To Walk the Constellations Pt. 07

Getting a drink because you were a Liminal Knight was one thing.

Seeing people -- scruffy, desperate people, people who'd been on the run from or fighting against the Hegemony, for literally their entire lives -- look at me with awe. Whispering the name Wotan Hohmann and reaching out, gingerly, to touch my blade.

That gave me more sweats than the corpse cities.

MEN

But there were things between the ticks.

And those things made me all...tingly. And blushy. And red.

Mal and I kept a careful distance. Like two orbiting planetoids, neither wanting to crash into each other. Since I'd kissed him on the cheek, he hadn't brought me hot chocolate again. But I'd asked for hot chocolate at the mess and did so at the same time he was getting hot chocolate, and then we'd both gone and sat in the lab, looking at Glory and his diagnostic machines, with him seated in the control couch, and me perched like the world's most friendly can-crab on the far shelf, trying to not knock over all the wrenches he had stacked up in orderly piles.

We'd talk about stuff. Glory, the latest planet we'd seen, the history of the Domain -- what scraps had survived to the modern day -- the history of the Hegemony, the history of his home Atom. How he'd been raised, where he'd learned what he'd learned.

We did not talk about kissing.

We did not talk about how soft his fur was.

We did not talk about laying on his belly and nuzzling his chest.

We did not talk about him being hung like one of the canid mounts the shinies had used.

But by Jesus and all her saints, I thought about it.

Rossck was his own kind of special blushy guilty squirmy excitement. But to explain that I have to explain Thale and...oh...oh Thale. So, Thale came to me in my dreams. He sometimes wasn't in the mood to talk. Sometimes, he'd sit and he'd brood and he'd look out at whatever dreamscape we were in. Sometimes, were clothed. Sometimes, we weren't. When he was in a brooding mood, I never had the courage to talk. Instead, I'd just...come up to him. I'd lay down beside him and gently put my head right up against one warm thigh and I'd lean into him and feel his clawed fingers gently, so gently, slide through my hair until I fell asleep while sleeping and woke up, feeling warm and glowy and so rested that I sometimes could hardly believe it.

But when he wasn't brooding, Thale taught me.

He showed me the thrust, the parry, then pirouette, the counter, the void. He'd taught me how to actually meditate. How to sit and think and let the brain slowly empty out, until you can feel the thrumming voiceless voice of the machine. Of the Djinn. He had taught me how to focus my will and ask the Machine to do things for me. The first lesson had been simplicity itself -- jamming a gun and changing a targeting program. Anything with a bit of tech in it could be whispered to, could be convinced that maybe today wasn't the day to kill a Liminal Knight.

That was how Knights survived so many battles in the end. Artillery didn't land where they were. Missiles went off target. Cannons hit somewhere else. Oh, there were still ways to get it in the neck, Thale told me. He told me about indiscriminate virus-crystals, who shattered and filled the air with uberanthrax and melted people into puddles of viscous, screaming goo. No hack or slice in the world would get you past that. He told me about the solid shellfire of the Big War on Oopse -- fifteen thousand thousand guns firing every day, using scratched out arithmetic and hand cranks to change the angles. No convincing a Djinn to intercede through that.

But then the lessons got more complex.

While sitting naked on rocks underneath a vast, starry sky on a planet that had three moons that danced in infinitely slow, azure patterns...Thale showed me how to clear my mind and allow the Machine to show me what was there. I would open my eyes and see through the optical lenses of the interior cameras on the Tiamat. I could peer through grainy chaos that my brain translated into corridors and crew -- and I could feel the thrumming conduits that spoke of doorway and comptech and the ancient brooding mass of programming code that was the main comp of the ship.

Thale could not go there. He could but tell me how to reach it, and listen as I described -- sometimes bubbling over with excitement -- what I had visited during my snatched meditation between repair shifts. I told him about the mental image of the engineered architecture that linked codex to hard drive to actuator to magnetic field inducers. I told him about my mind-body, striding through tangled cables that tasted of music and song, and finding a trove of text that spooled out when I touched it. Books writing about worlds and kings and gods that had never been and never were.

But the one thing we did not was make love.

Oh I wanted it. I wanted to crawl onto him and shove him down and slide him into me. I wanted it so badly I could taste it during my waking hours. But Thale never made the move. And with me and Mal and Rossck being so close and tingling, I never had the guts.

What Thale taught me led to Rossck.

MY GUILTY SECRET

It was between the crystal caves and the void cities -- but before the shinies - that I tried it out. I was sitting on my bed, hot coco in my hands, drunk half down and feeling just warm enough to be pleasing. I was breathing in and breathing out, and letting the sounds of the ship wash through me -- and I felt the tech around me, glowing to life. My eyes closed and I reached out, touching cameras with my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I peered out at the bridge. Techne was there, humming a song to herself as she checked on our burn.

"We really need to change out our magnetic bottles..." she muttered, flicking a screen with one finger. Once twice three times -- a light changed from red to green and I smiled eagerly, then swam through the electrical currents to the next camera I found. It was in one of the acceleration tanks. Rossck stood there. He was shirtless, because he was busy taking apart the ceiling units and changing out tubing that had gotten too stressed out for its own good. The shirtless part had an obvious reason: A tank or two of acceleration jell waited in the ceiling, and it dripped. It was slicking his back, pattered along his shoulders, gracing his muscular forearms.

The end result?

Every inch of his muscular, broad back was glistening. Like he'd been oiled. The movement of his arms caused the glisten to catch the light, shimmering and rippling, accentuating the already graceful motions of his body as he tightened a gasket here and loosened a bolt there. I sat there, an electronic ghost, watching him and gaping and feeling a flush heating me. Where I wanted to nuzzle into Thale, and where I wanted pet Mal, I wanted to chew on Rossck. It was a crazy impulse. An urge to run by teeth along those green scales and nibble.

Rossck nodded as he stepped away from the tube. "All right, we won't die this time," he said, grinning at Techne, who snorted.

"Who is we here?" she asked. "I'll be fine."

Rossck flicked his tail at her, whistling as he walked down the corridor. Almost without thinking, my vision blipped to a different camera. Since each camera came from a different world, from a different era, and had a different set of patches that made it work with the rest of the Tiamat's programming, it meant that each shift required a twist of focus. It was like hopping from pole to pole across a roiling river.

And each view had a different set of colors. A different resolution. A different zoom capacity.

The same Rossck each time.

Then he came to his quarters and the door slammed shut between my camera and him and I knew that I should stop. But by that time, the reflex of hopping to the next camera had gotten ingrained and that was my excuse and I was sticking too it. When I focused again, I was looking through a security camera that hadn't been activated in nearly fifty three years. The last time this sucker had been on, the Tiamat had had a different crew. A different set of sundivers, soaring to a different place, on a different mission.

I had questions about this previous crew.

Because the pure, clear, full color image was straight down in the shower, above the water head, which sprayed warm and clean onto a completely buck naked Rossck. My virtual cheeks heated and I gulped, slowly, as I watched Rossck whistle to himself and slide soap along his shoulders. Soon, his scales were covered in frothing suds, adding white to the mixture of green and gold that made him so...uh...evocative. I wished I could crane my head or move it around -- but the view was singular and directional. Not twisting. No zoom, even.

Which meant that I was mostly viewing his shoulders and the back of his neck and the top of his head and, sometimes, his face, when he rolled his head back to spray water onto his blunt muzzle. He gargled water in his mouth and spat it down the drain, laughing to himself. His tail flicked from side to side and I gulped slowly.

S...So, uh...

Just the shoulders was good too.

Then Rossck grabbed onto a bit of the metal wall and tugged it out. The wall unfolded with a whirr and rattle and click and suddenly, Rossck had himself a place to sit. I grinned. Was our comptech and astrogator, fearless disintegrator of villains and sundiver veteran, getting tired? Rossck sat down, leaned back, and I could see his cock. His huge. Black. Cock. He was leaning back against the wall, and had grabbed onto his member and I noped right out of there.

I came back to my body and sat there. Blushing.

And that was why everyone was awkward because I was a pervert peeping tom bitch!

Bleh.

THE HEREDITARY MONARCHY OF HYDRA

Finally, we'd made it: To world 987 -- the Hereditary Monarchy of Hydra. It had only been a two jump flight to get here, and we emerged with about fifty kilotons of ice armor left to our name. This meant that arriving in Hydra was remarkably staid. As sundiver jumps went. I got out of my acceleration tank, stretching one arm up to scratch my head, my other hand rubbing the dull, aching socket on my thigh. It was hard to imagine that I'd spent a few days with my guts filled with a non-Newtonian liquid to keep my organs from being squished to pieces by a huge acceleration.

Mal, moving faster than me, clambered up into his piloting chair. He swung himself in, settled in, then called out: "So, Venn, lets cover this before we get attacked. Unlike those feudal louts back on Gemglitter, these fellows won't shoot at us with arrows if they learn you're a Liminal Knight."

"One time!" I exclaimed. "Attacked by dog-riding sword-slinging savages one time, and ya'll won't let me hear the end of it."

Rossck, who had just gotten to his seat, grinned at me. "I got kidnapped, I think I'm allowed to not let you hear the end of it." He said.

"But Mal-"

"I subcontracted," Rossck said, shrugging.

"So, why is Hydra so bad and what's a Hydra?" I asked, biting my lip.

Techne stepped up to the front screen, then leaned against the curved edge of the bridge. She rapped it and the screen switched from showing the new sweep of constellations that greeted us every time we emerged from a sun to showing the system map of Hydra. It was one of those tricky trinary star systems -- two large yellow suns in close orbit, with a big burly red one in a stately, far out orbit. Dozens of planets ringed around the two primaries, and dozens more fanned out from around the red giant.

Seven of the planets glowed blue. Millions of asteroids glowed yellow. Some stats bleeped up on the screen -- names of planets, population counts. I did a quick mathery and whistled slowly. "Three billion people?" I asked. "That's what happens when you get seven planets at once, I guess. Are they all terraformed?"

"Barely," Techne said, then pointed at three of the worlds around the red giant. "These ones are kept intact by solar mirrors and artificial greenhouses. This one is fighting the hard fight against desertificiation. But the capital planet? Mycenaea? It's more like Home than Home is. And Argo, the capital city on Mycenea is supposed to be one of the wonders of the Chain."

"It's not that much more pleasant than Atom City," Mal said, the prickly pride of his native world coming to the fore. I grinned a bit at him. But then my grin faded as the question came to mind.

"Why are they so against Liminal Knights here?" I asked.

Techne pointed at two of the asteroids that had black and orange circles around them. "These are Hegemony resupply points, with several Hegemony skiffs. The Hydra navy serves as an ancillary to the Hegemony in this part of the Chain. They don't do any land fighting like the Elthasians, but they still bleed for Emperor Rehoboam."

"Booo!" I called out.

Techne chuckled, giving me one of those little grins of her that made me go all squirmy and blushy. I smiled back at her, my hands sliding behind my back. Uhhh. Techne continued: "So, we have to make sure that none of them learn what you are or they'll shoot out our engine with a railgun, board the ship, and stunshock you into oblivion and hold you here until Lord Drak can come and seduce you to the Hegemony's side. With torture and mind control and shit."

"That's not seduction!" I spluttered.

MYCENAE

The Hydra navy didn't bother us up close and personal. We had arrived from their primary, Hydra-A, and broadcast the standard designation. Or at least, what most people would see as a standard designation. The Alliance had given us an IFF-spoof that I could help ease and thread and make even more effective. All I had to do was meditate, focus, and the whole universe would think we were anything from a garbage scow to a prisoner transport. Now, uh, that wouldn't hold up if they looked at us, so I claimed we were just a standard sundiver transport with a heaping load of biologicals from Masque Macabre.

It helped because it was true. We did have biologicals from Masque Macabre -- mostly donated vampire blood. It was formatted by the nanotech that had served as the foundation for their overly long, overly detailed roleplaying game session, turning it into what Techne called an 'anagathic narcotic.'

"Ya know," she said, shrugging as we operated the cranes that loaded the massive tanks of gurgling red goop into the shuttle. "Melange, Juvinat, Teznar, Gundlang, the Ecch Fruit." I.E, a list of things I'd never heard of. Seeing my expression, Techne flashed a silvery smile. "Stuff that makes you young. And is addictive."

"Isn't it wrong to sell a...a...drug to people?" I asked. "Like, an addictive drug?"

"This shit's going to Hegemonic bootlickers," Techne said. "The only people on Hydra who are rich enough to buy it are kissing Emperor Rehoboam's ass." She paused so that I could boo and she could spit on the deck. "And they deserve to get hooked on a psychotropic blood drug. Besides, the main side effect of the addiction is getting to not age for a few months. I think they'll be fine."

Finally, we were all crammed into the shuttle, which flew heavy and sluggishly through the upper atmo of Mycenae. Mal held onto the controls with both hands, grumbling under his breath as the wings shuddered and caught and the ship dove up and down, fighting against turbulence and struggle. But then the clouds broke and I saw that we were soaring over a vast, beautiful set of fields. It wasn't the gothic loneliness or the somber ruins of Masque Macabre or Glittergem. It wasn't the alien crystal of Gallius. No, it was something else.

Mycenae was covered with farms. Rows and rows and rows of pure agri. I had heard stories and seen drawings of Agrisland back on Stumble, and I had imagined something like this, but on a smaller, more squalid scale. "Jesus," I whispered, my face mashed up against the side screen of the shuttle, looking down through cameras and sensors at the rows and rows and rows of crops. Automatons the size of buildings rumbled along those rows, and I could see -- even from this high up -- that they were turning the farmland back into scrub, and then the scrub would get planted again, then the farm would be reaped.

So long as this system worked, you could feed three billion people. Easy.

"That's mostly cash crop," Techne said. "They're making tobacco, hyperweed, chocolate, joyrubber..." She ticked off the plants with her fingers. "And the Hydra's best seller: Brainweave."

"Brainweave?" I asked.

"It's a tuber that was genetically engineered several thousand years ago to grow artificial nerve endings," Mal said, his voice cheerful, even as he continued to fight with the overloaded shuttle. "The stuff is great for brain repair -- and considering the amount of cranial trauma the Chain can dish out, it's in high demand."

"So, we're selling biologicals to buy biologicals?" I asked, making a face.

"Well. That's the thing," Techne said. "We're gonna need to walk light. Hydra doesn't let you launch without logging your jump calculations. And they're really good at spotting people who are going to Atom and shooting them down."

Mal shook his head. "Bastards."

I frowned. "Cause Atom's independent from the Hegemony?"

"Exactly," Mal said, looking over his shoulder and smiling at me. "And Atom doesn't have a naturally habitable planet in its cluster. We...er...they subsist primarily on vat grown food and harvesting from Atom's gas giant's ecosystem. But we can only eat less than a tenth of a percent of the biomass in the cloud layer. And harvesting is a nightmare." He shuddered. "My father served on a krillship. The stories he told me turned my fur white."

I nodded and looked back down at the farmland.

"So...we're a bust for this stop?" I asked.

"Nah, we're just gonna smuggle shit," Techne said, cheerfully. "It'll be easy as balls. We've got a Liminal Knight here." She slapped my back.

I snorted. "What do you think Hohmann might say?" I asked, looking up at Techne. She shrugged one chrome shoulder.

"Fuck em?" she suggested, pitching her voice into a gravely, male voice that I guessed might sound like how I'd imagined a grizzled Liminal Knight to sound.

ARGO

Setting foot on Argo, the capital city of the Hereditary Monarchy of Hydra, the first thing I noticed was how clean the air smelled. I breathed in and shivered, tasting the subtle differences. Growing up on Stumble had burned subtle out of my nostrils -- but visiting a dozen worlds had given me a sense for it. Like Masque Macabre had a tang of ozone, a reek of concrete, an omnipresent snarling bite at the back of the throat -- an iron whip crack of shed blood. I hadn't even realized how present it was until I had set foot on another world.

Argo straddled the terrifying wildness of, say, Glittergem and the plastic smog of Stumble. It smelled clean, but it still smelled like a city. And that city was pleasant. All rounded curves and broad walkways, gardens along the balconies and creeping vines on the walls. Several maglev trains came in and out of the starport, unloading a huge in-system hauler that had brought in what looked like a few mountains from the asteroid belt.

Our shuttle looked pretty piddling next to that.

Three men advanced. Two were in green and black uniforms, while the last was in a fancier green and black uniform, with a white capee and a tall, cylindrical hat. He doffed the hat and tucked it under one arm. "Welcome sundivers to the Parliamentarian Monarchy of Hydra."