Beneath the Rings of Rabba on the Curated Worlds
A short story
From altitude, the juggat appeared to be a weathered, worn stump. Some ancient tree, a sapling planted at the beginning of time, had stretched to touch the sky, whereupon a god had cut it down, the stump of the slaughtered giant petrifying over eons.
Great colonies of fungiform fanned out on the northern side, some of the fans huge enough to hollow out for a barracks pod. It was everything Ironsoula wanted. Caressing it with her eyes, she told the lift to hover low for a wet landing where the slow and winding Tiamat cut closest to it. Perhaps the current was strong, or perhaps toothsome predators waited in the muck, but so much the better. After all, was longwalk in your own skin even worthawhile if Death did not walkaside, your companion?
“It is your funeral,” the lift replied. The machine swooped low to make a fast stop, rotorjets blowing the brown water white.
“Get a new joke,” Ironsoula responded, completing the traditional ritual. “Altitude ten meters, hold position. Open the door.”
The lift hovered at ten meters and dutifully opened the release door.
“Return to post after jump.” Ironsoula took the swing bar in her hands and swung out from the opened craft, diving with a whoop, for she was a happy war child with half a hope to meet danger in the water.
Receding at speed, the lift had already reported her arrival, forgotten her, was already forgotten by Ironsoula before she struck the surface of the Tiamat.
Ironsoula dove neatly into the middle of the channel. Upon contact with the water, the distributed nervous system in her skin coordinated a metamorphosis, so that she was already powering through the water with great flippers on her feet and webbed hands as she returned to shallower depth.
Scanning the deep, her sensor net discerned a healthy amount of muddy bottom, riverbank grasses, and swimming fauna, all of it scattering away from the great noise that the lift, and then her splash, had made in the water. Anything that might have been attracted to any other swimmer would be repelled by the scent that her skin left in the water and the poisonous glow that shifted over the surface of her skin. Wrestling with fangsnappers was all fun and games until they swallowed you whole.
Swimming with the current and using a bit of reserve oxygen, she reached the river shore without breaching the surface and stepped out onto dry land, the skin on her feet hardening, resuming a shape that was more conducive to walking upright.
Upright walking was her birthright as a daughter of the humanitinuum. Ironsoula was descended from a primate species that had evolved to stand upright millions of years ago. That world, now lost, had been mostly like Wustvergen, the sphere on which she now strode and where she had adapted to maturity. To walk upright was to see farther, traverse greater distances, and find new resources. Surviving, thriving, and evolving on the Protosphere had produced a species now lost to the universe from which the entire humanitinuum had spread across the galaxy.
Ironsoula removed the hatchet from the thigh holster of her skin and set straight to work collecting firebush. She cut and gathered the dead wood, half-conscious of her network counting the landsbeasterie, for a full four percent of the daylong, clearing a campsite and ringing it with a protective thorny bramblewall.
After ten minutes, a large runnermom bellowed warning at Ironsoula. A grandmother. The beastie kept a respectful distance as her cortege passed behind in strings, each led and followed by females, with dominant males in pecking order, each leading their children close behind in the same sequence. Nature’s hierarchy on a world of ovipositors: this was very different from the Protosphere, where small gametes had played the dominant selection role in evolution.
Of the five Curated Worlds under Rabba, Wustvergen was the only living planet when the humanitinuum had arrived. It was also unique in the galaxy for precisely this reason, that large, immobile gametes could store more energy for the first growth stage of any life-cycle. Smaller gametes could flail to death, use up all their energy by the millions, to find and fuse with their larger, slower, less numerous opposites, transmitting genes. On Wustvergen, however, chance and unique galactic geography had conspired to assign the gestation of those large, fertilized gametes to the hosts of the smaller gametes. The males.
Evolution was therefore very slow on Wustvergen, and the planetary ecology replete with species that had direct ancestors in very distant time. Preventing the usual devastation of impact when the biomes of the humanitinuum arrived on strange worlds had been a key achievement of the First Mothers, therefore the adaptation to this world had also been very slow, 33,000 standard years according to tradition.
Ironsoula opened her visor hood and kept eye contact with the runnermom. They were not aggressive, preferring flight to fight. Rammers, on the other hand, were prone to butt heads with intruders until their faces were red with blood. (Not for nothing was the Legion called “Red Rammers.”) Ironsoula’s network had picked out a half-dozen pairs of rammers, here and there in the sea of runnermoms, but none came close to her. Everything alive on the open range avoided her.
The grandmother runnermom moved on with a final low warning to stay away from her family.
When the work was finished, Ironsoula opened her visor to let the Wustvergen air touch her face at last. The network in her skin blinked yellow, then red as she pulled her mask down. Encounter protocols were a habit of her training on other curated worlds, whereas this world was her natal home. Wustvergen’s atmosphere was a little thicker than the Protosphere’s, but not poisonously different. Ironsoula drew in a big breath of familiar, fresh air and let it out, enjoyed the sensation of wind on her face so much that she pulled the entire hood back to let the breeze blow across her entire head.
Being a mammal, she had hair. The “skin” of her natal flesh grew much of it, including substantial head hair, in the absence of an encounter skin like the one she wore. Thus the hairs on her head were soft, short, downy, and pale, the aesthetic of the Legionary, as she retracted the hood to enjoy the sensation of air and sunlight contacting her face again.
Her face was ruddy, a shade lighter than the muddy riverbank clay. Her jaw was squarish and strong, her eyes an emerald green, her nasal prominence broad. Any member of the ancient, lost tribe that evolved on the Protosphere would have recognized Ironsoula as both humanitinuous and female, though some measure of the uncanny would perhaps cause them a bit of fright; fanciful tales of Protospherians rediscovered, to terrify their descendants or be terrified by them, was a common story trope across the galaxy. Faceflesh encounters between near-star cousins had sometimes gone badly in the history of the humanitinuum when aesthetics clashed, so that one world’s angels looked like another world’s demons.
Ironsoula waded into the river, dumping the excess heat from her labors. She caught a great fish with her kit using a a vorworm for bait. The hapless swimmer she caught was an edible species. A sample.
Slicing the fish open with her knife, Ironsoula bit into the flesh, tasting a life of cool, muddy darkness. Her machinery detected no poisons, allergens, or contaminants. Setting fire to her bundled brush, she cooked the fish and gathered another bundle of kindling. When the fish was quite done, Ironsoula carved each bit of flesh from the fish-skin with her knife, consuming the whole except the head, throwing the skin and head into the water with traditional thanks to the Tiamat. It would be gone in moments, consumed by snapping things.
She resumed making bundles of brush, weaving cord from dry grass to tie them.
Her survey had catalogued hundreds of species in those hours, for the land was bustling with late summer life. A gossamer-winged insect flew close by; the sensors in her skin recorded it, identified the species, and informed her brain of the results. Ironsoula watched the rainbow-winged creature inject her eggs into a hapless male with one tiny flick of an ovipositor. She was the size of Ironsoula’s hand, while the newly-pregnant male was no bigger than a thumb. He lit away with an angry buzz, zipping right past Ironsoula’s ear, complaining of the violation. In two days he would burrow into the fecund soil and then die. His corpse would be the first meal for his ravenous children.
The juggat loomed all day as she worked. Ironsoula tried not to stare at it, patient in her preparation.
You were supposed to bring just what you had made yourself, or what had been gifted to you: that was the first rule of walkalong. She had crafted both axe and knife from titanium, bound the handles in cord that she wove by hand. The encounter skin was printed, of course, but wearing one for just an hour made it uniquely one’s own. Her back pouch held one hundred and fifty meters of handmade cord that she had woven from soft winter fungfiber stalks and a bag of salt. (She had not made the salt herself on the Midbight, sure, but no one considered that cheating.)
The planet’s days were forty-seven point-seven standard hours, one orbit of Wustvergen around Rabba. Ironsoula had timed her arrival in mid-afternoon. It took until sundown to clear a circle and set up her camp and her fire. The fish passed through her hungry gut quickly. Before darkness fell, she killed and slaughtered an elder rammer, smoked the shoulders before a zillion little flying things could take them, stretched the hide onto a frame she had made and scraped it clean. This, she let the little winged things have, for they would clean the last little bits of bloody flesh off within hours, and then the pelt would cure in the morning sun.
The duel was glorious.
Summoning her last aggressive force, the great elder rammer hoofed the ground in response to Ironsoula’s grunted challenges.
Sealed inside her skin, Ironsoula extended the shaft of the knife into a spear with a cold snick and repeated the challenge.
Most rammers would only feint a charge, but the very young and very old were the most aggressive. This one had seen her share of battles, by the look of her horn.
“Welcome friend. Tired of life yet?” Ironsoula wondered. “Your last walkabout, maybe. I have what you want.”
Confused, the poor thing was likely smellsick and left behind by her family string. But the animal was still patient in its approach, wary of being goaded into a false move. A young one would have already charged.
Ironsoula checked her shadow, stepped to her right, grunted again from the vocalizers in her encounter skin. She circled the rammer to have her shadow on her left, closing the distance until the creature was between three and four strides away from her. Stepping to her right had the desired effect of causing the animal to turn its head to follow her.
Now her skin pulsed with colorful light.
When the rammer finally charged, it saw only her shadow. Ironsoula sidestepped the charge and drove the spear through its heart with both hands. The great mother beast struggled once to stay on her feet and then collapsed, mercifully dying after just one long, snorting exhalation.
Trembling, Ironsoula remembered to apply its blood to the cheeks of her encounter skin so that the gods of the hunt would recognize the victory and accept the animal’s soul.
There was only time to cook the shoulders. Once she had flayed the pelt off, Ironsoula took the remaining corpse of the animal and gave it to the Tiamat. Electromotors and skeletal support in the encounter skin assisted her in lifting the carcasse and throwing it into the channel, so that it would carry away swiftly.
She made this traditional offering knee-deep, of course. Pausing to wash her arms off in the river water, she was almost surprised by the approach of a curious snapper. Almost, for she had warning from her sensor net. It was a juvenile, and seemed to sense her awareness of it, for it chose to sniff after the floating carcasse instead. Still: the day had been long enough, already.
Ironsoula ate the salted and cooked meat before sunset, savoring the flavor of a life on the Sea of Grass and Thunder. The air was filled with insects, but her skin made itself chemically uninteresting to the ones that might want to bite her. Bugbats filled the night sky with soft whispers and the river creatures skrawked with joy for the buzzing jubilee all around her. A finnix lurked outside the enclosure, curious but cautious in the tall grass, probably drawn by the smell of cooking meat. She watched the scavenging trickster in low-light mode. It vanished after a while, turning away with a silent swish of its broad, brown tail. Landsbeesterie lowed all over the plain, chewing their cud, huddled against the darkness. Ironsoula lay upon the bundled fiber bed and watched the cloudless sky.
Rabba was in his glory. Feet to the east, Ironsoula was ‘falling’ as the planet turned beneath her. Wustvergen was tidally locked to Rabba in the southeastern sky. His rings were tilted to their shiniest. Directly above her was the galactic plane. Locally, at this time of year, she could stick her left arm straight upwards, perpendicular to her body, and almost point right at the galactic center. Orbiters fanned the darkening horizon, catching the last light of Vol, the setting sun. Had she been uplinked, she could have identified them.
The trick in the wild was to get off the ground, if you could, or at least to put something between yourself and the ground. Thus the bed of grass bundles and the pelt. The enclosure kept out wildlife, including adult fangsnappers. Being near the water was safer than being near the juggat, she knew.
Ironsoula picked out forty-seven of the Hundred Brothers, objects orbiting Rabba with Wustvergen, before she tired of it, and slept.
Doublehead arrived at the edge of sleep, a phantom. Surely he was watching her this very moment, under the naked sky, for the Legion had countless eyes in orbit and in the air. “You have a ground leave to use up,” he had said, handing her the pilot key.
It was already programmed.
“Take walkabout, maybe climb about. You like to climb.” The charity and gentleness of his voice were a strong-arm suggestion being made to an unhappy protegé. Ironsoula wanted her own mission command and Doublehead was the Chief of the Company. “Ground leave” was an offer she could not refuse. A setting-aside.
Despite these misgivings, she did sleep.
Like walking, sleep was an inheritance of her evolution. Altogether, descendants of the Protosphere spent an average of one-third of their lifespans sleeping.
Her metabolism slowed. Her eyes began flicking around under her eyelids, creating sensations that her occipital lobes interpreted as dreams.
The hours passed in peaceful slumber until the millidragon roared, triggering her audio sensors. Ironsoula stood up to resume her waking duty as a Ranger, her sleeping dream already forgotten. By the time she made her feet, she knew why Doublehead had sent her here.
She made sure the fire embers were thoroughly extinguished and cleared the camp. The millidragon made its horrible noise twice more as she worked. Ironsoula stopped at the river bank to draw water into her skin through her ankles. A bit bloated in appearance after, she was also fortified against dehydration for her walk towards the juggat.
Only when she stood at the bottom of the juggat, looking up the western face, did she feel its true immensity at last. Day had broken broadly as she started climbing. Rabba waned. There was no better time to make a first ascent.
This was not a training course. There was no net to catch her should she fall. Every movement had to be deliberate. Every tiny twitch of minor muscles must have calculation and decision behind it. She could never loosen more than one hold at a time, picking her way up the juggat with absolute concentration, unplugged from all networks, alone in her skin, climbing death-alongside.
Despite this focus and care and attention to detail, the improvements in her climbing skill and strength would have been obvious to any observer who had seen her in youth. She could feel the difference in herself: choosing harder holds, concentrating more on each decision, Ironsoula still ascended the great rock at a much faster rate than the child of Stonehook, the girl who fell on her first climb, death-alongside. Transformed by the Legion, Ironsoula felt ten meters tall when she reached the top, though she stood a little less than two. She was stronger than she had ever been, a giant like the juggat. It was stone, and she too was made of stone now, after climbing it.
The top of the juggat was uneven, not as smooth as it seemed from the air, and covered in a rubble of large and small pieces of the decaying rock.
Ironsoula moved ninety degrees left around the juggat, struck her pin (a gift from a friend, it wasn’t cheating), and rappelled back down on her handmade cord. She lingered halfway down the rock face to admire the view, sense the slow seepage of minerals from the stone, taste the salt of the ancient lakebed that had formed it eons ago. Thanks to the opticals on her skin, she could pick out the primordial, prismatic bits of ancient organisms that caught the golden light of Sol Vol, the slow-burning star rising above the horizon.
A natural history of the landform unfolded before Ironsoula like the panels of a story scroll. The juggat had begun as a puddle left by an ice age, the lowest point in a dry grassland, an oasis that turned briny whenever the land became desert again. The life that lived within that microclimate left a legacy of hard stone below the lake, gradually reaching impressive depth as the terrain welled upwards around it in wetter times. Then a long, dry period had eroded the surrounding soil for the last million years or so, leaving an immense, freestanding rock mesa. Such features were not uncommon on a world with seven galactic years of biological history. Life on Wustvergen was far older than life had been on the Protosphere. Compared to the natural residents of this world, in fact, the entire humanitinuum was a mere infant.
What a pleasure to dwell on biostratigraphy without a space suit on, wearing just a skin. She realized she was smiling. Walkabout did not mean one had to walk. Some chose to sail the seas, or cross the polar ice, or travel on a desert mount in lieu of wandering on foot. Once, years ago on the shores of the Midbight, Ironsoula had encountered a grizzled crone who liked to catch fish in a tiny boat, braving sudden squalls and casting her net in treacherous waters. Walkabout simply meant the absence of any responsibilities other than one’s own self. Being alone in perfect union with the moment, living each breath — this was the essence of walkabout. For Ironsoula, climbing a juggat alone was the perfect walkabout. There was nothing to be found in the entire universe more immediate and total than gravity. Every moment she hung from a rock face was an adventure of planetary mass pulling her body violently towards itself.
Upon reaching the bottom, Ironsoula recalled her pin. Her intellect could understand that people had not always climbed with pins, but it made no practical sense to her. She had always had a pin. You held it to the rock, then it fixed itself in place, then you climbed. When you had climbed down safely on the rope attached to the pin, you simply summoned it, and it returned to you. One had to be careful not to stand directly under it, of course, because it would land with a hard thump on your head. But as long as she had climbed, Ironsoula had never seen a pin break.
Recalling the pin now at the bottom, she moved another ninety degrees around the juggat to the north and picked out a new, more challenging route for her second ascent. Removing the pin another ninety degrees, she descended again.
This time, she found a rock eagles’ aerie in a large crevice, and heard the young ones chirping in alarm. She gave it a wide berth out of respect.
She found bugbats suspended in the shaded overhangs of erosion notches, their dung a lavalike flow on the rock-face.
She avoided the larger fungifan blooms, but still managed to get a light dusting of spores on the encounter skin.
Hours later, she sat on the edge of the juggat-top, drinking water from the bladders of her skin, watching the rock eagles, apex predator birds, come and go, feeding their children.
She replayed the memory of the millidragon’s call, the unmistakable bleat of a dying landsbeest, the thunder of a herd escaping, the wet rending as the predator fed, the low thrumming of its territorial challenge.
A monster lived in the great crack on the north side of the juggat, a behemoth judging by the size of the hole she had found.
Millidragons were not native to Wustvergen. They were not even native to the galaxy. Their presence on this planet was a rude shock to the humanitinuum, for the millidragons had arrived from who-knew-where, who-knew-how, and adapted themselves to a new world, just like the humanitinuum, but apparently without the benefits of sentience.
According to historical record, Ironsoula’s ancestors had arrived on the gene ark, and it had returned to the sky above her at least seventeen times so that the people would know it was real. Such extravagance was beyond most planetary economies: no world had built a gene ark in tens of thousands of years, as far as anyone knew.
So whatever had brought the millidragons here must have been at least as impressive, and come even farther.
Ironsoula would have to kill it. She had only brought her knife, which was fine for close-quarters combat with a head-butting landsbeest, and her axe, which was most useful against wood. Both were quite inadequate for slaying a millidragon. The local flora and fauna offered few potential weapons. A real Ranger’s test, which had been Doublehead’s design, of course. What a relief to understand that.
She scoped out the millidragon’s trails that afternoon, smelled and tasted its faint, moldy odor. She recalled the scrabble of stone at the top of the juggat, enough to build a small fortress. After pondering the problem all the way back to the campsite, she worked it out. And then there was so much work to do.
With a last, tireless thrust of arms and thighs, Ironsoula stood atop the razorlike tower overlooking the entrance of the great cleft in the juggat. She peeled back the skin from her face and head, stretched her neck, and then ran her hands over her entire scalp once from the back, wiping the sweaty medium from her short, downy hair.
The landform stood almost a hundred meters above the surrounding grassland with its milling, wild herds and native predators. Her collected surveys had confirmed her first intuition. Despite the seeming-abundance of the landsbeesterie below the juggat, the advancing woodline along the riverbank was evidence of a local ecology in decline. Millidragons of moderate size and age still preferred carrion. Only one in a million millidragons reached a size and age that consumed every warm-blooded thing in sight, dead or alive: thus the common name of the species.
Nightly predation was making the landsbeesterie skittish about the juggat, narrowing the range they used. The lack of prey along the shore had reduced the population of apex predators in the Tiamat. Another, even larger juggat seven kilometers west-by-northwest suggested that a second beast lived at that distant landform, too. Their hunting restricted the north-south migration trail that passed between the Tiamat and the Oxxan mountain range to the west.
An invasive species, the millidragons had upset the local balance of nature. This one was closest to the river, so it was causing the most trouble. It would have to be destroyed.
The top of the spire was flat, about ten meters wide, large enough for every war dance Ironsoula knew. Indeed, she began to do that, calling upon her ancestors to inhabit her body and empower her battle spirit. Prayers of violent devotion to the gods echoed through the valley and the crack of the juggat, returning to her enhanced hearing in a perfect rhythm. She was a chorus in the rounds, a whole regiment drilling in tandem, leading the Legion in exaltation of battle.
As Ironsoula finished her third dance, however, a discordant note blew back at her. It was long, baleful, enormous, a sickening symphony of high and low frequencies. As intended, her battle call had roused the monster from its digestive daytime torpor at an annoyingly early hour. It would be hungry, down in its lair. Angry.
Ironsoula returned to the outer edge of the rock shelf with her back to the valley. Between the chimney top-like rock on which she stood, and the nearest spire of rock connected to the ringed surface of the juggat, there was a gap about three meters wide but fifty deep. She ran this full space available to her and leapt across the chasm with the aid of the exoskeletal supports in her skin.
No numby pumby today. It was time to zeep, zeep with purpose. She would run out of daylight soon enough.
And besides, the urge to pee was getting intense.
Indeed her bladder nearly burst as she landed. Ironsoula walked the edge of the crack at the quick-pace of someone eager to urinate. Stopping at the most convenient spot for her intended purpose, she began to remove the skin. Ironsoula stripped right down to the boots, disconnecting interfaces and blood and sewer lines with a series of practiced motions, whispering the checklist as she did so, until her disconnection was total and profound.
She managed to control her bladder the entire time.
Now the suit no longer monitored and recorded her data, could not protect her bornskin from the wind and fungal spores and insects, did not clean up her excretions or rehydrate her blood or maintain her body temperature, or snitch on her condition to a network that Doublehead was likely monitoring, right now. He did not need to see any of this.
Ironsoula squatted naked, feet set on either side of the top of the convenient cleft, toes and fingers gripping the sharp edge of the rock until it hurt, with her buttocks pointed bent out, and closed her eyes a moment, meditating upon her contempt, until her bladder began to empty.
It was an olfactory insult, an invitation that the millidragon could not, would not ignore.
Having thrown down this scented gauntlet, Ironsoula turned and squatted on the salt-tanned rammer hide, which she had set there for this very purpose. Breathing deep, eyes closed, Ironsoula now visualized herself pushing out a baby.
She had never done the real thing, of course. Men did not interest her, nor did babies. The Legion preferred senior leaders who had “led their own,” promoting parenthood, so her current disinterest in reproduction was likely a hindrance to her later career if she continued. Perhaps her feelings would change with time, or perhaps she would find another way to advance. Presently and to the point, her biology was still that of a female member of the humanitinuum, her body optimized for the gestation and lactation of infants in the ancient mammalian life-cycle. As such, she experienced ovulation and menstruation, though she enjoyed greater control over the process than her ancestors. The Legion machinery in her body amplified this evolved trait. An encounter skin worked best when it was linked to everything important. Installation had been no fun at all — her body had been unpredictable, all sudden tides and shifting winds, planets akimbo. “Ride the storm,” the mediciner had advised. “Growing up is supposed to be hard. There’s no other cure for it than growing up.”
Ironsoula willed the process along now.
No longer the soft baby who had escaped destruction at Stonehook, she was not a girl, not even really a woman any more, just as the Starborne Legions were not really women and men anymore, by the end of their service.
After a century or two, her own childish past would seem as ancient as the juggat, to her.
She held a breath now, forcing pressure downwards through the core of her abdomen, visualizing her body as a mighty fist squeezing the juice from a peeled fruit. The uterus was the strongest muscle in her body, strong enough to crush mountains. There was a hot, blessed relief, an enchanted flood.
Ironsoula stood up, carried the freshly soiled pelt twenty paces beyond her improvised weapon, weighted the soiled mess with a large stone, tied a length of hand-made twine tight around the bundle, and dropped it with a measured, well-aimed heave. The scents of landsbeest and mammalian blood would suggest a calving in progress. It was late in the year for that, but the millidragon was instinctive, not calculating. After all, compared to its enormous body, the leviathan’s brainspace was rather tiny. She watched the bundle fall into the thornbrake and roll once before coming to a stop.
Then she put her skin back on. It was not advisable to be out of a skin for more than an hour before putting it back on, and it was important to keep the interior clean, which was hard to do in a dusty environment. Checklisting in an inaudible whisper, she reconnected the interfaces and the blood and sewer lines with a series of practiced motions. Menses made the last task a bit tougher than usual.
The sky was dark now. It became a race.
She was finished just in time, for when she looked down the chasm again the millidragon was already emerged from its home, tasting the gloom with its spear-like tongue, whiskers tentatively poking out of its cave, the black eyebumps visible in the gathering darkness thanks to her enhanced vision.
She watched. She waited.
It hunted.
Its probing taste organ found the urine splatter and became engrossed in her flavor for a long time, as if it could not believe its luck.
Wing-like appendages on each segment tensed, relaxed, and then thrummed together softly, a sound Ironsoula both heard and felt in ways she could not have sensed without her gifts from the Legion.
The monster now made a partial exit from its hole. It had a long body, one pair of powerful yet stubby legs on each segment, each segment a ring of chitinous scale armor. It thrummed again, a low frequency that carried through the rocky juggat, resonating across the plains below.
Then it turned towards the tangle of thornweed. The creature curled up with lightning speed into a great crook, ready to strike. But its long whiskers still twitched, and its mandibles — large enough to cut her in half — still opened and closed, and after a brief hesitation its tongue shot out to full length, licking the air and the sides of the thorn-tangled draw. Intoxicated by the scent, the millidragon pushed aside the stubborn vegetation and undulated up the crevice, emerging fully from the hole, intent on finding a helpless father and his calf.
Using the vocalizers in the jowls of her skin, Ironsoula filled the great crack of the juggat with the sound of a landsbeest father’s birth bleat. It was a skill she knew from Stonehook. Children had competed at imitating the sound, which was alternately tragic or heartwarming or funny, depending on the context.
The millidragon was forty segments long. Viewing a dessicated exoskeleton up close once, Ironsoula had listened to an instructor describe its life-cycle, handled the rough translucent armor, heeded the warnings, and studied the files. Every child in Stonehook was raised to stamp the inch-long, wormlike flying larvae and longer, crawling pupae whenever they found them, to burn and smash and slice them up, but never to touch them, for their blood was poison. This hostility was ingrained before the standard alphabet, or arithmetic. Fully grown, an adult could reach enormous size; to stay out of its alien mangler of a mouth took cunning and skill, or else heavy firepower.
In Sharletsland, the eastern continent across the stormy Midbight, no one had seen a millidragon of this size in over a century, such was the prejudice. This western continent of Lakkodo, on the other hand, still had large millidragons to kill, unspoiled tribes of First Wave peoples to recruit for the Legion, and a decent respect for tradition. There were fewer compromises, and it made for different millidragons as well as different people.
The head of the millidragon now reached the talonwood bush where her experimental volley of rocks had landed this morning. Ironsoula gathered a great twist of rope into her hands.
The monster stopped, tongue shooting out and searching the rocks just short of the bundle, tantalized by the smell of her menses and tantalizingly close to her target.
Patience? The girl who ran away from home was never patient. The elite Ranger on the juggat had learned this quality of character by suffering lessons, over and over, had alternately hurried and waited, exercised and drilled in the squads, stood watches and guard shifts, memorized orders, joined hunts and forage missions until she was confident in herself and in her own good judgment. She had been to orbit, landed and jumped on a score of moons, sat for too many hours at lab-work, absorbed more knowledge than she would likely ever use.
The millidragon surged forward again a little, pausing, stabbing its tongue-spear through the air just past the bundle, testing, searching above it.
She did not flinch. Ironsoula was indeed changed from the girl she had been.
The sun was well below the horizon. Rabba was her illumination now and the skin adjusted her vision accordingly. Ironsoula watched the segments shifting, the slow stalking of a hunter, until the millidragon was making ready to pounce at last, to stab its tongue through the tasty calf it thought it had detected in a lightning stab, to trap it in cruel jaws and bite off pieces of the living animal and tear them up in its mangler of a mouth.
Ironsoula waited until the beast withdrew its tongue to aim the final strike. A third of its body was now past her mark. It was not what she wanted, but it would have to be good enough.
She recalled her pin and pulled the rope.
Stacking rocks was all about gravity and mass and leverage. Given enough wood, rope, and loose stone, one could ready a concentrated slide weighing several tons over three days, as she had. This carefully-arranged rock pile was kept in place by wood wedges she had cut with her axe. These in turn were roped to her climbing pin, which was now being strangely stubborn.
Frowning at the resistance, she pulled harder and recalled the pin again. Nothing.
She braced herself, recalled the pin again, and pulled with all her might.
This time the pin returned to her.
Loosed, the rocks fell, accelerating with gravity, striking the creature in the narrow V at the bottom of the gap with what she had estimated to be three tons of mass moving at forty meters per second.
The millidragon was tough, but not tough enough to withstand that much impact force.
It made a sound rather like a giant boiler whistle. The front and back parts of the beast reared up, still connected neurologically even though some of its intestines were now splattered on the rock walls around it, and the juggat shook with its low-frequency outrage.
The beast was silent, though its whiskers still flicked wildly. The rear body curled in death. Its legs continued to move in death, a reflex.
Finished reconnecting to her skin, she updated its memory, and then slid silently down her rope in the dark. She examined the smashed head of the millidragon closely, observed the glittering mandibles, saw that her bundle was caught on the reverse spines at the head of the creature’s spear-tongue in its nightmare mouth.
With a chant, she took out her knife and extended the spearform with a metallic snick, aimed the point of the monomolecular blade edge behind the scales of the millidragon’s head, and then stabbed into what might as well be called its neck, thanking Mother Vol and Father Rabba with a powerful shout. The creature’s armor resisted, but she pierced it and thrust the blade all the way to the hilt with a single two-handed motion, then sliced down.
Ironsoula retracted the shaft into a double-gripped handle and held her knife up to the light of Rabba, marveling at the green, bile-like blood. To the girl at Stonehook, it was poison. Danger. But the Legion machinery in her body could metabolize, analyze, neutralize, desensitize, and normalize it. Ironsoula put the back edge of the blade to her tongue and licked at the blood in one long motion. It was hot as the reddest range peppers, ghastly as a grave, tasted of ages in darkness and silence, of hunger and cannibalism and carrion logic. She spat the nasty stuff out, wiped it from her chin, fought nausea, choking on the foulness.
Sensory inputs screamed in alarm. She wicked the knife clean on a handful of dry grass and sheathed it before climbing back up the rope, but otherwise she did not tarry. Ironsoula had only a few minutes before the most interesting effects of the millidragon blood would begin, and she wanted to be on top of the juggat when that happened. Besides, there was one more thing to do.
Ironsoula reached the rim and readied her flame. A few moments later, she had a blazing torch, and then several of them, which she dropped down into the piled bales of dry grass that she had cleared from the bottom of the crag and stored up in its mouth yesterday. Acting like a natural chimney, the draw channeled her blaze upward, consuming the millidragon’s corpse.
Then she lay on bare stone at the center of the great juggat, face to the sky, picking out the Hundred Brother-moons of Rabba as the smoke carried away on a westerly breeze.
Using her enhanced vision, she noted the forgemoon of Ragnat, the tiny sparkles of distant shipyards, and the fuel and material lighters lined up in the sky.
As she stared, her biofeedback alarms subsided into grumpy acceptance of her chemical transgression.
The walkabout was over. Wasn’t it? She could reconnect now, if she wanted. Ironsoula suddenly felt the urge to call up a story. What to watch? Something mindless, surely. But the psychoactive effects of the metabolized millidragon blood hit her just as she called up the menu.
Now passed an hour, or a moment that seemed to last an hour, that Ironsoula was frozen, unable to make sense of the universe.
Then, presently, she sucked in a breath, sat up. For she actually saw it for the first time, saw the Protosphere filling the red and blue sky, great and terrible and omnipresent. The flames wreathing humanity’s womb-world faded and it crumbled into dust that dissipated on a solar wind.
“Every flame will burn out,” Grandmother said. “Even us.”
Ironsoula turned her head away from the galaxy that filled the western sky, past Rabba and his rings, to look east at the dead world of her youth.
Father, mother, brothers, sisters all turned to puffs of smoke and faded away.
Grandmother was an echo in the smoky air. She was real and present. Then she was a ghost again.
The Great Mothers were also here. Grandmother had brought them with her.
Grandmother told Ironsoula to fight the darkness, to see the flame of life passed on. Obedient, Ironsoula held respectful poses while the Great Mothers told her many things, whispered many secrets, sang many songs. Ironsoula danced with them under the open sky, celebrating, singing as the whole universe unfolded in the night. Stars and planets spun above them. She watched the First Wave landing and dying and learning and then spreading all around her, thousands of years passing in an hour as Grandmother told their tales of woe, described their discoveries and redemptions.
The landsbeest fathers birthed the young, nursed them, raised them, this was the mystery that led the Great Mothers to uprising, to throw off the unhelpful ways of Arrival.
Ironsoula could see them in the Great Lodge, sitting under their war shields hung glossy and bright all along the hall.
The long night passed in learning while the sky glowed all around Ironsoula in a riot of colors. Five planets orbiting Rabba hosted life: the Curated Worlds. A Ranger was sworn to curate them, to curate any world hosting life. Her knife had this purpose: it decided what would live and what would die, what plants and animals would be useful and how they would be used.
So they told her.
The Wustvergen night was long, but somehow not long enough. Eventually, the dance ended and the windy silence returned. Rabba became a crescent pointed east, so Ironsoula tried to ask Grandmother the great questions that had burned inside her all these years: about the fires that forged her spirit, about the great union that formed her flesh, about what she was becoming.
Grandmother began to answer, but the eastern sky became fire, banishing her ghost with the tale still untold.
Roaring jets roused Ironsoula from the reverie. It was a lift circling the juggat. She was face down, a raging river of pain shooting through her head like a cataract in a rocky gorge. Not until she sat up, still dizzy and even a little nauseous, did she realize that her fingers held a rock eagle feather. A long wingtip quill, gloriously banded and tipped in gold. The black and purple barbs turned green and red when she held it to the light of Sol Vol. Smiling, she whispered thanks to the noble creature for its kind gift.
“Good morning,” Chief Doublehead said. Dawn was breaking. He stood beside her in gleaming armor, face open to the air, his own rock eagle feathers embossed into the metal, signs of his rank.
She zeeped to her feet, the lingering effects of the vision dissipating like a morning fog in sunshine as the reflexes of a soldier kicked in, assuming the position of attention, almost falling down in her hung-over state.
Patient as the Wustvergen day was long, Doublehead told her to stand at ease. Then he turned to the chasm with an inscrutable smile. Tendrils of smoke were still rising from it. “Nice shot,” he said in the language of the Lakkodo.
It was the thing one said proudly to a girl who has just hit the bullseye, or a student who has answered correctly.
Then he looked at her hand, indicated that she should hold out the rock eagle feather, and smiled at the size and beauty of it. “You will wear that,” he said. The Imperial Spaceborne Ranger Corps needed leaders.
Then Doublehead told her how she could best serve the Legion, the mission she must undertake now, while Ironsoula took wing, soared into the sky, crying out in joy on a current of air, lifted up towards Rabba, weightless.
