Jan didn’t know if it was his status as his mother’s successor in CoG’s civil architecture or as her son that motivated this generosity, but he didn’t question it. He read through every file and update, swiping through dozens of pages of forensic analyses. Forced himself to look at the accompanying images and video, even as his stomach churned and tried to push its way up his throat. Charred bodies and parts of bodies littered the margins of the blast, some little more than black lumps indistinguishable from the surrounding rubble. Where his mother had stood at her podium, there was just a hole.
But it was a hole Jan recognized the shape of. A pattern was emerging out of the carnage, and it was one he’d seen before.
The Canopies traced a green ribbon of filtered sunlight onto the meandering path under Jan’s feet as he walked down the public concourse. The address he’d been given in the invitation was about halfway up the huge structure, twenty minutes of brisk walking from the public cruiser bay near the bottom. Jan didn’t mind, though. The concourse slope was gentle, and the walk would give him time to prepare for the meeting ahead. And to consider very carefully his host’s motive in requesting it.
The intention behind the choice of venue was more obvious; Jan was meant to be impressed by his host’s connections and taste. In the latter, at least, he certainly was. The Canopies were the stuff of tourist channels on the feeds, a wonder of human engineering and design on the level of the Emerald solar magnification array or the transatmospheric spire of the Universal Church’s Aival branch headquarters. Part shopping arcade, part arboretum, the Canopies were a six-kilometer-wide inverted funnel of nanocarbon, spun diamond, and ultralight metal alloys entirely suspended several hundred feet above Neo-Chicago’s streets. Huge beams of titanium–carbon fiber alloy, themselves as thick as small buildings, ran crossways under the bottommost level of the Canopies, supporting the aerial arcade between four conventional towers filled with hotels, shopping centers, and other services catering to the Canopies’ patrons.
Each level of the superstructure consisted of a wide circular corridor with shops, clubs, restaurants, and other diversions built into the inner curve of the spiral. The rest of the main thoroughfares were given over to extensive landscaping projects. Jan had heard somewhere that each level represented a different ecosystem from Earth, as well as a few nonterrestrial environments.
The hallway he was in appeared to be a terrestrial temperate rainforest. Broad ceramic paths meandered through a carpet of black soil coated in pine needles, ferns, and actual rotting trunks festooned with vivid green mosses. The outer wall and part of the ceiling were spun diamond, admitting the sunlight through a weave of drooping evergreen boughs. He breathed in scents of decaying cedar and fresh earth and felt his disquiet lessen for just a moment. Real soil . . . how long had it been since he’d smelled that?
But soon enough Jan reached his destination a little farther up the ring. The address looked like a closed-down storefront, window shuttered by overlapping metal plates next to a plain white door. Digging into the pocket of his slacks, Jan fished out his lightpad and brought up the electronic invitation. His screen turned white; then an equilateral triangle drew itself into existence on the screen in thick black lines. A white orb opened like an eye within the triangle, dozens of rays radiating from its body to touch the inner edges of the figure.
Jan held his pad up to the key scanner beside the door. It beeped, and the door slid up to issue him into a further greenness.
Blinking in surprise, he stopped in the doorway. It seemed the landscaping continued inside the private suite, in a vault of greenery that even included a stand of mature cedar trees near the center of the room. The suite’s opposite wall was also glass, offering what must be a vertigo-inducing view of the drop to Neo-Chicago’s distant streets, and the ascending coils of the Canopies in the other direction.
“Hello, Jan. I wasn’t sure if you would come.” Jan looked up and saw the Father leaning over the railing of a wooden deck built around the trunk of the largest cedar tree. He was dressed appropriately for the warm humidity of the forest environment, in a white cotton kurta and matching linen pants. Other than his attire, he looked exactly as Jan remembered him.
He shrugged. “This is my first time on Aival; I couldn’t very well pass up a chance to see the Canopies. Especially . . . this side of them.” Jan let his gaze orbit the room, taking in the carefully sculpted beds of ferns and green moss circumscribed by ceramic paths like those in the concourse outside. He heard the trickle of water and realized there was even a small stream running through the cedar grove. “From the outside, you’d never know this was here.”
The Father gave a quiet chuckle. “I suppose it does come off as a bit cloak-and-dagger. The Church leases private accommodations for our ministers on a number of worlds. Many of them travel extensively, particularly those in our White Arrows division.” He ran a hand carefully up the rough bark of the cedar supporting the elevated deck. “Our homes away from home, as I like to think of them.”
And just like that, Jan felt a wariness fall over him. For all his hostly congeniality, this man was also the leader of one of the most powerful organizations in the Expansion. An organization that had committed at least one war crime Jan knew of—if not under the Father’s direction, then at least under his purview. There would be strings threaded through his invitation, Jan was sure of that; they were invisible now, but in due time the Father would reveal them.
“Please, come up! Take your jacket off.” The Father waved him up with both arms, his kurta billowing. He retreated from the railing and called back, “Would you like anything to drink?”
Something hydrating, Jan thought, as the moisture in the air began to pluck at him through his linen jacket. He took it off before he began to sweat, glanced around for a hook, then shrugged and hung it on the branch of a nearby tree.
A curving staircase of wooden slab steps connected the deck to the ground. Jan climbed it.
“Coconut water would be n—” Before he could finish, the Father thrust a tall glass of watery white juice into his hand. He bustled around, arranging pillows on a pair of leather armchairs crouching on a woven carpet in the middle of the deck.
Jan took a chair, the leather sighing under him, and placed his glass on a side table. He laced his fingers between his knees. “Father . . . may I ask what this is about?”
A flash of surprise crossed those green eyes. Then the older man sighed. “Ah. I suppose I wasn’t exactly specific in my invitation.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I heard what happened and I . . . wanted to offer my condolences.”
A spike of irrational rage flickered through Jan. It seemed that was all anyone could say to him over the past few weeks—everyone he knew uselessly apologizing for the cruel randomness of the universe. But that wasn’t right; his mother’s death had been intentional, planned, an execution. Or assassination.
“I appreciate that,” he said slowly. “But—”
“But you don’t want condolences. You want answers.”
He glanced up from his drink. The Father’s calm expression had not changed—if anything it had grown stiller, as though it contained emotions beneath that might break free if not carefully suppressed.
“I lost my son to the war,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Jan responded automatically—before he remembered it must sound as meaningless to the Father as his offer of condolences had to Jan.
The older man nodded. “Fifteen years later, and that remains the most anyone can say.” He waved a hand to defuse the remark. “I’m not criticizing you, simply illustrating a point. What happened to your mother was so incomprehensible, so evil, that words fall short of describing it. Let alone offering you any comfort in your grief.” Leather creaked as the Father leaned back and looked out the window—but from the depth that came into his gaze, Jan sensed he was seeing something much farther away.
> “I remember the helplessness after my son died. There isn’t much I remember clearly from that time, but I do remember that.” He sighed. “I wanted so much to find some way of understanding why he had been taken from me, some answer that would give my suffering meaning.”
And did you? Jan thought but did not ask. There were levels of cruelty to which he would not sink, despite his misgivings about this man.
He pushed the straw around in his glass with a finger. “Mum never wanted—” A tightness in his throat smothered the words. He breathed it clear. “Mum never wanted the war with the Osk. Or the way it ended. People used to come up to her, even after she left the military, and congratulate her on Fate’s Shears. Like it was some kind of brilliant, bloodless solution. To her it was more like a stain she couldn’t get clean.”
Silence from the Father. Jan went on. “But she accepted what she’d done, or allowed to be done, because at least it meant the war was over. Now I realize just how naïve we were.” He turned his glass around in his hands, stared into it. “It’s looking like Olios 3 was just one phase of it, and now we’re turning into the next. People recognize it, too: the media’s already comparing the bombing to some of the worst attacks of the D2 crisis.”
The Father pursed his lips in apparent thought. After a pause, he said, “Wars have legacies. That is unavoidable. But it’s our responsibility to guide those legacies.” He set his glass on the side table and carefully rose from his chair. “I remember, the first time we met, you mentioned having fought on Rreluush-Tren.”
“That’s right.” Jan ran a hand over his shaven skull. He kept his hair buzzed short as a matter of habit; ever since leaving the Expansion military, anything longer than a buzz cut felt unkempt.
“I’m going to show you one of those legacies.” The white cotton of his kurta flashed gold as the Father walked through beams of sunlight to the edge of the deck. Staring up through the close green weave of the nearest cedar’s branches, he whispered something too low for Jan to make out.
The tree boughs trembled as though stirred by an interior breeze; an instant later, Jan almost jumped out of his chair as two huge green forms slammed to the decking.
The Father turned, one arm outstretched toward the two Arashal. “Jan, I’d like you to meet Isaac and Abraham.”
For a moment his limbs were jelly, holding him in his seat. The vibrations still reverberated through the decking. Otherwise it was so quiet he swore he could hear pine needles falling to the forest carpet below, disturbed by the Arashal’s dramatic egress from the cedar. The two giant reptiles watched him from eyes half closed against the warm sun, their heads slightly bowed on their snakelike necks. The scales around their shoulders were worn away in patches.
Jan approached them slowly. A creeping awe had come upon him, a kind of reverence he recognized from the time he visited the cloudwhale exhibit at Nheris’ Native Fauna Aero-Aquarium. He’d gotten the powerful sense then that he was in the presence of an alien soul. He remembered the convex side of the floating filter feeder bobbing in the tank of concentrated oxygen, gill slits he could have stuck his arm into pulsing open and closed. The eye was what had done it; as Jan gazed into the tank, the cloudwhale had backed air and brought its lateral eye level with his. An embodied consciousness hovered in that liquid black gaze, as aware of Jan as he was of it.
That same aware intelligence tracked him in the twin gaze of the Arashal as he stopped a meter or so away. Jan bowed, curling his neck and head in the Urdeki sign of deference he remembered. One of the Arashal barked softly—he thought in surprise, though he wasn’t conversant enough in their tones to be sure.
“I’ve been teaching them to shake hands,” said the Father. “Go on, you two. Say hello to Jan.”
In high, soft voices, Isaac and Abraham croaked in unison, “Hello, Jan.” The larger of the two tentatively extended a muscled arm thicker than Jan’s thigh and opened its hand.
He glanced at the Father. Jan didn’t know why, but something about this felt like it needed permission. “May I . . .”
“Of course.” Jan slid his hand into that huge grip, fingers as thick as three of his closing around it. The Arashal’s palm was warm and rough, stippled with tiny hairs to aid its grip as the creature swung through the trees of its arboreal habitat. Though he knew it was strong enough to crush rock—indeed, the Urd had sometimes used their slaves for just that, mining the stone for their mountain estates—the Arashal kept its grip light. As though it handled something small and incredibly delicate, like an elephant balancing an egg on its trunk.
“They don’t have collars,” he said.
“No. These two are free now, along with the rest of their kind,” the Father replied, with a small, satisfied nod. “They are one of the legacies of Rreluush-Tren.” A hesitancy entered his voice. “I’ve heard my share of horror stories about how they lived under the Urd . . . but you were there. Did you ever encounter them during your tour?”
As he released the Arashal’s soft grip, Jan felt a sad smile cross his face.
“Once. Under very different circumstances.”
He’d done drops just like it a hundred times since his deployment to Rreluush-Tren. Suit up, check ammo and levels on his tankboy, and ride with the rest of the heavy platoon into deep jungle.
The first human settlements hugged the rocky coasts, close to the original landing sites where the first colonists had obliviously staked their claim. “Urd” hadn’t been in anyone’s vocabulary then. Not until the first attacks. Animal attacks, colonists had called them. The settlements hired colonists to dispatch the unarmed saurians with rifles and installed pit mines around the settlements in hopes of permanent deterrence. Jan once heard that some of the more enterprising colonists started a bounty pool to up the competition: 50 creds for a dead Urd, 25 for just the head.
Then the air raids started. Urd gunships boiled out of the planet’s alpine fastnesses like wasps from a stirred nest, strafing the human habitats with the flechettes of sharpened metal that gave their primary weapon its name: razorcannon.
By the time the first CoG forces arrived on Rreluush-Tren, almost all the original colonists had retreated into the relative protection of the jungle. Jan had only seen the original coast towns once, on a long perimeter patrol, and that was from behind the visor of his tankboy. Except for the settlement CoG had appropriated as central command, the towns were eerie shells—empty streets of crazed ceramic lined with curtains of slashed metal and plastic that had once been homes, stores, schools.
Even after CoG forces secured the coast, people were understandably slow to return. The secondary settlements hidden deep in the jungle—deep in Urd territory—were what Jan and the other soldiers of CoG’s second wave had been charged with protecting. Rotated in from the coastal command center, the heavy platoons monitored the perimeter with above-human senses and maintained the fast-travel corridors hacked through the jungle between towns. And, occasionally, got into firefights with Urd gunner platforms and light cruisers making forays in from the mountains. It was far from a desk job, but a lot cushier than any soldier on combat duty had a right to expect. The mechanized suit troops called tankboys reduced the constant patrol duties from arduous to merely tedious.
Then a settlement went missing. Dropped off the frequency that central command had established with the interior. No distress signal; just radio silence. A cruiser had placed Jan’s team at the closest travel corridor, only a valley away.
His platoon was crossing a narrow ridge between two gorges when the Urd gunship struck. Jan’s only warning had been a blurring in his peripheral vision and a flare of red in his tankboy’s HUD as the gunship erupted from the thick foliage of the valley below. He was still swiveling to fire when the first salvo of razorcannon fire pummeled his tankboy’s chassis and sent him tumbling into the valley.
Jan woke alone. Thoughts still swirling with the shriek of hot metal, he�
�d scanned his frequencies and found them empty. His platoon was gone—killed in the firefight or in retreat, it didn’t matter. His course of action was the same either way. Get to the nearest human settlement and radio CoG to get him the hell out of there.
But not with his tankboy. Either the fall or the initial razorcannon fire had torn one of the conduits servicing the mech’s lower limbs, causing it to weep lubricant. There was no way he could travel any distance in it; at its current rate of fluid loss, the tankboy’s legs would be stiff and useless within an hour. He would have to make the journey on foot.
Jan had been trained for these contingencies. After taking stock of himself—no holes there, thank God—he’d opened the tankboy’s nutrient caches and stocked up on as many rations and water bottles as he could carry in his field pack. He strapped the long carbon fiber blade of the standard-issue bolo knife to his thigh, checked the radio frequencies one last time, then cracked open the back of the tankboy’s chassis to set the charges from his pack.
Tankboys were military assets, and expensive too. However, in a situation like this the protocol was to keep them out of the Urd’s claws by whatever means necessary. He was half a mile away when the charge blew, carving a black fountain of smoke into the yellow sky.
The close-woven canopy had brought nightfall to the jungle understory by the time Jan reached the outpost—Urd, not human. He could have reached the closest of the jungle settlements in half a day if he followed the travel corridors—but outside a mech suit the rules changed. If a random gunner platform didn’t spot his heat signature and strafe him through the trees, then it would be a tree-mounted turret, or a mine, buried in the red soil and covered up to wait for the tramp of unknowing feet. Unarmored soldiers stayed off the obvious paths; they lived longer that way.
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