The army the Lord of Katazyrna has rallied for me is more a squad. They are nearly two hundred strong, and when I gape and ask Jayd where they have all come from, she shrugs and says, “They had no choice,” and tells me to spray on my suit.
Jayd retreats into an upper bay adjacent to the hangar. The two hundred women mount two hundred vehicles. I squeeze the bulb of the spray-on suit, and it releases a thin sheen of translucent, spidery goo that hugs my body and seals off sound. For a moment, I hyperventilate, claustrophobic, but I’m able to breathe with ease, and the suit absorbs my sweat. I marvel at my suit-covered hands for a long moment until Jayd’s voice tickles my ear, relayed by the worm in the casing, “Mount up,” she says. “The door will open soon. You’ll be pulled adrift if you aren’t on a vehicle.”
I sit snugly on the great purring vehicle and give it a solid pat. Above me, flickering red lights flare across the ceiling. The skin there begins to ripple. It’s not opening so much as it’s stretching. It becomes translucent, then tears open.
I’m sucked up toward the hole in the sky, where outside I see blackness speckled in stars. All around me, the other vehicles whoosh up and away, hurtling toward the void. It happens so fast, I gasp. Yellow and green puffs of spent fuel whirl around me while the vehicles tumble upward. It feels like drowning.
As I spin through the tear in the ceiling, I punch at the controls of the vehicle until it jerks forward of its own volition. I’m spinning slowly, but it’s enough to make me dizzy and sick. I shift my weight, and the vehicle responds, sending little jets of propulsive fuel into the black. When I find my equilibrium, I raise my eyes and find that I am far above the world from which we were ejected. It hangs below us, a great brownish-green sphere covered in fleshy tentacles. It’s so massive, I cannot see the bottom of it from this far away, only the curve of its top . . . or are we at the bottom? The spinning has me unsure of what’s right-side-up. It’s only as I gaze out at the long lines of my army, all of them flipping and pivoting into formation, an arrow pointing away from the world called Katazyrna, that I think to look beyond the world.
What I see stuns me.
Across the flat black matt of the sky, sprinkled in stars, are massive floating orbs. They hang out here in the vacuum as if attached to strings, slowly orbiting around a misty core of soft light so obscured by that mist that I can’t see what is emitting the light that’s reflected and refracted. My memory tells me this is the sun, and right now, it is sleeping. The orbs all around me are varying sizes but roughly spherical, like the Katazyrna below us.
It’s still another long moment before I understand that these are not orbs but other worlds, other ships, made larger or smaller by how far or near they are from where we sit. Their surfaces swarm with red, blue, and purple lights; some flickering, some blackened, some clearly terribly injured. These have faces that are curled back, and they wobble in their orbits. Some have great tentacles lining their surfaces, like the Katazyrna, and when I look back again at our world, I see that toward the poles of the Katazyrna, the tentacles are blackened with rot in places, the outer skin peeling away. What happens to the people below, when the skin is breached? I watch the breach from which we’ve been expelled begin to close up again, like a fast-healing wound, and gaze again at the poles. There is rot and death here.
“Welcome to the Outer Rim of the Legion,” Jayd says in my ear, speaking to me now from the vibrating worm casing. “You see now why I couldn’t explain. We are a Legion of worlds. Ours are the Katazyrna worlds. But the Mokshi is something else. The Mokshi has escaped the Core, there beyond the misty veil that shrouds the sun. There are worlds there, we know, but no one from the Outer Rim here has ever been able to pilot a ship from the Core. Somehow, the Mokshi was able to leave the Core. Our mother must understand its secrets, and so, we must make it ours.”
I power my vehicle to the point of the arrow formation my army has made. It’s facing a world that appears no bigger than my fist from this distance, and I know that world on sight the way I know my own left hand.
The world called Mokshi is not supposed to be there among the others, Jayd says, and I can see that now in how it moves among the other worlds. The other worldships have far more fixed orbits; even the spaces between them are regular, but not the Mokshi. The Mokshi wobbles in the Outer Rim like a weary, derelict traveler, altering the orbits of its nearest neighbors, shimmering with blue and green auroras that snake across its poles, promising a thin atmosphere . . . yet the surface I can see from here is barren.
I raise my arm and close my fist, and I lead my army forward across the dark spaces between the worlds. We move quickly, far more quickly than I thought these vehicles could take us. There is a massive amount of detritus spinning among the worlds, and I see long lines of people tied to the tentacles of some of the worlds we power past. They are salvaging the junk that orbits their ships, packing it away into the worlds’ soft underbellies. These crews are alarmed at our passing, and though we are never close enough to see their faces, I note their hasty retreat from open space into the welcoming tentacles of their worlds, hiding among them as if they were foliage. After we pass, I gaze back at them and see the scavengers carefully resuming their work.
As we approach the Mokshi, I keep our distance as I scout along the equator. I’m looking for an entry point. Circling its equator reveals a wasted wreckage of once-great cities, a forgotten empire asphyxiated by lack of oxygen, perhaps? What strikes me about this worldship are these structures—I see nothing like them on the Katazyrna or the others we have passed. I dip closer to that surface, daring the world to wake, and see now that the structures are not cities but fields of crushed bone and rocky debris that pockmark its outer skin. I cannot help but sense the world is not so much dead, though, as . . . slumbering.
And though I do not remember anything on seeing it, I do have a sense of familiarity. Perhaps it is the feeling old enemies have on meeting again, and again, and again. How many times have we danced like this: me with an army and no memory, the Mokshi with an erratic orbit and no masters?