Yeesh, it’s been a while. So much has happened over here, and we’ve managed to clone the magical girl not once but twice now.
I seriously need to get another novel out. Part of my problem is that I’ve had trouble buckling down on a single project I’ve been drifting back and forth between sequels to my existing work and other things, but I finally grit my teeth and decided to finish The Cup of Agamemnon, a planetary romance I’ve had in the back of my mind for some time.
Below is a teaser from the first chapter. This is rough, of course, and it may be too heavy on info-dumping, so it will likely be trimmed before it sees print:
“Is he dead?” Angelica asked.
“He’s breathing,” I replied.
“Then he’s not dead.”
“Not yet,” said Sam after spitting out a stream of blackish liquid produced by the stuff he’d been chewing, “but he will be if you two stand around jawing.”
“That’s true,” I answered, “but you’re not supposed to move an injured man.”
“Sure. But you ain’t supposed to leave him in the mountains to freeze to death, either.”
“Very well. Sam, grab his legs. I’ll grab—”
“Ain’t no sense in it, him being light. I’ll just carry him myself.”
And Sam, the hulking brute, did exactly that: He bent down, took up the unconscious Gernian, and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of tubers. I winced, but I held my peace. Right now, I wanted to keep my head attached to my shoulders—and considering my situation, that meant holding my peace.
To make a long story short, our interstellar craft had unexpectedly struck atmosphere during a phase-out of its Alcubierre drive’s warp field. An Alcubierre drive is tricky to operate, especially in-system: By compressing spacetime in one direction and expanding it in the other, it can move a ship across the galaxy in a minute without relativistic effects. But traveling such a distance in one go would build up enough energy to produce a nova-sized explosion when the drive deactivated, so it’s necessary to travel in short hops, stretching a minute-long trip into months. Inside a star system, the hops have to be even shorter.
We made a bad hop and collided with our target. The protective ceramics burned off, and the ship hit the dirt hard, so it was now a smoking pile of slag. We were stranded without food and with little water in a barren range of mountains where the air was thin and cold but breathable. There was no snow, either because the wind had blown it away or because the air was too dry.
We were four in number: Three of us were mammals, so our needs were similar, but the fourth was something indeterminate, transcending all mortal classifications. Fortunately, he had his own ways of sustaining himself—ways too disgusting to describe.
The peaks over our heads were rough and came to sharp, needle-like points. The rocks, mostly flint, cut into our feet. But I knew this world was inhabited, or at least had been, and I was confident that we were not the first to walk through this forbidding mountain pass: There were telltale signs of beasts—too many to be random—mostly in the form of droppings but sometimes of churned gravel or overturned stones. At regular intervals, we found trash pits containing steel wire, fragments of what were probably harnesses, and rusted steel cans soldered with lead. All the evidence pointed to pack trains. This was a trade route, and I said so to my companions.
Our de facto leader was Angelica. She told me to shut up, so I did. She had been the ship’s captain, and she was still in charge. Besides, her formidable technology put the rest of us at her mercy. She was our best hope for making it out of the mountains and finding water, and she could also kill us in a nanosecond if she had a mind to.
By the way, she blamed the crash on me.
Angelica came from an artificial world called Terra, and she was something called a human. Hers was an ascended race of technomancers who practiced self-modification, so she had augmented her body to the point that it was doubtful how much of her original biology remained. She assured us that her kind were largely hairless except for their scalps, so her freakish appearance was only partly unnatural, but below the line of the long, black hair that topped her head, her skin looked pink in some lights but greenish in others, and almost scaly. This, she told me, was because she’d replaced her dermis with a nanomolecular ablative armor that was impervious to low-velocity weapons and cold weather. Despite this alleged guard against chills, she wore black, tight-fitting, glossy clothing that covered her entirely except for her head and arms; and over her tight clothes, she wore a long, loose coat. She even covered her eyes with something black and glossy.
The second member of our party was Sam. He was furry from head to toe, as a proper mammal should be. He was a Feralax, a species not usually found in deep space, as they had not yet ascended. But he was the largest and strongest of us. He usually packed an enormous automatic rifle across his broad shoulders, a weapon that only someone as big as a Feralax could operate. Now, however, Sam was obliged to sling the rifle low while he carried the unconscious Gernian. None of us offered to relieve him of his burden, but he didn’t complain. His white, almost bluish fur contrasted sharply with the black clinker covering the hillsides around us. When I asked him if he was cold, he merely laughed.
The third member of our party was a creature beyond our comprehension, a being who came—we assumed—from one of the globular clusters. Convention called his kind the Keepers of the Seas of Glass, but that said little about their nature. In our three dimensions, he resembled a white sphere, three feet across, the surface of which glistened like a soap bubble. Extending from this bubble were ropy, tentacle-like limbs, never consistent in number but typically including more than a dozen. He used these both for locomotion and to snatch small rodents from the rocks, which he absorbed into his translucent body, apparently for sustenance. Since he did not communicate with us, we did not know his name, but his name was probably unpronounceable anyway, so we called him Spheroid.
The fourth member of this bedraggled party was I. I am a Bardite of Therask, and my race, so well known, requires no description. Among this crew, I alone was not a technomancer; my power lay not in machines and physical laws but in rhyme and meter, in the singing of songs and the reciting of legends. My real name does not matter, but since I am the teller of this tale, I will call myself Narrator. Of our crew, I alone wore a parka: I always packed for various environments, though I had left most of my baggage behind in the wrecked ship.
Angelica could generate nutrient pills with her exoskeleton’s onboard systems, but she couldn’t replenish water or provide calories. Therefore, I was the one keeping us alive, though my efforts couldn’t last much longer: I sang songs of warmth and food and hope, songs that could sustain us as long as our bodies held together. The effects of a Theraskan’s songs were not exactly illusions, but they were not exactly real, either; they were eidetic, existing in the liminal space between the potential and the actual, the realm of thought that is almost ready to burst into being but never quite does. But the mind could control the body, up to a point: Whole armies had marched for months on no sustenance except Theraskan songs—but had then fallen dead once the realities of hunger, thirst, and weariness finally asserted themselves. We four had been marching for three Gernian days on the strength of my song, and there was no way for me to estimate how much farther we could go.
“This moon doesn’t have a geodynamo in its core,” Angelica muttered as she tapped a control panel on her wrist. “My compass is useless.”
I paused in my singing. “You mean you can’t tell north from south?”
“There is no north or south, magnetically speaking. That also means we’re taking a lot of cosmic radiation, by the way. How is it possible that the atmosphere’s intact?”
“The gas giant’s electromagnetic field protects it,” I said, pointing up. “This moon’s orbit is right between the planet’s two Van Allen belts, believe it or not, so the cosmic radiation is actually quite low.”
She shook her head. “That’s impossible. No moon can form outside the frost line and have that kind of protection.”
I shrugged. “It’s unclear how it happened. Maybe this is a former planet that got caught when the gas giant migrated inward from the outer system.”
Angelica sighed. “This place is weird.”
“I don’t suppose you have a directional gyroscope?” I asked.
“There was one on the ship, but it’s smashed.”
“How’s your altimeter?”
“I can’t calibrate it, obviously, but we’re definitely going downhill. I suppose that’s good, at least: Breathable air means there’s water someplace, even if basic astrophysics says there shouldn’t be.”
We had crashed on Gernis, the moon of a gas giant orbiting a red giant at the absolute limit of the Milk Way Galaxy—if you could even call this a part of the galaxy. Gernis was an ugly and rugged world with mountains stretching in crackling bands across its surface. There was more land on Gernis than water; its rivers drained into large basins, none big enough to be called an ocean. Those vast lakes held great quantities of salt and were surrounded by horrendous wastes—but they were also sources of bitumen, which was the Gernians’ primary fuel.
This lack of water meant intense shifts in weather, both from night to day and also between the Short Periods, or those times of darkness and light caused by the moon rotating continuously in and out of the planet’s shadow. The temperatures also fluctuated between each of the Great Seasons, or those long summers and winters, lasting many lifetimes, caused by the planet’s elliptical orbit. We were currently in one of the more temperate parts of the cycle—which is why we hadn’t flash-frozen when we popped the airlock on our downed spacecraft.
The largest feature on Gernis was a great desert, around which four mountain chains formed a ring. The desert contained one of these putrid salt lakes, and the whole system looked like a great scab on the world’s surface, like a gouge wound that had not healed properly. Since we didn’t know where we were, we might have been heading down into that desert where we would certainly perish, or we might have been walking into a mountain valley where some semblance of civilization lingered. We had no way of knowing because we hadn’t had time for a scan before our crash.
“That’s the second ship I’ve lost,” Angelica muttered bitterly. “My flying days are over.”
There wasn’t a lot of emotion in her voice, but I knew she had aimed that comment at me.
“You could have told me no,” I said, keeping my own voice flat. “You said your charts didn’t extend this far. You could have told me to find another pilot.”
“You offered to pay double,” she replied, cracking her knuckles one by one as she said it. After a moment, she added, “Besides, I was curious.”
That gratified me. I allowed myself a slight smile—or what I knew Angelica would call a smile. My facial configuration didn’t naturally lend itself to her interpretations, but we Theraskans could modify ourselves to meet the needs of many species.
She pointed up into the sky, where we had the best view in the galaxy. One limb of the red and orange gas giant, currently in a slender crescent, filled half the sky. Stretching from it like a line drawn with a straight edge was a faint ring, probably the remnant of another moon that had long ago sunk into the planet’s turbulent atmosphere. But beyond the gas giant, dominating the sky, was the Milky Way’s galactic disc, a great, swirling spiral of bright clouds and burning points, bluish-white at its fringes and a rich crimson in its central bulge. At its center, visible even to the naked eye, was its brightest point, Sagittarius A, which held a heart of darkness.
The galactic disc was brighter even than this world’s reddish sun, which hung directly overhead, almost forgotten in the midst of the celestial majesty with which it had to compete. The sun of Gernis was not native to the Milky Way: It came from the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which the Milky Way had, in a distant past almost forgotten, collided with and mostly absorbed. The collision had produced several star streams flowing in great arcs almost perpendicular to the galactic disc. The sun above our heads, located in one of those streams, was situated immediately to the galactic south of the Milky Way’s core. But we were a good seventy thousand light-years away from that core, out in the so-called “outer halo”; whether we were really in the Milky Way at all, or in intergalactic space, depended on whom you asked.
As we walked, I went back to my singing. I marched behind Sam, so I could watch the unconscious Gernian flopping on his shoulder. I sang healing songs. Coming from such a harsh moon, the Gernians are a surprisingly graceful race: Their skin is coarse, scaly, and brown, as befits their world, but they are tall and bipedal with long, slender limbs. The one over Sam’s shoulder had a crest, about an inch high, colored a deep red. That meant he was male. His clothing was simple—a close-fitting linen vest the same color as his crest and duck trousers the same color as his skin. Two gun belts enwrapped his hips and holstered heavy, clumsy revolvers covered with intricate etchings. He also wore a scabbard for a sword, but it was empty. Unlike his artfully tooled gun belts, his scabbard was waterproofed with hardened bitumen, which was a flat, dull black.
