only thing that made sense in a formless void after he’d gotten his ticket punched. Pray, and hope the Almighty had something for him other than weird nightmare visions of monsters.

  The long nothingness had nothing but time to reflect. Not even reflect, not even dwell; he was given himself and nothing else, and in the clarity of hindsight there really wasn’t much there to recommend. Aimless meandering through the criminal underbelly of New Orleans, and for what? He’d ended up nice and dead at the ripe old age of twenty-three, estranged from family and with so-called friends being partners in crime.

  He'd been weak. That was the long and short of it. No excuses, no foisting the responsibility on others — he had known the kind of people he was getting involved with. He’d known the problems, he’d known who was being hurt. But he’d never actually turned aside and resisted the easy path.

  How all that tied into the strange vision he’d been given he didn’t know, but he was sure it would come to him in time. What mattered was in what came next – if there was a next – he couldn’t be weak any longer. Couldn’t give in to the easy path, to the dawdling and dithering that had put him into the live he’d lived of crime and alcohol. Not just think it, not just want to do it, but actually be different.

  Light began to filter back into the void, along with sensations, but not ones that Sam Jones could fit to his experience. Then emotion smashed him like a wall and convulsed in a sudden panic, unable to move or breathe like he should have. But he’d been a Breaker Boy in the coal mine before his old man got them out and knew what things were like. If this was to be his purgatory, well, he’d better be up to the task.

  “Am I…?” He spoke, or at least tried to, but the whole apparatus was different. Sam’s anatomy knowledge was restricted to a few books from the high-class clientele that came by the speakeasy, the doctors who debated theories while sipping bourbon, but he was pretty sure the tongue was supposed to be involved. Not some bizarre organ located, well, somewhere.

  He tried to pry his eyelids open, feeling like he’d gone overboard on sampling his own product, and the hazy light snapped into focus. A blurry sun shimmered and danced above, and it took him far too long – the brainbox wasn’t exactly running smoothly for obvious reasons – to realize that he was underwater. Reflexively, he tried to hold his breath, but realized two things. First, he didn’t know how, and second, he was breathing water just fine. He could feel it passing through his body, cold and sluggish.

  Limbs – too many limbs – swept through the water as Sam tried to get handle on just what the hell was happening. Expecting punishment in the hereafter was one thing; just being confused seemed too damned unfair. He tried to ignore the profoundly wrong sensation of water running through whatever passed for lungs and strained to focus. If he was going to be better than the last time around, it wouldn’t do to fall at the first hurdle.

  Memory that wasn’t his filtered. It wasn’t much, but it was rancid and rotten with malevolence and spite. A him that wasn’t him knew those figures that made the enormous glowing sword, and it hated them. It hated the world, it hated creation, it hated the fishes in the sea and the birds in the sky. It especially hated that no matter happened, it couldn’t die and it couldn’t beat the figures.

  But it had a plan. A plan that dripped with dark glee as the originator of those memories watched the golden sword form above it. In the moment that the sword was created, it drew from regions beyond the world, beyond the sky. It opened itself to the stars and so, in turn, the stars were open to it. There was a movement and sensation like air, like water, like lightning, something immensely complex aimed at a tiny point in space and time where here became there and then —

  Sam gagged, despite not even knowing what he had for a mouth or a throat. The feel of the memories was vile. Slimy, wretched, foul, and every other thing his mother had used to describe the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Whoever, whatever the former inhabitant of his body had been, it was undeniably evil.

  “That’s just jake,” he muttered, hearing the words click and ping oddly inside his head. The sensation made him shudder, an all-over vibration which was so alien that it disturbed him even more, and it was only by sheer stubborn will that he didn’t go spiraling into a permanent panic. He remembered one man who’d come from the Orient and pontificated on the benefits of meditation, but Sam hadn’t paid much attention outside of supplying the foreigner with bourbon.

  With the grit he’d learned in the coal mine, and the fight he’d learned in the streets of New Orleans, he locked away the horrible swirling confusion and tried to actually think properly. He knew he wasn’t being given a second chance; that wasn’t how these things worked. He was being given a challenge. So what if everything was horrible and unfair? He sure hadn’t earned the right for fair the first time around, not when he’d been part of the biggest criminal operations operating out of the South.

  Sam tried looking around again, this time with some more care, and found the body he’d been given sure had a lot of eyes, ones that even seemed to work just fine underwater. He was floating near some kind of cliff, with the water’s surface far above and a corrugated floor far below. The entire face of the cliff was packed with sea life, but not the kind he’d seen when diving in the Gulf and helping out the rum-runners.

  A riot of reds and blues, greens and purples, even perfect blacks and whites covered the rock. Long spiny plants and short fringed ones, odd suckered things and vine-like growths crawling and waving and flowing with the currents. Fish of every shape and size, from the conventional schematic to half-moon things jetting around to what seemed like swimming crystals flitted in and out of the veritable forest. Some of them would have looked exceedingly dangerous, with mouths full of teeth and wicked spines that practically glowed, but they were all so small.

  Or really, Sam was large. He had tried not to think about it too much, but the body was a true leviathan, something out of the writings of Jules Verne. At one end, enormous octopus tentacles, dangling down toward the depths, connected to a body much like a shark’s bearing many, many eyes. Something powerful, sleek, with massive fins extending from the side like one of the Wright Brother’s creations. At the front, massive ropelike tendrils coiled around his neck, yet both from the horrible memories and vague feelings from his own body, he could tell they were more than just decoration. One of them uncoiled, a long, waving thing that split, then split again, and continued until the end was a fine mass of tiny threads under his complete control.

  He felt queasy just looking at it.

  Just the movement sent some of the nearby marine life darting for cover, though it didn’t last long. Sam kept watching the sea life as he tried to understand what the hell kind of body he was actually in, since it wasn’t anything even slightly near human. Almost as bad, he had no idea what to do, as floating around in the depths of the ocean didn’t get him anywhere. He hadn’t arrived with any instructions, or even hints, save for his own death and that loathsome memory.

  His pa had always said that first things came first, and Sam wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything if he didn’t know how to actually move his body. People had hands and feet, fish had fins and tails, but he had big, grasping tentacles that he could barely use. There were too many limbs, and he guessed that the body’s brain could handle it but he sure hadn’t had any practice.

  The big tentacles felt immensely powerful, moving them like crooking a finger, only moreso. They curled in, and in, and in, folding around on themselves into actual coils, until he was forced to stop with another full-body shudder. Far too strange.

  At the other end of his body, the manipulator tendrils were no less strange, but felt more like hands than the tentacles did feet. The fins at each side of his body was a lot like wiggling his ears, stiff things that didn’t have much play. He wasn’t sure how long he was at it, his body slowly drifting long with the current, but eventually he thought he could move without breaking something. Except it felt wrong when he tried.

  Fish had tails to propel them, birds had wings, men had legs. Dragging himself about with the tentacles didn’t fit with the fins; he ought to be moving nose-first. Some clumsy flailing managed to move him from the vertical to the horizontal, and immediately his body seemed happier. Then he tried moving forward and something very strange happened.

  That power of lightning, fire, water, and wind all combined, a strangeness he remembered from those vile memories seemed to run through his body, and he simply moved without actually having to make the movements of swimming. The experience was so shocking that he would have taken a tumble if it were an option. Since it wasn’t, he just came to a halt in the middle of the deep blue, already a good distance from the cliff where he’d awakened.

  “Never seen a clumsy octopus before,” he grumbled to himself, hearing the bizarre clicking and groaning of the words bouncing off the bottom of the ocean — and the top, for that matter. He could see a distant shoal of fish flurry in panic as the sound of his words reached them, and wondered hazily what on earth – or more to the point, not on earth – Leviathans ate. He didn’t feel hungry, but that wouldn’t last. Or maybe it would; he had no idea.

  He was still trying to get his metaphorical feet under him and literal tentacles behind him when one of his upward-facing eyes noticed something floating on the surface above. Dark wood and white sails framed against the sky. Now, most of the smuggling to New Orleans just used steamships, but he had seen enough of the smaller, older types, inherited ships and other such relics, to know what he was looking at.

  Before he even thought about it he started upward, and then froze in place the moment his brain caught up with things. He was a giant sea monster, and whatever poor sod was sailing the ocean blue with nothing more than wind and stars wasn’t going exactly welcome him aboard. Even as he watched, the surge of water from his movement rippled upward and practically hit the vessel square, sending it tilting precariously in otherwise calm seas. Then some poor soul plunged into the water next to the ship, probably shaken from the rigging, and Sam found out just how good his eyes were.

  The man wasn’t a man at all, but some kind of green-scaled lizard creature in orange and red clothes, whose panicked expression was obvious even from a hundred feet below the waves. He hadn’t much thought of it just looking at the keel of the ship above, but with the person – the clothes made it a person – he could see the details just as well as if it were an arm’s width away. They made eye contact, or something like it considering the distances involved, and the lizard creature thrashed its way to the surface.

  Sam just hovered, not entirely certain what to do. He knew how dangerous it was to fall overboard on a ship, but given a line it wouldn’t be too bad in the current weather. At least, so long as there weren’t any monsters in the water. Something like him, only less befuddled.

  Fortunately someone did cast a line from the ship, so he no longer had to worry about intervening. Moments later, the poor lizard-man was dragged aboard what had to be something like a galleon, given the size, and Sam spotted a few other heads peering over the side as the wind swept the ship onward. Sam drifted after, considering the thought that maybe there were other monsters in the waters.

  Obviously had no idea what, specifically, he was meant to do, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to tail the ship and make sure nothing attacked it. He was pretty sure they weren’t pirates; the ship looked too new and the lizard’s clothing had been some serious glad rags. So just wandering after it wasn’t much, but as his ma had always said, if you can’t start big, start small. Which seemed about right, considering how small the galleon was relative to the new body.

  Besides, it’d give him time to try and get a handle on things. He could move, but it was like an infant toddling about, and if he tried to grip anything he’d probably just crush it. A sorry way to go for anyone he was trying to help, and the absolute opposite of what he was trying to do. Good people didn’t squish other people.

  The waters were mostly clear; there were some fish here and there, nothing like the teeming masses back by the cliff face. No obvious monsters, at least, and a lot of the sea life fled at his approach anyway. At least the quiet gave him some time to think and practice moving around.

  Now that he had some distance from the repulsive nature of the snippet of memory he’d been given, Sam realized that it said a lot about the kind of place he’d ended up in. Not to mention the actions of the prior inhabitant of the body. Reading between the lines, this was a world full of people who had reason to hate the monster, especially since it couldn’t be defeated permanently. Clearly, that entity – Sam hesitated to even call it a person with so much distilled hatred – saw the place as hell. So far, the ocean was weird and Sam was pretty sure he’d miss the little conveniences of civilization soon enough, but the memory was a cautionary tale about what could happen if he let it.

  He stewed on it to one degree or another as he trailed the ship from far below, slowly working out how to operate the monstrous body as the sun sank and the sky started to darken. Uncomfortably, Sam wasn’t getting hungry or tired. Or thirsty for that matter, but he figured that being surrounded by water, salt or otherwise, made that particular need irrelevant. It seemed churlish to complain about, but he did mutter aloud as he swam along, listening to his voice ping and click from somewhere in the massive frame.

  “O’course I can’t just go walking out and greet any of these guys. Who’s gonna sit there and jaw with a million-ton octopus shark anyway?” A few heads poked over the side of the galleon, then vanished again. Sam had the urge to go up and test his question right away, but only for half a second. Maybe he needed to be a better person, but that didn’t mean being a stupid person, and he’d worked with Brownie York enough to know the only way to approach something you didn’t know was carefully.

  “Heck, maybe I’ve already muffed the entire thing by getting spotted. I doubt those scaly folk are too happy about having me trail ‘em. Not that I’ve got any better idea! Talk about needing instructions…” Sam’s muttering trailed away as it got dark enough to show the stars — and something else.

  Someone had clawed the sky.

  Long, vertical slices of light lay atop the dusting of stars, parallel groupings in twos and threes at different angles. It reminded him of a chunk of wood he’d found out in the woods where some friends had spotted a big cat when he was a kid. He’d never forgotten the big gouges and what they said about the strength of the claws behind them, and he had to figure something strong enough to leave clawmarks on the very firmament was terrifying indeed.

  Perhaps it had been the former inhabitant of the body. Clearly the fight that he’d been dumped into the middle of was some high-powered thing, heroes of legend and all that. Something out of the Arthurian tales, but pumped up so much higher. But he was pretty sure he didn’t have claws, so maybe something else of a similar scale, somewhere else in the world.

  Or maybe they came from without, a cat the size of a planet using it like a scratching post. He decided that was a worry that he could do without and left it for another day, trying and failing to find anything familiar in the skies. Not that he expected it; any old fool could guess that dying had left him somewhere other than Louisiana.

  Even in the darkness he could spot the boat – his eyes were really good – and as the hours went on following it became an unconscious thing. At least until he thought about it, and then he lost control of everything and drifted askew in the leviathan equivalent of tripping over his own two feet.

  “At least there’s nobody here to see but the fishes,” Sam grumbled, struggling to face himself forward again, tentacles thrashing against the open water as he reoriented himself. It took longer than he would have liked, the echoes of his meaningless muttering bouncing off of both the sea floor and the surface, but the white of the sail was not too difficult to spot under the light of the clawmarks, stars, and the sliver of a crescent moon.

  As he trailed after the ship, he realized there was another source of light somewhere up ahead, something he couldn’t directly see because he was so far underwater. He could guess though, as the seafloor started to rise, that it was somewhere on the shore. A city, perhaps, though if it were a port he would have expected to see more than just the one ship.

  His thought was a few minutes ahead of reality, as he did start seeing the blobs of other ships on the skin of the ocean ahead of them, and the orange reflection off white sails grew brighter. Bits and pieces of ship became visible on the seafloor, as the ocean became shallower and the waves became more prominent, but what really made him twig to the problem was the smell. So far he hadn’t really noticed any particular smell in general, and hadn’t even thought about smelling things in water, but the scent and taste of ash was impossible to ignore.

  “Gotta see what’s going on,” Sam sighed, and for the first time since he’d arrived he aimed to break the surface. He could easily ‘stand,’ the water was so shallow, the big octopus tentacles braced against the seafloor as the front, toothy part of his body broke the surface. That was probably not how he was supposed to do it, but if he tried to surface with the bizarre, invisible propulsion he’d probably end up causing a tidal wave.

  What he saw was a city on fire, with brightly-colored buildings of an odd, spiraled, around design crowded close together around a river. Sounds of distant fighting reached his ears, and from somewhere deeper on the shore there came flashes of light, followed by echoing reports. Sam goggled for a minute, reminded of his old man’s occasional stories of the Great War, a nightmare of gunfire and artillery. The sounds prickled his own mind, the crackling of tommy guns just before he’d gotten it, but frankly the whole death thing had happened too quick for him to build up any great dread of it.

  The sight of great, blue-and-green glowing bolide arcing over the city stirred him to action. He’d never been much to stick his nose in before, but just avoiding problems wasn’t going to cut it anymore. The problem was, in a war there was no telling who was good and who was bad, or if that even applied. The lizard-people might be upstanding folks, or cannibalistic savages, and he wouldn’t know the difference.

  While he was staring, the ship he’d been following pulled into the harbor, shouts echoing over the water as what were obviously troops disembarked and ran into the city. Alas, Sam couldn’t understand a word of it, and he heaved a big bubbly sigh before putting it out of his mind. Sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof; he was just going to start by trying to figure something he could do that wouldn’t make things worse. Wanting to help was one thing, but the road to hell was paved with good intentions. He couldn’t just go in half-cocked.

  If it weren’t for the vastly improved eyesight of the new body, he wouldn’t have been able to discern people getting into a series of smaller ships in the harbor — and not just people. Smaller lizard-folk, some of them in fancy clothes and others in less, being shepherded by a few larger ones. Kids, Sam would guess, getting evacuated, and seeing that a tension he hadn’t been aware of eased. That was unequivocally something he could get behind, no matter who was fighting and why.

  He drifted a little closer, pulling himself along with tentacle ‘feet,’ not sure how he would help but ready to at least try. At the same time, there was something about the fighting that seemed a little odd compared to what he was familiar with. Fewer gunshots, more sounds of steel, but also odd hissing and crackling and other, less identifiable sounds. The distant mortars lobbed glowing balls of light in different colors, rather than actual shells. It was when a circle of grey and white light blocked one of those bolides that Sam had to admit he had no idea how war was waged in this new place.

  The gaggle of corks or frigates or whatever it was that the small passenger ships were called started pulling away from the harbor, catching a breeze he could only barely feel on exposed skin. It seemed to be brisk, given that they were making good time, but not brisk enough as the mortar shells began to land in the harbor. One arced toward the escapee convoy, and without thinking he reached out hand to bat it away. Only, it was one of those weird tendrils and reached out, out, way far out and smashed the blue-glowing sphere as if he were batting away a fly.

  It detonated in a frozen burst, stinging a bit like when he stuck his hand into the ice bucket, but he doubted a ship or a person would come off quite so well. And if there were as many flying into the harbor as onto the city, he’d hardly be able to deflect them all. He was pretty surprised he’d managed the one without tangling the tendrils up somehow, or missing entirely.

  Sinking back beneath the water, he unrolled the other tendrils, focusing hard enough that he’d be squinting if he could still squint, and used them to grip each of the half-dozen refugee ships. He was very, very careful, afraid that he’d crush them, but after a minute or so he had them all cupped like holding a wine bottle in his hand, times six. Then he began moving.

  So far he’d been metaphorically crawling rather than walking or, heaven forfend, running. But even at that speed he could easily outpace sailboats, so he basically just picked up the ships and moved. Water churned as he sped away from the harbor and along the coast, trying to ignore the screams from the ships. Even if he couldn’t speak the local language, those translated just fine. But it was all in good cause, and he let them down once they were out of sight of the harbor. He didn’t know where they intended to go, but whatever direction it was, at least they were away from the attackers.

  Sam still had no idea what he was doing, but a small glow of pride for helping someone warmed what passed for his chest. It hit better than smuggling drinks and running a speakeasy, for sure. He figured it was a good enough start and sank back beneath the waves, turning around to return to the city and lurk some more. Hopefully his intervention wouldn’t cause any real trouble.

  ***

  “You’re absolutely certain?” Saint Misele of the Floating City narrowed her eyes at the messenger. Normally she wouldn’t impugn a fellow atril, but she had been opposing Nemesis her whole life and she knew its habits. After its defeat in the far north, it shouldn’t have appeared for another hundred years at least. Merely twenty was very strange. The heroes who had suppressed it last time were even still alive!

  “I went and checked the eyewitnesses myself,” Captain Corocol said. “The memory magic confirmed it. I’m not sure what about the Tashkali’s current civil war attracted it, but several people saw it strike a siege frostlance in midair. Our diplomat was in time to see it pick up several ships of refugees and leave.”

  “Those poor people,” Misele said heavily, slumping in her chair, feathers prickling as she considered the dire fate of the tashi who had been in the way of Nemesis.

  “Well…” Corocol shifted uncertainly. “It’s not in the written report, because the diplomat wasn’t supposed to leave the embassy. But he did, and the ships were just taken some twenty miles south and left there. No damage, no casualties.”

  “What.” Misele stared. “Why? Are the tashi in league with it?”

  “That was exactly what I looked into before coming here,” Corocol said, the vibrant orange feathers atop his head bobbing as he nodded emphatically. “But no, there were no summoning rituals, no cultists, no blood sacrifices anywhere in the city. Plenty of blood; it is a war. But just the normal kind of thing.”

  “That’s not how Nemesis acts,” Misele said, standing up and incidentally towering over Corocol. She flexed the wings on her back, golden feathers shimmering as she paced her office. Her talons thumped on the blue crystalline wood of the floor as she tried to puzzle out what could be behind the sudden change in behavior. The early return, showing itself without doing anything to accumulate power.

  It wasn’t like the Church of the Floating City had ever managed to completely purge the fragmented cults Nemesis put together. There was always some tiny seed for it to build from, but she trusted Corocol and besides, it had never shown mush interest in the tashi before. Its preferred servants were actually her own kind, glorying as it did in the subversion of the Saint’s people.

  “Was the last battle some kind of feint?” She wondered aloud. “Everything it did, even up to being defeated — was it just to appear there, out of expectation, and draw us into a trap?”

  “That seems depressingly possible, Saint,” Corocol said. “Though it’s obvious if it is such an inducement, and that by itself…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I believe you have told me before not to try and read into the twists of its mind.”

  “Else you’d go mad,” Misele agreed. “But we cannot refuse to move simply because we suspect its plans. Get my skyship ready, Corocol. I need to get the heroes back together.”

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