Welcome to the Neverwar

or what's left of it...

A bitter conflict that lasted for 3000 years, and ended in a single day.

The good guys lost.

Now the Halos 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 homeworlds. On distant asteroids and backwater moons, Shal and Humani live as they were created to live instead of like machines.

Even on the worlds fallen to the New Order, 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 3 (v1)

by

WISEFOOL

A Buy-After-Reading SERIALISED GRAPHICAL NOVEL

Wild Cosmos Edition

Also By the Author

Farlander

Stands A Shadow

The Black Dream

Fierce Gods

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>> CHAPTER SIX

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Dedication

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The Story So Far ...

Following a space battle with a Great Solar Dragon, our protagonist, the living Prophetship Child of Jih, almost crash landed on the asteroid world of Spin City, pleasure capital of the New Order. Fortunately, instead of crashing, she finds herself hunkering down in a sleepy repair yard disguised as an Humani freighter, while she undergoes repairs and seeks to recruit a new crew to replace all those she has lost.

Overhead, the Great Solar Dragon searches for her while the clock on her vital mission continues to count down ...

"The skies declare the glory of Jih;

the stars the sweep of His Creation."

- Shal Song of Wisdom

The Child of Jih

SHE DREAMED SHE was an impressionable young woman again, Jadeesh of the famed moonworld of Eos; back when she'd been apprenticed to a man soon be known as one of the greatest Stratomaestros of all time, Fiercesome Starshine, having just performed the most difficult, and deadly, Sky Opera ever written.

Except in her dream, which was actually a memory, Jadeesh couldn’t rise from where she lay, as much as she tried to. With a bolt of horror she realised she was 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, unable to move itself. Blinking, 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 had been found up on the rim of the caldera after the fifty-year superstorm had finally faded away, barely alive inside their burned and tattered enviro suits. With more good fortune than anyone had any right to deserve, they had been discovered by some Sky Prophets out on a morning prayer hike, robed mystics who carried them back to their secret Hermitage hidden in 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 Sunshee Sky Prophets.

The Sky Prophets gave her a room with a bed facing an airy window cut from the plastered rock, covered by gauzy white curtains so thin they wafted in the slightest stirrings of air. The view outside was that of the massive caldera, big enough to fit a city, with its raised dimple in the middle and the dust-coloured walls rising on the opposite side, topped by a thin slice of azure sky. It was a remarkable sight in the daytime, though Child seldom looked at the view whenever they raised her up on the bed. What was the outside world to her now that she could not 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 plaster-white expanse of blankness where nothing existed but the occasional crack darkened by its own depth.

She was never going to walk again, their specialist Healers had told her in hushed, concerned voices. Her nervous system had been irrevocably damaged by the strikes of mega-lightning she had sustained, and with no known way of repairing it, so this was it, unable to move for the rest of her probably short life to come.

At the beginning, Starshine would come to see her in the spacious, empty room. 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 would stand at her bed trembling and holding her numb hand, openly weeping at the sight of her; though she knew that elsewhere he was in fine spirits from the success of their Sky Opera and their mission, since it had worked, miraculously, and the New Order control shield had been brought down by it. But they had paid a price for their success, and that price seemed too much for him to look at whenever he came to her room.

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 to join a budding global rebellion largely ignited by the downing of the mind control field.

Saying goodbye to her for the last time, she noticed how Starshine did not look back.

In her dream she wanted to die, just like she’d wanted to die in the waking world. She stopped eating. Barely drank water either. 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.

Her dream diverged from memory in one respect; in her dream, Starshine came back to visit with flowers in his hand. Which was pretty much opposite to reality, since she never saw him again. Yet now here he was stepping through the gauzy white curtains of the window with that stupid big grin on his face, and even in her dream she could feel her real heart surging fast.

If only it had been that way for real.

We’re going to meet again soon, Jadeesh, he was telling her. On Stretch. On the prison moon. Just keep coming!

‘I know we are,’ she told him back. ‘It’s in my mission brief, you fool. And the name is Child now, not Jedeesh.’

When he strode from the room in a hurry she called after him, but another visitor stood waiting there and she shut up, faintly embarrassed at her behaviour.

It was Crazycloud, the ship’s lost holocaptain. Frowning down at the state of her just like her father had always done in her visits home, after she fell into the habit of rising late every morning.

Wake up, Chile. The dragon stirs. Its sight is returning. Soon it will be looking for you again.

He leaned down so that his mouth was next to her ear. When the dragon comes, he whispered fiercely, trust in the blade!

She woke with a start, Crazycloud’s words echoing in her mind.

When the dragon comes, trust in the blade!

Once again, Child of Jih found herself embedded in the vast body of the living Prophetship, which itself was laid up in the repair yard of a spaceport beneath a sun wheeling fast overhead. Spin City, Rock of Dreams.

She had nodded off to sleep despite her best intentions of staying alert.

Quickly, Child of Jih rekindled her newly restored Farsight sensor fields, then flexed them all the way into high orbit, scanning for a sign of the Great Solar Dragon. But if the beast was still really out there, she could see no sign of it.

It felt good to have some extended sensors back, like regaining your long-range vision. She left them extended like that so they would provide her with some early warnings of the dragon’s approach, though without a crew Specialist to man them, the Farsight sensors would only be useful as long as she remained awake.

If only she could fly again, and shift herself of this lingering sense of paralysis. But she still remained too underpowered for flight; a bird with clipped wings.

For a moment, she scanned throughout her passages and rooms for Babbatunde, growing concerned when she couldn’t find him. But then she recalled that he was outside working on the upper hull.

‘Babbatunde,’ she said though his suit mike. ‘How’s it going out there?’ And her voice was the same as in her dream, since the ship’s audio modulators were able to replicate what she had once sounded like as a young woman.

There he was – standing on her upper Flexor Array, a circular depression of hair-like antenna that rose or fell back against her body depending on whether they were in use. The Chief Granger was stripping each individual hair-like antenna of its burned and blackened exterior, and then washing the fresh growth underneath with another one of his gooey concoctions that would protect her from infection and speed up the healing process.

‘Babbatunde?’

‘Yeah,’ he answered at last in a croak. He had been working for twelve hours now without a proper break, helped only by the few dumb autocrew they could manage to sustain on emergency power; dim phantoms of hardlight that could lift and carry and not much else. When Babbatunde spoke, his voice cracked like old leather boots walking around the words he tried to say. ‘I’m almost done here. By the looks of the antenna, they’re all still alive, thank Jih. Should be able to make a cross-space connection soon as we have the power.’

A cross-space connection. She would be able to call home.

‘I’ll check now,’ she said excitedly.

Never mind Farsight – it was revitalising just to have some real power flowing through her again. In the damaged Charge Coil around her Spine, the newly spliced nerve bundles were growing into the old, allowing the Charge Coil to start recharging again from the electro-magnetic energy of the Flow. Now, when Child dipped into her Spine’s sensors for a reading of her present energy rate, she saw that it was indeed climbing, though slowly, as was expected on any planetary body shielded by its own localised fields, especially a tiny one like this.

‘Yeah, I’m still drawing steady power here. I think we should have enough. I’m making the call.’

‘Whoah there,’ he complained as the antenna-hairs of the array all rose as one. ‘Maybe wait until I’m finished up here, yeah?’

Child had learned patience in those long years of her paralysis. But now, at the prospect of calling home, she seemed entirely unable to wait with any peace of mind. She exhaled, trying to expel the frustrations from her body, and turned her mind to other things more urgent than this one - like getting back to the vital task of finding them a new crew.

At least she’d had some good news on that front. Earlier, checking for deeper life signs from the captain, they had discovered that Crazycloud was still alive within his embedded cocoon inside the Core, though he appeared to be in a semi-coma, presumably from a backsurge of energy when the bridge had been hit, and his holorig blown out into Space.

‘Maybe we can boost the cocoons a little too,’ she remarked, hopefully.

She meant the cocoons that both she and Crazycloud occupied in the Core.

There was no telling when he would wake up, but she felt certain he would, and then through the use of a holorig he could rejoin them as ship’s captain. Which was beyond good news for Child. Not least of all because the captain’s rock-like intensity of presence was something they could do with leaning upon right then.

‘Nnh,’ drawled Babbatunde. ‘I’d be careful draining too much power right now. Might damage those new nerve bundles I just finished splicing in, since they’re still knitting together.’

He didn’t sound too impressed at the thought of Child blowing out her Charge Coil again after all the work he just went through repairing it ...

‘Just let me know when.’

Once more she struggled to turn herself back to the task at hand - searching for new crew.

Covered in a gloss of perfect toothy smiles and fairground distractions, it really was a gut-wrenching nightmare out there on this Rock of Dreams, this Candyland of Pleasures. As the Vice Capital of the New Order, Spin City was a particularly dark place, and Child was glad to be somewhat removed from the beating heart of it, hidden as she was in the corner of a repair yard beneath a holographic disguise, with the Father’s love watching over her.

Looking randomly through the city’s cameras and holographic eyes meant witnessing things beyond ever repeating; acts so heinous they were past anyone’s understanding, sheer madness without meaning or purpose - unless you perceived the very real spiritual dynamics involved. For many people, they were locked into diabolical patterns of behaviour because they were themselves victims of the diabolical, and had been corrupted by that corruption; enslaved by it. For others, it was different. They knew what they played with; they knew that evil was a force that could be ignited through certain acts of violence, most of all the shattering of taboos and perversion of all that is right and decent about Creation, which when wilfully committed creates a kind of anti-Life anti-space, or living death; and through sheer selfishness, which was the opposite of selflessness and therefore the opposite of love, or anti-love; and through delighting in lies, and the late-night secrecy that accompanies so many lies, and the delusions of bending reality so that truth is whatever you want it to be, and force it to be, making you anti-truth. All of these things combined created a spiritual Nothingness, an infinity hole, a snake eating its own tale forever, which the practitioner of evil stepped into at the cost of their soul, and which gave out nothing but a false light that was also a false power; a force that in the end takes more than it gives, consuming and consuming without ever being quenched.

The Negative Space. The Koronis Rift. Where all the truly unrepentant ones would be cast come the Judgement.

But for now, the Negative Space was also here in Spin City, and anywhere else where such atrocities were commonly committed, just as the Kindom existed wherever there were children of Jih gathered together in peace.

It was no wonder Child kept turning inwards to be clear of it all for a while. Though even inside of herself, she wasn’t entirely clear. As her power levels slowly rose, Child was able to block out most of the shifting waves of entrainment with her own field resonances, but as she did so, she could increasingly hear the whispers of the Ruling Shadows of this tiny world - those corrupt cosmic intelligences drawn from the Koronis Rift by all the bloodshed and trauma and worship of their names here at the Crystal Pyramid; now gorging on the energies released from this first week of Bloody Season sacrifices. And beneath the presence of the Shadows, the feverish scratchings of their Soul Hunters working through the local population like harvesters, leeching from people’s souls by first corrupting them.

The presence of the Eaters of the Light was remarkably strong here, and focused on the Crystal Pyramid at the centre of the city, where many of the living sacrifices took place in public during the Bloody Season. For now, the Pyramid remained the only site across the Spectrum of the New Order where such atrocities were committed so openly. But that would change eventually, the closer they came to the prophesied rise of the Anti-God, a point seemingly not too far in the future now.

There was nothing she could do about the Rulers and their Soul Hunters except pray for protection and hiding from their ethereal stares. To go on the offensive against them would only betray her presence here, and the very last thing she needed were the local Cultists in control of this world – the mortal followers of the Eaters of the Light - finding out about her.

Child of Jih shuddered. If she thought this little rock of iniquity was bad, wait until the Eaters of the Light succeeded in their millennia-long mission of summoning the Adversary itself, Charos the Beast, from the deepest portion of the Rift, in that coming time they called the Great Wokening; that time when all the peoples’ would be of one mind and worshipping the Beast, the anti-God, as God Himself. When the Beast ruled the New Order openly as the ultimate life-hating, love-hating, truth-hating tyrant, every world across the Spectrum of worlds would become like this one, with living sacrifices held in public for all to see.

There was no stopping it now. The Lawless Time was fated to happen; Jih Himself had forewarned his children that it was so, and not to be disheartened. Before the Judgement and the Kindom Come, this present existence must reach the lowest, most fallen point of all, its nadir, and darkness must sweep across all the nations. As a Prophetship, Child had closely studied and memorised the prophecies foretelling these times now, these times nearing the end of the Final Age of which she still marvelled at having been born into.

Even when struggling through the last few years of the Neverwar, aiding the beleaguered Loyalist forces still true to their Star King, last free king of the Free Shal Nations, Child had known the war would be lost to the rising New Order and its Red Shal collaborators of the Dragon States. But that hadn’t changed her commitment to the cause. Doing nothing had never been an option. For three thousand years, the only way to preserve the light of life against all the agencies of death arrayed against it was to make a stand. To draw a line in the sand and hold it.

And for three thousand years they had fought to hold that line, free Shal and Humani. Some were still holding it now, because the war was only over when you stopped fighting – when you stopped resisting the evil.

Even following the destruction of the Shal homeworld and subsequent surrender of Loyalist forces, with the New Order celebrating its rise by viciously culling its own populations and those recently conquered in a colossal sacrifice to their masters, there were those who carried on the resistance. Prophetships like Child of Jih, who instead of surrendering at the official close of the Neverwar had gone rogue instead, joining a handful of other Prophetships still out there and allying with the remaining hold-outs of The Mission, that Shal and Humani Special Operations group of crowdfunded freelifers, who from their base on the comet of Old Hurl had proven themselves so effective during the war.

Just because it was nearing the Lawless Time of prophecy, and just because the road had dipped into a valley of death for a season, didn’t mean you stopped standing up for people around you, or ceased helping them whenever they stumbled. It didn’t mean you walked wilfully to the sacrificial blade with your children in tow either. Life remained ever precious. Souls still required redemption.

And besides, Jih had sworn victory at the very end.

The Kindom would come at the end of the Judgement, the Kindom that was the promise of all ages in which all suffering and tears would be wiped away along with all corruption, and Creation itself restored to its rightful perfection.

Her mission now was merely a helping hand, albeit a helping hand she hoped to offer to several hundred captive souls in the direst need of freedom from their prison moon. Although it wouldn’t radically alter the course of things to come, it might radically transform the lives of many.

What more could one do?

With a soft chime the holoscreen finished unfolding itself like the petals of a flower, so that it hovered alone in the dusty air of the ship’s Bridge, faintly glowing in the fading daylight pouring in through the wide wrapping of window.

Quickly, Child of Jih dialled for a cross-space connection, then waited impatiently as static fell softly down the screen in a dozen upside columns, each matched by one of the numbers she had entered.

As the auto-dialler ran through a tentative handshake procedure with The Mission comms at Old Hurl, a ping sounded from every band of connection achieved with the other end, followed by a corresponding column of static changing to a solid band of golden light, which varied in length from one second to the next depending on the strength of that particular waveband connection. When all twelve wavebands had turned to strips of light and were resonating fully, the instantaneous comm-link across space was made.

At first all she saw was the front mat. A blank screen with the words, WELCOME TO THE MISSION COMMS FRONT MAT blazing across it.

‘Hello caller. How may we help you?’ sounded the gender-neutral voice of a Streaming Intelligence pouring from one of their Cubes - a spooky Voice in a Box.

‘Mission Lead, Zero Oh Five Five, thank you,’ she told it.

‘And your code key?’

‘Even A Stopped Clock Tells The Time Twice A Day.’

‘One moment.’

As Child waited, she saw Babbatunde stamping onto the Bridge with his gold-and-tan decksuit peeled down around his waist, holding a mug of steaming honeyed chee in his hand like he normally did when taking a break form his duties. The weary Granger leaned back on one of the flight desks as though he’d been invited to take part in the call.

‘Need to patch that hole up,’ he growled after taking a noisy sip of chee, nodding at the big gaping hole in the side of the Bridge, the one ripped out during the battle that had resulted in the deaths of her flight pilot and navigator. Child sensed the hole as a dull throbbing pain like toothache, even through the relief of the Cannabar oil he was feeding her.

When she started to think of her lost crew again, and how each one had died, she tried to focus hard on the holoscreen instead.

At last some imagery filled the screen and brought it to life. Child glimpsed a pair of bare feet and then shining legs as the camera was lifted up and settled onto something flat, a chair or table probably, and suddenly the big smiling freckled face of Willowi filled the screen with her perfect teeth and skin and hair.

‘Hey guys,’ she said as she took a few steps back.

Almost inaudibly, Babbatunde sighed.

Willowi, their Mission Lead, wore a white swimsuit over flawless golden skin that ran slick with water, and she towelled a great dark plait of hair dropping all the way down her back. The young woman wrinkled her nose in concern. ‘I’m pretty sure I was just about to beat my lap record there. We’re not scheduled for a check in, are we? Is everything okay?’

Over her shoulders, a great blue surface of water ran across the top of the frame, though the water was upside down, just like the people swimming through it. Willowi stood in one of the variable-G chambers of Old Hurl, HQ for The Mission; a chamber filled with a big globular swimming pool where one of the major anchor points for gravity was at its very centre, so a person could swim round and round and round to their heart’s content. It just so happened that Willowi’s framing of the camera only captured the bottom side of the spherical pool. It was hard not to be lulled by the swimmers splashing past doing their exercise laps, even as Child explained the situation to Willowi, providing her with a brief crisis report: the dragon ambush, the loss of the crew, their down-time on Spin City.

By the time Child had finished, Willowi was frowning severely. Squinting, she donned a pair of glasses, which had the odd effect of making her look even younger than she already did, probably because they were so big on her, oversized even. The girl was confident in her fashion choices in a way that Child had never been at her tender age.

Under normal conditions, Willowi would have been much too young to serve as a Lead for a mission of this importance. But then, most of the personnel now keeping The Mission alive were also equally as young. It was mostly a young person’s fight now. It had to be, after the older generations of fighters had been taken out at the end of the war, when the destruction of the Shal homeworld had forced the survivors of the final battle to surrender. After that, the majority had been sent to prison planets for total mindwashing.

At the bitter end of the Neverwar only the younger generation had been left to hold the line in the sand, and with scant time to learn anything about how to do so. Causalities had been high, yet now, five years on, the earnest young survivors of The Mission were not only holding their own, but starting to dare to push back. The very fact they had sponsored Child’s plan for rescuing the imprisoned crews of fellow Prophetships was proof as much. Though assigning such an untested Mission Lead as Willowi indicated they didn’t hold out much hope for success.

Willowi, it seemed from the very beginning of joining their present venture, had other ideas.

‘So let me get this straight,’ she said now, adjusting her glasses for effect. ‘A month into your mission and just about half way to your destination, and you have no crew remaining, and no chance of flying for several days even if you had to, which you do. Is that what I just heard?’

Her tone made Child think of the younger, more sensible, more outspoken sister that Child had never had. She sounded as though Child should have foreseen the calamity that had befallen her.

‘Well you are a living Prophetship, aren’t you?’ Willowi asked. ‘Shouldn’t you have been forewarned about all this? Shouldn’t you have seen the ambush coming so you could avoid it, instead of turning the first proper mission I ever guided into a total freaking disaster?’

So that was it, really. Her ambition to do well meant getting angry at anything that countered her expectations. Normally, the captain would have dealt with these kinds of calls, and Child preferred it that way. Now, she wasn’t even sure what to say. She breathed out her frustrations and spoke in the spirit of the moment:

‘It doesn’t work like that, Willowi. It’s more like a wind that comes and goes, and you never know where or when. This is a set-back, that’s all. The mission is hardly over yet. I’m busy recruiting a new crew from the local population of slaves. Soon, we’ll take off again and resume our flight.’

‘Is that a promise or just something you’re saying to calm me down.’

‘Both. But I assure you, we are far from finished yet.’

It was not lost on Child that under normal conditions the assigned Mission Lead should have been the one offering reassurances and soothing words. But these were hardly normal conditions, and at the ripe age of thirty-five, Child was something of the elder in this situation.

‘We really are on a tight time limit here,’ said Willowi, stating the obvious in an effort to reassert herself and her control.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s less than five weeks before the Great Flow reaches its yearly peak. If we miss that, the whole mission is blown.’

‘I know, Willowi,’ she answered, smiling to herself. ‘I’m the one who came up with the idea, remember?’

It had come to her as a genuine Jih-given dream vision, after hearing news that her old maestro, Fiercesome Starshine, was imprisoned on the distant prison moon of Stretch, alongside the crews of all the Prophetships captured since the official end of the war; a way of dropping the mind-control field around the prison moonworld so they could make their escape.

More than that, Child had even been the one to recruit Willowi as their Lead, impressed by the girl’s quick wits and tactical thinking in the recent Tournament of Games - so Child could be forgiven for smiling to herself now.

‘Anyway, I’m fine, Willowi. Or at least I should be, after Babbatunde is done patching me up.’

At her words, Willowi winced and deflated a little in her anger. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You caught me off-guard, that’s all. This mission means a great deal to me too. But of course, our priority is that you’re alright, and that we inform the next of kin of their lost ones. Is there anything specific you would like me to pass on?’

‘Only that I will contact them myself, over the coming days.’

‘Okay then. So you say we’re still in the game, despite our losses. I’ll put together what support I can from this end. After I inform our advisors of what’s happened, and the Council of Elders.’

Despite the name, a Mission Lead was more a liaison than anything else between those on a mission and those Field Advisors who had agreed to advise on its progress in the field. Usually they were expert veteran elders, or what passed for veteran elders these days, since most of them were rarely beyond the age of forty. The very brightest served on the Council and ran the entire Mission.

‘Is that you, Babbatunde?’ Willowi suddenly asked.

The young Chief Granger straightened from where he leaned against a flight desk, and stepped further into frame. ‘Yeah, I’m still here. Good to see you, Willowi. You look … good.’

‘Good? You must mean fabulous, don’t you?’

‘Hah. Well in that swim suit, you certainly look … robust.’

‘Babbatunde, did you just call me robust?’

Her smile clearly captivated the young Granger. His face lit up like it was struck by golden sunlight glimmering off water, just as it had the very first time she’d been introduced as their Mission Lead back on the flying comet of Old Hurl; he had recognised her, having met her previously as an opponent - and then a drunken date - in the aforementioned Tournament of Games that had occupied the comet for a whole week.

They shared something fundamental, these two - both were partly Shal and partly Humani. As a consequence, they retained the golden skin but less of the brow features of a regular Shal, though Willowi was lighter than Babbatunde. They were two of a kind. In many ways, and maybe with more time back on Old Hurl they would have become an item, but for now they merely smiled at each other over a million miles and more of open Space.

‘Can I offer you both some privacy?’ murmured Child.

‘Huh?’

‘Would you like to be alone?’

When Willowi stopped beaming that smile at Babbatunde, she shook her head and instantly sobered. ‘Sorry. For an instant there I forgot about the plain old disaster of a mission I’m now guiding to nowhere.’

‘Please. It’s hardly -’

‘I’m joking, I’m joking. We’re fine. Everything is going to be fine.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You’re going to reach the prison moon on time. Our man on the ground is going to do his part in time. And so, by performing some of the most dangerous Sky Opera ever performed and right at the yearly solar peak of Flow, you’re all going to overwhelm their Global Mind-Control Field so our people can make their escape. They will get away not just in their hundreds, as planned, but in their thousands. And after this monstrous success of a mission, we’re going to be hailed as heroes and visionaries not just here on Old Hurl, but across the whole System, and people will lap up our every word, mimicking our every action, so in awe will they be in our presence.’

She smiled again, innocently enough.

‘I could warm to you, Willowi. With just the right amount of salt and seasoning, I think we could be good friends.’

‘Well, I hope you already consider ourselves as fast friends. But I’m honoured, anyway. And hey, there must be a good reason why you were chosen to become a Prophetship, right? You’re the proper person for the job. We have faith in you, so hang in there. We’ll send what help we can. Anything else for now?’

‘No, we’re good. Peace and blessings, my dear.’

‘And you!’

And with that, Willowi reached over, still smiling that easy smile of hers, and disconnected.

There must be a good reason why you were chosen to become a Prophetship, right?

It was an interesting thing to have said. Child mused over the words after Babbatunde returned to his repair work, saying he needed to patch up all the puncture holes in the living hull before he could consider doing anything else. Left alone to her thoughts again, Child recalled her earlier dream, which itself had been a recollection of that awful time of paralysis that had preceded her becoming a Prophetship.

The worst time of her life had resulted in the most fruitful time of her life.

Would she have chosen it any differently, given the choice?

Back then in the Sky Hermitage, unable to move and refusing all food and all views of the caldera outside while she wasted away in the confines of her bed, Child had come pretty close to dying – close enough that her heart began to skip irregularly and her breaths grew into shallow pants, her vision dimming for hours at a time. Occasionally, she had tried to revive her spirits by remembering how her sacrifice had worked, and that the Sky Opera had been successful; with the mind control field now down, open defiance appeared to be erupting all across the moon world. People were making a stand again and refusing to go along with the New Order. Yet even that momentary victory was tainted; 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 raising the rebellion, and no doubt the skirts of 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. They would come and visit her as individuals or in pairs, men and women alike with shaven heads and robes that were the tawny colours of eagle wings in the sun, most of them Shal but even a few Humani or mixed race, showing 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 skies 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 continued to refuse food.

Sometimes she would hear hushed voices just outside her room; some said they had to do something, while others argued they had no right to force her to eat anything. No doubt things would have carried on like that until one day she finally passed away. But it seemed Jih had other plans for her.

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, rising clear from the bed and into the air and through 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 Jadeesh 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 Silent and Still. Behind them the room was not quite dark, lit by some full moons still rising in the sky.

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

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

She would have nodded timidly, if she could.

‘Okay.’

Jadeesh really had wasted away, because the two Shal lifted her out of the bed with ease and wrapped her tightly in the thinnest of blankets. Together, in silence, 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 Twilights - ceiling algae glowing in glass coverings – and all of them silent save for the occasional fitful snoring, until they emerged outside onto the floor of the caldera in the warm stillness of night. She smelled the garden before she discerned it in the moonlight; saw 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 occasional pool of water. A few moonflies wafted about over the dewy flowers, playing with each other in flight. Frogs croaked somewhere close by and an owl hooted, hoping to scare out some rodents.

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

Child asked what it was.

‘That’s what what we brought you here to see, Jadeesh. Up here in these cloud gardens, under all that netting, we grow some things we do not wish our enemies to know about.’

‘Oh? You’re hoping to turn the war with some giant cabbages?’

The two Sky Prophets smiled.

‘Almost. Not quite.’

‘Some prize-winning Canabar then.’ Since Sky Prophets were well known for growing some of the finest medicinal herbs anywhere.

As the moons rose higher, more and more light spilled into the bottom of the caldera. The owl hooted again, still seeking prey. A silverfox called out from a far stand of pine trees. A bat fluttered through the air, chasing moonflies. The sounds and sights reminded her of the family ranch way out in the Florid Flats, where Child 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 shock of electricity – 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 had heard once how Prophetships were grown right out of the ground. Indeed, she could make out the long body now, 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 body rose so tall that the very top pressed up against the stealth netting.

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

As Silent 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.

‘It doesn’t have a name yet.’

‘Nor a mind.’

‘A mind?’

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

In her weakness, Child’s head was starting to swim.

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

‘We both believe that 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, Jadeesh, do you not?’

‘Visions?’

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

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

‘We believe that makes another sound reason for you being a prime candidate. You are highly sensitive to the Living Spirit.’

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

‘We’re proposing that you … join the Prophetship. Allow the ship to become your body, while you remain the Soul and the Spirit. That you and the ship become one.’

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

Prophetships rarely fought except in a defensive manner, and in the typical fashion of all Shal Loyalist forces, they did so not to kill but to debilitate, if possible. Mostly, they focused on spreading vital truths to those buried under years of mindwashing, and proclaiming visions of hope for the Kindom Come despite the present fall of darkness. They brought homegrown medicines and foods to those most in need of them. Carried refugees out of harm’s way and into safety. Helped out wherever they could.

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

The idea was almost unthinkable.

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

At this, Child finally wakened fully, as though from a dream.

‘My own body?’

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

She recalled the dream of rising from her bed and turning into a bird; that wondrously liberating sensation of soaring on wings through the night air ...

‘Yes, I see. 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 a problem, however,’ said Silent. ‘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.’

Jadeesh frowned. Let them go through what she was going through before anyone judged her on her state of mind.

‘If you could pull it together, Jadeesh. 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 is ...’

Her heart was pounding ridiculously fast in the cage of her chest. A lump hardened in her throat. This was real. This could really happen for her.

‘What do I need to do?’ Jadeesh asked in a whisper, afraid all of a sudden of popping this bubble of unreality.

‘You wish to go for it?’

‘Of course I wish to go for it.’

Sister and brother stirred happily on the bench.

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

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

For the first time in what seemed like months, a real smile creased Child’s features. ‘Then lets go get something to eat,’ she said, 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.

Gorgeous

'EHLAJA, EHLAJA,' croaked a sudden voice in the darkness, interrupting the young veteran’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 that he hadn’t heard in years.

Fear possessed the Humani ex-soldier - fear that he would be dragged back into the war. But the Neverwar was over, at least it was meant to be, for all that he kept reliving it in flashbacks like this one. Groaning, the man shook his head to clear it, and then someone chuckled aloud and he spun again, and there they were - his five squadmates clad in their Black Dawn situ-suits, all standing next to the field lab propped on legs like stilts, gathered around the small ferroplastic cage holding a naked and bloodied Shal boy. They were laughing as they poked him with their lit cigarettes.

‘Ehlaja. Mercy.’

For a short spell the young veteran entirely forgot where he was, time passing without his awareness. But then a dewfrog started singing its strange popping song from somewhere nearby, and with a jolt like ice water flung in his face he 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; in his other hand hung the limp carcass of a rabbit, caught in one of his impromptu snares placed further up the glade.

He had lost it again, his sense of time and reality. The young vet turned his head as a bird twittered from the nearby 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 trails with their lights blinking; beyond them, beyond the mountain and lake and the dark silhouettes of the neighbouring city, a curvature of early daylight slowly cracked the paling darkness in two, revealing an horizon so tightly bound that it instantly reminded him of the tiny world his feet stood 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 smothered it with. Indeed, in that very moment the sunlight spilled across the world like a blinding migraine and he squinted, almost in anger, and turned away from the flaring brilliance until his modified eyes could properly contain it. Again the breeze stirred, 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, needing a drink. He didn't relish the return of daylight so soon again - barely every half hour brought a new day here, exposing him even more to all the goofy tourists wandering through the steep woods on their hikes, and to the drones who were always keeping an eye on them for their own safety while looking out for interlopers in the park. Already, he could one of the silvery drones rising towards his position, reflecting glints of early sunlight.

It wasn't safe for him out here in the open, not without a valid ticket for the park stored in his Multipass. He needed to get back to the sanctuary of his stealth tent. 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 weren't really there.

Back at his camp, hidden in 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 something amiss ...

For a creepy moment he thought he was being watched, but when he cast his biosense around him to detect anyone's presence in the area, there was nothing - all he detected was yet another cyclist passing on the 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 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 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 - or maybe he wasn't drinking enough ...

He settled the matter by reaching into his tent to lift out a bottle of Hoosh, from which he took a long and fiery drink. Belching a few flames, he took another nip then it 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 view 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 wilderzone located right next to the sprawling metropolis. As the park's centrepiece, the mountain rose in the form of an island out of the waters of the equally artificial Scoop Lake, which was also previously part of the 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 the mountain island, carrying another haul of fun-trippers who would need to be avoided. 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 soldier 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 portions of meat that it offered - engineered like everything else here, but still edible - then 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; the birds sang and 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 ones before it, and he welcomed the light and heat - the constantly sunny weather here was one of the few positives the little world had to offer, beyond epic card games and (of course) the best prostitutes money could ever buy you.

Like the native Shal of this solar system, his appreciation of brilliantly clear skies could border on the truly awesome, even revelation of something divine. Not that he was some follower of the Most High, or anything likewise as crazy - he'd been raised in the Kraft ever since rising from the tanks - but the ex-soldier had served on worlds with barely any open skies at all, and the unending overcasts had ground him down beneath their eternally gloomy pressure: worlds with their skies chemtrailed to death, 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 ...

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. On its upper surface, a patch of whiteness bore the famous ‘BITE ME’ corporate slogan of Bite Me Burgers, number one for insect-derived fastfoods - a graphic which soon changed to an animation of a big toothy mouth taking a bite from one of their delicious cockroach hotpups dripping with flavoured 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.

He really hated these things. Loathed them even. You couldn’t go anywhere in the New Order anymore without being plagued by them. 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 after the infamous Zuhura virus corrupted their DNA some ten or so years ago (in what was probably a Chaos move by power players behind the scenes), they 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’d been to though, the veteran had never known a place so badly infested as this mountain. They really were everywhere up here. All along the trails, signs offered warnings to be careful when sitting down or stopping for any length of time, in case they 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 on your face going after your body heat and suffocated you – it could happen.

With these trail warnings depicted largely in pictures, they were certainly some of the more alarming signs he'd ever seen. And like all the other trail signs covering the mountain, 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. The artificiality.

From the thin layers of styrosoil and loamfoam beneath the minified dwarf forests, to the piped streams and ferroconcrete boulders and all the cultured 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 vet 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, then shaped as you grew up not by your own needs but by theirs, until you were more organic robot than Humani ...

He shivered with the chill of a man still awakening to the 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 falling sunlight he unzipped the porchway of his two-man stealth tent and ducked down into its muggy heat. With the door open for ventilation he settled inside the tent, making himself comfortable on 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.

So this is freedom, he thought to himself sourly. Having to wild camp illegally in a stealth tent 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. A few months ago he’d first 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 soldier 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 soon 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. At least up here, the mountain remained one of the few places where competing outside entrainment fields were fully dampened; only the local park fields persisted, and they were mild enough, promoting feelings of calm and relaxation and a faint need to buy something up at the Picnic View gift shop - a mental itch barely perceived by his own shielded nervous system. In contrast, life down in the city was a constant war over your moods and desires.

As the 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 curve 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, busy with holographic signs and the many flight lanes of hoppers. 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 in a job market thousands of times smaller than its potential workforce, since even most security work was automated. 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 in the 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.

Born in a chemical wetwomb, the young man had spent his life training and then serving as a black-ops supersoldier for the massive Defence and Intelligence Contractor that had spawned him - Black Dawn Permasolutions. At fifteen, as one of their legendary Blackcoats, he had been sent into action during the last years of the Neverwar, that most ancient of conflicts that had lasted for a mind-boggling three thousand years.

A war like no other, the Neverwar had gained its name because it had never been officially declared by the aggressors, the Humani/Shal rulers 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 always over invented reasons. And because most of its weapons were quiet, invisible weapons most often aimed at entire populations, not just armies, and they didn’t only kill, they weakened, corrupted, distracted millions into oblivion. Things like flooding populations with highly-addictive street drugs or hard-profiled 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 three thousand years.

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

Working for 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; quietly infiltrating and conquering one world after another until no more remained, and they owned everything and everyone.

Almost.

Now it was over, at least officially, following the total destruction of the Free Shal Nation's home planet - blamed of course on an experimental 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 seven years ago between the two sides, the New Order sealed their victory without ever openly admitting they had won anything. Instead - and proving that the war had always been about the few against everyone else (as he'd always known); about free will versus total slavery - they celebrated by turning their silent weapons against their own populations. Which was surely another part of the flip side of the Neverwar they didn’t want anyone to mention - the rampant population control that now saw God Kings of the New Age culling millions of their own people, in ongoing mega-sacrifices to that dark anti-god of primal self they so fervently worshipped, while mocking the very idea of aggressive population control. Populations so thoroughly groomed to love their abusers that they couldn’t even contemplate their rulers ever intending them harm; like children looking up to their Daddy while Daddy slowly poisoned them to death for a Health Insurance claim.

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 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, 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, shock terrorism and false flag attacks, with the odd exotic mission thrown in to keep him on his toes. He'd been numbed to most of it, just like every Blackcoat was designed and entrained to be, but deep down beneath all that, some of the work he had liked and much of it had sickened him, even horrified him. Only after the war though had his real troubles begun, when he started experiencing flashbacks where he forgot where he was and bouts of sudden uncontrollable rages. 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 - way worse - was the weird condition of narcolepsy he had recently developed, and which seemed only to grow more severe over time.

Considered damaged goods, his owners at Black Dawn had sold him 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 Bloody Dreams. But the bodyguarding work only seemed to cause his health to worsen, until the security venture was forced to let him go too.

Not exactly the greatest resume for today’s labour market, as one of his contacts had put it after he’d reached out to him for employment.

Really, all that his career as a 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.

He only came out of his brooding thoughts when he heard something moving outside the tent.

It was the tiniest snap of the tiniest twig, as though something stepped out there ever so slowly trying not make any noise. All at once his battle senses switched on, but being in something of a drunken daze by then, his biosense faltered, and then a bird chirped and flapped away, as though the source of the noise, and behind him something pinged and made him jerk – the Power Recharger of his Slate, and he forgot about outside for the moment. The ping informed 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 black rectangle of stone that had lain in a streambed long enough to have rounded edges. With a grunt of satisfaction the veteran settled the device on his thigh and brought its 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 at the top and still flashing for a response – an advert he had spotted earlier on a local Freenet bulletin board, posted by a ship seeking crew:

SHIP HIRING CREW!

FOR OFFWORLD MISSION!

OF EXTREME DANGER!

NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED!

ONLY WIT / SOUL / CONSCIENCE

He'd been interested 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 the extreme danger part barely bothered him at all. But he was sick of space travel, was the real bones of the matter. He’d 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 xap, Star Stud, The Game of Competitive Virtual Dating. With an aggressive poke of his finger he brought its holographic icon to life, and when the game asked for his screen name he typed: GORGEOUS.

Quickly he scanned the game's welcome screen, checking the current player rankings.

Gorgeous swore aloud and sat up straighter, seeing how he had been knocked from his coveted top ranking down into second place some time in the last five hours.

THE CONTENDER, flashed the name of the current King Star Stud at the very top of the screen. A name he had never seen before.

So, after a month of reigning supreme, a new bull had stepped in to challenge his dominance.

'Son of a …’

In his sudden anger the vet 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 angry he felt, the more tired too. With no time to lose, he forced himself to breathe and to calm himself, focusing his mind. He had to get back to competitive dating, and he had to get back to competitive dating right now.

When Gorgeous touched his Slate’s virtual connection groove he entered into its Dreambox mode, a virtual reality space like a waking dream, and from there he entered the online Star Stud Competitive Dating Lobby (Straight Flavour), otherwise known as the Hot Pools, where a seemingly endless supply of fleshy women played and teased to be noticed.

To regain his rightful top spot, Gorgeous would need to virtually wine, dine and bed as many of these 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. If needs be, Gorgeous would pound every last one of these women into submission to make it happen.

In real life, the young war vet with a penchant for calling himself Gorgeous 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 the circling sun while the vet slept restlessly on the open sleeping bag in T-shirt and cargo pants, snoring loudly. As he slept he didn’t notice the rapid shifts in temperatures, which were minimal compared to other worlds, really, being equalised with 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 vet from his sleep, though other times caused him to dream dark dreams filled with regrets.

In the diffused glow of moonlight inside the tent his face gleamed wet with tears. He dreamed of the Shal prisoner again - the terrified young Shal boy - croaking for mercy in his tiny cage.

‘Please. Ehlaja, mercy.’

He 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 until so many tears flowed that he could hardly breathe.

Gorgeous coughed, suddenly unable to catch a breath of air. Coughing even harder he snapped awake, only to find something cool and transparent plastered across his face. Horrified, he realised 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, Gorgeous sliced at the Ractive as it came quivering through the cool night darkness not much faster than a fast slug, barely hindered by the stubbly carpet of pseudo-grasses in the way. He made sure to shred the thing properly, 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 deck 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, he found no gaps in it anywhere. Dozens of old Ractives already lay perched against it impaled on the many spikes, slightly curled up 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 the worlds he had stepped on, these pseudo-living-plastic monstrosities really were everywhere. He’d seen them infest forests and valleys and lakes, not to mention all manner of large animals - even on the backs of leaping river dolphins. Every year they seemed to get smarter or tougher. It must have been by design.

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, however. He had frozen to the spot, washed in the light spilling down from a string of moons climbing fast into 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 there, 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; for a moment he was back in some other forest during the war, tracking some Shal Loyalists for the interrogation camps; he reached back for the pulse rifle slung on his back, only to find that 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.

Gorgeous 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 Stud again to bask in his regained glory as the 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.

Immediately, Gorgeous was back in the war again with his combat instincts taking over. While the modified pigments of his skin changed to a pine forest camouflage, he rushed to the tent and grabbed up his Slate and his prized, horn-handled Eagle recoiless pistol. Then, with a growl more wild dog than man, he set off loping on the trail of his prey.

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

He could just about hear the scratchy voice far away in 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 Dagetti Prime, in the campaign to pacify the local Sky Prophets there for refusing to worship the moon's newly installed God King.

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 even auto-scanners couldn’t follow their paths - it took the intuitive supra-senses of a supersoldier to track them over any real distance, sensing out the merest 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. A few months out of the service and he rarely got to use weaponry any more - that was something he was really going to have to rectify soon. But crouched low and padding along 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, 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 over and over, but then he would catch himself and swear in frustration, knowing the voice was only in his mind - a hopper pilot coming into a hot landing zone for pickup, broadcasting his call sign to a waiting Hazard Team that included Gorgeous and his squadmates. He remembered Flying Duck, of course - how could he ever forget him: a maniac pilot in the Dagetti Prime campaign who had saved their lives on several occasions just in the nick of time, and always with a manic cackle bordering on crazy.

Again, for a fleeting moment, he was right 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 fetid swamp waters trying not to step on another exploding puffer fish, with their Red Shal guide directly in front of him giggling wildly, and the squadmate directly behind sobbing his eyes out; the New Order’s finest reduced to wandering around the high plateau marshes of Dagetti Prime hoping to bump into the ever-elusive Sky Prophets of the region, so they could torture some sense into 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.

His head really was pounding, though it was only from his usual ongoing Hoosh hangover, and it was starting to clear in the high mountain air thanks to the intensity of the hunt; with every step he took in the high mountain air - his pistol feeling like the most solid thing in the world - the leaner he became.

Beyond 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 paths, 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 across the park pathways, until eventually he was following something more akin to intuition than any real suggestions of a Shal trail, and then after a while even that 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, 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.

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

Either this Shal couldn’t catch rabbits for himself, or had decided to mess with Gorgeous for his own personal reasons.

Gorgeous grinned, his lips peeling back from gleaming canine teeth. Outside of Star Stud, his online competitive dating xap, this was the first real fun he’d had in months. With a squint of concentration he cast his biosense ahead, and picked up the faintest trace of a Shal lifesign somewhere through the trees.

He breathed it all in and out of him until only stillness remained, like the roots of a mighty 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 zhing! right where he’d been standing.

‘Son of a -’

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

Hey!

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 death. Most soldiers when under live fire tended to act in the sanest of fashions - like keeping their heads down as low as they could, or even scooping 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!

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 plasma. Then he was on his feet, still firing the pistol, and charging fast through the trees right at the enemy camp as splinters flew all around him.

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, 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 with an almighty punch that knocked him backwards off his feet. Sprawling on the ground, the bleeding Shal seemed to have a plan though, because he rolled over until he kicked at a stake fixed in the earth, and Gorgeous noticed a vine tied to the stake which now came loose, so that another great big log came swinging down through the canopy covered with stakes and almost swept him off with it.

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

Growling, they sprang together like fighting tigers, blades in their hands, 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. 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 swaying 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, 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. The Brave's head was shaven, and his scarred features especially lean, everything sharp and angular like a hatchet. By his expression, he seemed to be enjoying himself too.

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

‘Yes. So are you!’

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

'Yes. I was!'

Gorgeous swerved a vicious stab to his face before he replied with his own 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 his curiosity 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 him, but Gorgeous grabbed at the blade of his enemy's knife with one of his skin-hardened palms and twisted it from his grasp before tossing it aside. The Shal cursed and got behind him with a bulging arm wrapping around his throat so it was hard to breath. 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 Shal Dragon Slayers, those Braves who had been chosen to serve their Star King - High King of the Shal 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 inches wide, denoting a high rank and tons 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.

'What?' gasped the Shal over 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 him 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 and another self-satisfied grin.

‘Hah!’ he barked back

For a moment there was nothing to say or do but to face each other in panting silence.

‘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 eyes took him in 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. 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 -’

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

‘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.

‘I was a champion gladiator, down in the Mean Arena. I escaped.’

‘Well hey, good for you. I have no problems with that kind of initiative. Now, you think maybe we can resolve this without pointing that pistol at my head?’

‘No. I think now maybe I shoot you between the eyes.’

The Brave’s 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, ‘Hiiii guys! Have you seen a dog around here anywhere? A pink Dashound with the cutest silvered highlights from ear to ear?’

Her mouth fell open as she gawped at the sight of them, both facing each other crouched and bleeding with guns 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 as swiftly as possible; 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 - 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 ass!’ he panted on his way past, and grinned 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 instantly leaped and started pedalling. With his muscular legs and the power assisted pedals of the holobike, Gorgeous started whizzing along the 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, hunched over the handlebars for extra speed. Baring his teeth he shouted, ‘There’s a drone overhead watching us. Unless you want to blow our cover, I suggest you act normal, Humani. Two people just out for a ride!’

He could see the drone, a small dark shape through the canopy overhead, up there in the blue sky.

‘I bet it all seemed like a great idea at the time,’ Gorgeous yelled back at him. ‘Your bait. Your brilliant ambush. Well how's it working out now, huh?'

A flash of a smile like a shrug. 'What can I say? Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face!'

Whipping by on either side, the trees momentarily formed a tunnel of green leaves that cast them into shade.

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

‘What?’

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

And with that he gave Gorgeous such an almighty kick that the young veteran veered right off the track before he could stop himself, so that 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 branches, gripping the hardlight handlebars of the bike 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; there was no sign of the drone, but right behind him the Shal Brave had changed his trail bike hologram in favour of a big Mountain Truck instead, equipped with hugely oversized wheels that ripped up the newly planted trees on either side of it, and the Shal bared his teeth over the high, high steering wheel.

He would use up his Slate’s Charge in no time like that, but that hardly seemed to matter when no time was all that Gorgeous had left to him, now that the slope levelled off just ahead, before ending in a sheer cliff and a four thousand foot drop to the lake below. Jump or die came 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 and thumbed through one of its 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 hardlight that fitted snugly around his body. The instant he flexed its wings they caught air, 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 him if they hadn’t been half-falling, spinning, towards the slopes. Somehow, Gorgeous aimed them towards a flat shoulder of the mountain to their right covered in grasses, where people were picnicking in couples or in groups, faces looking up in disbelief at what was falling from the sky towards them. A young couple kissed 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.

Game over. The Brave stopped struggling, realising it too. A single hard shove and twist of the boot, and he’d be dead.

Gorgeous had won.

The young vet’s heart pounded fast enough to burst and 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 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, and sparkled brilliantly in the sunlight. Throughout its 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 against the side of a mobile field lab, now devoid of their child prisoners save for this last one, this last boy waiting without hope while the awful screams went on and on from within. Inside the lab, guarded by Gorgeous and his squadmates, field techs in white coats broke and moulded their young prisoners into newer more useful forms – into dangerous things that still looked like children but were actually weapons and spies and agents of chaos, who would be released back into their communities to wreak havoc.

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 even then 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, quickly accompanied by a wave of sleepy exhaustion.

The young vet toppled to the ground like a man felled, snoring before he even settled 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 mountain, 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, though Gorgeous didn’t need asking twice. Wincing from his many bruises, he 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.’

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 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 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, John Marshall, Col Buchanan

Interior Art & Design

Col Buchanan

Guerrilla Published By

Wild Cosmos

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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