January 1907 E-10
—
You only live once. That’s what the people of Cyresia believed. No second chances, no do-overs, and only a slim chance that there was an afterlife to get into, and once you were there, there was no coming back. They knew Morsanna was still out there, and none of them were too keen on suggesting that resurrection, a direct violation of her creed, even existed. Ev was raised to savor each moment as it came, and to take things as they were for what they were, not to expect last-minute ways out. That didn’t always help or make sense, and it didn’t mean they could always make something of a bad situation (they were usually quite bad at that) but it was a good mindset to be brought up in. And while Ev personally believed in some form of afterlife, many others didn’t.
Sometimes, growing up that way made people more reverent with their lives. Careful, slow, observant. Reluctant to walk into things blind. For others, it made them reckless, careless with their own lives because “hey, you only live once, right?” Might as well do it all, see it all, and reap all the consequences, good and bad.
Ev had always tried to be the former. They believed in an afterlife, yes, but that didn’t mean they wanted to see it.
Now, as they chased a horrific beast the size of a hovertruck through thick, brambly underbrush somewhere in the northeastern Tartarun outback, they wondered if they were slowly becoming the latter, or if maybe they’d always been this way, and the past year had just made it more obvious.
Ev had grown up hearing stories about Tartarus, all of which painted it as this diverse, extravagant, mixed empire of warriors, mage scholars, and illusionists. The elders used to tell folktales about the great wars of Eras passed when Tartarus and [ x ] fought side by side (or with each other, on occasion) in glorified, high-fantasy-esque combat. Ev used to wonder if the elders were getting the fictional stories they were so often enamored with, filled with dark elves and mystical pixie-fairies, mixed up with reality.
Now, they could safely say they had at least the environment part of the stories wrong, because Tartarus was a hellscape, and not just because it was classified as a hellworld. Sulfuric earth and egregious heat aside, the eastern Tartarun outback was harsher than any environment Ev had ever been dropped in—and that included the people. Two weeks ago, they had fallen through a wormhole into some other, more forested region of the east coast and had nearly been burned alive by acid rain. Then, while they were tracking the scrawny beta Starspawn they’d fallen through with, a band of heavily armed, scarcely armored tribesmen with snakes for hair had chased them through the brush with plasma rifles and iriidi spears.
Yes, iriidi spears: long, plasma-infused projectiles with magnetic retrieval whose cores were made from a metal alloy found only in three places in the entire multiverse: the Iron Archipelagos, Arcaxia, and western Tartarus. Normal people don’t make spears out of that kind of metal, they make armor and guns and plasma enhancers and infused slug bullets. The Tartaruns apparently had an ample enough supply to make weapons out of it.
According to the Aetherian Council, the Emperor of Aetheria hadn’t visited Tartarus since the end of the first millennium—the 930’s, according to Talis. The tentative alliance between the two worlds, established when Aetheria installed itself as the [ x ] timeline’s neutral protector after the fall of Darekaeii in Era 9, didn’t require the Emperor’s presence for anything. The past three Emperors had attended the rare mandatory alliance meetings via HOLO projection, and before that, they barely attended at all.
Ev was beginning to see why, if all their warriors carried iridi spears and attacked any identified person on sight. So far, they actually hadn’t met anyone else.
The current reigning power in Tartarus was the Northern Coalition, which the New Empire of Aetheria allegedly maintained an alliance with—”allegedly” being the key word. In eons past, Aetheria had been invited to attend certain Coalition functions, like summits, along with the rest of Tartarus’s interdimensional allies. They had once suggested that the Empera or Emperade visit in person. (They liked to see the eyes and faces of the people they called allies. Something about being able to read intentions better in person than, say, over a hologram.) But the Aetherian Emperor hadn’t responded to a Northern Coalition summons in person for over six hundred years. Razienne, the Council and Talis had explained, wouldn’t be required to do so either. In fact, it was highly advised that they avoided Tartarus at all costs and only dealt with their ruling parties when absolutely necessary.
Well, they were here anyway.
As Ev continued their hapless chase through the outback, landing themselves in a wide clearing with the truck-sized beast they were hunting, they were about two seconds away from pulling up the inter-alliance communication board and pinging every Tartarun official in contact range. Their squad was somewhere in the Void, they themselves had fallen through a wormhole with this beast and its companions almost four hours ago. They were at their wits’ end. A few crazy warriors with iriidi spears and a decent plasma cannon would be more than welcome.
Acid rain began to fall, dripping and hissing against their armor. After their last fall into Tartarus, they’d requisitioned a weather shield from the Vanguard quartermaster: a thin magitech shield, powered and generated from their gauntlets, that lit up blue when the rain hit it, but was otherwise invisible. Theoretically, it would protect their armor and body from the elements. Considering Ev’s boots and pants already had tiny burn marks all over, they were severely doubting the veracity of that claim.
While they smacked their vambrace, trying to get the weather shield’s tolerance to increase, the Starspawn’s massive neon trunk of a tail caught them in the chest, slamming them into the nearest scraggly tree. They cursed and secured their grip on their remaining pistol, their vision fogging. Their helmet, a flimsy metal and plastic thing with a cracked holovisor, was about as shitty as their previous one, which had gotten destroyed in a firefight on the outskirts of Aetheria centra. It was doing their head no favors. They ripped it off and got up, starting to circle the Starspawn.
Damned hellspawn. That’s what these cosmic monstrosities should have been called. Things from the stars were supposed to be gifts, not ten-ton bags of muscle, scales, and acid that wanted to kill you on-sight. With three mouths, a full quiver of claws on each foot, poisonous dew claws, and eyes that could give you vertigo just by looking in their general direction, Starspawn were quite literally the stuff of nightmares. Add in the fact that their blood was acidic or their spit was a registered hallucinogen whose effects were accompanied by deadly fever, and you’d want to go live under a rock forever just to eliminate the chance of ever encountering one ever again—if you had the choice.
Ev paced around the clearing, the Starspawn circling too as it growled a low, rattling warning with each breath. Ev vanished their pistol, already damaged from the crash into the tree, and summoned the dual swords they’d been practicing with. They’d grown up wielding machetes—mostly for brush cutting, but for combat too. When they learned that the AAF also had access to dueling swords, they decided transferring what skills they had couldn’t hurt. And another gun exploding in their hand wasn’t something they could afford right now.
The acid rain seemed to be picking up, escalating from occasional drops to a proper drizzle. The Starspawn, of course, wasn’t taking much damage. Its scales were unaffected, and its fur—because of course these things couldn’t just be simple mammals or reptiles, they had to be an amalgamation of both—was merely steaming. Ev, on the other hand, was losing their flimsy polyester undersuit drop by drop. They tapped at their weather shield dial on their vambrace and it upped intensity, finally. Hopefully now they wouldn’t be near-naked by the time their squad found them.
The waiting was over. The Starspawn across from them began to glow, preparing for an attack. They leapt forward before the beast’s spines raised and brought their swords down across its shoulder, catching it off guard. Its skin split open as the searing edges of their lightblades tore into its musculature, blood hissing in the rain. They dodged a lunge from its good front leg and raked their blade through the softer fur covering its sides and more viscous blue-green blood spilled onto the red, dry grass underneath. Ev was careful to sidestep—Voidsickness from Starspawn blood was almost worse than the kind from their venom—and was about to strike at its jugular when something barrelled into them from the side and they were tackled to the ground as a second Starspawn leapt onto them.
This second one was scarred and bloody already, and Ev recognized wounds they had made earlier, prior to falling through the wormhole. They screamed in frustration and jabbed at its throat. “I thought I killed you already, dammit!”
The second Starspawn leapt aside, its narrow head wobbling unsteadily. It tried to shake it off, but it only managed to stumble towards the edge of the clearing, all six of its neon green eyes going cross-eyed. Ev kept an eye on it and lunged back at the first Starspawn before its spikes could raise to a proper shooting angle. They sliced near the tendon at the back of its hind leg, and when it whirled to bite them, they used its snout as a springboard and vaulted onto its back, plunging their swords into the sensitive pot right between its shoulders with a furious warcry. Blood seeped up around their blades and they pulled them free, jumping off and rolling as they hit the ground. They sprung back to their feet and watched as it teetered to one side, then forward, then collapsed. Directly across from them, watching its packmate die, the Starspawn that had tackled them just moments before screeched in rage.
Ev cursed and smacked their hands over their ears, the screaming, rattling vibrations of a tortured Starspawn sure to leave damage for the healers to fix later. Sure enough, their ears were ringing as the thing charged them, seemingly having regained full control of its limbs. They cursed again and adjusted their grip on their swords. They would prefer if this thing got itself to Hades quickly and very, very soon. They were losing their patience.
They sidestepped the second Starspawn with ease, but it was smaller and more lithe than its packmate. It pivoted and followed, and Ev had a split second to breathe in at one spot in the clearing and re-materialize in another. Teleportation, thankfully, came much easier to them these days than it had before they died.
Recalculating, they strafed along the side of the clearing as the beast sized them up, feet stumbling in the grass unevenly. Its top two eyes were drifting unnaturally, blood dripping from its feline-like ears. It charged them again and Ev was ready for it. They stood their ground, preparing to do exactly what they’d done to this whiptail’s packmate, only for a deafening crack! to stop it in their tracks. Ev’s resolve liquified and pooled in their boots. That was a high-power plasma rifle, just like the ones the Confederation used.
There was another crack! and the whiptail Starspawn went down, tumbling over its packmate with a forlorn screech that reverberated in Ev’s chest and bones. A puff of magic and electric static billowed off the two beasts like a cloud as it went down, and Ev tried to figure out what just happened. They could still hear the echo of the plasma rifle when an armored warrior stepped out of the underbrush, their head covered with a detailed aerator mask, the eyes glowing bright scarlet. The rifleman’s head turned towards them, almost imperceptibly, but their weapon remained pointed at the Starspawn. Across the clearing, two more warriors crept out of the woods and into the rain, both wearing the same armor.
Ev recognized the emblem on the warriors’ pauldrons immediately. They had forced themselves to memorize the symbology of the three leading Coalition provinces: Talki, Enzia, and Alcairo. This one was the Talkian emblem, a vertical, rectangular shape with a square and a dot in the middle and two circles breaking the lines of the outer rectangle. Strange, compared to the triangular motif of the NEA and the Confederation, but not entirely unlike the tribal sigils used to differentiate groups in Cyresia.
When the three warriors had crept up to the Starspawn corpses and assured that they were dead, the first barked something like an order in a sharp, twisting language which Ev supposed was Talkian and the other two ran back into the woods. The first warrior turned to face Ev and disengaged their aerator mask.
Underneath the aerator was a man who couldn’t be much older than Ev. He had warm brown skin and a spattering of dark freckles across an angular face, and the scruffy brown muttonchops he was sporting looked like they’d seen better days. His eyes were completely white, save for the opalescent sheen of his irises. While Ev noted all this and the beat-up, well-loved appearance of his armor—all leather, warm-toned steel, and polyfiber—they missed him vanishing his rifle and summoning a military-grade pistol, aiming it at their chest.
“Affiliation and reason for trespassing in Talkian borderland territory without authorization from the Arv’hein.” He primed the plasma reservoir. “You have one minute before I burn your brains out.”
Ev frowned. “How do you know I don’t have authorization?” (They didn’t, and they really didn't have time to argue, but—)
“I am the Arv’hein,” he growled, his opalescent eyes flashing yellow. They caught a glimpse of reflective pupils, and the air around them flared with empathic radiance and bitter reluctance.
Ev vanished their swords and put their hands up, fully preparing their spiel. Then those bright white eyes went wide, focusing on something behind them, and Ev acted on impulse. They surged forward and tackled the Arv’hein to the ground just as the third whiptail they’d logged upon exiting the wormhole leapt right over them. They rolled off of him and jumped to their feet, swords drawn once again, and the Arv’hein switched back to his rifle.
“Flank it!” they shouted at the same time.
There was a split second in which they both looked at each other like they weren’t used to that happening, then the third whiptail pivoted to face them and was charging right back at them. Ev yelled at it and charged it too, using its head, lowered to skewer them with its horns, as a springboard once again. They landed on its back and turned just in time to see the Talkian Arv’hein jump out of the way and prime his rifle. His first shot missed, his second landed at the Starspawn’s shoulder, and the third blew its jaw clean off. Ev watched as its top four eyes turned pink and cursed.
“Shoot it in the jugular or the forehead!” they shouted, just before they plunged their swords right into the same sensitive spot between its shoulder blades.
They jumped clear before the artery could spray them in acid blood and landed hard on their shoulder in the dry grass. There were two deafening cracks of the Arv’hein’s plasma rifle—they clocked it as an MX-78, modified for greater battery capacity and more controllable plasma expulsion—and the Starspawn went down. The Arv’hein stepped back as it twitched and breathed its last. Ev hauled themselves to their feet, wincing as their shoulder twinged sharply. Dislocated, probably.
“Anymore of those things I should worry about getting surprised by?” the Arv’hein asked, his voice a temperamental rasp.
The insane, nonsensical part of Ev’s brain wished they would stop meeting men that gave them heart palpitations. The part of their brain that was working got them to shake their own head in negative. “No,” they said. “I only counted three when we fell through the wormhole.”
White eyes narrowed. “Wormhole?”
They nodded. “My squad was on patrol through Kordan voidspace—that one border world out in the middle of nowhere between here and the edge of Imperial ‘space—when a pod of the damn things showed up.”
“Where’s your squad?” The Arv’hein glanced around like he was expecting the rest of Ev’s Vangaurd squadron to emerge from the trees like his own.
“Probably still out by Kordan,” they said to assuage his fears. They frowned and checked HOLO again. “You don’t happen to have a connection terminal or an amplifier I could use to contact them, do you?”
He narrowed his eyes at them. “What do you mean, 'probably still out by Kordan?’ How did you get here then?”
“Through the wormhole.”
“Yeah, but how? Why is your ship still out by Kordan if you’re here?”
Ev waved at the three Starspawn around them. “These things made the wormhole, I jumped through it after them.”
“You jumped after them? Through a wormhole?”
They shrugged. “Yeah.”
Cinnamon-brown eyebrows shot up. “How? Better question, why?”
“Well, for one, I knew it wouldn’t kill me. I’ve done it before.” They shrugged. “And for two, they’re not exactly biotagged. We knew by the markings that they were from the breach I caused back in March of last year, so I just popped the airlock and jumped. It was like, three feet. I was barely in the Void for a minute before I was crashing into–” They paused. “What’s that look for?”
The Talkian Arv’hein was looking at them like they had three heads, his gloves tight on his rifle. “Who are you and why the kas are you in my province?”
Ev got the impression that a third question: “are you always this insane?” was implied in the crinkle of his eyes. They took a chance and held their hand out to him. “Emperor Razienne the First, unfortunately.”
He looked between their outstretched gauntlet and their face with blatant skepticism, then scowled. “Since when does the Emperor of Aetheria go on border patrols?”
Interesting that he knew that Kordan was an official Aetheria border world. One worth patrolling. But not unsurprising. They raised an eyebrow at him. “Why does the Talkian Arv’hein?”
They’d glanced at a topographical map of the east coast of Tartarus. They knew this scrubby, wooded part of the outback was near the southern border. If they had to guess, he was on border patrol for the same reason Ev was: it was something to do, and it was familiar. (Ignoring, for a moment, that it also seemed to be Ev’s current job and their position should not mirror his in such a similar way.)
His scowl deepened and Ev smirked as he reluctantly freed up his left hand to clasp theirs, wrist to elbow, almost exactly like a standard Averonian greeting. “Fin Heran, trice commander—” He caught himself. “Arv’hein of the Tartarun province of Talki.”
Ev squeezed his elbow. “Nice to make your acquaintance, Arv’hein Heran.”
He grunted and dropped their arm. “Wish I could say the same. You know, my week was actually going pretty smoothly before I got a call about ‘hellbeasts’ and gunfire on someone’s fringe property?”
“I’d apologize, but they could have landed me anywhere with that wormhole. At least this way, you saved my ass from getting devoured by one of these stupid things, ruined week notwithstanding.”
He continued tostudy them, fingers tapping on the grip of his rifle. “You said you’re Razienne?”
“Unfortunately,” they added.
“Why ‘unfortunately?’”
“That, I believe is a story for after you’ve told me whether or not you have a terminal or amplifier I can borrow to contact my squad.”
He made a face at them, one of indignation and disbelief. Then, to Ev’s surprise, he broke into an irritated grin.
“Fine. We’ll find you a ranger with an amp when we find the rest of my squad.” He looked them over. “I still don’t entirely believe you, by the way.”
Ev looked down at their armor, most of which was a mix of ASMC gear, the basic replicated plastoid set they’d been issued recurringly, and whatever they found lying around Vanguard-aligned ships. Some things didn’t fit right, like their shoulder pauldrons and the nanotech shoulder attachment that was supposed to keep their chestplate in place, and everything was covered in burrs, mud, and acid spots. They looked back at Arv’hein Heran and shrugged.
“It’s a hazardous job.”
He scoffed and headed in the direction his two squadmates went. “Oh, I’m sure being Emperor of the New Aetherian Empire is just so dangerous.”
“I don’t know about under normal circumstances, but when you accidentally rip open a portal to zio’cerual in your first two weeks and get stuck with the job of fixing the resulting mess, it certainly is.”
He scoffed again and traipsed on ahead of them, moving unruly brush out of the way with his rifle. Ev moved through the thick grass and brambles after him, glancing back at the three dead Starspawn. A beacon had appeared over the clearing, marking them for collection at a later time. One less pod Ev and the IAF had to clean up themselves. Their helmet was still lost in the grass somewhere across the clearing, but they had no time to go back for it, nor reason to. It was better if they didn’t have it at this point. Their shoulder twinged.
They were getting back into the deep woods and Ev was starting to wonder if they should have let someone this familiar with the outback lead them out into it, potentially to somewhere they could be trapped or killed remotely, when they both went instinctively still. A shudder ran across Ev’s back and they looked over Heran’s shoulder. They both stood stock still as a blur of white, pink, and black the size of a small hoverbus barreled through the underbrush several yards ahead of them, lpeaing down from the plateau above them and roaring and screeching at its attackers. Three warriors in Talkian armor were chasing after it, one on foot behind it and two in the air, racing across blue platforms that materialized a half-second before their users’ feet landed. Heran’s head turned slowly as he watched his squadmates chase the surprise fourth Starspawn through the brush, then disappear in the distance where the plateau dropped off, whooping and hollering what Ev assumed were hunting cries.
He looked over his shoulder at them. “Just three, huh?”
Ev pulled up their HOLOmap of the local terrain and gestured furiously at it when nothing loaded. “How was I supposed to know when there’s no service out here?”
He rolled his eyes. “There’s service, just not for Aetherian tech,” he muttered. He jerked his rifle in the direction of his teammates. “Come on.”
He took off through the brush. Ev followed as quickly as they could, summoning one of their lightblades and turning up the heat setting, keeping their dislocated arm close and as still as possible. There was a plateau-shaking, earsplitting shriek-roar from the Starspawn that had run by, then, to Ev’s horror, there came another, and another. Two more Starspawn that had gone unaccounted for, triangulating each other from across the outback. They cursed and caught up to Heran just as they reached the edge of the plateau, skidding to a stop near the edge.
In the valley below, after a sharp ten-foot drop to the next plateau level, the three Talkians from Heran’s squad were converging on the Starspawn they had been chasing. Heran crouched and raised his rifle, sighting the beast through his holo-enhanced scope, and fired. His shot landed, burning a black hole into the Starspawn’s forehead. It stumbled and went down, and his squadmates turned back towards the ridge. He waved. One saluted back, the other two hollered something back that Ev imagined was about not letting them get a kill in.
“Bastards,” Heran muttered, shaking his head. He was grinning, despite his own feigned irritation.
While he wasn’t watching, Ev took the chance to look him over. His armor was about as worn out as theirs, but much better fitting. Broad, sloping pauldrons with straps that crossed in the front and back, seemingly low-tech vambraces that had magitech pads woven into the brown leather, worn but not threadbare boots. He flipped his hair out of his eyes with a casual brush of his hand, tapping the over-ear pads of his aerator mask and causing a headband to materialize. As he stood and slung his rifle over his back with deft familiarity, it became obvious that, whatever the prestige of the title of Arv’hein, this man was a soldier first and a political leader second.
Heran slid down the ridge first and Ev followed, holding their injured arm close to their chest. They landed next to him and watched as his teammates approached.
“Come on, Commander, you never let us have any fun!” said a tall, broad-shouldered woman with dozens of tiny cornrows braided around four small, pointed horns across the top of her head.
“Hey, that’s Commander Arv’hein Heran, to you,” sneered another woman about Ev’s height, whose thick, fluffy, pink hair was falling into her eyes. She flicked it away with the same motion as Heran, conjuring the same type of nanotech headband.
Heran sighed, hands on his hips, and looked to the sky. “I said that one time. Can you two stop?”
“Why?” asked the third teammate, a lanky kid with black skin, black hair, and startlingly white eyes. He smiled wide. “Afraid we’re gonna make a fool of you in front of your little trespasser friend?”
The other two laughed and Heran muttered something that was probably a plea to the gods.
“Yes, actually,” he said finally. He gestured to Ev. “This is Emperor Razienne the First, of Aetheria. They’re—how did you put it?”
“Cleaning up my own mess,” they said, shooting him a side-eyed glance. “Sorry to ruin your week, riide.” They winced, digging around for the right word in common. They kept coming up with veroa, the Aetherian word for— “Soldiers,” they corrected. “My bad.”
The pink-haired woman gave them a hard look. “Not in Aetherian it isn’t.”
Ev gave an uneasy smile, but was saved from having to explain they had been learning and unlearning too many languages recently when the other two Starspawn screamed again, one on the opposite ridge and the other emerging from the far right side of their level of the plateau.
“Where are Decker and valPrein?” Heran asked, looking around.
There were four identical HOLOpings and the lanky man (he couldn’t be older than eighteen, Ev thought) opened a bright pink HOLOscreen to check. “Closing in on that one,” he said, pointing towards the beast prowling edge of their plateau level.
Right on cue, two whooping warcries sounded from the ridge to their right—this Starspawn was lion-headed, its spikes buried in its mane, and its chimera-like troop of six legs were reptilian and furred. Two distant forms, one with a shock bright orange plasmic hair, jumped down and started firing light rounds at the Starspawn.
“Leese, Veran, go help them,” Heran ordered. He turned to the woman with the intricate cornrows. “Tor, relocate their shoulder, would you?”
He ran off with the lanky man—Veran—and the pink-haired woman—Leese—and left Ev with the woman called Tor. She raised an eyebrow at the arm Ev was still cradling tenderly.
“Please just get it over with,” they asked, turning and offering her their shoulder.
The lion-headed Starspawn went down quickly without a hitch. While the other two squadmates, valPrein and Decker, distracted it, Heran, Leese, and Veran took the beast down in less than five—an achievement, considering this one hadn’t been chased across the outback for hours on end. Ev and Tor joined them just before it went down, and the two soldiers that had been tailing it in the first place stayed behind while they all turned to face the final Starspawn coming down from the furthest diagonal ridge.
All three of the Starspawn Ev had chased after falling through the wormhole were whiptails: lanky, brightly-colored things that reminded Ev of the lizard-like keractyls back in Averon, characterized by thick, whip-like tails. One had had a bit of a lion’s mane like the one Decker and valPrein had been chasing—a hybrid. Both of the two extraneous beasts they had just seen killed were lioneres: big, bulky, maned counterparts to the whiptails. As the sixth and final Starspawn skidded down the ridge in the direction of its fallen comrades—and Ev and the Talkians—they could tell this one wasn’t either of those subspecies. It was a chimera.
All Starspawn had three mouths, razor-sharp claws, vertigo-inducing eyes, and poisonous dew claws, and most were brightly colored. Chimera’s were often photo-negatives of their neon counterparts, all blacks and bright blues, and possessed an extra set of mouths because, horrifically, they had two heads. Chimera Starspawn also had two tails, twice as many eyes, thicker skin, and extra dew claws on their middle legs, which most other types lacked. They were, in short, the heavy-duty equivalents of their more common counterparts. And they were a pain in Ev’s ass.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Veran, aghast.
“A chimera Starspawn,” Ev said, drawing their sword again. “They’re like the pod alphas whifen and and they’re around. They’re—”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Leese interrupted. She raised her blaster—a heavy ARV-9 carbine. “Let’s kill it.”
“I second that,” Arv’hein Heran said from behind them all. “Leese, Tor, Decker, wear it out and distract it. Keep it in this valley at all costs.”
“On it,” Leese and Decker said in unison. They ran off with Tor, who unshouldered her rifle and tapped on her aerator.
He came up to Ev’s side and motioned for valPrein and Veran to join them. “Aetherian, can you do that same maneuver from before?”
“The one where I jump on its back and get its soft spot?” They shook their head. “Chimeras have extra plating on their backs like Adaline dragons. Their weak spot is their stomach. Or, alternatively, if you can get a clear shot at its head again…”
Heran changed out the clip to his plasma rifle and sighed. “Can do. You and valPrein will sit out on standby. Don’t get close enough to get hurt. See if you can get a call out to your squad. Veran, with me.”
He ran off with the lanky, shadow-like kid and left Ev with valPrein: the thin, orange-haired young man armed to the teeth with spare plasma gear, blades, and cartridges. He was leaning against the closest boulder, favoring his left leg. His knee plate had been smashed in, meaning there was probably substantial damage beneath. He had a long-range communication amplifier strapped across his hip.
He sneered through his pain at them. “Is your Aetherian tech not working?” he asked cheekily.
Ev rolled their eyes. “Can your amp reach Kordan?”
“What kind of a question is that?” He started typing coordinates into the keypad.
The chimera went down in under ten minutes, and Ev quietly made a few mental notes about the efficiency of the Talkian military when it came to hunting large, acidic cosmic beasts. They asked once, while waiting for their message to Talis to go through, if hunting was a common pastime in Talki and their query was returned with wordless disgust. By the time their squad on the patrol ship Veroain responded, the chimera had been downed and tagged with a beacon. Heran made his way back over and valPrein straightened as best he could, as did Ev.
“Did you get through?” he asked.
Ev nodded affirmatively. “I have a rendezvous back at the voidbanks in twenty minutes.”
His expression twisted and he glanced sideways at valPrein. “I’m aware we’ve been less than hospitable, your majesty, but that doesn’t mean you have to be picked up from beyond our borders.”
Ev glanced at valPrein, who was more smug than was perhaps necessary, and waved him off. “It’s nothing on your end, Arv’hein. The few imperial rules I do manage to follow include not trespassing on sovereign ground unauthorized.” They paused and gestured to the chimera. “More than is necessary, anyway.”
Heran snorted and settled his weight onto his back foot. “Sure. Should we expect this to happen again, in that case?”
They frowned at the chimera over his shoulder, its breathing having long since stopped. “I wish I could say no, but…”
He and valPrein exchanged a look as Tor came over to retrieve valPrein, pulling one of his arms over her shoulders and leading him off to the side to tend to his knee. Heran watched them for a short while, then looked back at Ev, his opalescent white eyes carrying a sheen of intrigue.
“You’re aware of the Alliance communication board, yes?”
They nodded.
“If you ever lose your squad and crashland into Talki from another wormhole, ping me. Four hours is a long time to chase something through the outback.”
Their eyes went wide and Heran—the bastard—just smiled as they made the connection that he had been tracking them this whole time. It was smart, they could admit, to avoid someone unidentified chasing three large cosmic beasts through your borderlands.
It was also, however, a dick move. One that it seemed Heran was cocky enough to pull on them.
“Noted,” they said carefully. “I’ll be on my way out, then. I saved out the location map while your ranger amp’d my service, I can find my way back to the voidbanks.”
“It’s an hour’s walk, your majesty.”
Snarky. “Or two teleportation jumps and a five minute rock scramble,” they retorted, smiling. They held out their hand again. “And if you call me ‘your majesty again,’ I’ll put you on the ground.”
Heran’s sarcastic grin widened into something sharp, a wicked smile that made his eyes crinkle at the corners and showed the sharp, inhuman shape of his canines. He reached forward and clasped their arm, wrist-to-elbow, again in almost the same fashion as an Averonian greeting. “I look forward to seeing you try, Aetherian.”
His eyes danced with pink and blue sparks in the few seconds Ev held eye contact with him, and an uneasy (but not entirely uncomfortable) shiver rolled across their shoulders as they pulled away from each other. They nodded their goodbye and teleported back up onto the top of the ridge before Heran could see right through their veneer of neutral pleasantry. Another two jumps later, they could see the voidbanks, and the rocky beach that they would have to cross to meet their squad’s patrol ship.
Twenty minutes later, after finishing their rock scramble and rehydrating, Talis and their borrowed Vanguard squadron materialized through the black, murky haze at the edge of Tartarus’s dimensional plane. They lowered the landing ramp and Ev climbed into the cargo hold, a dull ache starting to settle in their muscles.
“What happened to you?” asked Max Seiren, a twenty-something redsuit who had apparently been ordered to wrangle them into the ship’s tiny medical bay—a medical closet, more like.
Talis poked his head through the door to the cockpit, giving them a peculiar grin. “You look like you just walked through hell.”
Ev considered the burnt holes in their undersuit, the smokey pitting in their armor, and the fact that they were covered in brambles and mud and smelled like sulfur. “I think I just did.”
“Wow,” he drawled, coming out and sitting on the bench across from them while Seiren looked at their shoulder. “What’s it like?”
“Tartarus, or hell in general?”
His eyes glittered and he didn’t bother making a clarification. In that moment, he looked so much like Heran, wearing that same smug look, that Ev got the unnerving sense that they both possessed the same uncanny ability to see right through them. They had grown up hearing that Tartaruns could see through concealment charms and had an unparalleled ability to suss out foul play and liars, but they severely hoped that it wasn’t because they were also all telepaths.
“Hot,” they said eventually. “And humid.”
“Hmm. Mission report.”
They sighed and launched into their full “report,” filling in Seiren and Talis with all they had been through in the past four hours, including the help they received from the Talkians. Talis seemed interested that they met the Arv’hein and made a comment about the recent shift of power in Talki—the previous Arv’hein, Heran’s mother, had abdicated the throne to him and disappeared not four months ago. While Seiren stripped their left side of armor and pulled their shoulder out of their undersuit to apply bande, Ev considered that and the experience of the past four hours. Part of them hoped they never had to go back. Another part, though, wanted to return as soon as possible. Something about Tartarus was alluring to them.
Or maybe they just missed real trees. Either way, with the knowledge that there were, in fact, people who tolerated their existence there, Tartarus seemed altogether much less hostile. Maybe returning there wouldn't be so bad after all. If they ever had to, that is.
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