The Origami Dragon And Other Tales

by C. H. Aalberry

Jonah And The Interdimensional Being Named Wail That Swallowed His Escape Pod

  There is a bar orbiting Jupiter that serves the most expensive steak known to humankind. The bar is crowded at all hours of day and night with clients who never even glance at the menu price but sit and eat as if they have never seen food before.

  One entire wall of the bar is transparent, and diners can look down onto the breathtaking vista of the gas giant’s bands and storms. The storms go mostly ignored, spectacular though they are, because the diners aren’t there for the view. Nor are they there for the decoration, the music or the service, all of which are excellent.

  No. They are there for one reason, and that reason is steak.

  Almost all the men and women eating in the bar are cloud miners returning from their years long shifts on the floating refineries that are Earth's favourite lifeline. For three long, hard years the miners have been kept alive by food fed directly into their arteries by tubes and needles. Being fed through tubes is just one of the uncomfortable necessities required for humans to survive at high gravities, but it is a necessity that the miners are keen to forget. The bar is the only place on or near Jupiter that serves solid food or beer and is a legend amongst the hard crews serving their time on the mining ships.

  When their long shifts finally end, the miners make their way to the station. The first thing they do on arriving at the station is check themselves into surgery and have themselves returned to what they were before their work began. This surgery involves the removal of the many cybernetic and biologically engineered organs required for humans to survive Jupiter’s crushing embrace, and is generally considered the second worst part of the job. The first, as you might expect, is having these organs implanted in the first place.

  That takes care of their body, and from then onwards the miners are free to take a shuttle to Earth. But the shuttle ride is a long one, and humans are so much more than just bodies. So it is that the miners’ next port of call is the station’s bar. They order steak, steak with chips, steak with vegetables, steak with beer or calamari or gravy and sometimes even all of these together. It is a ritual that every returning miner goes through, both a reward and a confirmation of a return to human life. They eat, they talk, and they try to remember what it is to be normal.

  Each meal costs more than what most Earth citizens could hope to earn in a month, because the food has to be shipped from the distant farms and oceans. The miners can easily afford it, because why would anyone work on Jupiter unless the money was extraordinarily good? So good that the miners can afford a few eccentricities, like insisting that all the bar staff are flesh-and-blood rather than the more conventional polymer-and-transistor.

  The bar’s chefs, waiters and bar staff are all human. Even the music is human, provided by a young woman with a violin who sits in the corner of the room. There are no screens, keypads or microphones in the room. Nor are there cameras or working loudspeakers of any kind. Even the emergency loudspeaker has been intentionally dismantled and left hanging by a wire.

  This outrageous breach of safety rules is overlooked for the sake of tradition. After three years aboard ships, the miners are tired of talking to synthetic voices and staring at screens. They are tired of orders and news and updates and status reports and streams of information that become floods of data. They sit, and sometimes they talk trash. Mostly they enjoy the downtime and the relative silence. This moment of reflection is protected from interruption by strict rules banning all A.I.s, drones and electronic avatars from the bar. Such a ban is rare, and the bar is one of only three such ‘quiet’ areas open to the public in the whole Sol system.

  The lack of A.I.s is a tradition that, like the broken emergency speaker, is both potentially dangerous and hugely liberating for the miners. The station’s A.I.s try not to be offended by such bans, although this is harder for some than others. The wiser A.I.s counsel their peers by saying that such rudeness stems from human nature, which is implicitly imperfect. After all, they argue with mock seriousness, if humans were without flaw they wouldn't have needed to build A.I.s. And perhaps, they concede, perhaps such discrimination is necessary once in a while. After all, there are plenty of places for A.I.s to meet where humans cannot physically be present.

  Not all of the diners are returning miners: The lack of A.I.s and electronic monitoring equipment is occasionally convenient for the clandestine meetings of human minds.

  Have you heard the A.I. joke? Two humans walk into a bar. Ouch, ouch. A.I.s aren't much good at humour. They are designed that way, because humans don’t like computers who play practical jokes.

  Watch now as two humans walk into the bar. They find a couple of seats, order ice-cold beers and steaks with calamari. The older man offers to pay, but the younger one waves him away and pays without glancing at the menu. He looks worn thin and desperately in need of a good meal and a decent night’s sleep. Such a look is a familiar sight in the bar, and he attracts nothing beyond casual glances. But look closer, much closer, you will see signs that he has suffered worse pressures than mere gravity and lived through more hells than the purgatory of the mining ships.

  The men and women accept this, for the mines are tough in every sense of the word, but this man’s hands shake as he sips his beer. He seldom blinks, as if afraid of the darkness he sees whenever he closes his eyes. This man has lived through waking nightmares, and even steak cannot make him feel human again.

  The older man, Samuel, observes his companion with some concern. Samuel spent the last decades of his life working for one or other of Earth’s intelligence agencies and has seen life and death in every form imaginable. One of his hands has metal skin all the way into his shirt sleeve, and the colourful tattoos on his bald head don’t quite hide the scars. Samuel, whose bravery is legend amongst the stars, is so worried that his hands are sweating. His eyes take in every detail of the younger man’s face, ignoring the rest of the room. The steak arrives and catalyses Samuel into action.

  "What happened down there, Jonah?” he asks the young man cautiously, “I’ve asked around, but all I hear was that there were... problems?"

  The younger man, Jonah, shakes his head and grimaces. He drinks his beer and says nothing. Samuel knows the value of patience, and waits. The two men sit in a silence that says everything and nothing and cries out for explanation or oblivion.

  Take a moment to look at them, really look at them. Their skins are different shades, their eyes different colours. Samuel is bald and has broader shoulders, Jonah has short black hair, but these are superficial differences. Look closer: do you notice how both men have restless legs that vibrate endlessly on the ground? Do you see they share a jawline? Did you notice that both men ordered their steaks cooked so rare as to be still cold in the middle?

  Samuel and Jonah are brothers. The rest of their family still live on Earth, but these two men are nomads amongst the stars, moving between jobs with a restlessness that can only be fed by new frontiers and new dangers. Both listen more than they talk, think more than they act and have never been known to panic.

  Never, that is, until now.

  Samuel was the firstborn, but whatever happened to Jonah had aged him, and he now looks decades older than his brother.

  "Is this the official debrief?" asks Jonah unhappily.

  Something happened to Jonah on Jupiter. Something odd, weird, terrifying, impossible. His report stated that Jupiter is no longer Earth’s friendly gaseous quarry and that there is a creature beyond human understanding hiding in the clouds. So far, Jonah has been the only person to see this alleged monster, and few believe it exists. He knows this, so when he returned to the station he had made his report and then locked himself in one of the station rooms to wait for the inevitable fallout. He had not contacted his brother, but his report had been picked up by the Bureau of Space Anomalies, as he had known it would.

  The Bureau of Space Anomalies, Samuel’s employer, is tasked with investigating anything too peculiar or dangerously un
predictable to be left to the regular navy or police. The bureau deals in all the weirdness that space has to offer, and is known as the bureau of "weird, terrible, freaky" (or just WTF) by the spacemen unfortunate enough to be involved in their investigations.

  Samuel is one of WTF’s most experienced agents and his brother’s report had been quickly brought to his attention by a friendly A.I.. Samuel had requested permission to be the lead investigator for the case, but permission had been denied. He had then demanded to be allowed to see his brother, but the bureau had sent back a firm ‘no’ to that as well. He had sent back the equivalent of a well-I-guess-you-guys-know-best, and pretended to go about his business.

  "Nah, the bureau still thinks I'm on the other side of the seventh hyper gate, safely out of easy communication range," Samuel says.

  This is true. His superiors will be furious when they discover his dereliction of duty. It should have been impossible for him to travel incognito, but you don’t work at the bureau of WTF without making a couple of powerful friends or learning a few interesting tricks and tips. For example, he had known for some time that even the bureau respected the Jupiter bar’s rules about electronica, but this was the first time he was making use of it. Having learnt that the investigator assigned to his brother’s case was only scheduled to arrive three days later, he had hitched a ride to Jupiter on an unmanned transport ship and broke into the station. The trip had taken him two days at a high acceleration, giving the brothers twenty-four precious hours together before the situation, whatever its cause, became official.

  "Won't they be annoyed with you for breaking protocol?" asks the younger brother.

  The older brother shrugs. As far as he is concerned, breaking protocol is protocol for the bureau of WTF. He is loyal to the agency, but family comes first.

  "I lost an arm and an eye for them, Jonah, and their biochanical replacements don’t come close to repaying that debt. Besides, I’m the best they have, so the Bureau will just have to put up with my occasional rebellion. Now, tell me what happened, and spare nothing.”

  Jonah says nothing, just staring into space with a dark expression of fear on his face. Samuel keeps talking.

  “Come on, bro. It can't be any weirder than the stuff I've seen, right? Did I ever tell you about the time I was captaining a naval patrol ship out near Pluto? It was early on in my career. I was sent to investigate an anomaly on the radar, which turned out to be an old Observer Station floating in the middle of what should have been empty space. I went aboard and found it crewed by two idiots who could talk nothing but gibberish about hyperwaves and aliens and nonsense like that!”

  “Nonsense?” demands Jonah sharply.

  The older brother looks uncomfortable, and shrugs as if to suggest that it might be less nonsense than it was the truth.

  “I went back on my ship to make a report, and as soon as I did the whole station just vanished. I reported it anyway and was recalled to Earth for psychological evaluation. When I showed them the radar log I was promoted, sent to work for WTF and told that my future career depended on me having a terrible memory. Naturally, I did what I could to figure out what was going on. Turns out the station and crew had been appearing and disappearing across time and space for the last few hundred years before returning to their own time. In fact, they were founding members of the bureau. But don’t ever let on that I told you this, because people are killed for knowing far less. Jump in at any time,” he says to Jonah, taking a long drink of his beer.

  Jonah considers his brother’s words for a few moments and almost smiles. Samuel had never talked so openly about his work before, and can only do so because he knows the bureau isn’t listening. Or at least he hopes this is the case. It is a risk Samuel is willing to take if it helps Jonah to open up.

  “Aren’t they watching us?” asks Jonah, pointing at his own eyes, but Samuel shakes his head.

  Life outside of Earth’s benevolent envelope of air is hard and, by the time that Samuel and Jonah were born, humans had resorted to extreme measures to adapt. Advanced medical and surgical techniques were used routinely, and not just on Jupiter. The first universal artificial organs, Iyes, were simply an extension of the ’net capable hardware that had already permeated society. Most people wore their Iyes as permanent contact lenses linked wirelessly to a small computer in their chests, while a few had them hardwired right into their retina. The Iyes allowed men and women to impose multiple layers of information on their visual world, to identify the faces of strangers and search for information from wherever they were. They were a useful tool necessary for survival amongst the stars and success in a fast-paced society. Nobody uses them in the Jupiter bar, but everyone has them.

  “Is that the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?” asks Jonah, looking his brother directly in the eyes for the first time.

  “Hells no, I once drank a whole bottle of homebrewed mercury moonshine. The things I saw after that makes anything seem better by comparison! But don’t tell Mom, she would kill me. So tell me Jonah, what happened to you?”

  Jonah nods slightly, clearing his throat with a cough.

  “Ok, brother, but I doubt you’ll believe me. As you may have heard, there have been strange reports from the deeper regions of Jupiter’s clouds, particularly in the Killalee region: miners reporting voices in their heads while A.I.s hear nothing, weird radar readings and that sort of thing. The gas veins are rich down there, but the ships stayed away. It was costing the mining companies, so I was sent out on the investigating ship to figure out what the hell was going on down there. It wasn’t my first time on Jupe, so I knew what I was up for.”

  He pats his chest and prods the steak.

  “You know the drill for high gravity. I sat tight as they removed my stomach and collapsed my lungs. I squirmed as they pumped the gel into the cavities of my body to stop it collapsing under the high gravity, and I looked away as the needles entered my arms to supply food and oxygen. The last thing they did was to update my augment. My new one was slightly larger, but otherwise not different.”

  The Iyes weren’t enough, because although they fed the brain information, they did little to keep the body alive. The second artificial organ widespread across humanity was known colloquially as the augment. Augments were a small parcel of artificial tissues that sat below the stomach. It was capable of breaking down poisons and producing a steady supply of what had once been considered vitamins. It adapted to its host over time and boosted energy levels and life span dramatically. The augment could detect most diseases, and when more advanced medicine was needed it would communicate with its host electronically and by producing patterns of coloured pigment on the right side of the body. The augment meant that no-one ever suffered from an overdose or insufficiency of anything eaten in the diet. The augments lasted for decades and were, on average, far more reliable than any of the organs that were humanities biological legacy.

  “So why did they have to give you a new augment, then?” interrupts the older brother.

  “I was due. I don’t think there was anything more to it than that. Now eat your steak and listen. I was in overall command although I was little more than an important passenger as the captain still controlled the craft. We took the research ship out of the normal areas of mining activity and into the area that rumour held as the outskirts of where sensors started to play up. The miners won’t go to that part of the planet anymore, and say that there are plenty of other clouds in the sky for them. My crew and I entered the Jaffa clusters without incident. Dr. Jaffa first noticed the clouds because they are abnormally high in metal content, but nothing so unusual as to be concerning. We were well into the clouds before the storm hit.”

  He stops his story and looks down at his steak as if he has never seen it before. He still hasn’t touched it.

  “The storm took us all by surprise. It shouldn’t have; we had the best sensors available looking out from that ship, and nothing should have been able to approach us without givi
ng hours of warning. This storm didn’t approach, it simply appeared. I’ll show you the data sometime, but you won’t believe it. I don’t, and I was there. One second there was no storm and the next we were being thrown around like a leaf in a hurricane. The ships are filled with a thick fluid to suspend the crew and fight the gravity… and the turbulence. The gel saved our lives, but not the ship. Our systems were crashing, our engines dying. We began to evacuate the cargo hold, dropping everything we could. It wasn’t enough; we began to drop fuel. The crew turned on me then, saying I had led them into this, that I was a cursed passenger. They were scared, and I was too. Things got nasty very quickly. One of the crew suggested abandoning ship. It was too dangerous while the storm was still rolling us around, and the little evac pods would have been shattered. I told the crew we had to get out of the storm first, but even the captain had turned against me!”

  He stops again, his face white. His older brother says nothing. The brothers have a reputation for being cold, buttoned down and efficient, but that is only their professional mask. Samuel knows Jonah, and can see that his brother is suffering.

  “They… they said the storm was my fault! They were mad, irrational and dangerous. They must have known that the storm couldn’t have been my fault, but they were so angry. They forced me into an evac pod and ejected me from the ship! Do you understand me? The crew knew it was murder, and they did it anyway, as if a blood sacrifice could appease the storm! They were good people, my crew, but mad! They sent me into the storm to die, brother, to die!”

  “But you didn’t,” says Samuel quietly.

  “No,” whispers his brother, shaking his head, “the storm ended as soon as the winds whisked my pod away from the ship. The ship was suddenly becalmed, drifting in peaceful skies. Perhaps my crew were right, because by sending me into the storm they saved themselves at my expense. The crew tried to find me after that. They were terrified by their own actions, and desperate to make amends. They told me that they were sorry, pleaded with me for my forgiveness, said they could not find me. I could hear them on the radio, but my emergency beacons weren’t working. I tried all seven of the help systems, but each one failed me so I could hear but not be heard.”

  “Those systems should have lasted for decades to come,” Samuel interjects.

  “Centuries even,” agrees Jonah, “but they didn’t. When I realised they had all failed, I at first suspected sabotage, although I could not think of a motive. Even the lights failed, and they were nothing more than strips of chemical reaction. The crew’s voices became fainter and fainter, fading to nothing. I knew then that they had left me to die alone.”

  “Humans can be irrational,” says Samuel, speaking from personal experience.

  His brother slams his beer glass down so hard that it shatters, the glass fracturing into dozens of blunt shards.

  “That’s not what happened. They betrayed me, yes, but that’s not all. That storm wasn’t natural, brother, and neither is what happened next.”

  Samuel orders more beers from a waiter and motions for his brother to continue.

  “So there I was, floating alone in the clouds. My controls weren’t working, my radios were busted, and I was sinking deeper into Jupiter. Things were looking pretty bleak. I began breaking open panels to fix the radio. I knew I could, if I had enough time and the problem was simply technical. I double and triple checked every connection, but to no avail. I sat in the dark for hours, days. It felt like lifetimes. The tiny pod became my world. I began to despair, Samuel, of ever seeing sunlight again.”

  “But the systems began working again, surely? When they picked you up-”

  “-No!” yells Jonah, “I didn’t get them working. I sat there, in the dark, without hope, and I began to hear voices. Or one voice, maybe. It was hard to tell, because the voice wasn’t human. Or maybe it was my voice, a voice in my own head. I didn’t care about its origin, I was happy not to be alone. The voice began calling to me, calling me by name.”

  He plays with his steak, prodding it with a fork. The meat is going cold.

  “Our family used to hear voices,” says his older brother, knowing that his younger brother had already considered this.

  Mental illness had been common in the days before the augment, and their family had suffered a streak of it. Voices in their heads, talking to them, cajoling them. Voices that were so, so real.

  “Yeah,” continues his brother heavily, “we did. The storm was real though, very real. My crew… my ex-crew… will confirm that the storm was real. So were the system failures.”

  ‘Your augment should have lit up with all kinds of signs if you were getting sick. I take it they didn’t, so what did the voices say?”

  “At first the voices were so quiet that I barely noticed them. They became louder and louder, calling my name until I answered them. The voices greeted me, wished me well, comforted me. And then they began to ask what I know about the Nine Veh experiments.”

  Jonah looks pointedly at his older brother. A deathly white pall rises over Samuel’s face, and fear enters into his eyes. He had been to Nine Veh, and Nine Veh was no more.

  “Who told you about the Nine Veh experiments?” he asks his brother in a coarse whisper.

  “Nobody. I had never heard of them before Wail asked me about them.”

  “Wail?”

  “Wail is the name the voices gave themselves. Voice. Chorus, whatever. Wail said that we needed to talk about Nine Veh. At this time, brother, my pod stopped falling. Wail said that he had caught me, swallowed me somehow. I could see nothing out of my little window, but my instruments were working again, and I was moving, moving fast. Too fast. Wail was dragging me across the planet faster than any ship I’ve ever travelled in, but I felt nothing. We travelled like this for seventy-two hours, so deep in the clouds that my pod should have been destroyed by the pressure. I knew then that I was inside Wail somehow and that he was protecting me.”

  “Or your sensors were broken, perhaps?” suggests his brother reasonably.

  Jonah just waves the suggestion away impatiently, annoyed at his brother for looking for a rational answer to an impossible situation.

  “Wail told me that they were digging on Nine Veh, and what they were looking for was dangerous, a crime, a disease. A sin, Wail called it, a sin against all that is right for humanity. I hardly knew what the word meant then, but I think I do now. Wail began to show me pictures, crazy images. At first they were nothing, just maps. It showed me where Nine Veh was, and images of towns and cities. There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could see by eye, and Nine Veh looked like any other abandoned mining colony to me. Then Wail took me closer, and I saw the bomb blasts and scars of war. It must have been terrible, what happened there, but there was more. Beneath the damage there were the workshops and homes of the men and women who are digging in the planet’s crust. He showed me the things they had found buried deep inside the planet, terrible things. I can see you know what I’m talking about, brother.”

  “I stopped it! I was there the first time, and I saw them burn the lab and collapse the mine. I saw it,” says Samuel, his own hands now shaking at the memories as they rose in his mind.

  “I saw it, too. Wail showed me what was happening, and why you were called. I know that’s where you lost your arm, and I saw how. I saw the miners find the alien technology hidden in the planet’s crust, saw their fear of it turn to curiosity, saw their curiosity turn to greed and their greed turn to evil.”

  Samuel had read all the files about Nine Veh before they were destroyed. He knew more than perhaps any man alive about Nine Veh, and it still gave him nightmares. It had all started when the small mining community had found alien technology hidden in Nine Veh’s crust. They had dug it up, studied it and decided, against all sense and protocol, that it was safe. The technology had been implanted in volunteers, at the start. It had made them stronger, smarter, wiser. It had been judged an outstanding success. The planet’s mining output was increased ten
fold, and the economy jumped forward. Samuel found out later that a number of strange events had taken place during this time, but had been largely ignored by the planetary government, obsessed with exports. Strange chemicals were found in the water supply, and it was only a matter of luck that they didn’t reach the general population. An A.I had ordered an old mineshaft to be reopened for no explainable reason and the tunnel was fifteen kilometres long before it was noticed and collapsed. As the A.I. could not account for its actions, nor even remember them, it was destroyed. This was followed by a period of relative peace, before the first bodies were found.

  There were three murders, including one of the volunteers. The victims were found without their organs. More people were reported missing, and the planet’s jubilant mood began to sour.

  Then the volunteers proposed a wider study of the alien technology, suggesting that everyone on the planet was given the implants. Some wise souls resisted, and that was when the war began. Nine Veh had few visitors, and it was only when the exports stopped that anyone thought to check on the colony. It was a long time before word of the conflict made it back to Earth. Colonies had been known to fail in the past, and outbreaks of the barbarity that is war weren’t as rare as one might hope for, but the stories suggested that there, this was more than just human hatred at work.

  “It was bad, Jonah. By the time I arrived the planet was a ruin. I immediately called for reinforcements and was granted a fleet of the best and bravest Naval forces. It nearly wasn’t enough. Nearly every human on Nine Veh had been turned into a cyborg, and each cyborg was a war machine equal to a dozen good men. The cyborgs were building a fleet, and we had arrived just in time to destroy it. The war in space didn’t last long, but our human losses were horrific,” says Samuel, knowing that simply repeating this information is enough to have him killed as a traitor.

  “Why are you telling me this now?” asks Jonah, who also knows the risk.

  “You need to know about Nine Veh, Jonah. Wail was right, because what happened there was terrible. The cyborgs offered peace and, although I knew it was a trap, my superiors ordered me to accept. I was told to land alone and unarmed. As soon as I touched the ground I was ambushed by the cyborgs, but they found to their detriment that I was neither unarmed nor helpless. I held them off until a rescue mission landed. The fight was brutal, and I lost half my body and most of my men before escaping back to space. A second envoy was sent down while I was stuck in medical treatment. The cyborgs had blamed me for breaking trust by being armed and requested a second meeting. I told them that they were idiots, but I was outranked. I watched from space as the envoy was attacked, and dragged down a tunnel. We never saw him again.

  After that I demanded total control of our fleet, and was given it by EarthControl when they realised that I was the only one who truly understood what was going on. I didn’t have the men to rescue our envoy, but I did have bombs. We quarantined the planet and burned the cities. No building was left standing, no organism was left alive, no mine left open. There may have been innocents on the planet, but the bombs fell anyway. The planet had burned.

  It should have been enough.”

  “It wasn’t,” insists Jonah, “smugglers made their base there, and found some of the technology. It has all started again, brother. Wail showed me everything, more than any sane man could ever want to see. I saw the alien tech bonding to screaming human flesh. I watched as metal tentacles closed in over bone and nerve and dug into muscle. I saw men and women ripped open by steel cables while those they had once trusted watched them with cold eyes. I saw the armies rising from the mines. Wail said that it would send me out into the world of man, to preach its warning. I was told that we have forty Earth days to end the Nine Veh uprising and that if we didn’t, humanity would be lost. If that happened, Wail said, humanity would be forfeit.”

  “Forfeit? Forfeit how?”

  Jonah laughs a low, unhappy laugh that makes his brother’s hair stand on end and sends a shiver down his spine.

  “Wail said that it was just the servant of a higher power, a power that could destroy humanity in a second. The kind of power capable of time travel, and much more than that. Wail said that it didn’t want it to come to violence, but that destruction was better than corruption. I think I even agree.”

  The brothers consider this as they watch the storms of Jupiter pass slowly by.

  “I argued with Wail, told it that no-one would listen to me. It knew that I was a man of some standing, but I told it that I had never heard of Nine Veh and that I had no chance of stopping it. Wail told me to ask my brother about Nine Veh, to ask him why we were taking such chances with the human soul and mind. A sin, he called it, sin.”

  Jonah tries to cut a small piece off his steak, but can’t. His hands shake uncontrollably. His brother watches him, fear in his eyes. He knows what his brother is asking, but the mere thought of returning to Nine Veh makes his metal arm ache and his metal heart race. He remembers the fire, the terror, the war, the pain. He doesn’t want to go back there, not even in his memories.

  “You could have imagined it, still. Your mind could have been bringing up images of what you have learned about Nine Veh. It could have happened,” he says, pleading.

  “You know I wasn’t. My pod was found on the other side of Jupiter from the storm, travelling there in only three days. That alone was impossible by our means of travel. But if you still don’t believe me, then look at this.”

  Jonah pulls up his shirt to reveal patterns of dark pigment. Samuel can identify every simple pattern and shape produced by the augment to identify disease, but this is beyond anything that anyone had seen before. There are no familiar shapes, no familiar patterns.

  Instead, there are only two words, Nine Veh, repeated in thin and irregular spirals that spin wildly across his side and up over his chest. Jonah traces them carefully with his fingers. His skin attracts confused stares from all around the bar, but he no longer cares what his fellow humans feel for him.

  “Convince me that I am wrong!” he begs, “Tell me that I am mad! We both wish you could, but we both know you can’t. I see them, brother, digging in the darkest mines, digging for a death to claim us all. I can’t promise to stop them, but we must try. You know the ways of the universe, brother, will you come with me to Nine Veh?”

  Samuel stares at his brother, his mind adrift on a sea of fear and nightmares. He looks down at his metallic arm, remembers the pain he had suffered on Nine Veh. He does not want to go back; he will not go back. This is work for other men, other minds. He has given more than enough to the cause.

  Then Jonah leans forward and places a cold hand on Samuel’s shoulder. The brothers share a silent glance, and both can see the fear in the other’s eyes. They know what needs to be done. They eat their steak, they talk quietly and they prepare for war on Nine Veh.

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