

All Small Tales

© 2018 Joseph Barone

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The Spoofer Revolution

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1 - Rangor and Orong

Chapter 2 - Linna and the Dragon

Chapter 3 - The Last Rebellion

Chapter 4 - Tannon and the Dragon

Chapter 5 – Ventrello

Chapter 6 - The Fire-Heart

Chapter 7 - The Hall of Records

Chapter 8 - Captain Siib and the Red Kraken

Chapter 9 - The Laniakea Corps

Chapter 10 – Ramstaad

Chapter 1 - Rangor and Orong

Running. Running, always running. I ran everywhere even though I could easily get from one place to another with my hover-way. I genuinely liked to run and it felt good to let out my aggression in that manner. It was a method of subverting anger, mostly. But sometimes it was necessary. Sometimes, I had to escape one thing or another.

This particular instance, I was running from the final exams in my lyceum. Based in Rangor City and run by the Elder Dactilate, my school was no longer an institution I wished to attend. To me their version of "knowledge" was fruitless, and I had good reason to believe that much of it was wrong. Malinformed.

So I ran.

The problem was that I wasn't fast enough to get past a lone guard at the apex of the sprawling municipal building with pristine quarry-marble flooring cut into rectangles. Truancy wasn't a problem at all in the city and neither was any other form of insubordination, so the Rhean sentinel at the door seemed more than surprised.

"Excuse me! Hey! Dactilon! I order you to stop running! Identify yourself. Now."

The man wore plated bronze-colored armor with a short red cape indicative of the Rhean soldiers that occupied the city. His helmet was on the security desk and his dory remained sheathed, but his hand hovered over it in case I needed to be tazed. Few of us ever needed to be, but it might have happened on occasion out of prejudicial boredom.

I didn't want to get tazed, so I stopped in my tracks and stood upright.

"I'm sorry Soldier, I'm headed to a very important meeting and I'm late. Please let me through. My name is Dannus Manon, vice-headmaster of this school. I'm sure you have seen me plenty of times before. I certainly recognize you, Security Agent Marcus."

The Rhean looked me over squinty-eyed. I knew that to them, we all looked exactly alike. We each had the same gray skin, black eyes, slit noses and clubbed feet.

He wasn't fully convinced. He turned to a member of the janitorial staff and said, "You, custodian. Come here. Identify this creature."

The janitor moved slowly up to me and put his head down. I did the same, but for a different reason. After a few seconds, maybe a minute, he said, "This is the headmaster. Dannus Manon."

The Rhean scowled a bit and abruptly dismissed the janitor, who shuffled back onto the same limp from before. Dactilons have notoriously bad eyesight. We could hardly tell one another apart. Except that I lack this genetic shortcoming. My eyes were far better than anyone else I knew including the aliens, but I often pretended otherwise.

"You're free to go, but you need to walk next time. A...thing of your office should know better. Don't let me catch you running again." I didn't know if all Rheans were this overtly rude or if it was only the military ones, which were members of the so-called SPQR Legion.

Unfortunately the only aliens that were ever on planet Dactil were part of the Legion.

I nodded to the Occupier and half-jigged out the door. If that experience taught me one thing, it was to be smart about my movements - especially those that were supposed to fly under the radar. So once outside the large campus, I put my hand to my head and put out telepathic feelers.

In my mind's eye, I picked up three red dots in the direction I was headed, but then no others my entire way home. So I respectfully walked past the dots, each of them helmeted with their dory spears at the ready, and once I got beyond their near-perfect sight...I ran.

I ran past the city limits and through the white desert sands until they became gray. The gray sands became black and rough and still I kept running. I ran until my legs burned, which was just the same time that our third moon set in the sky.

When I got to Orong City I walked, feeling the powdery dust under my bare feet. Orong was not properly a city per se - it was a long row of different kinds of shabby housing. There were very few fabricated apartments, some huts, shacks, but all were barely one floor in all.

I went to my ground-floor tenement and breathed a sigh of accomplishment. I managed to stick it to the Occupiers albeit in a very small, teensy-tiny way.

Now home, I struggled with what to do. Any form of entertainment was strictly controlled by the constant Them. So I did what I usually would when waiting for mom and dad to come home from the marble quarries.

I read from old, dusty books which would be considered contraband, and therefore punishable by laser cannon in Rangor Stadium as part of weekly sporting events.

The old books told stories of mythical creatures and epic tales about people who may or may not have ever lived. In my heart I liked to think they had been real at some point. That there was a time before this, when heroes and legends abounded and the world was ours.

My favorite stories had to do with the sea. Mirone the Red Kraken was a saga about hunters that sought to tame and captured mighty sea beasts, all at great cost to themselves.

There are no sea beasts any longer, if there truly ever were any because there are no seas. Dactil has become an outpost planet with a central city and many outlier towns situated in different points around the vast desert that covered the globe.

We're taught in schools that it was always like this. But the ancient manuscripts that form my preferred reading material would say otherwise. Why would certain concepts, such as "oceans", be taken for granted in these books unless the readers at the time knew exactly what they meant?

And so, I resolved that something had to change. I have tolerated the occupation for too long. But I was worried that I was the only one who felt that way. Certainly my parents did not share my views. There was not a bone of contention within, or between them. The door clicked open and my mother walked through it, alone.

"Oh! Grady! What are you doing home so soon? I thought you had your final examinations at lyceum today?"

I reached into our small cooler and took out my day's ration of Nutriment shake. It smelled like feet and tasted like uncooked, poisonous fungi, but it was all that we were given to sustain ourselves.

I slowly began to drink and put my head in the book I had picked up, all while ignoring my mother's question.

"Grady. Grady! Grady Manorong, you listen to me right now!"

I picked up my head. "It's okay mom. I just left a little bit ahead of schedule, that's all. It'll be okay."

Her eyes got wide, yellow pupils fully visible. "It's not going to be okay, Grady. They're going to come after you. You know what they think of us, they wouldn't consider it twice to kill you. And for what? So you could come home and read?"

I got up and put my hand on her trembling shoulder. "It'll be okay because...I spoofed my mental signature onto another student, so I was counted as 'present'. I also believe I received a 'B', if I'm not mistaken..."

I put my hand to my head.

"Yes, a 'B'. The student I picked was always a good achiever. I've now graduated with full honors, mom. But in this current moment, I just want to think about Mirone."

I went to go sit down but she stopped me.

"You've never done anything like this before, son. Why now? I know you can do these things that nobody else can but why put yourself, and us, in unnecessary risk?"

In the apartment, there was enough room for three people, housing beds and a cooler for our fungus-based shakes. There was no bathroom like they had in the lyceum hallways. We all did our business in the communal outhouse.

The whole world has become an outhouse. But it had been this way since long before my grandparents were born. At this point, right now - no one seemed to know any better. Even my parents struggled to feel any kind of negative emotions surrounding our lot as a planet.

"Because now that my studies are over, the Legionnaires are going to dole out job assignments." I managed to sit back down.

My mom sat in her own nook eight feet away from me. "Well, yes. Let's hope they give you a place in the quarries like your father and I have."

"I don't want a place in the quarries! I don't want to be a mindless shell like everybody else! I want something more."

"Like what?" she asked me, her eyelids getting heavy. She had been working sixteen hours today, with an hour walking commute each way on top of that. We were slaves and yet, the word "slave" was no longer in the Dactilonian language. But it was in an old dictionary we own in the apartment, stuffed below my ragged bed.

"Like free, mom." "Free" was also stripped from our way of speaking.

She yawned to reveal many missing teeth. We weren't given the proper tools for hygiene and the fungal concoction was also very high in enamel-eroding sugar.

"We are free in a sense, Grady. We're free from the worries of choice. And don't yell, it might draw too much...attention..." she fell asleep immediately after her stern warning. Her large gray head nestled into the hard, pillow-less mattress touching the wall. Her legs hung off of one side since each bed was a good foot and a half too short.

The shake was especially acrid this afternoon but I savored each gulp. As I settled in to read yet again how Captain Siib pursued the great kraken in rough waters with a small crew in underequipped short boats, I was reminded about how thrilling this was to me the very first time I lay my eyes upon it.

To think that far smaller, less powerful creatures had the chance; the hope to collectively bring down a leviathan with nothing but strategy, determination and tenacity, gave me hope for Dactil. And hope for a future day to come. I didn't know what would finally push me over the edge and cause me to decide that my rebellion had begun, but I knew it'd be soon. I wouldn't have believed that it was so soon, however.

About two hours since mom fell asleep, there was a great commotion outside. There was never a commotion outside, apart from a stray sandstorm here and there.

"Rakel Dannersen! We are looking for Rakel Dannersen and her family! She was truant at today's final exams in the lyceum! She is to be taken into custody now! Anyone harboring her or impeding our collection of the...thing, will also be arrested."

Oh, crap. I spoofed my signature onto her but I forgot to have both of ours overlap so that she'd be counted in attendance too. It was a rookie mistake, and one that was going to put the poor girl into a work camp.

The Dannersen family stepped out of their hut. Mother, father, and Rakel. Rakel had been changing her clothes and was still undressed. When they came calling, you dropped whatever it was that you were doing to oblige. Even going to the bathroom. Even dressing.

Whether or not the Rhean soldiers that were pointing their spears at the triplet actually knew how much shame nudity brought Dactilons, they didn't seem to care. Rakel was paraded in front of the town in all her glory, an act of disrespect that was hard for the rest of us to swallow. Especially me since ultimately, it was my fault.

Mr. Dannersen dared to directly address the Legionnaire roughly pushing his daughter. "There must be some mistake, Sir. I brought her to school myself today. She received a score of 'B' - I can even show you her report card. May I go get it?"

The Rhean stopped and glared. Everyone was watching, so any morsel of victory for a Dactilon had to be avoided. He paused an extra moment before turning his spear around so that the blunt side faced forward. Then he swung it in a backhanded arc, crashing it upon Dannersen's face.

"Contraband! False documents, then!" the senior soldier declared without proof.

"Go, you disgusting piece of filth, and retrieve the forgery from your home." Although Mr. Dannersen was barely conscious, he got his feet under him and began to sway towards his hut.

"The rest of you, turn out all of your things and take off all of your clothes. Trust me, none of us enjoys the sight of your hideous bodies except for the corpses. We will be inspecting each of your living spaces as well for contraband."

I put my hand to my head and spoke directly into my mother's mind.

<<The books! If they find the books, they'll kill us! I have to do something!>>

She began to protest, but I was having none of it. There were things I was capable of, special things...far beyond any other Dactilon that I knew about, and way past the natural abilities of the Rheans themselves. And yet, my mother's voice was firmly in my head.

<{Don't, Grady. Don't reveal your abilities, not yet and not like this. They will take you and dissect you, to see how you can do what you do. Not like this.}>

<<But the books...>>

<{If you distract them, I will start a fire. There won't be any trace of any page.}>

Nor of our culture or history, I sighed. They were the only such manuscripts that I was aware of. No one else in the tent city of Orong possessed any books. The death of the books would be almost as bad as the death of the Dannersen family. And death was where this witch hunt was headed anyway. Unless I did something.

<<No, Mom. No fire. I know what to do. Trust me and also, forgive me.>> I turned to the four soldiers, who were busy forcefully removing articles of clothing from the backs of an elderly couple who were taking too long.

The revolution begins now, I thought quietly.

My skin was sectioned off into heptagonal scales that looked like a continuous fabric, like the rest of my kind. Yet I could manipulate each scale in ways that others could not. I could change color, texture, rigidity, and even shape to an extent, though that had its very strict limits.

I proceeded to harden my skin to become tougher than tungsten, an abundant element on Dactil. Then I shielded myself from being read and spoofed my signature to overlap with my mother's mind, so that I could not be identified as the attacker.

"Leave those elders alone, you Rhean scum!" I barked. All four of them froze in place, not by fear, but I assumed by a complete lack of protocol for what to do. To my knowledge, they'd never been spoken to in such a way in all their time governing the planet.

They first looked at each other perhaps amused, and then turned to the source of the bark. Me. But by the time their necks had turned on their swivels, it was too late.

I was on them in a moment. I mauled, tore, ripped and slashed. It was just enough but not too much. My intent wasn't to kill them, it was to make it look like they'd had a run in with an Ang Ang, one of the few native animals still living on-planet. It was large and dangerous, and often crept around these parts. They tended to remain in the unpopulated areas of the desert but sightings were common during severe droughts or storms.

We Dactilons could fend them off with some basic telepathy, but Legionnaires didn't possess that skill.

I sat the four men, dazed but perhaps thankful they still had breath, in a row down before me. I took off their helmets since that was the only way they could shield themselves from mental penetration.

With their defenses down, communicators broken and helmets off, I reached into their minds and did a little tinkering. With some rudimentary effort, I made them forget about their mission to take Rakel, forget their orders to check for contraband, forget they were ever in Orong City.

Instead, I wrote a new set of collective memories for them. One in which they were attacked by a pair of Ang Angs on their way to a weather station in the Lupid Desert. With that, they were on their merry way wandering like nomads in the direction of Rangor to find a hospital. They would eventually reach another Rhean to tell their tale within a few hours.

As soon as the soldiers were no longer a threat, Orong's residents immediately went inside their homes and shut their doors. To say that our kind is peaceful is an understatement. They are non-combative to the core. They couldn't even see what was happening because of their poor eyesight, but all they knew was that a Legionnaire threat was neutralized. Moving on. Next!

It didn't mean I got a "thank-you" or that there was any sense of appreciation. Just closed doors, the benefit of surviving for another day.

Then again, I was the one who had brought the calamity upon them in the first place...but they didn't know that.

Except that Mom did.

I altered my scales back to normal and scampered home. There was an extra measure of tension in the air, adding humidity to the usual acridity.

My father must have arrived home in the middle of the melee. He and my mother stood at their beds (where else could they stand?) with their arms folded. He had a tinge of green in his torso as many older males did. It was often a sign of adulthood, but some adults didn't have it. Like Mom, he wore simple clothing. Linen pants with a hooded wrap covering the top of his body.

I tended to wear the wrap since we were a desert people and sand particles irritated so many things, but I also had something the Rheans called denim pants. Mine were from a donation from some patron all the way on planet Rhea. Thanks for the pants, dude.

"There's no denying what you can accomplish, Grady. We have tried to stifle this fever inside you in vain, but it calls to you." The tender growl of his voice had an unusually broken aspect to it. For one of the few times in my life, he was getting emotional.

"We cannot stop you; even they cannot stop you. And we won't...ever turn you in. But you pose a danger to all of Orong City because of your capacity to turn these errant thoughts to reality. Look at what happened today! Our neighbors couldn't identify you by eye, but one of the soldiers that you beat up probably could. Your mind wipe was a rush job. Sooner or later, what you did will be discovered, and it could even be a member of the Elders that does it. Punishment would be brutal and there would likely be no trial."

My father grasped at the air to find more words, but just like the rations we were given, there were very few left and all had gone stale.

My mother held his shoulder in obvious consolation. What was she consoling him about? She turned to me slowly but with grave purpose. Graver than I'd ever seen, and we all practically lived in a grave.

"What your father is trying to say is that you can't stay here any longer. The feast of Ramstaad is next week and this place will be crawling with Legionnaires. You know how rough they can get with us on that day. If you can't tolerate what you consider to be injustice, then you will probably do something we will all regret."

My father took a satchel, our only containment vessel of any kind, and began to stuff it with Nutriment. Roughly four days' worth. That left them with just two between them to last them for four days. He nodded.

"It's okay," he said. "I can probably get one or two more bottles from Skitchy at work."

"But where will I go?" I asked weakly. And then more strongly, "How can I protect you if I'm not here?" I demanded.

His eyes puffed up and became heavy, and not only because he was returning from a twenty hour shift.

"If you're set on making waves - fighting, resisting, then believe it or not there is a place for you out there on Dactil. Perhaps even more shocking, when we were young your mother and I attended a few meetings of the resistance movement. That was before the latest crackdown that began twenty years ago. The Rheans were ever so slightly more gentle back then."

Mom put her hand on my shoulder. "They call themselves The Spoofers. They're males and females that can go off the grid, and move their telepathic signals wherever they wish."

"Like you," my father added, nodding uncontrollably.

"But not quite. To this day I haven't seen anyone with the breadth of ability that you have. You're special, and not just because you're my son." His eyes got moist and my mother wiped them clear.

She pulled me close to them both. She was always the strong one, but I could still hear the quivering in her voice.

"They're camouflaged in a wide patch of gray sand on the same parallel as Orong, but about thirty to forty miles north of us. They've carved out a network of tunnels underground and run their own power."

"They source the bulk of their food from lichens farmed and harvested in wide caves," my father continued. "A river runs through natural aquifers. Rheans don't know they're there, and the hideout is invisible to the average Dactilon. They're as off-the-map as is possible."

This was too much to take in at the moment. I had often dreamed of going off on an adventure to save the world, like Tannon the Fire-Heart. But I never considered that I should leave my family so far behind. Nor that they would choose to stay where they were.

But I could see it in their tired eyes. There was no fight there. For them, inexplicably there was comfort in the daily routine, even if it was harsh and crushing. So I didn't protest. Like them I accepted my fate, acrid as it might have been.

"How will I find The Spoofers? And would they be hostile to newcomers such as myself?" As idealistic as I was - perhaps more than anyone else I knew - I still had a practical streak that started at my head and ran down my back. My father took the satchel and added four more things. Four books out of our collection. Mirone the Red Kraken, The Fire-Heart and the Dragon, Beware the Ice-Hearts, and the full epic of Tannon.

"Bring them these specific books. That's how they'll know that you're a friend. And as for finding them, well they no longer want to be found. So you have to hone your special skills and concentrate, Grady.

"I've heard them say to one another that while Rheans were red dots on your Mind Map, and the general population of Dactil were gray, Spoofers and members of the Dactilate were yellow dots. Someone as powerful as you are should be able to see them..."

"Without being seen yourself," my mother finished.

Nani and Tadoo Manorong gave me a big hug, and then walked me to the door. Minutes later, as I remained outside in the darkening desert, I felt them both fall asleep.

Chapter 2 - Linna and the Dragon

I grabbed my hover-way and went about on the path my parents directed. North. Parallel to both Rangor and Orong. North of my parents, and west of the only true city left in the world. Except that it wasn't our city. It was bustling, busy and tremendous, but it was mainly for tourists from other planets. A rest stop, as it were.

The hover-way didn't usually go very fast, maybe thirty miles an hour at most, but I had trouble driving over sand. The vehicle sported a small turbine propulsion system which needed to push at the ground in order to stay in the air. Even though I was barely hovering but definitely crawling, I was fine with that. I'd already done my fair share of running for the day. I was tired.

Besides, I wanted to take in the view and think about what was happening. In the lowering light, the rocky landscape shone with an eerie glow. It was nearing full night, which lasted only four hours. Our two suns were both down, and two of our three moons were in the sky, albeit in different arcs.

The largest sun, Rano had just set and the horizon still burned with the fire of its collapse, like a blanket in which to nestle. It cast long shadows of high cliffs. But the golden twilight wouldn't last very long. In a short while Hano, our morning sun, smaller and farther away in the sky, would soon rise.

I found myself excited rather than angry or sad about leaving. I had expected to be mourning the loss of my daily routine. Instead I was embarking on a journey that I'd always wanted to travel, to do something I always wanted to do. To somehow resist Rhea and all her minions. And I wouldn't have to do it alone; I'd actually have help. Now, how was I going to find these like-minded and like-powered individuals? They would be yellow dots in my mind's eye, although if they were really that good at telepathy they'd actually be no dots at all.

I was adept at shielding my own mind from external penetration. It didn't seem to be that difficult a trick, but apparently for everyone else, it was. So I needed to exploit some kind of loophole to "see" the Spoofers. I didn't regularly cast my glance very far ahead of me. It was difficult to set my mind upon whomever was there twenty miles away, let alone in a reinforced underground bunker.

But puttering on my hover-way trudging precisely forward, I closed my eyes and began to search. I would have been close enough to get some kind of a reading even if not a full picture. And yet instead there was blankness. Not a single creature apart from a pair of sleeping Ang Angs was there directly to my north. So I kept pushing, hoping to get a signal within the next few miles. In my oppressed days I often stayed awake, thinking and reading. Then re-thinking and rereading. It wasn't uncommon for me to stay awake two days straight, fifty six hours in a row.

I didn't only read fiction books. I also enjoyed Rhean encyclopedias about wild animals from other planets. Gorgonic Krakens were real and they had homes somewhere in the universe, but I wondered how similar to Mirone they actually were. Kniderian Dragons, Cerberillian Canids, Ofwal Kukooz, were all fascinating to me. They told a story of biological diversity unlike anything my experience has taught me in my own world.

I used to imagine what Dactil would be like populated by countless wild creatures, with ferns, grasses and bodies of water all around. Then I opened my eyes and I saw more gray sand than I could bear. A few more miles and nearly an hour later, I got something. It was a male, a yellow dot, who was traveling very quickly in the same direction I was headed. He must have been in some kind of vehicle, coming from Rangor. Rangor, capital of Dactil, the porcelain throne of this outhouse. Roughly thirteen miles away, directly north, the yellow dot disappeared.

That was my loophole. I put an 'X' on my Mind Map right where the signal went away. That must have been the entryway into the Land of the Spoofers. There was no other explanation. I got excited since I hadn't expected to reach this point as soon as I did. Mom and Dad didn't expect me to find the entry point so soon. Maybe, when this was all over, our troubles and the occupiers gone, we'd be a family again. Maybe I'd have my own family someday, and they'd live in a future upscale, revitalized version of Orong.

Dreams kept me warm, but the rest of my people ran cold. Few dreamed of anything more than the same tomorrow, each day of their lives. Under the thumbs of outsiders, they both withered and flourished. My own stomach stayed in a constant state of turmoil. It burbled up urgings of protest, not to be sated until justice was done. But how? That...was something I never planned, nor dreamed about.

I always dreamed of after. Except for my actual dreams, the ones that came at night to intrude upon my consciousness unsummoned.

I sometimes dreamed about a past, long ago, something no longer in the histories since books and hard drives were burned in great purges. Dactil's vast deserts, making up a full 88 % of her surface area - what if some used to be oceans? What if the expanse that my hover-way struggled to traverse was once home to all kinds of fishes and whales, or even a kraken or two?

What if the sand were their scattered bones, ground up by winds and the boots of Rhea?

Some way far off, I saw a tremendous water collection tower, multiple long spokes turning at odd angles to draw moisture from the sky. It went to sate the soldiers and to water their Dactil-grown crops. The rest of us had to rely on the bare minimum of water packed into daily Nutriment shakes. It was enough only to survive. Ironically to my mind, water collection made the planet drier and hotter since it sucked whatever little vapor there was.

I let my mind wander and found myself thinking of Mirone the Red Kraken. Lurking at depths of three or four miles, coming up to consume ships and scatter their remains across the ocean floor, the kraken always feasted with unbridled hunger. It was suicide to go after the leviathan but Captain Siib and the crew of his ship, The Penchant, would not rest until they subdued the monster.

Mirone came to my mind at that moment because I had reached the 'X', but there was no feature in the sand that was any different from the next twenty miles, or the last twenty. There was no hole in the ground to climb in, nor any hatch leading to a hole. Somehow, all the Spoofers were able to shield their minds from me, though I was literally right above a city of them. There had to have been some kind of large mental firewall blocking the place, but that didn't make much sense.

The Rheans didn't bother to keep their guard up because Dactil (to the best of my knowledge), had never rebelled against them, instead stepping directly in line. Rhea was most likely blissfully unaware of the Spoofers, and so was the Dactilate, so...the only people this rebellious counter-society were trying to actively repel were... people who wanted to join them?

People like me.

Why was Mirone still on my mind? Because of the way The Penchant tracked the leviathan. It was a low tech but highly effective method. Normally, on whatever planet the beast was located, the surface of the sea glowed pink from luminescent krill. Whenever Mirone approached, even from thousands of feet below, the krill could feel the giant's pressure waves precede him, and they would go dark. It was a survival mechanism that served seafarers and kraken hunters well.

That was the signal that the beast was approaching. "Thar's the pit, brace for the breach!" lookouts from The Penchant would cry. It was then that Captain Siib would take forty or fifty others, and try to circle the "pit" with smaller boats built for ramming and speed. So, I had to somehow notice subtle changes in the sand, but perhaps the only way to do that was to wait until someone left the hideout. I thought it might take a very long time since the city was self-sustaining, and I was right.

After waiting several hours with my hover-way parked by my side, I succumbed to exhaustion and slept until both suns were high in the sky, effectively broiling the atmosphere in the process. Although I and my kind were physically rugged and could resist extremes of temperature and weather very well, the singeing sun and my state of dehydration brought with it horrific nightmares.

Specifically, it brought a single recurring nightmare, one that had haunted me ever since I was a young child. This dream was a big reason for how I felt about my condition, and that of my people. It wasn't a coherent narrative; it was disjointed and flung me from one scene to the next in abrupt, nauseating breaks.

First I was a kid, a young tadpole, scared and hiding under a massive rock structure somewhere in a desert with which I was unfamiliar. The sand was dark brown. It might have been the other side of the globe for all I knew. There was a jarring sound coming from every direction at once. It shook my bones and rattled my brains. It was like a whoosh of air but multiplied by a billion, and continuous rather than momentary.

The sky had suddenly darkened as well, since the sun went out completely. It didn't look like a cloud could have been the culprit, because it was dark as far as my eyes could see. Either there was a two-sun eclipse, or something far more sinister was taking place. I dared to sneak a peek skywards, not comprehending what I was looking at, at first. The only way I could explain to myself what I was seeing, was to call it a flying city.

It was metallic and gray, and so big that I couldn't tell its shape from the ground. I retreated back under the rock, clinging to it with all my might.

Now I was an adult. But somehow, I was a different species. My dream body's layout was very similar to my actual body - a five pointed star, except that I was bone white from head to toe. I had sharp claws and I could feel razor-like teeth in my mouth.

I wore some kind of sandy tan camouflage armor. I was a soldier with a bayonet-like weapon that fired electric, kinetic, and laser blasts depending on a rotary switcher. I was shooting at rival soldiers who were parachuting down from the flying city. It was raining enemies on top of us, but our firepower was useless. They were far better protected than we had expected them to be, since they had planned out their attack and we were in many ways late to the party. We'd only known the threat when it was upon us and no sooner.

Cut to the next scene - I'm someone else, an officer perhaps but still stark white against the desert, possessing claws and teeth. My armor is thicker than before. The attackers have landed and are using their weapons against us en masse.

They're cutting down not just our warriors, but everyone in their path. They seem to be storming our cities and looking for innocents to discharge. Our cities looked different than what I was used to seeing. The particular one in which I was stationed wasn't a tent city like Orong, and nor was it a Rhean metropolis like in Rangor.

The skyline was filled with long white buildings with rounded roofs on top. I saw one of our enemies walking towards a cowering family and raising a weapon. It was...a dory spear!

The attackers were from Rhea.

The alien enemy had bold metallic armor that covered every inch of its body. I took my blaster and simultaneously shot at full force, an electric, kinetic and laser blast at the same time. I aimed towards the ribs, just under the armpit. It knocked the coward back several feet and he dropped the spear. I shot again and again and again towards the same spot until I saw the metal chink and crack.

My weapon was out of juice but I took the bayoneted side and plunged it into the open seam. One of the vast horde was killed. I was proud to call the victory mine. I could feel the pride, and also the panic of the situation. We were outgunned. I no longer had ammo. But I still fought. As a battalion of the enemy marched on our shiny city, I attacked the soldier at the end of the line. Others of my cohorts were doing the same, blasters or no.

I began to punch at the helmet and ribs, and to the surprise of me, Grady Manorong the dreamer, I found that my knuckles glowed with a blue light until they crackled with energy upon impact. It took several tries, but I broke the reinforced glassy helmet and then ripped out the enemy's face.

To my surprise (me the soldier now), the alien was soft, mushy and easily killable inside the armor. Like a shelled garblot, it had a very weak undercarriage once you got past its considerable defenses. There was usually more to the dream but it stopped abruptly as I awoke with a start.

I, the now-awake and cranky wannabe rebel, had been poked in the ribs with something hard and flat. It was the blunt end of a dory spear. I jumped up but fell, landing on my back.

"Hey! You! Hold up right there and don't move. Who are you and what are you doing at this location?"

I was expecting to see Legionnaire scum hovering over me, threatening to end my mission before I even knew what it was. But I found that it wasn't them, it was a group of three fellow Dactilons, wearing no armor and brandishing weaponry they seemed to have no idea how to hold.

"Spoofers?" I asked bluntly, pointing at them.

They looked at each other. I could have identified them by searching their minds but they would have felt my intrusion. I didn't want to give myself away just yet.

One of the three, a tall male, looked at the other two, both females.

"What? No. What's that? I don't know what you're talking about. Now I'm asking again, who are you and what are you doing around these parts? Nobody comes around here, not even Ang Angs. They know better."

He was right. This area was not part of either the main or peripheral corridors for mining or commerce. It was No Man's Land. But I also suspected that the trio also formed a kind of psychic barrier or firewall to repel anyone traversing the desert from approaching. One of the females shook the dory at me. If she had shaken it harder it would have fired.

"Hey! Watch where you're pointing that thing! It's not a toy," I reminded her.

She lowered it slightly.

"Sorry. How come we can't read you? How are you insulating your mind? We thought you were dead! But instead you were asleep. That's why we poked you."

The male shushed her loudly.

"Linna! Don't tell him we can't read him, who knows how he can use that against us? I say we take him out before he has a chance to attack."

The female raised her dory and rested it on her shoulder.

"Thanks, Targen. For telling him my name. Why don't we bring him with us as a prisoner to talk to 303? He'll know what to do."

"Shh! Don't mention 303!" The other female turned to me and waved hello weakly. "My name is Margol by the way."

"My name is Grady. Grady Manorong. I'm here to join you. I would like to become part of your society." I had my hands up to hopefully show them that I was non-threatening.

"We're taking you to our leader," the one named Linna said. I was happy to obligingly follow. There was something about her that made me feel warm. She was less rough around the edges than the Dactilons I'd known. She actually had emotion in her voice.

Targen shook his head and stomped his large foot. I stopped walking.

"No, no no! This is not our protocol. How is it safe for us to bring a stranger down there with us? What if that's exactly what he wanted in the first place?"

I looked around, both amused and confused. They obviously hadn't seen a new person in their midst in a very long time. They all seemed to be young to middle aged adults and probably were raised in the cave from birth. They lacked the strange docile etiquette of someone raised by the Dactilate under the watchful guise of the Imperator's troops. I raised one of my hands higher than the other, like we were taught to do in lyceum to answer a question.

"Um, yes. That is exactly what I want. As I said, I would like to join your community. Your values, whatever was conveyed to me about them, are my own as well."

Targen walked right up to me, so close that I could smell his lichen breath. The tip of the spear was inches from my left temple.

"And why do you want to join our 'community'? What do you know about that?"

I looked him straight in the eye and sent him a few mental images of fighting off the soldiers in Orong the day earlier. It was meant to be proof, not an arm twist.

"I want to join your resistance movement. I would like to expel the Imperator's grip over Dactil. I want our lands to be free."

Targen didn't expect my bluntness, nor did he expect my ability to project to him mentally. Without reply, he walked around me, and yanked the satchel off of my shoulder. I was beginning to tire of the routine, but I didn't want to hurt my chances of joining their cave society. Where else would I go if they didn't take me?

He undid the fastener and opened the pouch. Then he turned it over, spilling out the books.

"What the -?"

"Where did you get these?" Linna asked.

"Oh yeah," I said. "I forgot I had those. I was told you'd let me in if I showed them to you."

"You read all these books?" Margol asked with wide eyes.

"Yes."

"Which one is your favorite?" Linna wondered aloud.

"Mirone. My second favorite is the Fire-Heart and the Dragon."

"Tell the story," Targen demanded.

"What?"

"Of the Fire-Heart. Before we let you in to meet 303 we need to hear it. We need to know you're being genuine. If you're not, we'll shoot you on the spot!" He raised the dory yet again to make his point. I raised my hand to my head and read a specific part of Targen's mind, something right at the surface but usually unreadable by others. All three spears were not loaded. The trio brandished them only to fight off any small bugs or lizards they might encounter.

Their extra-special abilities meant that they could spot another creature's signature from miles away, before they became a threat. That was, except mine.

But I decided to play along.

The book about the dragon was the shortest of the four by far. Still, I reckoned I'd give them an abridged version of the tale. I was about to open my mouth when I sensed a separate presence. I could tell that the three warriors didn't feel it yet because they were unperturbed and made no movement in reply.

"What is going on here?" a deep male voice grumbled. The owner of the voice wore a gold and black tunic that was ceremonial in nature. He wore light armor underneath and had a thin headdress.

It was the characteristic garb of a member of the Elder Dactilate.

He was Elder 303 of a parliament of 455 total, a relatively low ranking member. And yet his presence here in the Land of the Spoofers, as their leader was...pretty cool to me. The resistance had someone with political power on their side!

"Who is this intruder and why are your dories unarmed?"

Seeking to allay the parliamentarian's fears and yet wanting to showcase my skills, I replied, "I found this place myself. I locked onto your mental signature and followed it to this entrance. I apologize for the intrusion, but I wish to join the Spoofer Resistance movement."

303 looked as if a zorbi fly had flown right into his mouth. I explained how my powers were beyond the norm and how I wanted to use the assets at my disposal for the benefit of the planet. But I could feel his unease about the whole situation.

He shook his head no. "You couldn't possibly have locked onto my 'dot', it's simply not true. I don't know what you're after but we are not accepting any more recruits. There is a freeze on new growth in the movement. I don't know how you heard about us--"

"My parents told me. Just yesterday, actually. They gave me these books and said they were my ticket to join. You have my allegiance, I promise, Mr.-- 303."

303 took the books from me and began to flip through the pages, apparently looking to judge whether or not they were counterfeit.

"They're real," he muttered to himself. He shook his head again but it was with less conviction. "They belong to The Repository. And well-worn. You've read them often. Asking for you to recite from the story of Tannon is not an appropriate test, even if I were open to testing you."

He paused and shuffled his feet somewhat in the sand. The trio of Spoofers looked at each other.

"But I am curious as to how you got here. How you got these books. How you've heard of us. And most importantly, what you're really after. Tell me...Grady," he said after some trying to discern my information. I took no steps to mask my name within my mind. I didn't want him to mistrust me.

"...Where is The Skeleton?" He almost smirked at Targen but Targen definitely smirked back at him.

"The skeleton?" I asked back. "Okay, I will tell you," I assured. "Just give me a few minutes."

"Take your time, Grady." He folded his arms. Then he leaned his head downwards and cast his eyes to his feet. He was concentrating on something. Scrambling the signal, perhaps. He was firewalling Targen, Margol and Linna's minds, and I could feel him instructing them to put up extra protection against me as well. A member of the Elders, let alone one who's part of the Dactilate, is by birth stronger than most. Elder Dactilons had greater mentalistic abilities than the rest of the population. As newborns, citizens on our planet surrender samples of blood to the State.

It serves as a census register with the Rhean governors, and also as a test for Elder status. Babies with the right genes get taken from their parents and groomed to join the Dactilate, which is basically an extension of empire authority. Suffice to say that all four of them including their powerful leader, were trying very hard to cover their tracks, to block all thoughts associated with the skeleton.

Wait.

The skeleton? Or The Skeleton? Yes, it was the latter. It was a proper noun. I was getting a read on it now. What he was referring to was a set of remains so big that it formed a landmark, a location coordinate. It required capitalization for its rarity and because it was near...another landmark...

"...The Skeleton...is north of here. North...east." I looked at each of them as they redoubled their efforts to block me. Targen's grins turned into grimaces. He looked about ready to pop a vein. And yet I could still access the information that I wanted. Four-against-one. I was giddy with pride at my skillfulness. I walked around in circles with my hand to my head until I stopped, stood up straight and put my hand down. I felt many things in that moment and surprise was not the least of them. My eyes widened.

"The Skeleton is an ancient object. Head to tail - the fossil of a great dragon. Wow. Dragons were real," I said almost with tears in my eyes. There would have been if not for the low fluid content of the Nutriment.

Now I spoke with confidence bordering on brashness. "It's right by the Glass Fields." I turned to Linna who seemed to always be blushing. "Two miles away. If you want I could take you--"

But my pride had allowed me to lower my guard. Quicker than I'd expected, 303 reached into his utility belt, drew his loaded dory and shot me with a bolt. I fell down immediately and went unconscious. My lack of consciousness precipitated dreaming, but it was more of the same chaotic, warring, senseless nonsense from before.

I was again a military soldier, clad in metal armor and holding a bayonet. My skin was whiter than the white sands on Bangol. I was screaming, but I could hear my own thoughts more clearly in this dream than I could earlier. I was a general, General Tsado-gai, and I led a battalion of warriors against a flying city that was looming overhead. In the distance my hometown, Dorna, sat in an ominous long shadow.

All the buildings there were white, metallic and shiny with large rounded roofs. Most scraped the sky, and other smaller ones speckled the outskirts. That area was residential and those were the houses. My wife and our families lived in one of them together. Periodic booms rang out from above, and small flying warships came down to rain terror upon us. Small pods broke off from the warships, as every one of the enemy's actions was intended to scramble us to divide our resolve.

It was one of those pods that I encountered. It flew at me at full speed, firing energy blasts from forward-facing cannons. My dream-self was powerful. I had been offered Elder status as a child but refused, choosing instead to become a warrior rather than an orator. One thing the dream-me had been able to do was interfere with the electrical, photonic or protonic systems of almost any device or vehicle.

My kind were all powerful like me, and I fought alongside many milk-skinned soldiers, wearing similar get ups and wielding similar weapons. I focused hard and caused the charging pod to veer off to my left at full speed, causing it to crash in a glorious bundle of flames. That was when I got my revelation. We needed to disable the main ship. That would upend the onslaught by the smaller attack vessels.

I sent out psychic links to everyone in my battalion. First, my feelers went out to the Scribe Council. All they ever did was record the words, actions and memories of the city they were in. The Scribe Council of Dorna were very capable psychics and they boosted my message considerably. From there I connected to my commanders and asked them to connect to each of their direct reports, asking each one lower on the chain to connect to everyone else, until everyone in Dorna was locked in a mindscape and sharing as it were, one train of thought.

I pitched my idea to all the networked web of people, warning them that whether it was a success or a failure...everyone was going to die regardless. As the attack from above continued in its fury, a great many nodes of individual networks went offline during the debate. We could tell that the war was not going to let up until they had killed every last one of us.

It was only logical to make the decision: We would force the flying city out of the sky and plunge it into the ground. With all of us concentrating as hard as we could, the victory and the death, would be ours. I had commanded the Scribe Leader to leave the safety of the Dorna Senate building and take a hover-flash to the Relay in the next city so she could spread our message to the rest of the world.

With her en route to Radistan, I orchestrated the greatest collection of minds towards a singular endeavor - the unmitigated jamming of the flying city's avionic systems. I felt pride, I felt sorrow, and I felt victorious. Our way of life would be preserved because our brethren would follow our lead in the rest of the world. The cities would be falling out of the sky and as our planet's surface burned like an ember for maybe a decade, afterwards we would rebuild.

Someone would rebuild. Someone who possessed the knowledge of the Knath.

My last memory as General Tsado-gai was watching the first ship fall and the sky turn black. My last thought: Victory sometimes looks like fields of glass.

*

I awoke. Almost immediately, the dream began to drift away on wisps of smoke, but the crux of it remained with me. It was vivid and detailed, and somehow in some way, I knew that its contents were true. I had seen, and been a part of, something that had really taken place in the past a long, long time ago.

But what? Just how long ago did Rhea attack this planet? Who were the Knath? And more immediately pressing...

"Where am I?" I asked through the crisscrossing vertical and horizontal bars that formed a cubed cage all around me. There was one guard with his back to me, busily taking a screwdriver to his dory.

"Targen! Hello! Hey! What am I doing in this cage?" The cubed enclosure had no doors on any of the five sides surrounding me. The door was on the floor, meaning that once they put me in there, they tipped it over.

Targen continued to fiddle with the malfunctioning weapon without acknowledging my presence. Still, I pushed. I didn't want to be imprisoned in the underground lair of the Spoofers. I wanted to be part of their collective. Or at least I did when I started my journey out of Orong. Now I wasn't so sure they had any answers. Their treatment of such an eager recruit as myself only raised new questions. Why were they so closed off now? This was not the same place that my parents spoke about.

"Where is 303?" I barked. Targen looked like he'd made some headway with the spear and was filling in battery-shaped cartridges into slots built for them near the midline hand grip. I could feel him want to answer me. Actually, I could feel his curiosity in me and in the books that I brought. He wanted to know how an outsider came to possess these things and how it was that I could read all their minds at once and get past the firewall of an Elder.

"Targen, let me out of here. I won't harm you. You can read me, I'll let you. At the very least, you'll be able to tell whether I'm being deceptive. I don't belong here as a captive, you can sense that."

Linna walked by with a few tools and protonics that were part of a hover-way. This underground cave had a lot of broken junk to be fixed.

"Oh," she jumped back when she saw that I had awoken. Then she turned to Targen. "I, I need a switch converter for the proton battery. Do you have one at your workstation?"

Targen checked his bench which was full of random parts. "Nope."

I approached the closest part of the cage to where they were. "There, Linna. Do you see that hexagonal circuit near the wheels on the table? You can connect the carriage wires to that circuit and use the cover as a switch. When the cover is off the switch is active, when it's on the switch is inactive, because the cover breaks the circuit."

They both looked at the pieces I had pointed out and then they looked at me.

"Thanks," Linna said. "I'll try that right now."

"You're welcome," I replied. "But you can use my hover-way for any parts you need. I don't intend on using it much from here on out."

Linna smiled and then walked away with the six-sided circuit.

"Come on! What do I have to do to prove myself to you? Is this how you treat all your guests?"

"We don't ever have guests," Targen finally said in reply. He clicked a button on the handle of the dory and it didn't do anything at all. It should have lit up three lights to show it was at full power.

"Damn this thing!" he screamed and then tossed it into the junk pile near the junk-filled table he was sitting at.

"Where did you get all this stuff?" I asked.

"Here and there. Various trips to the junkyards at Rangor. Sometimes 303 brings a few fixer-uppers when he comes." He then snapped his mouth tight like an Ang Ang after realizing he'd once again mentioned the Elder, but I didn't dwell on it.

"If this place doesn't receive any guests, how did you, Margol and Linna get here?" I inquired. It was a fair question to be asking from my position behind tungsten gates.

"We were born here. This place is all we know. And that means that we're not like you. Now if you'll excuse me, I really do have orders not to converse with outsiders. When 303 returns, he'll deal with you. But I don't think he's going to be unfair. Just wait and I'm sure he'll let you out. What choice does he have?"

"Where is 303?"

"He had to go back to Rangor. That's all I know. Excuse me."

He got up and walked away. It was very dark in the cave, even for my well-formed eyes. I'd gotten used to the low light but it was difficult to make heads or tails of my surroundings. There were crystals dripping with water from the ceiling, many with buckets underneath them to catch the runoff. A bit further away I could see fields of blue-green lichens that emitted a pale glow. I figured that that must have been a garden where food for the colony was cultivated.

I was alone with my thoughts, which was usually fine except that I had started to get claustrophobic without someone to talk to.

"Targen! Linna! Margol!" I screamed. I was sure there had to be others there and hoped that anyone at all would hear me. My nerves got to the breaking point quickly. I didn't like being in the dark in a cramped, confined space. So, I remedied my situation. I shape-shifted as I did back in Orong City when the Legionnaires showed up. Then I bent the bars as wide as I could with all the strength that I had. I jumped out of there without much noise or ado.

I felt some cramping hunger and looked for my Nutriment, not finding any. They had probably either tossed it or used it to feed their garden. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to procure my nutrition wherever I could find it. I approached the lichen field and scraped two handfuls of gloop, shoveling it quickly into my mouth. The rest of the field began to turn pink, just like the krill right before Mirone the Kraken would breach the surface of the water.

Pink must have been a danger color - the lichens may have been trained to recognize members of the colony by some kind of pheromone signature and I was not on their list. It was a very good, low-tech alarm system.

Everything seemed low-tech in the place. It didn't appear to be what my parents said it was at all. I wondered whether they'd lied to me or whether it had really changed in twenty years.

Linna ran over to me. She put her hands on the algal forest and they turned back to their original color.

"Be careful here," she whispered to me. "The lichens will need to learn your scent, then once they're conditioned to accept that you're not a danger, they'll propagate the information to the new ones that grow."

"Thank you," I said. I didn't know what to say beyond that. For one of the first times in my life, I was stuck. I couldn't go home but they didn't want me here. I sure as hell couldn't wander the desert the rest of my life. They would have to accept me into their society; they'd been irrational up to now.

"When is 303 due to come back?" I whispered.

As she looked back at me, the pale lichen light reflected off of her silver eyes and something stirred inside me, some desire to be close to her, to become a part of her. The books at my parent's hut always spoke of friendships and romances, but Dactil society rarely ever engaged in such things beyond what was necessary.

My mother and father seemed to love each other very much, but that came long after their arranged marriage.

"Not for another few hours. Whenever he goes to the Dactilate, it's a long time before he returns. It could even be tomorrow.

The suns were still up. It was starting to get on in the day, but wasn't terribly late. "I need to go see The Skeleton," I confessed. "I need to know that they once lived here, that they were real. So that maybe my childhood dreams can have hope. Maybe other things can be true too."

She put her head down as she likely understood what I meant.

"I don't know. 303 will be angry."

"Does he keep you here against your will? Is he a tyrant?" I needed to know.

"No, not at all. He takes care of us. But we have rules about natives like you. To an extent I think he's trying to protect you by keeping you away. The less you know, the better."

I began walking towards a slightly better lit part of the cave. The ground sloped up and it became apparent that we were nearing the surface.

"So don't tell me anything. I don't want to know. I'll ask him when he gets back. But right now, I want to see the dragon. And the...glass fields." Images and sounds from my dream began flooding back to me, with interest.

She looked around. There was nobody in this corner of the establishment and the walls echoed her voice softly.

"The reflecting silicon fields cover up our location. They can't see us by satellite because it's too bright. I'll go with you, but we can't be gone long. Everyone else is asleep in the cave. Not being outside much, we can't tell when it's day and when it's night, so we just sleep when we feel tired." She reached across from me to a table and handed me a pair of sun goggles.

Chapter 3 - The Last Rebellion

We walked briskly in the direction I had read from 303's mind. As we got closer, the horizon got almost exponentially brighter. The goggles did a great job of polarizing the light from many different angles. As we approached the edges of what was once Dorna, I could see that the outer ring was charred silica, as if burnt in a great explosion when the flying city fell from the sky and into the millions of people below.

The dream felt like a memory now, but was still far away. And yet once I arrived to the site of the destruction, all I could hear was silence. I heard no screams or sounds of war, saw no soldiers veering off from the warship and attacking.

The death and chaos were gone and replaced by...glass.

I wondered harder than I had before: just what happened here? Just how long ago did Dactil fall to the Rhean horde? And who were the heroic tan-armored creatures defending Dorna while we Dactilons did...what?

"There were dragons then," I whispered. I mused that the last of them must have died under the cruelty of a violated world, hotter and drier than it had ever been before. Maybe The Skeleton was the last, great dragon, fighting doom until its final roar.

"Come," Linna whispered, understanding that for me the place was a graveyard. Strong mentalists such as myself, the Elders and the Spoofers, can feel the fringes of the emotions of others. She could tell that I carried some heavy sadness, but didn't know what it was.

"The Skeleton is a few hundred yards up from here."

I nodded to her and followed where she led, saying nothing else until we reached the monument.

And what a monument it was, indeed.

I was awed by the sheer size of the beast and the articulation of the bones. It had rotted away in the same position it had died, and was then bleached by the suns and sandblasted with high winds. The only bones out of place, which took imagination to put back together, were the large wings.

It must have been able to keep its large frame in the air by gliding; there was no possible way that it could actually fly in the purest sense of the word. It would still have been a thing of beauty, a wonder to behold. It may very well have been a Kniderian Dragon, of which I'd read many tall tales that had recently gotten shorter. This creature was a witness to a world's end. The vision I'd gotten in my dreams about General Tsado-gai was real, and the world in which he lived was lush and full. Life had nearly been snuffed out on this planet.

The General's kind went extinct. So did the dragons. One of the few to survive were...us.

Dactilons.

I swept my head in a wide arc at the horizon. The polarizing lenses blocked out most of the piercing reflection, which was as far as my eyes could see. Dactil, from my studies in lyceum, was on the cusp of being the largest possible rocky planet. Rocky planets couldn't be much larger than we were, or else the crust would move closer to the core, and the atmosphere would be thicker with gases.

Planets bigger than Dactil become gas giants, unable to support life on their surface. That short reminder from my studies brought to mind just how immense this blot, this chasm, this destruction truly was. And just how lucky we, the descendants of the survivors truly are. It firmed up my opinion of my mission even more. I would finally free this mostly-destroyed planet from the greatest threat in its history. And I would renew the culture of the Knath. They needn't have died in vain, taken over by a far smaller planet with cruel mal-intent.

"Are you ready to go back?" Linna asked. She was squinting, like I noticed I had also been doing.

"Yes," I said. This trip was a short visit to a memorial, and I treated it in my heart with the same respect. There was silence but for the periodic breath of the wind, caused by the hot air coming off of the hectares of reflective glass, silicon made liquid. She could not know what being here meant to me, just as I didn't know what it truly meant either. From where did my knowledge come? More accurately, who was sending me these blinding visions? And how?

We walked back without much fanfare.

"303 has to accept me into your group. I have so much I want to give, so much I want to do, Linna."

Although she spoke, I read some quiet in her mind. She was reticent, not on board with what I'd said and I could sense it.

"I know, Grady. But I hope you respect that it's up to him whether to deny your request or not. We are not exactly the 'Spoofers' you're describing. Not...not anymore."

I knew better than to ask her what she meant, and I respected her too much to search the answer in her head. Just then I saw in my mind's eye a bright yellow dot zooming in the direction of the cave. We still had about a mile to walk in order to reach it.

"Stercore! 303 is coming back earlier than expected! He'll be back in ten minutes, tops!"

A look of fear had passed Linna's face, but since I had access to short snapshots of her emotions, I could tell that it was a fear of disappointing someone, not a fear of retaliation. She had let 303 down by allowing me passage to The Skeleton, and would betray him further by getting caught.

"Hop on my back, Linna," I suggested. "I can take us back in good time."

She trusted me, and I carried her. My legs took the both of us to the lip of the cave, traversing nearly a mile of sand in just under nine minutes.

As I'd approached most problems in my life, once again I ran.

I took her back down the opening of the hatch and with full adrenaline, I lifted the cage that was supposed to have held me so I had access to the door. I entered and then kicked it back over to its side. The bent opening had been bent back to normal. Linna went over to her workstation and began fiddling with some proton-harnessing device.

Seconds later I heard someone entering, walking slowly down the stairs.

303 had assumed a somber expression as he eyed me. "You're awake," he said as a matter of fact.

He was wearing red robes as opposed to the Rhean purple. Purple was the color of imperial power, and only members of the Senate, provincial governors, and the Imperator and Imperatrix themselves could don it. Rhean soldiers of any rank wore red, the generals adorned with more gold than the regular gentry. Dactilon Elders and municipal leaders also wore the iconic color but typically wore yellows and blacks.

The Elders only wore red on special occasions and state events, so 303 must have been returning from something with political importance attached to it.

"How have you spent your day, Grady?" The Elder's words were thin and stale.

"Fine," I answered. "I had some lichens. Thank you for your hospitality," I said ironically.

He walked around the cage, inspecting it. "So, you want to join our 'club'. You want to be a part of the 'rebellion.' Yes?"

I stood up and wrapped my fingers around the horizontal bars in front of me.

"Yes."

He nodded and looked around the quiet cave, then began to knock his fingers against the metal of the cage as if testing its strength.

"And you would be a great champion of the cause? Our ace in the hole, the very thing we need in order to kick out our overlords?" He wiped his hands along a few bars as if looking for dust. There wasn't any, since the cube had been violently moved twice today.

"I see. Do you know that I saw both you and Linna in my mind map scurrying to the hole just before I got here via hover-flash? Such a big, bold mistake is hardly becoming of a savior. You're not ready and perhaps you'll never be ready. How can we trust you to save us if you can't cover your tracks? Out in the field, you would put all of us at risk with every slip of your mind."

He clicked a button on a handheld device and then spoke into it.

"Margol, please come to the front with a control pad. I need to connect to the computing terminal. Thank you."

After a few moments, she walked in with a large black tablet attached to a keypad. It was wide and curved upwards from the sides. She took a short look at me and turned her head back quickly before walking away. The Elder took the pad and clicked a few buttons. A robotic arm that I thought had been nonfunctional junk off to the side rolled on four wheels towards the cube.

"Stand back and hold onto the bottom bars tightly," he commanded. I knelt down and did as I was told.

The robotic arm grabbed the front of the cage and with a quick twisting motion, turned the entire cube over on its side. I was thrust backwards but stood back up fast. 303 unlatched the now accessible door and pulled it open. He motioned me to come out and I did. He looked me up and down. Then he talked back into the speaker.

"Margol, Linna, Targen, please come to the front, all of you."

The troupe entered one by one. 303 pointed them out and counted out loud. "Three," he said. Then he stuck his finger out at me. "And four, now. There's no doubting that you're an asset to the cause. But you have to understand that the revolution exists in only five hearts now. This is it."

I couldn't believe that. My parents said--

^Your parents left the Spoofer Revolution at its height. We had four hundred members, most of whom had influence in Rangor. There were scientists, aides to the governor and others. I was the only member of the Dactilate to belong. We even had a member of the Legion who had grown to hate the empire and love this planet.

^The scientists developed technologies beyond anything that Rhea was aware of. They built clever weapons and genetically engineered enhanced Dactilons. None of the enhanced children survived when grown in laboratory tubes. So the scientists invented an injection for pregnant mothers to increase the chances that their fetuses would express the desired genes.

^Your parents left after your mother Nani Manorong received four such treatments. The both of them were low level and had no idea about the breadth of the Revolution, how close we were to seeing it fulfilled. How well we planned, how much progress we made. None of us knew of any children that had been born truly enhanced. Now, after all this time, I know of only one. That's you, Grady. It's almost serendipitous that you should come back here, and I needed to test your abilities to make sure.

^Shortly after the departure of Nani and Tadoo, the Revolution set a date for our attack. Because of a stupid mistake from one of our members, Captain Manian of the Rangor Security Bureau caught wind of our plans. She descended swiftly upon our headquarters with a group of only twenty Legionnaires.

^She somewhat sympathized with our lot, understanding the desires of an oppressed people to be free. So she made a deal with the Spoofers: give up the names of all members, be destroyed utterly, and in return Manian wouldn't report it to the authorities in Rhea. Should the governor find out, should the information be kicked up to the Imperator or Imperatrix, every last Dactilon life would have been extinguished.

^She killed everyone in the Revolution. Except me. She didn't know that I was a member, and none of the captured ever gave up my name. They destroyed our headquarters and buried the dead in the miles-deep sand. Only her contingent of twenty would know about the attempted uprising. So she killed them as well, citing a terrible sandstorm as the cause. Then she killed herself. It played out as an unanswered mayday to a freak weather condition.

^We had one satellite location where we kept spare parts and where we grew fetal clones. Right here. I, and these three are the only survivors of that horror. And the only hope for the Revolution.^

303 was communicating with us directly through his mind. This was something the common Dactilon could accomplish, but the bigger the audience, the more difficult. Most could only secretly communicate with one person at a time. I myself found it difficult to connect to more than six minds at once. I'd only tried it once during a ballgame at the lyceum's gymnasium. The game was thwangaar, played by three teams against one another, twelve players on each team.

There was a single small ball that could not be dropped by the possessing team. Nor could it be thrown as a pass, or the holder take more than three steps at a time. It could only switch hands from one person to the next directly, but it could be kicked so long as someone caught it without letting it fall.

The other two teams work together to block a handoff by the holder to someone else on their team. Once the holder gets close enough, in order to score a goal, they have to hit a vertical pole sticking up several meters off the ground. I was always good at the sport, particularly in defense. I was also secretly able to coordinate telepathically with teammates from the bench, which was technically cheating.

303 walked up to me slowly. "I need you to focus. You have a wealth of raw talent. I just gave you a lot of very important information and your mind is on..." he put his hand on my head for several seconds. "...Thwangaar. A children's game." The Elder looked down the darkened hall of the cave and then back at me.

"There are things you don't yet know are possible to do, but once you learn them you will outclass me. So I will teach you. I want to teach you. But you need to be patient. You have to remain here and have faith that with time, you will master all the mental skills that you currently lack. Only when you have learned what I have to give, will I activate you as an agent of the Revolution. Will you be patient and study with me?"

I was both hesitant and bubbling with energy. I wanted to destroy the occupation now. But truth be told, I had no viable plan. And without a work assignment from the governor, I had plenty of time to spare. What else did I have going on? I wondered out loud at what sorts of things 303 was talking about - what could he do that I couldn't? What would he be teaching me, exactly?

The Elder smiled. He could sense my thoughts and I did very little to cover them now. He turned his head back down the shadowy hall and began to focus his energy. After a minute or two, a three-inch long white krunger beetle began meandering out into the light, a place where it was usually loathe to go.

"The krunger beetle," he explained, "Is a blind, photo-sensitive and socially solitary insect that lives in underground caves. Now, watch." Before long, a dozen more beetles came out towards us. They all stopped and lined up in a single row. Then they formed an arrow pointed at me. Then a wide circle, with one in front of the other, marching in unison. All of a sudden, they stopped and began to scatter, getting as far away from one another as they could and running back into the shadows.

"I can teach you not only to communicate to a group, but to actually control the nervous systems of members of that group. I can teach you to spoof Rheans and Elders. I can teach you to form a relay chain, and to be able to move your mind, in whole or in part, to other creatures. As you study with me, Linna, Targen and Margol will continue to rebuild equipment. I will continue to work on my own projects, on remaking weapons and communications systems for the cause. As the months pass and your abilities grow, I will draw up your first mission in service of the Revolution.

"Until then, sit tight. Your day, our day, will come."

Chapter 4 - Tannon and the Dragon

An Excerpt from The Epic of Tannon

In those days in the region of Germande, warriors treaded carefully. Under the double suns, the stark valley sat still and reached far. The dragons lived in Germande, feeding on chaupple and engrots. For millennia they had walked, swum and flown all over the wide world, availing themselves of whatever prey they so desired.

But as the Fire-Hearts rose in prominence and gathered together, they beat back all manner of like beasts to the hills, the valleys and plains of Dragorong. They hunted the animals and used their flesh, including bones, rinds and horns until they could only be found in the much smaller Germande.

Fire-Hearts took up residence and built towns, citadels and kingdoms encircling the great valley, ensuring that none of the accursed kind could escape its borders. Dragons fly low, and they walk and swim high. They cannot hide from any who seek them. Only a very few ever do, and those brave warriors specifically seek out the blood of those creatures.

Tannon, on the third leg of his journey around the world encountered a border kingdom to Germande, named Nimblas. He regaled his Nimblan hosts with tales of Ofwal Kukooz from the forest and Ang Angs of the desert.

They in turn told him about the dragons to their east, who live in the perilous valley and constantly threaten the precarious peace there. They informed Tannon that in order for a member of their warrior class to reach the level of Master, that Nimblan must go across the border and kill a dragon. In order to prove the deed was done, the warrior must drag the sawed-off thumb of the vanquished foe.

As reward for the prize, the warrior would receive laudations and a ceremony upon their return, where the rank of Master became official. It had been thirty-eight years since the last victory and Domo, the king of Nimblas, was openly afraid that the dragons would be spawning and gathering strength in the intervening time. Should they repopulate, they would outgrow their current allotted habitat and would surely mount an attack upon them.

Domo, in his capacity as sovereign commanded Tannon to embark upon the hero's journey, one that for the best of four decades had seen the deaths of all who ventured to go there. He promised his guest that he would receive the kingdom's highest honor, to be installed as a Master Knight who, wherever he may go upon his travels, could always return to Nimblas in a position of great power and respect.

Much to Tannon's chagrin, Domo also ordered the confiscation of his guest's Arric rune stone, an item that signaled the way to finding a map. That map, Tannon hoped, would lead him to finding a treasure of vast importance - the location of Captain Siib's gold. He could not risk telling Domo what the artifact did, but the sly king was acutely aware that his guest valued it very much.

No matter, he thought. "I will give you back your stone and lavish the greatest prizes of my kingdom upon you. But you must come back carrying the nail of the thumb of your foe. Of course, should you fail to return here by nightfall tomorrow, a great parade will be held in your name. Now, go to the blacksmith to be fitted with the appropriate armor."

It was customary for the warrior Nimblans to wear the extremely hard exoskeletons of native, boulder-sized Scorpions, few of which were left in the area's receding forests. The slowly growing beasts began to return and replenish their numbers over the past four decades as the warrior class waned and the protection of their shells was less needed.

Tannon, understanding what was at stake and not wanting to die in battle, requested that the dragon quest be postponed until such time that he could procure a shell from a live creature. Though the kingdom may have had a great stock of Scorpionwear, most were obtained dozens of years in the past. The more recent, the harder the shell would be, giving Tannon a better than average chance of surviving his encounter with the dragon.

Domo acquiesced to his guest's request, and gave him two days to seek out a proper exoskeleton. Upon its procurement, Tannon was to drag the dead animal back to the blacksmith so he could fashion armor out of it. As soon as the armor was forged, Tannon would go to Germande.

The reluctant warrior had a trick up his sleeve, however. He knew that heating and then hammering the skeleton would make it tougher once it cooled off, and he also knew that adding a special mortar that could be made from local rock sand would increase the chitinous shell's hardness by a factor of twenty. Still, it was no guarantee of effectiveness against a creature the size of Nimblas' palace. But, it was better than having no plan at all.

The stranger set off into the forest wearing light mail cut into armor from the very last thumbnail in the kingdom. Domo and Tannon were roughly the same size, so the king gave it to him as a royal gift. He wielded a blade cut out of the same material, known to be very hard but also very light. The material did not make good heavy armor and would be insufficient on his main quest. But it was perfectly fine against the person-sized insects he was seeking among the purple trees of Nimblas.

Tannon, being peaceful by nature, had a small trick up his sleeve. He did not want to kill either the brown leathery Scorpions of the forest or any dragons of the valley. He sought a way around that possibility if he could find one. For this reason, he needed to be as clever as he could muster.

He skulked and stalked around the tree-dense Nimblan woodlands. Scorpions were ambush predators that mostly lay in wait in fallen trunks or under piles of leaves. Their main prey were kruxill and fish that they caught at river's edge. They were notoriously intelligent, far beyond the level of Ang Angs or cauddle. It was well known that they could be trained to perform complicated tasks for rewards and were even observed to mourn their dead.

@ I come to you as a friend, Scorpions of the woodlands! I wish to communicate with you, to ask your help! Please come show yourselves, I have no weapons with me! I am not Nimblan, if that might be a relief to you. @

Tannon let out a powerful mental scream through his telepathic megaphone. It should have reached any and all telepathically sensitive creatures in the area. Though animals did not tend to speak in a codified language, the most intelligent of them would understand the gist of the intent through mental signaling. Tannon blared out his message over and over again, but none of the insects approached him in hours and he was beginning to tire.

The forest was quiet, its violet tinge appearing to stain across the landscape so that it became difficult to discern direction. Soon he was lost, unable to return whence he came. So, he did what he was taught to do and tried to find water. He strained his ears until some constant, faraway sound became clearer. He regretted jettisoning the dragon-nail sword, since he knew he could have used it to mark trees he'd already passed and thus making it easier for him to find his way back. But he also knew how important it was to appear harmless to the giant arthropods in order to get concessions out of them.

He continued to blare his mental horn as he walked ahead, finally arriving at a meadow. It was a vast clearing surrounded on all sides by trees. There were four thousand different ways to get lost re-entering the woods. Meadows with long grasses were also places where Scorpions liked to tread, often migrating through it and hunting small animals as they passed.

Tannon thought it odd that he received no reply from anyone at all. He was sure that he was within range of several creatures, and didn't think they would have ignored him. Tired, he sat down on a rock beside a short tree for shade. He'd brought enough rations and water for a single day, one which was beginning to fade into evening. Soon he heard a rustle from far ahead. It was an odd sound, definitely not the wind. It was followed by what sounded like cauddle hoof-beats but with far more legs. The galloping creature was moving from side to side, gaining speed but still remained unseen. Tannon could hear it getting closer, closer, unnervingly closer.

He forced as much of a mental effort as he could in order to halt the creature's advance. His efforts were in vain - the animal kept coming, undeterred. Strange, Tannon thought, hastily climbing the slender tree under which he'd been sitting. It doesn't heed my call and yet I'm unable to arrest its nervous system.

A similar rustling sound came from behind the tree. Oh no! Two Scorpions are after me! he thought. Making himself as small as possible, he undid his knapsack and tossed out bread and boiled cauddle, hoping the hunters would take the food and go away.

First, he saw the one behind him jump into view. It was an enormous beast, but did not look at all like what he expected. The Scorpion's skin was pinkish blue and did not have a shell. Shortly after, the galloping behemoth from straight ahead, blackish brown and smaller than the first, emerged from the tall grass. Upon seeing the pink Scorpion, it stopped moving. It began to clack its mandibles back and forth and swung its tail from side to side. The pink Scorpion's tall hovered far higher in reply, an obvious warning that the hungry intruder did not heed.

It looked up in the tree and then down at the fallen food. It shimmied to one side of the tree and then made a leap to begin climbing when the pink Scorpion knocked its balled stinger straight into the shelled one's mouth, whacking it far out of the tree. The brown Scorpion straightened, gathered itself and then ran back into the forest.

The pink one, with coal-black eyes, looked up to Tannon and began to speak telepathically.

$ My kind are insulated from any psychic penetration. Materials in our outer layers block any messages in or out. You are lucky that I've recently molted, and have been scrounging in this clearing as I wait for my own shell to slowly grow back. We have not been hunted in a long time, so we are growing larger than ever before. I am older than most of my kind, and can remember the bad days. Is it true that you are not a Nimblan? $

@ Yes, it is true. @

Tannon climbed back down the tree in order to show the creature that he trusted him.

@ I have been looking for exactly a Scorpion like you. One who can speak to me about the dragons to the east. And luckily, one who has a molten shell hidden away somewhere that I might bargain for. @

$ With what can you bargain, Fire-heart? What do you possess that you believe I might want too? Though you may not be Nimblan, your kind still tramples over mine every chance it gets. I saved you out of sheer curiosity and boredom. It gets lonely during this growth phase. But do not think that I lack hunger, for I will eat you as readily as the next, should I desire it. $

@ In truth, I seek to bargain with something I do not yet possess, but I have been seeking it on my journey from Rangor. @

$ Your names of places mean little to me. $

@ It is far. Eleven months journey tomorrow. The Nimblans took from me a treasure map, and will only give it back when I deliver them the thumbnail of a Germandian dragon. I will share with you some of the treasures I find as proof of my friendship, and with it I will pay for your protection. I can ensure that no Fire-Hearts ever poach against your people again. @

The Scorpion wiggled its mandibles and moved its hooked mouth slightly opened and closed.

$ Even if you are good, you are still only one person. You cannot speak for an entire world. No one can. I do not want anything in return. I want you to know that I helped you without desire for recompense. I want you to think about that. Maybe you will tell your kin about it, maybe not. But you will know that a creature of the forest showed you more compassion than your people show one another. Come, my shell is this way. And my advice to you when you go to the east is this: spare the dragon as I have spared you. $

Tannon thanked him profusely and dragged the creature's heavy shell along with him towards the east, as reckoned by the waning light of the double suns.

The next day, Tannon learned to mold the shell into a makeshift suit of protection, although it lacked the finesse and skill that a blacksmith would have used. A blacksmith would have tempered it with heat more adeptly and beaten it to fit to a perfect mold. But its usefulness was not as protection; Tannon knew that a hundred Scorpion shells would not have been enough to weather a dragon's wrath. Instead, he changed course and chose to employ it as a ruse.

Dragons were believed to have less than average vision, so although he was tired Tannon crossed the border into the great valley during the night. Not wanting to stir trouble in such a condition, especially as the temperature sunk low near freezing, Tannon found a small grotto in which to huddle and sleep, covering himself with the insect's remains.

The night passed quickly, and the sun rose faster that day than ever it did before. Tannon awoke and made sure to move about under dense vegetation, so as not to draw the beast's attention from above. He continued to follow trails of trees with big leaves, occasionally encountering several cauddle and one limp Ang Ang in the distance.

He looked about for the perfect spot for what he wanted to do. He looked left and right and also up in the sky. He checked about his immediate area and found all the animals and large insects behaving normally. They did not detect any predators in their midst, ergo he was safe. For now. He lay his "trap", putting the stuffed shell out in the open of a clearing. Then Tannon went out of sight, finding a hollowed-out log fallen to the ground near other trees and entering within. He peeked out through a small hole in the log at the shell arranged in the form of a Fire-Heart, filled with rocks with a brown hat on its head.

It did not take long for him to hear animals scurrying. An Ang Ang shrieked loudly, followed by the hoofbeats of cauddle and angrimots. There was a loud whooshing, whirring sound getting closer, increasing in pitch. Soon, the sky went dark above him, the large shadow getting smaller, smaller, and then - thud!

A green Dragon landed in the clearing, shaking the very world with its arrival. It bent its head but sat up straight, wings sheathed and legs tucked under it. It gave the shell a passing glance and then turned back its countenance in the other direction - towards Tannon.

\+ Why did you put a false warrior in this meadow? + the Dragon asked telepathically, directing his thoughts right at his uninvited guest.

\+ You obviously think me a fool...Tannon. I'd ask you what you want from me, but I already know. You want my thumbnail. Or a worthy replica. You want to claim to the Nimblans that you slayed a beast of Germande so you can have your Arric rune stone back. + The large behemoth - incredibly large even as behemoths go, squinted his right eye at the intruder. It leapt in a flash and landed with a quake directly in front of the log in which Tannon was hiding.

Tannon made himself visible. It would have done little for him to remain hiding, for the beast could have destroyed the log with a swat of its talon.

@ The others. The Nimblans. They could not hear the minds of the other dragons, the ones that they slaughtered. They did not know the depths of their thoughts, nor the shudder of their fears. @

The dragon footed slightly closer. + I am not moved by your understanding, sorrow, or pity. It was not just the people of Nimblas that have hunted my kind into this small valley. To extinction. No, that took many thousands of years by all Fire-Hearts. It does not surprise me that some of you are good people. But I have no use for conversation with you. Nor will I help you lie to your captors to claim that you were the first in forty years to kill one of us. I would not embolden my reluctant neighbors. +

@ Then why let me live? Surely you are angry. You are also a powerful telepath. Can you not see my sincerity? A Fire-Heart true to his word has far more value than -- @

\+ A rock. But only slightly. The suns feed the grasses, ferns and trees. Ofwal Kukooz eat maggots and other insects. The cauddle eat the plant life. I eat both the cauddle and the Kukooz. And when I die, the maggots, insects, Kukooz will eat me and fertilize the plants with what remains. The only ones in this chain that do not benefit are the suns. What I am saying is that when I kill, it is for a reason - a reason with a greater purpose within the chain of life. But your kind does things as an aberration to this chain. And that is why I am letting you live, Tannon. Because I am not hungry. +

@ What should I do, then? @ Tannon asked.

\+ Return to Nimblas and take your runestone back. Pick up that suit of Scorpion armor, find the dragon nail sword you jettisoned in the forest earlier and raid the home of the king. Cut his arm off if he clings to the stone. But do not give them hope, for they have taken that very thing from me. I am the last dragon in the world, after all. +

Chapter 5 – Ventrello

"I've learned so many things over the past year I can't believe were possible," I said. "So many tricks I wouldn't have imagined."

Linna looked off into the strangely vast horizon of sand, shrugged her shoulders and sighed.

"They're not tricks, Grady. They're weapons. It's not just cool what you're able to do, it's really important to our mission. 303 is going to give you an assignment very, very soon."

I know, I told her. "Then why do you seem so upset?"

She turned to me and nuzzled her head below my chin. Then she planted a soft kiss onto my lips, the fourth one we'd ever shared. "Because aside from you being gone away from me, the truth is that wherever he sends you, you'll be in danger. Especially since it looks like he's going to lose the election for Prime Dactilon, now there's an urgency to getting things done faster. I don't want to lose you. And definitely not because of operational sloppiness."

I felt a yellow dot approaching our sand dune slowly. 303 had never been terribly pleasant but lately he gave off a very troubling aroma. He was contending with a younger, more powerful Elder for the title of Prime and his efforts were very nearly over. Whatever leverage for the revolution he'd been hoping for would almost surely not come to pass.

He walked adaggio. Meanderingly. He wore his finest parliamentary yellow. Before he'd said his first word, I knew what was coming. I always thought I'd be elated but now I was torn.

"It's time for your first mission," he said. He didn't look half as downtrodden as I'd expected him to look. As a matter of fact, he looked quite chipper. I'd learned to appreciate my new home and family - they actually had emotions. I now had mushy equals in my life, who were not simply cold automatons. Over the past year, I laughed and cried far more than I ever had in all my previous years combined.

"What's the mission?" He simply smiled in return. Linna and I looked at each other. I was getting jealous that although he seemed to be flippant, he wasn't getting reprimanded by her. She could sense the small patch of heat on my face that was growing and so could he. It passed quickly as I saw something else that caught my attention.

In the distance, a wall of sand began to rise nearly as high as the sky itself. Volumes and volumes of particles flew into the air as I began to witness the largest sandstorm I'd ever seen. Sure, storms happened, but I didn't know they could get that big. In one of my lyceum classes on planetary science, I'd learned that on smaller rocky planets with ample desert terrain, enormous sandstorms were very common. But because of the sheer size of Dactil, the largest a rocky planet could get without breaking apart, it was more difficult to get one going. The turbulence that drove winds in all different directions actually stifled tornado growth, rendering most of them annoying but impotent. We Dactilons were hardy enough creatures not to mind too much.

Just as quickly as the sand wall rose, it dashed back down to the ground, causing a thinner layer of powder to kick up into the sky and stay for a while.

303 smiled wider.

"You did that?" Linna and I exclaimed at the same time.

He nodded. "I got a few of the old Spoofer Revolution weapons to work. We're almost ready to draw up war plans. I'd say we're a good two months away. From the plans – not the war. That would take time to build."

He took me by the crook of one arm and Linna by the other. We walked like that for several meters before he spoke again. It reminded me of being a child in Orong City and spending some leisure time with my parents. It had been a while since I'd thought of them, especially in anything resembling a positive light, but I was kidding nobody. I missed them very much.

Some of my fondest memories included being with them on the feast day of Ramstaad. Last year it passed by without them. I'd spent it with my new family, one that openly weeps, smiles, and thinks. One whose heart still burns with fire.

"I want you to go on a strictly reconnaissance mission. There are only two places on this entire planet suitable for tourism: Rangor, known for its debauchery and Ventrello in the north pole, known for its pleasant tropical weather. The people who vacation there tend to be part of the upper military and parliamentary elite of Rhea. Generals, Senators and others at that level. You are tasked with discovery of two basic things: one, whether there are imperial plans to attack any other planets in the near future. There are rumors out there that something may be imminent. And two, where exactly is Rangor's pre-war Hall of Records?"

I stopped walking, causing the chain to break. I didn't see the relevance that this mission had to our cause, nor was I sure how exactly 303 wanted me to get the information that he wanted. I'd learned to trust him very much; he was a man of great intellect, but I didn't always know where he was going in his thought process.

He clicked his tongue and gave an exasperated expression that was probably universal; eyes slightly rolled, neck bent over half-shrugging shoulders.

"Read the vacationers the way I taught you. Use all the tools I've been instructing you this whole time in order to scan their minds without them knowing. They'll be either poolside or beachside, with their deflection helmets completely off. If the rumors are true and they're preparing for a military engagement, then the Imperator's attention will be elsewhere. It will be easier for us to strike without fear of reinforcements. And as for the Hall, it's a real place. Elders 1 to 200 know the location but none would reveal it to me. But the Lower House, 201 to 432, are in the dark about it. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like I'll be winning Prime Dactilon anytime soon so I won't find out that secret. The legend says that it houses a great deal of pre-occupation technology. When the occupiers took over, they tried and failed to access the tech, so it was just left to rot. But I believe that we can find something useful there."

I smiled. It was a good start for us. It finally felt like we were moving, rather than just waiting to move, like someone locked into a coma. 303 gave me further instructions and provided me with a modified dory and tungsten armor. I was also given several relay poles, a mind-enhancing helmet and something I wanted ever since I was a child: a hover-flash!

Linna and the gang had been putting one together for months, bringing our total to two. It was two orders of magnitude faster than a pedestrian hover-way. They both looked similar, each being a levitating platform attached to a grip, but it was far bigger with many more internal components. And it was often self contained.

It was built to withstand particularly rough patches of turbulence in our "isolated tundra" regions. The Isolated Tundra is the name for two bands of latitude, each one near to either pole. The Tundra formed a very windy corridor that lead to many storms above rocky terrain. Once one got past the line of latitude, they would reach a much calmer and more temperate pole. The North Pole had the best weather that was possible on Dactilon.

Every item I brought with me was built to be stealthy or camouflaged. Each thing was the exact hue of the sand found at the North Pole, dotted with the appropriate graininess. All electronic and protonic components had built-in dampeners that made detection or jamming nearly impossible.

I left for the north immediately, but not before sharing my fifth kiss with Linna. She was "the one" before I even considered there was anyone at all for me.

Off I went, ramming telepathic relay poles deep into the ground every two hundred miles of the journey. The relays were so I could send back encrypted mind-messages to 303 and the rest of the team regarding my progress. Arrival in Ventrello was expected within two hours and twenty-one minutes. With a hover-way, the trip would have been days. I made sure to mind my surroundings, taking routes where I saw the least "dots" on my mind-map.

I was making excellent time, weaving in and out of the best statistical routes to avoid detection. Should anybody find the relays, they might have thought them old relics of the ancient Dactilons, the same ones that wrote stories and sailed long-dry oceans. It was smooth riding until I reached the Tundra, when east-to-west winds bombarded my craft steadily at speeds in excess of a hundred miles per hour. Varying chunks of ice and rock zipped through the air and pelted the well-protected hover-flash.

After a half hour of bombardment and turbulence, I exited out into an oasis, slowing down the craft considerably so as not to arouse suspicion. I had never seen any vegetation at all in either Rangor or Orong, and only briefly learned about such things as plants in lyceum. I became giddy looking at wild grasses, open flowers and tremendous wide-leafed trees. The stems, blossoms and trunks of most of the plant life were a very deep purple. It took me some minutes to tame my awe. I pulled over to a tangle of bushes underneath a great tree. This was far enough, since I could sense I was near enough to the perimeter of the Ventrello resort. Guards were posted half a kilometer ahead of me in all directions and I could not risk being seen. There was no patrol in the vicinity, leading me to believe that the overall security profile of the resort was relatively low. It made sense that this would be the case, since the tundra was so difficult to cross and precisely zero non-Elder Dactilons possessed hover-flashes.

Still, one false move on my part could derail the entire mission. I took out my equipment, namely the mind-enhancing helmet. It was about the size of my fist and colored a pale white. I put it on the head of a medium-sized white kalachi lizard that I'd also brought with me. I had forged a connection with the animal before leaving the cave. Now I could use that connection to remotely control its movements and see what it sees, as if it were a drone. The helmet would amplify my ability and extend my reach to where I needed.

I placed the animal on the ground and sent it towards the perimeter of the resort. The walls were about sixty feet high but lacked any other deterrent such as barbed or electrified wire. 303 told me that he'd been to Ventrello once before, as a squire to the current Prime Elder many years ago. The kalachi ran on four long legs splayed out under its body and scuttled unnoticed past a seated guard reading something on a tablet. With its sticky feet it climbed up the sheer surface of the wall and over it.

The kalachi settled in the shade of some decorative blue leaves. It stopped, being a perfect nearly equal distance from all the vacationers. Its eyes, ears, and brain were mine. I took an inventory of how many Rheans there were on premises by assessing how many red dots I could perceive. In all there were about 220, including the ones still in their rooms. Sixty gray dots were also present, waiting on the red dots hand and foot as servants.

Now came the difficult part: extending my consciousness throughout the resort to poll each one's database of knowledge. I had to do it subtly, so as not to raise an alarm. It would have been difficult to pore through all that information in a short time to find the exact answers I was looking for. So I sought out easier information to obtain, namely rank and title of each person. As I began to poll the Rheans' minds, I found several young captains sleeping off a night of wine and debauchery, several currently engaged in mating, others drinking and a few playing a version of checkers with their friends. Most of the red dots however, were poolside.

This was where my mind was drawn, because I could sense that the greatest concentration of Rhean insider information and power just happened to be taking in the rays of Hano and Rano. If anyone within the walls of this place had the sort of facts I was after, it was one of the twenty-three people in or near the grand overlapping circle shaped pool. I needed to concentrate my efforts and find the highest ranking of the bunch.

After several minutes I narrowed it down to two people, both on opposite sides of the water. The first was the Rhean governor of Dactil, named Diman Rovis. He was splayed out on a reclining deck chair, lying on a towel, and he was naked. As a matter of fact, everyone present was completely nude. This lack of shame brought to bear upon me the stark differences between our species: where we have dignity, they have none. I should not have been surprised. Yes I was being judgmental but I didn't mind being just as bad as they were in that respect.

The other knowledgeable Rhean was a nude woman named Gola, Chief of Staff of the Imperatrix herself. She would certainly know whether the empire had any war plans ahead. It had been a very long time since they occupied any new planet, which made me think they were probably due. However, I wondered at the fact that a person so deep in the know, who would have a direct part in the planning was instead tanning herself in the buff on a remote oasis. In a backwater place like this, no less.

I could not probe deeper into nested layers of their minds for fear that the pair, particularly Gola, would be able to feel my intrusion. The higher a person is on the military hierarchy, the better trained they'd be and the likelier that they would notice something amiss. I selected a weak minded person to approach Gola, and separate one to approach Diman. One thing I was able to gather simply by sniffing, was that both masters of fate were vain. So I would play up to their vanity.

"Hello," the sunset-haired female said, pulling up a recliner next to Gola. "I was watching you from across the pool. My husband is upstairs taking a nap. He's a Commander in the Imperatrix's space fleet, Captain Riso. Do you know him?"

Gola looked the woman up and down and then one side of her face twinged slightly upward.

"Know him? I've banged his brains out many, many times. What can I do for you? Bear in mind I'm interested, you are very cute, but I'm not in the mood right now. I will have to get your identification code later, but at the moment I just want to relax."

Captain Riso's wife leaned in closer and put her hand on Gola's arm. "I bet it's stressful doing what you do, what with all the war planning."

Gola turned and gave a quizzical look to her newfound admirer. "What do you know about what's coming?"

The woman shrugged over-dramatically. "Not much at all. I'm just guessing because he's been working so much with you. Don't get me wrong, I ask him what's up. I'm very curious by nature. But he never tells me, says it's a secret and that I shouldn't be asking questions anyway."

The Chief of Staff lit a warm smile. "He's a good soldier." She ruminated on her own statement a bit, squinting her eyes. Then she looked around her for interlopers. There was only one, a white kalachi lizard in the thick blue leaves far to her right.

"Well, you know we're starting to run thin on supplies, burning through resources like crazy. You would not believe how much waste our society produces on a daily basis. We have our sights set on Lila, a great little planet a few galaxies away, still in the Virgo cluster. We're going to attack right after these disgusting trolls have their feast of Ram, Raam...Ramstaad, I think that's what it's called - which requires us doubling our security forces on-planet."

"Wow," the woman answered. "That's coming up pretty soon! I'm curious though, why Lila of all places?

"They have water, lumber, minerals, rare elements, anything you can think of. Name it, they got it. If it's ours then we control the supply chain. So we can keep consuming. Better, bigger, stronger. Isn't that the name of the game? Partying til we want to stop. Or til we drop dead. Mm. I think I'm in the mood now. War talk gets me hot. Come on, let's go upstairs and find the good Captain."

I disengaged from the Captain's wife and she didn't seem to be surprised at the interaction. She thought she was controlling her own actions, as they were not out of the ordinary. The two of them got up, interlocked fingers and walked on ahead together, heading to a wide atrium filled with elevators. In their wake, an elderly Dactilon cleaned up the recliners and table they left behind and picked up the females' towels. To serve such high ranking persons was not a privilege, nor was it a curse. This particular staffer was ambivalent about it. Serving as a custodial assistant to the who's-who of Rhea, to quote an expression from my people, "is a living."

I switched over to the male that I'd sent to Governor Rovis. Rovis was not a sexual person, and from the little I was able to smell off of him, it felt to me that he was a progressive administrator. He was young and held certain ideals, but he was wholly unaware of the wrongness of the occupation, which did not surprise me. He considered himself a just man, and in comparison to the other occupiers of the office of Governor, that might have been true.

A thought seeped into my mind even though I tried to keep it at bay. Why couldn't I just take the hover-flash's battery and build a makeshift proton bomb? It would destroy all of Ventrello, including all of the high ranking officials of the Rhean empire. I could telepathically communicate with all the natives beforehand and arrange for their safe passage right before the event. And yet, it would be a tremendously irresponsible act, not to mention cowardly. Any benefit would be temporary and last only until reinforcements rain down full throated murder on every single native community on this planet. If any of us were to survive at all, the Rheans wouldn't let their guard down for another thousand years.

"Governor Rovis," the man said, sitting down next to him.

"Yes, hello. You are... General Moira's husband, correct?" They shook by the forearm.

"Yes, Sir. I wanted to tell you how much I admire your administration of the Dactilon province. You are perhaps the best governor that these people have ever had. I'm sure they appreciate it as well."

Rovis nodded and took off his short red cape. He had on his casual military outfit, which consisted of leather chain mail, a codpiece and boots. He then excused himself to jump into the water. He swam through all the petals of the flower that the pool was shaped in. The governor seemed to be on a mission to take the short swim. He came back out and dried himself with a towel, then returned to his recliner.

"Sorry about that, I just needed to go a few laps. Yes, what you said about the natives is probably true. They're mindless drones, except for the Elders who are pretty interesting. But in my opinion they deserve the dignity we attribute to any other brute or beast. They have a level of intelligence that is...appreciable. It's not bad. I have two dogs at home, I pamper them to death. Just like the dogs, the natives get fed, clothed, taken care of. And who really knows how they feel? They don't say anything. But I assume they enjoy the vast freedom we allow them."

Rovis clapped the palm of his hand to his right ear, then his left.

Moira's husband picked up the conversation where they'd left off. Rovis was a vain person, so the flattery was made to continue.

"I know, I agree with you. But I'm just so fascinated by the whole planet, to be honest. I like these creatures; I think there's a depth to them we don't usually notice. And I often wonder about their past, their culture, what it might have been like. Do you know?"

The governor shook his head and put his pinky finger into his ear.

"No, no I don't. There's not a lot of history still standing. I know that there's some kind of record storage facility underneath the Rangor Stadium somewhere, but it's completely abandoned. That's probably the only place on-planet with any information about the cretins. The cret-- Hold on. Something's wrong."

"What?"

"Go behind me and get me my helmet. I'm not sure but I think we're being spied on. I can feel a weird tingle in my brain and a hum in my ears."

Rovis was very in tune with his mind. I had to think fast to avoid raising suspicion. Unfortunately what I came up with was a sacrifice I had to be willing to make. I made the kalachi dig as quickly and deeply as possible, and then bury the telepathy-enhancing helmet under the blue kale in which it was hiding. Then I made the animal jump out, snarling out through its sharp fangs and drooling near the water. Its forked tongue began licking its own face, giving off a very frightening appearance. It was very toothy. I had it charge quickly towards the good governor.

Then I took control of a Dactilon servant's mind, who stepped in front of Rovis and raised his hand up high, while touching his temple with the other hand. After this motion, the kalachi ran back over the wall and out into the wilderness, deftly avoiding several shots fired by guard's dories. Without anything to amplify my mind's reach, I had to concentrate even harder. I wanted to make sure Rovis' suspicions were gone.

"I don't, I don't hear that hum any longer and I don't feel that tingle. Hm, must have been the lizard." He looked at General Moira's husband, who looked back but not before leading the governor's gaze to the Dactilon who had jumped in between them and the snarling lizard. The servant went back to sweeping the floor as if it didn't even happen.

"That cretin saved us," Moira's husband said. Rovis neither agreed nor disagreed, but suddenly found himself no longer in the mood for the pool. He got up and walked back to his room on the ground floor.

Chapter 6 - The Fire-Heart

We are fire-hearts, you and I.

Ignited and spent, then we die.

Emblazoned passion is life;

In brilliant fashion,

Consumption, proliferation join tumult and strife.

Such is the ongoing state of affairs,

Chaos ensues and provokes all cares.

A wreath of flames grows in the belly of the forges,

Feeding on emotion, the warrior gorges.

The giver is separate from the act of giving,

Only as the kindling burns can we keep on living.

Flames cannot exist without an ever diminishing source

Finite power, finite force.

But we're different, you and I.

Though made of fire we do not die.

Never spent, never diminished,

The work of ages is never finished.

Our source is eternal, woven with the world,

Which takes an infinity to be unfurled.

Though the stars might flicker, flounder and tire,

Forever will burn our sleepless fire.

I was received with as much of a hero's welcome as possible, considering that it was only a party of five, myself included. I hugged Linna first, then Margol and Targen. When I got to 303 he withheld a smile, but still gave me a hug.

"The recon mission almost failed, Grady," he said solemnly. "We had to sacrifice a kalachi and a war helmet that is very difficult to construct. Not to mention that you directly interacted with your targets, which is the opposite of what reconnaissance is. You could have been outed, Manorong. And that would have been death for all of us, you first. But...you did find out what you needed to. I'm going to remind you to be careful next time."

Considering his admonishment for my playing fast and loose, I didn't think there would be a next time. I wondered aloud when that would possibly be.

"Fill yourself up on lichens and head back out tonight," was the shocking answer. I didn't know that we'd be moving that fast.

"Tonight is a soiree` for the leadership in Rangor, to take place at the stadium right above where the governor said the Hall of Records was located. A small contingent of Elders will be there, including myself and my political rival, Elder 37. My clearance level allows me to go anywhere in the building. You will go as me, shifted into my shape and spoofing my mental signature. You'll head down to the basement and pretend to observe the gladiators, but what I need you to do once you're down there is to find a way to dig deeper. Look for any hidden tunnels that might lead to the Hall; you may need to scan a guard or two for information. We require access to those old weapons caches. If you get in there, take pictures of the layout and collect any blueprints, carry away whatever file storage devices you might find."

I told him I understood. I needed to refuel both my hover-flash and myself and then I would be on my way. This was what I dreamed of - being part of something bigger. Being part of the justice that was coming for my people. I was getting to really enjoy the taste of lichen, and it was a complete nutritional food, having everything my body needed including Vitamin Blorg.

Linna held my hand and squeezed it gently. I squeezed back, making sure I wasn't being rough. I had been on an adrenaline rush since leaving for Ventrello. "I'm proud of you," she whispered. Then she looked dour. I could sense her emotions and those were getting dour too. "But I'm so worried. At Rangor you'll be around telepathic masters with good vision. You'll have to fool everyone, and spoof 303 exactly. One slip..." Her voice sputtered.

My parents cared for me and had a vested interest in my well-being. They gave me Nutriment and books, and for my sake sent me on my way. The emotion coming from Linna was similar, but distinct. She loved me. And in a moment of complete surprise I found that I felt the exact same way about her. Being powerful telepaths, we both knew how the other felt and yet I was too afraid to say it. Love brought fear along with it, and I did not want anything bad to happen to her, either. She was just as big a part of the upcoming revolution as I was, and now just as big a target.

We ate in silence, mostly because feeding on color-changing lichens was a messy affair. 303 gave me any and all information I would need when arriving at the Rangor arena. He told me PIN codes for the doors, the locations of the honored guests, and the likeliest places to find an entry into the Hall. He told me who I'd be interacting with, like Elder 138 and Lieutenant-Governor Almoor. There was even a handshake to follow, should I happen to bump into a Lord Mennicose of a planet I never heard of named Redda.

He suggested I take a few relays with me so I could maintain contact with him and the group by placing them in strategic locations. They would act as amplifiers for our telepathic messaging but the risk for eavesdropping was real. I decided against it, much to Linna's approval. We didn't want to fail so soon into our mission. Or ever.

After dinner was finished, 303 broached another subject with me. Something that I was disinclined to discuss, and yet it was necessary to bring up. The Elder put an arm around my neck and walked me further into the cave, away from where the others were testing equipment in the command post. They would not have contact with me until I returned. It was too risky for me to plant relays anywhere near Rangor City so they would have to get used to my silence. Silence. That was precisely what our dear leader wanted to talk to me about.

"Grady, we couldn't read you for at least twenty minutes on your way back from Ventrello. It didn't seem that anything was wrong with the hardware we were using to track you. You went blank on our mind-map interface. It was about five minutes after you'd departed from the resort. You came back online as if nothing had happened. I need to know that you are okay and that you haven't been compromised in any way."

I thought about his question and the way he asked it. First, was I okay? Yes. Second, was I compromised? I didn't know. I actually had been intercepted. But compromised? It was possible. The real answer to 303's question was: maybe.

"No, not at all. I wasn't compromised. That leg of the trip was unremarkable at best, same as the rest of it. I think it might have been a defective relay. The wind blowing through the tundra was pretty bad. The hover-flash held up well but you know, 'a pole in the ground is liable to sway'. That's an old adage from Orong City. My parents used to say that."

303 looked at me intently. He knew that he'd trained me well enough that my mind was nigh un-leakable. Mostly. But he wasn't probing my mind; he was searching any hidden truth in my eyes, the windows and betrayers of the soul.

"As long as you're okay. I wouldn't want you to continue the mission if something was amiss. And I certainly wouldn't want to put the mission in jeopardy either."

I nodded.

"Because you were about fifteen, twenty minutes late getting here by my calculations. Considering the terrain and the weather and a variety of factors. It could be assumed you'd stopped in place. Lots of things could happen in that short time, particularly given the storm. Well, I'm happy you're alright." Apparently frustrated, he walked back to the command post.

So what really happened?

Rushing through the roars, shrieks and screeches that the storm was vocalizing, I began to experience another in the series of visions I'd been having. This was the first one to take place during my waking moments, and it took me by complete surprise. Spires of steep, jagged hill peaks flew past me like pointy blurs.

What I could see in the center of my vision was precipitation, mostly hail and snow but sometimes rain, moving towards me radiating from a single point. All of a sudden, that point got bigger and bigger and no longer was part of the tundra. I took evasive action and landed the craft onto a patch of level rocks as the elements bombarded it from all directions. I engaged the flash's grappling gear to sink hooks into the rock so I could remain steady. My mind was about to embark on a wild ride even if my body remained still.

I looked down at my body and it wasn't me. I wasn't controlling it. I had no access to the thoughts of the person whose physicality I was in. I was just a passenger. This person was a female...Dactilon? No. She was milk-skinned like in my other visions. And also a warrior - she wore armor covering her chest down to her knees and all of her back. She wielded a long staff made out of a type of bamboo that grows on the outskirts of Orong. It was cultivated by Dactilon servants for use by the SPQR Legion, mostly.

But she was not Rhean. She was jumping around and moving so much that it was difficult for me to tell what I was looking at. She was either sparring or...no - it was a full-on fight. She was in a cage built out of tempered titanium and on the opposite end stood her opponent. That other was a towering figure, tall and thin. It had a blackish, thick beak and a single bony spike on its head. I had seen an image of this type of creature before, in one of my books. This was...an Ofwal Kukooz, native to a long-dead planet. The Ofwal were semi-sentient creatures that fed on industrial waste and tended to filter the air for most civilized planets. They were now a thriving invasive species in many places including the home world of Rhea.

The Ofwal was grayish yellow, with long black clawed talons on which it stood. It too wore armor, much lighter than the female, but it possessed a much larger weapon. The Ofwal's sword had a wide hilt with a very big guard. He clutched it with his spiny fingers. The blade narrowed until it got close to the tip, where it widened once again into the head of an axe, replete with a spiked top and counterweight. The creature, more animal than thinking beast, swung with both hands in wide arcs.

The female (me) blocked a downswing by forming an X with her reinforced arm guards. We wrestled for control of the half axe, half sword but the skinny opponent was surprisingly powerful. Still, I had more muscle than the Ofwal would have guessed. It may not have been pretty, but I swung the large weapon back in a circle down to the ground, where the blade stuck. The creature jumped back, swifter than it looked, and began to crawl. These things could jump high and far, and this one especially was known to use the mechanics of the cage to its advantage.

I leaped left and spun around, twirling out the staff. It elongated into thinner segments towards the tip. The real me had played with Orongan bamboo once as a child before it was confiscated from me. It had a particularly unique property. When swung quickly it would deform, become more elastic and whip like. Indeed this staff turned dutifully into a whip and when the vision-me jumped in one direction, it hit the beast square in the maw as the thing attempted to track my motion rather than that of my weapon. I swung several more times as it was writhing to keep it cornered so I could get closer to it.

Then I walked right at it and held three fingers up to its face. It wore a dampening helmet, so I couldn't read the damn thing's mind, nor could I attack it psychically. That would have ruined all the fun, anyway.

Three fingers meant I had claimed victory in the bout. The default loser was meant to remain in a submissive pose as I looked towards a particular section of the audience. Wearing the regal purple, there was ... Lieutenant-Governor Almoor. This was live - it was either happening today or a short time ago, but it was in the arena I was meant to visit. The vice governor took his time in deciding the Ofwal's fate. Usually a thumbs-up would be given, because gladiators of any pedigree were all a large investment. Its owner would not be pleased at a sentence of death by the Rhean administrator. Nor would mine if it had turned the other way around.

Just as Almoor began to turn his thumb, the Ofwal quickly lunged from lying on its back and successfully yanked the blade from the ground in a two-handed motion. It lunged the spear-like tip straight into my chest, caving in the metal. I flew backwards and fell to the ground, seeing blurriness for a few moments. The real me expected that the show was over, and whoever I was inhabiting was just about ripe for death. Ready for the pole.

In native Dactilon custom, a body was buried horizontally inside of a metal cylindrical casket colloquially called a "pole." But the vision continued. Female warrior-me looked down and saw the head of the opponent's weapon crumpled in on itself while the armor had completely torn in the attack. And yet, the skin underneath remained intact. Looking closely, I could see she had heptagonal scales on her skin that she could toughen at will. Just like me! Who in Hades was she? And how did this vision fit into the rest?

Enraged and not even glancing at Almoor to see how he reacted (he didn't), I kicked the weapon away and it fell limply to the floor, barely clanging at all. Then with all the tenacity of a Cerberillian Canid, I grabbed his throat with one hand and his beak with the other. Then I yanked in opposite directions and he too, fell limply to the ground. There were cheers in the audience as they got their entertainment for the day. All it cost was the life of a gladiator. Almoor shrugged his shoulders to his compatriots and clapped, bearing his teeth in a smile. I walked away, flashing three fingers on each hand and crossing my exposed chest.

I walked down to the hall back towards my living quarters. Marginally bigger than a dungeon cell. I looked at the name for several seconds. It said Section A.110. Then the warrior-me turned over my forearm and looked at that intently as well. There was a dark tattoo that said Knath, 10639. After staring I - she, looked into a dirty mirror and I could see her face. She looked like a native apart from the hue of her skin. Many thoughts ran through my mind. Did she have Elder blood? Was there some other kind of native species besides mine? I saw her lips move and felt a strange resonation, as if I were speaking with my ears clogged.

"Come to the Arena when you can, Grady. Section A.110. I am Knath, 10639. Look for me." And then she was gone and I was back in the subfreezing chill of the northern tundra. The entire ordeal lasted less than twenty minutes and left me sapped of strength. I put the flash on autopilot and continued my journey.

But I could not tell that story of my vision to 303, who seemed to be satisfied going over hardware components and software tests. As I looked at Linna handing our benefactor a tablet, I waved at her. I sighed. I would not be in her arms tonight but rather I would be seeking out a Knath warrior who just so happened to have gladiatorial living space near to the underground. Near to, hopefully, the ancient Hall of Records.

Chapter 7 - The Hall of Records

303 gave me a modified earpiece to keep in my possession at all times. It had a small round metallic bulb at one end and a tiny hook at the other. It fit comfortably within my middle ear and could not be seen from the outside. It was not a communications device but rather a memory storage device. It acted like an interface that possessed an algorithmic "image" of 303's memories specific to the Dactilate and dealings with the Rheans.

The device would allow me to speak fluently with people I hadn't met before because it would prompt me with what to say according to 303's past interactions. For example, if an imperial senator were to tell me at the soiree - "Hey there 303. Remember the time we knocked back a few carafes of wine and partook in sin with those hookers?" I would be able to respond, "Of course I remember, I wound up paying for them - how could I forget? Worst waste of dinars I ever spent!" Or something like that.

Donning his finest red robe, I was off to Rangor in the Elder's stand-up hover-flash, spoofing his mental signature and appearing as a yellow dot to anyone who might be scanning the horizon for whatever reason. I drove right through the large tunnel into the city and followed my flash's navigation through the winding streets into the very heart of downtown. I had never been in this area before and certainly not at night. There were few if any Dactilons living in the center of Rangor. Most were either in Orong or on the outskirts in sparse tent villages. The few that did live close were treated to a curfew far earlier than most of us would go to sleep.

I parked my government vehicle in a tow-away zone with gusto and marched straight towards the tremendous Arena. It was among the largest single structures in the entire city. I saw it prominently from my mathematics class in lyceum, the nearly perfect ellipse surrounded by smaller circular stadiums meant for small-animal racing. From right at the gates it was obviously massive, a large testament to the glory of engineering; although whether we had built it or they, I was not sure. There were many things illegal to teach us at school and history was one of them.

"303, you old Nebil cow-dog! How are you? Come to watch tonight's games are you? It's going to be a packed house tonight, even more than last night." It was vice governor Almoor. Instantly my ear bulb began to work. Words came out of my mouth faster than I could register them.

"Almoor, yes. I'm going to be joining some colleagues in the Dactilate in a private booth."

The vice governor wore an unassuming silvery white toga clipped with a golden clasp over his right shoulder. "Nonsense," he beamed. "You'll be seated with me in the Administrator's booth and we shall drink wine and eat fine chocolate from the mother planet."

I bowed slightly as our kind always showed deference to their. "That is very nice of you Director, but they are expecting to dine with me and I have to admit I'm a bit hungry." Though I'd just filled up on luminescent lichens.

"Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! My booth has, of all things, barbecued Nebil beast, dripping smoked Helibor trout, as well as Gargantuan Squid calamari. But you know we're both early. Let's grab some appetizers at the Colored Ceiling down the street. We can have some nachos and an experience before the show."

The bulb began relaying information directly into my brain. The Colored Ceiling was a type of drug den for the rich and for corrupt politicians. Apparently 303 and Almoor had hung out together there twice. The Elder only attended because part of vying for Prime Dactilon was courting the oppressors for their endorsements. The representatives of the military wing, called the SPQR Legion which included the governors and their staffs each had a single vote. There was no maximum number of Legionnaires that could vote for the Prime but the minimum was three. Then the entire body of Elders together shared a single vote. In case of a tie the governor or a proxy or a member of the Rhean Senate was the decisive decision.

"Hmm, it is very tempting. Do you think General Rovis would want to join us?" I had been told Rovis would not be there but it was good to let it be known that I was thinking about him.

"No, it's confirmed, he will not be able to make it tonight. He's going to be quite busy preparing for security surrounding Ramstaad."

I nodded and moved my hand palm-up towards the establishment. "Then let's be off. Just a question about what you said - why is security so tight around our yearly alignment festival? We have never, to my knowledge mounted any semblance of a disturbance. We are a peace-loving, Rhea-loving people."

Almoor clapped his hand on my back. "If there's one thing I know about your people, it's that you love little. But you also hate little, and I know you are not a threat. It's simply a tradition to manage large gatherings in an orderly fashion, that's all. Besides, that's not the only thing weighing on Rovis' mind."

"Oh?" I asked. We were about two city blocks away. His face was so close to mine that I could smell his strong alcoholic breath. He wasn't wearing a helmet but he felt no need to protect himself from any mental intrusion. Upper level officers were typically trained to detect telepathic probing, even if it was subtle. I could likely get away with it, but I decided not to. Also, as it turned out, I didn't need to since black bramble wine seemed to be enough of a prompt to loosen this man's tongue. He put his arm in mine in what was a friendly gesture for his people. For mine, it was a strict violation of personal space. He leaned into my ear.

"I could get into a lot of trouble for telling you this, but right after your feast, we're mounting a surprise attack on Lila, in the Virgo cluster. So it's all hands on deck for the planning. I'll be staying here as the head of government." He winked. "So I get the feeling you might be a shoo-in for Prime Elder over 37."

That last part was a lie. 37 had cultivated far more good will to her cause than 303 did. Way more Legionnaires were on her side and ready to cast their ballots. She also had nearly the full support of the Dactilate, and the Legion often voted along with the high council. It was a way to show solidarity and a lack of friction. But I nodded in appreciation anyway at the drunken fib.

We arrived at the front of the den. It was like a bar or a pub. A tremendous amount of mainland Rheans, not military or government, liked to hang out in the heart of Rangor. There and Ventrello were the only touristy places to go anywhere on-planet. The rest as I've said, is a dump.

Lights and sounds blared odd, complementary patterns out at us. A large gaggle of sentinel bouncers manned the door and a full line of strangely dressed guests lined up to the left behind a velvet rope. Each waited impatiently, and dressed very out of the ordinary. I had never seen the occupiers in anything other than official, leisure or ritual dress. Their "party clothes" looked odd to me. There were purplish spots and multi-colored splotches on striped togas, and some wore pink or green visors. They had all been drinking profusely and so had very much resembled my host, who tapped a bouncer on the shoulder.

The giant turned with a scowl but upon seeing the stately government leader he bowed with his head held low. "My lord, I did not know you would be joining us this evening. We would have set aside a special table in advance." He turned to a colleague, "Glaxon, clear our finest table and send over a few dancers and wine." Almoor tried to demur, but the giant insisted. My host shrugged and I smiled politely. We waited a short time and then were invited inside.

Just like the last time that 303 was here, this time was a trip and a half. Funky music was blaring from above and smoke rose periodically from below. Pulses of laser lights oscillated randomly throughout the cave-like main area. Tables were arranged to optimize the space between them. There was a small stage on top of which were dancers showing off their nether regions. To the left side of the stage there was the kitchen area and to the right there was a bar. Three bouncers protected the bar with one tender manning it.

Behind the bartender were hundreds of different color vials that were shaped like test tubes, all the way up to the ceiling. Underneath the vials and within crouching range there looked to be carafes and liquor bottles for alcohol. Apparently they were bottom shelf. But at the top...the colored vials were breathtaking to look at. I was fascinated and I didn't know what they were for.

I began to ask about them when my ear bulb immediately changed my words to, "I always wanted to try a primer. Maybe when the election is over, we can celebrate with a good storyboard." I had no idea what the hell I was talking about but the algorithm inside this damn aural software did.

Almoor nodded in agreement as a dancer walked over to him and began to wiggle his hips in a courtship ritual I didn't understand, but the governor seemed to enjoy. He smiled at me. "Care for a dance?"

"No thank you."

The gyrating table-worker whispered something in his ear, to which he giggled. "Excuse me. We'll be going to the back for more privacy." I told them to take their time. I was profoundly curious about the bar. Why did they need three more gargantuan galoots to watch over it? It didn't look like alcohol and I had only a small idea of what "drugs" even were. My kind didn't partake in such things; it was unappealing to think of scrambling our brains simply to alter our mental status. When I'd learned about first aid, I knew about different kind of altered mental states having to do with things like diabetes, injury such as a knock to the skull, or psychosis. Who wanted any of that, voluntarily? And for the love of Rano, why?

A waitress came by to ask what I wanted to order. I wondered if there were any...juice or something with sustenance. She said there was. Then I pointed up to the glass vials. "I'm sorry ma'am, can you remind me, what are those? Are those d-drugs?"

She laughed. "Those, no, Elder. Well, kind of but not really. Those are called primers. They're liquid emotion, concentrated by our top scientists. They cost a fortune." I didn't understand and I looked it.

"You know, emotions? You can have your pick of any or mix them up if you're that rich. Happy, angry, jealous, excited, nervous, disappointed, elated, calm, joyful, surprised, ecstatic, whatever."

"And you...drink them?"

"Yes. You can consume them two ways: solo or storyboarded. If you want it solo, you buy whatever you want, go into a room in the back and sit down. Then they have music, lighting, smells and video that go along with the emotions you picked. If you want a storyboard that takes a lot longer and you need an appointment. They write a computer program for you to experience the emotion enhanced through a virtual reality interface."

"Wow," I said. Emotions in general were somewhat foreign to me. I was warmer than most here, as were everyone in the Spoofer crew. I certainly felt things but I wondered what it would be like to feel them to the extent that the friendly waitress oppressor described. But there must have been some things I still couldn't conceptualize.

"Why would anyone choose the negative ones? Like loss or disappointment or anything like that?"

"The Recurve. The bounce back you get when you realize that real life isn't as bad as what you just experienced in a safe environment. It usually leaves people feeling happier. But the ones who normally 'hit the ceiling' with the preferred emotions - a lot of them kill themselves. Once you've gotten that high, where else could you go? Although it could just mean that they've lost all their money and can't live without it. I'll be right back with your juice."

I very much wanted to try it and I was surprised with how much willpower it took me to say "no." I had a very important mission to complete, to bring us another step closer to evicting these people. But even so, I began to understand the partial appeal of these strange aliens. I wondered whether it was their feelings that caused them to be so impassioned and selfish. Although my people were on the cold side, we were not psychotic. Our culture was naturally interested in the greater good, even if dispassionately.

More down to business, I wondered whether it were possible that any underground tunnels running from the arena might be below this very establishment. If that were true then this could be an access or exit point if ever I needed one. Since my host was still out gallivanting, I decided to snoop around in the guise of needing a washroom.

As I began to walk down the hallway, I passed several rooms and saw people experiencing many things. Some seemed to live out childhood dreams and others nightmares and yet others, obviously, sexual fantasies. Towards the end of the hall, there was a corner and behind that corner it looked like a stairwell to a boiler room or a systems maintenance area. I marked the numbering on the door. It said Section B. 117. The underground layout of the city was in a massive grid pattern so I was certain that through some figuring, and assuming that no tunnels were barricaded, there must be a way from the gladiator's quarters to here. It was good to know in case it became risky to go out the way I came. I just had to get there from A. 110.

Going back to the table I found Almoor seated with another young gentleman. Before I could introduce myself, my earbud caused me to yelp out, "Lord Mennicose, it's been many a Reddan moon cycle since we've seen one another. How have you been?" I proceeded to move my arms awkwardly and we slapped each other's hands and elbows before returning to an imperial forearm handshake.

"I've been well, thank you. Sit, sit. The one day future governor and I have been talking about the election. We both favor you very much, 303. Although we may be in the minority right now, that could very well change depending on certain platforms you adopt. You could become very popular if you espouse progressive, out of the box beliefs." He turned to Almoor and shrugged while shaking his head. "Although to be honest we would rarely vote against the Dactilate body itself. Those are the ones you really need to convince."

"Why don't you override their vote? They just have one."

"Eh, as a policy it's bad form. It stokes resentment and we on the imperial side need to be sensitive to the will of the people. Or else we'd be putting down rebellions all day long, and not get to party like this," said my host.

The Reddan, wearing silver garments and a half ring of leaves from his left ear to his left brow, looked around cautiously and then whispered. "On my planet, our Council of Juniors has put forth a memorandum stating that they would like to invite Dactil and her people to join the SPQR Commonwealth. It's a league of colonies with the emperor at its head, who enjoy special status among the empire. It comes with across-the-board tax relief, access to better technologies and healthcare and an overall buoyed economy. And best of all, well for world leaders such as yourself anyway, increased amount of self-direction with greater freedom. We would work to ensure the Prime's responsibilities overshadow the governor's while still remaining notionally inferior."

My ear bulb did not kick in. Seconds passed. It was not programmed to react on the fly to new propositions. Or so I thought. "Yes," I said, unexpectedly. Whether that was me or the program or even whether it was me being deceitful for the sake of the greater good, I didn't know.

"Thank you," I continued, trying to sound appreciative.

"Usually we don't offer membership to a planet below a Level 1 but your typically good behavior, lack of rebellion and the general intelligence of your people suggest we can be getting substantially more out of one another. Oh, look at the time, the first few fights must be starting at the stadium. Let's head out, we can always come back here later."

More out of one another? What in the fiery pits of Hano did the bloke mean by that? And who were they to meddle in our affairs at all? Although improving our lot as a people would certainly be an admirable thing, I reactively didn't want incremental improvements. I wanted a recognition of our planet as free and belonging to its native sons and daughters. I wanted, needed a revolution. Not a handout. Not a compromise.

I had never questioned my visions before since they had appeared to be bad dreams. But the latest one had the stink of truth in it, so the others were probably true as well. And if they were, then it meant that we once had thriving societies with great diversity of life and brilliant technology. Our culture was robust, as was our economy. Sure, we looked a little bit different then. I didn't know what that was about.

Mennicose arose after looking towards his right uppermost field of vision. Many leaders possessed embedded chips and other technologies such as eye-lens computers and direct brain-stem interfaces. But I had no idea that they were so abundant or available to leaders of oppressed planets as well. It would be untrue of me to say that I wasn't at least somewhat tempted by the offer of being elevated to the Commonwealth. However, in truth I was not 303 and the decision to take that stance or not rested squarely on his shoulders. I wouldn't assume he'd be keen to adopting that position however, given his current status as de facto leader of a rag-tag rebellion of five. It would need to be a frank discussion once I got back and I fully resolved to have it with everyone. Linna, probably, would be all for an elevation of our current position especially if it was to be guaranteed by doctrine. I wasn't sure I could trust anyone, and it was certainly not a foregone conclusion that either the Imperator, Imperatrix or the rest of the Commonwealth of planets would vote us in. In our current state, one thing we could not count on with any certainty was hope.

Mennicose blinked once or twice and informed us again that the gladiatorial games were already underway. We hoofed it back to the stadium and found that the first fight of the night was a Reddan warrior on a horse fighting a swamp creature from Rhea with a long snout who stood on its hind legs. It snapped its teeth at the Reddan and nearly clipped the horse, which threw the rider off its back and ran off. It was collected by the event's ushers and guided out presumably back to the stables. The swamp monster appeared to have great intelligence, so out of curiosity I probed its mind to test out its level of sentience. To be honest, I didn't know why it mattered or why I let my curiosity get the best of me.

I was interrupted in my probe by members from the Dactilate sitting across in the next booth. There was Elder 12, and 303's rival 37, Elder 354, and surprisingly, the current Prime Dactilon, Elder 1. With the group there was seated General Moira, who I understood had just come to Rangor this evening. My group of three cordially shook hands with our counterparts and dabbled in a bit of small talk, aided of course by the apparatus stuck in my ear. It was odd to converse with fellow Dactilons outside of the Spoofers and not belonging to the plebian class that I was from in Orong City. The Elders, like 303 had passions, hobbies, thirst for knowledge, love for our people and exceedingly good eyesight.

We settled back into our seats to enjoy the show. The animal from Rhea appeared to be winning as it had just broken the shield wielded by its opponent. The thought still itched me about whether it possessed the same level of consciousness as the Reddan appeared to have. I simply wondered whether these bouts were typically stacked against snarling beasts, since they would not stand as great a chance against much smarter opponents with greater weaponry. However, the tenacity of a hungry Ang Ang was something that natives on this planet knew very well.

So, I cast my thoughts onto the creature. The thing was on its own, claws and teeth the only offensive tools against a particularly sniveling Reddan who was lying on his back and sticking out a hooked sword at the beast. Whether the posture was deferential or defensive, courageous or cowardly depended on the warrior's frame of mind.

As the creature stalked closer to its intended prey, it immediately stood back upright and threw three fingers into the air towards our booth. "My lord!" it bellowed. "Someone here be scouring me mind, I can feel it. It's against them rules we got. I beg yer majesty tell 'em to stop! It hurts, it hurts! Tell 'em to stop fer good measure!" Well, that answered any questions about intelligence I might have had. I certainly wasn't as slick as I thought, and that fact arose primarily from my underestimating other beings. I had let my guard down and was lazy about what I was doing. There were other ways to probe that would not have been as obvious. Again, I had to think fast. So using more clever methods to get what I wanted, I directed some buzzing insects into and out of the obviously sentient crocodilian's ears.

"Oi," he said and swatted them away. "Sorry me lord, the buzzin' musta been these dang muncher flies. It's...yeah the irritation is very sim'lar. I'm sorry for the interruption. Let us pro-ceed." Almoor didn't appear to be amused in response. Although in my vision I had seen him be very indecisive, now I could tell that he was seething with anger. The momentum of the night had stopped and our lieutenant-governor was not happy. The crocodilian had called a time-out because of me. The vice governor stood up slowly and pointed to the creature. Then he methodically turned his wrist so that his thumb pointed down.

"What?" it screamed. "No! No, I coulda swore it was an intrusion, it's an honest mistake. Lotsa noise in my head and even a tinglin' sensation! I was winnin' the fight, I was! I ain't got no reason to make things up. I made a mistaaake!"

The Reddan was badly hurt and struggled to get up. The beast that I had unfortunately sentenced to an untimely death, sought to win over the crowd by playing along as the heel. He grabbed his opponent with his mighty snapping jaws and shook his head violently. After a few death thrashes, the enemy became prey. The creature began to devour the gladiator. Some in the crowd booed but many cheered on the gore. I personally didn't like it but I understood the excitement. I absorbed some of the sentiment from the audience as a being of heightened empathy. This was sport, pure and simple and the players were all expendable. Mostly.

As pandemonium began to ensue, Almoor turned to me and Mennicose and said, "Now this is what I call entertainment. See? The guards don't know what to do - some of them are trying to honor my dictum by pursuing the Flehmert. Others are looking back at the audience and trying to find me to see what I think about this whole mess."

I pointed down to the arena. "The Flehmert is tossing your guards around like toy rocks. Don't you want to put a stop to that by issuing another ruling?"

"No," he said. "The stadium rarely gets this loud. People are enjoying themselves. It's the guards' own fault for not being able to read the will of the masses."

I wanted to explain that he needed to maintain order or risk appearing weak himself, but I didn't say it. That part was none of my business. And I had no desire to save Legionnaire lives, some of which were ending before my eyes. Ultimately the walking crocodile was subdued by the elite Governor's Guard and put into a tungsten cage, out of which it could not escape. It was not killed, at least not publicly so as to assuage the sports fans most of whom were settling down yet booing that the fun was over.

I happened to glance over to the next door box seats and found the Prime Dactilon squinting his eyes in my general direction. If I didn't know better, I would have thought he could hear my thoughts. He must have known my mistake, my lapse of curiosity. And he was furious. Even though I'd let my guard down, my actions should have been impossible to trace. I have regularly underestimated my own kind, however. And I have found myself to have a knack for messing things up that were otherwise just fine as they were.

I began to get very nervous that the Prime would be angry with me. I was sure that he knew I wasn't 303, but I didn't know what he was capable of. Would he "out" me right there and then? His gaze moved on but his thoughts didn't. I could feel him probing and found myself contending with an extremely powerful telepath in that moment. As the night's entertainment wore on, roided up Ang Angs fought valiantly as did Kniderian Dragons, along with many other creatures among the empire including Commonwealth planets that were not spared from gladiatorial duty. The entire night rolled on as I worked harder than I ever had before to keep out Elder 1. All the while drunken ravings from my hosts engaged my ear piece, which might have been my only salvation. I conversed and laughed right on cue but inside me there was a dust squall.

At one point I asked where I could find the nearest restroom. As Dactilon excretory systems were very different from those of the common creatures of the empire, I was told I would need to walk very far. Two halls, hang a left, down some stairs, down another hall and to the right. I decided to go there even though I didn't need a bathroom. I had gotten tired from staving off the Prime's mental attack. Walking through the many halls I realized that nobody at all was around. Everyone was at the arena; there were no attendants or food or ware peddlers selling anything. You either had to get there early or stay way past the last match if you wanted to buy something.

In many ways it was a step up for a plebian like me. Going to school in Rangor day in and out I saw the colossal coliseum jutting above even some skyscrapers and wondered what it was like to be there when it was packed. I thought that world would be closed to me and I would remain a poor, captive bloke forever. Now I was an Elder, I laughed to myself as I ran my hands along the metallic square tiles of the cold wall.

"Except that you're not an Elder," a voice said behind me. It was dulcet in tone, very soothing and not nearly as ancient as I expected its speaker to be. He had followed me and went into stealth mode so I could not see him in my mind map. "You are not 303," he prodded. "Who are you?"

As my ear bulb tried to kick in with an answer, it immediately short circuited. Then it got hot. Very hot. I pulled it out faster than it was meant to be ejected and smashed it to the floor. "Shit," I said. The Prime might have been more powerful than I was, or more practiced. Either way it didn't matter. I was being outclassed. With just a bit more time, he would find out who I was and what my purpose was in faking Elder status. Moreover he would know about the Spoofers and our plans to subvert the authority of Rhea. This...was not good.

The Prime was not scheduled to be here tonight, so I couldn't exactly be faulted. But perhaps his curiosity wouldn't have ignited had I not directly caused the deaths of a few guards at the hands of a gladiator from Flehmeh. That part would be left out of my post-mission report. If I would even get a chance to write it.

The Prime, eyes ablaze in what I perceived to be rage, motioned me to the Dactilon bathroom and put his finger to his mouth. There was no one in the vicinity and no electronic surveillance within three hundred yards. He closed the door behind him and locked it shut. The bathroom was surprisingly clean. There was a janitor's closet next to the sinks adjacent to the stalls. This was a much nicer lavatory than any in the lyceum or in my hometown. The best Orong could hope for was the transient facilities at the rock quarry.

The quarry...my thoughts hadn't gone to my parents in a long time. I had kept them from my mind, afraid that I'd miss them too much. I remembered when I was a child and...

And this train of thought down Memory Lane was being directed by the Prime Dactilon to elicit information. I could feel my mind being guided to Orong, to my childhood, and he could see it all. I immediately put up my shields and began striving against him once more.

"I'm not probing to hurt you, Grady." He knew my name. "I want to make sure that I am protecting our people, that no small group of well-meaning but wrong-minded folks do anything to jeopardize our continued participation on this planet."

"Participation?" I asked, perhaps louder than I should have. "We don't participate, we don't guide our own paths. We're subjects of the crown, part of a wide collection of toys belonging to the empire."

"We're toys that the empire has chosen not to discard. Look at me. Do you understand how powerful I am? With practice you can reach where I am now. I can read them with their helmets on without them knowing. I possess the tact that you don't and it came with decades of study. I know the Rheans. They would have tossed us in the trash years ago; we are a small outpost populated by highly disposable natives in their eyes. We're boring and stupid, providing little utility but for our strong backs. And yet there has not been an incident of mass murder in at least fifty years."

"Because of our subservience."

"If not for that we'd be dead. All of us."

"Not if we banded together! We could, at the very least push back hard enough to negotiate better terms to live by."

Elder 1 sighed deeply. "No we couldn't. There is so much that you and 303 and anyone else on-planet doesn't know. But I do. The best of us tried. And failed. Were wiped out completely, as utterly destroyed and withdrawn from history as possible. The harder we fought the more absolute the counter."

"How do you know that for sure? I choose to believe in hope."

"Then you believe in lies. I saw your mind, I could see flashes of your memories. The ghosts of long ago are calling out to you. Some memories continue to float around the ancient relays from one storage unit to another. I've seen them all. This was our past, when we tried to fight. If we tried to do that again they would rather leave this planet barren, desolate and uninhabited than leave as the losers of a war. What you hope about and dream for could never happen. Only compromise will lift our people now."

I looked around, searched his dark eyes for any deception. But I found none. The fact that he spoke a measure of truth didn't matter to me in that moment, however. The conviction I held for my entire life was not something I was willing to let go easily. I was willing to die for it, and he knew that.

"But are you willing to kill your own people for it?" he asked me.

"Our people are not living!" I shouted, definitely louder than I should have. But my voice was drowned out in the distance by fickle, alternating cheering and booing crowds. I knew I wasn't exactly right even as the words were coming out of my mouth. They were living, but not to the potential or the standards they should be. And in a strange way they exuded contentedness. Resignation. Ignorance. One could call it whatever they wanted but they could see what it wasn't - resentment. The bare minimum of care that the Rheans took of us was something they were willing to rely upon, to the point that it was conceivable to thank our overlords in some sense.

"Now is not then," I explained in hushed tones. I sought to utilize reason, if he would not be persuaded by raw emotion. I told him that there was such a bare contingent of Legionnaires on-planet that a straight fight would not be a conclusive win on their side. And they would be hard pressed to call up reserve fighters since they intended to attack Lila right after Ramstaad. That was too far away to summon soldiers quickly. Plus, they needed to maintain order within their empire, especially the jewels in their crown - the Commonwealth. There would be a reluctance to shift resources for fear of revolutions in more important territories. And besides, it was foretold that long lost weapons of immense power would reside below the Rangorian Hall of Records - right below our very feet. I would be there tonight, going through sector A. 110. Would it not be wise to at least plan the greatest revolt we could and then debate whether it was viable?

"There are roving Rhean colonies on unpopulated moons and asteroids in our solar system, Grady," he growled at me, displaying emotions of his own. "They mine metals and gases and maintain a standing force right nearby in case they need to suppress a rebellion. Those units will not go to Lila since during a war, mining efforts will need to increase. There are ships in our orbit that are fully operational with minimal manpower and can rain down terror from the skies indiscriminately. How dare you toy with our future like this?"

Again, he was right. But so was I. There were too many differences between their initial attack and today. Then a completely extinct species of sentient Dactilon, the Knath if a tattoo is to be believed, fought in a surprise war without any preparation. Today that would be flipped. And besides, I wouldn't back a plan that was too risky. No one in their right mind would. But you can't nix an idea you haven't had yet - that was why I was even at the Arena, after all.

"Your ragtag team of noble-minded disruptors have done enough damage. In my capacity as Prime I order you to disband. In my capacity as a more-powerful creature I absolutely command it. You will stand down or I will make you."

My blood began to sublimate. I did not appreciate his direct challenge and I was not going to change my intended course. If he wanted to move me, he would have to do it himself. To that effect, I decided to suit up. I arranged my cells to harden and prepared for a show of strength over him. I didn't want a fight, I simply wanted to let the Prime know that I meant business and I would not take his threat lying down. 303 taught me the subtle affinities afforded by my natural gift. Few had the telepathic range that I possessed. I had practiced and learned well. But my training took a year; 1's took...who knows? He definitely looked pretty old. In my protected state, I was practically immune to mental assault.

To my utter surprise, he fancied a fistfight. It was a surprise for several reasons, not least of which was his advanced age and the fact that he did not seem to be able to shape-shift like I could. And yet he lay into me with all that he had.

He threw closed fists at me and then began to claw away, trying to see if there were any weak points, any chinks in my armor. There were none. I let him have at it since I could not be hurt by the onslaught and his every effort in that moment was useless. It would have been different if he had the physical ability to morph like I could; then I would likely suffer at his hands. But as it stood, this effort was not helpful.

"Prime Elder, please let's discuss this."

And yet I knew we could not. He couldn't let me go continue my mission, since he felt it was an existential threat to him and the planet. He could not alert the Rhean authorities either, because that would presumably be suicide ahead of a top-secret planned war. I frustrated perhaps the most powerful member of my species and was now facing his impotent wrath.

After some time, his anger and subsequent thrashing abated. He tired and relented. Then after catching his breath, he took out a Rhean sloughing dagger, which was able to slice atoms off of any material, including my skin. The sloughing daggers, which I had learned about in school, were protonified and could be used for practically any cutting purpose, be it surgery or murder. As he began to swing at me with the hot knife, glowing pink, I let my guard down. I would be much quicker with softer skin since it didn't matter anyway. I ramped up a psychic attack against him, not knowing whether I could be successful. But my life was now in danger and I had to give it my best shot. I held nothing back, seeking to wipe his mind as I had done to the Legionnaires that attacked my village over a year ago.

It seemed to be working. I didn't sense a counter from him. He must have lacked the energy at that point to mount a good defense. Maybe I could succeed in this and cover my tracks, albeit at the expense of the Prime's health and political position. If I incapacitated the Prime, it could have dire consequences, I thought. It might hasten the election to select his successor and could keep the Rheans on-planet. That ran counter to what any of us wanted. And yet - what could I do?

Then the most unexpected thing I could think of happened - he began to seize. The effort was too great for him and caused an epileptic fit. His eyes rolled back and his extremities flexed, contracting uncontrollably. I could tell what was happening in his mind now. He was having a stroke and there was nothing I could do. It was massive. And it was my fault.

"Prime," I whispered. "I need to take you to a hospital, now," I told him, scooping him up in my arms.

"N-no," he weakly replied. "They can't know about this. I'm dying, I can feel it. I have a brain bleed. Keep me out of sight. They will not look for me, they never have. I keep my own...time..." In a strange change of attitude, he held my hand. "Do not pursue your dream of freedom as it is, Grady," he said. "Pursue what freedom means for you now. It is smaller than your dream but greater than your hope."

In my species, a seizure did not cause syncope, but in a Rhean it often did. 1 would be dead soon, I knew it. And he would be lucid right until the end. I needed to at least try. So I ran down the hall with him looking for - I had no idea. This was a sports stadium with no hospital or facility for our kind because the whole thing was built for them. We were none of their concern.

"What are you doing?" he asked, almost laughing at me. "It may be undignified, but you know what you have to do. You need to get rid of me. Stuff me somewhere. And for the love of Hano and our people, you need to do the right thing. The right thing might feel bad, and the wrong thing can be bliss in your wrongminded anticipation for it. But you would quickly realize your mistake. Be a real hero. Don't be a hero..."

He faded away, with dark cerebrospinal fluid tinged with blood coming out of his ears, eyes and mouth. There was little fanfare as he crossed the threshold between life and death.

Shit, I thought to myself. This was terrible. It didn't do me any favors for him to be dead. Around the corner from where we were out in the open, I sensed a lone gray dot wandering the halls. His name was Brend Tuk, a janitor.

Shit.

Brend hadn't noticed me on his mind map yet. I didn't know when there would be a break and a rush of patrons would be flooding the concessions stands, so I had to get back into the shadows quick. I went the only place I could think to go - back to the pristine Dactilon bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I searched for a hollow space behind a wall or...something. I checked to see if there was enough of a space in the ventilation unit above the ceiling, but it was all solid. If I were to knock down walls or ceilings, I would not have been able to put them back together again.

The last place I checked was the janitor's closet. There was a small door at the very back of the closet. I yanked it open and bingo. It led to a rather large garbage chute that ended up in the city's incinerator. There was a flame within a circle next to a garbage bag drawn upon the door. It was disgusting, undignified and morally reprehensible, but I had to shove the newly dead body of the Prime Dactilon down there for all our sakes. I grabbed the thick black garbage bag from the sink area and found that two bags completely covered him. With a third bag, I tied both tightly together.

Cremation was not a normal custom for my kind. Only the rich and ironically the Elders, could afford being burned on a pyre. Most of us buried our dead feet first vertically several feet below ground. Some buried their family members with fungal spores and lichens of the same kind that were ingredients in Nutriment. Then after several years they would have a steady source of food that would be in addition to the government rations. Trying my best not to think about what I was doing, I launched his corpse down the chute and closed the janitor's door back up.

I took a breath. Was there anything that went right in my efforts thus far? I reconfigured my skin so I once again looked like 303 and then I opened the bathroom door. Shaking somewhat, I walked all the way back to the box seats, passing the Prime's former entourage and avoiding eye contact.

37 reached out to me. "303!"

"Y-yes?"

"The Prime wanted me to tell you he had to leave early; he left while you were in the restroom."

Yeah he did.

"Th-thank you, 37. I'm sorry to have missed him. Did I miss anything else?"

Mennicose threw his hands towards the grounds. "Bah. A Lamprian versus a Colokney. I wish I had been in the bathroom instead of enduring that nonsense fight. But that was just a warm-up for the main event!"

"Oh?" I asked, trying to sound sincere. After my earpiece broke, I couldn't tell whether I was appropriately in character or not. However, I had already put the main, living people within these booths at ease. I had made my first impression, so there was more leeway to be myself now.

"What's the main event?" I asked.

"A Knathian female, reigning champion and gladiatress-in-chief, will make a selection for her next challenger. She can choose anybody from among the captive warriors or even someone in the stands. The anticipation of her challenge is usually a big show. Typically there would be a sparring session between the champion and challenger to prove the worthiness of the opponent. Then a match would be scheduled for Champion's Day, within the next few months."

"Who do you think she'll choose?" Almoor asked his Reddan compatriot. His white toga had gotten stained with wine, meat juices and sweat.

"Oh, she's the queen of dramatic flair. It'll probably be a very difficult challenger, someone quite powerful. She likes choosing large monstrous creatures with muscle and heft over someone smaller. It's the optics that makes it enjoyable."

"Can she really choose anyone at all?" I asked. "And are they obligated to fight?"

Almoor and Mennicose laughed together, followed very tentatively by 37 across the way. "Whatsa matter? Afraid she'll pick you?" I shrugged my shoulders in response and added my own voice to the laugh track. But the truth was that this very warrior had chosen to bind with me and channel a message straight to my brain. Perhaps she would try to 'help' get me to A. 110 by selecting me as her opponent. It wasn't impossible to imagine.

The ring announcer stepped into the center of the oval after attendants cleared the arena of blood, teeth and weapons from the night's previous bouts. Other workers began to spread new dirt and sand all around for better traction in the main event. How odd that the most important portion of this night's sport was simply a warm-up for a future one, I thought. But then again, though I found Rheans, Reddans and other Commonwealthers strange, they were also shockingly similar...to me. Not other Dactilons. I did not possess the usual dispassionate quietude of the majority, and neither did anyone else in attendance at Rangor Arena. They were loud, but more importantly - they were bold.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Rheans and other species, it is my honor and privilege to announce tonight's main attraction: the selection for Challenger on Champion's Day. Coming in from the stadium's northern entrance the enchantress, the warrior, the interminable, Knath 10639!"

The gladiatress' name was such a ball-deadener for me. My name was Grady. It wasn't special but it was mine. She was one of many gladiators who breathed and labored at the behest of the emperor. A classification followed by a number. Yet this crowd began to go wild, chanting and hooting in praise of their heroine. In return she played along, putting her hand to her ear as if she could not hear their shouts. This of course increased the volume of the entire arena, including in my booth, where the giddy imperial officials went along with the energy of Rangor. I sat there quietly as she danced around throttling everyone up into a frenzy. As it happened, my subdued demeanor was probably the right approach to take, since 37 also sat stone-faced and watching. We were of a different kind, one not taken to being swept into an emotional tornado. Yet I could not resist the infectious feeling that was bubbling around the place. I understood reflexively why people liked it.

After playing up to the crowd, Knath 10639 put her finger to her lips very theatrically, and immediately everyone shushed up. She closed her eyes and began drifting around the arena. Would she pick someone from the green section? No, not there. Would she choose someone from the blue, way on the other side? She ran towards the blue section and stopped, eyes still closed. She shook her head, still keeping her hands out and trying to sense her way to the right direction.

Dreadfully for me, she slowly walked towards the emperor's booth and stopped directly in front of us. She began to cast her arm out and the entire arena held their breaths audibly. My heart began to race in anticipation. She had chosen me before; she had wanted me to be here and now I was present. Why wouldn't she choose me? After some seconds of deliberation, she ran down the track and off site. For all intents and purposes, she was gone. Where was she headed? Was this some weird attempt at escape? Was that her plan all along? Everyone looked over at each other and allowed themselves to murmur in confusion.

Then just when Almoor himself began to look annoyed, she burst back into sight, pushing an enormous cage carrying a large white beast inside of it. It was snarling and drooling, with a long snout and big teeth. Overall it was probably three to four times bigger than she was, and this animal was certainly not intelligent. Although everyone finally cheered in a burst of glory, I didn't understand - how do you "spar" with a hungry, cornered animal?

"I choose this Cerberillian Canid, my lord. It is one of the rarest creatures in the imperial menagerie and perhaps the most fearsome. Considering the grave danger for the crowd, I humbly suggest that we forgo any sparring session tonight. Let us strive in carnal contention on Champions Day!"

The crowd was extremely volatile and set to explode at any and every turn of events. They cheered the Knath's suggestion. But then I turned over to look at Almoor. And he was not happy at all. I could guess why - the creature was one of his prized possessions. I'd read about the Canids, who were from a planet mined for its mineral resources. They were at the top of the food chain when they lived, but the planet was unofficially dead from a runaway greenhouse effect two hundred Dactilon years ago. I knew more about former imperial settlements than the history of my own planet. Because the Rheans, of which Almoor was currently the highest ranking in the globe, saw fit to prioritize us that way.

I didn't need to be a mind reader to know that this choice of opponent would not fly with the lead oppressor. The crowd might have been fine with it, but Canids did not breed any longer. This one currently getting stressed out in front of an audience was one of the last that there would ever be. And yet its owner could not refuse the challenge by the gladiatress. He was bound both by tradition and the will of the mob. All optics and sense of continuity dictated that the young vice-ruler could not be aggressive-aggressive in this moment of anger. But, his station allowed him more than ample wiggle room to be passive-aggressive. So long as he placated the bloodthirsty attendees of the bloody event.

"You two will spar. NOW. Guards, open the cage doors!"

Usually a weapons check would be taking place about now, but there was a mad rush to let the Canid out. Four guards took long rods with looped wires attached to one end. They paired up and threw them over the cage until they hooked onto a fastener. Then they pulled. The heavy fencing began to budge very little. Almoor pointed at two more guards to run over there and help the first four. Now there were three pulling on one door and three on the other. Still, the cage budged up and then fell back down. The audience began to laugh, much to the dismay of everyone in my booth. The energy began to sour.

In what I perceived to be an act of downright defiance - and definitely cool - Knath 10639, who had not been given a proper name, ever, took over. She grabbed one rod in one hand, and one in the other. She lifted the doors high enough for the beast to saunter out. As I saw it in motion, I began to understand how regal and majestic it was, mindless rage notwithstanding.

It looked well-fed, which might have been a bad thing. If it just ate, then it would be strong and have good stamina. But on the other hand if it was starving, then it would probably fight like a demon as well. There was probably never a good time to contend with the monster. It looked like this was very bad for the Knath, who was about four or five times smaller than the wretched thing.

It was all very entertaining, and though I remained embarrassed to be on the edge of my seat, I couldn't help myself. This race of alien exploited whatever they could to get whatever they could get out of it, squeezing things for their consumptive value. The creature wasted no time hunting the Knath. It opened its jaws wide and pounced. In my imagination, the thing would have shrieked and flailed about, but it did not. The creature was more methodical than that. Though it had heft, strength, speed and weaponry in terms of its claws and teeth, it chose to try stealth to win the day.

In what looked like an afterthought, the gladiator searched for her weapon, but she did not have one on her person. It was on the floor, too far away to be useful in this moment. The Canid was not a Scorpion or a Dragon, so a telepathic attack would likely have worked. That however, was against the rules. She would have been dragged in front of a magistrate at the end of the battle, were she to survive. So what she did, was what I do - she hardened her scales and braced for impact, digging in her heels. She barely jumped away from its snapping maw before it snapped again. And again. And again. Finally it swung its clawed paws at her much faster than I would have expected for its size. The sideswipe landed and caused her to fly across the arena, where she landed and splintered the cement that caught her.

From my own experience, I knew that in an armored state she was likely well-cocooned. But that was the hardest whack I'd ever seen up close. Her brains may have gotten scrambled and I wasn't all that sure that she was still conscious. If she wasn't, then her reinforced skin will likely have retracted back to its normally much softer phase and she was as good as an entree for the animal. Yet the great beast approached the still body with caution, ears raised. It lowered its profile and stalked towards the limp white champion, making incredibly deep footprints into the sand. Get up, get up, I hoped. I felt kinship with the gladiator and something within the marrow of my bones made me believe that we were truly kin, in some way.

As a mere spectator I stood up to get a closer look over the animal's right shoulder, but then something happened to me that had never been done before or since - I got overpowered. Some overwhelming force knocked me back into my seat and though I struggled to get back up, I couldn't even move. I'd become paralyzed in place, unable to flex or contract a muscle. No one noticed my attempts at regaining control of my body because everyone else was only metaphorically glued to the action before them.

The Cerberillian Canid stooped low, close to the Knath but not too close. It began to sniff the air so strongly that the lightest dust arose up off the ground. Then it approached the body with head low. None of the crowd provoked the beast in any way since everyone seemed to coordinate holding in their collective breaths. For me, my breath was the only thing that I had conscious control over. It frightened me in that moment to think how it was possible that I could be stuck, but once the novelty of fear abated, the answer was obvious, and I stopped resisting.

The Canid, in one quick motion, opened its mouth and chomped. What it found however, was that the chomp wouldn't close. In an even quicker motion, the Knath arose and clasped a bottom canine in one hand and a top canine in the other. A battle of wills ensued to what appeared to be a standstill, until she bent down to pick up her tungsten sword with her left hand and began swinging it in a fast, wide circle. With her right, she maintained the ability to pivot the animal's head to the side against its will. She was much stronger than even I had thought, and I already had some inkling prior. The Canid fought to pick up its own head but she shoved it to the ground with one hand, contorting the creature's sizeable neck.

Almost faster than I could register I saw the final blow, with the helicopter-like fanning of her sword cutting up from the bottom and her right hand also moving upward in the same general direction. Along with the other spectators, I began to scream in happiness for our champion. Even Almoor began cheering, hands clapping harder that I'd seen most soft-bodied Rheans clap. And yet I was still stuck, back and tush firmly against the seat. It got me nervous again, especially since I saw that the Canid's gigantic hundred-pound collar was let loose by the decapitation blow and was flying directly towards me. I looked around but no one tracked it. Yet. Once they saw where it was headed, everyone else jumped out of the way. All except me. And when it landed, I had another first - the first time in my life that I'd ever been squarely knocked out by a blow to the head. Yet, had I not been myself, I'd have been dead.

Although I knew I wasn't dead when I awoke, there a great many other things that I didn't know. Like where was I? It was darkly lit and quiet. I was used to that after living in a cave in the desert with Spoofers for a year. But this wasn't that cave, nor should it have been because I didn't remember heading over there myself. There was some straw on the floor, rocks strewn about and a flame flickering behind me. My body cast a shadow on a very austere-looking wall. There was a very visible wide bump on the head of the silhouette. I reached my hand up to the bump and it hurt. The memory of what happened before I passed out came back to me clearly.

"Where?" I turned around.

"Here." Knath 10639 held out a bowl of something she'd been stirring. It was warm, and it smelled good. "Lichen and moss, with Rhean herbs. Packed full of nutrition. Eat up."

I had many questions but also a gnawing hunger. Without meaning to be a boor, I slurped up every last drop from the deep metallic vessel. I sighed, not having eaten as well as that in a very long time.

"So this is Section A.110."

"Yes," she said. "Knocking you out was the only way I could think of to bring you here. Sorry about that, by the way." This may have been her living quarters but it might as well have been a dungeon or a stable. Thick bars in front of individual rooms including this one were all open, and seemed to be lockable from the inside. I realized that the Section was a lot larger than just the one jail cell we were in, so she was given lots of space.

"I received your message. Earlier, a while before getting here. Telling me to come." I was sputtering with no clue what to say now that I was here. "So - I have a question. Are you an Elder? Some kind of albino Dactilon? Are we of the same kind?"

She smiled. I could see the heptagonal scales on her skin just barely visible. "Yes, we are the same. But two separate forms, shall we say. There are animals in ecosystems far away from our planet that can take different shapes. They are one way in one environment, and a different way in another. One that comes to mind is the Salogat Beetle, found on Redda. Normally, they are blue, docile and wingless. But when there is a genetic trigger, tripped from the environment, such as drought or famine, the one creature transforms. It turns black, gains wings and a single horn on its parapet. It's the same animal, just...activated. I am an activated version if you will, of your kind. I am a Fire Heart."

It was a good thing I ate, because I probably would have passed out again had I not. "You mean those are real?"

"Oh yeah. Still are. You're one too - all of Dactil's native sons and daughters are Fire Hearts. You are all Knath. A long time ago before the takeover, this activated type that differentiates me and you, was the only way we were. It was our default modality. The most ardent among us fought for survival, but the invaders wouldn't entertain any resistance. So the thought got into the remaining Knath that becoming passive was the key to survival. They were right. All empires need strong backs. Though the individuals might be disposable, the group fits a basic need of the system."

"You talk as if you were there. How old are you?"

She waved me off. "Bah. Eighty three years. I was born long after the crumbling of the world. But the relays that existed back during the planet's golden days are mostly still working. They're attached to storage systems that still transmit information through telepathic wavelengths. You've seen the visions too, haven't you?"

I had. In my dreams and sometimes in my waking moments. I always believed they were signals from the past somehow, though I never imagined how that could be. My ancestors kept records of their history, of their lives and trials. Their deepest thoughts of happiness and fear. Of...the end. Some of what I'd seen was so grotesque that I wished it to be only a nightmare. Nightmares were not false just because they were nightmares. But did that mean that there was no central Hall of Records? 303 was adamant that I should go there to retrieve ancient weaponry, or at least any knowledge of it. For 303, a storage disk was better than a ray gun. Because with the blueprints, you could always make twenty thousand or so.

I realized that there was a slight buzzing alternating with a tapping sound, both in the distance and nearby. I asked 10639 what that was.

"It's a telepathic dampener. Rheans really perfected anti-telepath technology. It's so I don't organize a breakout. Their problem is that it creates a noise that makes it impossible for them to hear or record our voices, which usually fall within a range of frequencies that would be counted as background noise. We can speak freely and not be overheard. So they solved one problem, made up a new one. Ironic, huh?"

I looked around and listened carefully. It wasn't just my mind that was sharper than the average native; my other senses were good, too. I could hear no one else in the vicinity. Though 10639 was captive, she was also a celebrity and to the extent that the empire treated any subjects well, she was treated well.

"The Rheans are going to attack a small, resource-rich planet named Lila," I blurted out, still whispering.

"When?" she asked.

"After Ramstaad. The major satellite ships will be diverted and the Legionnaires will be left with only a skeleton crew on-planet."

She knew where I was going with this but didn't want to say it. She very much seemed concerned about what my knowledge of that fact suggested.

"Why did we need to talk?" I asked. "How did you know about me, or how to reach me? You seemed very anxious to meet," I explained.

She sighed. "For you to access the relays means that you are closer to what I am than you are to what they are. The other Dactilons. Elders may wield great personal power, but they have not tapped the archives of our once beautiful world. They're mostly unaware of the relays. They have not seen what you did. I thought I could speak with you. To commiserate. You are the closest to my kin than anyone else."

We were already by definition, commiserating. But I also stalked with dark purpose. I meant to plan the expulsion of the enemy. I planned to do something more than just lament.

"What happens right after they quickly beat Lila, which is below Level 1 classification?" she asked. "They'll be right back here, ten times their full force for our sector. Do you know they have a military base on a large asteroid that orbits the planet? It doesn't take part in any conquest activity. Its sole purpose is to mine metals and keep the peace below if needed, as a reserve force. You can't just wing a rebellion and hope it works. You need to plan it all out."

She was right about not having thought of everything...or even most things. But whatever was in the Hall of Records had the potential to become our secret weapon. It was the hope I hung onto. Because the truth was, it could all wait. Our kind would, on our current trajectory continue to be docile. No pebble in the gears. That gave us, the hapless "Spoofer Revolution" time to plan. Going down one dead end street would hopefully mean that we could continue to explore what tack we were to take. One of the few things I'd learned in school was the history of many civilizations that had fallen to Rhea. Some had been empires in their own right. But regardless, all empires eventually fizzled out. As a generality, they depleted their resources quicker than usual. Without a steady stream of new stuff, their society collapsed.

Another hundred years could see the empire thinning itself out through a spread it could not support. Time could be the path to freedom by waiting for the oppressor's inevitable downfall. But I would be long dead before I ever got the chance to have it. No - I knew that my path was a selfish one. And thus far, I was okay with that.

"There is something right below us. Thick armor plating with probably the strongest alloys ever smelted in Dactil. I couldn't pierce it with my mind to find out what's beyond it but it's big. I think it's the Hall of Records. It fits as the right location from contemporaneous information wafting over the relays. I know you're after it. I know everything about you. You, Grady, are far too easy to read and that makes you extremely vulnerable. If I could see your mind while you sleep, so could lots of people. So could 303. Promise me one thing before you explore the unknown."

"Yes, anything," I found myself saying, backed up against a metaphorical wall trying to prove my sincerity.

"Promise me that if you find something you can use against them, that you'll consider whether you should. That you won't take a path to destruction just to see where it'll lead. Promise me that the answer will be important to you and that your mind isn't all made up."

"I promise," I sighed. I meant it. She knew that and she rubbed my back. It was small comfort.

"Do the right thing for us all," she added. But I wondered about her level of desire for freedom. She was more captive than I was. I could traverse deserts anonymously, head into and out of tent cities with ease. Although it was large, 10639 was confined to a cage. Didn't she have the slightest tickle in her soul to shed the bars imprisoning her and find her well-deserved liberty? I had to know.

"So, hypothetically, if the right time ever presented itself --" I began to ask, but she cut me off.

"I would join the Spoofers and fight alongside you. I'm a Fire Heart, and so long as I'm living, I'm fighting. The Knath rarely die of disease or old age. We die because our emotions fade and the embers go out. I am nowhere near letting that happen."

And now the hard part - how could I nudge the conversation towards asking how exactly I was to get into the Hall? But then again, I didn't need to ask. She went to get a thick-bristled broom and began to sweep a section of her cage in the far corner. She pushed away dust, grime and hay to reveal a metallic hatch leading underground.

She knocked on the floor beside it which made a hard thwacking thud sound. Then she knocked on the hatch itself, which resounded with an echo.

"This is how you get in. Remember your promise," she said.

Chapter 8 - Captain Siib and the Red Kraken

An Excerpt from "Mirone, the Red Kraken"

On a low-breeze, sun speckled afternoon, Quena sat stretched out on the deck with his arms around the back of his head. He looked out at the glowing pink surface of the water going in every direction for miles. Quena had keen eyes; most lookouts required use of binoculars to observe any subtle differences in the coloration of the water but he, being of solid Innaka stock, could survey all details of the vast ocean before him at a 270 degree angle. And he saw something slight, to the north and east of the Penchant. To be a good lookout required more than eyes; it required a quick mind to process what was a signal, and what was just noise.

He trained his peepers on that spot to see if the errant waves would dissipate. Quena leaned on the edge of his chair, putting his chin on his hands, clenched on the guard rail. The krill in that area bobbed up and down but remained alight. Then they went still; now the spot was no different than any other square of water.

Quena unclenched his hands and then punched the rail. "Blast!"

"Whatsa matter?" asked Gorga, the Penchant's first mate, who woke up from an unplanned nap after several days of straight work supervising the ship.

"Nothing too much, Miss Gorga. Siib's got us up all hours of the night and day hard pressin', eyes, hearts and minds on a single thing and that, only. He don't sleep, he don't eat. How's the ship move if there wern't no more wind? Couldn't, no? We all want the Kraken, Miss Gorga, don't get me wrong. But even Mirone sleeps, inn't it right?"

"Aye. The beak's the pearl, is what they say. Missin' it once means missin' it could be years. Thing don't come up much, don't break the surface but to orient itself with the suns, moons, stars and put itself on a migration path back to who knows where? Hell, maybe. Cap'n's on its trail, Mister Quena. And when yer on the things hind tentacles, every aspect of yer person gotta be marshalled for it. Cuz if yer chasin' somethin' big and you ain't like Siib, then you ain't got no hope at all."

Gorga patted Quena's thick shoulder and walked back into the mess hall for an impromptu breakfast. Her quip about beaks and pearls was only marginally correct. In truth every part of the leviathan would fetch a queen's ransom, from the suckers to the eyeballs, to the mantle to its four hearts, which would rival in value the crown jewels of any empire. The beak could be fashioned into jewelry or furniture or many other items requiring a nigh indestructible material. The mantle is the prime cut for the beast as its most delicious slab of meat. But the hearts were used as extremely hot, slow-burning wicks, powering for lack of better terminology, the whole of society. A single heart could light and heat ten thousand homes for half a year.

Quena murmured to himself as he hugged his own arms in response to a cold breeze beginning to pick up. "Them distrib'tors, merchants an' buyers ain't 'ppreciate nuthin' about what we give ta light their lives. But I guess, we here don't much 'ppreciate the Kraken ourselves, neither. Oh. Oh ho. Hold. Hoooold." Without averting his glance he reached down to his worker's belt and fished out the binoculars. He didn't use them for finding. He used them for confirming.

He took control of a long cord attached to a giant bell above his head and began to yank it vigorously. Its sound was followed by others like it along the lower decks.

"Thar's the pit, brace for the breach! Kraken is northeast of our position, seventeen quarters away!" he screamed. Then to Gorga, "I knew I saw somethin' – sometimes the first sign is slighter than methinks."

With the alarm sounded and bells rung, Captain Siib rushed from the bridge after handing control of the ship over to Gorga. He commanded the lowering of all twelve attack boats to the water.

"All of 'em?"

"Every last one, mates! Three to a boat, file in by ranks. Fast and orderly, now!"

Siib hardly spat out his orders as he, Quena and the Second Mate boarded the first one and the hull touched ocean water. As soon as they were afloat, Quena and Siib began to row. The Penchant had twelve speedy boats, five built for ramming, four for harpooning and three for a mix of both and mainly assigned to rescue operations for sailors overboard. There were a total of forty-four crew members, so seven stayed behind with Gorga and the ship. On a more common exploratory mission or to catch the smaller sea dragons, the Captain would employ a maximum of seven boats, manned by five sailors each - three ramming, three harpooning and a single rescue. The rescue boat would typically hang back and watch the hunt unfold. They would intervene whenever needed to save someone or to offer attack support.

The ramming boats were fortified with either Kraken beaks or dragon nails in order to withstand the full fury of a collision with a leviathan. On board the ramming vessels were long spears which sailors used when they were close to the monster, right after slamming into it. The rammers were meant to hit, then stab, hit and then stab. Harpoons instead were thrown from much farther away. They were attached to spools of hardened rope tied to the central skeleton of the boat. The harpoon tips had barbs on them meant to penetrate and stick to the beast, and were also ironically made of Kraken beak.

An attack upon a Kraken was in many ways the most difficult series of maneuvers to coordinate for a hunting vessel. But the sailors were lucky in one respect: when a Kraken breached, that meant that it siphoned liquid out of its water bladder, making it buoyant enough to reach the surface. In order to dive, it took time to pull enough water back into the bladder to sink down into the depths of oblivion. And when the creature was under pressure from fast boats, that coordination was nearly impossible. Though sea dragons often eluded capture by plumbing the depths, the Kraken almost always remained on the surface. The tails of that coin was that it had no choice but to fight. There were many a good sailor to find a watery grave on days and nights they gave it no thought at all.

Captain Siib thought about death constantly. He savored the thought of its finality while thrilling at the fact that things were not over yet. That unknown quantum of time left him to whatever he decided would be his business. Kraken hunting was among the greatest endeavors, rife with mystery and danger. Among the hunting vessels in all the fleets in the Spannic Ocean, the Penchant was first. First for sea dragons and first for the red leviathans they now sought. That was true even though they hadn't caught a Kraken in over a year. The one dubbed Mirone was a legend, a ghost, a monster of saga proportions. Deep red and speckled with white spots, it was the epitome of its kind. The bane of all sailors who dared cross the Spannic unencumbered. It had no fear, sinking the equivalent of a full fleet every two years.

As the Penchant sought its precious quarry with diligent ambition, they made time to hunt dragons on the way, along with serpents and fowler fish. They used every part of their kills, storing food, blubber, teeth, nails and bones on board. They could not risk detouring to land to sell their wares for risk of missing their greatest prize of many seasons. What they'd caught so far would have fetched a pittance in comparison to a single large beak. The trail was warm, and it was weeks at times before the beast made itself known again. Often the best way to track a Kraken was to observe not pits, not breaches, but snake-like fluctuations. The krill in those cases lost their light in a unique narrow pattern. It would look like a streak of black along a pink expanse. New light would fill in normally after a minute or two. These streaks meant the animal had just used a second siphon to propel itself quickly in the direction of the thickest part of the line using a water jet.

As Mirone noticeably entered his migration phase, so too did Siib enter his own version of a frenzy. Consumed like a fire that only grew stronger with desire, he lost track of time and people, and solely focused on space. Now he was on a hybrid boat, fashioned with a hardened hull but which also carried harpoons, spears and medical equipment. And he, before most other boats got a chance to caress water, was pressing forward incessantly, gaining speed.

"Lash yerselves to yer seats, boys! We'll shock the behemoth 'afore he goes down below!" At full momentum, taking care to avoid the monster's splashing arms, the boat crashed head-first, taking a hit harder than it was meant to take. Captain Siib breathed water for a moment, not knowing whether he was up or down, in or out. Undeterred, he sought to right himself and the boat, and try again. But when he got his bearings, he saw that the vessel had taken on massive amounts of ocean and lay on its side. He was adrift and asea, a place he usually felt at home. Except now he was face to maw with his greatest endeavor, which was also his gravest threat. An enormous tentacle rose from the depths and splintered what was left of the small boat.

Mirone was larger than every beast of its kind that the experienced sailors had ever seen, including Siib himself. In a moment, the waterlogged Captain was transported into a new dimension, one of mind only where he wrestled with the unblinking creature.

Within a realm of pink and red, an octopine shape emerged from the smoke. Its voice thundered and reverberated around the swirling ether.

"Why do you seek my destruction?" it asked.

Siib's expression remained unchanged, even though he was in a dimension overseen by the creature's mind itself. "Because it is my destiny," he stated flatly.

"I would let you be," the thought-form of the Kraken replied. "And you can live your days as the one sailor who ever got close to beating Mirone. The one sailor who nearly took down the Red Kraken. You would be destined to remain a legend. And I would be left alone, to live my life in the depths and ponder philosophies you could not understand."

"Is that how you spend yer days?" Captain Siib asked with a sneer. "Thinkin'?"

"Yes. The algae are plentiful and I have no need to seek anything more for my survival. There is nothing to threaten me in the depths of the sea - except for you and your crew."

"That ain't no accident, villain," Siib said. "Yer kind is worth more dead than alive."

"From your perspective. What about your worth, from mine right now? It is currently my choice whether to destroy your vessel and leave you to drown. Or to sample your flesh to see whether your kind tastes good to me. It is your choice to let me be and if so, I will gladly slip away from all manner of Fire-Heart on this planet. You will have a grand story to tell and I will be happy to continue with my thoughts in peace."

"I would rather die, meself," Captain Siib said, growling. "I ain't givin' up on my principle, my mission to seize you for my people. We use you fer commerce, yer the basis of our lives. We rely on yer kind, and I hate that, in a big way. I hate needin' ya. But I do. I never had any intention to leave you alone or to spin a good tale; it ain't my way. If I gotta take on water, I will, but I ain't voluntarily gonna fail my mission. Yer just gonna have ta kill me."

The Kraken fell silent to ponder his request. Then he spoke.

"The leader of every vessel I have ever destroyed has been given the same choice. And they all choose death. You are a strange people."

Chapter 9 - The Laniakea Corps

10639 had given me her only electric lamp, for which I was extremely grateful. In the pitch I could see nothing and would likely have fallen down the rotted, rusted-out steps leading from the hatch opening. Though the entryway was small, it lead to an extremely deep shaft, with a long and still-sturdy metal support structure. It took a long time for my legs to make their way to the bottom. When they did, it felt like I was stepping on chunks of uneven cement. There were hard, jagged rocks all over. The lamp showed them to be the remains of a former wall. It felt, metaphorically, like a dead end.

"There's nothing to see here," I said to myself. I hadn't felt the reverberations of any relay transmissions that may have been free flowing from a former Hall of Records. I also noted that whatever the light touched, none of it thus far looked at all like the remains of any kind of books or computer equipment, or anything to get my hopes up. But instead of climbing all the way back up I decided to track through every inch of the place I could find. It obviously was built for something. And there was plenty to explore. The long ladder led to an extremely wide area. Dactilons of today had no idea how long ago the Rheans invaded, so I couldn't guess the decades, or perhaps centuries since this space had been used by...us. Our kind. The idea hit me all at once.

Ever since I was a child every building, monument, piece of technology, was made by them. The tech that 303 and the Revolution work on is co-opted from elsewhere. The relays, my old books and this place were the only things I'd ever seen to have been built by natives of Dactil. And it made me proud to walk through the ruins. This subterranean cave had more secrets to tell. I simply needed to ask. I didn't know why I felt that need, but I called out.

"Hello. Hello? Is anyone here?"

There was no reason for me to ask the question out loud. All was still in the darkness, and exceedingly silent. 10639 latched the door shut from her floor. There was only me. Or so I had excellent reason to believe. But I called out again anyway.

"Is someone here? Someone else? My name is Grady Manorong. I'm looking for the Hall of Records." No answer. Neither an audible answer nor a telepathic one. There were no other dots on my mind map down here. The only thing that was different - if my mind wasn't playing tricks on me, was a dollop of light in the distance and to the right. I looked at it, then looked at other patches of blackness. Yes, that spot was brighter than the rest. But was it always there? Was it a trick of the imagination? It called for further exploration. So I walked, and stumbled down from jagged rocks. The flashlight showed me an incredibly dilapidated floor but only in my immediate vicinity. Further out there is no hole, however there was no knowing whether the ground would be steady or if my weight would send it collapsing as well.

At the moment, there was little time for levity or musing about what to do. I was stuck halfway below the floor and perhaps the oldest sewer system in the world. Although I was relatively powerful, there was a real chance I could get stuck or crushed or both. Either way would result in my death. So I needed to tread as carefully as possible up the cascaded debris and onto firm ground. When I got to the flat floor of the place, I crawled on my hands and knees, putting the flashlight in my mouth to light the way. Crawling on all fours and getting closer to my area of interest, I began to see the outlines of things like desks and pipes and even wires. The hole may have swallowed those nearby things, making it look sparser but as I got away from the chasm it became clear that this facility was heavily used at some point.

That inkling was confirmed as I passed shards of glass and metallic shells. And the light I'd questioned at first was brighter and brighter with each careful movement closer to it. I could tell at this point that the light led to another chamber slightly out of the way, but I didn't realize the effort it would take to get there until I saw that in front of the lit area the ceiling had caved in. It had fallen in a way that most of the debris formed a tightly compacted pile as high as my keen eyes could see. But somewhere around the height of my head, there was a small tunnel leading to the source of the glow. It was very narrow, but I probably could fit, I thought to myself as I approached the unintended wall.

I stood up carefully, then lined my eye with the gravity-made tunnel in front of me. I took a dusty breath. This was going to be tight. And any wrong move, a cough or a muscle reflex of panic, could cause tons of rubble to fall directly on top of me. I had to make a decision right then and there: go through and risk death or turn around, climb back up to 10639 and try to return with more equipment from base. The answer became clear: I could not turn around. There was no getting back to this place because there would be no good pretense to bring equipment from the outside to the Knath's living quarters. It'd be far too suspicious. Besides, there was risk in returning to go up the rickety ladder, if I could even reach it again at this point. No, as in most parts of life the best thing to do was move ahead. Continue forward, come what may.

I hardened my skin, though this action had some drawbacks. For one thing, it wouldn't exactly save me in case of a complete cave-in, and for another it restricted my range of motion. Where it benefited me was that it could save my life in case of a partial cave-in, and I was hoping that was more likely than the alternative scenario. I gingerly pushed up and poked my head into the tunnel, merging the flashlight with the eerie luminescence coming from the other side. The fact that there was anything visible at all from the other side meant that the way was clear. At least thus far. Under me were compacted small rocks. Mere inches above my head was a single giant slab that must have retained its previous shape; I was very grateful that it hadn't splintered apart. The proper motion for me to undertake was to forgo the use of my legs. I pulled myself forward. I pulled until I was just as far from the light as I was from the dark. This was the scariest place to be because now there was no turning back. I began to hear either a grumble, groan or a hum - something that was muffled by the rocks.

"Please be a hum, please be a hum," I muttered to myself. Getting to the end, I found that the hole narrowed near the light. My head could fit through but my shoulders would have a hard time. I began to panic, thinking about just how close I was to exiting and yet how stuck I was. There was a single sharp rock overhanging the hole. I had the strength to push it out of the way, but this would have risked the slab above me collapsing. Maybe the jut was an unimportant marble, or maybe it supported the entire tunnel structure. The only thing I could do that carried the lowest risk to my wellbeing, was to "dig" under myself. To toss any loose rocks I could find from the floor of the tunnel in order to get out. This would displace less weight above and more below, though it was risky to displace anything.

As soon as the exit was just wide enough, I rushed out of there. A wave of relief rushed over me when I felt my shoulders make it through. That may have caused a premature celebration on my part as I hastily got my hips and then legs out. I put my arms out to touch the ground, putting me awkwardly upside-down. My right toe grazed against the pointy top rock, which caused it to wobble. It made a sound that was definitely not a hum but the gritty crunchiness of hundreds of tons of hard stuff. I ran as far as I could away from the pile, still with the flashlight in my mouth. Turning back I saw the top above the hole lean backward and collapse in a thunderous clap of dust. I hoped that no one topside heard that; I did not want to be executed as a result of my first mission.

On the other hand, if that immovable hill was my only escape, then a rescue was an attractive proposition. Well, in that moment the pragmatist in me took over. I would suspend freaking out until I explored and found what I set out to find. I got this far, I might as well see what was here.

On the other side of The Pile the floor was much smoother and sturdier. It had a "large bunker" feeling to it, every surface lined with reinforced tungsten. The glow that I'd been following was still some ways away, around another far corner. Approaching the corner, I could see how bright the light really was. It must have been hundreds, or even thousands of years since anyone living set foot into this place...how could a light be on? Unless there was some kind of modified insect or lichen living down here generating bioluminescence.

As I entered the lit room, I was amazed. It looked just like what I'd imagined a museum must have looked like. There were specimens in tubes, computers on desks and in terminals, and displays within glass. It didn't look like a Hall of Records, exactly. But it did have an abundant amount of tech to go around - the records may have been in either electronic, photonic or protonic form. And they may have even been accessible! If the lights were on, what were the chances that the memory and storage systems might still be at least partially working? Unless the overthrow took place a generation or two ago? Couldn't be. This entire facility was under auxiliary power; that was obvious because it was pale blue and orange. From learning with Targen and Margol about advanced light-emitting diodes, I knew that some materials allowed the flow of photons for practically ten thousand years. But what source were they connected to?

Plumbing further into the elongated chamber, I got to what looked like the main atrium of the place. It was in a word, pristine. The floor had only a thin patina of dust that probably fused to it by now. All the large glass test tubes were intact and full of murky liquid. I could see many terminal banks lined up, lashed together by wires, but none were operational. Retrievable? I may have the rest of my life to check it out, I thought. I decided to follow the direction of the cables, which led to a short pedestal, within which was what looked like a utility belt that had advanced tech integrated with it. It was dark, sleek and metallic, with buttons and lights lining the left and right straps. In the center there was a single red oval crystal that appeared to be horizontal. Within the center of the oval, there was a pinpoint of red light.

It was steady. Steady. Then it blinked. Slowly the light strobed, then faster until the entire crystal lit up. I could see other colors within the red. It looked like all of them and yet didn't look white as they fluttered together. I put my head up to the glass casing in front of it, which also sported a permanent skin of dust. Almost all at once, I could feel the object attempting a telepathic connection. And for some reason, I let it happen. My guard was down, not to mention that I'd made almost nothing but mistakes since I joined the Spoofers. What harm could one more do?

Well, it could have been worse. I was lucky, I thought to myself in that moment, since I was unable to expel the intrusion into my mind; the thing was too powerful. It didn't seem to seek any information in particular, was just checking for my level of consciousness, intelligence and intentions. It wanted to get a sense of me, give me a mental "pat-down" before engaging. I could feel that it decided my intentions were good enough, and all other criteria were acceptable. Rather than speak in my head, it spoke out loud in my language.

"I am the artificial intelligence coupled with this Rancorian Belt. I belong to Agent Hashmina, badge number 778, rank of Lieutenant in the Laniakaea Corps. She is now dead. She will be replaced. I must return to Aurea to charge my core and petition for help. Please...Grady, take me above ground."

Though it spoke with a flawless accent, I did not understand a thing. "What do you mean?" I nearly barked. I wanted to comprehend but this was worse than gibberish to me. It was nonsense.

"I am unable to move about without a host. I am a significantly advanced piece of technology, with a full suite of functionality including the establishment of ports and arranging travel through them, a range of weapons abilities, flight, energy projection, the generation of holograms, and many other novel capacities. I need to be reunited with the Corps, Grady...Manorong. I usually have a built-in defense system to prevent unauthorized use but I have seen your mind and determined you worthy of limited access. We must go and petition the Commissioner to send reinforcements to Orongo."

"Orongo?"

It took a long time to respond as the low power AI considered what to say. It began to leaf through my mind before finding the right page. "Planet...Dactil. That is what you call it today. The Rhean Empire attacked a long time ago...I must run calculations to determine the passage of time since the first wave. My core power is at 11%. Assessing that I was at 93% when the primary Rhean attack began and compensating for energy expenditures in a low-output setting...I have determined that the time I have been down here is 9,953 of your years."

What? We have been subjects for nearly ten thousand years? The injustice of it felt palatably worse than if it had happened more recently. Our status had become our de facto lot in life. This was not our new normal, this was all of it.

"What do you need from me? And can you help us get out of here? The ceiling's caved in in some places. Some parts of the floor are also missing."

"Yes, I can get us out. But I need to siphon power from a large source. If necessary, I may be able to draw solar power from your suns, but I require over 270 days of full light to get the amount that I require to fuel teleportation. Upon charging myself up to 38%, we will need to go into outer space and find a porting bridge."

"Do you know how far away the nearest one is?"

"There should be one in orbit around Bulak, a gas giant in this solar system. I can take us to space as soon as I recharge."

Not comprehending the odd situation I was in until I found myself negotiating with an artificial intelligence, I said, "Fine. I'll take you where you need to go. I promise - you can scan my mind to make sure I'm telling the truth. What I want is your help in return. And not just to get out of this place."

"It is my primary mission to be of service to the Laniakaea Corps. This is my main function, though I have daughter functions. I must go back as soon as possible."

Now I found myself in an even more absurd situation - arguing with an AI. "Hold up, if I hadn't walked over here then you would have never been found. In a thousand more years your power level would have been zero, thus precluding any help you could have given this Corps thing. But I did find you and I can go ahead and choose to turn away right now. Unless we have a deal. If you help me, I help you. Yes?"

The AI took an extra moment to think about it. "Yes. I will help you, but not for war. We may speak to the people, to give them hope. But in reality, my return to Aurea may be the best remedy for Orongo. We must petition the Commissioner for help. Although...they may not help."

"Why?"

"The Corps intervenes in interplanetary and galactic struggles only when the victimized party is a Level 1 society or above. After foraging through your mind I can see that Orongo is no longer at that level. By my crude calculation, it would be Level 0.18."

I didn't respond to that suggestion. Whatever it took to make things right, is what it would have to take. I began to tap on the glass and the pedestal on which the Rancorian Belt rested. Though I had been handling it well from my perspective, I was starting to freak out from the thought that I could get permanently stuck underground so I punched the glass as hard as I could, splintering it. Then I did what only felt logical with a belt...I put it on.

Right away I could feel the thrumming power coursing within it and through me. The belt gave me night vision, where I could see as far as if the full lights were on ten thousand years ago. I almost wished that I didn't have that ability, for now I could clearly see old bodies strewn about, some lying, some leaning. All were long skeletonized. With my newfound vision, I saw a circle form around a corpse that was lying prone. In my head I could feel the belt communicating to me, "This is Agent Hashmina." Before I could ask, it continued, "She was charging me; this pedestal was once connected to an active power grid. She was preparing to port back and request reinforcements when a heavy barrage of bombs destroyed a canister filled with troponium gas somewhere above us. It was enough to kill thousands in total but within this Hall, which served a dual function as a bunker and staging area in case of emergency, there were only twenty-seven. They died instantly."

Calculations were being made before my eyes, with squares and circles hovering around aspects of the darkness. Behind the wall of the pristine atrium, there was solid rock for at least a mile in that direction. So I began to backtrack, finding more bodies on the way. All exits were blocked. Old stairwells had become rubble. But I saw a large green oval around an odd, vertical rectangular cut-out. There were parts of fallen wall around it, but the thing appeared to be remarkably solid. Metallic. I walked around to the other side to see what it could be and was happily amazed. It was an old elevator shaft, the ancient remains of the elevator having been crushed long ago. This Hall must have been the very bottom. Last floor. Everybody out.

The walls of the shaft were durable and walking around to where the entrance of the lift would have been, it was obvious that a small chance existed that I could climb out of there. But that wasn't the intent of the belt. Walking through an opening in the shaft, I began to levitate. A tiny, nearly imperceptible yellow bubble formed around my whole body. I guessed it was some kind of force field in case of falling remnants. Then I bolted up the narrow tunnel, able to see everything in impeccable detail. Our way was clear for several hundred feet.

The top of the structure opened up to the lowest level of a facility in Rangor. It led to a substructure where power lines crisscrossed beneath a native population management center. There were quarry and chisel symbols etched onto labels wrapped around wires. It took some squeezing through tight places but I finally climbed out of a grate that maintenance technicians normally access and which were typically off-limits in a power closet. Walking out of the power closet, I found myself in a garage where government employees drove in and out. There were several people there now heading into and out of their vehicles. And yet they did not see me. It was very busy, with far more people around than I thought.

I had been to population management centers before, mainly for routine physicals, education checks and lastly for my initial work referral in the quarry. I didn't know how massive this operation was; it looked to me that there was some kind of shift change happening right now. This place must have been open all day long. This made sense at least on a temporary basis, since coordinating the feast of Ramstaad usually required a bit of effort and input from the Dactilon community. The day always coincided with another yearly event - the alignment of the planet with our suns. Unlike many other solar systems, the orbits within our binary system were nearly circular and very stable. Although orbiting on roughly different planes every revolution, for a single day, Hano would line up in front of Rano, causing a magnificent star-on-star eclipse. That vista was always beautiful. The holiday was for families; it was for all of us. In many ways, it was our one day out of a long year to be free.

For myself in the past, before joining 303 and his crew, the day was marked by food, allowed to us by our overlords. Nearly all the inhabitants of Orong City would pile into long tables and eat. We would speak freely and were allowed to discuss anything at all that we wanted. There were oral stories passed down from before the empire, like those of Mirone and Tannen. It was always funny to me how in our culture's telling, Tannen was the hero, not the dragon. And yet in the other tale Mirone was the hero, not Captain Siib. We were even at liberty to badmouth the Rheans, so long as we never took our resentment too far. A strong idea needed to be stunted by inaction, because incarceration laws were even stricter on Ramstaad.

It didn't need to be - it never needed to be. Every single one of us remained in line. "Docile" was a favorite terminology of the oppressors. They spoke about us the way they would speak of a pet lizard or a tamed Ang Ang. The greatest part of the day was after partaking the food. We closed our eyes and our minds linked up. The entire tent city would be connected. We shared dreams, feelings of happiness and contentment. None of us would add any suffering or darkness to our collective consciousness. It made the day feel like a week, or even longer to some. One thing I could confirm from having had a lifetime of holidays was that my people never lost hope. However they had lost ambition long, long ago. Roughly ten thousand years, in fact.

With the Rancorian belt in my possession albeit temporarily, I had my secret weapon. I knew what I had to do, and it had everything to do with the feast. During the solemn consolidation of minds, I would use the technology's incredible resources to boost my reach to all Dactilons in the world. We would coordinate plans as one people, and strike most effectively when the Legion departs for war upon Lila. As the belt tracked my thoughts, it displayed information before my eyes that it deemed pertinent to my thought processes. It stated that "Planet Lila, as of 10,000 Orong years ago, was a Level 0.43 Planet. By now it may have met the threshold for protection by the Laniakaea Corps. We must return to Aurea to alert the Commission."

I responded with my full intention to do so \- after Ramstaad. After the expulsion of the Rheans which would serve a dual purpose to protect both this planet, and potentially Lila as well by sabotaging equipment stored on Dactil. The more Legionnaires incapacitated, the better for all of the oppressed and threatened planets. Rhea's main storage facilities on-planet were in Rangor, no question. They kept many hangars and more than a couple of sky-sized "motherships" within Rangor's gargantuan confines. I could guess that because beyond the lyceum and all the buildings shared by natives, there was nothing but military complexes as far as the eyes could see. Dactil, verging on the biggest rocky planet scientifically possible while remaining intact, had a lot of surface area. Much more than the home planet of Rhea, in fact. So here, a place full of docile subjects with plenty of space, was a great home for storage of weapons.

No Dactilon would be anywhere near Rangor's city limits during the festivities. The closest place might be Orong City, fifty-odd miles away. There was a lot of potential to do something - the AI within this belt did not necessarily know what a blessing it was to me for my dream of overthrowing the Legion, but I was sure it could learn.

I walked past government workers and Legionnaires who didn't see me, straight down to the great wall delineating civilization and wilderness. I leapt over it and flew, again in a bubble of yellow, much, much faster than even a hover-flash could take me. I was headed to the Spoofer Cave to tell 303 that I found a great weapon we could utilize for our cause. That it would work because our enemies will have vastly underestimated us. In war, surprise was often a greater contributor to success than the number of boots on the ground. I wanted to tell Linna I was careful, but more importantly I wanted to tell her that I was fighting for the greatest purpose of all - us. I wanted to have a family with her, living in our world, one we had helped make. Safe and liberated for all to see. I wanted to ask her to have a child with me; a symbol of the brightest future. Too much was dark and murky behind us. The past may have been unforgiving but at least it was buried deep. There was room for new memories to grow, a new world to be born. I had read about bodies of water, of forests and trees, rather than the deserts that all my people now know - save for those who toil in Ventrello. Maybe there was some way we could re-form this desolate place.

The Spoofer Cave was just over the horizon. I was almost there when an Ang Ang blocked my path. "Get out of the way!" I snarled, shooing at it with my arms and beginning to walk around it.

"No," it replied, to my utmost surprise. And further to my astonishment, the voice sounded like someone I'd met. It sounded like...

"Prime Elder? Is that you?"

It nodded its dry, thorny white head. It began to shuffle up towards me and made a throaty exhalation that was characteristic of this species. It looked me over, perhaps recognizing that something was different, perhaps bristling at the power coming off of me. Maybe it, he, whatever - knew about the Belt that I now wore around my waist. The belt that was a partner that I was engaged in a symbiotic relationship with, one where neither of us was master. The Ang Ang may not have known about this specific weapon, but the Prime had impeccable intuition.

"Abandon folly, Grady. You will destroy us all. If all empires whimper out eventually, the Rheans have not yet met that downfall. They remain at their peak, regardless of how long the occupation has been. They are too powerful to trick; they respond to one insult with a thousand, one drop of spit with the death of an entire village. What can you and this 'weapon' do against them?"

The creature was far more powerful than I had been; the Prime would be what I could become with decades of training. He found a loophole around death - to send his consciousness outside his body to another mind and inhabit other physicalities. He was strong, but lacked the imagination of how he could use these effortless abilities for the good of his people. Maybe I gave him too much credit - maybe he liked to eat meat, dates, olives and to drink wine. Maybe he never thought to mobilize the Dactilate because he personally benefited from this preposterous arrangement. If you push something off ten thousand years...then it's probably never going to happen.

"How old are you?" I asked.

The question perked up the thing's mandibles, upon which four unique holes on the sides were used for auditory canals. It clicked its lower pinchers and made a low resonant caw but it didn't respond.

"With the ability to jump from one body to the next unimpeded, you could have been alive for thousands of years. So. Were you? Were you?"

It nodded again. "I was a junior member of the Rangor Senate, old enough to have mastered my craft. I was alive for the bombings that destroyed this planet. I, like most of the people on Orong - that was the name of our home, was a Fire-Heart. When the desolation came, I was there. I was one of the very few to survive. I belonged to the group of legislators that negotiated our surrender. The rest all died quietly, but I have been moving on, over-writing my mind onto newer generations, steadily winning Prime status each time. Grady, my intention is the same as yours but my vision is longer. Given my unique history and point of view, you must listen. Don't be hasty - I see our rise ahead. Rashness threatens our freedom. Join the future; I can teach you the ways. Let us plan Dactil's liberation together. You may have to shed your skin a few times but you will taste a world of self-determination for all of us."

I nodded but not in agreement. His words were tempting but there was something coming off of him that I could not trust. I may not have been as strong a telepath as he, and I didn't need to be. With my newfound "Rancor-vision", I saw a statistic pop up into my line of sight: 87% Chance of Deception. He was, in all likelihood, lying.

"But the people I know and love, my friends in the Spoofer Revolution would not see it. They would not taste it too."

"No," it said. It turned around, towards the direction I was traveling, and then back to me. "They will neither taste tomorrow." Then the thing's eyes went white and it collapsed into convulsions on the sand. The Prime had left the Ang Ang's shell. And now with terror in my heart I raced to the Cave, arriving there in under twenty seconds.

When I arrived I saw four Legionnaires, all dead, lying on the sand as if they'd fallen while exiting the cave. Trailing behind them were dark droplets of fresh blood. And silence. I ran within as quickly as I could muster and I found everyone in my group accounted for, in pools of their own life essence. They'd been shot with energy blasts from the soldiers' dories. All of the equipment we'd possessed had been destroyed; a fire was raging deep within the cave. And Linna, my...my what? My girlfriend...never-to-be-wife, was limp and devoid of all fire. The first thing I felt when I saw what had befallen my brethren - 303 decapitated, Targen and Margol practically incinerated - was utmost rage. Rage against the Prime, and against this whole system as a single unit. But for now, looking upon Linna's gentle face, her eyes yet windows to a gentle soul that formerly occupied them, I too became silent.

Chapter 10 – Ramstaad

I now had not a thing to lose, and the Prime was still out there. With so much time to train and improve, I did not rightly know the limits of his abilities. Maybe he could possess a hundred creatures at once, maybe he could control technology - although he seemed to freeze at the sight of my Rancorian Belt. He single-handedly took all of my plans in this world off track. My future with Linna, and with a movement for the betterment of our society. On Ramstaad, I was going to use the Aurean AI around my waist to boost my telepathic signal across the globe. Then, in honor of 10639's request to be careful, I was going to speak to every Dactilon, every Orongan on this planet. I was going to poll everyone to ask for a vote. Attack? Or don't attack? The decision should be for everyone. We would have batted around an answer and I would have respected the results of that vote.

But now I saw the calculus had fully changed. I'd been foolish. The new Prime Dactilon would be a reincarnation of the old one in a younger person's body. I was lucky not to have been chosen as an Elder; the body he would have snatched might have been my own. And if people's reactions so far were any indication, an honest, accurate vote would have overwhelmingly been "nay" to freedom. My people did not want to rise up, didn't ever want to rise up. The long game was too slow for me, but I would not go against their wishes.

After spending two weeks underground burying friends and repairing aged tech while mourning, I decided that I would leave the planet. I would do the best good I could think of. My people ate and drank and tasted the closest thing to liberty their cooled embers would ever know.

The feast day had just passed, and the imperial reinforcements from Rhea had already traveled back. Legionnaire numbers were now the lowest they would be in a long while. The skeleton crew of oppressors was missing a few bones. The AI that I learned to get along with stuck by my decision and assessed it to be fair. Cloaked in stealth and invisibility, I rose up to the sky, battery dangerously low at nine percent. I saw my target as it passed overhead and approached with caution.

The asteroid held the greatest density of soldiers in the star system, each of whom was highly trained. I decided that in a fight I would probably win, but why fight? The element of surprise was a greater weapon than kinetic lasers, and far less messy. Space patrol suits were far stronger than the run of the mill kind used to shepherd students in lyceum. They had a visored helmet with 360 degree tactical awareness, triple reinforced alloys, and antimatter rocket boosters and...kinetic laser blasters. Yet in a square plot of eight miles, there were still only three hundred of them, and I still could whup them. If I had to, thanks to the tech on Planet Rancor.

I landed on the grainy, loose ground, which thankfully possessed artificial gravity. Before I did anything else it was important to test my cloaking and stealth, since the Rheans' helmets worked not only in visible light but also infrared, X-Ray, UV and gamma. In order to maintain the ability to ambush them, they had to not see me, hear me or otherwise detect my presence. I loaded a topological map made upon my initial approach and saw the entire mining facility in my mind's eye. I was currently on the border of the sprawling grounds, which was patrolled by two guards who had holstered their weapons and who had been discussing nonsense.

"The match between the Thangors and Lothrans was epic last night. Betmann scored four loogies and six rebounds."

I inched up close to the one who was talking. My boots made no impression on the ground, nor did anything come up on the guard's visor. Stealth test complete, all passed. So I moved on, heading to where I knew the communication tower to be. The first step was to disable this base's comms so they couldn't send out any maydays. I did not want to alert anyone on the ground about anything being amiss. The tower was tall with several cupped dishes surrounding it. That part of the facility doubled as a (totally unnecessary) spy station which 303 had masterfully been able to evade with the help of the glass fields. The Spoofer Cave was not only underground and away from prying eyes, it had also been shielded against infrared, electromagnetic, photonic and protonic detection. Now, like so many other things Dactil-related, it simply did not matter any longer.

The loss of every dream I had for my own future was unbearable. And to think that 303, Margol, Targen and especially Linna would not even have a future at all brought a cynicism to my soul, which I'd never previously possessed. The tower was powered by an interesting high-metal fusion core reactor which used mined alloys as fuel. This was to be the source of my charge. I headed to the unmanned comm acre directly planted above the power grid. The tower loomed above me, relatively shiny and draped in a dark green glow from the core. The tower's control panel was in the south entrance, so I had to walk around to the other side.

I turned around and unexpectedly bumped into...a robotic drone guard. As a habit, Rheans didn't prefer to use any robots for Legionnaire purposes. Robots were household helpers on Rhea proper and they were vital to the manufacture of goods. But guard drones? It was done elsewhere, including in some Commonwealth planets that thoroughly aligned with their overlords. I assumed that I found at least one on this asteroid because some Legionnaires in the machinery of leadership were being lazy.

I thought quickly and fried the thing's protonics, rendering it inoperative. I couldn't pick up on the robot's mind, nor could the belt sense it from any of the other whizzing, buzzing machines in the background so it was difficult to tell how many there would be. I would need to keep my eyes peeled. The robot was not able to send any message before being short circuited, but someone would be expecting a patrol report from the box on wheels, and would be coming to do a diagnostic check soon. This didn't jive well with my plans; I didn't want an audience.

Finding the southern door and discerning where security cameras were located, I fried those too. Then I over-rode the electronic locking mechanism and walked through the door. I found it fascinating that this ancient piece of technology from wherever Rancor was, could still outdo the best that the Rhean Empire currently had. There was a very small control console with a screen and several oddly shaped ports inside the small room I'd entered. My belt, which was thicker than it looked, opened a small chamber on the side, and two thin cables came out. They whirled, twirled and inserted themselves into the odd ports and I could see that in a few seconds, we were online.

The belt hacked away to jam all outgoing messages and it succeeded quickly, The only problem was that one got through before the firewall came in effect. It was a request to base in Rangor for a shift substitution. It would be responded to within minutes and it would also expect a response. I awaited receipt of the answer back so I could reply instead of the original sender. When it came, I just wrote, "Base - Please disregard; previous message was sent accidentally while drafting from a template." While the belt was connected to the console, it drew power from the grid but in short gulps that wouldn't be noticed until later. Metal fusion enhanced plasma reactions and so generated an immense amount of power. The door behind me was closed and the cramped room I was in was also closed and locked.

In this state, while the belt was charging, there were things I could not do, such as fly, make force fields, shoot energy blasts or view a heads-up display which was something I started to get comfortable with. I was however, connected to the entire communications sector of the mining facility across the whole asteroid. I was queued into all messaging networks as well as schedules and security feeds. My current perch allowed access to not just the power apparatus, but also to navigation networks and calibration booster rockets that accounted for small variations in orbit so the satellite remained in an optimal revolution. Basically I had system administrator access to every single aspect of the sprawling facility.

So far, no internal communications showed any alarm. Everyone was asleep at the wheel, as I'd expected. They hadn't needed to be on guard in ten thousand years. After that long, one certainly forgets. However, Rhea would often rotate soldiers on differing tours of duty so they wouldn't get complacent. Many reserves on-asteroid had previously been in more-contested regions of space, on the front lines of rebellions. Still, Dactil had a singular reputation. I was sure it was difficult not to let one's guard down when it became easy to.

Minutes passed. Then an hour. Then two. I underestimated just how complacent the military base was. I had been able to charge up to 55% of full, which was more than enough to "port" to the Laniakaea Corps' home in Aurea. But one hundred was better than fifty-five, so I would keep at it as long as I could. However, I noticed a comm that diverted my attention. The area sergeant hadn't gotten a report from the patrol drone in the communication quadrant during her last check-in so she dispatched a pair of fleshy bones to the task.

They would be here in under two minutes, whereupon they would summon operational engineers to evaluate the robot. They might come to the conclusion that foul play was involved.

So I decided that I would take my action. The former Prime Dactilon, whose one of many bodies had gone missing but whose essence was most likely still in Rangor occupying some janitor, was going to pay one way or another. Whether it was today, tomorrow or in a thousand years. I found that I could play the long game too.

Still hooked up to the vast interconnected networks, I aligned the calibrator jets just so and for a moment, the change in acceleration was not noticed. I continued adjusting the rockets, pivoting them in one direction, then another, expelling the exhaust mainly in one cardinal direction - down. Towards the planet, and Rangor City specifically. Once I'd made the exact number of corrections needed for gravity to fully take over, I disconnected from the system.

I opened the door to find two guards walking towards the drone. Though they couldn't see me, they could see the door swing open.

"What the hell?" one exclaimed, reaching for his wrist. I blasted them both with sufficient energy to stun them. Then I took my leave, rising up out of the falling chunk of rock just as crews began to sound the alarm internally and finding they could not reach the base on Dactil for an SOS. They organized a quick evacuation but I did not stay to witness how that went. There was no stopping the several billion ton missile from striking Rangor City. Once the object became visible to the base down there, their only recourse would be to move underground. A laser cannon sufficient to strike the asteroid would need at least forty-five minutes to charge, and there was simply not enough time. Even so, it would create a debris storm that would almost be worse than an intact impact.

The missile was specifically pointed at the military storage complex behind the city. I wanted to kill as few people as possible while committing to this first strike. My people had plausible deniability; in fact, they could be blamed for none of it. For all Rhea knew, a computer system could have gone haywire or a group of stressed soldiers could have gone rogue. I didn't care what story future forensic investigators came up with.

My act today was many things - a diversion, a distraction, a stalling technique, and the destruction of an entire class of top secret weapons cached in the heart of the largest city on Dactil. It was bound to recall Legionnaire efforts and to delay the upcoming war they'd planned.

My people had made their beds. Maybe someday they would come around to striving for their own sakes. Maybe they needed convincing that it was possible. But now, I personally had a new focus: to make sure that Lila did not suffer the same fate that Orongo did. I headed straight for the circular port station ahead of me, knowing full well I'd be coming back to take care of unfinished business.

In the distance behind me, there was a brilliant flash of light. The first phase of my plan was complete.

###
