The High Wild: Neverwar Ep 1
Author: Col Buchanan
Date: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Science Fiction; Space Fantasy
Description: High Wild: Neverwar Serialised Novel
Publisher: Truthvine Press
Rights: Creative Commons License (CC-BY-NC-ND)

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 2
by

Col Buchanan (aka wisefool)

A Buy-After-Reading
SERIALISED NOVEL

Truthvine Press Edition
Copyright (c) 2023 Col Buchanan
Version 1.2

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 FIVE

>> CHAPTER SIX

>> CHAPTER SEVEN

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
5

Still wrapped in the holographic disguise of a banged up Humani light freighter needing repairs, at rest on her landing pad in a quiet corner of a Spin City repair yard - which itself lay in a quiet corner of the ever-bustling tourist spaceport – the Prophetship Child of Jih sighed.

‘Hey, you mind?’

It was Babbatunde over the comm, standing beneath her forward hull with the shaft of a dip-sponge dripping in his hands. Stopping momentarily in his work, the ship’s Chief Biogranger coughed at all the dust and debris blowing up around him from the sudden venting of air from her massive port-side gills.

‘Sorry,’ answered Child, and tried not to sigh again in her frustration.

He wretched and spat upon the ground before speaking again.

'How are the patches holding up on the antennas?'

He meant her upper antenna arrays, some of the first things he had set out to repair. Without them they were blind beyond basic line-of-sight and with no means of detecting their adversary, the Great Solar Dragon, who had ambushed her so effectively and could still be up there now searching for them.

'Relax, Babbatunde. We're cloaked and only scanning passively. Finding us won't be so easy on a busy rock like Spin City.'

'Relax, she says, when there's most likely a great big Solar Dragon somewhere up there looking to tear us a new --'

But her attention was drifting away from his words, returning once more to the wreckage of her interior. Within Child's living hull, the rhythms of Space Opera turned way too loud washed back and forth from the sonic grills of her dim and winding passageways, playing so insanely loud that the sound-waves grabbed physically at her muscles and pounded against her inner ear arrays, with the heavy bass sections rumbling like an earthquake in her stomachs. Yet even then the thunderous cacophony of music wasn’t loud enough, not even remotely, to fill the empty spaces left by her vanished crew.

Even in her present condition of emergency low-power mode, Child of Jih turned the music up another few notches until the dim internal lights started to flicker, and it felt as though even the several thousand tons of her body-weight were shaking on her landing feet from the massive rippling pulsations of sound. It was Conrod Starshine's Burning Mountain, his greatest masterpiece, and she always listened to it during the very worst times of her life - chiefly because they were the only times she could tolerate the sound of it and the magnitude of its ridiculously overblown pathos.

‘And what’s with the Space Opera thunderattics affronting my eardrums out here all morning? You really need it that loud?’

‘No. I need it louder.’

As Child spoke she disengaged the final safeguards and turned the volume up as high as she could boost it, until the lights flickered and dimmed even more and her ear arrays throbbed dangerously and every body of water within her – the pools and basins and bladders and puddles – all trembled across their taut surface tensions. An old cracked drinking glass burst into pieces in the galley; others started rattling in their racks. Throughout her spaces, songbirds that had escaped during the battle from the garden domes up on the Sky Deck chirped and fluttered like they were caught in a storm. Down in the lower air ducts, the wild loner panthercats - no larger than domestic cats, but meaner - growled their complaints. Even the armoured thickness of her hull wasn’t enough to contain the rolling thunders of Space Opera. As Babbatunde had just testified, the noise was leaking out into the yard in impressive crashes and rumbles where fortunately it was contained within the curves of her hardlight holographic disguise; no minor feat at such a galactic volume as this, with a form of music traditionally performed using weather and the electro-magnetic forces of a planet to render into being.

‘Why don’t you just pipe it straight into your brain instead of making us all suffer?’ Babbatunde shouted through his comm-bead.

‘Because I need to feel it.’

The Chief Biogranger had little time for Space Opera, a fact that Child of Jih tried hard never to hold against him. Like the rest of his tastes, the young bio-fixer preferred something a little courser than the magisterial sonic vistas of classical opera - usually the relaxed and sunny tunes of Beach Roots or the smoky bonga-bonga of Shal Hill Vibes. Out on the yard, Babbatunde slipped some flight muffs over his ears and returned to swabbing out a wound on her lower hull sustained from the previous space battle, getting dripped on by a green goo that he made himself from the cinnabar plants grown in the ship’s garden domes; a substance that would not only staunch the flow of sap-serum leaking from her cut, but would also vastly accelerate her natural healing.

Normally, she would never act with such inconsideration towards one of her crew, but today Child of Jih was desperate to feel something above the numb sense of shock she was experiencing, and to drown out that awful hum of emptiness in her ears.

Earlier, while Babbatunde had first rushed to staunch her many open wounds along her outer hull, Child had employed a few emergency hardlight holograms – a few flickering autocrew – to gather the remains of her regular crew, so that she could have them buried up in her starboard garden, in a little meadow in the dwarf forest. Babbatunde had claimed to be much too busy to attend the service, and so she had interred the bodies alone as the sun spun overhead through the transparent dome, singing a song of Loss and Longing that had made the birds of the garden flitter and chirrup even more so, confused as they were at the rapidly cycling day and nights of this tiny world so aptly named Spin City.

Child would meet them all again, some day in the Kingdom to come, she was sure of it. But still, even so ... shaken from her losses, the Prophetship sighed long and hard once again.

'Hey!'

The repair yard lay quiet beneath the wheeling stars, night having already cycled round again. These thirty-two minute days really were dizzying to the uninitiated, not just the ship's birds.

Around the disguised Prophetship, half a dozen light freighters rested in various conditions of repair, their hulls illuminated by spotlights and the occasional air traffic passing low overhead. Only a single ship was being visibly worked on just then, an old Red Shal ex-military asteroid hopper painted in stripes like a fire-wasp, a fellow living ship like all Shal ships though this one came from the opposite side of the war, the rebel side, here to make use of the largest port facilities to be found on the edge of the Shatterzone; blue sparks flew from a cauterizer and someone in a liftersuit carried a heavy laser polisher towards the high curves of its hull. But otherwise the repair yard remained a sleepy corner within the greater busyness of the port itself, which ferried tourists by the thousands to and from this most famed of New Order pleasure hubs.

At last Child of Jih had reluctantly turned the volume down on the pounding Space Opera, if only because Babbatunde refused to come back inside until she did so. Now it thundered and roared only within the heavily armoured and shielded area of her Core – where Child’s physical body was embedded, integrated into a cocoon within the ship so that they were one.

Babbatunde stepped onto the flight deck with a cup of steaming chee in his hand and still wearing his dripping utility overalls, so that his steps could be traced all the way back to the galley and then down to the lower airlock as gooey boot-sized impressions. He stood there sipping noisily while he inspected the inside of the big boneplate that he'd grafted across the hole in the hull, which hopefully would merge healthily with the ship. With a season's worth of skin growth, the patch shouldn't be all that noticeable from a distance, not with all the other old scarring across Child's outer surface. Just another warwound to add to her many others.

If only he could patch together the rest of her crew.

For a moment the young Biogranger lowered his head, and let out a long and weary sigh.

'Child,' he said with a shake of his head. 'I'm hurting too, you know.'

Yes, she could see it in his bloodshot eyes, now that the initial shock of it all had left his system - emerging depths of pain for the loss of a crew he had barely tolerated. Babbatunde was like a dog who had been kicked too many times by humans to ever trust any of them again. He had never taken to anyone overly much. But survivor's guilt could strike at anyone, and those final catastrophic moments of the fight had been enough to undo even a veteran. She knew that after they had landed he had shaken in his bunk during the two hours of sleep he had managed to snatch. Intuitively, she sensed the Biogranger could still hear their final strangled screams as echoes in his ears that would not fade away.

She still hadn't answered him, she realised. Too lost in the Opera and the spin of her own emotions.

‘Well read it and weep,’ Babbatunde announced in his usual slow drawl, and left a scratchpad on a control console next to the cup of chee he had just finished in a single gulp.

‘What’s this?’ Child of Jih asked after him, focusing on the scratchpad from one of her ceiling eyes.

The chief Biogranger kept walking out the door. ‘The bill!’ he called over his shoulder.

Ah. It was a list of the damages she had sustained from the battle. Now that her outer wounds had been dealt with, Babbatunde had been able to make a proper appraisal of her interior condition.

Just reading through the injuries made her wince.

‘I’m in a bad way,’ she reflected.

Babbatunde's dreadlocked head bobbed along a passageway. ‘Yeah. Like I’ve been trying to tell you. It's a wonder you're not dead and gone already.’

‘Strange. I don’t feel this bad.’

‘That’s because I’ve been pumping you full of Cinnabar oil since we landed.’

‘What? Well that would explain why I'm feeling so overly-dramatic right now.'

Scanning the list again, she marvelled like Babbatunde that she hadn’t suffered some form of terminal failure while in the air.

'And Crazycloud?' she asked quietly, nervously. 'Your list doesn't include the captain anywhere.'

Babbatunde sighed again.

'I took a better look at his dedicated nerve-net. It's fried all the way to the firewall on his cocoon. There isn't a hope of pulling out any life-readings until I have a chance to resheath the blistered nerve bundles and see what's happening.'

His cocoon was located deep within the armoured Core of the ship, not far from her own. Almost close enough to reach out and touch, if that was possible.

'So we still don't know if he's alive or dead.'

'Not unless you can sense his thoughts in there.'

She would have frowned if she could. The possibility of losing Crazycloud, her captain for the entire twelve years of her existence as a Prophetship, was simply too much to bear right now.

In her mind she glimpsed his bearded face and narrowed eyes, saw his white hair blowing in the winds of one of her ship-sized breaths.

Even on their present mission, with all the odds of survival stacked against them, she hadn't summoned up the courage to tell him how she felt about him, how she loved him.

And now he might be gone.

'First thing's first,' said Babbatunde. 'If I don't restore power, we ain't getting anything else back.'

As he approached a hatchway it unfolded before him like a pair of wings, then sprang closed again as he stepped through. The chief Biogranger stood inside the long running chamber of her Spine, a dimly lit and silent space that ran all the way from her fore to aft. Working alone in there, it was going to take him some time to patch up the damage and restore her Charge by drawing it from the world's atmospheric Flow.

‘Any luck finding us some crew yet?’ he asked casually, inspecting some damage along her Charge Coil.

‘I’m working on it. Give me some time.’

Child of Jih was a big ship. Usually the vast bulk of work on board - especially the dangerous stuff - was undertaken by holographic autocrew and remote-access virtual Volunteers, though these could only do so much. Without at least a physical skeleton crew, she had little hope of continuing on her mission

But recruiting a new crew from this enemy rock wasn’t going to be an easy task, that much was certain. Spin City was an Imperium colony after all. Like all New Order worlds, its citizenry no doubt existed in a state of permanent mind-daze, lost in a matrix of delusion while remaining fanatically loyal to the reign of the God Kings. As a Prophetship on the run with only a hostile population of mostly Humani to recruit from, what she needed were some candidates without loyalties to the New Order. Which meant slaves and prisoners, those whom she might be able to set free, along with Freelifers seeking a way out.

Already, with a few simple hacks over the Mainline, Child of Jih was using the city's Overwatch network to follow some likely candidates who might be willing to join her. Maybe she could help them to escape their circumstances if the chances arose. And surely, too, some freelifers wanting off this rock would respond to her hiring ad on the local Freenet?

If there even were all that many people living as Freelifers in this hardcore megacity playground of the New Age, Child reflected.

Certainly, the entrainment waves on Spin City were the worst she had ever encountered before. With her shielding presently at minimum they overwhelmed even her internal grounding, and were strong enough to literally make her countless eyes sting – though maybe that was also the effects of the pounding Space Opera on her seemingly-numbed grief. So many entrainment fields competed with rival fields here, flinging artificial feelings and impulses and thoughts around like the flapping of opposing winds. Any Freelifer attempting to live outside the Mainline of this world would need to be heavily grounded, and absolutely certain of themselves in what they were doing. Surely, they would also be desperate to get out?

Child’s gaze lifted to the sky and focused on the brilliant glittering star directly overhead that was the local God King’s Orbital Palace, suitably rendered out of diamond. And then her eyes continued to roam the skies, seeking a sign of the Great Solar Dragon through all the busy air-traffic.

The Prophetship wondered if it was still up there in space somewhere, recharging its depleted strength from the background Flow, hopefully still blinded from the desperate Star Burst that had enabled her to escape. But with her minimal power she had minimal sensors, and her antenna could only detect so far. Besides, reaching out actively to try to sense the creature might only draw it to her.

Minimal sensors and no cross-space comms yet. Really, Child badly needed to inform Mission Command about her delayed and battered status, and to pass on word of the fallen crew so their next of kin could be informed. These matters should be dealt with quickly, responsibly. But a month now into her mission, having observed minimal communications the entire flight so far, Child was also in need of calling home and seeing some friendly faces, and reminding herself why she was out here all this way risking her life and the lives of so many others.

‘Babbatunde. How long before we can reestablish a cross-space link?’ she asked for the third or fourth time in as many hours.

‘I told you already,’ he answered against a background of music coming over the open comm. ‘Not until the power is back up and I sort out the field grippers properly.'

'And then we can restore some VC connections?'

‘Nope. The VC nerve-net is fried just as bad as the captain's. I'll need to resheath its bundles before we can restore working virtual crew. Right now all we have are a few emergency autocrew, and I need them with me. Now stop bugging me, will you?'

‘Fine, I will.’

‘Good.’

‘I’ll leave you to it then.’

‘Wonderful.’

Child wanted off this tiny planet as quickly as possible. She loathed having to visit these New Order worlds where everything was of the same dark spirit, places where all thoughts and moods were Regulated, and privacy no longer tolerated, and people lived as little more than machines. But then, near everywhere was getting as bad as this since the fall of the free worlds at the end of the Neverwar, even places like her remote homemoon of Gale. What she longed for now were the thriving spaces and open people of Old Hurl, that sizable comet settled by the Mission, her backers, which for the last eight years she had been fortunate enough to call home.

She knew she should return her attention back to the city outside and on gathering together a new crew. But it was ugly out there, what she could see of it through cameras and the hardlight eyes of random urban holograms. For all that these New Order worlds were vaulted for being pinnacles of progress and prosperity, they really had fallen low.

Having taken a break from it all, Child was reluctant to return.

Inside her Core, the Space Opera raced onwards ever more urgently, each crashing crescendo rising to an ever higher one like crests of a mountain rising towards its summit. Thinking of starry skies and burning slopes, Child of Jih found herself being swept away with the music.

With the two competing fronts of the opera thundering together at last as storms colliding, vibrating the bony walls of her Core like skins over drums while soaring to its highest peak yet, Child was taken back to when she first heard this stunning crescendo performed for real beneath the heaving skies – having helped, in her own way, in its making.

But then, something was nagging at her attention like an itch that would not go away. At last she noticed the little flashing white light in the corner of her peripheral vision, overlaid with the number five. It was one of the Core's smartnets she had tasked with monitoring the city's thousands of surveillance cameras for possible crew candidates. When she gave it her attention it responded with a few streams of data across her lower vision and some remarkable telemetry.

It seemed the smartnet had found a Pleasure Palace with fires burning on its flat expansive rooftop, right in the heart of the city and overlooked by the great diamond ziggurat. Even more interesting, a young woman hung naked from the side of the building, seemingly unnoticed by anyone. Fascinated, Child took a closer look. The building was one of many soaring Pleasure Palaces in the area, and the young woman sported a mop of of orange hair on her head and wore the stringed pearls of a Pleasure Slave instead of clothing. It would appear she was trying to escape by climbing down the outside of the building, which was adorned with balconies and statues.

Smartnet 5, she snapped in her thoughts. Get me access to every advertising blimp in the immediate area, if able.

Priority of command?

The woman's flesh gleamed like marble against the ferroconcrete sides of the Pleasure Palace. She was reaching down with her bare foot to one of the many grotesque statues adorning the outside, but she couldn't find her footing without it slipping away. She looked like she might fall at any moment.

Priority Ultra. Do it now!

Bosy
6

'And we promise you this!’ warbled the voice of the company CEO through the loudspeaker, to a backdrop of stirring martial music - the same recorded speech that always seemed to play whenever the squad flew into battle. ‘If you follow orders and keep your heads out there, we will get you through this in one piece, and you will live to see every hazard bonus owed you. That’s a promise, I promise you! Now good luck, and happy hunting!’

Promises of promises? Bosy made a frown with his furry, heavily worried features. What did promises mean to a mere slave without any say or recourse in anything? His last owners, Agri-Megafarms, had promised him a peaceful retirement when he grew too old and creaky for the heavy labour of the vats and autofarms. Yet only a week ago, after a lifetime with Agri-Megafarms, they had sold him to the highest bidder, and without even a goodbye. Just marched into a shipping crate and driven away.

And so here he was, an aging manimal ape bred for industrial farming, but instead clinging most ferociously to the inside of a flatbed and refusing to take a look as they spiralled down towards the roof garden of a major Pleasure Palace, feeling sick in his stomach from vertigo and with his nostrils flaring from the scents of fires and chemical weaponry - dropping into someone else’s war for the third time in as many days.

If there was one thing Bosy hated most of all about this new job of his - even more than the desperate fighting itself - was all the flying from site to site that seemed to be necessarily part of it. Flying meant heights, and beyond any common sense or reason Bosy had always been stricken dumb by heights. Which was odd, whenever he thought about it, since along with his human genetics there were an even greater amount of modified chimpanzee genes, and so he carried ancient memories in his flesh of ancestors swinging high through the treetops.

‘All right you furbacks, get ready, get ready!’

It was Delaware, their big straw-headed Humani crew boss, pushing his way through the press of manimal apes preparing for the action below, chewing a cigar and hollering like the ex-orbital-roughnecker that he was.

‘You too, old timer, time to wakey-wakey!’

A slap on the back forced Bosy to open his eyes at last - or at least a single eye, just a little bit, just enough to glimpse over the side of the flatbed. They were coming in so fast that Bosy groaned aloud. Between eyelashes, the old manimal ape glimpsed lasers flashing across the roof gardens below, and trees and shrubbery on fire, and then beyond the vast rooftop lay Capitol Square itself, the heart of Spin City, filled with the sun-struck Crystal Pyramid and thousands of roaming pleasure tourists enjoying the sights during the Bloody Season. And then the airwagon tilted sharply and Bosy looked away with a grimace, trying not to suffer the indignity of throwing up in front of everyone else. He fixed his gaze on the back of young Porto standing in front of him, the youth still fumbling to fix a clasp of his high visibility anti-stab vest before they landed. Getting himself all flustered by the looks of it.

Bosy touched the youth’s shoulder to settle his shaking, and fixed the clasp into place for him.

The young ape nodded his thanks.

They were dropping way faster than normal, like something was wrong and they were needed extra-quickly as reinforcements. Even as Bosy realised the fact, their crew boss Delaware shouted at the pilot in the forward cab to keep dropping as rapidly as he could. He seemed worried about their forward squad already down there on the roof garden below. The big man held a palm over his ear to better hear their comm chatter, frowning and chewing away at his cigar. Everyone in the squad could hear the same chatter in their own ears from their helmets - the first response team on the roof of the Pleasure Palace was hard pressed and panicking after an intense half hour of battle, and yelling for relief.

Shouting into his mike with a string of expletives, Delaware ordered them to hold their ground.

‘Easy green, go green!’ he added several times over the mike, throwing in some common triggers to bolster their base conditioning.

His joints aching with age as he clung to the side even harder, Bosy wished that his own conditioning would somehow make this easier for him too. But the old ape had been bred for horticulture, not for this, and with the kind of high fatality rates he was seeing so far, how many more of these drops could he reasonably expect to survive?

‘Boss man got a bug up his cracksy,’ murmured Porto, breathing quickly, excited at facing his very first battle.

‘Never mind boss man,’ muttered Laloyd by his side, their veteran squad sergeant. The black-haired ape loaded his flamer without even looking. ‘You keep your wits on the apes around you. You follow our lead, not his.’

The manimal sergeant looked tired. By all accounts it had been a frantic week for the squad, with Bosy dropped right into the middle of it all just as he was getting ready for his retirement in the sun. They said it was always this way at the start of the Bloody Season, when open warfare broke out across the roof gardens of rival Pleasure Palaces - at least this limited type of warfare, where drones scattered seed-pods of rapid-growth, engineered bioweapons in the form of 'smartweeds' across rival gardens. But the fighting was particularly intense this year, the worst ever they said, and casualties were soaring. Hence why the company had been buying in so many untrained replacements and throwing them straight into the grinder.

In their ears the comm filled with rising shouts of panic about Hazard Grass enveloping the first response team’s position. Those Grunts sounded wild with fear down there, and their fear worked its way across the airwaves until Bosy was shaking from it. He loathed and hated Hazard Grass with a passion equalled only by his hatred of heights. In the space of three days, he had witnessed fellow apes being skinned to the bone by the serrated razor-sharp edges of grass-blades that wrapped around them at the slightest accidental touch and tightened with every pull of resistance. Around him now, the others in the squad readied their lasers and flamers or nervously fingered the pain collars locked around their necks - always fitted a little too tightly for comfort. Collars that marked them for the slaves they were. Everyone stank of animal fear.

He felt the dread in his belly as the airwagon slowed with a whine and came in to land on the roof garden near some ponds and decorative hedging, and then they settled onto a scorched lawn just as a cloud of black smoke billowed over them.

Choking, Bosy fixed the goggles over his eyes and gripped his laser rifle and blinked at all the things that were burning or sizzling before them under the high sun. It was his third touchdown into combat, yet he was as frightened now as the very first time - even more so, because now he knew what monstrosities he would be facing.

'Come on you maggots!' shouted Delaware into his mike just as the first stooped figures appeared through the smoke - apes from the first response team helping their wounded and limping comrades back to the airwagon, while others splashed through shallow ponds further behind them, firing back frantically. The nearest pair of manimals made it and hopped through the flatbed’s open gate, sticking their tongues out in the customary manner so that their ownership tattoos could be scanned and verified by the rig. Behind came more of their squad, reeking of smoke and musky sweat and burned fur, their tongues hanging out too as they jumped on board.

With the the smoke momentarily clearing, Bosy spotted the line of battle up ahead. A dozen Grunts huddled under a blossom tree firing lasers and flamers while Hazard Grass gathered around their position, and over their heads Choke Vines reared and snapped through the tree branches like living snakes, deadly plant and animal crossbreeds engineered for swift movements and even faster rates of growth.

But help was coming, supposedly. Deleware stood tall next to the flatbed’s open gate cradling a big multiflamer in his arm, cast into silhouette by a sudden eruption of fire. He lit his cigar with the small blue flame coming out the end of the weapon, then turned to his apes with a wicked grin and his eyes shining like he was made for this insane line of work - and maybe he was.

‘Weed Wackers,' the big man rumbled. 'Let’s roll!’

As battles go, this one seemed little different than the previous ones that Bosy had fumbled his way through as best he could. Really, it was less like armed combat and more like armed weed control, though with the added innovation that most of the modified weeds could move fast and were out to kill you.

Weed Wackers was the name of the poor Grunts forced to risk their lives in this typical Humani nonsense known locally on Spin City as The Weed Wars. Bosy had pieced the story together over the course of the previous week of his being with the squad, having never heard of such a thing before.

Even on Spin City, vice hub of the New Order, there were commercial laws of consequence which had to be followed by the owners of the Pleasure Palaces that were clustered around the heart of the city. They couldn’t just blow each up to get rid of the competition.

The closest they could come to an outright shooting war was the much more limited Weed War. For several years now, Weed Wars had become a favoured method of anonymous attack, where they would intentionally seed their rival’s pleasure gardens with deadly flora capable of flash-growing in a matter of hours. Bioweapons in the guise of weeds. Serious outbreaks like this one would cause countless deaths, stoppages and litigation against any Pleasure Palace hit by them, and with no way to prove who had launched the attack in the first place.

Around this strange phenomenon had arisen small mercenary companies hoping to profit from the hostilities. That was how Weed Wackers was also the company name of the outfit who had bought and now owned Bosy, being a hostile-weeds contractor run and staffed by ex-marines and tough orbital jocks like Deleware. Bosy knew all this because he paid attention to his surroundings and liked to ask questions and join the dots together. He watched and listened and he put things together until they made some sense to him, and then he would have knowledge, the only form of power available to him as a slave.

As far as Bosy could see, this particular outfit was presently in desperate financial straits, which was why they seemed to cut all the corners they could and were suffering inordinate casualties as a result. Certainly, most of the Humani staff appeared harried and stressed, and unlike his previous work on the farms, they relied constantly on base conditioning to control their manimal slaves.

Through the smoke screen, Deleware was shouting more coded commands to the squad. ‘Go ready! Go red, go ready!’ and so on, provoking the common conditioning of the manimal apes until they started whooping and charging into battle like Big Friday Shoppers seeking the best bargains of their lives, glowing in their high-viz stab-vests.

‘Come on,’ young Porto yelled back at him, laughing giddily. 'Come on!'

It was an ugly sight and Bosy hung back a little, not feeling it like the rest of the squad.

Bosy was old enough now that his own base conditioning - forced into him when only an infant - had somehow weakened over the years, loosening its grip over his body and mind. He wondered sometimes whether his incessant, life-long hunger for truth and meaning had somehow played a part in that, causing his soul to grow around all the trauma programming of his infant conditioning and then clear out of it, much like a living vine seeking and finding the light. Whatever the cause, Bosy was no longer enslaved by the conditioning but only aware of its fading remains within him; ruins of an internal control system so brutally created that he was often glad he could barely remember those earliest years of his life.

Still, the old ape remained as vulnerable as anyone to the waves of entrainment washing over him from the surrounding city - waves of radiation pulsing their synthetic emotions onto and over his natural emotions, so that as he followed after the others he couldn’t help but quicken his loping pace as a sense of compliance filled his aging muscles; tensions forming in his nerves that were only eased by doing what he was told to do.

Through the commotion of battle ahead, silhouettes struggled against a splash of rising flames from a hedgerow bursting into fire. Once more, the joint-pains of age were fading as the adrenaline in his system started to peak. How youthful and limber Bosy always felt when cast into a life or death situation and the fear was truly on him. Everything moved with a kind of trailing time-lag like when he was badly drunk. His big feet stumbled on a fallen weapon but he barely noticed, fixated on the sight before him of a manimal being lifted into the air by a rearing giant Choker Vine, screaming like the young ape that he was. It was the youth, Porto, of course. Bosy could tell by the red scarf tied around his neck. In his shock, Bosy forgot all about the laser rifle he carried, and squinted as Laloyd their sergeant swept a flamer around the base of the plant, but even burning, the Choker Vine tossed Porto into a mass of Hazard Grass, where the youth was shredded alive shriek by shriek until the flash of someone's laser ended his agony.

After that, Bosy wigged out a little from the action. Like a dream, the details came and went in fractured sequences which were hard to string together into any kind of meaning, and he waded through them as though submerged in something thicker than water, always responding in slow motion to events happening too fast to follow and seemingly all at the same time.

It was dark now, the sun having fallen after its thirty-two minute day cycle. Heat seared his fur as jets of fire raked along a writhing bank of Hazard Grass, lighting up his squadmates in the thick of the action in their high visibility armour. Lasers slashed across his vision while the comms yammered in his ear. An ape with a machete stopped hacking and fell back yelling about acid sap burning his arms. A manimal medic rushed to his aid. Another ape came right up to Bosy’s face screaming something wild and incoherent - asking where somebody was, maybe, but Bosy could only stare back at him dumbly, not having the will to engage with him, not even as a stand of Choke Vines reared up behind the shouting ape.

Even as the vine was about to strike, someone big yanked him out of the way and torched it.

‘Wake up, furback!’ Deleware yelled down at him, slapping the top of Bosy's helmet.

For an endless time Bosy fumbled with his laser rifle to prime it, and when it was finally ready he held it up looking for something to shoot at. But half the squad was retreating quickly, and Bosy had been stepping backwards too without realising it, while the remaining half were bent over retching from something in the air - toxic spores, the sergeant shouted, released from a burning Whistle Brush upwind. Now some were roaring in gales of laughter they could not contain within themselves, their whole bodies contorting like they were possessed. One of them started dancing spasmodically.

Suddenly Bosy found himself pressing against the parapet around the edge of the building, from where other apes in the squad leaned out for fresh air. Bosy spun around, barely avoiding the Stickler Vines that were already growing over the side, and looked out at the crowds of Capitol Square and the vast crystal ziggurat standing at its centre, lit now by interior spotlights as the night darkened quickly. Like the others he leaned out over the parapet for some fresh air, but that only exposed him to the sheer side of the Pleasure Palace dropping all the way to the distant Square below, and the ant-like crowds oblivious to the firefight raging over their heads. His head began to spin. Bosy was about to reel back when he finally noticed something remarkable not far below him - a naked Humani figure, clinging to one of the many statues adorning the building's concrete facade.

It was a sight so incongruous that Bosy knew right away it must be a pleasure slave trying to escape from the Palace itself.

Just then the slave looked up and spotted Bosy gaping down at her.

A woman, a girl really, trembling so hard he could see it from where he stood, her short hair as orange as carrots, her eyes slashed black with makeup so that they shone huge and brightly white in contrast.

‘Help me,’ she cried up to him, clinging to the statue for her life.

It really was a long way down from there. She must have climbed out from one of the balcony windows, thinking it would be easier to escape by the outside of the building than the inside. But the climbing was much harder than it had appeared, and now she seemed to be stuck.

‘Help me,’ she cried again, her eyes wide and tearful.

Shouts of alarm from behind him almost drew his attention away, but the old manimal stayed focused on her eyes. A wave of heat wafted across his back from a shooting flamethrower. If his squadmates spotted the girl they would likely report her right away, goofed up on their base conditioning as they were. It wasn’t worth risking their necks over an escaped Humani slave, after all. But Bosy hesitated, sobering from his daze and unsure of his next move. The only thing he was certain about was that he wasn’t climbing down there after her.

For a moment he stood paralysed to the spot.

HELP HER! flashed the words of a passing advertising blimp in big white lettering. As Bosy stared hard, the holographic words beamed into the sky were replaced by the normal images of an infocommercial - something about flu shots for cats and dogs.

Just when he thought he had imagined it, another sky commercial from a different blimp momentarily disappeared, only to be replaced by a different set of words seemingly spelled out just for him: DO YOU WISH TO BE FREE?

He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Who are you? Bosy wondered. Was it God? Was it one of his Blazes finally come to help him?

Again the words flashed in the darkened sky. DO YOU WISH TO BE SET FREE?

Free? As in freedom? It had been so long since Bosy had even considered the notion - too far removed from any possibility of it ever happening - that when he tried to consider the question now his mind reeled in a kind of internal vertigo. It took all his willpower to stare at the words and to answer them.

'Yes!' he blurted.

Of course he wanted to be free. For all these years more than life itself he wanted to be free.

THEN HELP HER! flashed the words again.

Behind Bosy the battle pressed closer with all its frantic action. Either he acted now or never - and never seemed like such an awfully final word right then, like a form of death.

There was only one way he could do this, though. Reaching into his combat webbing he took out a vial of Go! , and after a second of hesitation - he hated this stuff, and how it made him feel so artificial inside, and so sick afterwards - he inhaled it sharply. Instantly, his fears started fading away. With the simplest of grunts, Bosy climbed up and over the parapet before he even realised what he was doing.

All of a sudden he found himself hanging down next to the girl, who stared at him with her big wide eyes and her mouth hanging open. Bosy resolutely did not look down but instead fixed his gaze upon the girl, who wasn’t entirely naked after all, but wore the stringed pearls that passed for the clothing of a standard Pleasure Model inside the building. Bosy dangled so close he could see the goosebumps on her pale skin and how she flinched at an explosion that threw a plume of smoke over their heads.

What was he doing here? he wondered, and Bosy wondered if perhaps he had lost his mind, as some old manimals were prone to do if held too long a slave. Surely the circumstances of this week were exactly right for some kind of mental breakdown to have occurred?

Around his big hands the ferroconcrete was starting to shine with a golden light. Bosy realised the sun was rising already, and he craned his head around to look at its brilliance peaking up over the city skyline. Squinting, the old manimal sought out more words as a sign.

There - a more distant blimp than the others, its projected holographic advert replaced by a single word.

GOOD.

And over there, on a different blimp:

HELP HER.

And from another:

THEN HEAD FOR SPACEPORT!

He knew that signs in life didn't come any clearer than these ones. And whoever was behind them could hardly have any worse intentions for his future than his present owners. But he knew, too, that helping this girl could quite likely lead to his death by sacrifice if they were captured.

Trapped between a hard place and an even harder one, for a moment Bosy felt more ape than manimal.

‘Oook!’

Child of Jih
7

Almost two decades ago, before Child had even been called to become Child of Jih, a living Prophetship operating at the tail-end of the Neverwar, taking on this mammoth ship’s body as her own, she had lived as a Shal female called Jadeesha on her home moon of Gale; a young woman with passion in her eyes and a burning desire to be the next great composer of modern Space Opera, no matter the cost.

Nineteen years and several lifetimes ago, or so it now seemed after all this time of being embedded within this living vessel.

Back in that old life, Child - or rather Jadeesha - had been blessed with impossibly good fortune in several remarkable ways. One of these blessings was having been born on the moonlet of Gale, a small world famed for being the closest of all moons to the supermassive planet of Thrull - with Thrull itself even more famed for the mighty glowing golden belt called the Particle Falls that orbited its waist, raining a particle charge upon the supermassive planet and across her closest moon worlds. On Gale, where the winds never stopped blowing, this not only created some of the most astonishing electrical storms to be seen anywhere in the solar system, but just happened to also make it one of the greatest locations for the crafting of Space Opera, a musical form that relied upon planetary magnetic fields and global weather patterns for its very formation.

Yet how doubly blessed she had considered herself to be with the timing of her birth too. How incredible, to have been born during the lifetime of the second most famous Stratomaestro of modern times, Conrod Starshine, while he was making the very best of his music on Gale, where he had made his home. A maverick composer whom she knew would some day be ranked alongside the legendary Weatherwax himself.

But blessings were one thing - outright miracles another. It had felt like a miracle when the man had finally agreed to take her on as his only apprentice, after having vowed never to take on such a person ever again.

All she'd had to do was become his eager lover. Which really, when it came down to it, had been no difficult thing at all.

Those blessings did not come without an eventual cost, however. A cost she thought she had been more than willing to pay. Until, that was, she saw how much it amounted to.

'Keep climbing!' her maestro and lover had called back down to her from a higher rocky ledge, just as mega-lightening from the fifty-year superstorm flashed near the mountain peak behind him, casting his form into a striking silhouette of crazy dreads and flapping windcloak and his prized Stratocaster slung across his back. ‘We’re nearly there Jadeesha. Keep climbing!’

If Conrod Starshine still intended to climb to the very peak of the mountain in all this mega-lightning then he was even crazier than she had reckoned him to be – and she'd known him to be crazy for most of the three years she had been his lover. Right then in that moment - as the Stratomaestro yelled down at her through the gusts and held out a gloved hand to help her up, a lean middle-aged Shal with early grey at his temples yet grinning through his hood's visor with the vitality of an over-exited twelve-year-old - the raging superstorm resembled nothing less than a war-zone cast from the most dramatic of movies, with thunderous concussions sending pulses through the charged and crackling air, deafening as they shook her from the inside out, and fingers of mega-lightening slashing down in flashes that would have blinded her had it not been for her hood's visor, bolts striking so much quartz on the mountain flanks that sparks flew like the struck flints of giants.

Tourists came from all across the system to witness these unparalleled weather events. Though they watched the superstorms from shielded observation decks inside perches and skycraft, nicely snug and safe from the dangers of the elements. What they didn’t do was go climbing into the heart of them with only an insulated and grounded windcloak and hood to protect them from the mega-strikes. Yet by missing out on the raw terror of standing within such a raging atmospheric monster, they missed out too on the sheer Holy awe of these events, an awe that shone from their eyes whenever they were able to glance at each other, breathless and shaking, as they struggled upwards.

At some point, Starshine even tossed back his hood so he could experience it all the more clearly, relying on ear-plugs and a pair of simple beach shades to protect his senses. He truly was mad, she realised. Almost at the top, he sprung ahead in his excitement, forgetting to help her with the load that she carried on her back – the majority of their gear – until she called out to him, and he clambered back to help.

Finally reaching the summit in the midst of the storm’s unimaginable violence, they both found themselves standing on the lip of a vast caldera - since this mountain was actually an ancient and long-dormant volcano - and bracing each other against the winds as though they might be blown away. Leaning back to take in the troubled skies, they gasped at this spot of the cosmos that wrangled so fiercely with itself in the form of lightning spearing down from voluminous cloud banks, and mega-thunder rocking the world beneath their shielded feet so appallingly loud it was painful even to their protected ears .... Through rents in the clouds they gazed up at the golden aurora cascading down upon the moon world in curtains of light as dizzying as anything ever could be, like gazing up the flank of a cliff a million miles tall and millions more wide, and given scale by the cloudbanks and stars.

Together, the pair stood at the foot of the Particle Falls on the tallest mountain of their world, with mega-lightning bolting down on every side and the winds trying to lift them from their stances.

Starshine held her gloved hand in his own. He squeezed hard.

'My heart is yours, Jadeesha!' he shouted over his suit's comm. 'I love you like no other!'

She almost lost her balance in shock of his words. It was the first time he had ever declared such a thing to her.

Did he expect to die up here?'

Jadeesha blinked, squinting through the misty curve of her visor. Beyond the far side of the caldera, out there at a safe distance, a fleck of light moved against the darkest and clearest portion of sky - a hovering cruise ship with its decks brightly aglow, carrying thousands of tourists come all this way to watch this Storm of Storms, this King of Storms, this storm that only gathered itself every fifty or so years.

Strange how Child carried a sense of pride at this moon of Gale being her home world. An irrational sensation, surely, since she had nothing to do with where she had been born. But beside her, Starshine felt it too – she heard it in his voice over the comm as he spoke, his pride at this moon on which he had made his home. So maybe it wasn’t so strange after all. Maybe, like the old hill Shal used to say, we truly were part of where we were born and raised, even expressions of those places - a living offshoot whether we liked them or not.

‘This is it,’ the Stratomaestro hollered. ‘Our one chance in a lifetime. A storm to make even the Shadow Lords tremble.’

But Jadeesha was too preoccupied to answer. Too busy thinking of the affectionate words he had just said to her and whether he really meant them; and too busy driving in stakes from the tether gun to stop them from being blown away by the worst of the gusts, quickly anchoring their windcloaks to the rock.

Starshine didn’t declare that he was beginning. He didn’t do anything at all, except begin to play. His dreadlocks flying in the gale, he slung the Stratocaster from his neck and aimed it at the sky, ramping up the gain with a twist of his hand. Drawing its power from the storm itself, the beam that projected from the end of the instrument shot straight up through the partly cloudy night, almost invisible except for a faint ripple in the air like the effect of heat. It reached up through the atmosphere, and while at first there seemed to be no resistance to the beam, when Starshine pressed a few keys and engaged the first Grounding notes of the opera, suddenly Jadeesha could see some effort in his movements, as though the atmosphere up there had suddenly thickened enough to stir.

Even then, after three years of following him as his apprentice and watching him perform with his Stratocaster through the blowy nights, Child couldn’t get over the semblance of Starshine fishing in some weirdly inverted manner from out of the sky. The Stratomaestro leaned backwards like a fisherman with his rod, and lightning followed a curving line of golden plasma as he drew it downwards out of the heavens towards him.

The Grounding notes could barely be heard at first. She felt them in the depths of her being though, every cell thrumming, and as they increased in volume the plasma flowed down along the Stratocaster’s beam, its golden fierceness narrowing her eyes. As it fell lower it created a resonance with the surrounding atmosphere, which in turn created the first rumbling sounds of the opera and amplified them throughout a sky charged with flailing aurora.

Bolts lashed the mountain peak all around them while the plasma continued to run down the line, only stopping when it reached a brilliant halo of light not far above Starshine’s mass of wild dreads and the pointed end of his Stratocaster. Starshine grinned like a man with the answer to the universe.

Now the Stratomaestro really began to play.

Even to this day, with Space Opera largely outlawed across the system by the victorious New Order, historians of Shal culture quietly disputed whether it had even begun as a form of music, or as a type of weather warfare instead. With the opera’s chords and harmonies ringing out across the night sky, storm clouds began to circle the mountaintop caldera, bunching together until it was like standing in the eye of a tornado, which itself lead all the way up into the Particle Falls. Feeling a little sick from vertigo, Child had to look away, and made use of the opportunity to check that the sound equipment was successfully recording the performance.

Burning Mountain, the Stratomaestro had named this most ambitious of works, after the tallest mountain on Gale where he had always intended to perform it. Like all Space Opera, his composition relied on musical flair and dramatic themes rather than the singing of an outright personal story, and it was by far the most dangerous compositions of his life – for all that it was comprised of only three short Acts, since performing even a single full-length Act of this piece at the right time would likely be the end of him. Nothing less would do for an opera written for the Most High Himself, he claimed with barely a semblance of sincerity. It was heroics that he was after, and so life and death had to play a part in it, and indeed they were the very focus of the piece, being an attempt at expressing the glory of life and weight of death, following the drama of a single life from inception to its material end. Nothing less would do and only one place was suitable for its performance, one place where it might reach its fullest potential - the supercharged moonlet of Gale during a fifty-year megastorm.

Winds howled but the music howled louder, even using the gusts as layers of added percussion. With the caldera acting like a vast echo chamber, the opera crashed upon itself in wave after wave of deafening noise too loud to be truly appreciated, only endured. Starshine was wildly into his performance by the time Jadeesha came to her wits within the howling plasma storm, having somewhat lost her senses during the latest rising crescendo of music and thunder. Inside the sweaty humidity of her cloak's windhood she shook her head to clear it, and realised it was almost time to join him in the performance. Starshine had come up with the idea as a way of mitigating their risks up here - splitting some of the beam loads by adding a second lesser Stratocaster to the performance. With aching muscles, she lashed her own instrument to her body and pointed it to the sky.

It was tricky, playing in the thickened windcloak with its hood and insulated gloves and the raging war of the elements bashing her brains around. Her creamy soapwood Stratocaster – a gift from her maestro - was newly grown and had control pads a little stiff where they needed to be more yielding, yet it was still something special to play. Nearby, Starshine had cast off his thick insulated gloves so he could play better. There was no way Jadeesha was doing the same, not with the strikes of mega-lightning growing ever worse the deeper into the opera they went, and the sparks flying from the mountain flanks like something out of an autofactory, her body hairs rising and fluttering even within the insulated clothing. Caressing a fleshy stud and then a bony key on the living instrument of her Stratocaster, she joined him with her own Grounding notes, feeling the sudden resistance of the atmosphere against the beam she cast up through the circle of clouds.

With a tug, Child drew down a line of plasma and stirred the electro-magnetic fields of the moon world, seeking the right pitch of frequency for her opening chords by listening to the Stratocaster’s feedback through amplifying pips in her ears. Once located, she increased the power to maximum and hooked the beam in position by plucking at a fleshy set of strings, and then she opened a second beam to the skies which struck out at a slightly different angle, and she stirred it through the atmosphere until it poked clear out into the High Wild of space itself, where she picked through the cosmic radiation for some suitable beats.

‘This is it!’ Starshine was laughing. ‘How else could it be but this?’

Whether he meant life or opera, she didn’t know. Maybe he meant both. Starshine had waited his entire adult life for this superstorm to come around, following a youthful dream that would not leave him and which had given birth to this very composition. Somehow he hadn’t been killed during the long and lonely years of building himself up to become the Stratomaestro he needed to be to successfully perform it, and live.

It was his destiny, and he knew it.

Now Jadeesha's beats were joining with his beats and creating a rhythm entirely distinctive from traditional Space Opera, like hand claps within hand claps within hand claps of thunder. Leaning far back with her Stratocaster, Child gathered together strands of chorals from the lower ionosphere, adding what sounded like winged Lights singing the sweetest of arias and then warriors shouting before battle.

Starshine’s dreadlocks whipped and lashed through the wind. His teeth were bared and Child couldn't help but grin too. She could feel it at last, reaching a place in the music beyond the immediate fears for their lives or the immensity of its sound, reaching through to the soul and the meaning of it all, to the glory of this music supposedly composed for the Most High. Her body jived to the music just like his own, and together they danced and played through the racing opera, silhouetted against the formation of storms.

Other moons could be glimpsed out there where the skies stretched clear of clouds and aurora; a string of creamy pearls hanging across the throat of the night. Slightly below them shone the world of Edos, the lights of its cities visible to the naked eye even from here, including the central massif that was the modern capital of Gozom City, from where the Red Shal God-Queen known only as She ruled the Shal home of one of the original Seven Tribes.

Gale orbited Edos, just as Edos orbited the massive giant of Thrull. And while Edos had fallen more than thirty years earlier to a revolution fomented by the New Order, Gale remained a windswept backwater still very much loyal to the Star King's reign. Pressures had mounted from the now-hostile world of Edos, of course. Through info-leaks, it became known how the Imperium had targeted the population of Edos with a powerful mindgrafting field prior to the staged revolution there, projected from another world already under their control. After that, a further mindgrafting beam had been loosed against Gale itself from a massive spire that had been built at the very centre of Gozom City, casting a subtle spell upon Gale's unknowing inhabitants - an entrainment field which coerced every thought and emotion with its own.

For more than twenty years, the mind-control beam had sapped the will of the native population to resist and stand firm against the New Order. And for all of those years, Conrod Starshine had been trying to perfect a way of destroying the field using the only thing a young Stratomaestro desperate to be a hero to his people understood - the field harmonics of the most epic form of music ever created, Space Opera. Because Space Opera, at the heart of the matter, could also be employed as a Space Weapon. With the correct modifications, the greatest of opera could bring down the mightiest of global control fields.

Starshine was certain his plan would work, if only they could reach the final crescendo with enough pitch and vibration and power. He had spent years optimising the harmonics of Burning Mountain, simming them thoroughly in a Cube to project the results. The sims all showed the music reaching a critical resonance with the field until it shattered, and a backwash of energy surging all the way across Space and down into the broadcasting tower in the Edos capital, burning out all electrics there.

Though if the opera’s harmonics really were working against the mind control field, there was still no sign of it, not even with the final cycle of rising crescendos they had just entered into. Upwards soared the music while the storm fronts gathered closer, threatening to blow them from their feet despite being anchored to the rock. Yet they were still alive, and they had made it this far. At last Starshine motioned that it was time for the finale. The drawing together of the beams.

Never cross beams, every starting Space Opera apprentice was taught over and over until they mumbled it in their sleep. It was why Stratocasting was usually a solo affair, being far too too dangerous to attempt with others when crossing their beams could mean sudden uncontrollable explosions in the atmosphere. And yet the Burning Mountain’s grand finale relied entirely upon doing exactly that, while drawing together two opposing storms of music.

Child heaved at her Stratocaster, drawing her beams and her storms across the night sky while Starshine did the same. As they grew closer, fresh mega-lightning erupted in fury over the caldera, and thunder crashed so loudly it caused the mountain to tremble. Her heart galloping, Jadeesha watched their opposing beams slowly collide so that they glowed like never before, flaring so brightly that her visor darkened to protect against the sudden brilliance. In her hands the instrument shook like a living creature seeking to be free, and she hung on with her teeth gritted, expected the skies to explode at any moment. But instead, the plasma lines of their Stratocasters began to slowly coil around each other like lengths of living twine.

At last the atmosphere was starting to glimmer energetically. Starshine shouted across to her through his comm. It’s the control field, he was saying. It’s working!

But forked lightning struck so close just then it almost threw her to the ground. Child ducked behind a cascade of flying sparks, yelling, not sure she could hold on for much longer. More bolts struck from further along the mountain ridge, and in horror she watched them stamp towards their position gathering in strength as they came. But Starshine wouldn’t listen to her warnings, too focused on their soaring crescendo and the effect they were finally having on the field.

For an instant, Child had the choice clear in her mind, and time enough to make it – fling clear her Stratocaster and leap free of the approaching mega-strikes, or stand there with her maestro and her homeworld through whatever may come.

When the loudest thunders of the night came together in a terrifying clash of storm fronts that stood all of her hair on end and played out the final beats of the opera reverberating across the sky, all she could think of was how inadequate their shielded windcloaks really were in these conditions, and then the mega-bolts struck their position and everything blew up around her.

Pained confusion, not sure what was happening even with his voice yelling in her ears. A state of dreamy semi-consciousness like lying afloat in lapping waters, in which she was meeting Starshine for the first time again in the old bazaar of Shepherd's Lee, and he wanted her, quite obviously, while Jadeesha wanted … everything.

When her eyes at last snapped open again, the final notes of the opera were still winding down across a warring sky that no longer glimmered energetically. It had worked! She sensed the lack of the entrainment against her mind.

Lying there on her side, she saw Starshine sprawled not far away on a shelf just below the smoking ridge-line. Her lover didn’t move when she called out to him. But then she didn’t move either, when she tried to. Not a muscle.

I’m paralysed, Child who was still known as Jadeesha thought somewhat coolly in her mind. Though if she had known how she would be paralysed for the rest of her life, she might have screamed instead.

In her memory, those days immediately after she and Starshine had just performed the most difficult, and deadly, Space Opera ever written were the worst she had ever known or hoped to know.

Every morning she would awaken with a start, instantly aware of the living nightmare that her life had become. She would find herself lying paralysed from the neck down on a bed that made no impression against her body, so that it was as though she existed as nothing more than a dismembered head lying there on a pillow. In vivid flashes she recalled the strikes of mega-lightning on the mountaintop that had blasted them both from their feet, she and Starshine, at the climax of the opera, inflicting her with a paralysis she had thought to be only a temporary thing.

Weeks had passed since they'd been found up on the rim of the caldera after the fifty-year superstorm had finally subsided, barely alive inside their burned and shredded windsuits. They had been discovered by some Sky Prophets out on a morning prayer hike, blue-robed mystics with bells in their dreads who carried them back to their secret Hermitage hidden within the cliff-like wall of the caldera. It was there, in the cool rarefied mountain air, where they lived lives dedicated to the Most High, as part of the System-wide order known as the Sanshee Sky Prophets.

The Sky Prophets gave her a room with a bed facing an airy window cut from the rock, covered by gauzy white curtains so thin they wafted in the slightest breeze, which on blowy Gale meant all the time. The view outside was that of the massive caldera, big enough to fit a city inside, with its raised dimple in the middle and the dust-coloured walls rising on the far opposite side, topped by a thin slice of azure sky stained with dust borne on the high-altitude winds. It was a remarkable sight in the daytime, though Child seldom looked at the view whenever they propped her up on the bed. What was the outside world to her now that she could no longer move around in it, trapped in a motionless body going nowhere? In those bad early days, the ceiling held more interest to her dazed and struggling mind; a polished expanse of blankness where nothing existed but the occasional crack darkened by its own depth.

She was never going to walk again, their Master Healers had told her in hushed, regretful voices. Her spine was fused together and her nervous system irrevocably fried from the strikes of mega-lightning she had sustained up on the rim. With no known way of repairing such extensive injuries, this was the most she would be able to expect now, unable to move for the rest of her probably short life to come.

At the beginning, Starshine would come often to see her in the spacious, empty room with the eternally flowing curtains. Somehow the Stratomaestro had recovered quickly from his own injuries – he had avoided a direct lightning strike, it seemed - and was up and limping about the place, making a nuisance of himself by most accounts. Always he sat on the edge of her bed trembling and holding her numb hand like a dead thing, openly weeping at the sight of her; though she could see, too, in the animated way he would otherwise move around, that his spirits were high from the success of their Space Opera and mission, since it had worked, miraculously, and the New Order control shield had been brought down by it.

Even better, as predicted in his sims the backwash of energies had made their way across Space to Edos and its capital city, destroying the Spire that had generated the beam along with all the electrics of the city. By all reports they had no clue as to how it had happened. It was a major blow against the New Order, and he and Jadeesha were heroes. Yet they had paid a price for their success, and that price seemed too much for him to look at whenever he came to visit her, too much a dampener on the highs of their success.

What a waste, his every word and action said without ever actually saying as much, glancing at her lying immobile on the bed, drooling, crying her heart out.

Soon he would leave the Hermitage and Gale itself to share his Burning Mountain performance with the rest of the free worlds, becoming known across the System as the most famous Stratomaestro in the process - not that he could admit publicly to the destruction it had caused to their enemies. Only the highest echelons of the Star Crown were to know of this new weapon in their hands, a weapon severely limited by the need for a fifty-year superstorm to succeed.

Saying goodbye to her for the last time with a cool kiss to her cheek, Jadeesha noticed how Starshine did not look back.

It was the last time she ever saw him.

Deserted by her lover and with no future to look forward to, she wanted only to die. A single sensible course of action remained open to her, and so she stopped eating, and barely drank any water either, and cursed at the Sky Prophets as they fussed and tried to save her.

Wasting away, she demanded of God over and over why this nightmare had befallen her. Unable to move and refusing all food and all views of the caldera outside, Child came pretty close to dying – close enough that her heart began to skip irregularly and her breathing fell into shallow panting, her vision dimming for hours at a time. Occasionally, Jadeesha tried to revive her spirits by remembering how her sacrifice had worked, and how the Space Opera had been successful. Yet even that momentary victory was tainted, for she had been abandoned there in the Hermitage by Starshine, with not even a call or a message from the maestro checking on how she was coping. Too busy enjoying his new-found celebrity, and no doubt every young fancy who caught his eye.

At least the Sky Prophets didn’t leave her alone, for all that she wanted them to leave her be. Even when they weren't nursing her, they would come and visit as individuals or in pairs, men and women alike with shaven heads and robes that were the colours of the blue sky, most of them Shal but even a few Humani or mixed race, people who showed her lovingkindness with their quiet talk and compassionate eyes.

Many simply chatted to pass the time with her, depicting daily lives spent on prayer walks under the heavens or at work in the Hermitage and gardens, or simply worshipping alone in their individual, isolated caves dotted around the steep walls of the caldera. Some would hold her hand while praying powerfully for blessings of wellbeing. Others would push her harder, testifying to how they had found Jih amidst the wreckage of their old lives down in the world below, and that she should never give up hope, especially hope of salvation. Always they would touch her with the gentle peace of the Living Spirit; but even after those visits, she would resist, continuing to refuse any sustenance.

On one particularly hot night, with the air wafting in from the window as warm and tacky as blood, she dreamed that her prone body rose from the bed as it transformed itself into a bird flapping a great pair of growing wings so strongly and so certainly that she took off from the bed and rose clear into the air. With a surge of wings she swept through the lacy curtains of the window and up, up into the startling starry sky above the caldera, crying with the joy of being a woman on the wing.

And then she was awakened by a gentle whisper of her name, and Jadeesha woke paralysed in her bed chamber again, with the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Standing above her were her two favourite Sky Prophets, the identical twins Moonfall and Sunrise. Behind them the room was not quite dark, lit by some full moons still rising in the sky.

‘Come,’ said Sunrise with a smile, though his eyes were serious enough. ‘We have something to show you, girl.’

When he looked to Moonfall, the woman nodded. ‘The Spirit has touched us both on this. It’s time. Come.’

She would have nodded timidly, if she could.

‘Okay.’

Jadeesha really had wasted away, because the two Shal lifted her out of the bed like she weighed nothing, then wrapped her tightly in a thin blanket. Together, in silence save for the tiny bells tinkling softly in their dreads, they carried her out of the room and down a series of passages and rampways, passing chambers and vaults dimly lit by the wane creamy glow of glowlights - ceiling algae shining within transparent coverings – with everything silent save for the occasional fitful snoring, until they emerged outside onto the floor of the caldera in the warm stillness of a summer night. She smelled the fragrant scents of a garden before she discerned it in the moonlight; blinked in surprise at orchards and edible shrubs and even ponds of silvery water surrounded by wildflowers. High overhead, some kind of stealth netting disguised it all from the sky.

The two Sky Prophets settled her down on a smooth wooden bench and then sat down on either side of her, lightly supporting her numb body with their own.

It was beautiful in the midnight garden. Even in her broken spirits she could see that much. Through the stealth netting overhead, stars glimmered and reflected upon the pools of water, where the occasional fish leaped at the moonflies wafting above their surfaces. Frogs croaked somewhere close by and an owl hooted, hoping to scare out some rodents.

Off to the east of the gardens, something dark and massive obscured everything that lay beyond it.

Jadeesha asked what it was.

‘That’s what we brought you here to see, Jadeesha,' said Moonfall.

'Up here in these cloud gardens, under all that netting, we grow some things we do not wish our enemies to know about,’ explained her twin brother.

‘Oh? You’re hoping to turn the Neverwar with some prize-winning Cinnabar?’ Sky Prophets were renowned for growing some of the finest medicinal herbs anywhere.

The two Sky Prophets smiled.

‘Almost. But not quite.’

As the moons rose higher, more and more light spilled into the floor of the caldera. From amongst a stand of billow trees the owl hooted again, still seeking prey. The sounds and sights reminded her of the family ranch way down in the southern lowlands of the Florid Flats, where Jadeesha had been raised by her lone rancher of a father.

‘It looks like a hill with wings,’ she observed in the gathering moonlight.

‘Close.’

‘But this hill flies.’

That’s when it struck her, like a jolt of electricity in her mind – the sudden awe-inspiring awareness of what she was looking at.

‘It’s a Prophetship,’ Child breathed. ‘You’re growing a living Prophetship right here in your cloud gardens!’

She knew that Prophetships were grown right out of the ground like other Star Crown spacecraft, but she had never seen it before now. Indeed, Jadeesha could make out the long body and the upper sloping hull that extended out into a pair of vast wings, with the whole thing, hundreds of yards long, resting on its belly in the dirt. Its form rose so tall that the very top pressed up against the stealth netting.

‘We grow one at a time here. Just as our Order is doing at other hidden Sky Hermitages across the System. It takes fifty-five years for a full-sized Prophetship to mature, under optimum growing conditions. Another few years to get her gardens going, and full fittings installed.'

As Moonfall spoke, Child could see the Umbilical Root connecting the very tip of the living ship’s nose to the ground. The effect was to make it look like one super-massive marrow growing there on the soil.

‘This one doesn’t have a name yet.’

‘Nor a mind.’

Jadeesha blinked. ‘A mind?’

‘It's nearing maturity. In seven or so years she’ll be fully ready for flight. Which is how long it takes to train a candidate to join with her.’

In her weakness, Jadeesha's head was starting to swim.

‘Where are you going with this?’ she wanted to know, suddenly feeling uneasy.

‘We both believe you would make the perfect candidate for our Prophetship.’

‘You could say we’ve even had signs.’

‘Oh?’

‘Visions about you both belonging together.’

‘You have visions too, Jadeesha, do you not?’

‘Visions?’

‘Dreams, rather. Where things are communicated to you from Jih Himself. Pieces of the future still to come according to His Plan.’

‘I suppose. I always have done, from an early age.’

‘We believe that makes another sound reason for recruiting you. You are sensitive to the Living Spirit.’

‘I’m still not sure what you’re proposing here.’

‘Simply that you … join the Prophetship. You allow the ship to become your body, while you become its mind and soul. So that you and the ship become one.’

Jadeesha knew, of course, about the legendary Prophetships and their exploits during the Neverwar. Over the last millennia they had proven themselves an inspiration for Loyalist Shal forces and the Humani resistance alike. They had set such legendary examples with their actions - made famous through stories ringing down through the centuries - that few could doubt their anointing from Jih, or that being on the same side as the living Prophetships meant being on the side of the righteous.

Prophetships rarely fought except in a defensive manner, and in the typical fashion of all Star Crown forces they did so not to kill but to debilitate, if possible. Mostly, they focused on healing the sick and feeding the hungry, and spreading vital truths to those buried under years of lies and mindwashing, and proclaiming visions of hope despite the present fall of darkness. They brought homegrown medicines and supplies to those most in need of them, carrying refugees out of harm’s way and into safety. Helping out wherever they could.

But Child, or Jadeesha, had never considered serving on one of them, or on anything else way out there in the dangerous High Wild of Space, never mind becoming one.

The idea was almost unthinkable.

‘Just consider it,’ said Sunrise in his quiet, gentle tone. ‘We lay you in a cocoon inside the ship’s Core, and slowly you become one with the Prophetship. The entire ship becomes your new body.’

At this, Child recalled her dream of flying from her bed free as a bird.

‘My own body?’

Usually we only consider elderly people, or those suffering from a debilitating disease. But you, Jadeesha, your condition is perfect for this. You won’t be giving up anything at all. But you would gain so much!’

It was so much, so quickly. Only hours ago she was contemplating how many days she might continue to live ... And now a different door had suddenly opened before her. A door leading to life.

‘Yes. I see what you’re saying now.’

But no sooner had the first faintest rumour of hope begun to stir deep inside of her, than it was dashed.

‘There’s one vital condition, however,’ admitted Sunrise. ‘You would first have to make it through seven years of intensive training just to qualify for the role. And the Selectors … they’re a little uneasy at even giving you that much of a chance - they’re worried about your state of mind.’

Jadeesha squinted, not liking what he had said. Let them go through what she was going through before anyone judged her on her state of mind.

‘If you could pull it together, Jadeesha. Show them you’re not just a candidate worth considering, but the candidate for this ship right here … by Jih’s providence … as we believe it to be ...’

Her heart was pounding ridiculously fast within the constrictions of her chest. A lump hardened in her throat. This was more real than any dream. This could really happen for her.

‘What do I need to do?’ Jadeesha asked in barely a whisper, afraid all of a sudden of bursting this moonlit miracle.

‘You wish to go for it?’

‘Of course I wish to go for it.’

Sister and brother stirred happily on either side.

‘Then you need to start eating again,’ quipped Moonfall.

‘Yes,’ added Sunrise. ‘Not dying of starvation would make for a promising beginning.’

For the first time in what seemed like months, a real smile creased Jadeesha's features.

‘Then lets go get something to eat,’ she declared, inhaling all the good scents of the midnight cloud gardens around her, before looking again towards the mighty form of the living Prophetship, large as a hill though one with wings, sitting there waiting to become a part of her.

This is a BUY-AFTER-READING Edition ...

If you would like to see further episodes of this series, and think the creator should be compensated for his work, you can do any of the following:

SHARE!

Sharing copies of this book will help get it out there into the wild.

DONATE

Your donations might keep this series going against the odds:

Bitcoin Address: bc1q 6s2k 84xk u9g5 0zdx czva lhqp l0v7 dvhs z389 7x

Paypal: paypal.me/thiswisefoolery

SUBSCRIBE FOR NEWS OF FURTHER RELEASES

Send a blank email to: author-feed@thiswisefool.com

REVIEW

Leave a review wherever the book is found.

SEND FEEDBACK TO THE AUTHOR
email: wisefool@thiswisefool.com

VISIT BASECAMP:

@ www.thiswisefool.com

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.

You are free to share, copy and distribute this ebook for noncommercial purposes.

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

-end-