Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

We were a peaceful movement before the PCA tried to break our spirits. They broke our ideals first, and the consequences are on their heads.

—Self-described RLF freedom fighter responding to request for anonymous interview, 243 UE (c. 35 years after the Fires of Ibis)

He woke up to a crowd of doctors talking excitedly about things he didn’t understand—carrier waves and neuron response time and Coral bleed. He had been hurt, they said. An accident. The procedure to treat him was a success. It had been very bad. Some of the doctors had not thought he would recover.

They asked him if he remembered his name. He did. They were very happy about this. His injury might have harmed his memory. He got a number: C1-442.

That was the start of his ‘rehabilitation’.

The doctors had to help him a lot at first. His muscles were weak. His hands shook uncontrollably. His head ached. He had to relearn how to walk. The doctors were very encouraging. They made sure his diet would help him heal. He had been very badly hurt. His muscles got stronger. The doctors had needed to give him implants—augments, they called them—to help his brain recover from the injury. They plugged him into a computer and used more words he didn’t understand like ‘irregular electrical activity’ and ‘neurotransmitter imbalances’. They worked very hard on their computers. The shaking stopped. The aching never did.

A new type of training began, this time on one of their computers. He had to move his arm without moving his arm. If he did, the arm on the screen would move. If he didn’t, it would not move, or his real arm would also move. He had different doctors now—no, not doctors, scientists. The scientists were very invested in his ability to move only the computer arm. The doctors had been kind, encouraging, gentle. The scientists were hurried, critical, cruel. They spoke a language he did not know. He was punished for moving his arm.

He began to wonder if he had been in an ‘accident’ at all.

The training continued. How to move the image on the screen like it was his own body. How to walk, how to jump, how to fight. He was told to walk, and he walked. He was told to jump, and he jumped. He was told to fight, and he fought. The scientists hooked him into a machine much like the computer. Now he was moving a real, physical metal body. It was no different than the images he had moved before.

The scientists sent him away. He thought he was free. He was not. More scientists waited for him. They took him to many places he did not recognize. They put him back in the machine from before. They had him walk, jump, fight. They had him kill.

He did not want to kill. He knew from his training what would happen if he did not.

He killed.

After a few years of this, he had learned enough of the language those around him spoke—his third—to understand. There had been no accident. He had been lied to, experimented on. Many others had died. He had lived, and so he was valuable. The scientists considered him only as a display piece for the technology they had placed in his head. He had been sent here to demonstrate its worth to other men. One day, the scientists developed new technologies. Better technologies, in new display pieces. He was sent back to the world he had awoken on to serve a new master.

To his surprise, life was better there. His new master was military, or acted so. He liked her orders better than the scientists’. She made him use the machine more but fight less. He stood guard over great stretches of empty land, over warehouses and parking lots, over convoys and transit stations. She gave him a new designation: Ratter. It referred to a hunter of rats, she told him. He thought it made him sound more like a rat than a hunter, but he did not hate rats, so he did not complain. He did his job, which consisted mostly of ‘not doing other things’ while standing in specific places. He finally mastered the language spoken on this world and many others. He talked to people, interesting people, friendly people. One of them offered to help him forget his woes. He took Ratter to an an old warehouse where people would introduce small quantities of the Coral to their bodies through their nose or veins. ‘Dosing’, they called it, and themselves ‘Dosers’.

For the first time since he’d awoken to the sight of the doctors, Ratter was happy. His head no longer ached. He no longer jumped at shadows. Too soon, the feeling passed. His headache returned. The darkness scared him again. He wished to consume more of the Coral, but his friend stopped him. It was dangerous, his friend said. Too much, too quickly, would kill a man. It made perfect sense to Ratter. Too much happiness could kill a person as surely as anything.

He returned to his duties. Every so often, when the pain grew too great or his nightmares too deep, he would return to the old warehouse or others like it. He did not mind the cost when nothing else could offer a similar release. Time passed. He was not happy, but he was not miserable.

The sky caught fire, and the world burned.

Ratter found himself sheltered by the great Grid in east-central Belius, protected from the flames that rolled in from the west. His masters were dead, his leash snapped. He was free. He tossed aside the great weapons his machine bore with joy. He found other people, men he had met in one of the Coral houses, fleeing the destruction with what food and clothing they could carry. They did not know what had happened to the world either. “Come with us into the Grid,” they said. “There is too much ash at ground level.” Ratter followed. He trusted the people who had named him one of their buddies.

There were five of them, including Ratter. Their leader, an old machinist the others called Tiny—whose nickname had been ironic before Ratter, 203cm when barefoot, had arrived—led them to a stable section of the burnt-out Grid. He pointed out an old Coral pipe that had connected one of the southern wells to the spaceport. It was still full of the Coral. Tiny showed them how to tap it so only a small amount of the Coral escaped. They dosed that night. Ratter slept well.

The next day, Tiny took them a kilometer and a half along the great tram track that ran through the grid. He taught them how to remove bolts and screws without damaging them, how to check if a pipe was empty before you took it off the wall. He taught them which parts were valuable and which were not, what damage could be repaired and what would render something useless. Junk-work, he called it, and them junkers. That evening, looking over the results of their work, all carefully organized and counted, Ratter was proud of a day’s work for the first time.

After a week of this, Tiny revealed the purpose of their work. They dressed in heavy clothes and tied cloths around their faces to protect themselves from the ash. There was a farm down on the surface, not far from the junkers’ home if one discounted the kilometer they had to descend. Beneath the shadow of the Grid, the fields were lit with strings of lights and tended with miles of irrigation pipes. The farmers were wary of their group at first, until Tiny had the junkers untie the bundles they were carrying and spread them out on the ground at the edge of the fields. He spoke with an artisan’s pride of the pipes and valves and spigots and filters, wires and circuits and pumps and gears. The Coral the junkers brought would fuel the farmers’ lights. The farmers were ecstatic. Ratter’s pride in his work redoubled.

The junkers took back with them fresh vegetables and old cans of processed worm meat, cooked them over a camp heater and ate under the rolling scarlet clouds that covered the sky more thickly every day. They laughed because they were alive and their stomachs full. Bingo began singing—poorly, but it convinced the other men to join in. Ham brought out some of the technical manuals he and his fellows had been given for their work, taught Ratter to read and write the language he had learned by sound alone. Ratter took to it with uncanny speed even for someone learning their third alphabet. Patches asked if he was merely humoring the other man’s attempt to help and did not seem to believe Ratter when he said he was not.

The farmers had books to trade, fiction and history and news briefs and science texts they had salvaged from the ruins nearby. Ratter bought two of them, brought them back to trade for others on the next visit. The words poured into his mind like water into a bucket. The world that once scared and confused him resolved into an image clearer than he had known existed. He finally understood the corporations that had yanked him about on a chain, the wars he had participated in, the crudeness with which he had been cut apart and remade. An inconspicuous marketing brochure tucked into a novel as a bookmark revealed the goal of it all: a soldier beyond compare, faster, smarter, more capable. Ratter did not feel any of those things—but then, none of his fellows could follow the words in his books, and not one of them could make his armored core move to their commands.

From the bartered texts, he learned to maintain his AC the way others had during his career. He spent much of his free time caring for the only thing that had cared for him for so long, before he’d met Tiny and his buddies. He cycled the fluid through the hydraulic lines, checked bolts and rivets for signs of corrosion, touched up the lubrication in the joints. He brought the AC to test readiness, turned the lights on and off, moved the limbs just enough to avoid contact welds from long periods of immobility. He scrubbed off the name his old masters had given it and painted a new one from his home in its place.

The other men had their own hobbies to fill the time not spent dismantling the Grid piece by careful piece. Ham covered every interior surface of their home with paintings, landscapes and abstract patterns in the bright, bold paints used in the factories, going along wall by wall and painting over his oldest pieces when he ran out of room. Bingo experimented with pipes and wires too damaged to trade, making a racket with musical instruments approximating those he had seen before the disaster. Patches and Tiny spent much of their free time on either side of the kludged-together table at the heart of their hideout, playing games on boards of warped metal with pieces shaped from broken bolts and stripped screws. Some, they recreated from their childhood; others were their own inventions.

Ratter asked Ham if he could use the empty logbook at the back of the man’s own manual as a journal, and his buddy laughed and helped him dig up a pen from the wreckage near their hideout. He began to record an account of his days but soon grew bored. He used the pen to wax poetic about the Coral instead.

About twice a week, Tiny would allow them to tap the pipe, and they would imbibe more Coral. It was only a week or two after Ratter had joined Tiny and his buddies that he first saw the voice—though it was neither sight nor hearing, but some new sense the Coral awoke in him.

“Why do you do this?” she asked. “Does it not harm you to touch the Coral so?”

“It is dangerous, I was warned,” he replied, marveling at the opportunity to speak his mother tongue and be understood for the first time since his childhood. “But I do it anyway, for it soothes the pain in my body and heart. Surely it is not such a bad thing, to risk one’s health for a taste of happiness.”

“Then drink,” she said, “for the world is cruel, and happiness hard to come by.”

He now knew enough to understand just how correct the voice was.

He could not have stopped regardless.

Ratter knew what addiction was from the times before his not-accident. He recognized it in himself now, how his hands shook when it grew close to his next dose. They all had them, the shakes. Bingo swore off the stuff on a weekly basis, only to give in before the next week was out.

The voice did not come to him every time he dosed, but she always returned eventually. He rejoiced each time, falling back into the language of his home with delight, for none he had met since then could speak it. They spoke of many things: the places Ratter had seen beyond Rubicon, his work collecting metal for the farmers, the kindnesses and cruelties he had endured. Soon, Ratter began to miss her even when he was sober. Ham thought that was daft. “The voice is in your head anyway,” he told Ratter. “You’re just missing yourself—the you that’s happy.” Ratter thought Ham might have enjoyed studying psychology in another life. A better, kinder life.

The world turned. Winter came, the second since fire scourged the sky. The farmers they traded with would no longer part with their food, not for metal nor Coral. They were sorry, they said, but they could not even share a meal with the men who had come to visit as they once had. The junkers returned to their hideaway with empty bellies and in poor spirits. Ham was perhaps the worst, for all he tried to hide it beneath a jovial exterior; the man enjoyed even the worst food as much as the rest of them enjoyed the Coral. Patches was bitter, Bingo sulking, Tiny lost in thought. There was no laughter around the heater that day, nor the next, as they ate sparingly and watched the cans of food remaining dwindle.

That evening, just over day after their failed trading trip beyond the cover of the grid, Tiny called the others to gather around the table they used for their games. “We need food,” he told them. “We thought the farmers would keep trading with us, so we didn’t save any.”

“Because Ham eats more than any of us,” Patches complained.

“I’m sorry,” Ham murmured, the portly man now so much more timid than he had been only days before.

“None of that,” Bingo said. “We can offer them more of the Coral. We have enough.”

Tiny shook his head. “If we didn’t bring enough, they would’ve said so. They don’t want the Coral anymore, and they didn’t even look at our metal.”

“Greedy bastards,” Patches complained. “They got what they needed from us, and now they’re leaving us to starve. They’re lucky we offered to trade at all!”

Ratter didn’t like what Patches was suggesting. He looked to Tiny to tell the man no.

Tiny stared at the battered tabletop, lost in thought.

“Hey, no,” Ham said. “We don’t… we’re not bandits, Patches.”

“I’m not saying we hurt anybody, see,” Patches said. “We just… remind ’em we could, you know? Why else are we keeping that big hunk of metal around?”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody, either,” Bingo said. “Sure, maybe they don’t need metal anymore, but there’s got to be someone around here who wants the Coral, right? It was all anyone cared about before.”

“Yeah!” Ham said, encouraged by the support. “What about those guys we passed by when we went exploring out east? Maybe they have some extra food.”

Ratter frowned. He hadn’t liked the look of those men. He’d felt something from them, that same light-that-was-sound-that-was-heat he felt from his fellows when they were freshly dosed with Coral. It didn’t seem right, that men could look so mean with the blessings of Rubicon alive in their veins.

“It’s risky,” Tiny said. “We don’t know them. We know the farmers.”

Ham hung his head.

“It wouldn’t come to a fight,” Tiny said, though he didn’t sound sure. “That old machine of Rats’ would put the fear into them.”

Ratter realized the other four were looking at him. Ham and Bingo would rather deal with the eastern group. Tiny and Patches were willing to steal, maybe to kill, if it kept food in their bellies. All were waiting for his vote.

He suddenly felt very small, for all that he towered over the others even sitting down.

“I didn’t come here to hurt anyone, boss,” he murmured to his knees. “I was running from that life when you found me.”

No one argued.

Tiny was the one to speak the decision aloud. “We’ll head east tomorrow, see if we can find those folks again. If they don’t have food themselves, they’ll know who does.”

They dosed again that night to ease the ache in their bellies, and the voice came to Ratter as it often did.

“Who are you?” he asked it as he felt the presence settle around him. He had never dared ask, before, or perhaps had lacked the presence of mind, but that day, the question fell from his mouth.

“I am Seria, part of the Coral you consume,” she answered. “My brothers and sisters and I.”

Ratter’s body clenched and shuddered worse than if he had not taken the Coral at all. “No!” he begged. “I am sorry, fair lady. I meant to hurt no one!”

“Fear not,” she said. “There will always be plenty.”

Ratter wept nonetheless. “If I were you, I would never allow this,” he told her, and was shamed by his deceit, for he knew he would not speak up when it came time to dose again.

Chapter Text

The five men set off on foot the next morning, carrying a small fuel cell full of Coral and a selection of their junk. They had not come this way in a long time, not since they had first seen the others nearly a year ago. Tiny had not wanted to risk angering them when there was no reason to risk causing trouble. The ache in their bellies after a meager breakfast gave them reason now.

The other group found them first. By unspoken consensus, Tiny did the talking, as he had with the farmers years ago. The other men laughed. They were not traders like Tiny and his junker buddies. They were bandits who took what they wished from those who could not fight back. They threatened to beat the five men and took their metal and their Coral. A man with a metal wrench lamed Ham’s arm when he spoke back.

Back in their own home, Ratter dredged forth everything he could remember from the books on medicine he had read. Tiny gave Ham the largest dose of the Coral he dared, drugging the man into unconsciousness so Ratter could poke and prod at his forearm without hurting him unnecessarily. Luck was with them all: as best he could tell through the skin, it was a clean, simple fracture of both bones. Ratter cleaned a three-meter length of twelve-centimeter cargo ties with detergent and boiling water. He used a thin steel rod as a splint and wrapped the ties around the arm and rod both, then applied plaster over the ties to keep them in the proper shape. Another cargo tie cut to length made a sling.

It was a long, cruel winter. The men dug through the Grid in an ever-widening search, breaking open any containers they could find in hopes of a meal. Dried beans and canned vegetables became precious treasures, and even the cans of worm meat the men had once made the butt of their jokes were cause for celebration. Still, it was not enough. Desperate, Patches and Tiny even ventured down to the surface to hunt the forearm-sized mealworms with sticks. Ratter had not known that anything could taste or smell worse than canned mealworm, but the fresh article managed it.

Ratter told Tiny that Ham should eat a larger share of their meager food to help his arm heal; Patches argued the opposite because the man could not work, even to scavenge. Tiny settled the dispute by declaring that each man would have an equal share of the food, and no one was happy. Ham especially was despondent. He had lost the use of his dominant arm, and could neither aid the others in finding food nor work with his paints. Ratter found it uncanny how his injury had fixed their home’s walls in time, the images no longer fluid and changing as the days passed by.

The mood worsened. Tiny returned to junk-work, filling their hideout with more metal than the farmers would ever buy, even in spring. Some days he would stay up late into the night counting it all, as though he might find a food tin between the screws and bolts. Bingo took to sleeping all hours of the day and could barely be prodded to join in the scavenging. Patches began taking longer and longer walks around their home; Ratter would often return from his own foraging to find him staring off the edge of the Grid as though the horizon held some secret only he could see.

A month later, Ratter woke with a knife to his throat.

Four of the junkers were bound and gathered around the table in the center of their home. Patches was not. He was in charge. The northern group had fought a war against itself. One side won. Patches had found the other on one of his walks, fleeing with everything they could carry. He had offered them a deal: he would lead them back to his hideout and share the Coral Tiny had found if the others swore to follow his leadership. The one thing the fleeing men hadn’t managed to take was any Coral; they were suffering and desperate for another dose. They had agreed.

None of the four other junkers knew what to do. The other group had brought weapons, cudgels and guns and even a half dozen muscle tracers stolen from elsewhere in the Grid. Tiny pleaded with him to reconsider, but Patches only grew more angry. This was all his fault, Patches said. He had failed them by not saving food, by losing metal and Coral to the northern group and getting Ham too injured to work rather than taking food from the farms. Things would be different under Patches’ leadership. They weren’t just junkers anymore. Patches decided to name their group the Coyotes to reflect their new ‘teeth’. Ratter privately though Patches would make a better hyena than a coyote.

The junkers knew when they were beat. Patches’ new friends outnumbered them three to one. They guarded their weapons jealously, even the MTs, which only they knew how to use. Bingo watched stone-faced as the men tossed his hand-made instruments off the side of the Grid, mocking him all the while. Ham fumed in silence as some of the people who had injured his arm now treated the junkers’ home like their own. Patches favored his new enforcers over his previous friends; the junkers were given less food, fewer blankets, and more work. Often, they would be forced to maintain their new superiors’ MTs at gunpoint, lest they get any ideas about sabotage. Ratter did the work without complaint. ‘Less food than the Coyotes’ was still more food than he’d had the month before.

The one thing they shared evenly among the now fourteen-member group was the Coral, and only because Patches was just as miserly with the substance to his new friends as his old. Ham suffered most from the new restrictions. He’d been dosing more frequently to deal with the pain of his broken arm, and now suffered shakes if he went without for only two days. At least his arm healed well. When Ratter cut the cast off a few weeks later to reveal that his injury was no more, the whole group was impressed. Among the Coyotes were some of the men who had seen Ham injured. Ham in particular wept with joy. A factory worker before the disaster, Ham could not have afforded such care then. The injury might have crippled him for life.

Ratter found himself made the group’s doctor. It did not earn him any extra food, only lighter work, that he might always be available to tend to their wounds. Ratter was simply glad he would no longer be asked to follow the Coyotes down to the surface to threaten the farmers. He spent the extra time tending to his old armored core resting in the hangar above their living area.

Patches was not only miserly with the Coral, he was fiercely protective of it. He drained the whole pipe into a large fuel container dragged in from elsewhere in the Grid and kept it under lock and key, portioning out only one dose a week to each man. As he was no longer sent to raid or scavenge, Ratter spent his days keeping a close eye on the Coral, suspicious of Patches’ control over the container. Perhaps if he caught Patches stealing, he could… he did not know. It was a foolish plan, and doomed to failure. Ratter would come to realize that Patches had stopped dosing completely sometime over the winter. The walks he had taken must have been to hide the shakes.

Ratter told himself that one day, he would stop dosing as well. He was lying to himself. The relief he found from each dose eclipsed even the shame and horror he felt once the fog faded. The voice never once reproached him for his addiction. She described the Contact his dosing mediated as a form of symbiosis. Ratter didn’t understand. How could one organism consuming another be symbiosis? How could she be so kind to him even as she condemned the men around him for their sins? She was so kind. He felt sure that he could quit dosing if only she was there to help. Perhaps it was the ultimate excuse, locking the path to recovery behind an impossible gate so he would never have to walk it.

One day near the end of winter, Bingo and one of the Coyotes did not return from a journey to the surface beneath the Grid. The farmers they had been preying on had grown desperate. They had fought. Bingo, another Coyote, and all of the farmers were killed. Another of Patches’ men had been gutshot. Ratter stopped the bleeding but lacked the proper supplies to prevent sepsis. He tried his best. The man died anyway. Ratter’s standing fell in the eyes of the group.

Bingo’s death changed things for the remaining junkers. Gentle, taciturn Ham could not fill the silence ever-boisterous Bingo had left, though he tried. Tiny stopped talking all together, moving through his duties like a zombie. Ratter finally buried the man Patches had once been in his heart even as he continued to follow the man Patches was now.

Patches had not sent the Coyotes to kill the farmers. He had not sent them to hurt the farmers, except by depriving them of food that the Coyotes needed to survive. Perhaps, if he had not, it would be the junkers and Coyotes who had died. And yet it was without question that the extortion had led to desperation had led to violence, and now many innocent lives were lost for the gain of none. Ratter could not call the man who set the events in motion his buddy any longer. Had he the power to undo the harm Patches had done, he might have acted on it.

Bingo had spoken out against robbing the farmers alongside Ham at that fateful meeting; he had taken bruises for speaking out against it a second time once the Coyotes took over. It was only on Patches’ orders that Bingo had been part of the group that day. He had not deserved to die any more than the farmers had.

The Coyotes tried to work the fields, but they did know how to run the machines responsible for caring for the plants. They turned to Ratter, but the farmers had never traded the texts they used for their own work, and Ratter could not find them now. The plants withered and died, and the food situation once again grew perilous. Rations were reduced, then reduced again. Tiny developed a wracking cough. Ham stopped painting again, injured not in body this time but in spirit.

A month later, Patches called everyone together on the deck outside their home. Ham had been caught trying to steal food, or so Patches said. Ham denied it. Ratter would not be surprised if Ham had tried to steal, for their rations were meager, but he trusted Ham more than Patches now. One of the Coyotes cuffed him about the head when he said so. Another threatened him with a heavy wrench. Ratter was cowed.

Patches sentenced Ham to be thrown from the edge of the Grid to the ground nearly a kilometer below. Two of the Coyotes did the deed while the rest watched, hands resting on weapons. Tiny stared with dead eyes, barely more lively than a corpse except when the coughing took him. Ratter also said nothing. If he spoke up again, he would be killed. If he tried to intervene, or even to leave, he would be killed. He would not dishonor Ham by dying then.

No one was watching him that night. Patches thought Ratter domesticated. He was the group’s doctor, someone valuable, more Coyote than junker despite his lack of privilege. The other Coyotes did not trust him so much as think him beneath notice. Ratter sent the man guarding the Muscle Tracers away on an errand so he could sever their hydraulic lines and spill their fuel to trickle down through the gaps in the metal deck beneath them. He moved on to the food stores, sending the man there to find the MT guard while he raided their least perishable goods. He went back to the long-neglected supplies of salvage, still neatly sorted beneath months of dust, gathered as much as he could fit into a massive double-layered canvas sack along with the food, and left it by the Coral.

The last thing Ratter did was to visit Tiny’s cell. The man was a broken shadow of himself, but he was Ratter’s last connection to the old group of junkers. Ratter asked Tiny if he wished to escape with him. Tiny shook his head. “Just go, damn you,” the man whispered between coughs. “Off-world, if you can. Find something better than this place, Rats.”

Ratter went.

They had no guards on Astłik. Patches believed it no longer ran. He thought Ratter’s maintenance a ritual rather than something useful, much like the ragged journal Ratter still kept on his person. Astłik stepped forward out of its long slumber in the warehouse above their home to find the Coyotes running every which way on the street below. Patches screamed and raged at them to fix their damaged MTs and find the saboteur. Such was the severity of his frenzy that he did not notice Ratter approaching until Astłik’s shadow fell upon him.

The year and a half he’d spent with Tiny and the junkers had been the best of Ratter’s life. He had believed he might live out the rest of his days without ever taking up arms against another man again. Bingo’s death had hardened his heart, but it was the screams Ham had uttered as he fell to his death that had broken his resolve and fanned his wrath into a cold, hard flame.

For the first time in his life, Ratter chose to commit violence of his own free will. His first such act was a murder.

Astłik’s foot smashed Patches flat before the man could recover his wits enough to flee, his pleas falling on deaf metal. The Coyotes scattered, the machines they might have used against Ratter already scrap. Ratter broke into the building with Astłik, lifted the Coral container onto its shoulder and the sack in its other hand, and set out west into the Grid. He dosed once the morning he set out, then again the next morning, then that very evening. Never before had he had so much Coral to himself. He could have bathed in it, sunk into the Coral until it stripped his flesh from his bones and burned even those to ash. The voice he heard when he dosed urged him to.

Ratter persevered.

Chapter Text

Astłik could walk further in a day than any man could walk in a week. Ratter resisted the siren song of the Coral on his back, dosing only once each week after his first lapse. Each week, the voice came to him. The month after he departed the Coyotes was the longest the voice had come to him without cease. Knowing she would come, he shifted to taking smaller doses, that they could speak with less of the psychoactive effects clouding his mind.

It was only then that Ratter came to truly believe the voice was more than a product of the high. He knew enough about the brain to know how little he knew. It would not amaze him if a drug could fool the senses into hearing something that didn’t exist. His foremost doubt was that none of the other Dosers could hear her voice despite their own dosing. She had explained that the augments he had been given allowed the Coral to impart meaning to his nervous system in addition to the blurry noise that formed the drug high, but Ratter considered that explanation to be well within the realm of something his own mind could invent to justify itself, so he did not trust it.

Now, more alone than he had ever been, Ratter had no one to anchor his doubts to. He gave in to delusion. Seria was delighted. She had been distant for as long as he had known her, drawn by curiosity yet resentful of his disbelief, but as his doubts abandoned him, she warmed to his company. She spoke of her people and the harm humans had done them, those same humans who had brought him to Rubicon and lied to him to obtain his cooperation. Her stories were things Ratter did not think his own imagination capable of inventing, even were they false, and so he accepted the impossible.

Among the many Seria explained to him was the nature of her existence within the Coral: most critically, that the burning (or dosing) of a single mote or a thousand mattered little so long as enough of the Coral remained to host her. Ratter wept once more, this time with relief, for he truly wished to harm no other despite his addiction.

He passed through another group’s territory, then another’s and another’s. Tiny’s junkers had been an anomaly, a speck of goodness ignorant of the evils of the world. These groups were not. Some were like the Coyotes, bullying those weaker than them and fleeing before those stronger; they scattered like cockroaches before Astłik, and Ratter paid them no mind. Others were more like the junkers, survivors doing their best to look after themselves in a dying world; they greeted Ratter warily, and did not take their eyes off Astłik until he disappeared into the chaos of the damaged Grid. All wore weapons openly, like insects advertising the potency of their sting.

Sometimes, one of the latter groups was bold enough to invite Ratter to trade with them. They left their weapons outside of the hangar, and Ratter got out of Astłik. Most had plenty of metal and too little food; Ratter had the same, so few deals were struck. More rarely still, a group would ask that he join them. Even without a weapon to its name, Astłik would do better to protect their enclaves than a battered Muscle Tracer or two and the few hand-held slug-throwers they scavenged. Ratter regretfully declined each time. He did not think he would mind being a deterrent, not when Astłik was pointed at aggressors rather than innocents, but the spray of Patches’ blood under its heel had joined the thousand similar events in his nightmares. He did not wish to fight again. They parted as amicably as two parties could in such scarce and uncertain times.

Pacifism was not the only reason Ratter declined. Even when he could feel her presence humming in his veins, Seria would not deign to speak with him until he had put some distance between himself and the people he happened across. Even an entire community could not replace the friend he had made during his journey. Seria, Ratter had quickly learned, did not like even a single human who was not him. Even in death, loyal Ham and cheerful Bingo could not earn her approval. That was perhaps more Ratter’s fault than theirs, for Seria held against them the years Ratter had dismissed her voice as a product of his own imaginings.

Seria had more than enough reasons to dislike humans, Ratter would admit. He was not the first to speak with one of Seria’s family. The scientists had given their first round of subjects too much of the Coral; it had killed them, some quickly and some with horrifying slowness, but not before one found Contact with one of Seria’s brothers. He had spent some time talking with the human before their inevitable and unenviable death, and returned to his family speaking in haunted terms of the things he had found.

Seria also told Ratter a story of the Cataclysm, a secret she did not believe any other human still living knew. The fire that had scorched Rubicon was no accident. Coral would not catch fire without a spark of equal size, and this spark had been struck within the confines of that same accursed laboratory. (Ratter asked her if that did not make it more likely to be an accident, for that laboratory was exactly where the most reckless and callous scientists gathered to experiment with the Coral. Seria scoffed. If there were any who would know both how to invent such horror and the consequences of doing so, they would be among the men of the laboratory. The idea that one would do so by accident required negligence so terrible it was no less so than the intentional act.)

Lastly, Seria spoke of the things Ratter himself had experienced, and the things he had learned of the world. Her people did not have the same concept of ‘family’ humans did, and yet that was how they treated each other one and all, to the point that Seria had never seen cause to refer to them as anything but her brothers and sisters. How did humanity treat each other? How had they treated Ratter? The scientists and their callous cruelty. The Corporations and their all-consuming greed. Mars’ government and the brutality with which it enforced its will. The harm he had been forced to endure, and the harm he had been forced to inflict. Were all these not enough for him to judge his people?

But Ratter remembered the kindness of people, as well. The joy he still carried in the blurry memories of his long-lost home: the gentleness of his parents and their town in one of Earth’s decivilized zones, the memories worn thin by the long years since yet no less precious to him for it. The small kindnesses even in the cruelty of the Corporation’s worlds, like how people would hold a door open for another person carrying too much to work the mechanism. The way Tiny had invited a stranger to shelter with him and his buddies just to spare him the horror of wandering the ruins alone. When people were free to choose, Ratter believed, they would most often choose to be kind. To be as family to each other.

Seria challenged his assertion, pointing to the betrayal he had suffered at the hands on one he called his friend. But Patches had not been free to choose, Ratter argued. Like the people who worked for the Corporations, Patches had been bound by hunger and fear. The people he had found had been bound by their cravings for the Coral.

What of Ham and Bingo? Seria asked. What of the injustice of their fates?

They were the reason Patches was dead, Ratter responded, and Ratter himself had done the deed not in the throws of rage but the cold, calculating clarity of wrath, so perhaps he was no less wicked.

Or perhaps, Seria said, he was no more free.

The Coral container was still at 80% capacity; it had taken fifteen men many months to drain it as much as they had, and Ratter no longer drank as deeply as when he had set out. Seria had urged him before to throw himself into it back when he had thought her the manifestation of his suicidal ideation. Now she spoke in certain terms of the consequences, the possibilities. To set himself free, to become one with the Coral as Seria was. To cross the Threshold between humanity and the Coral.

If Ratter shared Seria’s view of humanity, he may have found himself tempted. But each time, he remembered the gentleness of Ham’s smiles as he painted, the raucous joy with with Bingo debuted each new noisemaking device, the care with which Tiny shared his knowledge of the Grid’s wonders, and yes, even Patches, faithful Patches, who had once spent a full week failing to instill an appreciation for checkers into Ratter’s stubborn head, laughing merrily all the while.

There was good in humanity, he knew. Someday, he hoped Seria would see it as well.

Around a year after he began wandering, Ratter crossed from Central Belius into Western Belius. Gradually, the Grid thinned, and more structures began appearing on the ground below. The people changed as well. One day, Astłik entered a settlement where no people reached for their weapons. Children ran out into the street to marvel at the metal giant that had come to town.

“What are those?” Seria asked, delighted curiosity spilling into his mind. It was the first time she had spoken to him in the presence of another human since he’d left the junker Coyotes a year before.

“Children,” Ratter said, marveling at them in turn. He did not believe that the whole of the Grid behind him lacked children among the survivors, but any present had been kept well away from strangers. The people here were not so suspicious. The survivors’ knowledge and the resources of the surrounding ruins allowed them to farm in the Grid itself, far from the contaminated surface, and food was not so scarce. Their weapons were stored neatly beside their houses, easy to access but not ready to hand.

The people here were not Dosers as many he had passed had been. They did not well regard those people, and that Ratter partook was a measure against him. Still, the people of the hamlet offered him a place in it, if he was willing to work. The children had already charmed Seria. Ratter accepted. He allowed the people a share of his Coral for their generator and promised to take none of their own. It was a promise he would unknowingly break in the months and years to come, for the townsfolk secreted some of their Coral back into the container in thanks for his many works.

He gave up his Doser name, his pilot name, the one he had carried with him since his return to Rubicon. He was no longer Ratter. He had long since ceased to be C1-442.

He was Sasun Dolmayan, and he had a home.

The work was simple, honest stuff. The people built their own buildings, the factories at the edge of the Grid made to a scale too grand for human use. Dolmayan took Astłik into one of the factories and carefully removed a plasma-cutter from the rusting factory line, anchored it well to Astłik’s arm and hooked it into the control and power lines that had once worked a prototype laser glaive. The old tool arm could cut through the toughest of metals, for it had once served to trim starship armor to size, and at lower power could weld it back together again. The work of a month by the whole town to erect a structure was now done in days. He built the frames of three new hydroponic farms before the month was out.

A festival followed. One of the townspeople brought out an instrument Dolmayan recognized from Bingo’s cobbled-together projects, its wood a rarity amidst the cold metal of the Grid. The man named it a guitar and offered to teach Dolmayan to play it. Dolmayan learned quickly, as he had ever since the scientists had changed him. Bingo had never managed more than a screeching whine from his attempts to recreate the thing, but its soothing tones reminded Dolmayan of him all the same.

One day not long into Dolmayan’s second year in the hamlet, a child fell through a rusted deck plate and broke his leg. Confident after his success with Ham, Dolmayan took charge. The break in the bone was much worse, so Dolmayan had to operate. He was lucky the shipyards the nearby factories supplied often used pure titanium for their small parts, and that the townsfolk had carefully hoarded medical supplies sourced from miles around. He carefully reassembled the bone, fastened it together, and stitched the incision closed. He wrapped a splint around the limb and covered it in plaster.

Six months after that, the cast came off. The child could walk again. Dolmayan cared little for the esteem the hamlet heaped on him and much for the smile of the child as he ran and jumped about the town square. He took on an apprentice, the lad’s elder sister, and taught her all he could recall of medicine. She recorded it in a book by hand, with charcoal, and then again in another with handmade ink.

Life was good again. Yet still, Seria was not content. She could not trust these people who held Dolmayan at arms length despite years of familiarity, for whom no amount of healing the sick might override suspicion of his Coral habit, and who averted their eyes when he tapped the Coral container and shunned him in her presence. Even his apprentice looked at him with pity when she thought him unaware. Seria especially resented how even the children kept their distance from Dolmayan, for they were the only ones she found tolerable.

Dolmayan thought their parents wise for keeping the children away from him. He was a good man, he thought, but he was not a good example to follow. Addiction was a monster coiled around his heart. He could not, and would not, judge the people of the hamlet for shunning his poor behavior. They had seen a strange man in a stranger machine approach them, had mistrusted his vices, and still offered him a place in their home as though he were family. That was the kindness Dolmayan knew humanity to be capable of, so long as they had the safety and freedom to grant it.

Seria did not protest, but neither was she convinced. The scars of the past ran too deep.

Chapter Text

Years passed. Laughter and wind wore lines into Dolmayan’s face. Gray hairs appeared in his beard. His knees began to trouble him when he worked. Sometimes, when the loneliness found him in the dark hours of morning, Seria would speak once more of his choice. Of the Threshold, and what lay beyond. Dolmayan longed to see it, but that longing could not overpower his love for his fellow men.

Discouraged, she began to wander again, to wherever it was she went when she was not waiting for him to dose. Each time a dose did not bring her voice felt a waste of time and Coral both. The high itself no longer appealed to him; where once it had blotted out a cruel and painful world, it now served only to blur the beauty of the hamlet and its people. If not for the shakes that plagued his limbs and the craving that scourged his heart, he might have quit years ago.

‘Might have’ only because each dose of the Coral might bring Seria, and each time it did was a better balm than any drug. Yet Seria herself grew increasingly melancholy. The children had long since ceased to amused her. She wished to leave this place, and asked Dolmayan to come with her. Dolmayan agreed, already thinking of how he might explain his departure. A return of his wanderlust, he thought, would offend no one.

But Seria made herself clear: she had seen enough of humanity and would truck with them no more. She no longer wished to accompany Dolmayan the man, she wished to accompany Dolmayan who had crossed the Threshold into the Coral flow. It was the one request Dolmayan could not grant. She issued an ultimatum: humanity or her. Dolmayan rebuked her, for such an ultimatum was too cruel to give a friend.

They fought bitterly that night. Both said things they would regret. She lambasted the selfish nature of humanity, dismissing the hamlet as an anomaly doomed to follow in the junkers’ footsteps. He swore a reckless oath to prove her judgment wrong.

Seria departed long before the Coral began to leave his system, making her decision to part ways clear. Her last words were that he would not hear her voice again.

Dolmayan waited for morning. He called out to the townsfolk to gather around as they began their days. The years since he had come to the hamlet, he told them, were the best of his life. After so long wandering the dense, desperate Grid of central Belius, their town had been a balm for his heart. He thought perhaps to tell them then of the voice he heard when he dosed, but he knew well their thoughts on the practice, and he was that day still an addict. He spoke instead of wanderlust, of the desire to see what yet awaited him beyond the grids. A white lie that was also a truth.

Years ago, he had forged Astłik a toolbox sized for an AC. It was into this the townfolk set about piling the worth of their regard for their doctor, their teacher, their friend. Food such that Dolmayan had to refuse any more lest it go bad before he could eat it. Blankets and tent-poles; clothes, coats, and cushions; trinkets and mementos. The old man who had taught Dolmayan the guitar insisted he take the instrument with him and could not be dissuaded, and Dolmayan wept freely for his kindness. All was carefully arranged within the family-bathtub-sized body of the toolbox, and then Dolmayan departed the Grid, flaring Astłik’s boosters as he descended through tangled knots of scaffolding and strut-work.

He left the container holding the Coral behind him. He would approach the next town not as an addict but as a changed man.

A week out from the hamlet that its residents had never named, the shakes took him. He developed a great fever and could no longer hold food or drink within him. The world ran boiling hot and freezing cold in turns, and Dolmayan realized he had dosed too much over the course of his life. He would die. It was no wonder Seria had urged him so.

But the fever broke. The shakes still came, but they grew gentler as time passed. He did not attempt to hide them when they came, no matter who might see, but spoke freely of his past and his mistakes. He had dosed on the Coral, he admitted. Now he did not. Within the rapture of Rubicon’s blessing, he had heard a voice condemning humanity for their sins, and so he had left that sin behind him. He now wished only to spread a message of peace and kindness for one’s fellows: that a man must treat all the world as his family.

When he first began his journey, the people he met considered him a mere oddity, but as he continued to travel in a slow spiral out into Western and Central Belius, path gradually widening but occasionally detouring through his previous course, he witnessed a slow but steady change in his reception. Some of it came from his preaching, to be sure. His message touched the hearts of people hardened by years of harsh living and rekindled in them the hope of better days to come. Following his sermons, he would take the guitar from the bundle of blankets he used to protect it and pay for their time with the happiest songs he had learned, and that too endeared him to the people he met.

The people of Rubicon knew well that to offer aid to to ones fellow townsfolk and accept aid in turn was the foundation that allowed them to survive as long as they had. The tensions between the old labor classes, the resentment of the engineer by the factory worker and the factory worker by the farmer and the farmer by the miner, had been set aside only by necessity. The idea that such had not merely been practical but righteous helped to finally smother those old embers. The call to expand that effort to the towns around them and then onward to the whole became, in turn, a call to return Rubicon to the land of relative plenty they remembered from a decade prior. Perhaps they did not expect anything to come of it, but the people enjoyed his sermons enough that they began to call him ‘Father’ Dolmayan with fondness, for man must treat all the world as his family.

But that was not the largest reason for the change. Dolmayan had not set out to do such, but as one of the few both willing and able to travel beyond the safety of the scattered enclaves, he found himself a rare source of news from town to town, whether it was the discovery of some new method of living or simply that such-and-such person had survived and wished to know if her family had likewise. Astłik itself was also a welcome aid for a hundred different tasks, from raising barns to clearing the debris that occasionally rained down from the disparate remnants of Grid overhead when the storms grew particularly severe.

At first, the townspeople had tolerated Dolmayan and his ramblings with good humor; within a year they welcomed him and feasted his arrival, flocking to hear his news and staying for the sermons long into the night. Even those towns he had not reached before had often heard of him, for his wanderings did not follow the roads but were erratic and frequently retread old ground. It was not long before people—mostly youths, but some approaching Dolmayan’s own age—attached themselves to Astłik in a baggage train. Some sought adventure, some travel, and some simply to follow the man whose message had brought hope and kindness to their hard lives. The convoy found its own function in turn. Many in the cities had working factories and not enough food; many in the country had working fields and not enough manufactured goods. The trucks trailing after Astłik bore samples of goods from place to place, not as a mercantile enterprise but as the bearer of good news for those who had not known whether the smoke in the distance came from industry or chaos. The people began to call he and those who traveled with him messengers, which soon became The Messengers.

Everywhere he went, Dolmayan preached his vision for Rubicon and humanity, his love of his fellow man and the things they created together. Sometimes, he would speak of the start of his journey, the voice he had heard in the Coral. He knew well how people would find it: that an addled man had prayed for deliverance and dreamed up a God to shame him into action and urge him to spread kindness where he had once spread harm. Dolmayan would have thought the same had he not lived it himself. He preached it anyway, for in the story lay a parable of redemption for any man willing to work for the betterment of himself and his neighbor.

That view—of a fool Doser whose guilt manifested before his drug-addled mind to inspire him to urge kindness for all—would change soon. The catalyst had occurred even before Dolmayan had left the hamlet to begin his pilgrimage. A former factory worker scavenging near an old Coral pipe had found mealworms larger than men grazing around the side of an old leak. The hungry man had shot and butchered one, and found the flesh not merely edible but less distasteful than the common forearm-length mealworms who filter-fed from cleaner soil.

Now with a potential use for fresh Coral, the man followed the pipe to a fuel depot where a few canisters of Coral still waited for transport to the space elevator far to the south. The man took one of the containers back to his village and began to scatter a small amount of the Coral for the mealworms in one of the ash-choked fields nearby each day. Within a month they had doubled in size. Within six they were as large as the ones he had seen near the pipe. After two years they were larger than the trucks he had worked to assemble before the world ended. The meat was even more palatable than the smaller specimen he had hunted near the pipe, though it was still mealworm.

The same man had eagerly shared the story of his success with Dolmayan and his still-small baggage train of Messengers (then only three men and a woman in an old truck) over a plate of roasted mealworm, and the Messengers had shared the technique with every town they passed through from them on. Their next visits to those towns saw the people fatter and healthier. Not only were the townsfolk better fed, their fields would once again yield a few precious vegetables and herbs. Each mealworm now filtered hundreds of kilograms of soil per day, and where once it had been common knowledge that the pests would eat the fertilizer right out of the fields, now the dirt they left was cleaner and better for farming than what it had become following the Fires.

As the Messengers rarely visited any single town more than once a year and never more than twice, it took another two years for Dolmayan to notice the increase in demands for the stories of the start of his journey, and by the time he realized what was happening and what it meant, it was too late to alter the course of the narrative. Dolmayan had never claimed to be the source of anything but his own desire for peace, compassion, and cooperation, but each new discovery he spread inevitably attached to his self in the minds of the villages he brought it to. In this case, that discovery was nothing less than a miracle twice over: once for the surplus of meat, and once for the restorative effect on the soil itself. Dolmayan had not considered the significance people would attach to the fact that in this case, the cornerstone of both miracles was the Coral, and he all-but its self-described herald.

To those who flocked to his sermons, he was no longer Dolmayan, the old fool who had found God at the bottom of a drug phial. He was now Dolmayan The Messenger, who had spoken to the Coral and been given the gift of life with which to seed a barren earth and restore the Rubicon of yesteryear. He had not set out to found a religion, and had anyone suggested it, he would have replied that spinning tall tales and obscuring the world with mysticism was no way to spread a message about how to do right by your fellow man. But he had not once lied in his tellings by his own will, and could not have known of the rumors taking shape in his absence.

Dolmayan knew enough about people to know that he could either embrace the role and ensure his words were not misquoted beyond recognition, or fight it and send people looking elsewhere for their signs and portents. Finding himself on a boat approaching the rapids, he elected to steer rather than jump ship and swim for shore.

He would have a very interesting next few years.

Chapter Text

“You little punk!”

‘Sticky’ Eule had known he was fucked the moment he heard the garage door open, but he ran for it anyway. The boy vaulted the old metal barrel he’d been half-hidden behind, zagged between the decrepit, long-dead machines littering the hangar floor, and had just about made it to the service exit when the long, strong legs of the man who’d peeped him caught up. Eule found himself hoisted off the floor by the back of his too-large jacket, the sudden stop forcing the air from his lungs in a rush, and there he dangled in the huge, meaty hand of his captor.

The man was strong enough to turn Eule about and lift him until they were eye level, and large enough that the lad’s feet were near a meter off the ground when he did. He sucked in a breath as his eyes met the giant’s, a glimmer of red visible in the blackness of his pupils.

Eule was fucked. This guy wasn’t just some tech, he was—

“What were you doing to my AC, eh, boy?”

—the hells-damned pilot.

A tech would’ve been content to beat a kid found filching from the garage before doing their best to hide the damage. Everyone knew pilots would kill you just for touching their machine without permission, never mind the mischief Eule had been up to.

“Quiet type, are you?” the giant asked. He gave Eule a shake enough to make the boy a little motion-sick, then headed off towards the AC while still holding the kid’s feet most of a meter off the floor. Eule hadn’t bothered trying to hide his crime, more concerned with flight than anything else, so the old length of hose he’d borrowed from his parent’s farmstead still dangled from the AC’s leg, a trickle of hydraulic fluid continuing to drain into the repurposed petrol jug below.

“You got some real nerve, kid,” the pilot told him, “siphoning hydraulic fluid from an AC. What would make you go do a fool thing like that?”

Something in Eule snapped. He was tired, hungry, and dirty from field work. He knew the things his parents tried to hide from him, how fewer and fewer vegetables and grains made it through the seasons each year, their growing concern for his young, sickly sister. The farmstead that could once have fed a whole village now produced barely enough for a single family, and this season he and his father couldn’t even gather it all before it rotted in the fields because they were doing so on foot across half a hundred barely-arable acres.

He was done with this shithole world.

“Fuck you, old man!” Eule yelled. The giant swung him away as he threw his first punch, leaving him kicking, flailing, and screaming in the opposite direction of his rage’s target, but Eule wasn’t about to let that stop him. “You soldiers are nothing but pests! Ruining our fields! Eating our food! How come you have a stupid AC when we can’t even run our tractors? Your fancy bot gonna feed you? Huh? Fuck you! I hate the army, I hate ACs, and I hate you! So just kill me already and be done with it!”

Fury spent, Eule went limp in his jacket, wondering how painful dying was and how it compared to the hunger of the last few years. He was not expecting the giant to drop him and so spilled ass-over-teakettle to end up on his bum next to the AC’s foot heavy, rivet-studded foot.

The man ignored the footstool Eule had pilfered from the other side of the shop, needing only to reach up to unhook the hose from the hydraulic line Eule had cut. He wrapped it around his arm thrice to coil it, nice and neat like Eule’s father had taught him, and set it down next to the half-full can.

“You’re all right, kid,” the man told him as he worked, “but what kinda tractor needs hydraulic fluid?”

“My da always told me the only difference between hydraulic fluid and transmission fluid was the price,” Eule answered, baffled by the turn in the conversation.

The man frowned. “He’s not exactly wrong,” he allowed. “Not enough it’d break something rugged as a frontier tractor, anyway. What’s your name, kid?”

“My friends call me ‘Sticky’.”

“I bet they do, but I asked for your name, son.”

The man hadn’t hurt him yet, so Eule sullenly answered, “Eule Flatwell, boss.”

“Eule, then. How old are you?”

“Seven.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Try again.”

“Seven Mars standard!” Eule repeated, feeling more than a little slighted by the skepticism. “I’ll be seven and a half next month! Da says I don’t get enough to eat, that’s all.”

The giant harrumphed, but accepted the answer. “You can call me Dolmayan,” he said. “That enough for your tractor?”

“Huh?”

“That can,” ‘Dolmayan’ said, gesturing at the item in question. “That enough to top off your tractor’s transmission?”

Eule glanced at the can. The floodlight lighting the garage from its opposite side cast an obvious shadow of the liquid within: a couple of liters, easily. “Should be?”

The giant motioned for Eule to stand, then picked up the hose and can and passed them into the baffled kid’s arms. Eule took a moment to settle the hose around his shoulder, then looked up at the giant once more time.

“Why?” he asked.

The giant reached down and ruffled Eule’s hair with one great, meaty palm, an act the kid’s one free arm could do nothing to prevent. “You’ve got heart, kid,” the giant said, “but you need to learn to listen to your brain, too. Think of a way out of trouble before you go getting into it, and you’ll go far. Now off you go.”

Eule went, carrying the can of hydraulic/transmission fluid eight kilometers down the road to his ma and da’s farm. The next morning, before even the first light of dawn, he carried a sack of everything he owned all the way back into the old town that had sprung up around the fuel stop years before the big fire his parents always whispered about.

“What’re you doing back here, kid?” the giant asked when he found the youth sitting on his AC’s foot shortly after sunrise, the small sack thrown over his shoulder. “What’d I tell you about using your brain, hmm?”

“I used my brain!” Eule whined. “Da got the tractor running, so now he doesn’t need me around the farm anymore, and there’s not enough food for the four of us anyway. You’re not like the other soldiers around here. You got a code or something, like Nine-Ball in the holos, and I want to come with you.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you see on the holos, kid,” the man said. “Hell, you probably shouldn’t believe any of it. Nine-Ball’s not real. He a character. Fiction.”

“I know what a story is,” Eule grumbled. “I’m not stupid. They don’t even get the same actor every time.”

“And yet you still decided to run away from home with a man you only ever met once?”

“I’m not running!” Eule said. “I told my da I traded my work for the can of fluid and I wouldn’t be back soon, so it’s not running away! Ma gave me a token for luck and everything!” He stuck his hand into his coat and came out with the shiny dollar coin his ma had pressed into his hand before he’d left, showing the geographical region of Belius on its front and an image of farmers harvesting grain on its back. “She said it’s no good as money anymore, but it’ll remind me of home. Besides, you let me go even though I tried to rob you. You can’t be that bad. What’s your name, anyway? Like, your pilot name?”

The man sighed. “I gave up mine a long time ago.”

“Well that’s no good,” Eule said. “You gotta have one, so now you’re Thumb.”

The pilot’s smile turned to confusion. “‘Thumb’?”

“Thumb,” Eule repeated, brushing his messy bangs aside and pointing to where the man’s parting manhandling the previous day had left a clear thumbprint in actuator grease in the center of his forehead, only slightly smudged by a half-hearted attempt to remove it. “You can’t have an AC without a nickname. That bit’s not just a story, is it?”

Thumb blinked, then threw his head back and laughed. “Well then! Guess I’m Thumb, now.”

“So how do we get in?”

Thumb’s laughter stopped.

“Sorry, kid,” he said. “ACs only sit one. It’s a lonely road.”

The words brought Eule’s dreams crashing down around him. He’d thought… he’d thought accepting the name meant they were… whatever people traveling together were. Companions, or something like that.

“I’m messing with you, kid,” Thumb said. “Not about the AC, sorry. You’ll be riding with my buddies. Say, you know how to drive?”

Eule tried as hard as he could to scowl, but he couldn’t stop the smile. “Da taught me to run the tractor…”

“Good enough. Lowie can teach you the rest if you want to take a turn with the truck. Come on.” Thumb turned to head back into the front room of the machine shop, but Eule had one more question to ask.

“What’re we trying to do, anyway?”

Thumb turned around to fix Eule with a look. “You’re only asking that now?”

“It can’t be worse than sitting around on a farm that won’t grow food anymore,” Eule told him.

“Suppose it isn’t, at that,” Thumb allowed. “We’re looking for people who want a better life on Rubicon. People who want to live with the Coral, rather than just tearing it out of the ground.

“We’re looking for a future.”

Chapter Text

Dolmayan’s buddies were five men and a woman crammed into the cab and cargo bed of an old two-door pickup truck, black with a hand-painted stylized mote of Coral on the passenger door. A man almost as large as Dolmayan who introduced himself as Rorit described the adornment as a ‘dandelion-fluff mote’ and looked sad when Eule asked what a dandelion was. He had known these people for less than a minute and already he had disappointed one of them. His journey was not off to a promising start.

The other six arrived at a swift consensus that Eule should ride in the cab. His clothing was not as thick as theirs, and while it served him fine when he walked, it wouldn’t keep him comfortable at highway speeds. Additionally, it would be far easier for Lowie, the driver, to answer his questions without having to shout over the wind.

Eule didn’t have many questions of his own, in part because he didn’t know much of anything about what he’d signed on for beyond the charisma of Dolmayan himself. Lowie was well prepared to deal with that and went over the broad strokes of what Eule was missing without needing his input.

The group called themselves the Messengers. In large part, this was because they offered one of the few means of communication between towns now that the Coral storms in the sky had rendered the old civilian equipment incapable of pushing through the interference. Almost as important, however, was that Dolmayan—Lowie referred to him as ‘Father’ Dolmayan without fail—was a traveling preacher, spreading his ‘Message’ from town to town.

The Messengers, and those who came to Father Dolmayan’s sermons in the towns they passed through, worshiped the Coral. Eule though that was weird, though he knew better than to say to Lowie’s face. He could think of a half dozen things he’d rather worship: the sky, the soil, the mountains… even the mealworms, native pests that ate crop seed out of the soil, might be appeased as one would evil spirits. But Lowie’s faith was obvious and sincere, so Eule smiled and asked follow-up questions like he would whenever his father slowed down one of his tasks about the farm to impart the skill to his son.

The fastest vehicle Eule had ever ridden before today was the smaller of the two tractors his father kept. When he’d asked, his father had explained it would take nearly a week of round-the-clock travel to make it to the next closest town beside the one they went to to trade. Eule had no idea whether they were headed to that town or one even further away, but they made it in less than two days of daylight driving, comfortably before the sun began to set behind the veil of clouds that never left Rubicon’s sky.

(When they resumed their travel, Eule would pay much closer attention to the world passing by and marvel at the speed. Lowie would laugh and tell him that while this was as fast as the truck could safely travel on the icy roads, Dolmayan’s machine—Astłik, he called it—could move more than twice as fast. Eule was less surprised by this because war machines did not play by any rules of reality he knew. If it could teleport between towns, it would have been just another ridiculous feat the soldiers kept to themselves.)

The town they soon arrived at was much like the one Eule had known as ‘the town’ his whole life. Mostly Old-Era buildings in varying states of repair, people bundled up against the chill as they went about their lives. They, like Eule himself had, regarded Dolmayan with suspicion, but his machine carried no weapons beyond the massive factory tool on its left arm, so he was not much of a warlord if he had come to menace them.

“We haven’t been through here often,” Lowie told Eule as Dolmayan did his best to attract a crowd in the town square with an old stringed instrument Eule didn’t recognize. “Wait ’til we get further north. They throw us parties there.”

Eule wasn’t sure he believed that. He’d never seen anyone with enough of anything to throw a party for a stranger. On the other hand, he had to admit Dolmayan’s music was lovely; if his family had had anything to spare, they could do a lot worse than tossing it Dolmayan’s way in thanks for the performance.

The sun was nearly set by the time Dolmayan packed up his instrument into the sloppily welded metal case he used for it and took up a standing position on Astłik’s foot, the better to address the crowd. He started with news, much of which were messages from other towns asking after family or responses to the same. He spoke of new industries arising in far-off cities and the goods which might soon make their way here through trade. He answered questions and took new messages from the crowd.

And then he began to preach.

What followed was the first of many, many, many sermons Eule would hear in the next six years of travel. Most of it Eule thought was nice, for all it seemed to gloss over how meager so many people’s lives were and how cruel the world around them was. Dolmayan told the crowd that all the men and women of Rubicon were like one family, their common humanity the blood that bound them together. He urged them to share all they had with each other, to pool food and medicine and fuel as communities. He bid them give what they could afford to give even to those who could afford to give nothing in return, as they would wish another to do for them. It was, to Eule, a strange intermingling of wishful thinking and common sense: ‘strange’ mostly in that despite the stark difference between those two things, Eule would be hard-pressed to sort out what was what.

One thing that did stand out to Eule as nonsense was Dolmayan’s talk of the Coral. To hear him tell of it, he had been little more than a drug-addled, if honored, member of a village up on the Grid when he’d granted a divine vision during one of his highs. The Coral itself, his drug of choice, had spoken to him and bid him leave the Grid to seek the kindness of Humanity below and spread good will and compassion wherever he could. Eule wasn’t sure if Dolmayan had experienced what he described, but even if he had, it sounded more like a drug-induced hallucination than the message of some ‘god’. Dolmayan also bid people to spread what Coral they could spare in fallow fields for the mealworms to eat, which brought Eule back to his idle thought about mealworms being, perhaps, a more practical thing to worship.

The people of this town did not throw the Messengers a ‘party’, though they were generous in their own way. They allowed Dolmayan and his group to use an old building at the edge of town for their rest and gave them food and water and petrol in exchange for the news. It seemed much more practical to Eule than the fanciful stories Lowie spun of the towns further north.

They left the next morning, bound for a town one day’s travel away. Then another, and another.

Despite Eule’s skepticism, their welcomes became warmer and warmer as they traveled. It became obvious that Dolmayan was known to people, if not ‘expected’; they reacted to his arrival as one would to surprising good news. Perhaps that was exactly what it was, because absent the need to attract a crowd, Father Dolmayan would begin dispensing ‘news’ as soon as he disembarked his machine.

It wasn’t until about a month and a half later that Eule saw the truth of what Lowie had described as a ‘party’. The people of the town they arrived in were not merely happy to see Dolmayan: they reacted as though a holy day had come early. Children ran out to play in the streets. Cookfires sprang up all over town to heat stew-pots and grills. Dolmayan was not the only one with an instrument, though his was much finer than the townspeople’s, and a half-dozen competing songs began to drift through the village.

Despite his youth and not-yet-two-months’ tenure as a Messenger, Eule was given a place of honor between Rorit and Lowie at Dolmayan’s table. A beaming young woman only a few years older than he was placed plates bearing a steaming steak of white meat garnished with vegetables in front of them each; Eule had to ask what it was.

Mealworm.

Mealworm?!

Eule had never seen mealworm served as a steak, even if he ignored the size of the portion. His father had much preferred to render the forearm-length mealworms down into fertilizer than eat them himself; when the cellar grew empty in the waning months of winter, his mother would grind their slimy flesh into sausage filling and soak it in vinegar for a few hours to remove as much of the bitterness as she could before boiling the lot. The result could only ever be described as ‘less’ horribly bitter than the original flavor, and the meat no less tough for all the mashing and boiling. But the other Messengers dug in with gusto, so Eule trusted his new buddies and took a bite.

The flesh was still slimy, but it was tender. It was still pungent, but it was not bitter. It even had some seasoning that tried to work with the flavor rather than failing to cover it up. It was, without a doubt, the best mealworm Eule had ever tasted—a damnably faint superlative, but still! He couldn’t wait to learn how their hosts had done it.

It was the damned Coral. Eule had only been half-listening to Dolmayan’s sermon and had dismissed his instruction to feed it to mealworms as some kind of religious observance. Now, he heard the whole of it: it wasn’t some weird act of worship, it was a means of raising livestock! One of the local farmers took Eule to see his herd, and each of the half-dozen mealworms sitting fat and happy in the field was larger than any tractor Eule had ever seen.

“They clean the soil, too!” the proud farmer explained to the awestruck young man. “We always thought they was a pest, eating the fertilizer and seed out of the dirt, but whatever poison came down after the Fires, they eat that away too! Bless the Coral for its aid, to grow the worms large enough to clean whole fields! Soil still ain’t as good as it was before, not by a long shot, but we can get near half our crops to harvest so long as we let the mealworms have their way with each field every other year.”

Eule demanded to know if Dolmayan had spread this through his own town; the man laughed and answered that of course he had. Eule remained a skeptic towards the Coralist religion, but when the whole town observed a prayer that evening, he prayed to the Coral that his parents would heed the news. (He would pass through his own town a little over a year later and learn they had.)

Prayer did not come naturally to Eule. He felt nothing on the other end of his plea. It was this, perhaps, that drove him to seek out Father Dolmayan the evening after they left that town, camped out on the side of the road in the relative heat of late spring. The man had climbed up a fallen portion of highway overpass to perch on the edge of the road overhead, legs dangling over the drop. Eule took a seat beside him.

“Is any of it true, Thumb?” Eule asked Dolmayan, still too stubbornly ‘cool’ to be seen to remember the man’s strange name. “The stuff with the Coral, I mean?”

Dolmayan laughed. “You think I made it up?”

“It’s hard to believe, though, ain’t it?” Eule replied. “I mean, I don’t mind most of it. The stuff about family and all, that’s fine. I like that bit. I just… it’s hard to believe, okay? You said you were all drugged up those days. Don’t you think it’s more likely you were just hearing things?”

“I thought of that,” Dolmayan said. “I thought it for many years. But in the end… no, I don’t. I wish I could prove it to you, but… well, that’s why we call it ‘faith’, isn’t it?”

“So there really is something in the Coral that wants us to all get along,” Eule said.

“You think I’m lying?” Dolmayan asked, no heat or accusation to the question.

“I don’t know, okay?” Eule whined. “It’s just… it’s more likely than there really being something out there, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the Coral being able to speak make it wrong to feed it to mealworms? It can talk!”

“The voice I spoke to is not quite ‘the Coral’,” Dolmayan explained. “It lives in the Coral the way we live in the world around us, and it does not begrudge us our need for the substance.”

Eule frowned, not sure he followed that chain of logic.

“I know you may not believe in it yourself,” Dolmayan told him, “but I hope you can at least believe that I am not lying. I will never lie to you, kid, I can promise you that much.”

“That’s a daft promise,” Eule said. “What if you need to keep a secret? Don’t promise to never lie, promise to… to tell me if you do, even if you can’t tell me the truth of it. That’s a better promise, ain’t it?”

“Maybe.” Dolmayan reached out and ruffled Eule’s hair, as so many of the Messengers seemed fond of doing. “It’s a promise, then.”

Chapter Text

Dolmayan had made his promise to Eule never intending to need it, for he would rather speak truthfully in the first place than seek an apology for dishonesty. He would keep it a little over a year later.

Mealworm farming had proved wildly successful. Even in Eule’s hinterland South Belius town, Coralism had blossomed like a young shoot in clean soil; in the heartlands of the faith, it burst forth from people’s hearts like a flourishing vine. The town which would host the fateful events had welcomed and feasted the Messengers; its people had listened with rapt attention as Father Dolmayan spoke at length of the Coral’s wishes for humanity.

One young woman approached Dolmayan after he had stepped down from Astłik’s foot, as the crowd clapped and prepared to go back about their days. She carried with her a small phial glowing with Coral and, voice pitched to carry, bid Dolmayan commune with the Coral once again.

You idiot, Eule wished to scream from his place near the front of the crowd. Does the word ‘addict’ mean nothing to you? But despite his headstrong nature, he had long grown used to not speaking out of turn in matters of the Messengers, and that timidity kept him on the sidelines here.

Dolmayan accepted, of course, though he took the Coral and hid away in a dark and lonely room far from imagined judgment. The crowd stood outside, eager to hear of their prophet’s vision. They remained for hours, their fervor making not only Eule uncomfortable, but the rest of Messengers as well. Only once Lowie swore to summon them back once Father Dolmayan began to stir did they disperse to resume the thousand tasks of daily life.

“It’s not a bad idea, I think,” Lowie murmured to the others once the onlookers had moved on, “but standing around like that is weird. Isn’t it?”

That the other Messengers approved of all this justified Eule’s prior inaction, at least for the moment. Still, Eule wasn’t happy about the situation. “It’s creepy,” he said, drawing a reproachful look from Farvin beside him.

“It’s faith, Eule,” his senior Messenger said gently. “Don’t judge them too harshly. They mean well.”

“Father Dolmayan’s a great man,” Kamila said, “but he’s not… he wouldn’t want this kind of devotion, would he?”

“I don’t think he would,” Rorit said. “But he earned it, so he’ll live with it. That’s the kind of man our Father is.”

Farvin grinned and clapped the taller man on the shoulder. “Well said, Brother Rorit.”

Eule had to admit that Dolmayan had, indeed, earned no small part of the people’s devotion through his words and deeds alike, but the way they showed it was off-putting all the same. The young man respected the Messengers’ Father immensely, but he still felt the man was a bit of a charlatan. A harmless one plying the trade for a good and noble cause, Eule judged, but a charlatan all the same: Dolmayan struck him as too wise and well traveled to accept his own story at face value.

The ten Messengers—their ranks grown further since Eule’s addition two years prior—kept vigil outside their Father’s chosen room for the six hours he remained within. Lowie left to round up the townsfolk when Dolmayan began to stir, as he had promised, so Dolmayan emerged blinking against late-afternoon sunlight to find the whole town waiting for him as though they had never left. Eule, standing at the front as befit a Messenger, could well read the pain on the old man’s face; from the tense silence that descended on the crowd behind him, they too sensed something amiss.

Dolmayan looked out across the people come to hear of his communion, and adopted a wide smile. Eule could not see any falsehood about it, but he knew the man too well to believe his mood would turn so suddenly.

“The Coral is pleased, for we have made great strides!” Dolmayan called out, his booming voice carrying easily across the town square. “I am merely humbled by the task which still awaits us! For ours remains a harsh land, colder and less forgiving than the splendor of the past, and it is only through years, perhaps decades, of effort that we shall once again enjoy such riches.”

The crowd cheered, every hope for their present and future as good as confirmed. Eule was practiced enough to hide his doubts deep, where not even his fellow Messengers might see them and rebuke him.

He did not hide them so deeply that he did not give them voice the next day, as they once more made camp by the side of the road, though still not where most would hear. “Father Dolmayan,” Eule said, having long since given up his affectation of addressing Dolmayan by the silly nickname he had saddled him with, “can I have a word with you?”

“Of course, Eule,” Dolmayan said. “We’ll take a short wander while Farvin cooks dinner.” So they did, walking a fair distance away where none would overhear them over the bustle of the camp. Eule picked a nice-looking rock for a seat, one tall enough that he was nearly at eye level with Dolmayan.

“You promised to tell me if you ever lied to me, Father,” Eule said. “I’m sorry to doubt you, but I have to ask: is it true? Did you really speak to the Coral again?”

Father Dolmayan did not shy away from Eule’s eyes even as tears began to form in his own.

“No,” Dolmayan admitted. “The Coral didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t expect it to. I told the truth when I said I believed in the story I told about speaking to the Coral. I still believe it. But that’s only the beginning of the story. I never told anyone how it ended, and why I went wandering down here through the towns. I would… tell it now, if you’ve the will to hear it.”

“You haven’t told anyone the ‘whole story’, have you?” Eule asked, reading well the pain it brought Dolmayan to speak of it.

“No, I have not.”

“Then you don’t need to tell me,” he said. “You kept your promise already. But if you need to tell someone, I’ll listen.”

Dolmayan took his time to consider the offer.

“Maybe I shouldn’t trouble a lad like yourself with it,” he said, “but at the same time, I’d reckon your skepticism makes you better suited to hear it than most anyone else. I’m afraid I’ll take you up your offer, Eule.”

Father Dolmayan took a seat on a rock well-sized to serve as a stool not far from Eule’s own perch.

“When I first began my journey, I did not do so as a preacher or prophet,” Dolmayan began, falling once more into the formal yet easily rolling speech he often used when preaching. “I did so as… as a wandering philosopher, of sorts, sharing a message of goodwill and generosity between men. That I had found my mission to do so from my dosing was, at best, an afterthought. Nothing more than an explanation for why an old Doser like me would give up the habit and become a migrant hermit. I still believe in my experience of the Coral’s voice, but I knew well that few others would. I believed they would consider it nothing but the drug-addled ramblings of an old fool, as you do.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool!” Eule said. “You’re a wise man, Father Dolmayan! That’s why I always thought you must be lying, just a little. You’d know better than I how odd your story is.”

“I do, and yet I believe it all the same. I did not expect others to, and I did not at all guess how and why that would come about. My story changed much in the retelling, as all stories do, but I tried my best to stick to the facts. And yet I admit, certain… flourishes crept in.”

“Flourishes…?” Eule asked.

“The Coral did not bid me descend from the Grid to aid my fellow men,” Dolmayan admitted. “I did that myself in hopes of proving it wrong. The Coral… I had spoken to it at length over many years. It is true that it wished for peace and goodwill among men; it is a lie that it believed they could do so. It…”

Here, Dolmayan’s voice grew thick with sorrow.

“It had seen us at our worst,” he said, “the evil men did to each other in the Old World, and it despaired that we could be anything more. I set out in the hope that I could prove it wrong because I believed I could find people who would show all the world the same kindness they would their own family, and I did. I did, Eule! Everywhere we’ve been, you’ve seen the teachings I’ve spread, the proof of my faith in humanity.

“But the Coral… it did not believe me. It knew the wickedness in men’s hearts. It had judged us for it. And it hates us, for what we have done to the Coral and to each other. The voice forsook me then, before I ever began my journey, and will not return to me again.

“You were right, Eule,” Dolmayan said. “It is a daft thing, to promise not to lie. It would have been far crueler to speak honestly to the crowd, and tell them something so horrible as the truth.”

Eule’s shivering had nothing to do with the cold evening temperature. If Father Dolmayan had insisted in his story, that the Coral did indeed bless him and all humanity… perhaps, after the years they’d spent together, Eule might have believed it himself. If nothing else, he would have trusted that Dolmayan was not a charlatan; that the old man believed his story as much as any of his adherents did.

Instead, he had responded with… this. If Dolmayan had wanted Eule’s belief, he would not have needed anything as dark as the tale he’d told. His grief, too, seemed far too heavy and raw to be anything but real. Eule could not, would not, believe the man weeping softly across the clearing from him was merely playing at his sorrow.

Eule was not yet fully past his habit of rushing into trouble before he found a way out, but for this, for Dolmayan, he would spare no thought in his examinations. He turned over the question, the story, the legends that had built up around Dolmayan with or without the man’s own help. He did not mind the time, nor notice the smells of cooking food as their supper approached completion.

“You have to keep the story up,” he said at last. “It wouldn’t just be cruel, Father. It might well ruin everything you’ve done. If they think you a liar, they might well throw out the lot of it, even the parts anyone with any sense would keep. You’d undo all the progress we’ve made in the last fifteen years.”

“I know,” Dolmayan said. “I wouldn’t’ve kept things going this long if I had any better ideas. Still, I’m glad you agree, lad. I always worry I’ll become blind to my own faults.” He took a deep breath and wiped the wetness from his eyes with one hand. “Now, come. Supper smells ready, and you’ll need to replace all that food you spent thinking so hard.”

The girl in the town that day was not the last one to offer Dolmayan another dose of the Coral. Eule took it upon himself to stand between Father Dolmayan and his enablers, always quick to step in and bid them save the Coral for their own use rather than waste it on what he termed an ‘indulgence’, and most smiled and nodded as though it were obvious in hindsight. To Eule, it was, perhaps, the one duty he and he alone could perform among the Messengers, for the others believed too completely in Dolmayan’s strength to understand the weakness of a man offered a taste of an old addiction.

It also served to thrust Eule more and more frequently into the limelight. Perhaps that was why, by the time he turned ten Martian Standard years of age, Eule Flatwell had become something of a heartbreaker.

He was under no illusions that he was anything special. Following someone like Father Dolmayan across the countryside, a journey in which he could compare himself to the man thrice each day, made that perfectly clear. But his practice at speaking to a crowd, his no-worse-than-average looks, and the air of adventure that came with traveling anywhere in modern times meant Eule caught the eyes of far more than one young man’s share of starry-eyed young suitors across Belius, starting before he turned eight and getting steadily worse by the month.

It was rough every time. It was bad enough when Eule had to explain, as clearly as he could, to a recently besotted hanger-on that he simply was not interested. Those conversations never got any less awkward no matter how much excruciating practice he gained. It was worse when people he considered friends couldn’t help but push further. He’d let them down as gently as he could, and they would be very kind and understanding and then vanish entirely from his presence for however long the Messengers remained in town, and for each visit thereafter.

Only thrice, in three years, did someone promise to stand by him despite his lack of requited love, and one of those soon found she could not keep the promise after all. The two who did were a boy and a girl, both roughly his age.

Samantha Radovich was a sweet, matronly sort even as a young woman, more careful and considered than Eule but no less adventurous. Her friendship with Eule began when both were about eight and a half years of age, and resumed immediately when the Messengers next passed through her town less than a year later. She’d confessed to Eule the night before the Messengers were due to leave that visit; perhaps because she only worked up the courage when the deadline came thundering down, or perhaps to spare them both embarrassment if he rejected her.

Alas, Eule had had no choice; he did not, and likely could not, return her affection. His heart had broken at the thought that the friendship they had formed, which had held so strong despite many months of absence, would be destroyed by his peculiarity. What a relief it had been, then, when Sam had insisted that they not let it come between them. If Eule’s rejection was not for any issue he had with her, she said, then it should change nothing.

Eule had heard that once before. He tried not to get his hopes up. He did anyway, and Sam did not disappoint him when the Messengers passed through not long later.

The second, Ewell Cadmore—his first name a different spelling of Eule’s own—was an earnest young man with a charming smile, a penchant for harmless trouble, and messy blond hair he could never hope to tame. He was, in hindsight, exactly the sort of person Eule thought he would have fallen in love with if he were wont to. Though Ewell confessed later, the two had met before Eule and Samantha: not long after Eule joined the convoy, brought together at first by the coincidence of their names and then by their shared impulse to get up to all sorts of mischief. Ewell’s parents insisted the young man remain home until he turned nine at the earliest, so he and Eule wrote each other reams of letters, which they exchanged all at once during the Messengers’ roughly twice-yearly passage through Ewell’s town.

Ewell had his things packed away for travel the next time the Messengers came through following his ninth birthday, not long before Eule’s own ninth, and he confessed his affection to Eule that very night. What a funny match that would have been, Eule and Ewell, but it was not to be. For the sixth time that year, Eule had to reject a romantic confession, this time with the added anguish that Ewell was not merely one of his closest friends, but may have planned to join the Messengers for him in the first place, and would now either have to remain home, or feel a horrible awkwardness with one of his fellow travelers.

Ewell laughed at the idea. Stay home? When he had dreamed of joining the Messengers for four years? And to think he would shun Eule just for not fancying him in return! They were thick as thieves, they two, and naught would change that, no matter if he might have wished for them to be more. He proved his words in the weeks and months to come, as he returned to the easy friendship they had shared as though nothing else had passed between them.

Eule had thought nothing of introducing his faithful friends—the most faithful, perhaps, to stick with him through his rejections—to each other when next they passed through. That Sam took the opportunity to join the Messengers herself was not a surprise, for she’d admitted she’d been considering it when last they passed through her town, and the three fast became inseparable. Somehow, despite spending more of his waking hours with the two than apart for the next four years, it came as a complete surprise to Eule when they announced their intention to marry.

The PCA conducted OPERATION CLOUDED SKY three months before the planned wedding.

Chapter Text

The Messengers had been between towns when the warship had come screaming past overhead. When they saw the smoke in the distance, Eule at first thought the ship had been dispatched to aid in some disastrous fire. But the ship had been nowhere to be seen when the Messengers arrived at the devastated farm, the fields and house torn asunder as though by a giant’s flaming claws. On the contrary, two more columns of smoke now loomed over the horizon.

Father Dolmayan was the first to realize the horrible truth. The Messengers, now a group spread across more than a dozen vehicles, scattered to every nearby settlement they could reach in two days’ time. The ships were burning the farms! The Messengers did not know what the people of Rubicon had done to earn their wrath, but their could be no mistaking their purpose.

Some farmers received the warning before the ships reached them, giving them time to hide what of their herd they could save underground. Others saw the ships coming in time to flee, burning their fields and homes to hide their escape in smoke and fire from the eyes in the sky. The least fortunate only learned of their fate when the beams swept down from the heavens to annihilate house and homestead. The death toll, not only in the attacks themselves but to the famine that was sure to follow, would be unspeakable.

The Messengers, distraught and traumatized, began to regroup. They found their Father waiting in a scorched and ruined field much like many others. What was different was that there, his Astłik sat beside the burned and butchered corpse of a PCA warship. The plasma torch that had for so long been a tool of peace and industry had proved its mettle against the starship armor it had always been intended to cut. Father Dolmayan sat astride his machine, staring with dead eyes at the scores of lives he had taken that day.

They gathered that night around a petrol campfire in an old factory Elcano had made of a mineshaft, as that business often had in the early days of their company, debris fit for seating dragged into a circle around the flame. None of the Messengers knew whether the PCA would come back for vengeance for their slaughtered ship, and so they sought shelter where a ship could not reach. Father Dolmayan had said nothing since they had found him. Many of the Messengers clung to each other. Those who had lost family wept, some silently and some with no such composure. Many of those who had not wept as well, for there could be no mistaking the slaughter for anything but a statement of most dire intent:

The PCA had declared the planet abandoned; this was known. If there were people on the planet, then it was not abandoned, therefore there could be no people on the planet. The PCA could not sweep through and eliminate every single person: it was not economical. No, if the PCA was to commit genocide—and they were to commit genocide, their mandate was clear—they would do so efficiently.

By burning out every food source they could find.

The Messengers, and all they had built, would be erased. Ground beneath the heel of famine until they were forgotten, nothing but a footnote on the Fires, the deliberate malice behind their extermination elided from all the myriad histories to be written in the years to come. Such a tragedy, the Federated Worlds would write, that the Fires rendered Rubicon too barren to feed its population.

Rorit Dunham was the first to offer a voice towards the path ahead.

“We have to fight,” he blurted, the hulking miner pacing and fuming like he wished for nothing so much as to punch a warship out of the sky with his fists. “We have to! We can’t let them do this! They’ll kill us all like we’re nothing more than mealworms ourselves!”

“We can’t fight!” Farvin yelled, the normally collected man dirty and disheveled from the mad dash ahead of the advancing ships. “Have you forgotten everything the Coral has taught us? We approach our neighbors with an open hand, not with weapons!”

“If you approach the PCA with an open hand, they’ll just lop it off!” Rorit snapped. “If we want any hope of survival, we need a fist!”

“If we take up arms now, we’ll lose the very thing that makes us worthy of survival in the first place!”

“We can hide,” Guss said. “The PCA want to burn us out? These tunnels run kilometers deep. We don’t need sunlight for our crops when our crops are mealworms.”

“Then what will you do when the PCA send down soldiers?” Rorit demanded. “When they flood the tunnels with gas and worse?”

Guss did not have an answer. The Messengers’ focus, as it always had in times of disagreement, swung to Father Dolmayan. Rorit puffed himself up, prepared for the rebuke and ready to fight even so.

It did not come.

“Brother Dunham is right,” Father Dolmayan said, his usually rich voice thin and reedy after the horrors he had seen and done this day. “The actions of the PCA can have no other response but war.”

The reaction was met with shock. Most expected him to hold to his pacifism. Some, perhaps, expected a compromise, a tacit acceptance of a splinter faction raising arms. Not one among them had thought Father Dolmayan would speak in favor of war. Even Rorit was struck dumb, for all he had been the first to speak of fighting.

“Father!” Farvin yelled, dismayed. “Father, no. We can’t. We can’t.”

“Then we will die,” Dolmayan said. “Those are our options.”

“Listen to yourself, Father Dolmayan, please. What happened to family? What happened to peace?”

“The PCA happened to peace,” Eule said.

It had been nothing but a spiteful grumble, borne of helplessness and frustration, but the focus shifted to him all the same. Adults, many twice or even thrice his age, paused to hear what the youth who had once been famous for his ill-considered antics had to say. It was a heady feeling. It made him want to vomit.

“Eule,” Samantha murmured. “We can’t.”

“Someone has to,” Eule said, and oh it burned, to break ranks with the teachings of a man he respected so dearly, for all that the man himself had taken the first step. “Not all of us. Farvin has a point. If we become a whole society of soldiers, we’ll lose the future we’re fighting to protect from the start. But without an army… without a fist… we’ll lose it just as surely.”

“Brother Flatwell raises a good point,” Dolmayan said. Eule’s heart skipped a beat at the respect of being referred to as ‘Brother’. He’d turned ten years ago, making him an adult by laws that no longer cared what happened on Rubicon, but like every child, part of him had expected to be ‘kid’ until the day he died.

Dolmayan continued, “We will need farmers and artisans more than ever in the days to come. We are all family here. Brothers and sisters”—his gaze crossed Jev, standing behind Lowie’s seat—“and comrades,” Dolmayan added, which earned him their grateful smile. “I will ask no one among our number to take up arms who would rather hold to peace. I will shame no one for choosing the noble path, the righteous path. But neither can I stand aside as our family and their homes are put to the torch.”

“That’s it, then?” Farvin murmured, his heart breaking. “A return to the wars of the Old World? You will damn yourselves with every life you save.”

“Then I will be damned,” Dolmayan replied. “My conscience can allow nothing else. Forgive me, Brother Jaskot. Forgive me, all of you.”

He took a deep, bracing breath.

“Please, anyone who would not walk this path: leave now, before your souls are stained with our sins.”

Farvin exchanged glances with Lowie, with Eule, with Samantha, with Rorit, with Ewell and Guss and Xing and Demir and Juan and Cylas and Kamila and any others who would meet his gaze. Then he headed for the exit. One by one at first, and then in twos and threes and fives, more than two thirds of the group followed. Eule was not sorry to see Sam and Ewell among them; they deserved whatever peace they could find far from the war the PCA had brought to their doorstep.

“We’ll need guns,” Rorit said, once the council had been reduced to a war council. “More than that, we’ll need MTs. ACs, if we can get them.”

“We can’t ask the civilians to make them, even if we had the factories,” Demir said. “Far as the Coral’s concerned, that’d be no better than having them fight themselves.”

“BAWS?” Elmedin suggested. “They’re no friend of the PCA.”

Rorit shook his head. “BAWS might hate the PCA, but they’re not a charity, and we don’t have anything they can’t get elsewhere.”

“Like hell they ain’t,” Elmedin said. “How many at BAWS you think didn’t lose family over the last week? There ain’t that many of us left down here, Rorit.”

Rorit frowned and rubbed his chin, considering.

“Jev,” Eule said, “doesn’t your uncle work for BAWS?”

“As a factory manager, yeah,” Jev agreed. “Not high up, but high enough he might know people who know people. I’ll reach out. He can’t do more than kick a few half-defective firearms our way on his lonesome, but Elmedin’s right. The PCA made an enemy of everyone on the planet the moment they started their sweep.”

“And Father Dolmayan,” Rorit said. “Forgive me for asking this of you, Father, but you were a soldier yourself, weren’t you? We’ll need your leadership in the field.”

“I was a soldier, Brother Dunham,” Dolmayan emphasized. “A pawn running this way and that as part of a plan I was never privy to. I fear I know just as little about leading men to battle as you do.”

“We won’t be fighting a ‘war’,” Eule said, the last word unmistakably dubious. “Not as the PCA or corps would reckon it. We’ll be… irregulars?”

“Guerrillas,” Dolmayan supplied. “An insurgency.”

“Terrorists,” Rorit said. “Don’t kid yourselves,” he added when others looked to him in horror. “That’s what they’ll call us. The PCA, the corps, the whole Fed if anyone is even looking our way at all.”

“But even if we’re not fighting them on their terms, we’ll need somewhere to start,” Eule said, continuing to work through his thoughts aloud. “Not all of their tactics will work for us, or on us, but if we try to figure it out as we go along, we’ll lose before we learn the lessons we need.”

“You have an idea, kid?” Rorit asked.

Eule didn’t, not yet. He had a mere inkling, a thought to follow, and follow it he did as the rest of the council moved on.

“We’ll need a name,” Demir said. “We can’t be the Messengers anymore. Farvin had that much right: our ‘message’ was always one of peace.”

“A good point,” Dolmayan said. “It would be wrong of us to take that title from Brother Farvin and those who followed him. Yes, Sister Claire?”

Claire was a girl a two or three years younger than Eule, though her short and slender frame made her appear younger even than that. Orphaned far too young to a tragedy none knew the truth of, Cylas had taken her in when the Messengers had passed by her burnt and ruined home. Those who had not noticed her presence before she had come forward were surprised to see her now, for she was, by most of their thinking, a delicate girl who should have left with the others.

She was mute, or nearly so; Eule had never once heard her speak, and he did not hear her speak now. Instead, Claire walked over to the nearest wall, holding a brush and a can of the near-glowing white paint used for road signs, and began to paint.

No one spoke as she worked, lest they disturb what all felt was a sacred moment in the history of an organization barely born. Claire painted as though she were merely printing an image she already held whole and perfect in her head: a man, head wrapped in billowing cloth, clutching a star-studded ship’s wheel and pointing, or perhaps reaching, off to a point to the viewer’s right.

Below the emblem, she wrote one word, each letter elegant and brimming with flourish:

Cendrillon

“It’s a beautiful work, Sister,” Dolmayan said. “I can imagine no better banner for our cause.”

“Aye!” Rorit agreed with great enthusiasm. “I’m inspired already! I’m afraid we’ll need a name oafs like me can pronounce, though.”

“Maybe simple and direct is best?” Jev suggested.

“We’re the Rubicon Resistance,” Elmedin said.

“We’re the Defenders of Rubicon,” Demir said.

“Maybe the Rubicon People’s Militia?” Miren said.

Dolmayan considered the suggestions carefully.

“A matter for another time, perhaps,” he said at last. “Sister Claire, if you would be so kind, could you reproduce that image on something more… portable, than the wall of a factory? I would dearly like to take it with us.”

Claire blushed and nodded vigorously before leaving to do just that. Her original work, not yet refined to the clean, crisp stencil that would come to represent the organization in the years ahead, would remain where it had first been set down. Perhaps some day, a historian might stumble across the factory; see the ashes and scuff-marks that hinted at the meeting it had held, and the painting on the wall; and realize the historic events that had happened in a place even those present for them had swiftly forgotten as ‘just another ruined factory’.

Eule’s idea germinated.

“Send me to BAWS,” Eule announced. “They have everything we need.”

Chapter Text

Never in his life would the humble farmhand Eule Flatwell have expected to be sitting before the entire executive suite and extended leadership of an interstellar corporation.

He could not have been more out of place if he tried. Eule wore the grand total of all the nicest, best-fitting, least-patched clothes all the conspirators had between them. When he’d stepped out of the truck in front of BAWS’ corporate headquarters, he had though himself among the best-dressed men on the planet.

If anything, the effort only made him stand out more. He did not look any less like an uncultured bumpkin; rather, he now looked like a bumpkin who had tried to disguise himself and failed terribly. Quite apart from the unmistakable difference in style and form, the eight men and two women before him wore clothes without a single mended tear, missed stitch, or unevenness in their dye.

Eule could barely stand to look them in the eye for fear the judgment they must have of him, this lowly, filthy child come to beg directly from the most important businessmen still on the planet—and yet they had given him a seat and introduced themselves to him as they might any other guest. They addressed him as ‘Mister Flatwell’. Their own names had flown in one ear, clear past his anxiety-addled brain, and out the other. Were it not for the plaques before each listing their name and position, Eule could not have hoped to address even one of them as anything but ‘the one this-many-places from the left’. Their faces might as well have been as identical as their suits.

It had taken the Militia—the only name they had for themselves as of yet—more than a month to secure Eule’s audience with BAWS’ executives. Much of that time had been spend sending messages back and forth through intermediaries while Eule worked on the finer points of his plan with Dolmayan. If all had gone well, Eule was here less to negotiate and more to receive BAWS’ response.

The first to speak was a man whose age Eule could not guess, identified by his plaque as ‘ROBERT GAUSS – CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER’.

“Your people are correct that we have no love for the PCA,” Gauss said, “but we are a business, first and foremost. They have spoken with great fervor of the wrongs committed against them—and make no mistake, the PCA’s latest efforts are nothing short of monstrous—and the things they would need to make them right, but nothing of how they could pay for it. So I would hear it directly from the one they elected to speak for them, face to face: what can you and yours hope to offer us in exchange for our cooperation?”

This was the exact kind of question that Eule had been counting on Dolmayan to have resolved long before he set foot in the conference room. He suspected Gauss was perfectly aware of that.

What could a ramshackle militia, newly impoverished by the destruction of their food supply, hope to offer a corporation who shipped millions of tons of product off-world each year? Vengeance? Corporations were cold and soulless things, devoid of passion. Each individual man and woman before Eule now might well wish for the destruction of the PCA, either for their more recent crimes or simple spite for years of oppression and interference, but together, as BAWS, they would reject it out of hand.

Eule searched deep for some answer as he bought time by looking at each man or woman in turn, as though he were the one judging them. He found it in the memory of the day he had joined Dolmayan’s retinue, before he had even known the name ‘Messengers’.

“A future,” Eule said.

The executives were not used to concealing their thoughts during such meetings, or perhaps they simply didn’t bother before a guest as unimpressive as Eule, and so he could read confusion and consideration in their faces. Encouraged, he pressed on, “The PCA aren’t just killing us for sport. They—they want us gone, all of us. If they had their way, they would be guarding an empty, lifeless husk of a planet!”

Eule took a deep breath. The men and women before him were well aware of that. He needed to focus.

“If you didn’t care about Rubicon in some way—maybe not the way we do, but about the place, the history—you would have left already. But you didn’t. You’re BAWS. It’s in the name, ain’t it? Belius Applied Weapon Systems. This is your home. The PCA want you gone as badly as they do us, but you won’t leave any more than we will. The thing is… this recent attack, the strikes against the farms, they’re not just targeting ‘scattered decivilized populations’. They’re targeting you just as much as they are us! We’re… us Rubiconians, Coralists, tribals, whatever you want to call us, we’re not just your neighbors! We’re your future workers, your managers, maybe even your executives! If we go… sure, maybe BAWS can draw workers from off-world for as long as you keep your factories open, but you won’t be Rubiconian anymore. How long before the next generation of executives, clean, Sol-raised professionals, decide the cost of importing food and labor far eclipses any ‘historic’ value of the factories you run? How long before the last trace of Rubicon in the company is a single letter in an acronym no one cares to lengthen? How long before even that becomes an ‘unnecessary relic’?”

Eule cut himself off there, before his mouth could get him into more trouble than he was already in, unprepared as he was for this line of questioning.

The next to speak was ‘FRANKLIN ARLOW – LEGAL’, the only man at the table old enough that rejuvenation treatments couldn’t keep the lines off his face.

“I think we are all aware that the costs of operating on Rubicon surpassed the ‘historic value’ of our properties years ago,” Arlow said. “You’ve made your point well, Mister Flatwell. If we did not value our legacy as a company founded on and by Rubicon, we would have left with the rest. And yet for all that, we cannot be seen to openly aid a group in direct opposition to a Federated Administration. We can sell you weapons and MTs because that is our entire remit as arms manufacturers. We can even reopen the old Basho manufacturing lines if you can create a local market for them. But we cannot take your side, as it were.”

“We can work with that!” Eule said. “We have access to old factories, chemical facilities, refineries and mines. If you’re willing to buy from us for scrip, and take that scrip in trade…”

“It would be easily justified as exploiting the native population,” Gauss said, which was not quite how Eule would have phrased it. “As long as we keep everything in local scrip, you wouldn’t even need to launder it. My own department could handle it on our end without issue.”

‘AARON RUSS – CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER’ frowned thoughtfully as he stroked his chin. “It might not get you much,” he warned Eule. “Even if we slash the prices to naught but our operating costs, you will need other sources of income beyond local production to run an army. Preferably ones that would not lead back to us, though I’m afraid I’m not sure what those could be.”

“Anything is better than what we have now, sir,” Eule said. Several of the faces across the table nodded in approval of the sentiment.

‘LAUREN ALBRECHT – CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER’, was less easily swayed.

“We have common cause, I will grant him that,” she told the men sitting next to her, “but it would be a waste regardless. Even if they can raise an army, and even if we equip that army, they have no one among them who could train it, much less lead it. As ill as it reflects on me, even our own security forces aren’t up to either task. We haven’t fought anything more organized than a few roving bandit gangs in more than two decades. Having an intercorporate war come down on our heads now would be a serious problem; sparring with a damned Federated Administration force, even a nominally ‘peacekeeping’ force like the PCA, is much, much worse.”

Eule hesitated. He and Dolmayan had agreed that they would need BAWS to grant them a lesser favor long before they asked for the moon—not that Rubicon 3 had a moon, but the expression survived. The only way to answer that challenge was to ask for much, much more than the concessions they were already reluctant to grant.

But this was the level of ‘necessary improvisation’ that had led Dolmayan to put Eule in the hot seat when it could have just as easily been a man ten years his senior.

“But you could get that expertise if you needed it, right?” Eule asked.

Albrecht fixed him with a scowl, but Arlow preempted any rebuke she might have made. “Perhaps we should fix that weakness of ours,” he said as he gave Eule a thorough, deeply appraising look.

“Maybe we should,” Albrecht said testily, “but that isn’t the issue we’re discussing today.”

“But it could be,” said the carefully neutral voice of ‘BENEDICT POWELL – CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER’.

Albrecht raised a carefully manicured eyebrow at the man at the center of BAWS’ table.

“We are long overdue to prepare a replacement for old Everest, aren’t we?” Powell said.

“Everest’s already trained his… oh. I see. Risky, but…” She turned her gaze back to Eule with a frown.

“That excuse would get us at most one ‘employee’ back and forth beneath suspicion,” Gauss said. “We’d have to pick well.”

Albrecht asked, “Could it work, do you think, Sarah?”

The target of her question was the only other woman at the table besides Albrecht herself, one sitting behind a plaque reading ‘SARAH WOODSWORTH – MARKET RESEARCH’. ‘Market research’, Dolmayan had explained to Eule before this meeting, was more often than not a euphemism for industrial espionage.

“I can’t see why it wouldn’t,” Woodsworth said. “Our ‘neighbors’ wouldn’t even need a proper spy. He wouldn’t need any SIGINT because the only thing he’d be there to learn would be what an academy is there to teach. HUMINT would help him cultivate contacts, but even that’s unnecessary. All he’d really need is the ability to lie worth a damn.”

“He’d need augs,” Albrecht said.

“6th is mature,” Gauss said. “If we omit the more rigorous modifications, it’ll cost less than tuition.”

“Mister Flatwell,” Woodsworth said. “Let us say, hypothetically, that you need to travel to Sol, enroll in a military academy, and return here to Rubicon. How would you go about it?”

Eule wasn’t sure why they were asking him, the lowly ‘uncivilized’ outsider come to plead for aid—nor was he not such a fool to believe the situation was hypothetical except that he was the one making the trip—but he put his entire brain into the question.

“You have the legal authority to move people between Rubicon and Sol,” he said. It was a guess, but no one corrected him, so he continued, “To explain why you were sending someone to a military academy, you would pose them—me, I suppose, in this situation—as a member of your security forces. Or at least a prospective member? Someone you want educated in modern military tactics to instruct your security forces, who aren’t practiced in intercorporate warfare. Maybe even… someone trained in anti-insurgency tactics, to deal with the bandits…?”

“Many military academies require either exorbitant up-front fees or first-right-of-refusal for their graduates’ employment,” Woodsworth told him. “How would you ensure there was no risk you fell afoul the latter?”

“Not graduate?” Eule replied without thinking.

The executives exchanged looks.

“He’s perfect,” Woodsworth announced.

“Our neighbors chose well,” Arlow agreed with a nod at Eule.

“He’s clever, collected, and not afraid to take a public loss for a private gain,” Woodsworth said. “That’s better than half the people I’ve had to work with since I got this job.”

“Is that enough to address your objection, Miss Albrecht?” Powell asked.

Albrecht sighed. “It’s still a long-shot, but it’s not ‘impossible’.”

“‘Not impossible’ is a great deal less certain than I prefer my wagers,” Gauss said, “but I won’t be young forever, and I’d rather there be another generations of Rubiconians to hand my seat to than have to drag some puffed-up Sol-born aristocrat in to make the lot of you miserable.”

“They don’t need to ‘win’,” noted ‘JOEL FISCHER – CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER’. “I don’t think any of us expect them to ‘beat’ the PCA in open conflict, but that’s not what they’re aiming for. They want to live, and we want them alive. We should all take the chance we’ve been given.”

Woodsworth smiled like some primeval predator: all teeth. “Besides, Bobby, it’s not as large a wager as you might think. If he washes out at the right time, he could disappear and leave the bulk of the tuition bill unpaid. Dozens of unhappy hopefuls pull that shit every year; the people running the show will shuffle it off to collections without a thought.”

“That would cut the expenses considerably,” Gauss said, smiling in turn.

“Then we are in agreement?” Powell asked.

No one spoke out to contradict him.

“Congratulations, Mister Flatwell,” Powell told Eule. “You’re going to Sol.”

Chapter Text

Eule spent another month under Woodsworth’s supervision until she felt he could convincingly pass as an immigrant to Rubicon rather than a native. BAWS sent him off to the Mitsubishi’s military academy on Luna, one of the most elite officer training schools in Federated Space. (Corporations were not, nominally, allowed ‘military forces’, but they were allowed military academies; where else would the FWS’s own military draw the bulk of their forces from?)

He had a stopover on Mars on the way, where men he didn’t fully trust rendered him insensate and cut into his skull and brain. 6th gen surgery was a well-practiced art, by this point; the complication rate was below 30% and fatalities below 2%. Eule was willing to play those odds. He won, avoiding even the common issues like intermittent migraines or light sensitivity, and then it was off to Luna. Luna was a strange world: the first to (intentionally) house humans off their homeworld for long-term habitation but among the last of the solar system to be tamed. Like the smaller moons of the outer system, only the invention of a-grav had made Lunar habitation more than a curiosity.

Eule Flatwell did not blend in well, but he was not expected to. Military academies took all sorts, so long as they had the money or patronage for it. He fumbled through academy life in more or less the way anyone would expect him to, given his attested history, and even managed to make a few friends along the way. BAWS had, just as he’d suggested, attested an interest in having their hopeful protege study anti-insurgency tactics to deal with the bandits, and Mitsubishi obliged. The extra work took a visible toll on Cadet Flatwell, which his friends would later judge a warning sign of the misfortune to come: at the end of his first year, he missed the cutoff for the second and final year by only two percent.

Devastated, he left a rambling note—furious at how close he had come only to fail, bitter at the chance denied him, and sorrowful for having to leave his friends—and fled the dormitory ahead of the crushing debt of a failed bid for academy graduation. It was, like everything about his life on Luna, well within the bounds of how anyone else in his position might act. Those who knew him might think fondly of their friend in the years to come, and they might judge his fate unfortunate or even ‘unjust’, (and one of those friends, not a fellow Mitsubishi Luna Academy cadet but a business student soon to be hired by Schneider, would hold him in high enough regard even many years later to do him a small but vital favor,) but none among their group thought Eule’s disappearance suspicious in the slightest.

Woodsworth had been exactly correct. It did not take a spy to go to a military academy to learn the curriculum of a military academy.

Flatwell made it back to Rubicon almost exactly a year after he left and promptly set about repaying his debt to his benefactors: he spent half of the following year teaching BAWS security exactly the lessons they had, in theory, sent him to learn. In exchange, BAWS bought out his debt to Mitsubishi for about one fortieth of a percent of its value, gave him a Basho AC frame, and paid him a monthly salary for his time at more than thrice a fairly judged rate for an Academy dropout. Additionally, he sold an entire year’s worth of gossip from his roommate to Woodworth for half again as much as that salary totaled, an equally large overpayment. The information did have value enough to be worth some amount of money: the man’s family was very well connected, and their scion had dangerously loose lips once you got a few beers into him. Plying him for information had been so easy it was hardly espionage at all.

The amount of credits in his account after those six months—a full three hundred thousand dollars in company assured money—made Flatwell’s head spin. With Gauss and Russ’s departments’ cooperation, every single credit would be laundered to Mars and back before purchasing MTs and weapons in bulk for what Flatwell had been informed, only minutes after stepping back onto his homeworld’s soil, was now called the Rubicon Liberation Front.

With that done, Flatwell took the first and last true vacation he was like to have in his new career while catching up on what had happened in his absence as he traveled.

The creation of the Rubicon Liberation Front had not split the Messengers not in two, but in three, and the Coralists with them. In fact, with Dolmayan himself now removed from the equation, his closest followers fragmented, and no single noteworthy migratory population to speak of, the division between ‘Messenger’ and ‘Coralist’ had lost its meaning to the point that, with the exception of the militant Front, the two had become functionally synonymous.

The two main factions other than the newly-christened Rubicon Liberation Front both called themselves Messengers, and neither were happy that the other did so as well. The majority of all Coralists, by a clear but not impressive margin, were those who supported the Front but would not fight themselves. As Dolmayan had said (Flatwell had, in truth, forgotten his own role in the observation), Rubicon would need farmers and artisans now more than ever before, and these Messengers served that role. They would provide the majority of the Front’s supplies, though their eagerness to do so would wax and wane over the decades to come. In lean years, Flatwell would find himself running something closer to a protection racket than a populist movement, and he would do it anyway because they’d all die if he didn’t, Coral damn it.

The second faction, accounting for a little more than quarter of the Coralist population, was outright belligerent towards the Front from their inception. Farvin and his most dedicated supporters had split with the moderates over their willingness to supply the RLF, and his Messengers swore to pacifism with a will that would have been laudable under any other circumstances than ‘liable to be bombed off the face of the planet at any moment’. If a PCA officer showed up at the man’s door and threated to shoot him unless he slapped them, Farvin would like as not apologize for costing the pig the bullet. Despite staking their claim to the Messenger name, the seventy-ish percent of Coralists outside their faction called them the Pacifists.

The Pacifists, for all their faults, were everything Dolmayan had preached for near twenty years. They were everything Rubicon's society should have been—nay, everything it had been before the PCA had torn it down.

They were maddeningly, suicidally stupid, and Flatwell wanted to shake each and every one of them by the collar until he rattled some sense loose in their skulls.

Still, there was a method to their madness. PCA strikes targeted the Front preferentially and the Messengers only rarely; the Pacifists, through isolation and low population density, either avoided detection or simply presented such a low priority target that the PCA had only struck a Pacifist community once over the last near-two-years. (That strike, unfortunately, had been an Orbit-to-Surface Kinetic Kill Weapon more than sufficient to instantly annihilate all 140 people in the village in question; no one was sure what had prompted it.)

Those statistics had a silver lining for Flatwell’s personal feelings because the Pacifists were the group Sam and Ewell belonged to. His own family were among the Messengers, so Flatwell reluctantly avoided anything more than a letter passed by hand along what few lines of trade remained, wishing them well and letting them know he was still alive. His parents and sister were already at risk enough without anything more to tie them to someone who would soon be a wanted man. Instead, he set out to visit his old friends.

Sam and Ewell had taken up residence in a farming community in the shadow of one of western Belius’s more damaged Grids, a town and four outlying farms of perhaps eighty adults and half that many children. It was a long drive, and he had to stop often to ask for word of his friends, for the only thing the people could tell him of their whereabouts was what direction they had left in as the Coralists scattered following the schism. Flatwell was shocked by the openness with which the towns he passed through operated: in his mind, nearly two years of war had reduced Rubicon’s surface beyond the Corporate holdings to naught but a pockmarked hell, every last survivor driven underground.

The truth of the matter was shocking, even disgusting, in its normalcy. The PCA were a looming threat, but even after the horrors of the attack that had sparked the RLF’s war—an operation for which BAWS’ furious demands for answers had yielded little but the name CLOUDED SKY—their attacks on civilian populations were infrequent enough to give everyone involved a sense of that it was something that happened elsewhere, however false it might be. Once a month, perhaps, one might hear of a PCA strike against the ‘rebels’ or vice versa; once a season, at most, one would hear of the PCA striking one of the many hundreds of established settlements; and only once had they struck a truly ‘peaceful’ town. It was that illusion of normalcy, Flatwell thought, that allowed the Pacifists to exist as a movement at all. Were it even a hair more fragile, none could believe that if they just left well enough alone, all would be well.

It was, in some sick, sorry way, Flatwell’s calling to prove them right.

Eule doubted he could visit his old friends again once he returned to the Front, but as of now, he was still, legally, an employee of BAWS in good standing rather than a terrorist. Thus, he too moved openly on the surface in a simple frontier two-door truck loaned from BAWS. He had had to search the entire motor pool for one without a trace of company branding on it. As much as the Pacifists might frustrate him, he respected their idealism too much to show up to their town covered in advertisements for a weapons dealer.

He parked the truck at the quite literal edge of the small town an hour before noon and disembarked into a swarm of curious children. The adults who followed the sound of commotion smiled and waved the stranger further into town. Flatwell had feared that his affiliation with the violence of the Front would see him cast out if any recognized him, but that was not their way. The first to recognize him, a woman two years his senior, merely had her expression turn towards the sadness with one regards family who had lost their way. She did not rebuke him, nor did she hesitate to take him by the arm and lead him to what he had surely come for.

Sam and Ewell had made their home not far from where Flatwell had parked his truck. Sam had become a tailor; Ewell taught children their letters. Both were home when Flatwell knocked, and both nearly knocked him out of his boots with joy to see him. They dragged him into their home with too much enthusiasm for him to so much as clean his boots on the mat, and the reason for their glowing pride was soon made obvious.

Not once—not in all the year he had been away, nor in the additional six months since his return—had Flatwell found a single cause to regret his choice that day, to remain with Dolmayan and the burgeoning Front as his most precious friends turned away. He had his first such moment there, as Sam carefully and tenderly removed the most perfect baby boy he had ever seen from the infant’s crib.

“Ellos,” she whispered as the sleepy infant, perhaps one-quarter to one-half of one Standard year in age, squirmed and fussed in her arms. “Ellos Cadmore-Radovich. Isn’t he beautiful?”

He was. Sam placed the boy in Eule’s arms, and the overwhelming surge of familial love Flatwell felt brought tears to his eyes and a gentle tremor to his hands. Were Flatwell anyone else—had he not made the commitments and taken on the responsibilities he had—he might have abandoned the Liberation Front then and there, taken the guest room in the large, refurbished old pre-Fires house and raised his friends’ child as his own flesh and blood. In that first second Flatwell held him, the boy had become as dear to him as his friends, and he would have liked nothing more than to remain there for the rest of his life, however short or long that may be in the shadow of the PCA’s guns.

But he had, by his own plot, become well and truly indispensable to the Front. Until he had trained the first generation of the Front enough that they could train their successors in turn, to turn away from his duty was to condemn them to death. Once he had, he did not think the PCA would tolerate his retirement to anything but an image on a memorial. The senseless cruelty of Mars had rendered the things he wanted beyond his reach.

Perhaps not all of the tears in his eyes were of love.

“We weren’t sure we’d ever see you again,” Sam said, her voice pitched low so not to disturb the boy. “But we though… if you ever came round… we want you to be his godfather, Flats. Will you?”

“I would love nothing more,” Flatwell answered, his voice thick with emotion, “but… you have to know odds are good the next you hear of me, it’ll be the PCA celebrating my death. Surely, you would rather someone here…?”

Ewell reached up from behind him and ruffled Flatwell’s hair like they were still boys three Standard years younger. “Don’t be daft, Flats. We don’t need no fancy title to trust my neighbors with my boy, and there’s no one we’d rather honor with the name. Will you?”

The question required not a second of consideration. “Of course. How could I say anything else?”

The three retired to the battered but well-loved couch, Flatwell squeezed between the two proud parents as he held the boy in his arms. They spoke without cease until the sky outside began to darken. Ewell urged him to stay for supper; Eule feared such would be the first step to never leaving at all. He was due back at BAWS in three days time, from whence he would disappear for good into the shadows of the Rubicon Liberation Front.

Ellos slept soundly throughout it all, and only once it came time for Flatwell to hand the boy back to his father did the lad begin to fuss. Ewell laughed and kissed his sons head. “He likes you, Flats,” Ewell said.

“I like him too,” Flatwell said, beaming at the boy. “I wish I could stay, Caddie. It breaks my heart that I can’t, I can’t even put it into words. But… I made promises. Promises I have to keep, or people will die.”

“I understand,” Ewell said. “Sam and I, we… we believe in the Coral’s Message. The old Message. But we’re not so daft we’ll tell you off for doing what you think is right.”

“Thank you.” The simple words were a balm to Eule’s heard. “I’m not the fool I used to be, Caddie. There is nothing glorious or righteous or just in war… but I still think someone has to do it, and I’m willing to be that someone.”

“A different type of fool, then,” Sam said, then raised her hands in mock defensiveness. “I’m kidding, Flats. I’m sure you think we’re just as daft as we think you are.”

“I won’t embarrass you by confirming that,” Flatwell said. “I can’t agree with your decision, but I respect every bit of it. Live your lives the way the Coral would want. If I have my way, none of you will ever need see a weapon.”

The Fates would spit on that vow, as they are so often wont to do.

Chapter Text

Fifteen years passed, or near enough.

A PCA orbital strike came down on a lonely settlement in western Belius.

News made its way through the RLF.

Flatwell set out in the fastest vehicle they had, an Elcano rapid resupply/courier VTOL.

He arrived hours late. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been there the second it happened.

He pulled the only survivor from the rubble and took him away to the ironic safety of the war front.

He grieved, long and hard, for the friends he had never believed a soldier like him could outlive.

And then he spat upon their memory and betrayed all they stood for.

And
    it
       worked.