Welcome to the Neverwar

or what's left of it...

A bitter conflict that lasted for 1000 years, and ended in a single day.

The good guys lost.

Now the Shalos star system has fallen into an age of darkness and delusion, where God Kings enslave populations in waves of mind-control while they devour the planets alive and sacrifice millions to their secret masters behind it all, The Eaters of the Light.

But some still stand against the rise of the New Order. Indeed the greater the darkness the brighter they shine. Refusing to surrender, Rogue Prophetships bring aid to both the free and enslaved, to Humani and native Shal, proclaiming truth and a vision of hope now barely dreamed of ...

Meanwhile, way out in the High Wild of space, freelifers build communities of refuge for those fleeing the insanity of their conquered homeworlds. On distant asteroids and backwater moons, Shal and Humani try to live as they were created to live instead of like machines.

Even on the fallen worlds, a remnant of freelifers still hides out amongst the mindwashed living dead; individuals who are awake for all that they pretend to be asleep like those around them, usually alone for the sake of cover, usually quietly seeking a way out.

If you are reading this book, then maybe you are one of them ...

THE HIGH WILD:

Neverwar

Episode 1

by

Col Buchanan (aka wisefool)

A Buy-After-Reading

SERIALISED NOVEL

SMASHWORDS Edition

Copyright (c) 2023 Col Buchanan

Version 1

Also By the Author

The Heart of the World Series:

Farlander

Stands A Shadow

The Black Dream

Fierce Gods

The High Wild Series:

The Good King

Praise for the Author's Works

'One of the most refreshing fantasies out there.'

- SFX MAGAZINE

'Completely absorbing ... I just couldn't put it down.'

- GLENN COOK, AUTHOR OF THE BLACK COMPANY NOVELS

'A truly exceptional book.'

- DAVID DRAKE, AUTHOR OF THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

'A fast-moving novel that, for all its fantasy elements, explosively addresses the universal questions facing any society.'

- L.E. MODESITT, JR, AUTHOR OF IMAGER'S INTRIGUE

'Farlander turns out to be something special ... The story grips from the astonishing opening sequence to the unexpected conclusion.'

- THE TIMES

'A searing new fantasy series that gets the blood pumping ... Bold, fearless in execution, exhilaratingly new and with a steely intensity ... this is a series to be reckoned with. Everyone take note.'

- THE TRUTH ABOUT BOOKS

'Col Buchanan's debut novel is gripping ... Delightfully undermines expectations.'

- SFX MAGAZINE

'The story will sneak up on you - yes, like an assassin - and before you realise it, it'll be early in the morning, your eyes will be bloodshot, and tears will be running down your face. I absolutely adored the unconventional hero Ash.'

- BARNES & NOBLE

'The novel is nigh-impossible to put down ... even better than the author's debut. Engaging and addictive, Stands a Shadow is one of the best novels I've read this year ... I love this series.'

- CIVILIANREADER.COM

'Like its predecessor, this is fantasy of the highest order - reminiscent of George R.R. Martin. Compelling writing and a pulsing plot.'

- BOOK GEEKS

'He has a powerful style that made me deeply connect with the story.'

- BETWEEN TWO BOOKS

'Digs deep ... Draws upon the harsh truths that history has taught us to create stories that feel epic in scale. The result is a world in which every person feels believable and real.'

- ED FORTUNE

'Fierce Gods is the third novel in the fabulous Heart of the World series.'

- FANTASYREADER.COM

'Resonates long after the final page.'

- STRANGE HORIZONS

BookNav

System Map + Map Legend

Ship's Deck Plan

>> CHAPTER ONE

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>> CHAPTER THREE

>> CHAPTER FOUR

BAR

Credits

Dedication

Tail Banner

Copyright

"The skies declare the glory of Jih;

the stars the sweep of His Creation."

- Shal Song of Wisdom

Child of Jih

AT FIRST THE living Prophetship couldn’t tell how long she had been unconscious. Mere seconds, probably. But as Child of Jih regained her senses, she groggily observed three things about her condition:

One. She was falling like a stone out of a crazy-blue sky.

Two. Smoke poured from her scarred wings and body – the skin blackened from having entered the atmosphere too fast and too steep.

Three. Her Field Net had collapsed, meaning the Prophetship had no means of arresting her free-fall.

Dizziness washed the ship’s mind, made worse by the nausea of a flat spin through thickening air. Hard to think straight with a whole world racing up at you in ever greater detail, a whole world of rising panic. Child of Jih tore through a cloud trailing vapour from her wing-tips, blinking fast to clear her vision.

I’m out of control, she thought. We’re falling to our deaths and I’ve no way of stopping us ...

Despite her youth, Child of Jih had honed her reflexes through the tail-end of a war. She had survived more close calls than she cared to remember. Instinctively, muscles and skeleton started to flex until her body-wing tilted more steeply into the air, allowing her to turn into the spin and then finally to pull out of it. Good. At least her stomachs didn’t feel like throwing up any longer. Now, to see about restarting the Field Net before she hit the ground at several hundred miles an hour.

Wrapped around the length of the living ship’s spine, the Primary Charge Coil lay ominously silent when Child queried it for information. Finally, she squirted a little remaining power from a secondary coil until the Primary woke up at last, and it started replying with self-diagnosing nerve impulses that told her nothing but bad news.

She was failing to draw any charge from the Flux of the moon’s magnetosphere, with her skin scorched so badly, and what little power remained along the Primary Coil was being blocked by a sequence of ruptured nerve bundles. Worse, all of her auxiliary coils were pretty much fully discharged. Which was just about as bad as it could be.

She had no means of restarting the Field Net by herself.

Don’t panic, don’t panic.

Panicking, she switched to internal sensors and looked for crew through the winding cavities of her body, hoping to call the first person she spotted for help. But what Child of Jih glimpsed in the rooms and passageways inside of her was so shocking that she gaped in total dread.

Corpses of the crew lay strewn throughout her interior, some blackened and burnt by the plasma discharges that had made it through her shielding, others killed by the high-G turns she had needed to pull with failing inertial dampeners in order to survive the battle.

No one moved out of a crew of a dozen, not a single one.

‘Crazycloud,’ the Prophetship finally managed to say through her internal chatternet, her voice hushed by emotions.

If anyone was still alive inside it was the holographic captain.

'Crazycloud,' she breathed again, seeking out the legendary veteran of the Neverwar, her captain for the last fifteen years. But the old Humani was nowhere to be seen, and when the ship switched to the sensors of her flight deck, she found the forward deck to be empty, with air sweeping in through a ragged gaping hole in the side which she felt as a dull ache.

She remembered now. The flight crew had all been blown into space during the fight.

Still falling - her body-wing drawing a rising moan from the air it sheared through - Child of Jih mourned for her dead.

Oh Father, the Shal Prophetship prayed from her deepest core. Oh Jih Most High and Most Holy, honour them in power and glory, in blessings and loving kindness and peace.

Most of the crew had died in the final moments of battle. Child of Jih remembered it now as flashes of memory came back to her unexpectedly; the spinning stars of Space and her body wrapped by a monstrous shadow while blinding crackles of plasma enveloped them both in pain beyond her enduring; a spiralling death embrace she was unable to break free from, even as she could hear the mounting fatalities of her crew - the screams of her people perishing through energy discharges, explosive vacuums, wild panic.

Typhon was the beast’s name. Largest of the Great Solar Dragons yet to emerge from the Koronis Rift - that screaming singularity of nothingness from which all things diabolical had emerged to torment the living at the close of the war.

For a fortnight now the beast had hunted her through the Shatterzone, the belted remains of the Shal homeworld - that mega-sacrifice of life which had been used to open the Rift. Finally, it had caught up with her as she wove a course through a denser region on the outer skirts of the asteroid belt, known as the Shoals. Child of Jih hadn’t even seen it at first amongst all the drifting rocks, and then the Dragon was almost on her - a shadow pouncing out of the sun’s glare with outstretched wings and claws and fangs all afire. At the last moment Child had wrenched to one side to miss the worst of the attack, though she still sustained a raking wound across her wings. After that, she survived a further number of seconds by dancing with the Great Solar Dragon through the tumbling rock field, while it blasted her with fire and she replied with crackling supercharged shots of her Plasma Lance, wounding the beast but getting wounded just as badly or worse in return, unable to escape its barrage until she could barely see from the pain and the shocks. At last, like a punch-drunk fighter staggering on shaky legs, Child had been forced to close in with the Dragon, and then, insanely, to embrace it in a clinch that at least checked its fire.

There were times in life when terror overrode your will and body so entirely it made a slave of you, and this was one of them. In those desperate fiery moments with the Great Solar Dragon’s wings tightening around her in a straining, spinning high-G turn, the beast’s psychic rage tore away the last of Child's courage even as it ripped and tore at her living flesh. Her terror became a blaze of white lightning, and through it she glimpsed a pair of burning holes that were eyes searing with a malevolence that fed off all living things, and the beast rearing its maw to take another chunk from her wing, to devour her bite by bite; and Child of Jih turned, turned, spinning them both as she tried not to die ...

It was the Most High's prompting that told her what to do in those final moments. One last offering of faith cast into the winds of potential - a total overload of her Field Net into the visible spectrum, releasing the entirety of her remaining Charge in a single blinding pulse of coherent light.

A Star Burst.

The energy overload cost her some ruptured nerve bundles along her Primary Charge Coil and who knew what else. But for a crucial moment, the immediate vicinity of Space lit up so tremendously bright that the monster recoiled in shock and blindness, and Child of Jih broke free.

Within seconds, she had flung herself into the atmosphere of this passing little world, where her Field Net had finally collapsed during the flaming entry of the upper atmosphere, forcing her to pass out from the G-forces of deceleration. Now, without power, without crew, the battered Prophetship fell as uselessly as a rock dropped from orbit, with the bodies of her crew jostling and shaking in dim imitations of life inside of her while the Great Solar Dragon itself – the cause of all those losses – remained nowhere to be seen.

The ground really was approaching fast. Child of Jih noticed it through her bleary forward optics: a soot-blackened landscape wrapped within the bounds of a tight horizon, entirely blank and devoid of features except for a distant metropolis gleaming in the distant sunlight like a diamond ring. This world was a small one, not really a world at all but an oversized asteroid surrounded by the spinning debris of the Shatterzone. Too small to have an atmosphere or sizable gravity field by itself, its owners must be manufacturing both within artificial fields for the benefit of its Humani population, so that the Prophetship could feel the substantially thickening air rushing cool and soothing over her burnt skin.

Child realised that she knew this world. Knew it well enough that it was on her list of Worst Places To Die.

Do something then.

It came as a command, a need for action that would arrest her freefall. Though all she could do just then was flex and tilt through the air until she was at least - in some fashion - gliding downwards rather than entirely plummeting, with her body-wing straining against the extra pressure building beneath it. Pain signals rippled through her wrenching muscles, flared from her many wounds, but she could hold it, barely, and at least the semi-glide would give a few more seconds before she hit the ground. A few more seconds to work with.

Work with what, though? What could she do now?

‘Child! You there?’

The male voice came from inside of her; slurred, seemingly fighting through pain. Child of Jih switched to the visual sensors in the long chamber of her spine. It was her Chief Biogranger, Babbatunde, risen from the dead all bloody and battered, struggling to fix one of the ruptured nerve bundles in the Coil.

‘Babbatunde!’

‘Child!’ yelled the Shal over his shoulder with sweat raining from his dreadlocks.

Her spirit soared just to see him standing there alive. Alive! Babbatunde had been her rock throughout her service tour in the war. The biogranger was her foundation, hidden mostly beneath the surface but always there to rely on when she needed him most. In that moment, a sudden air-pocket kicked the ship around and Babbatunde staggered to keep his feet, but Child of Jih righted again, and tilted herself just a little extra to help him back to the ruptured nerve bundle. The Shal grasped it with a grunt, and with slippery hands he wrapped a pressure patch around its bleeding flank.

‘Is it just me,’ the biogranger panted, ‘or are we falling fast?’

‘Yes. I’ve lost my Field Net, Babbatunde. Can you restore its Charge?’

Another grunt of effort. ‘What do you think I'm trying to do.’

‘Hurry then. We’re dead without it.’

‘Hurry, she says. Like that helps me do this any faster.’

He was sweating so badly he had to shake his eyes to clear them. The least she could do was cool him down some, so Child of Jih routed some air from her refrigeration lung and directed it his way in the form of a softly blowing breeze. Way, way up in the higher frequencies of light, the Shal biogranger shone like a burning arc-torch as he worked. He had the Shine on him, the Anointing, and when she saw it she knew they were going to be okay, that Babbatunde was going to restore her Charge and they were going to live.

Hope angled Child of Jih towards the distant city, for all that she still fell fast.

From this height, the city covered most of the asteroid’s northern hemisphere, and seemed to be constructed entirely from crystal. Next to the sprawl lay a spaceport with its towers and comm spires reaching high. It was tricky gauging her altitude through sight alone - the asteroid’s smooth black plains offered nothing for comparison even by way of rocks or craters, save for bands of ripples that may have been dunes rushing up towards her.

‘Try it now!’ yelled Babbatunde like a prophet of good timing.

Child fired another tentative nerve command to the Charge Coil along her spine. All at once the Charge surged and the Prophetship became fully alive again, her Field Net crackling around her like a coat of flaming fur only visible in the higher wavelengths of light. Strength revitalised her flagging muscles. Confidence restored her sense of mission. Deftly tuning the Flux’s wild conflagration of electrical wave-lengths into something useful in this artificial atmosphere, Child of Jih flexed the Field Net and shaped it beneath her ever more broadly so that she slowed gradually, gently, coming in with the grace of a bird on a wind of gravity-defying energies.

Dry your tears, Child. You have work to do.

Gorgeous

'EHLAJA, EHLAJA,' croaked a sudden voice in the darkness, interrupting the man's walk across the starry mountain glade so that he spun around in surprise, gripped with horror, but saw nothing there.

‘Please. Ehlaja, mercy,’

A child’s voice, a boy’s voice, breaking with pain and grief as it drifted like a ghost on the momentary breeze; pleading in a native Shal dialect he hadn’t heard in years.

Fear possessed the Humani ex-soldier - an irrational fear that he would be dragged back into the war. But the Neverwar was long over, at least it was meant to be, for all that he kept reliving it in vivid flashbacks like this one. Groaning, the young veteran shook his head to clear it, and then someone chuckled aloud and he spun again and there they were - his squadmates from the Numbuchat campaign, five armoured figures in their Black Dawn situ-suits, all standing on the operations deck of a field lab propped on legs like stilts above the stinking swamp waters, gathered around the small ferroplastic cage holding a naked and bloodied Shal boy. They were laughing and jibing with each other as they poked the youth with their lit cigarettes.

‘Ehlaja, mercy!’ cried the boy.

For a while the young veteran entirely forgot that he was on the dark mountain flank, time passing without his awareness. But then a dewfrog started singing its strange popping song from somewhere nearby, and several others joined in to create a croaking chorus, and with a jolt like ice water flung in his face the man came back to himself on the mountainside and found that he was shaking, and so sick in his stomach that he gripped himself and bent over a little, exhaling fiercely. A few beads of sweat trembled on his forehead, cold like the high air.

He had lost it again, his sense of time and reality. Pre-dawn light already paled the night sky. The ex-soldier remembered the rabbit carcass hanging limp from his other hand, caught in one of his impromptu snares placed further up the glade, and gripping it tighter he set off again along the trail that his feet had already tramped through the grasses. A bird twittered from the nearest stand of dwarf trees, calling to others who whistled back from further down the slopes where mists clung to the low-lying canopy, and a few drones drifted over the hiking paths with their lights blinking. Beyond them, beyond the mountain flank and the lake and the dark silhouettes of the city, a curvature of early daylight slowly cracked the fading darkness in two, revealing an horizon so tightly bound that it instantly reminded him of the tiny world his feet trod upon: Spin City.

Dawn came fast and hard here, especially when you nursed a permanent hangover that refused to die no matter how much alcohol you tried to smother it with. Indeed, in that very moment the sunlight spilled over the world like a blinding migraine and he squinted, almost in anger, and turned away from the flaring brilliance for the few brief seconds it took his modified eyes to adjust. Again the breeze stirred around him, playing against his scarred and souring expression, and the veteran rubbed his stomach beneath a heavily stained T-shirt that read HEY DICK NOSE! and belched into air still crisp enough to turn his breath into steam. He needed a drink, and he hurried onwards, not looking forward to the return of daylight so soon again - every half hour here on this tiny world brought a new day again, in which he was exposed to all the goofy tourists wandering through the steep woods on their hikes, and to the drones that were always keeping an eye on them for their own safety while looking out for interlopers in the park. Already, he could see one of the silvery drones rising towards his position, reflecting glints of early sunlight.

It wasn't safe for him to be out here in the open air, not without a valid ticket for the wilderpark stored in his Keypass. He needed to get back to the sanctuary of his stealth tent as quickly as possible. And so, like a moonfox returning from its nightly prowl, he hurried back towards his hidden lair with the rabbit carcass still in hand, hoping he wouldn't hear any more voices that were there only in his mind.

Back at his camp, hidden within an edge of dwarf forest where his stealth tent had shaded itself to look like the green and spiky foliage of the trees, the young vet stopped and looked around at the familiar surroundings, sensing that something was amiss, but not quite knowing what ...

For a creepy moment he thought he was being watched, but when he cast his farsense around him he detected no drones, only another cyclist passing by on a nearby track.

Just another strange flashback, he supposed with a frown; imagining more things not there.

These war flashbacks of his had become more frequent in the last few months. Ever since his military discharge, in fact - ever since his owners, Black Dawn Permasolutions, had dismissed him as irrevocably damaged and cast into the street like so much unwanted garbage. The shock of going from a respected black-ops veteran to a no-nothing bum almost overnight had been bad enough to turn him to drink, and maybe that was the problem, the reason for all these flashbacks he was now experiencing - or maybe he wasn't drinking enough ...

He settled the matter by opening his tent's awning and reaching in to lift out a bottle of Hoosh, from which he took a long and fiery drink. Belching a few blue after-flames, he took another nip then put the bottle back again, feeling better already.

The ex-soldier was camped high on a mountain that would be considered small by most standards - he'd seen larger peaks obliterated in the Neverwar by single strikes from orbit. But as a man-made feature largely comprised of cast-off diamond chippings from the open mines, and rising several thousand feet above the otherwise featureless surface of the carbon asteroid, it made for an impressive enough sight, and afforded him a rare, high vantage over this little world and its singular city.

Diamond Mountain, the Ral-Fanghi Leisure Corporation had named this primary attraction of their Really Wild Theme Park - the artificial wilderpark located right next to the sprawling metropolis. As the park's centrepiece, the mountain rose in the form of an island from the waters of the equally artificial Scoop Lake, which was also previously part of the open diamond mine, and where now he could see the marinas and their yachts gleaming white in the growing daylight like children's toys in a pond. The young man frowned, spotting a pair of ferries cutting delta-V's towards his mountain island, carrying another haul of fun-trippers who would need to be avoided on the mountain paths. All weekend long those ferries would be ploughing between the island and the lake shore bearing their loads.

Not for the first time, he thought of the many ways he could disable those ferries to stop the influxes of unwanted park visitors. As an ex-corporate-supersoldier specialised in black ops, acts of domestic terrorism on that scale were well within his skill-set and experience.

But that was in the past, back when he had lived as a bioengineered mercenary with little choice in the matter, or in much else either; born and raised by a mega-corporation to think what he was told to think, and to follow their orders without conscience.

Even so, habits die hard. As he sharpened his knife with a whetstone in the shadow of the tent's porch, the young veteran fantasised about his options.

Quickly, he butchered the dead rabbit for the lean portions of meat that it offered. Engineered like everything else here, it was still technically edible, so he salted the thin strips of flesh before hanging them from a nearby tree to breeze-dry in the air, next to older strips that were already curing. His spirits lifted a little as he worked; he whistled along with the trilling daybirds, while the warm and breezy air tugged at his raggedy hair and overhead the brilliantly blue skies invigorated his senses. It was another clear day like all the previous ones he had spent on this rock, and he welcomed the light and the heat now he was returned to the relative safety of camp. The constantly sunny weather was one of the few positives the little world had to offer, beyond epic card gaming and - of course - the loosest women on vacation ever.

Like the golden skinned Shal, the original colonisers of this solar system, his appreciation of brilliantly clear skies could border on the truly awesome, even in revelations of something divine. Not that he was some kind of religious nut, or anything - but he had served on worlds with barely any open skies left at all, and the unending overcasts had ground him down beneath their eternally gloomy pressure: worlds with their skies chemtrailed to death by Black Dawn airtankers, so you rarely saw the blue above the smothering never-ending chemical clouds and hazes that seemed always to block out half the daylight, causing automated car headlamps and outside lights to switch on during the day and only adding to the impression of dimness. Ghoulish, half-lit worlds of the New Order, some of them only recently fallen, where mindwashed populations pretended that nothing was amiss beneath whitened skies that were seldom natural anymore, raining down particulates of heavy metals, graphene, and invasive nanotechnology which slowly dumbed people down and made them sick, including their children, and subtly connected their minds to the Imperium's digital Overmind ...

In the dazzling mountain sunlight the veteran washed off his hands with some canteen water from a nearby stream, and pondered what to do with himself now. Time for another drink to take the edge off, he reckoned.

When he straightened, he glanced down at his left foot and grimaced - a Ractive was slowly wrapping itself around his boot like a jelly fish or some kind of massive flat slug, and he shook it off, cursing with feeling at all the slime now stuck to his boot. When the thing flopped to the grass it unfolded flat like the thinnest puddles of goo, its body clear as silica and sporting the famous ‘BITE ME’ corporate slogan of Bite Me Burgers, number one for insect-derived fast foods - a logo which soon changed to an animation of a big toothy mouth taking a bite from one of their delicious cockroach hotpups dripping with specially seasoned goo.

Quivering, the living Ractive advert crawled over the grass towards his left boot again, drawn by the heat of his body and a bioengineered need to be seen by Humani eyes, flashing its advertising payload.

Oh how he loathed these things. You couldn’t go anywhere in the New Order without being plagued by their presence. Originally, Ractive adverts had been limited to specially treated surfaces like storefronts and the walls of megamalls, and car parks and street surfaces where loitering wasn’t desired – places where they would roam around while displaying their special offers and logos to passersby. But ever since the infamous Zuhu virus corrupted their DNA some twenty or so years ago (in what was probably a Chaos move by power players behind the scenes), they had escaped their programming in their billions all across the System, and now infested anywhere that wasn’t regularly sprayed to keep them away, which usually meant ghettos and whatever natural or wild spaces existed on the infected worlds.

In all the planets he had been to though, the veteran had never known a place so badly infested as Spin City, and in particular this self-contained wilderpark. They really were everywhere up here on the mountain slopes. All along the trails, signs offered warnings to be careful when sitting down or stopping for any length of time, in case a roving Ractive latched onto you and stained your clothing or gave you a bad rash. People were even warned not to fall asleep on the ground, in case one of them crawled onto your face going after your body heat and suffocated you – it could happen.

Depicted largely in pictures, these trail warnings were certainly some of the more alarming signs he'd ever come across. And like all the other trail signs covering the mountain slopes, they were a constant reminder of how artificial the entire place really was. Though maybe that was why it was so heavily infested by Ractives in the first place. The artificiality.

From the thin layers of styrosoil and loamfoam spread beneath the minified dwarf forests, to the piped streams and ferroconcrete boulders and all the biocultured animals, nothing existed here that was entirely natural, not even the paying hikers on the trails with their host of modern genetic modifications, nor all the trees planted in rows to make for more efficient forest management. In a way this wholly fake mountain reminded the young veteran of himself a little, because if there was any real, unique, natural part of him at all that hadn’t been tailored or modified before his birth - and then ruthlessly engineered afterwards - he had no clue where it might be found.

He frowned at this familiar thought. To be owned by corporate masters was one thing … That was life for most people in the New Order ... But to have been designed down to the finest degree by them, so that even your very desires were written into you by the needs of another, and then shaped as you grew up by constant conditioning until you were more organic robot than Humani ...

He shivered with the chill of a man still awakening to the deepest realities of his world.

Grabbing his knife again, the veteran knelt and slashed the Ractive advert into eight cross sections with quick efficient strokes, earning a vague satisfaction from the act - it was said they felt no pain, but you never knew - then left the pieces to dry up and die. In the late sunlight he unzipped the porchway of his two-man stealth tent and ducked down into its muggy heat. Even with these short days the air warmed up fast. He loosened the neck of his camo-vest, and with the door open for ventilation settled inside the tent, making his big muscular body as comfortable as he could on the tent's inflated floor and his sleeping bag’s thick padding with his pack as a backrest, facing the open entrance and the view of the lake and the great city beyond framed by azure skies.

So this is freedom, he thought to himself sourly. Having to wild camp illegally in a theme park intended for tourists only, hiding out from drones and holographic park staff and the general public stumbling around all over the damned place, living under constant threat of discovery and arrest.

People and trails were to be found everywhere on this pretend mountain theme park, making it hard to find a quiet, truly secluded spot to pitch up and camp. Even now, up the slope behind his present location, a bike trail stretched only a hundred yards away through the trees, carrying the occasional dayglo cyclist whizzing by on one of those rental power-assisted hill bikes with its familiar rattles and whines. More than a month ago, having been kicked out of yet another exorbitant rental accommodation and not much favouring living rough on the streets, Gorgeous had first come to this park with a hiker's pack on his back, and had tried camping on the far side of the mountain, the side that overlooked the vast open-pit diamond mine and the black wastelands of carbon dust surrounding it. But that outer flank crawled even thicker with camera-wielding tourists than this side facing the city, and so he had withdrawn, forced to slip away like a guerilla retreating from a skirmish.

Now, the young vet found himself sipping on his last bottle of Hoosh and brooding on how he would need to venture down for supplies from the local freelifer stealth store, just as soon as his meagre monthly payment for Disability Insurance came through on the Mainline. He had grown to dislike going down into the city outskirts for his supplies. The noise and bustle of the streets clashed with the vast emptiness now inside him after living for weeks up here alone. At least these high mountain slopes remained one of the few places where the city's many competing entrainment fields were fully dampened; those microwave fields used so commonly across the New Order as a means for mass mind control. Only the local park's entrainment fields persisted on the mountain in the middle of the lake, and they were mild enough, promoting feelings of calm and relaxation and a faint need to buy something at the Picnic View gift shop - a mental itch barely perceived by his own shielded nervous system. In contrast, even with his shielded nerves, life down in the city was a constant war over who owned his moods and desires.

As the latest mouthful of Hoosh singed its way down his throat and exploded like incendiaries in his belly, the young veteran leaned back and exhaled fumes that briefly ignited into flame just past the curvature of his lips - too briefly to burn him, just enough to be seen turning from blue to yellow to nothing.

Already the clear sky over the city was growing dark again, marking almost half an hour having passed by. Here and there a few early stars stabbed through the atmosphere with their flickering light, moving fast behind lines of air traffic that reminded him of trails of tracer fire. With a bloodshot stare he looked towards the distant spaceport and all its lights brightening in the falling inrush of twilight, where lifters glowed as they rose upwards on their Charge fields, headed for low orbit and rendezvous with ships so large he could see them hanging up there as drifting stars. He pulled a face, knowing he should be on one of those ships heading offworld. There was nothing left for him here, an ex-blackops-supersoldier recently released from active service on account of disability, and with no real sense of what to do with himself next.

Cursed with a Citizen’s License stamped D2, he wasn’t just marked as disabled but as a liability, and this in a job market thousands of times smaller than its potential workforce, since even most security work was automated these days. If he was unemployable here, on Spin City, then he was probably unemployable everywhere; certainly, elsewhere, his old contacts had come up with nothing since hearing why he’d been dismissed from service – a soldier who could no longer be relied upon to do his soldiering, due to a debilitating condition wholly beyond his control. And all his real friends who could have helped seemed to be dead.

It was all so hopeless, he was starting to fantasise about robbing a slot casino or something equally as stupid - something that would end up getting him killed by some fast-response RAT team in an almighty blaze of glory. He could see it now in his head, the dramatic reports across the evening news, the barely-surprised reactions of those who had known him. At least, in his own way, he would end his life with some honour.

Spawned in a chemical wetwomb, the young man had been raised by the massive Defence and Intelligence Contractor Black Dawn Permasolutions with the exclusive purpose of joining their legendary mercenary legion, the Blackcoats, as a black-ops supersoldier. At five he had been enlisted into their brutal training academy, which resembled a university crossed with gladiator school, and at fifteen, having made the grade as a class 1 linesman ready for action, they sent him into active service during the last few years of the Neverwar, that inter-generational conflict that had lasted for a mind-boggling thousand years.

Trained for a war like no other, he knew how the Neverwar had gained its name because it had never been officially declared by the aggressors, the Humani/Shal Dark Occultists of the New Order, who had waged their war against the free Humani and Shal of the system so silently and so slowly that it could barely be perceived. Also, because it involved so few open battles, which anyway were always fought in faraway places by fake fronts and proxies, and often over invented reasons. And because most of its weapons were quietly invisible weapons most often aimed at entire populations, not just armies, and they didn’t only kill, they weakened, corrupted, distracted millions into oblivion, or outright sought to control their thoughts and therefore their minds.

Things like flooding populations with highly-addictive street drugs or pornography (so the men who were supposed to be defending their families and people became gradually compromised instead). Or lethal microwave rays causing pandemics of cancer. Or droughts and famines from weather warfare. Or tainted medical supplies, which rather than killing immediately killed over the course of years by what looked like random diseases. Or mind-control entrainment fields beamed from Space, which slowly ate away at people's free wills until they were barely more than thoughtless machines without any real life or character left in them. Any weapon, in effect, that could be denied as a random result of nature, even if only spuriously.

The Neverwar had been the ultimate war of deniability, where one side – the New Order side - always denied everything it was doing, while the other guys, the free Humani and Loyalist Shal worlds suffering long-penetration attacks, became slowly fractured and demoralised, until even their key figures and leadership were largely compromised by blackmail or bribery. Often, the eventual conquests of these worlds occurred from within, so riddled had their societies become with the secret supporters of the New Order.

Over the long course of the war, whenever free nations did act in self-defence, they tended to do so purely in deniable and covert ways too. This was important, because the New Order always escalated its efforts on a world whenever confronted with open resistance there, usually by intensifying its efforts at corrupting those who most stood in opposition to it. Anything to divide their target populations, and then break their wills; even if it took a thousand years.

It was almost easy to feel sorry for a target of the New Order's Dark Occultists whenever you saw the process in action. What could you do against an invisible arm locked around your throat and slowly choking you tighter and tighter, when every response you made against it caused the arm to grip even tighter and more quickly, and all the while its owner denied even strangling you? How creepy an enemy must they have seemed?

As he worked for the advancement of the New Order under the corporate guise of Black Dawn Permasolutions - and even equipped with eyes as cynical as his own - the young vet had come to look upon their skills at covert conquest in something approaching awe. The Planet Snatchers, he called them in his private thoughts, because essentially that was what they did in their greed to own everything; quietly infiltrating and conquering one world after another over the course of centuries until finally no more remained, and here they were, the owners of everything and everyone.

Almost.

Now the silent thousand-year war was over, at least officially, following the total destruction of the free Shal home planet - blamed of course on an experimental space reactor experiment gone wrong - which pretty much knocked the stuffing out of any mass resistance still remaining. With the signing of the Peace and Unity Accords eight years ago between the two sides, the New Order sealed their victory without ever openly admitting they had won anything, simply offering a recognition of the changing times while they rolled out Administrations and corporate military forces to the conquered worlds, and then their God Kings with all due pomp and ritual mega-sacrifices, where they declared new ways for everything.

And so welcome to the Neverwar, not only the longest but also the dirtiest war that never was. Because if you fought a war quietly enough, slowly enough, over a great enough amount of time employing the most subtle and ruthless of means, you could win it without people even noticing they had ever been at war.

In his three years of active service in the war he had seen some military action, but only because of his role as a supersoldier, the smartest muscle of the conflict, and usually only in the most limited kind of actions, stuff that was seldom reported by media with any coherence – a medicines factory supposedly blown up by gas leak, or a gunfight between unlicensed salvage gangs - and on the most far-flung moon worlds and asteroids.

Mostly, his work in the war had involved urban wetwork, psychological warfare and false flag attacks against innocent populations, with the odd exotic mission thrown in to keep him on his toes. He'd been numbed to most of it at the time, as unfeeling as every Blackcoat was designed and entrained to be. But deep down beneath all that, right down in the pit of his guts, some of the work he had liked and much of it had sickened him, even horrified him. Only after the war was over had these reactions to what he'd done begun to surface in strange ways, when he started experiencing flashbacks where he forgot where he was, and bouts of sudden uncontrollable rages towards random people. Not that any of that was unusual for a veteran Blackcoat, or prevented him from continuing in active service after the war. What was worse - by a factor of about a billion - was the weird condition of narcolepsy he had so recently been diagnosed with, and which seemed only to be growing more severe over time.

Considered damaged goods, his owners at Black Dawn had sold him last year to a lesser security venture specialising in high-profile bodyguarding, which was how he'd ended up here, protecting the super-wealthy of the New Order on this spinning diamond rock of Spin City. But the bodyguarding work only seemed to cause his sudden narcolepsy to worsen, until the security venture was forced to let him go too.

Which left him with not exactly the greatest resume for today’s labour market, as one of his contacts had responded after he’d reached out to him for employment.

After all was said and done, after all the killing was finished, the only course that his career as a black-ops supersoldier seemed to have equipped him for was a life of drinking Hoosh alone in a tent on the flanks of a fake mountain, damaged beyond repair.

Child of Jih

From the city spaceport came sudden bursts of comm chatter, automated air-control crackling for attention. Shuttles rose from the port’s outer spokes and headed into orbit. Lines of airbuses bustled back and forth between its many passenger terminals and the crystal city itself, above which the sun was dropping remarkably fast.

Now that she had a moment to catch her breath, Child of Jih scanned the blue skies for signs of her pursuer. She could see no sign of the beast though, and more comm requests pressed for attention from the spaceport. Unable to risk drawing attention to herself on this hostile New Order world, she answered the air control’s queries with one of her many fake port passes and flight logs, praying they would work, and held her breath until they sent back clearance to land. Good.

Still, a disguise would be needed before she flew close enough to be seen. It would hardly be fitting to touch down on Imperium ground only to be recognised as one of the last of the Rogue Prophetships, rare survivor of the Neverwar and still very much on active duty. With a rapid command sequence sent to her Cloak, Child of Jih threw up a holographic illusion around her body, so that she resembled nothing more than an innocent Humani light freighter coming in from the cold of the High Wild. A flimsy deception when seen across the full spectrum of radiation - not enough to fool a Great Solar Dragon, certainly - but most others would simply see the disguise itself.

Suitably camouflaged, the Prophetship followed the feed of landing instructions towards her allotted berth, passing over the outer spokes of the spaceport where rows of heavy transports and shuttles lay in service, hooked up to transfer cables and surrounded by the moving, flashing specks of maintenance droids. A large and busy port for all the size of the world - this asteroid that was actually the largest diamond ever discovered, a fast-spinning diamond bigger than any mountain, coated in a layer of compacted carbon.

Spin City, they called this colonised asteroid on the edge of the Shatterzone, owing to its insanely rapid spin rate which caused the sun to rise and set here every thirty-two minutes - and the stars to spin dizzily overhead in its absence. Once only a rugged mining frontier on the outer reaches of New Order space, it had since grown into a famed tourist attraction for gambling and indulgences, known as a place where anything was permissible, even human sacrifice, if you could afford it, and replete with diamond skyscrapers and casino vice hubs larger than stadiums. As though that wasn’t enough to contend with, it was the beginning of the Bloody Season, and so the place was even more thronged than ever, with the blood of public immolations no doubt already beginning to flow.

Even from here, Child of Jih could see the city’s central ziggurat rising above its many skyscrapers, marking this unmistakably as a world of the New Order. She knew it was famed for having been carved from a single solid diamond, and even from this range the entire edifice shone remarkably as the sun dropped fast behind it. A beautiful sight, in spite of what would likely be happening in its upper temple right now - human beings sacrificed alive to a dark and ancient anti-god.

The Rogue Prophetship shuddered in her skin.

Charos the Adversary. Charos The Insane, The Insatiable, The Eater of the Light. Charos The Great Devouring Asshole of Worlds. That mighty fallen spirit secretly behind the rise of the New Order; that brilliant cosmic intelligence gone horribly wrong. Insanely addicted to every vice and craving, corrupt yet prouder than any other in creation, hating the Most High even as it tried to usurp His position with its own inverted unreality of lies; Charos the Ungodly.

No doubt the anti-god's most dedicated followers would be pridefully strident now it was the Bloody Season once again across his realm. The Eaters of the Light, they called and fashioned themselves - those humans and Shal secretly in league with the anti-god's forces against life itself. Another year of strip-harvesting the worlds from under the noses of the mindwashed populations they ruled over – and now, since the end of the war, those worlds under occupation as well – and here was the culmination of it all, the yearly peak revel, the pinnacle of rewards for those who had sold out their own species to the Adversary of life whether they knew it or not. A month-long festival of bloody murder and debauchery and self-worship that was also beast worship that was ultimately worship of their depraved anti-god.

A month of madness which would negatively charge all of New Order space with a dark energy, adding to the oppressive overshadow that already hung across everything, and only further widened and deepened the Koronis Rift.

For days now, that winged monstrosity of shadowlight pursuing her – Typhon the Great Solar Dragon, servant of the anti-god - had been increasingly charged, increasingly strengthened, the closer to New Order space they flew. Child of Jih had felt it, even as her own strength, her own certainty in her mission, had only seemed to wane, subdued by something like a chill settling deep in her bones.

Outmatched as the Prophetship already found herself to be, her pursuer grew stronger and faster with every passing hour.

Still, her trust remained burning like a torch through the long night of Space. She knew how He favoured working through disadvantage more than any strength, through underdogs more than bullies.

In her weakness, Child of Jih would be granted power.

Jostling for attention, holo-ads floated before Child's eyes while she manoeuvred above a small repair yard right on the edges of the port, not far from the city itself. The ads only cleared out of the way when she dropped towards her allotted berth as nimble and light as a falling leaf, drifting down amongst the other parked hulks to settle onto a dusty empty lot. With a sigh of her gills – which sent litter and carbon dust flying – the disguised Prophetship settled her extended feet onto the concrete surface, her claws of living keratin splaying against the weight.

Again some chatter burst through the comms. The ship replied briskly, then sent a payment of credits for a twenty hour stay. She hoped she wouldn't need any longer than that.

Behind and through the distant crystal ziggurat, a dazzling halo declared the last of the sun’s light to anyone who happened to be looking that way. Child of Jih had barely touched feet to the ground and already she could feel the subtle effects of entrainment fields pressing upon her psyche. Like all worlds of the New Order, the city and spaceport were flooded with mindwashing fields aimed at the invisible manipulation of the population. Moods foreign to her own competed for her mind while alien desires vied for domination. One impulse prompted her to visit a particular Vice Hub with the sudden realisation that she was certain to win a vast prize in money. Another tempted her to the delights of a famed Sin Street, with sudden impulses of illicit, perverted lusts.

Beneath it all ran the local ground control entrainment field, soothing in its suggestions for conformity, edgy with anxious worry about stepping out of line.

Whispers upon whispers upon whispers of electromagnetic signals, broadcast using the most bio-harmful wavelengths possible to the living body.

Thank Jih she was immune to many of their effects with her network of sheathed nerves. Still, a vague pressure was already starting to settle across her brain. Child of Jih was glad she would not be here for long.

In twenty hours she could at least patch up the worst of her injuries and regather her wits. The crew situation was another matter again. Without a minimal working crew, she had about zero chances of continuing her mission deeper into New Order space.

Hardening her heart, Child of Jih accessed the local Mainline using an anonymous and untraceable virtual connection; something that would allow her to do some serious hacking across the city. While she was at it, she also opened a link to a Bulletin Board on the local Freenet, and posted an advert for any Freelifers who might spot it:

SHIP HIRING CREW!

Gorgeous

Outside the tent, a twig snapped.

It was the tiniest snap of the tiniest twig, like something stepped out there ever so slowly trying not to make any noise. Or someone. Instantly the young veteran's battle senses switched on, though being in something of a drunken daze by then his farsense faltered behind the sudden stabbing of a headache, and then he heard a bird flap away, and of course thought that must have been the source of the noise - and then behind him something pinged and made him jerk where he sat crosslegged on his sleeping bag. It was the power recharger of his Slate, informing him that the little mobile-comms device was fully charged again, having spent the last five hours or so gathering energy from the artificially-attracted EM fields of the asteroid.

About the size of his palm, the Slate resembled a translucent flat-sided rectangle of stone that had lain in a streambed long enough to have edges rounded like a pebble, though it was much lighter than it looked. With a grunt of satisfaction the veteran settled the device on his thigh and brought its little holoscreen to life, then opened up a connection to the Mainline.

On his Homescreen, aka his Welcome Mat, various earmarked pages hung in the holospace waiting for his attention. He glanced at the one pinned to the very top and still flashing for a response – an advert he had spotted earlier on a local Freenet bulletin board for Spin City freelifers, posted by a newly landed ship seeking crew:

ATTENTION FREELIFERS

SHIP HIRING CREW!

FOR OFFWORLD MISSION

OF EXTREME DANGER

AND IMPORTANCE

NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED

ONLY WIT / SOUL / CONSCIENCE!

INTERESTED?

He'd been curious enough to earmark the advert and pin it to the top of his Homescreen - at least it offered a working way off this rock, and with the mood he was in, the extreme danger part was just an added bonus. But he was sick of space travel, was the real bones of the matter. The young vet had done too much of it over his career, confined on one lousy ship after another on his way to one offworld mission after another. Now, the thought of living on a cramped ship in Space just twisted his stomach into knots.

Instead, he let his attention switch to something else much more prominent on the Homescreen – his most favoured entertainment dap, Star Lovers, The Game of Competitive Virtual Dating. With an aggressive poke of his digit he brought its holographic icon to life, and when he touched his Slate’s virtual connection groove he entered into the Dreambox mode, a virtual reality space in his head like a waking dream, where the game's three dimensional portal was waiting for him, shaped like a pair of parted lips. With a thought command, his blue-eyed blond-haired avatar stepped through into the online Star Lover's Competitive Dating Lobby (Straight Flavour), otherwise known as the Hot Pools, where a seemingly endless supply of fleshy men and women played and danced amongst the fronds. When the game asked for his screen name and password, he leaned over the virtual keyboard and typed GORGEOUS twice.

Quickly, Gorgeous scanned the game's welcome text, checking the current player rankings.

And swore aloud in surprise, sitting up straighter against his pack. On the leaderboard for the ranking Star Studs - hanging there in the game lobby amongst lush green vegetation and mostly naked dancers, right next to the Star Slut's rankings - his name had been knocked from his coveted top position down into second place some time in the last five hours.

Outrageous!

Now in the number one spot flashed a name he had never seen before, THE CONTENDER - topped with a crown to reflect his status as the currently reigning King Star Stud.

So, after a month of reigning supreme in the online arena of competitive virtual dating, a new bull had stepped in to challenge his dominance.

'Son of a …’

In his sudden anger the veteran yawned, fighting through a bout of heavy weariness. Where most people grew more energised with anger, somehow in the last few years he had developed entirely in the opposite condition - the more emotional he felt, the more tired too, sometimes even leading to the point of falling sleep. With no time to lose, he forced himself to breathe and to calm himself, stilling his mind. He had to get back to competitive dating, and he had to get back to competitive dating right now.

To regain his rightful top spot, Gorgeous would need to virtually wine, dine and bed as many of these beautiful women as would have him, dating them so spectacularly well that his DIC – his Dating Induction Curve – grew bigger than that of this so-called CONTENDER.

In real life, the muscular young war vet with a penchant for calling himself Gorgeous sat up straight and loudly cracked his knuckles, then started tapping the holoscreen like a man on a mission to be King once again.

It grew cool in the tent, then warm, then cool again, following the half-hour cycle of day and night while the vet slept restlessly on the open sleeping bag in T-shirt and cargo pants, snoring loudly, dreaming of competitive dating and his latest victory. As he slept he didn’t notice the rapid shifts in temperatures between day and night, which were minimal compared to other worlds, really, being equalised by atmospheric heaters firing microwaves into the air to warm it up. Haap Heaters, they were sometimes called, and they caused a barely perceptible hum in the air that many people could hear even if they seldom realised what they were hearing, and which sometimes woke the veteran from his sleep, though other times caused him to dream dark dreams filled with regrets.

In the diffused glow of daylight inside the tent his face gleamed wet with tears. His dreams had turned to the past again, to his campaign on the swamp moon of Numbuchat and the terrified young Shal prisoner who was merely a child, croaking for mercy in his tiny cage.

‘Please. Ehlaja - mercy, mercy.'

Gorgeous dreamed in such vivid detail that it was like living the events all over again, and the young vet cried from what he had done back then, cried and cried in his sleep until so many tears flowed over his face that he could hardly breathe from them.

Gorgeous coughed, suddenly unable to catch a breath of air. He coughed so hard that he woke himself up, only to find something cool and transparent plastered across his features. Horrified, he realised that a Ractive had crawled onto his face even as he yanked it off with a yell, and cast it out through the tent door which he had unwittingly left open after all those hours of competitive virtual banging.

He cursed for a long time while he wiped the slime from his eyes and nose and grimacing mouth. Enough was enough - he had to get out of here, find some place not infested with these things. Maybe a simple unobserved rooftop on the outskirts of the city would have been better than this mountain all along, even if he had to put up with all the entrainment fields pressing against his shielded mind.

When he stumbled out of the tent growling, Gorgeous hefted his knife then sliced at the Ractive as it came quivering back at him through the cool night darkness not much faster than a fast slug, barely hindered by the stubbly carpet of pseudo-grasses in its way. He made certain to shred the thing thoroughly, since cutting it into anything less than eight slices meant risking each individual piece growing into a new Ractive with this location genetically imprinted as their home, and then you had a whole new world of problems on your hands. Gorgeous marvelled at how the creature had gotten over the defensive line of spiky gorse that he’d ringed his camp with. When he checked the ring of gorse for gaps he found none. Dozens of old Ractives already lay perched against the ring impaled on the many spikes, curling at the edges as they dried, long dead even though no fly would touch them.

With some suspicion, Gorgeous looked up at the overhanging branches, wondering if some Ractives might be smart enough for manoeuvres like dropping from the tree limbs. He frowned, thinking again how much he loathed these things. Across all the worlds he had stepped on, he’d seen them infesting forests and valleys and lakes, not to mention all manner of large animals - even on the backs of leaping river dolphins.

The cool night air washed around him, making the hairs on his bare arms stand on end. It was the only part of him that still moved. He had frozen to the spot, lit by the fast-moving stars in the sky, his nostrils quivering like a dog scenting game.

A scent lingered in the air that he had not smelled since the war. Something that could not possibly be here, yet there it was, a subtle trace amongst the night scents of the forest - the musky sweat of a Shal warrior.

At once the veteran was down on his haunches and scanning the undergrowth for signs of ambush, his supra-senses flaring. He was so shocked that it was enough to briefly dislocate his mind from the moment, so that instead he was back in a different forest during the war, keenly scanning the undergrowth for enemies, though when he reached for his pulse repeater slung at his side it wasn't there – and then he came back to himself with a shiver.

An owl hooted in the moonlight as though in laughter. Gorgeous frowned. When a soft breeze played across his squinting features the smell was gone, if ever it had been there in the first place.

He straightened, fairly certain he had just hallucinated a scent out of thin air. It unnerved him, just like every other living flashback he'd experienced since the war. Trying to think of better things, he considered returning to his Slate and loading up Star Lovers again to bask in his regained glory as King Star Stud, but as the vet turned he noticed something out of place, or rather something that was not there that should have been there - and he exhaled slowly and geared further into his highest alert mode, where all his senses started subtly screaming on edge. In total silence, he stepped to the tree where he had hung all his rabbit meat out to cure in the air.

And where it was all now gone.

The twines he had used to hang them up, all cut.

Gorgeous raised his head, and again smelled the familiar scent in the air. He even caught the direction it was coming from, further up the slope behind his camp. Hard to believe, yet it was really there - the lingering smell of a living Shal Brave, here on this pretend mountain theme park on the pleasure world of the New Order.

With his combat instincts taking over and the modified pigments of his skin changing to a pine forest camouflage, he rushed to the tent and grabbed up his Slate and his prized, horn-handled Eagle recoilless pistol. Then, with a growl more wild dog than man, he set off loping on the trail of his stolen meat.

'Moonfox, Moonfox, this is Flying Duck on the inbound, do you read me, over?’

He could just about hear the scratchy voice far away at the back of his mind - another unwanted reminder of his days in the war - and he shook it off with a waggle of his head, like he was chasing flies away.

It was a long time since he had tracked Shal like this. Probably back in the Cloud Swamps of Numbuchat, where he'd often tracked Shal Loyalists through the fetid waters in order to capture them for the interrogation camp he was assigned to.

The best Shal Braves were easily a match for any New Order supersoldier, most of all when it came to using terrain to their advantage, like when retreating and hiding out. Trained from youth in how to walk so lightly they left no obvious trails behind them, the very best were called Waterwalkers, so gently did they tread, and with that kind even auto-scanners couldn’t follow the course of their paths - it took the intuitive supra-senses of a supersoldier to track them over any real distance, sensing out the merest psychic impressions of their passing.

Whoever this Shal was, he had barely left any hint of passage through the slopes of dwarf forest. Nothing at all, except an occasional possibility.

Like a ghost. Or a phantom of the young man's mind ...

The Eagle Recoilless felt heavy in his hand, and a little unfamiliar after all these months now retired from active service. But crouched low and padding between the trees with quick noiseless pants of breath, he was instantly a soldier in the zone again, perfectly engineered for this work and precisely poised in the moment, scanning ahead with his supra-senses.

‘Moonfox, Moonfox, this is Flying Duck on the inbound, do you read me, over?’

Sweating, the veteran grunted and shook his head once more to clear it. He kept wanting to reply to the comm chatter he could hear in his head, but then he would catch himself and swear in frustration, knowing the voice was only an hallucination - a hopper pilot he had known coming into a hot landing zone for pickup.

Again, for a fleeting moment, Gorgeous was back in the steamy Cloud Swamps, burdened with a pounding headache from all the intoxicating swamp gas that made him feel like laughing and crying at the same time; walking with the others in a line through the bubbling swamp waters trying not to step on another exploding puffer fish, with their Red Shal guide at the very front giggling wildly, and the squadmate directly behind sobbing his eyes out; Black Dawn's finest supersoldiers reduced to wandering around the high plateau marshes, hoping to bump into the ever-elusive Sky Prophets of the region so they could torture some intel out of them.

Get a grip, the vet told himself fiercely, trying to focus on the here and now. The war’s long over. This isn’t anywhere but a tourist-trap mountain in a Spin City theme park.

Crossing the bike track, Gorgeous stuck to seldom used deer trails winding through the dwarf forest, spotting the occasional walkers through the trees out on the regular pathways, glowing brightly in their dayglo walking suits. High around the mountain he went, circumventing small glades and rocky outcrops and a few times having to dash from sight, until eventually he was following something more akin to intuition than any real signs of anyone's passing. And then after a while even that faint impression was gone, so that the young vet began to seriously wonder if he really was only following some kind of phantom flashback from the war.

Just as Gorgeous was about to give up on the matter, he stopped with a sudden tingle of his danger sense, and smoothly he squatted down on the pine needle floor of the minified forest and adjusted his grip on the pistol, breathing slowly.

At his back the sun was returning after another brief micro-night, throwing the early dawn light ahead of him like a lantern held aloft just for his needs. In the warming morning air a breeze played down a game trail and caused his nostrils to inhale, and it was unmistakable - the smell of curing rabbit meat up ahead.

Was it a trap of some kind? He thought it unlikely, considering how difficult it had been to track the thief back here. More likely, the mystery Shal Brave was playing with him for his own sense of sport.

Gorgeous felt his lips peel back from gleaming canine teeth. Outside of Star Lovers, this was the first real fun he’d had in months. With a squint of concentration he cast his farsense up the slope, and picked up the faintest trace of a Shal lifesign somewhere through the trees.

He settled in place and breathed it all in and out of him until only stillness remained, rooting him to the spot like the roots of a tree sinking deep. For ten minutes he scanned the foliage in his sightline for signs of anything out of place, using various magnifications of his eyes, until finally he spotted something ahead - what might be a few strips of meat hanging from a branch, and maybe, next to it, what looked like the side of a lean-to made from spiky pine branches. Gorgeous slid the safety from his pistol, hyping himself into his hyper-stealthy mode. He took a silent tread forward, and another, testing the ground before applying his full weight – but then his danger sense screamed at him, and he dived for cover just as a plasma bolt went zing! right where he’d been standing.

‘Son of a -’

Another bolt thudded into a tree trunk right above his head, showering his shaggy hair with splinters, and then a third brought the whole dwarf tree down on him.

Whoah!

Scratched and battered he scrambled out from under the branches, trying not to lose his cool as he heard more shots ripping through the air, each one a fraction away from ending his life. It had been a while since Gorgeous had been this close to tasting his own mortality. It was like being wakened in a freezing cold shower; he wanted to whoop from the rushing thrill of it as he ran firing his pistol in reply, using speed and the passing tree trunks for cover. Where most soldiers under live fire would keep their heads down as low as they could, or even scoop out depressions in the dirt to crawl into, supersoldiers were a different breed. Supersoldiers were raised to be crazy. When pinned down by enemy fire, they were trained to respond with as much aggression as possible; or, as his old Tactics Instructor, Hosho, used to always say: when pinned down by the enemy, attack!

Of course it helped to be fitted with body shields that could absorb a few deadly shots before they killed you. Unlike now, where the barrage of plasma fire coming his way finally forced him down into cover before it blew his head off.

During a brief gap in the firing, Gorgeous rose on one knee and took several rapid shots at where he thought the Shal was shooting from, his Eagle snapping off bolts of blue light. He glimpsed a head ducking for cover, and then he was on his feet again, still firing the pistol, and charging fast through the trees right at the enemy camp as splinters flew all around him, feeling the rightness of his actions right down in his cultured cells.

His danger sense alerted him just in time to skip over a camouflaged pitfall, but then a few steps later he tripped a tripwire, and had to duck beneath a log whipping over his head with a row of sharpened stakes fixed all along it like teeth.

Traps, he realised. This bastard Shal had set up traps around his camp.

Still moving, Gorgeous glimpsed a campsite ringed by a pile of gorse with dead Ractives piled up against it, just like his own, and then a lean-to of leaves and branches, and next to it a Shal male squatting in the dirt with a pistol aimed right at his chest, smiling. Gorgeous rolled behind a tree trunk just as the trunk exploded, then dived to another trunk even closer to the firing Shal - always attack! - knowing by now that the enemy’s pistol must be nearly depleted of Charge. And indeed, there it was – a momentary silence as the Shal swapped a fresh power clip into his weapon. Gorgeous used the moment to leap from cover to shoot the Shal dead – or he would have done, if his own pistol hadn’t run out of Charge just as he leapt out shouting 'Hah!'

With the barest of pauses, he flung his gun at the Shal’s face and leapt after it, taking the fellow by surprise so that Gorgeous went sprawling on top of him. He landed a few punches before the Shal kicked him clear.

Gorgeous picked himself up just as the Shal regained his footing too.

Growling, they sprang together like fighting tigers, blades in their hands, swaying and stabbing and slashing so fast it resembled a choreographed dance more than a real knife fight; except that over time a bloody gash or nick would appear on one of their bodies or faces, and their small blades grew more and more crimson. He was shockingly fast, this Shal warrior. Maybe even faster than Gorgeous with all his supersoldier enhancements. The Brave sensed moves before they happened, and pushed just as hard as he was pushed so they duelled almost toe to toe, neither giving an inch of ground, only swerving aside when they needed to, their knives flashing as quickly as their eyes, clashing with little scrapes and rings of steel, their breaths going huff huff huff, entirely oblivious to a pair of hikers speed-walking a trail some distance through the trees.

Pressed hard behind flurries of hands and steel, Gorgeous barely had time to study his adversary, let alone keep stock of his surroundings. The Brave's head was shaven close, and his scarred features especially lean, everything sharp and angular like a hatchet with his golden skin stretched taut as a drum. By his expression, he seemed to be enjoying himself too.

‘You’re good!’ Gorgeous shouted at his face in Common Shal.

‘Yes. So are you!’

‘That tattoo around your neck – you’re a Star Nation's Brave.’

'I was!'

Gorgeous swerved a vicious stab to his face before he replied with his own flashing blade, and even then he was trying to get a better glimpse of the elaborate tattoo around the Shal’s neck, which did indeed mark him as a Brave, a tribal warrior raised from youth to defend his people with his life. But this was really no time for curiosity, and it left Gorgeous too distracted to avoid a punch to his solar plexus then a lightning-fast roundhouse kick which knocked him clean off his feet, so that he sprawled in the leaves and twigs of the loamfoam forest floor with his head reeling. It was a shock to his system to be floored by anyone out here in the civilian world.

Who was this Shal anyway?

At once his adversary was on his back with a blade pressing at his throat. Gorgeous grasped the blade with the armoured skin of his palm, barely holding it back from his jugular. Roaring in anger, he used his brute strength to wrench the knife from his opponents hand. The Shal cursed and wrapped an arm around his neck instead, throttling him. Grunting, raining sweat, Gorgeous almost laughed in surprise at this turn of events. Even as he strained and gasped for air, it came to him how he had seen that tattoo design around the Brave’s neck before - a circlet of flames reaching upwards to consume the base of his skull. It was the marking of the famed Dragon Slayers, those Braves who had been chosen to serve their Star King - High King of the Star Crown Nations - as his most elite fighting force. Warriors who specialised in hunting down dragons on those ridiculous flying surfboards the Shal liked to ride into battle on, when not leaping around in their stilt-suits.

A Shal Dragon Slayer! Living rough here on the New Order playground of Spin City! And with a neck tattoo several inches wide, denoting a high rank and years of experience; like all Loyalist Shal tattoos of rank it resembled a slave collar, really, reflecting their belief that the rank of leadership equalled servitude to others, not tyranny over them.

‘Want to know something funny?’ Gorgeous rasped on his knees, barely able to breath.

'What?' gasped the Shal above him.

‘I’m not even trying my hardest yet.’

Maybe the Brave possessed some sense of humour, because his grip relaxed just a fraction, just enough for Gorgeous to finally reach the little taser in his ankle holster. In that moment, Gorgeous twisted and jammed the taser into the Shal’s ribs, sending the fellow jolting backwards to the ground with a great convulsion and yelp of pain.

‘Hah!’ Gorgeous yelled at him, and took the chance to grab up his empty pistol from the ground.

Holding his ribs, the Shal flopped into his lean-to, then rose brandishing another pistol.

‘Hah!’ barked the Shal.

For a moment there was nothing to say or do but to face each other in panting silence, one knife versus a gun.

‘You’ve rigged your whole camp with traps of the lethal variety,’ called the supersoldier, panting hard. ‘Why?’

The easy use of his native language seemed to catch the Shal off-guard, and he cocked his head, curious, taking a moment to study the military tattoos on the young vet’s bared arm.

‘Why do you think, soldier? To protect myself from gophers and hikers?’

‘You stole my rabbit meat to goad me here. So you could ambush me.’

The Shal's dark languid eyes observed him over the gaping barrel of his gun.

‘I’ve been watching you, big Humani, living up here in secret just like me. But I tell you now, this mountain isn’t big enough for both of us. With all these tourists walking about, it’s barely big enough for one.’

Well he wasn’t wrong there, that was for sure.

‘Hey,’ tried the veteran smoothly, calmly, holding up a hand. ‘I’ve been here over four weeks now. If anyone should go then it's you.’

‘And I’ve been here for more than three months.’

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t get it. How did a Shal Brave of the Free Nations end up here?’

For an answer, the Shal showed him a brand on the back of his hand of two swords crossed beneath a skull.

‘Down in the Mean Arena I was number one gladiator. Until I escaped. You have a problem with that, Humani?’

‘Well hey, good for you. I have no problems with that kind of initiative. Get out of the crap heap however you can, that's my new motto. Now, you think maybe we can resolve this without pointing that pistol at my face?’

‘No. I think now maybe I blow your head off.’

The Brave’s tanned leather boots and outfit creaked in unison as he leaned into his aim. It was a smaller Gauss pistol than his first one, but a shot at this range would still take the vet’s head clean off. And he was going to fire, Gorgeous could see it in his eyes.

Neither of them could afford to look around at the sudden crashing footsteps making their way towards the camp, not even when a woman emerged through the trees smiling in a bright red hiking suit, and called out to them across the clearing, ‘Hiiii guys! Have you seen a dog around here anywhere? A little pink Dashound with the cutest silvered highlights running from ear to ear?’

Her mouth fell open as she gawped at the sight of them both facing each other, crouched and bleeding with weapons in their hands.

‘Oh … I see you’re already quite busy with ... with ... Well, okay then … Yes … You uh … You need some help, maybe?’ And she looked back over her shoulder, and croaked, 'Help?’

Gorgeous did the only thing that was left for him to do.

He ran.

Only fools thought that running from a fight equalled retreat and only retreat.

To run from battle could mean many things: repositioning yourself in the tactical theatre to more advantageous terrain; changing the dynamics of a bad situation; opening up the field to other methods of attack.

And so the young supersoldier ran along a wide hiking trail with his eyes scanning for opportunities to turn the initiative of the fight - though admittedly his attention was momentarily waylaid by a female jogger up ahead in a sweaty running suit tighter than a second skin - indeed what they call a skinsuit.

‘Nice!’ he panted on his way past, and beamed back at her surprised expression and then at the Shal Brave running behind her, now tucking the Gauss pistol out of sight under his arm.

Time to further shift the dynamic.

Gorgeous held his Slate up in his hand and pressed the sunken thumb imprint that was the Action groove, then tossed the device into the air in front of him. Before it could hit the ground its holographic projector spun a hologram around itself, instantly capturing the Slate within the form of a hardlight trail bike - upon which the veteran leaped into the saddle and started pedalling. With his muscular legs and the power assisted pedals of the holobike, Gorgeous started whizzing along the gravelly path sending stones and grit flying up from its wheels. Good. He should be able to get clear this way, and maybe even lay some kind of ambush up ahead.

When he chanced a glance back, he saw the Shal brave following on his own holographic trail bike, legs pumping just as furiously.

Who is this guy?

They rounded onto the sunny side of the mountain again, overlooking the lake and the city and the bustling spaceport beyond. On a level stretch of path the Brave drew up alongside Gorgeous, both baring their teeth and hunched over their handlebars for extra speed.

‘You know what else is funny?’ called the Brave.

‘What?’

‘I’m not even trying my hardest either!’

And with that he gave Gorgeous an almighty kick so the young veteran veered right off the path before he could stop himself, and in the next instant he and the holobike were hurtling down the sheer mountain slope shaking and juddering between rows of freshly planted saplings with his head ducking low to avoid all the low-hanging boughs, gripping the hardlight handlebars of the holobike for dear life and just barely in control. It was madness to glance back right then, and so of course that's what he did; right behind him came the Shal Brave, though he had changed his trail bike hologram in favour of a big Mountain Truck instead, equipped with hugely oversized wheels that turned the newly planted rows of trees into splinters. Over the high, high steering wheel, the crazy Shal bared his teeth.

He would use up his Slate’s Charge in no time like that. But what did it matter, when no time was all that Gorgeous had left to him now that the slope levelled off just ahead, and appeared to end abruptly at a sheer cliff and a four thousand foot drop to the lakeside below. He realised his options even as he took one. Leaning right into, Gorgeous and bike leaped clean into the air …

No time to scream and flail around like his body wanted to before falling uselessly to its death. With a cool head and floating stomach, Gorgeous reached down to his Slate fixed to the bike's crossbar and thumbed through one of its holo-menus trying to find the right option. Come on, come on …

He was starting to drop before he found it – quickly he hit the Action groove and the holobike transformed itself into a wingsuit of feathery hardlight that fitted snugly around his body. The instant he flexed its wings they caught air with a snap and he started to glide. But something grabbed at his ankles, heavy enough to pull him right out of his flight angle, and Gorgeous glanced down in shock to see the Shal Brave dangling from his legs hundreds of feet above the forested mountain slopes, grinning up at him.

Now they were both trying their hardest.

He really would have shouted something down at the fellow if they hadn’t been half-falling, spinning, towards the nearing slopes. Somehow, Gorgeous aimed them towards a flat shoulder of the mountain to their right covered in grasses. People were picnicking down there in couples or in groups, faces looking up in disbelief at what was falling from the sky towards them. A young couple smooched on a picnic blanket as Gorgeous and the Brave swooped over them and crashed rolling to the ground with grunts of pain. Gorgeous killed the holographic wingsuit even as he leapt onto the Shal - who seemed to be stunned by the fall - getting a boot on his neck before he could rise.

The Brave stopped struggling, realising that a single hard shove and twist of the boot, and he would be dead.

Game over.

The young vet’s heart pounded fast enough to burst. His skin ran slick with sweat, stinging everywhere he was cut or grazed. He could barely catch his breath, and he sucked down air until the trembling in his body started to subside. They had crash landed right on the edge of the pretty lookout area called Picnic View, though the tourists seemed to be doing more panicking than picnicking right now - a few had even screamed at their unexpected arrival – and some seemed to be calling for the police on their Slates, while green-clad holo-rangers emerged from the gift shop pretending to be real and alarmed.

Gorgeous inhaled the high fresh air and looked towards the summit of this fake mountain rising just above them, where the very peak had been left exposed right down to its diamond bedrock. It sparkled brilliantly in the sunlight. Throughout the peak's diamond interior ran the rooms and corridors and galleries of the Diamond Top Mountain Resort, one of the most exclusive resort hotels on the world, and accessible only by elevators that ran all the way down to the Lakeside. Even now, its security optics would be scanning this neighbouring picnic location and Mainlining everything that was happening here.

Maybe this wasn’t the best place to be reenacting the war.

‘Please. Ehlaja, mercy.’

He looked down, but it wasn’t the Dragon Slayer under his heel who spoke; it was a voice in his mind, the Shal boy prisoner of war who kept plaguing his dreams – the half-starved, big-eyed youth held in a cage amongst all those other empty cages propped up on the operations deck of a mobile field lab, now devoid of their child prisoners save for this last one, this last boy waiting without hope to be brought inside, and broken.

The young vet knew what he should have done back then. Despite all his genetic tailoring and his numbing years of training and experiences of war, some part of him deep down had known that he should have ignored his squadmates, and shown mercy to that poor boy. Only cowardice had stopped him.

Sighing, Gorgeous lifted his boot from his adversary’s throat and took a faltering step backwards. He felt a tear run down his face, and it was like the first drop of a flood because the next thing he felt was a great deluge of grief and remorse overwhelming him, only to be accompanied by a wave of sleepy exhaustion.

The young vet toppled to the ground like a man felled, snoring face-down against the grasses.

He was surprised when he woke again to find the Brave kneeling over him, looking almost concerned.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked the Shal gladiator and ex-Dragon Slayer.

Gorgeous shook his head.

‘When I get too emotional – too sad or too angry - I pass out.’

The Shal found this amusing, though Gorgeous could hardly complain as a hand was offered to help him regain his footing.

Facing each other squarely, it seemed their war was over.

‘You were always afflicted this way?’

‘No. Not until recent years. Along with a lot of bad flashbacks.'

'That's too bad. I can hardy kill you now, in this condition.'

'Hey, don't let a little narcolepsy stop you. Look - everyone's gone.'

When they looked around, they saw how the Picnic View Lookout area was entirely deserted, with picnic blankets strewn everywhere. It was a strangely eerie sight. Even the holo-rangers seemed to have vanished. When Gorgeous turned to look down the slopes he saw police hoppers circling the base of the mountain, and a few rising towards them, no doubt bearing RAT teams to hunt them down.

‘You blew my stealth cover, Shal.’

‘And you blew mine, Humani.’

‘So now neither of us gets the mountain.’

By the looks of it, some of those hoppers were already dropping RAT teams further down the slopes - sunlight flashed from optics and rifle scopes. Other hoppers continued to rise slowly towards their position.

They had to move, and they had to move now.

When the Brave tossed his Slate before him, it snapped into a holographic skyboard, the kind he and his fellow Dragon Slayers had ridden during the war. The skyboard bobbed slightly as he hopped onto it, held aloft by fields of magnetic repulsion.

‘Get on,’ he snapped, much to the veteran’s surprise. Wincing from his many bruises, Gorgeous squatted down on the back of the thing, thinking of all the precious gear he would be leaving in his camp back down the slope.

‘Where to?’ he asked the Shal.

‘I’m not sure. Just away from here, quickly.’

Gorgeous felt a sigh escape his lips, one of resignation. In the next moment he found himself holding aloft his Slate so the Shal could see its holographic Homescreen, and in particular the Freenet advert about an offworld ship seeking crew. Right now, even a spell in Space seemed a whole lot more preferable to a return to some form of slavery.

‘A ship?’ croaked the Shal.

‘Time to get off this rock, don’t you think?’

They could see the spaceport from here, off to the right of the sprawling city.

‘Call me Blade,’ growled the Brave as he kicked the skyboard into life.

‘Yeah? Well Dick Nose, you can call me Gorgeous.’

And Gorgeous flashed him his world-winning smile.

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THE HIGH WILD: NEVERWAR

Written By

Col Buchanan (aka wisefool)

Cover Design

Alyn Spiller, Col Buchanan, John Marshall

Interior Art & Design

Col Buchanan

Guerrilla Published By

Truthvine Press

For Fionna Barnett, and her

bravery in opening so many eyes.

This ebook is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International License.

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Creative Commons License (CC-BY-NC-ND) 2021

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