EVERYTHING PAST HERE IS SPOILERS: Under the Hood

AIRAGHARDT: FROM PLAY TO PAGE

It’s safe to say that everything past this point is SPOILERS. So, if you’re still reading the book, don’t look too much farther!

“ULTIMATELY, MECHANICS MATTER.”
  This is what I decided the moment I signed the contract to write for Infinity. I wanted to tell a story about my favorite factions, a fish-out-of-water tale, a weird “found family,” all that–but I knew I also couldn’t get away from bringing the manga-inspired science-fiction action to life on the page as well. I wanted the Infinity fandom to be able to look at the words on the page and extrapolate the flow of combat through ARO and two-part short skills. And to do that, I was going to need to faithfully represent the troop profiles that inspired these characters by highlighting their unique skills, equipment, and weaponry.
  And so, I built a list.

  Using a Caledonian Volunteer Spec-ops, I built Wil out as what he’d appear as on the page and priced him around ~37 points just to average out the list and keep things workable. He fills the spot that I’d normally bring McMurrough in, same as how Llowry, Bell, and Fionnlagh being a Boarding Shotgun instead of a Chain Rifle would add up to about one Uxia McNeill. It’s not the best list–I don’t think it’d be very competitive, all said and done–but that it had a fireteam and a host of solo operators worked great for the narrative that I wanted to tell.
  I played about five games of Infinity with this list against various opponents, including myself. A lot of little rules interactions never made it into the book–at one point, Alastair tanked both saves on an E/M grenade; Fionnlagh berserk-chained through four Taigha; Saoirse CasEvac’d Alastair through suppression fire and lived; and Wil died, died, died every time I tried to use him as an active-turn Rambo piece. While the last one did bleed into the book a little with Wil’s “Pain isn’t Pain” motto and his propensity for getting his ass kicked, the rest were sadly left on the cutting room floor as the book evolved.
  However… many others absolutely did. Weathering four edits, five beta readers, my editor’s edit, and all the final checks, parts and pieces of these games went all the way from the LGS table to your hands.
  Below, I’ll go over some of the encounters in the book and write a play-by-play of the order expenditure and rolls that went into the conceptualization of each scene. Perhaps you might’ve even noticed the N3 rules conundrums that inspired some of them? I definitely skewed N3 whenever I could–call me a grognard, but that’s the game I played and loved and the one that was in my heart when I started penning Airaghardt.

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Wil vs. Keyes, Ch7 pg56-57

  When I first decided to write this confrontation, I knew it had to be between something ridiculously deadly in the Shasvastii lore, and also, something most players had already heard of. Since Noctifers and Speculo were right out since I didn’t want to escalate too quick, I leaned on the humble Shrouded instead–specifically, the boarding shotgun profile, which I downgraded to a light shotgun for drama’s sake. And of course, Wil is using Bell’s crusty regular pistol instead of his AP Heavy Pistol, aka the Detour, to even the odds.
  Of course, even when it’s 1v1, the characters should still feel like they’re playing Infinity. Giving them both 2 Orders per round sounded tight enough that I’d be forced to make sure both sides made big plays that would end the confrontation within a page or two tops, keeping the pace brisk and the action going.
  From here, I’ll go over the scene line-by-line and explain the mechanics under the hood and decisions that went into bringing the game to life on the page. Hopefully you can find this brief skirmish between these characters interesting–the rest of the game played around this cat-and-mouse would later form the basis for the entirety of the conflict in Chapter 29.
  So, with no further ado, let’s get into it:

Keyes jerked back. His hands jumped.
  Wet, stinking fur slapped Wil in the face. Red stained his vision, covering his oculi right as he startled the Kremen up and fired twice.
  Footsteps rushed away. Two misses.   

  Previously, Wil has approached the bothy window by declaring Move-Move. Now, he declares Move to walk into contact with the wall to see inside. Keyes is prone on the Bothy floor below the window, and reciprocal LoF is established. Keyes declares Dodge; Wil declares BS Attack with his Pistol. His MSV1 is busted at the moment and only cancels the Low-Vis, but not Keyes’ mimetism, giving him a -3 from modifiers and a +3 from range for a nice B2 at +0.
  Keyes on the other hand is still suffering the -3 from Low-Vis, so he’s 9 to Wil’s 13s. Unfortunately, a critical success sees Wil losing track of his opponent as they Dodge around the wall.
  Unfortunately, Wil’s out of orders. It’s Keyes’ turn now.

  Fifteen rounds remained in the Kremen.
  Wil strained to listen over the drumbeat of his heart. He wasn’t ready for this. Exhaustion had taken its toll on him from the infection, from his escape. Steady pangs in his abdomen bled through the rising adrenaline. His mouth was dry. Tongue, sandpaper on his teeth. Keeping the pistol level seemed an impossible challenge with the persistent shake from the cold and the twinge in his knuckles.
  He stepped back. Dead leaves crunched underfoot.
  The empty air around the corner of the bothy glimmered.
  A shotgun blast shattered the silence. The stone wall beside him exploded, and Wil scrambled for cover, plunging behind the bothy corner and into a pile of spiny, flowering vines. The planks of a disintegrating planter box obscured beneath the green dented his ribs.
  A second shot scoured the eaves from the overhang and showered him in splinters. For an instant, Wil had eyes on Keyes’ silhouette, and then he was gone again, ducked behind the cabin.

  Keyes’ Lieutenant Order is spent using Recamouflage. He then edges out onto the bothy corner to see Wil. Wil knows he has a light shotgun, and knows about template mode, so he chooses to Dodge–and Keyes fires in hit-mode twice to try to cancel it.
  Low-Vis kicks Keyes down from 18 to 15, and Wil goes from 12 to 9. Worse, Wil goes from 9 to 6 thanks to Surprise Attack. Miraculously, somehow, Keyes only scores one hit and one miss–the true Infinity experience, IMO, of throwing dice on absurdly high numbers and still somehow failing.
   In Resolution, Wil makes the ARM 13 roll (2 ARM, -3 Cover). Failing Guts, he falls back behind the wall into Total Cover.

  Camouflage. Not thermo-optical. Bioquantronic. A Shrouded—a guerilla surveillance unit dedicated to spearheading sabotage efforts. But Shrouded didn’t wear human faces, so then this was what, a Speculo Agent? The hell could they do?
  Wil’s exhaustion evaporated, replaced by a rush of sickening electricity. His breath quickened, heaving in the crushed flower pile’s acidic tang. He refused the urge to make space, to flee for the forest. Gaining range would’ve been smart if Keyes wasn’t better armed. A geist-assisted shotgun’s smart ammunition could detonate at long or short range, making its threat variable and impossible to predict. Worse, he was surrounded by a field of dead leaves, and only one of their footsteps made sound.
  There had to be an angle Wil could press for an advantage. Something nearby.
  The Kremen? No—low caliber, no stopping power. Dive into the bothy? Close-quarters with zero cover versus a weapon optimally utilized in a choke—yeah, great idea. The animal corpse, twitching beside his leg—what he’d be in ten seconds if he didn’t do something.
  A swathe of small, dark shrapnel pocked the wall. Flechettes.
  He paused. Looked again. Low-tech, low-yield. No evidence of armor-piercing coating. Closer to nails than razors. Nothing like the shot he’d seen on Paradiso, buried in the walls of their checkpoint after the Dāturazi’s failed charge.
  It was human-make. Light, 20-gauge tops. The shotgun from the Balena. Purpose-made to dissuade an Antipode, not for warfare. Ariadnan. Outdated. It’d only load three shells at a time.

  The above is, IMO, indicative of a VERY Infinity-related interaction: Keyes’ player said he has a ‘shotgun’ in the ARO phase, and now that Wil’s player can spend orders, he’s asking questions about Keyes’ troop profile. He learns that it’s not just any shotgun–it’s a light shotgun–and about Keyes’ mimetism and stealth. Keyes’ player explains the true danger here is allowing Keyes’ to sneak around behind him for a free shot with Camo and Stealth, but Wil knows there’s also a real threat in being outranged and baited. After all, Wil’s shots can only do 1 Wound in ARO, and Keyes’ has regeneration–trading with a template is probably the smart thing Keyes will try next since these two only have another 4 orders each before the end of Round 3, and the game.
  (Yeah–I’m going that abstract.)
  As an aside, when Wil feels the ‘quickening,’ it’s both a Highlander reference and a signpost that his turn is about to begin. At one point I joked to Arizona Infinity that miniatures can feel when they generate an order, and this is me taking that in-joke to fruition.

  If he provoked a salvo, he could close the gap before Keyes managed a reload. Jumpy as he was, cornered without a proper firearm, he’d probably mag dump anything that moved. Just needed a poke in the right direction and reflexes faster than his reload.
  Wil stifled the steam in his breath as he edged to the corner. Careful, like threading a needle, he popped two shots around the bend and flinched back.
  The stone clustered with nails. Grit scattered into his face, and then again.
  Two shots. No third. Bait untaken. He snatched up the dead rabbit, hedged his bet, and tossed it into the clearing.
  Mid-flight, it vaporized into pink mist.
  All pretense of subtlety abandoned, Wil ripped around the corner and stormed Keyes’ cover. A single line etched in his HUD there indicating a possible camouflage silhouette, and he filled the space with bullets.

  Wil Moves to the edge of Cover to see Keyes. Keyes’ knows that if Wil hits him twice, there’s a very real chance he’ll die, forcing a draw–and he wants to win. So instead of templating, he declares Shoot.
  They trade AROs. Neither hit, neither succeed.
  Then, Wil attempts a very old N3 trick, something used often long before N4 cleared this interaction up. What’s happening here is that Wil is Idling in Keyes’ Zone of Control before he declares Move in order to force Keyes to make an ARO. The only legal ARO here is Idle or Change Facing, and so Keyes’ declares Change Facing… and Wil Moves directly into silhouette contact, forcing a Close Combat.
  I have done this roughly one-million times with JSA and the day I learned you can declare BS Attack without LoF and still shoot as long as it’s legal in Resolution was pretty much the worst day of my life.

  Gore spattered the bothy wall. Leaves crushed and scattered without sound. Atop them, bioquantronic camouflage crackled and died, revealing Keyes’ sagged semi-human shape. His mandibles squeezed together like smashed spider legs and went limp, ejecting a sloppy wad of chewed rabbit. Violet oozed from the hole in his throat down across the shotgun, alien blood steaming in the cold.
  It didn’t have a smell.

  Keyes’ turn begins, and all he can do is Dodge or CC. Neither matter–the roll fails either way–and Wil successfully Close Combats Keyes with his Pistol. One DAM 11 hit sans Cover later, Keyes is unconscious at Wil’s feet… waiting to Regenerate, and make for the woods.
  You can find out how that ends in the rest of Chapter 7. Unfortunately, this blog post is getting kind of long and I really want to hit another example before I cut myself off!

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The Noctifer and Malignos, Ch22, pg162-164

  First, a little bonus: the Shasvastii list that goes up against the MacArthurs at the Brume in Ch22. Combine a Haris of Haiduk with a defensive Nox fireteam, plus a few skirmishers and an assassin, and it looked good enough to run the game mode they’re essentially playing here: Decapitation.
  Canny readers will notice something interesting about this list that turns out to be really important in Ch 35. Call it my own weird brand of foreshadowing if you want. 🙂
  However, right now we’re focused on just one small skirmish: Wil and Neil vs the Malignos and Noctifer in the ambush that begins the chapter. Funny enough, the interaction that inspired this back-and-forth happened in a very different game than the Decapitation match that became the rest of the conflict, so you’ll notice the profiles don’t quite match up.

  This one’s a little less straightforward, but still pretty heavily confined by the rules. We begin with Bell being shot dead and Wil being thrown onto the defensive, scrabbling for cover just for a hope of survival.

  Wil hurled himself onto his belly beside Bell’s still body before he could think. Two thumps soaked into Bell’s ribs and a third sheared his tweaked nose, coating Wil’s sleeve in a splash of discolored cartilage.
  No reports, no muzzle flares. Just the rip of air, heralding the impacts. High-tech suppressors.
  Shasvastii.
  He crawled into a run and beelined for the boulders. Puffs of turf on the forest floor corralled him, forced him behind a tree. His shoulders coated in bark chips. Needed harder cover.
  Rifle off his shoulder. Safety off. Loaded. He tied his belt in a knot and reclipped his holster. Wil spun up his comlog, and static roared back. Had he left Vern’s repeater range, or was this a hacker running Oblivion on him? No way to tell.
  Wil checked around cover. Couldn’t establish a visual.

  A hit and a successful ARM sends Wil prone in the clearing, having failed Guts with no Cover within 2″. Unfortunately for him, his opponent’s turn is now over–two orders, and then a scot-free Recamouflage thanks to Wil’s Prone state breaking LoF.
   As his turn begins, Wil declares Move and beelines into cover. When neither of his enemies declare ARO, he Dodges just in case something weird is about to go down, and ends up good.
  Then the problem starts: he leans out and back in to see his opponent’s Malignos and Noctifer in Camouflage and they don’t shoot. He declares Discover, and fails–just like that, his turn is already over.

  No time to hesitate. Seconds to act, and he needed help. A shout would draw attention but wasn’t urgent enough. Didn’t want to chance luring someone into the crossfire. Had to make his situation crystal clear.
  Wil leaned out and drilled three shots into a tree.
  An instant later, the trunk beside his neck exploded. He skittered back, impact throbbing past the layers of his armor. Bad guess, but the report would bring the MacArthurs running, and he’d learned something besides: By the angle of the shot, the shooter was shifting position, using the hill as natural cover. Forcing him to turn. Opening his flank. All signs pointed to a partner, waiting in the wings for an opportunity to present itself. If Wil didn’t want to find out what happened at the end of the rodeo, he’d need to risk his neck and buck the lasso.
  First, distance and cover. He launched to his feet and bolted, aiming for the buried boulder he’d climbed on his approach. Silent puffs of moss and dust trailed him but didn’t strike home, and he scrabbled into better cover. Knelt behind the granite with safety on one side, he could respond, turn the fight—
  A shockwave from behind sent the leaves crazy-dancing. An ex-plosion at camp. The morning silence shattered as shouts became screams, drowned out by concentrated gunfire.
  They’d been caught in an ambush.
  No help was on the way. No plan from here. No use saving battery on his MSV. Wil spun up his dial, confirmed settings, and the world smeared into infrared, shapeless save for a single bluegreen silhouette crouched atop the bough of an Ariadnan fir a hundred meters out.
  He knew that grim reaper getup anywhere—Noctifer. Shit. Spitfire. Shit.
  But that wasn’t where the shots had been coming from.
  A humanoid shape ascended the hillside, barely visible in its pur-ple hues in comparison to compared to the surrounding technicolor wilderness. TO Camo—thermo-optical, heat-shedding, designed to render multispectral technology useless. By the bucket shape of the helm, a Malignos. Legendarily undetectable. Nightmarishly untouchable. Its long coat fluttered, rifle primed, and it opened fire.

  The Malignos begins to circle Wil’s Cover wide, aiming to flush him out with a failed Guts roll in order to put him into the Noctifer Spitfire’s LoF. Two orders of shooting before the Malignos goes into Suppressive and the game is halfway over.
   Wil begins his turn and just goes for it. He runs. The Malignos tries to gun him down, but Wil is focused on Dodging. With his second order, having moved out of the Malignos’s LoF but remained in the Noctifer’s, he declares Discover intending to use the special Discover+Shoot maneuver.
   The Noctifer reveals itself and Wil realizes he’s screwed. He expected a short-range gun, but the Noctifer is packing SWC. Luckily, its not a Missile Launcher, but… still, a Spitfire isn’t good.
  Actually–the Malignos has LoF on where Wil is now. Is there another place he could Discover+Shoot my Noctifer from? No? Is it okay with you then if I have my Malignos take an ARO? Okay, thank you. They’ll both shoot. You can split burst if you like.
  Wil chooses to Dodge.
  (If you haven’t had this happen while playing Infinity… I don’t know how to tell you that you’ve been playing another game, somehow.)

  Wil ducked back. Muted gunfire drilled the stone. Suppressing fire from the Spitfire above swept centimeters above his scalp, keeping him pinned. Their footsteps made no sound, but Wil knew the Malignos was growing closer, closer—
  A red-white shape hurdled the bushes into the clearing. Neil, with his chain rifle in both hands. He staggered to a stop, transfixed by the blur that stood over his dead friend’s body.
  An impact caught the kid center mass. With a flash and a spark, Neil toppled face-first into the dirt.
  Wil dropped the Strela. Lunged out. Gloved fingers found Neil’s backpack strap, and he dragged him two-handed into cover.

  Of course it’s the Shasvastii turn again. They move up, fire, go into suppression, play it extremely safe as they close in on their target.
  Then Neil comes right through the terrain having chained together 3-4 Dodges during the Reactive turn. Finally, he sidles out into LoF of the Shas and gets shot for his troubles.
  Of course, he’s ARM 1 (seriously–look it up, in a kilt and a jacket, their ARM is equal to a Fusilier’s) so he passes ARM with a natural 20 roll and willingly fails Guts into Cover.
  Now, this is something that actually happened, and the explanation came about directly at the table right after the successful roll. How do you explain stuff like this in the narrative? Another challenge of directly translating tabletop to paperback, but, well, I thought myself very clever for breadcrumbing the Teseum dogtags up till this point.

  But before they were totally clear, Neil sucked in a ragged breath and belted a litany of vulgarities so thick, so impossible to understand, it must’ve been what made him bulletproof. He lurched to a stand, leveraged his chain rifle over the edge of cover, and screamed, “Gie off my friend, ye bloody knock-kneed invertebrate cunt!”
  The Malignos jolted back, chittering, and the crack-flash of the chain rifle swallowed it whole. Sizzling white-hot shrapnel embedded in the dirt, the trees, the hundred pureed chunks of flickering thermo-optical camouflage that’d just been a Shasvastii.
  Flank clear, Wil vaulted the boulder and zeroed in on the infrared blob of the Noctifer. Deep breath. Slow and steady. Aim over speed. A Spitfire tracer sliced the fantail of his duster, scant centimeters from his thigh, and only then did he pull the trigger.
  Two rounds hit the tree; one disappeared. Gore drained onto the bough below. The Noctifer wobbled, but it refused to die.
  Instead, Wil’s visor did.
  The heavy crack of a large-caliber weapon sent Wil to his knees behind the stone. He wrenched the visor from his face, squinting for the telltale signs of camouflage—pressure, motion, distortion. But the Noctifer was gone. The tree branch was empty.
  He scanned the tree, the woods, pulse hammering into overdrive. “Neil! Where’d it go, did it jump?”
  Neil panted, keeled against the boulder, and pointed. Blurry air heaped at the foot of the tree, purple blood pooling atop an invisible mound.
  “Who—”
  Boots crashed through the underbrush, chasing a whirl of sunfire hair. Saoirse sprinted out from the thicket, Mk12 in hand, backpack jumping on her shoulders.

  Neil uses the last order in the group to go out and Chain Rifle the Malignos. Sure, it’s got regeneration, but it doesn’t want to die–and of course it biffs its Dodge.
  Wil spends a Command Token to gain a single order through O-12’s Prestige and goes out to fight the Noctifer with his AP Marksman Rifle. MSV1, range, Cover, Burst 3 vs Burst 3–it comes down to luck of the dice and the Noctifer suffers a Wound.
  However, Noctifers are Dogged. So it doesn’t go down.
  But it’s Wil’s last order, so… it dies as the game ends. Why? Well, Saoirse shows up and shoots it in the back, of course…

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  Hopefully, these examples made sense and helped you see through the thin veneer of fiction into the nitty-gritty Infinity mechanics beneath.
  Next time, I’ll translate some of the climactic battles of the book back into Infinity the Game, explain how I tried to characterize Natural Born Warrior versus Natural Born Warrior, and go over my math on how many Wounds a horse has versus how many Wounds a Caliban can deal in one Order.
  As always, take it easy and thank you for reading!

Pre-order AIRAGHARDT on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from Winged Hussar today.

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Launch Day Feelings Post

AIRAGHARDT: 11/100

  I know, I know. First book feelings. Listen, if I promise not to write too much, maybe you’ll promise to listen? Yeah? Well, thanks. This matters to me and I’d just like to share it while I’ve got my fifteen minutes.
  When I first started writing seriously—yeah, that kind of post—on February 5th 2021, I made myself a promise: I would either get 100 people to read my book by 2025, or I’d quit writing forever.
  My terrible first book had two readers, and I trunked it in June 2021. My second, six—with some editing still ongoing, but honestly, it might get trunked soon too. My third book was Airaghardt, and it scored a grand total of eight read-throughs, including my editor. All in all, those reads accounted for 13 total human beings, a massive 87 away from my goal.
  Might as well still be at square one.
  But now, Airaghardt is releasing on ebook and paperback. It’s gonna get stocked through Target.com. My LGS asked me where they could order copies to stock on their shelf. But the thing is, I knew every single one of those 13 people who read my book save one (a beta reader’s mother, believe it or not). I kept meticulous track. I knew it by heart.
  Now, God willing, that number’s gonna go up and there’s no way I could ever know when or by how much.
  That’s where you come in.
  If you read Airaghardt, love it or hate it, let me know. Ebook, paperback, pirated PDF (I get it), whatever. Leave a review, good or bad. Talk to me about the ending. Tell me what lore I got wrong! Talk to me about your favorite character, and complain they didn’t get enough screentime. Talk to me about your least favorite, and ask why they got so much! Whatever the subject, I’m more than excited to yap about my book to anyone who asks, and if you can give me another tally mark closer to 100/100… that’s honestly the best gift I could receive. I couldn’t ask for more.
  I’ve lived the last three years on a mantra: “there are no free lunches.” It’s stood true both in life and in writing, through all the ups and downs, through the brutal moments and serene peaks and PanOceanian smoke grenades and everything in-between. But meeting this goal? Knowing that I made it? Getting that one free morsel from people who’ve read my work the world over?
  It would mean so, so much.
  So if you read Airaghardt, drop a line. Let me know if you finished it. Be part of my 100/100, and prove that sometimes a dream is enough.
  I’m thankful either way.

Novel Excerpt #2

AIRAGHARDT: CHAPTER 3 + 4

With the impending launch of Airaghardt, I thought I’d offer up the next two chapters as free fare as well for anyone still on the fence about just how much they’d enjoy ~350 pages of Infinity the Game, miltech Sci-Fi action, and Scottish werewolves rocking six-foot tall claymores.

(Chapter 1 and the Prologue can be found HERE!)

Enjoy! And if you really liked it, the links to purchase can be found at the bottom of each post!

CHAPTER THREE

WIL BRACED, BLIND, ANTICIPATING JAWS AND THE NOTHING AFTER.
  The Antipode rammed him head-on, yanking him off his feet and carrying him at least five meters before his back struck stone. It fell atop him, armor groaning beneath its ridiculous bulk. Limbs straightened like ramrods, convulsed, and went limp. 
  Its lifeless eyes were a perfect shade of blue.
  The howling in the trees transformed to yelping and receded. 
  With an unhelpful splash screen, Wil’s multispectral visor kicked back on, sprinting through startup diagnostics. Lines of naked code obscured the blank-eyed gaze of the lupine monstrosity dead on his chest, skull punched by a single lucky shot. The overpowering stench of loosed bowels pried past the gaps in his helmet, chased by the metallic tang of blood and dried saliva. 
  Servos groaning, Wil squeezed breathless from beneath it. His shoulder joint squeaked like metal on glass in its socket, gouging his muscle with every twist and pull. Kicks propelled him until he could lift its arm and wrestle free. Shoulders burning, he staggered to his feet and searched for the knife-wielding albino he’d seen gloating over the Balena’s smoldering corpse. 
  But they were gone. Run off, maybe. He’d heard trinary intelligence made losing a member of their ménage à trois something like a mental breakdown. Wil naively hoped he’d convinced them to retreat but knew they’d return with friends—and soon. He hefted Rajan again and made it another eight feet before his HUD flashed. 
  ERROR REPORTING HAS SUFFERED A CRITICAL ERROR. CLOSE PROGRAM? 
  His vision went black again. 
  Blindfolded and huffing, Wil smacked the visor’s side. “Come on,” he growled, and the sound of his own unprocessed voice startled him. 
  Behind him, the Balena detonated. 
  The shockwave flattened him again. In his feeble attempt to keep Rajan from eating shit, he cracked his faceplate on a rock, and his teeth snapped together hard enough to feel the echo in his tailbone. 
  Pressure grew on the inside of his skull and bulged against the back of his eyes, throbbing in his temples. Wil lay flat and worked through the pain. He leaned into it, let it inhabit him. Head, neck, teeth, shoulder, legs. A lot of places, sure, but none as bad as surgery, nothing like back then. 
  Pain wasn’t pain, he told himself. Pain wasn’t pain. 
  Ready for more, Wil crawled to his knees and tore off his helmet. Freezing air bit into his skin, his neck, his sweat-soaked hair, at war with the heat raging from the burning carcass of the Balena. Almost relief. Too far to choke on the smoke, but not far enough to avoid the heady, noxious stench. 
  His helmet looked like it’d been stepped on by a Squalo. The bot-tom-left oculus had shattered, and feeble light sparked within. No use, now, and dangerous to wear. He let it fall by the wayside and ran an armored palm up his face to search for injury. Ropes of grimy anti-kinetic gel slimed from his burst gorget, sticky on his face and neck. Many small cuts, more bruises, but nothing gushing.
  Beyond the brush, shapes moved, indeterminate and strange. Their colors shifted in tandem with the landscape. Not photoreactive—mimesis. More Antipodes. Not three, but an entire pack, impossible to count by eye as they faded in and out of vision. 
  Heavy panting grew louder, drowning out the growing inferno in the Balena’s gut. A howl split the morning air, source invisible within the terrain. 
  Time to move.
  Seizing Rajan by the wrist, Wil dragged him away, desperate for advantageous ground.   Nothing but cracked boulders and looming trees that juddered and swam in waves of vertigo, limbs swaying like ribbons on the wind. A granite slab hunched over a small hummock of muddy ground, not far away. Enough to guard his back. Wil staggered to its base and left Rajan at his feet. 
  This would have to do. Back to a wall, better than in the open. Wil checked his pistol—without the interface in his helmet, he wasn’t sure if he’d fired three times or four. Didn’t matter. He nursed the crick in his neck, licked the sweat from his lips, and listened. 
  Silence, undercut by the sigh of leaves. The gentle reverberation of flames inside the Balena’s cockpit. 
  Claws on stone. A small, dark Antipode darted from the treeline and reversed course, cutting back into the green. Wil took a shot, and it sliced into the brush. No yelp. He’d missed. Another maneuver in front of him, a sprint and fall back. When he didn’t fire, they tried again, testing boundaries, his reflexes, his patience. 
  Or providing a distraction.
  Wil spun and cracked a blind shot over the boulder’s edge. A furry blur flinched back out of sight, Teseum-coated claws scraping the rock in its retreat. 
  They were setting up flanks. Surrounding him. 
  Quiet, now. Only his breath. His vision narrowed. The ground tilt-ed, and he almost lost balance. If he fell down again, he knew he’d stay there. He needed to scare them. Kill a few. Open a path and take it. Every other path led to death, and like hell PanOceania would waste a resurrection on his sorry ass. 
  The white Antipode loped through a tendril of smoke into the open just meters away, fur pale as the granite underfoot. This close, the pink of his albino eyes glinted with something like conceit. It raised its knife, teeth bared in a challenging snarl. 
  Wil took the free shot. 
  It recoiled. Not hit. A dodge. Wil trained his aim and opened fire. The pale bastard skirted through the barrage, transferred the primitive blade to its teeth, and charged. 
  The brush behind him cracked. Another surprise attack—no, a dis-traction. The white Antipode was almost atop him. He turned and put one in its chest. 
  Its fur stained red. But the shot didn’t pierce. 
  The knife flashed. The steel of his breastplate carved open without resistance, burning a line across him from armpit to armpit. He recoiled into the stone. Leathery claws stretched down from above. One skirted his gorget, and the other engulfed his gauntlet. 
  And pulled. 
  Wil managed the release command before the artificial muscle tore. He narrowed his hand, but the unfolding internal mechanism snagged his skin and pulled. The momentum whipped him away from the Antipodes. He kept his footing but lost the pistol.
  Blood spattered against the scree. Instant shivers, cold sweat, even before the razor-wire slice of degloved skin took root. The skin of his forearm had unzipped from the bed of his elbow to the webbing of his thumb. The vacuum-tight suit beneath his armor hissed and sagged, no longer sealed, and numbness flushed his arm from the bicep down—more anesthetic, delivered by his dying suit’s autoinjectors. 
  An instant’s hesitation, and he’d have lost the limb. Out here, alien bacteria rampant, he still might. 
  Antipodes crowded out from the brush, tails high, ears perked, eyes wide. Twelve in all. Their teeth shined in the morning light, umber lips wet and glistening. His ambusher circled around to join its packmates, stolen gauntlet held high as it traded deep snuffs of its bloody interior with its friends.
  One of the Antipodes trotted up beside Rajan. It pawed at his wound, claws dipped red, and licked up the wet. Tentatively, it pinched his sleeve between its teeth and dragged him toward the pack. 
  A new Antipode took point, mouth frothing. The albino yanked it back. It growled and chuffed, tongue undulating as two small, dark allies joined in. Language. He’d heard it called ‘Snarl,’ and that description was apt. The albino was claiming its kill.
  Or making his case for feeding the Blood Tree. 
  With quaking fingers, Wil drew his knife. The thunder in his pulse rattled the cracks below his ear. “Kill me,” he gasped. “I fucking dare you.” 
  The white Antipode perked and straightened. Its alien gaze locked on his, flush with understanding, and it shoved its subordinate aside. Brandishing the Teseum knife, it loped forward. 
  A small, dark shape bounced among the rocks and exploded. 
  Wil jolted back, covering his face with his arm. A second and a third crack followed, dousing him in a cascade of stones. Grenades. Gun-fire raged over the ridge behind him, aimed at the Antipodes’ feet. Dust jumped from the river rocks. Bark spilled from the trees in errant gouges. No impacts, no kills. But the pack broke and made for the trees. 
  The white Antipode hesitated. Revenge or retreat—it made its choice and lunged. Wil saw its arc, knew how he needed to move, but his legs were too heavy and it was too fast. 
  A green blur launched over his shoulder. A woman: tall, built, hair red as a Paradiso sunset and dressed in muddy forest-colored fatigues. She held an enormous sword in one hand. A claymore. The blade matched her height, and she carried it as if it weighed nothing at all. 
  Steel flashed. Met. Both weapons rang out, and it was done. Blood splashed the rocks in a crescent. Clutching the gurgling chop in its shoulder, the white Antipode disengaged and fled for the trees. 
Its small, dark friends trailed after, tails tucked between their legs. One of them dragged Rajan in its jaws. Wil launched his knife at its back. His toss flew wide, but the clink of steel on the stone was threat enough for it to abandon its prize, and in seconds there were no   Antipodes left in the clearing. 
  Safe. Finally, safe, and with it, the storm inside died. Unbalanced by its loss, Wil sank to his knees. 
  The pressure in his skull doubled, and thinking became very dif-ficult. Wil’s geist populated his lens with safety warnings. Minor breaks. Numerous cuts. Probable concussion. It automatically attempted to arrange transport to a local hospital and lagged through a loading wheel before playing a downrezzed ad for Eco Cars in his peripheral vision. 
  A soldier stepped into the sunshaft above him. 
  Vision blurred, Wil focused on keeping grip on the gurgling tear in his arm. “Thank you,” he said. “Almost—almost got me. Thanks.” 
  The soldier leveled their weapon at him and shouted, “Get tae fuck, PanO bastard! Hands down, now!” 
  Not a CSU. Not a PanOceanian, or a SWORDFOR Kappa. A young blond man in a dirt-brown field jacket and a green and gold kilt. The chain rifle in his arms looked like it’d come from a museum, rust and dust and all. 
  The growl of engines preceded the arrival of three weathered AUVs burgeoning with armed frontiersmen in kilts. And though a herd of monstrosities had just beat a tentative retreat, all eyes and iron sights in the clearing trained on Wil. 
  “Princess,” the soldier called. “Tin man here’s pure fuckered. Might be done for. ’Pode gave him a Teseum kiss.” 
  The woman who’d saved him sheathed her weapon and wiped her lips with the back of her gauntlet. A furrowed, vertical scar dashed up her right cheek from jaw to hairline, disappearing into a shoulder-length tangle of crimson hair. Tartan matching the soldier’s colors hung across her hip, and her face was strange, though he couldn’t focus enough to know why.
  “Don’t look too lethal,” she said. “Just bag ’em, Neil. I’ll carry. Quick, now.” 
  Wil opened his mouth to rattle off his name and identification number, but before he could stumble over ‘lieutenant,’ Neil cracked him in the forehead with the butt of his chain rifle. 

CHAPTER FOUR

THEY PRIED THE QUANTRONIC LENSES OFF HIS EYES AND STUCK A BAG OVER HIS HEAD.
  The AUV motor chugged beneath him. Sharp jolts echoed from his bashed shoulder into his lungs with every random bump. Blood swamped the sleeve of his bodysuit, bicep vised in a tourniquet. Black fabric smothered him when he inhaled, sickening exhaust muddled with the campfire scent of the AKNovy barrel level with his temple. 
  His escort spoke English until someone snapped, “Whisht!” and every voice, male or female, changed to a roomy, rolling language. Caledonian, a pidgin of Scots Gaelic and the other languages used by the original frontiersman sent to colonize the highlands two-hundred years ago. 
  Back in Aquila, they’d done three weeks of SERE school—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Extraction. Simulations, but educational. Those memories urged him to summon up whatever strength remained to make a break for it, but an icepick stirred his temple with every heartbeat now. His legs burned instead of bending. All he’d manage by resisting now was suicide by Ariadnan.
  Wil counted the seconds between stops. Between turns. Tracked their bearing by what scant sunlight penetrated the bag. 
  The vehicle ground to a halt. Two soldiers took him by the arms and hauled him into a concrete tunnel. His boots scraped against descending stairs. Another steel door. More stairs. A new woman’s voice joined the chorus, shouting orders. Bright light. He slammed into a chair. 
  Someone snipped the zip-tie around Wil’s wrists and unfolded his arms from behind his back. He clenched his teeth, but his shoulder ground in its socket and he couldn’t hold back the grunt. 
  They ripped the hood from his head, and a spotlight focused on his face. An older woman in scrubs assessed his arm. Beyond the door, Rajan raced by on a stretcher surrounded with people. 
  Princess shadowed the exit. “Crash landed on the border of Achadh nan Darach, near got ate by ’Podes,” she said. “If he didna have a concussion afore, he’s got one now courtesy of Neil. Care—he’s got a comlog in his arm, and a Cube.” 
  The doctor stood back, hands on her hips, and stared at Wil’s combat armor. “Bloody hell. Anyone got a can opener?” 
  Beside him, knives glinted on a surgical tray. 
  Wil snatched up the sharpest one. Lunged out. The shadow to his left flinched clear. The doctor backpedaled out of his reach, back against the countertops. Wil stood, listing wildly, blade outstretched, until what had to be a battering ram smashed the breath out of him and left him puking on the floor. 
  Princess stood above him, sunfire hair curled wild over her eyes.
  Not a battering ram. Just her. 
  Barrels swiveled toward him. Voices ordered submission. Wil refused. Fighting to a crawl, anger surged in him again—a fifth wind, a shout, a burst of desperate— 
  Cold steel bit into the meat of his neck and hissed. He swatted it away. An autoinjector dart rattled across the linoleum, blue liquid within drained into him in a second. Serum. Medical fluid, flush with nanobots. And something else. The ceiling spun. 
  Across the room, the doctor holstered her MediKit gun with a twirl, and her next words were inaudible. The assembled soldiers laughed, and their cacophony drawled into a low roar. His vision smeared like the lagging Neoterran skyline back in his prefab, shimmering and shaking as the colors sharpened to a miserable edge. 
  The tile softened, the pain faded, and then, so did Wil. 

                          ⸶⸷

  No, he shouldn’t sleep. Not now. Wil jerked awake, fumbling for the knife. 
  Not the examination room. Somewhere darker. No longer in his own clothes, or his armor. He’d been reduced to a plain white shirt gone grubby from sweat and baggy beige elastic-band shorts. No shoes. No skivvies. 
  Prisoner wear. 
  The examination room had been replaced with a dingy concrete cell. Mildew and old earth clouded in the air, and rain dripped past the glass of a barred window on the wall. Electric light glowed from under-neath a tall steel door along the far wall, brightest near the eye-level slat. A grimy bucket occupied the opposite corner. 
  Mierda, it was cold. He pinched the edge of the blanket and pulled. 
  The moment he tensed, fireworks erupted behind his eyes, and an all-encompassing hurt stomped him into the coarse fabric of his cot. His ribs ached, all twenty-four bones throbbing out of time with his head, his shoulder, his spine. A cluster of neat black stitches plucked along the olive length of his forearm, and a similar squeeze graced his chest and his scalp. 
They’d taken his lenses and his earpiece. The lingering threads of half-remembered urban legends drew his hand to his neck, brushing the old scars there. No stitches. At least they hadn’t cut out his Cube. 
  Something weighed his wrist. A silvery shackle. Thick. Two green diodes on the band blinked at random intervals. Loose enough to slide the length of his arm, but not enough to remove without taking his hand or his fingers. 
  He’d seen devices like this before, on patrol after Karnapur. The onboard computer overloaded implanted comlog’s quantronic processors to prevent them from sending automatic distress calls—like a never-ending flash pulse. But unlike the slapdash version the Ikari Company had left on the corpses of their Yujingyu victims, this version was Teseum-alloyed. Nigh unbreakable.
  Footsteps thudded outside the cell door, receding as fast as they came. A patrol. 
  He hoped Rajan was alright. Would be a shame to carry his dead weight that far to have him die anyways. 
  When Wil woke again, night had fallen and the storm outside had grown. Rain rattled the glass. A flash of lightning glinted across the rims of a thin tray lying by the door; thunder jostled its contents.
  Wil reached for it, but his arms felt hollow. A lukewarm puddle swamped his cot, and all his clothes had gone sticky with sweat. Bit by bit, he unraveled his frail lethargy and drummed up the strength to hook the tray with his thumb. 
  What awaited him hardly felt worth the effort. A spoonful of porridge, vegetable medley, four neat cubes of white meat, a paper cup of water, and a plastic cup of pills. After briefly considering the conse-quences of eating food he hadn’t seen prepared, hunger won. He fingered the scant meal from the compartmented tray to his mouth and choked the water down. He didn’t realize how much he needed more until it’d run out. 
  His chest itched madly, deep and unabating. Where the Antipode’s knife had grazed him, his skin puffed taut and radiated uncomfortable heat. Damp crust piled between the stitches. The bandage had gone askew, interior padding stained more yellow than red. 
  Wil’s reservation about the pills ended, and he swallowed them dry. 
  Muted thunder lulled him back to sleep. 

                          ⸶⸷

  He startled awake, mired in the comfort of a clean white bed. Nice and dry. Bright. The air smelled like bleach and linen instead of stagnant water and sweat. 
  The line across his chest. The infection. Layers of fresh gauze prevented his clumsy probe. Where his shoulder once ground inside the joint, the pain had dulled considerably, and he could move all his fingers and toes. He might even be able to walk. 
  All pretense that he might have returned to the DRC faded when he glanced to his right and saw the bedside stand of obsolete diagnostics machinery. The ceiling was brickwork; the walls, water-stained plaster. An electric fan wobbled on the ceiling, just above the privacy screen. 
  Behind it, the soft beep of a machine. A second patient.
  An indignant huff to his left stole his attention. A pretty strawberry-blonde in a field jacket and plaid slacks sat at his bedside, blue eyes locked on his exploring hand. Same uniform as the kid in the clearing. 
  As his fingers grazed the bandages, she reached out and slapped his knuckles. “Stop touchin’ it, numpty-muppet.” 
  Wil coughed. “My mistake.” 
  “Oh, hell!” she yelped and wobbled in her chair. “You’re awake! Here, here.” 
  The blonde fetched a paper cup from the bedside table and tilted it against his lips, thin hands rough as any soldier’s. Water. Lukewarm. It spilled down his chin to his neck, and she wiped it up with a cloth. 
  An archaic dial flickered to life above her clunky wristlet comlog—holographic projection, the kind of tech that was bargain-bin before Wil learned to walk. She swiped the touchscreen instead of in midair and smiled. “You’re in the infirmary. My name’s Nora. How you feeling?” 
  He coughed. “What’d you do?”
  “No worries,” she said and did it again. The bed beneath him whirred, headboard lifting until he was sitting. “You had a hell of an infection. Almost died in your cell. Been out of commission three days, loaded up with steroids from offworld, antibiotics from… somewhere. Comfy?” 
  Cell. So he was still in Caledonia. 
  Wil cracked his back and stretched his limbs. The stitches down his left strained halfway and stung. He tried to go farther, and it started to really hurt until Nora grabbed his forearm and folded it back onto his chest. 
  “You tear those again and I won’t hear the end of it,” she said. 
  Wil laid back. “Sorry.”
  She wore a nametag that read MCDERMOTT, and Wil wasn’t sure why it gave him déjà vu. A patch of the staff of Asclepius on her shoulder confirmed his suspicion: paramedic, not a doctor. Still, better bedside manner than most Trauma-Docs he’d met, but he had yet to see if she’d mix up her MediKit gun with her pistol.
  Someone on the other side of the privacy screen got Nora’s attention with a whisper. She lifted a rifle from its prop beside her chair and flit over, mumbling a quick, “Sorry, one minute! Hang tight.”
  Hushed conversation filtered through the gaps in the screen. Wil slowed his breathing and strained to listen. 
  “Don’t think he took a booster,” a woman said. Doctor Quickdraw, from earlier. “Immune system’s basically nuked. Infection may well still kill him yet.”
  What a perfect ending to a wonderful weekend, dying of easily avoidable sepsis all to avoid an autoinjector and a pinch. What an utter genius he was, making so many good decisions.
  “That scar, below his ear,” Nora whispered. “We didn’t—” 
  “Not us,” the doctor said. “I’d never extract a Cube. Too risky, too cruel. My bet’s he got one put in, back alley-like, ken?” 
  “I thought all PanOs were born with one,” Nora said. A response, unintelligible, and then, “Is Eideard gonna hurt him?” 
  Fantastic. Should’ve played dead. He’d survived something—an infection, anemia, or maybe he was a Dog-Warrior now, too—and now that he was hale and hearty, these bastards would show him the hospitality Ariadna was famous for. 
  Ten seconds later, the infirmary door burst open, and Wil hadn’t gotten two words out before they’d shoved another goddamn bag over his head and dragged him out into the hall. 
  “Be gentle,” Nora called after them, soft and ever so futile. 

                          ⸶⸷

  The infirmary’s laundry-fresh scent fell away, replaced by motor oil, then lacquer, then dust. Stone, tile, then wood. Stairs, several times—some narrow, most wide. The rattle of a kitchen in full swing on his left. The chug of washing machines, his right. A door clicked twice—double doors?—and the ground went from hardwood to carpet.
  The bag ripped free, and Wil hurtled into an armchair. A wide, stately room filled with tables and mismatched carpets stretched out around him. Shelves loomed up to the ceiling on every wall, lined with rolling ladders and packed to bursting with weathered hardback books. Two chipped teacups on two chipped saucers sat atop a tea table in front of him. Something in the air smelled like burning potpourri. 
  A paper library. He’d never seen one before. 
  An old man stood beside the hearth, minding a kettle hung above its flames. He had a nice turtleneck sweater on. Slacks. Thin, with receding white hair barely a fingertip long. The boss, but not clan chieftain. Wil didn’t know why, but he was sure the chieftain would’ve had a sword.
  A portrait twice the size of any other hung above the mantel, depicting a healthy brunette sitting on a drystack wall. She held an M-16 against her woolen sweater and wore a crucifix around her neck, defiant eyes the color of Loch Eil. By the fade of the acrylic, the painting had to be a hundred years old. 
  Wrists zip-tied in his lap, Wil took stock of his new escort: four soldiers in kilts with pistols on their belts. The guy who’d cracked him in the forehead was among them. Neil. A checker-strapped Glengarry bonnet cocked atop his head, failing to hide his mess of blond curls, and his name badge read MCDERMOTT—same as the paramedic, Nora. No wonder he’d recognized her. With the familial resemblance, he guessed they were siblings, if not fraternal twins. 
  Wil wormed in place, trying to find a position where the ache in his bones didn’t worsen. 
One of the soldiers unlimbered his pistol. “Eyes forward.” 
  “Gentlemen,” the old man called. “That’s enough.” 
  The escort grimaced and holstered their weapon. 
  When the kettle whistled, he brought it over and filled both their tea cups. “You’ll have to forgive the lads. They’ve never met a PanOceanian before, and especially none who’d put our doctor at knife point. Understandably, they’re none too chuffed about it.” 
  Protocol said to spit out the chicken feed—his name, rank, identification number, and birth date—and hope it was enough to delay an execution. But Wil got the feeling that when the Caledonians weighed the consequences of owning up to black-bagging an Aquila Guard and a Neoterran diplomat, or dropping their corpses off at the local Antipode den and claiming they’d died on impact, they’d choose simplicity over sym-pathy. 
  So, he chose silence, instead.
  “My name is Eideard Carr,” the old man said, and sat. “Do you ken where you are?” 
  Wil missed his geist and his lens already. If the local datasphere didn’t get a hit on that name, a quick rewind to when he’d been reading the files on the Circular to Dawn would’ve sufficed. Instead, he was without auto-search for the first time in two decades. 
  Eideard unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket. A readout, likely pried from his armor’s wrecked onboard systems. “Can you tell me how you got here? The names of your compatriots?” 
  With the right equipment and a hacker, they’d have had access to his comlog by now. Without, the numbers were very pretty on the page, and Wil had the feeling they were exactly as Atek as a paper printout suggested. 
  Atek, short for ‘a-technological,’ meaning none. An Atek’s sensorium was limited to only their five senses plus what their obsolete comlogs could process in ‘dumb mode,’ and they generally lacked the hardware to interface with most digital systems such as halos, domotics, AR. 
  In the wider Human Sphere, being Atek was considered a disability. To doggedly resist the technology that defined the 22nd Century was the realm of the mentally unwell, conspiracy theorists, and Ariadnans. 
  Eideard’s reedy eyes flit across the page, and then to Wil. “We stand on MacArthur land, in Castle MacArthur itself. Your transport crashed within our clan territory three days ago. Care to explain what you were doing flying a hundred klicks outside your airspace?” 
  MacArthurs. Rajan had mentioned them, so Wil had done his due diligence. Their clan holding was the closest to the DRC-9, and the border of their claim ran parallel along the frontier, sectioning off Odune’s little corporate kingdom. He wasn’t that far from home after all—400km, at the farthest. So they’d been flying for an hour while he was asleep….
  Interesting wording, too. Crashed. 
  “The Antipode you killed, Indigo River? He was chieftain of the Winter Dancer Tribe. You’ve unbalanced a tenuous peace, and worse, elected Pale Shadow their leader.” 
  Indigo River—the dead blue-eyed monstrosity. Pale Shadow must’ve been the albino. 
Unspoken threats of literally being thrown to the wolves aside, Wil focused on the room. Needed to find bearings. Landmarks. Four massive windows stood guard along the far end, three flags hung beside them: an Ariadnan bullseye, a crimson lion rampant at the center of a white saltire on a blue field, and three crowns laid across a blue shield. 
  Outside, an Ariadnan holding stretched out beneath them, crammed into the hollow between two gray peaks. Old-world brick and mortar buildings muddled amongst concrete fortifications haphazardly strewn down the hills. A sliver of Loch Eil shined from between inclines, but the rest of the landscape was lost in the trees. 
  Paired anti-air batteries reclined along the ridges closest to a large, dark facility. A Teseum mine. 
  Across the library, a woman sat alone, dark, cloudy hair tied high and tight behind an azure bandanna. A camouflage-patterned poncho hung over the armrest beside her, and on her lap, an old Tartary Army Corps Molotok. From where Wil was sitting, the rifle looked patchwork. Custom. Old. The gunmetal of its stock almost perfectly matched her obsidian skin. 
  She caught his look and curtly  waved, pistol in hand. 
  Funny—he’d heard most of the Scots Guard had left Dawn with the Kosmoflot. 
  “Admiring our library, I see,” Eideard said. “You ever read a paper book before? Some of our collection came to Dawn aboard the Ariadna, shuttled to this place in an old motor with Ceilidh MacArthur herself.” 
  Honestly, this was a softer approach than Wil had expected. He’d nursed a little fear that the Caledonians had been the ones to shoot down the Balena, but if that were true, they wouldn’t have tried so damn hard to be cordial. 
  Eideard reclined in his chair, fingers latticed on his knee. His untouched teacup had stopped steaming. “We haven’t had PanO armor touch ground in Kildalton since the Commercial Conflicts. Your presence here violates a hundred small treaties, and more than a few big ones. Not to mention the contraband your friend had decorating his sleeves.” 
  Rajan’s gift from Odune. The brand-new Teseum cufflinks. Should’ve known that it wasn’t above-board. All things said, if Rajan was alive, Wil owed him an apology: his theory about the missing attaché seemed less ridiculous by the minute. 
  “We’ve attempted to contact your compatriots at the DRC-9, but they’re not answering. Given the fact that you were engaged in the air in a ship meant to carry six, I assume you, your friend, and the pilot weren’t alone. Are there more in the wilderness we need to concern ourselves with? Allies, perhaps? Someone who might need help?” 
  Damned if he did or didn’t. Tell the truth, and it became easier to declare total casualties with no fault. Lie that backup was waiting in the trees, and Eideard would grab a rag and a pitcher to find out where. 
  You, your friend, and the pilot, he’d said…
  That was more than enough information to make a decision. It’d been three days minimum since the crash. If PanOceania or O-12 hadn’t come asking by now, it meant they either didn’t know they’d crashed or weren’t certain they’d survived. If Rajan’s missing attaché theory was true, the former was more likely than the latter. 
  No use pretending that words would solve this, or that someone was coming to find him. He had to leave, and soon. To make the opportunity he needed, he only had to get back to his cell. And while he didn’t like the most obvious route, it was quicker than the alternative.
  Wil reached forward and took the teacup. 
  The four soldiers’ boots creaked as they shifted weight. Like he was dangerous without his armor, without all of his gadgets, and his MULTI Rifle, and his multispectral visor that knew down to the second the last time his target brushed their teeth. 
  He was. But he needed them to think he wasn’t. 
  Wil gave Eideard his best King’s Den face. “You the chief around here?” 
  “The MacArthur isn’t available right now,” Eideard said. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” 
  No clue what that meant. “The other guy. How’s he?” 
  “Your friend? Alive. Answering a few of my questions may extend that. Make things easier for you, for me. For everyone.” 
  Wil sniffed the hot leaf water. He took a sip. “What blend is this?” 
  “Ours,” Eideard said. “We grow the tea shrub here, in the township. Can’t find it anywhere else in the Human Sphere.” 
  “It sucks,” Wil said, and poured it on the rug. 

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Novel Name Guide

AIRAGHARDT: PRONUNCIATION PET PIAMHS

AUTHENTICITY IS TOUGH.
 When I set out to write Airaghardt, I knew two things for certain: the Roman alphabet used to write Gaelic wasn’t developed for English, but for Latin, and that most people who picked up the book wouldn’t know that. The pronunciation for some of the names I’d hear out loud would basically just be improvisation. And I’d have to either be okay with that, or…
 Well. Make a blog post about it.
(Note: ‘Piamh’ in the title is pronounced like ‘peeve,’ which is how the name Niamh is pronounced—like ‘neeve.’ Get it? Funny, right? … Right?)

 So, this is the Big Damn Name Guide, the place to look when you’re not so sure if you’ve got something right and now you’ve got to say it out loud. Hopefully we learn something, and if all we learn is that we don’t know anything, then, well, we’re making Socrates proud!
 Amongst the names, you’ll see I’ve tossed in a few places and concepts as well just to keep things on the level. Enjoy! I hope you’re either reading the book or looking forward to it by the time you find this blog post. I’m keeping myself out of Spoilers for now, but might upload a more complete version of this at some unspecified further date.
 Alright—name time!

Name/Place/Object, as Written	IPA	Pronunciation
Aquila	/ˈa.kwi.la/	AK-wil-a
Odune	/o.ˈdun/	Oh-DOON
Saoirse	/ˈsɪɚ.ʃə/	SER-sha
Cailean	/ˈkʰa.lan/	COL-in
Fionnlagh	/fɪn.ˈleɪ/	Fin-LAY
Cù-sìth	/ˈku-ʃi/	KOO-shee
Dun Scaith	/dun#skaɪ/	DOON Sky
Brizuela	/bri.ˈswe.la/	BREE-sway-la
Eideard	/i.ˈdɜɹd/	Ee-DERD
Antipode	/ˈæn.tə.ˌpoʊd/	AN-teh-POAD
Lhost	/ˈɜl.hoʊst/	EL-Host
Teseum	/ˈti.zi.ʌm/	TEE-zee-UM
Scáthach	/ska.ˈhɑk/	Ska-HAWK
Airaghardt	/ɛɹ.ə.ˈgɑɹt/	Air-a-GART
Airaghardt	/ɑɹ.ˈgut/	Ar-GOOT
Airaghardt	/ɛɹ.ˈɑɹst/	Air-ARST
Airaghardt	/ɑɹ.gə.ˈhɑɹd/	Ar-ga-HARD
Airaghardt	/aɪ.ɹə.ˈgʰɑɹ/	Ai-ra-GHAR
Bearpode	/ˈbʊl.ʃɪt/	Bull-SHIT

Huge shout out to Corey McCulloch for the IPA here!! You rock!!!

  Hopefully this handy guide has been helpful to you! Unfortunately, you must now live forever burdened by the knowledge that her name is not ‘Cerise’ or ‘Sa-orsa’ or ‘Sarisa’ or ‘Sayorsie’ or wow I’ve heard so many of these from people I could do this all day. The point is, good luck to you if you want to talk about this book in person with people. I have apparently made it as difficult as possible. God help me if you need to recommend this book and have to spell the name.
  Really looking forward to my next book, where the most difficult name in the roster is five letters long. Until then!

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Novel Excerpt

AIRAGHARDT: FIRST 15 PAGES

NOISE. PAIN. HEAT.
  Harness straps vised Wilhelm Gotzinger’s powered combat armor’s joints. Debris washed across his faceplate. Gauntleted fingers squeezed divots into both armrests, deforming the steel like clay. Information read-outs flickered across his heads-up display, projected on quantronic lenses: 195 km/h. 15-degree angle of descent. 3,650 meter elevation and falling fast.
  A missile—they’d been struck by a missile.
  Smoke clawed into the Balena through the gaping hole in its side. The multispectral visor he wore cut past the billow, painting the transport’s interior in burning golden lines. Across the cabin interior, Rajan tangled in his seat straps. Limbs awkwardly folded by the centrifugal force, he jostled without resistance. Unconscious.
  Beside him, an empty chair. The diplomatic aide, Rajan’s assistant, had vanished. Wind screamed against the blown cabin doors, and her unfastened seat belt flapped between the armrests. No trace of her presence remained.
  Wil wedged himself into his seat and tensed his legs until his bones bowed. Anything to keep blood in his brain where it belonged.
  The alarms blaring from the cockpit and the desperate grinding in the port nacelle died at the same time. Total silence, save for wind cut with the Doppler chop of loose maglev and his own pitched breathing against the inside of his helmet. Shards of polysteel and glass hissed along the floor as the Balena’s nose pitched down, pattering against his boots.
  Shadows careened past. Daylight flickered in the windows, erratic. Branches scraped the hull. The winglet of the Balena bashed into some-thing and rebounded, juddering his ribs, his neck, his collar. Another collision. Something splashed across his chest. Not water. Needles, from a fir tree, or whatever passed for a fir on this godforsaken—
  The Balena struck ground.
  Skipped.
  His seat danced wild. Bolts came loose. Another shock, and the harness snapped.
  Wil speared into the ceiling head-first. Ribs crushed. Head torqued. A jerk, a snap, and an urgent cold followed after—numbing agents, auto-injected from his armor. Artificial muscle ripped along the surface of his neck. No chance to flinch, to embrace the hurt. Shards of the overhead light coated the sleeves of his duster.
  Going back down wasn’t half as pleasant. Neither was the second time up.
  On the third drop, a thrum raced along the soles of his feet. Red flicked to green in the corner of his HUD, and on next impact, his boots clamped down on the flooring and fixed him in place. Magnetic anchors, intended for zero-g conflict in deep-space Circulars. Before he could consider thanking the Knights of Santiago for making them standard-issue on an ORC, a loose chair rebounded off his face and sucked out the open cabin doors.
  The transport skidded, jumped. The sky spun. His stomach sucked into his throat, then vice-versa. Polysteel fuselage crunched and tore overhead, underfoot, all around him. Sunlight lanced past the holes in the Balena’s exterior, darkened, lit again.
  The roll slowed.
  Stopped.
  Arms dangling, Wil hung from the floor. His duster’s hem brushed the other contents of the churned Balena interior puddled two meters beyond his fingertips. Steel. Plastic. Glass. Everything sharpened to daggers save for some oxygen masks.
  Pain. Lots of pain, along his jaw, his shoulders, behind his ears. Freezing anti-kinetic fluid oozed along his collar, dripping into the mess below. If the reserve in his gorget had burst, it meant he’d only narrowly avoided breaking his neck.
  The cabin doors were long gone, lost far behind where the transport had turned into a crayon on the rocks. Outside, boreal wilderness stretched out in all directions, surrounding the dry, rocky riverbed they’d landed in, like something out of a holo-ad for scented candles. A carpet of vibrant moss coated bark and stone alike, and it was very quiet.
  Too quiet. Loose wiring sparked silently in his peripheral vision. Debris shifted without sound. Wil tapped his breastplate. Nothing. His sensors must’ve short-circuited, lost audio outside his armor. Examining his helmet by feel, he found both of his radial antennae wrenched out of shape, the right dangling by a single stubborn bolt.
  Wil queried his geist to open his faceplate. Servos whirred loud above his cheekbones, and it didn’t move. That they made sound at all meant they’d been compromised. Desperate to listen and fearing fire, he reached for his helmet’s manual release. Something too blurred to read in his HUD switched color, and the thrum in his boots went quiet.
  The ceiling rushed up to meet him. The cushioning of his armor’s interior wasn’t enough to soften its full weight crushing atop him. His shoulder bore the brunt, folding inward. More pain. Immediate. Severe. Sprawled atop the debris pile, Wil weathered the sprain until his armor recognized the injury and replaced it with fresh, cold numbness.
  Painkillers made his head spin. He coughed. “Fuck.”
  Breathing through the fresh pain, he took firm hold of his helmet’s release and pulled. As the bodysleeve of artificial muscle around his throat slacked, the world came alive. Above him, the mangled engine chattered. The cabin roof groaned, struggling to bear the weight of its floor. Inside the paneling, electronics sizzled and popped. A low wind rattled the pines, whistling the myriad wounds in the Balena’s hull.
  The smell came next, the sickening tang of metal-on-metal churning inside an earthy stench he hadn’t breathed since their withdrawal from Karnapur. Nothing like Maya sensaseries, or the chlorine-washed alleys of King’s Den, or the proving grounds in the Aquilan outback flush with greasewood and pittosporum.
  Wet. Alive. Untamed.
  Dawn.
  Wil fumbled his duster off his face and rolled to his knees. He tried to stand, but the servos in his greaves whined, impotent. Blown. Any amount of movement meant deadlifting a hundred kilos of ORC Combat Armor. Wasn’t as if he had a choice. He groped above for a handhold to haul him to his feet and touched something soft.
  Rajan. Blank-faced and swaying. Unconscious, but breathing. His vitals blipped in the lens of Wil’s left eye, edging toward critical. Brushing the young commercial attaché’s suit jacket aside, Wil saw why. A small hole punched into Rajan’s charcoal-matte designer vest, no larger than his thumb. Blood dripped along the embroidery, riding the threads to soak in his beard.
  His geist scanned the injury: a long, tapered piece of the transport’s hull had pierced Rajan’s ribs and stuck snarled in his diaphragm. Move the injury by centimeters, and it would’ve grazed through the meat of his flank. The other way, center mass, instant death.
  Unlucky.
  He shoved aside the insults from the heliport and worked to untangle Rajan. The job outweighed his personal feelings. He just hoped that when someone reviewed his lens footage later, they’d consider his hesitation shock and not deliberation.
  The partition window to the cockpit had cracked but hadn’t left its frame. In the midst of undoing a buckle, Wil craned his neck to see through the shatter to the other side. The pilot’s seat was missing. Through the empty windshield, beyond the Balena’s nose, a smear of red terminated in an upended chair. Tilted onto its face upon the rocks, two legs stuck out from beneath it—or what was left of them.
  Beside the gap, Keyes swayed upside-down in the co-pilot’s seat, his chest a pincushion for all the shrapnel Rajan hadn’t caught. Blood drooled up his face without a heartbeat to propel it, mouth gaped in a perpetual scream.
  The metal-on-metal stench intensified. Fire. Getting away from the explosion hazard seemed a smart first step. The second was finding a place to hide. Whoever had put a missile into their transport didn’t do it because they’d wanted to take prisoners.
  Harness undone, Wil drew Rajan across his aching shoulders like a sandbag. No time to favor a side or keep a gentle hand. Limp by limp, Wil distanced himself from the dying Balena, wobbling on the uneven riverbed stones.
  Wil spun up his comlog dial from his wrist-mounted unit, feed painting across his contact lenses with his helmet disconnected. He scanned for secure channels. Nothing but snow. A distress call sent direct to the comms array back at the DRC-9 failed, and again a second time. Jammed? Hacked? No way to tell, but—
  Ten meters from the crash, Wil fell. He struggled up and made it another three before he hit the dirt again. Branches slithered overhead, blurred leaves soaking up the rays of Dawn’s alien sun. The way they moved put the taste of paper on his tongue.
  A concussion. The anti-kinetic gel hadn’t soaked the full impact.
Soft staccato beeps signaled the arrival of undesignated targets. Hostiles? Friends of their ambusher, no doubt. No clue how they’d closed on them so fast across the mountain terrain or what they were armed with. Red lines on his lenses traced movement vectors through the overgrowth. Shifting, blinking. Focusing on the visual feed churned Wil’s stomach and threatened to bring up the morning’s sour coffee.
  He struggled to his full height and groped for his MULTI Marksman Rifle.
  Gone.
  With a weak double-tap, Wil queried his geist for it, expecting its outline to highlight within his lens’s field of view. Nothing. Some small hope urged him to scan the crash site, praying to find it lying atop a rock under a sunbeam or something.
  He didn’t. It wasn’t.
  Maybe he should’ve joined the Military Orders, after all. At least then he’d have a goddamn sword.
  Wil drew back his trench coat and unlimbered his pistol. Sixteen rounds of more than enough for anything he’d ever seen on the battlefield, save for that time with the Kriza Borac—or the two Sù-Jiàn—or that gaggle of fucking Yuan Yuans—
  Metal scraped metal. A massive lupine shape ambled atop the crumpled Balena. White fur. Bared fangs, broad and sharp. In its curled claws, a primitive knife, wide and long as a human leg. Its silvery sheen caught the light as it drew to a two-legged stand and growled.
  An Antipode.
  Beneath the multiplying alerts of incoming hostiles, a notification flashed in Wil’s peripheral vision. It was one he’d only seen once, back when he’d first requisitioned his armor, before he’d been taught how to plug tertiary systems into the ORC’s onboard battery. Something his instructor on Aquila had promised that the Hyperpower’s bottomless war chest would never let them see.
  LOW POWER.
  In the corner of his vision, movement.
  A blitz from the side.
  Just before his visor died, Wil raised his pistol and opened fire blind.

CHAPTER ONE

ONE DAY AGO...

  Joan of Arc extended her gauntleted hand, smiling like the Mona Lisa. 
  Wil dismissed the advertisement. 
  The hologram froze and flickered away, receding into the display underneath. There, clad in power armor, Joan sheltered a trio of children in her fortified embrace. A beatific halo shined from behind her braided blonde hair, and a sword weighted her hip. Knights of the PanOceanian Military Orders always carried swords, and their de facto leader was no exception. 
  Text scrawled below, floating in mid-air: SUPPORT THE NEOTERRAN INTEGRATION FUND! THE HYPERPOWER UPLIFTS ALL CITIZENS EQUALLY! And below the loglines: TRUST ALEPH. ALEPH IS YOUR FRIEND.
  The jury was still out on that one. 
  On a more civilized planet where MayaNet was abundant, skipping an advert might’ve triggered any number of competing ads to take up the free space on his lens instead. But the MayaNet signal at the DRC-9 was unusable at its best, and one loading wheel spun into another before his geist dropped signal and dimmed.
  The expansive hallway windows gave a vantage point over the Dawn Research Commission, and he scanned it from above. Personal dormitories and scientific research labs lined the forested mountainside, interconnected by a network of narrow switchbacks and elevated walkways that overlooked the still, dark expanse of Loch Eil trailing over the horizon far below. Sparse, boreal wilderness crawled along the loch’s rocky shores and blanketed the bordering mountains in resilient greenery. Above, where the clouds met stone—snow. 
  And if not for Wil’s multispectral visor, that incredible panorama would’ve ended a meter from the glass in an impenetrable wall of fog. Myriad feeds on multiple spectrums supplied the foundation for his geist to make a digital best-guess, compositing shared photographs, surveillance data, and algorithmic assumption into something more poignant than flat gray.
  Not quite real, but real enough. 
  The peripheral of his visor indicated incoming movement, ten o’clock. Wil scanned the lobby, his geist already estimating the height and weight of the two unknowns ascending the staircase from the third floor. Male. Large. The Dawn Research Commission insignia glowed atop their security vests, projected in AR. Not soldiers, or SWORDFOR Kappa, but corporate security. CSUs. 
  Their social clouds were open and easily skimmable: The tall one was Fontaine; the shorter, Ghent. Both wore mirrored shades, sported crew cuts, and followed military-adjacent meme-tags chock full of guns, glitz, and glory. 
  And if they were allowed to carry anything but stun pistols and telescoping batons, they would’ve been half as threatening as they thought they were. 
  Fontaine squared with him like the armor was an open invitation for posturing. “Hey, big guy. You the new secretary? Where’s Melantha?” 
  Wil nodded to the door to the executive suite behind him. “She’s inside, with Counselor Odune,” he said, voice turned deeper by his helmet’s vox. “If you’ve got an appointment, you’ll have to wait.”
  Ghent hooked his fat thumbs in the armpits of his security vest. Unlike his friend, he seemed worried, almost reticent. “About how long?” 
  “Didn’t ask.”
  “Be a good lad and knock for us,” Fontaine said. “Won’t be a minute.”
  “Take a seat,” Wil said. He dropped his hands to his side, closer to where his pistol magnetized to his hip. “Wait your turn.”
  Fontaine’s smile wavered. “Real helpful.”
  “I aim to please.”
  Ghent pulled on Fontaine’s shoulder, and they made for the seats across the lobby, shooting glances over their uniformed shoulders. Halfway there and five meters away, words clicked into place along the bottom of Wil’s field of vision. 
  [FONTAINE, PETER]: WHERE DOES HE THINK HE IS, THE ÖBERHAUS? WHAT A PRICK.
Odune’s fourth-story admin building lobby wasn’t the seat of the G-5 on Concilium, true, and maybe full arms and armor was a bit much. But it hadn’t been his choice—Wil had dressed to Rajan’s expectation, no more, no less.
  The vacuum-tight suit of artificial muscle and fiberweave underlaid beneath the plating of his ORC Combat Armor bulked his silhouette from six-foot-four to Not to Be Fucked With, and the calf-length duster he wore over it bore battle scars from six different systems—particulate ammo, explosive rounds, plasma bursts, worse. 
  The MULTI Marksman Rifle he carried was a SG-A2 Schärfe II, top of the line, interlinked to his visor and armor via his geist. With his multispectral visor overlaid on his four-eyed helmet, its gaze sharpened into something predatory, like the eagle of his old unit’s namesake: The Aquila Guard. 
  The crème de la crème of PanOceanian officers, masters of tactical acumen and wartime strategy. Leaders. Warriors. Their motto: In Omnibus Princeps. First in All Things. When an Aquila Guard put boots on the ground, it was usually the first sign the tide was about to turn in PanOceania’s favor. 
  He’d been one, once. Not anymore. 
  In truth, the visor was on loan; the duster, a keepsake; his MSV, privately acquired. Probably shouldn’t have put it on, but Rajan insisted—apparently, being escorted by an Aquila Guard was better optics and ‘venned with his halo’ more than the Orc Trooper Wil officially was, and for a man like Rajan, aesthetics always trumped practicality. 
  The two CSUs fell into the minimalist square couches, gesturing to their geists on their private haloes. With two flicks of their wrists, their ruddy, mirror-shaded faces blurred, words replaced by unintelligible electronic scratching. Their clouds derezzed, leaving only a few scant legally required identification codes visible in the empty nothingness of their social media. 
  They’d blacklisted him.
  But the closed captions on the bottom of Wil’s vision kept translating their conversation.
   [GHENT, HESSEL]: I WAS HOPING WE WOULDN’T HAVE TO SEE THAT COWARD HERE.
  Though Wil was blocked, his multispectral array wasn’t. Its onboard geist read the breath cadence and movement of the lips and larynx of those within his field of vision, supplying his comlog with enough data to extrapolate the faintest whispers into intelligible subtitles. 
He could’ve raised a privacy screen. Been discreet. But while on security detail, Wil didn’t have the luxury to drop his guard for privacy’s sake, and he’d just been informed he was a cowardly prick otherwise.
  Face artifacted into a pixelated mask, Fontaine sighed. “Don’t tell me that’s him.” 
  “In all the disappointing person,” Ghent said. “Wilhelm Gotzinger III, worst Guardsman in the history of the unit.” 
  “I thought Aquila were s’posed to be good,” Fontaine said. 
  Ghent chortled. “Not this one.”
  “Then what’s he still doing in uniform? Didn’t he get court-martialed or something?” 
  “Should count his lucky stars, then. Back in the old days, deserters got executed, mark my words.”
  Fontaine’s heart rate must’ve jumped; Wil’s geist pinged the pistol on his hip. “You saw the footage, right? Fourteen effing people.” 
  “Fourteen effin’ people,” Ghent echoed. “Doesn’t matter how many Shasvastii he’s killed, get me alone in a room with him and I’ll make him wish he died back on Svalarheima.” 
  Fontaine pounded his fist on the table, posturing. Ghent escalated to casual death-threats. Wil comfortably tuned them out. 
  The Shasvastii Expeditionary Army. Tall, gangly slug-skinned aliens infamous for their guerilla fighters and nightmarish saboteurs, deadset on clearing a path for the Combined Army and its leader, the Evolved Intelligence, to put an end to free will in the galaxy. 
  Despite Fontaine’s assumptions, Wil hadn’t ever killed a Shas. Just two of their Q-Drones. Never even seen a live one, at least not close enough to look them in the eyes. All he remembered of that day was plasma flares, frost smoke, and fleeting shadows. 
  Ads for Eco Cars, reruns of the Myrmidon Wars, and The Go-Go Marlene! Show, ONLY ON OXYD! played in sequential order on the holo-ad’s surface until Joan returned, arm pleadingly outstretched. “The Shield of Skovorodino safeguards—” 
  “Sure,” Wil said and dismissed her for the fiftieth time. 
  The office door sighed open, and Rajan and Counselor Odune sauntered out, followed by their respective assistants. Their social media halos floated after, bombarding Wil’s datasphere with high-res images of space-station charity galas, crystal-clear Varuna beachfronts, and eccentric Concilium fashion shows. 
  Wil jumped to attention, returning to the SecDet routine ingrained in him on Aquila. He scanned for hostiles on three different spectrums, squaring his body to shield his charge, painstakingly aware of every minute notification that skimmed past his lens. 
  Rajan snapped his fingers twice. “Oi, Gotzinger! Stop spacing out. Come over here and say hi.” 
  Despite Wil’s suggestion to come prepared for the rugged terrain, Rajan had insisted on dress shoes and a suit. After ten minutes planetside, both were tinged brown at the fringes from mud. A domotic shimmered the embroidered orchids on his undershirt with pink and blue light, and his eyes swam with technicolor mandalas, garish even for cosmopolitan Neo-terra. Not real. Geist-assisted programs, only visible in AR. But Rajan enjoyed those kinds of things—they distracted from his medium height, the one thing he couldn’t biosculpt without spending a fortune for a custom Lhost. 
  Standing beside him was Administrative Counselor Xandros Odune, the official liaison to O-12 for the DRC-9 Dun Scaith. He was bigger than the photographs suggested, as tall as Wil in his armor but much, much thinner. His nose was blunt, and a snowy pallor lined the edges of his dark, clean-cut hair and beard. Compared to Rajan, the simple ivory-white three-piece suit he wore nearly glowed, woven with self-cleaning fabric that kept the color bright.
  Odune flashed a hollow smile, and the two of them traded double-taps on their extended forearms. “Captain Gotzinger, my word.” 
  “Only for a moment, sir,” Wil said. “Lieutenant now, I’m afraid.” 
  “Mea culpa,” Odune said. “A pleasure.” 
  Something itched in the back of Wil’s head, a kind of déjà vu. Intrusive. He dismissed it along with Odune’s granted level-two social access—a quick glance confirmed it was mostly PR shots and blurb biographies, puff pieces about Odune’s spearheaded efforts to secure funding, settlers, and scientists. How he R&D’d the prefabricated housing pod’s mountainside stabilizers on his own dime.
  Wil had read it all already on the Circular to Dawn. After Kurage, building an outpost in the wildlands of Planet Dawn had been unpalatable to most investors, and Odune had graciously taken advantage of that.
  “I must admit, Rajan,” Odune said, “I was expecting Yearwood’s replacement from Neoterra to be another stodgy, boring old mathematician. Instead, this conversation has been the highlight of my year.” 
  “You must be glad I showed up a few weeks before your corona-tion, then,” Rajan said. “A whole delegation of donors from Neoterra flying straight to your doorstep—and one hell of an honor, if I read the release correctly?” 
  Odune scoffed. “Oh, spare me. Honor? Only another useless accolade from Bureau Gaea and the Dawn Research Commission, soon to join the others collecting dust on my mantel. Like you said before, it’s all bullshit.” 
  “The check it comes with better not be,” Rajan said and fell into a competent impression of human laughter. 
  Wil trailed back to surveying the adjacent rooftops, glad that neither of them could clock his twinged patience through his helmet’s face-plate. 
  Wrists clasped behind his back, Odune approached the fogged-out windows. “A new frontier. Scientific discovery. Cultural exchange. Those are the true rewards. And while a soirée is welcome, in the end it’s but another frivolous ribbon.” Suddenly, he broke out in a wide grin. “You know, you should attend. Liven things up.” 
  Rajan cast a sidelong glance at Joan on the holo-ad and grinned wolfishly. “I heard you were expecting a surprise guest.” 
  Odune cracked a single, thundering laugh. “Oh, please! As much as I wish that were true, I can’t imagine the Maid of Orleans would take time from her busy schedule after the Second Resurrection to deliver a simple Exceptional Civilian Service medal. Absit omen, dei gratia, hm?” 
  “Yeah, gratya,” Rajan mumbled, bemused. “Agreed.” 
  Joan of Arc was a Recreation—ALEPH’s approximation of the historical figure from the 15th century, downloaded into a Lhost body and trained in the Order of the Hospital at Skovorodino on Svalarheima. The greatest tactical mind in the PanOceanian army, a military leader whose presence on the battlefield always signaled imminent victory. She was as much the real patron saint of France as Achilles of the Steel Phalanx was the real conqueror of Troy, but there was something Wil found inspiriting about her rise from the lowest rung of the Knights Hospitaller to her place as the figurehead of their nation’s military—even if that was what she’d been made for. 
  Judging by Rajan’s momentary leer at her literal breastplate, he didn’t share the same admiration. While his religious affiliation hadn’t been registered in his file, what was present confirmed the cover matched the contents: rich father; multiple arrests before adulthood; purchased Ivy-League degree; nepotism hire. The rest hid beneath redactions on redactions, expunged records, and settlements. 
  The last guy had somehow been worse. After a full year of ghosted negotiations, Yearwood dropped off the grid rather than return to Neoterra and face his superiors or the media. 
  Honestly, Wil didn’t blame him. He’d rather get shipped back to Paradiso naked than face another wall of WarCors and their camera drones. 
  “If time allows,” Odune said, “you should consider spending a few nights in Mariannebourg once the clan introductions play out. No modern city in the Human Sphere compares.” 
  Rajan fiddled with his cufflinks. “If we have the time.” 
  His assistant—a thin, artificially pretty woman who’d introduced herself to Wil as hmph—brightened. For the first time since he’d met her aboard the Circular to Dawn, she pulled away from AR. “I’ve heard the diaspora culture in urban Merovingia is mad lindy. Cravats, scarves, berets. So cute.” 
  “The French are a fascinating bunch,” Odune said. “Intellectual, spiritual, fashionable. Much more interesting than our rainy neighbors here at DRC-9, and much less plaid.” 
  Everyone laughed again. None of it sounded real. 
  A dark-haired bodysculpted beauty scowled her way out of Odune’s office and over toward Fontaine and Ghent. His secretary, Melantha—another hmph if not for a courteous double-tap. Beyond the open door she’d left, Wil caught a glance of four highball glasses surrounding a half-empty bottle of Caledonian whisky and a marble chessboard. White was playing a perfect game; black, not so much. 
  Odune must’ve smelled blood in the water. He traced Wil’s gaze and grinned. “Not too shabby, hm? Rajan gave me a run for my money, but I can always tell when someone’s geist is playing for them. You dabble?” 
  “No, sir,” Wil said. “Had a CO back in the day who made everything a chess metaphor. Pawn this, en passant that, castling this. Called everything a gambit, or a mate. Kind of ruined it for me.” 
  “Alas,” Odune said. He clicked his tongue as the hallmarks of a quantronic distraction ran across his face, and changed gears abruptly. “Rajan. Captain Gotzinger. I apologize, but something came up. Let’s take an adjournment, and after you return to Dun Scaith, you can tell me how the meeting went?” 
  “If you keep the champagne ready,” Rajan said. It sounded painfully forced.


                          ⸶⸷


Outside, the administrative building loomed over the scattered prefabs and Ariadnan pines, shock white and brutally angular as Odune himself. 
  The drizzled beginnings of another freezing downpour spurred Wil’s assets across the muddy road to their waiting AUV—Ariadnan Utility Vehicle, an unholy union of armored personnel carrier, lunar rover, and racing REM. Uncomfortable, but better than a one-way ticket to the bottom of a ravine. 
  Rajan climbed into the back seat, salesman’s grin replaced with a glare. “I’m pissed at you, Gotzinger. Know why?”
  “Sorry,” Wil said. “Just a checkers kind of guy.” 
  “Not that,” Rajan snapped. “I’m the one chugging this shit raw while you sip on recycled air from that filtered helmet. I can feel the mold setting root in my lungs. It’s disgusting, puts me off my game.” 
  “Can’t be that bad,” Wil said. “The Ariadnans seem to love it.” 
  “The Scots, the frogs, the yee-haws, or the Ruskies?” Rajan said and slammed the door.
  Wil went around to the other side, opening the door for Hmph. She hummed noncommittally and climbed inside, engrossed in her invisible fantasy. With her halo set to private, it turned what could’ve been very specific motions in her AR game into strange, purposeless groping. 
  Back in King’s Den, they called people like Hmph zoners, so addicted to AR that they forgot the real world existed beneath it. Turns out that when you’re the grandniece of a Moto.tronica sub-executive, being a zoner was just another kind of profession. 
  When Wil slipped into the AUV’s passenger seat, Rajan started again. “You know, they got this motto here: Dawn is Ours. What an assumption. Who ever said I wanted it? Spare me the planet and leave us the Teseum, am I right?” 
  Teseum—the vital neomaterial that started the Quantronic Revolution, first discovered in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Difficult to find and expensive; the surface of Dawn was unusually rich in it. While the great minds of the Human Sphere harnessed the secrets of Teseum to fuel their dreams of ending scarcity via the Universal Teseum Cradles, or unraveled the mysteries of death itself to bring about the first Recreations and normalize resurrection, the Ariadnan Army used it to make especially sharp knives and bulletproof helmets. 
  Most folks back home considered it a waste. After the rediscovery of Dawn twenty years back, two-hundred-years after the the Ariadna’s landing, the colonists weren’t too keen on sharing—so everybody started taking instead. ‘Dawn is Ours’ was usually the last thing a Teseum smuggler heard before some bastard in a kilt gave him a lethal dose of it. 
  The limited-AI driving program carefully navigated the inclines back toward their accommodation. Muted prefab strip lighting cut through the fog along with a smattering of pedestrian shapes. Several times they banked into gray nothingness, floating on solid clouds until the mist faded and the ground reasserted its existence. 
  Rajan snapped his tawny fingers in Hmph’s face. “I’ll need a toxicology screening the moment we’re offworld and another antibiotic booster. I’m not taking a fungus back to my penthouse in San Saba, no way. Oh, and next time you want to share your shitty opinion? Don’t.” 
  She blinked several times. “I didn’t—” 
  “Mariannebourg, so cute,” Rajan sneered. “Are you a child?” 
  “Sorry, sir.” 
  “I bet you are. And if you marked down Odune’s god-awful party in three weeks, cancel it. If I’m still here by then, just shoot me.” 
  Shrank against the window, she returned to gesturing aimlessly, lips tucked in a pout. Her seatbelt remained unbuckled, and she made no motion to change that. 
  “Hey,” Wil said, low and kind. Waved. But beyond a brief flicker of annoyance, she didn’t register his presence. 
  Wasn’t worth the energy. Didn’t want her to feel like he was ganging up on her, too. 
  Rajan kicked back and fiddled with his cufflinks. They were different from this morning, pearl squares replaced by silvery Teseum studs. “You ready for the no-show showcase tomorrow, Gotzinger?” 
  “Ready as anyone can be,” Wil said. 
  “The MacCallums, the O’Brien, the Campbells, the Munro, and the MacArthurs. Five minor Caledonian clans in four-hundred kilometers, all squatting on Teseum deposits they can’t tap, all refusing to cooperate. You know what this place would be if the local yokels worked with us, instead of against us?” 
  Wil shrugged. “Loch-front resort?” 
  “Lake-front fucking resort.” 
  “They call it a loch up here, I think.” 
  “Tomato, tamaatar,” Rajan said. “The point is, it’s all bullshit. At the end of the day, the world runs on money, Gotzinger. Money! If only the locals weren’t too blind and backward to see it. It’s a goddamn travesty, is all I’m saying.” 
  “Maybe they just want to be left alone.” 
  “One drop of freedom isn’t worth getting eaten by wolves or dying of cancer, no matter how much tartan you dress it in. Ateks, man. Almost too stupid to live.” 
  A specific spot in Wil’s neck throbbed, embedded in his neck below his ear. Memories of cardboard, halogen lights, and wet black plastic sheets gave way to the rational desire to keep from a second court martial. 
  He cracked his knuckles. “Sure.” 
  “Well, strap in for the long haul,” Rajan said. “If my boss has his way, you and me are stuck on this godforsaken rock under Odune’s thumb until the day they run out of Silk on Bourak.” 
  Wil furrowed his brow. Forever wasn’t the assignment. Six months, they’d said. Diplomatic negotiations. Corporate elbow-greasing. Protection detail. A handful of quick forays westward for a cultural exchange with Caledonian clan chieftains, negotiating joint ventures regarding the Teseum mines, and then they were out of here.
  “What you’re thinking right now,” Rajan said. “That’s our plan. Their plan—PanOceania’s plan—is to keep us here until I get at least two of these five chump chieftains to agree to let in a drill team.” He licked his teeth and straightened his suit jacket. “AKA, never.” 
  Now, this whole scenario was starting to make more sense. This is where high command had sent them to disappear, the long-overdue coup de grâce on his career as an Aquila Guard in the Neoterran Capitaline Army.
  Wil could’ve danced. 
  He’d expected his long-due retribution from the NCAto be a permanent assignment to a space station on the Human Edge, or an arctic research station punched into a glacier, or some doomed bulwark on Paradiso. But on Dawn, there were actual trees instead of ones biomodified for aesthetics, and the air tasted crisp instead of refurbished. So it rained three-hundred days out of the year? So there was more mud than solid ground? Cold, wet, and permanently tinged with mildew was more than he deserved. 
  It was getting off easy. 
  But this wasn’t for him, was it? It was Rajan’s protection detail he’d been assigned to, and it was Rajan who would be stuck organizing meetings with disappearing Highlanders in perpetuity, glued to Odune’s side playing lapdog in a holding pattern. No nanoweave bed sheets; no sensorium pornography; no nitrocaine or nightclub bathrooms to bump it in. 
  He really must’ve pissed someone off. Likely the same guy who put all those redactions in his file.
  Rajan stared into the fog, brows pinched with uncharacteristic gravitas. “Tomorrow, after we go through the motions at Fort Resolute, I want to alter the flight plan and do a flyover of the southwest shore.” 
  “That’s restricted airspace, sir. Don’t think we can do that.” 
  Quantronic mandalas reflected in the AUV’s squat, dirt-flecked window. “Their plan. Your plan. Odune’s plan,” Rajan said. “I’ve got a plan of my own.” 

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