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#all my made-up mech pilots

(h/t: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots / @Scampir)

#Denis Urban, fictional sports pundit


Previously: Chapter 1: The Door

Mild warnings for gore, misgendering and talkin' about poop in this one, which is a hair over 11k words.


2. The Pilot

The first salvo from its autocannon tore through Aranani and Issor right in front of me. After the stillness of the pit it was viciously loud. The high-calibre bullets must have shattered on the rocks around us, as I heard the whining of too many ricochets, felt stings across my shins and thighs. I threw myself towards the near-side wall of the chasm, leaving behind the shredded remnants of two fine soldiers, the expanding cloud of their flesh very red against the white rock.

My unit moved with me, some unslinging their rifles and others crouching ready to leap for better terrain at my instruction. I sent Ermsan with three others back the way we had come in the hope of flanking our – hopefully – lone target. Sornten and Mahosh were dragging the prone Pras to cover. Gogi had dodged the opposite way from the rest of us and now hunched in the corner by one of the buttresses, their face as pale and stiff as the stone against which they crouched.

With a roar of engines and a clangour of metal joints, the spider-tank leapt across the chasm above us, twirling as elegantly in flight as I have ever seen one do. Vittar and Yarbe fired a few shots, but I shouted at them to hold. We had no ammunition reserve besides what each soldier carried, and while our rifles would puncture the tank's armour we would need to be surgical to have much effect.

The spider landed on the other side of the chasm, right above the door, instantly turning our cover into exposure. We scattered as the autocannon spoke again, shredding the vulnerable trio of Sornten, Pras and Mahosh. Such is the hatred of soldiers.

In the bottom of the canyon we were sitting ducks. At any time the spider-tank might deploy one of its more sophisticated weapons and obliterate us all. I looked up at the bulging folds of the wall above me and leapt, hoping I had judged the shapes correctly.

My cylegs carried me a good fifteen, perhaps eighteen metres up. I steadied myself in the air with one hand against the wall just long enough to plant a foot and push off again. The angle was awkward and I felt the xylem stiffen to keep my ankle from twisting, but with the resulting bound I reached the top of the nearer buttress. I struck it half-flopped, and it took a moment's frantic scrabble to get me steady on the flat top.

That put me almost face-to-face with the spider, less than twenty metres from its dormant headlights. I was spared the autocannon only by the fact that, in turning to bring the gun to bear, the thing's front right leg had slipped over the lip of the cliff and spoiled its balance. I pushed to a sprinter's starting crouch and took off along the top of the buttress, cylegs accelerating me in a few leaping strides to over fifty kilometres an hour.

Behind me, tight bursts of rifle fire marked some of the others achieving the ridge. I slung my own rifle off my shoulder and checked its safety as I ran. I had taken it from the cache of spares we abandoned with our vehicles shortly after planetfall. It had been decades since I had last fired one myself but some training never truly fades.

I reached the nearest upright shape on this side of the chasm, a low wall of chronium, vaulted it and landed in a slide which the crystallised ground prolonged. By the time I regained my footing and took a rifleman's crouch behind the cover, the tank was airborne again, its silhouette more like a jellyfish with all its legs extended and brought together beneath its bulk.

This time the leap was not so well-judged and it landed backwards, flattening a two-story cabin in a cloud of glittering chronium flakes. From the chasm's edge, where they must have taken up station atop the other buttress, Sujib and Dufore fired a salvo and I saw their rounds detonate against the tank's legs. The tank regained its footing and returned fire, the autocannon again. Sujib was too slow to duck and became a crimson spray out over the chasm. Dufore I could not see.

I started to take aim myself but movement opposite me caught my eye; Ermsan and their improvised squad forming up behind a more deliberately fortified wall on the far side of the ravine. They opened fire and again the tank turned its whole body towards them, bringing the autocannon to bear. That put its back leg to me, and I jumped up and charged it.

A spider-tank should have a crew of three, the pilot, a comms operator, and a gunner. The gunner could control the generous portfolio of weaponry around the turret independently of the pilot's movements, but either this tank's turret was jammed or – more likely, since only the autocannon had fired – only the pilot survived.

I brought my rifle up as I crossed the open ground towards the near leg. The leg was a square trunk of metal with slanted plates overlapping the joints and skirting the thick, rounded tire at its base. I knew better than to shoot at the tire, instead putting two quick bursts into the lower of the leg's two knees. My shots flew true, gouging neat divots from the plating.

The autocannon shouted, and I could not spare attention to see if it found its mark. I leapt, long and low, flipping in flight to come down feet-first astride the knee. My height made me just tall enough to point my rifle downward and fire point-blank into the joint. I kept it to a single burst, three shots, that bit deep into the armour and made a smoking ruin of the servo within.

The tank bucked, but I rode out the motion and jumped again, towards the turret this time. I cast the rifle aside midair and extended the long blade of my cythorn from my right wrist. Stretching as the spider began to spin, I caught hold of a hatch handle with my left hand, arm groaning to the shoulder to steady me.

Then I put all the coordinated force my cystem could muster into a single blow and drove my cythorn through the panel I had seized. Crackling electric sounds rippled through the blade and back into my bones, and almost immediately I smelled acrid smoke. The pilot thrashed the tank around in a spin, the motion made a tumble by the dragging leg, but I clung on and struck again, a handspan away from the first puncture. Any damage I could do this close-in would hobble critical systems, it didn't matter much what I hit.

I caught a glimpse of Dufore standing their ground in front of the tank as it spun, their own cythorn extended and clearly looking for an opening to join me. My shout to them to back off was drowned by the roar of the tank's engine as it attempted another leap. This time I felt the heave as it drew in its legs underneath it all at once, and the jagged angle as the broken knee spoiled its takeoff.

We spiralled through the air, and my feet slipped so that I was hanging on by one hand only, my wrist straining as if on a rack. The landing was a crushing, juddering thing that tore at the muscles of my forearm despite the support of its cylimb. I could not hang on, sliding on my back down the spider's flank towards the pinch-point peril of its hips.

The autocannon fired again, barely a metre or two from my head, loud as a crashing dropship. Rage for the soldiers it had destroyed surged in me, and I half-pushed, half-rolled forwards, finding my way to my feet mid-slide and leaping at the sound. All the angles were clumsy, but I managed to sprawl over the rotor housing, its heat stinging my chest.

I gained something resembling a stance and drove my cythorn into the motor. Buried in it almost to my knuckles, I felt a kick up my arm as a chambered round jammed off the cannon's belt and detonated. For a moment my cythorn bound in there, and I feared it had bent, but a full-backed heave brought it out intact. I looked down at the wrecked gun and stabbed again, snarling.

"Sir!" Dufore had got up onto the spider-tank's front hull plate, and their shout brought me back to myself. The tank was pushing at the ground, but its fall had trapped its rear legs underneath it, and there was little purchase on the chronium, so that it was scrabbling backwards like a prone soldier. My veins still sizzling, it was easy enough to hop over to Dufore's side.

They crouched over the tank's main crew hatch, cythorn of one heel hooked deftly through a rung of the ladder for balance, swaying with the dying vehicle's convulsions. If the spider's crew had been at full complement, we could have known that they would know we were there, and would be prepared to repel us with small arms. I was sure that only the pilot was at the controls, but the other two Commonwealthers might still be inside, injured but able to handle a handgun.

Dufore had gone through the antitank training much more recently than me. I ducked my head to them and raised a questioning eyebrow for them to lead. They gestured for me to move round to the top side of the hatch. As I moved, the tank gave one last lurch, almost shaking me off, then lay still. Dufore extended their wrist cythorn to its full extent, drew their arm back, and met my eyes for one final confirmation.

I nodded. They thrust down into the hatch, right at its latch handle, and I struck beside them, my blade positioned to cut away from theirs. Our cystems give us the strength to puncture armour, but not really to cut it; we pulled away and stabbed again, like hunters driving spears into wounded prey in search of a killing blow. Again, and with the third blows we had the half-meter latch side of the hatch torn through.

The hatch did not open when Dufore tugged on it half-strength. They paused, frowning. Our unprotected hands would avail us nothing trying to tear it open, and it was likely dogged all the way along the top and bottom of the frame. And there was the question of the pilot and their potential armament.

Dufore made a gesture I didn't understand, then shifted in place when they saw the confusion on my face. They squatted lower, hunching, and drove the tip of their cythorn under the lower edge of the hatch, at an angle. I understood when I saw the tip reemerge through the tear we had already made; leverage.

I did my best to match what they had done, fumbling a couple of times before I managed to get my blade out in the right place. Then, placing my feet either side of my wrist as Dufore had, I maxed out my cystem and heaved. The flat plate of the hatch bent resentfully, fighting us, metal teeth screeching.

Then it buckled and sprang open, sending us both reeling back. Dufore tumbled, legs-over-back-over-head and down out of sight off the hull. I fell onto my haunches and scrabbled awkwardly for something to hang onto. My cythorn, still at full extension, fouled my first grab as someone leapt out of the torn-open cockpit past me.

I got a foot on something that gave just enough purchase and kicked, throwing myself after the escaping pilot. There was the crack of a gunshot, trailed by a metallic ping as it glanced off the tank hull, and then the dull, lumpy sound of bodies landing prone. The chronium we landed on offered little friction, but it was hard and the crevices between crystals scraped and cut through my uniform.

Scrambling, I came up to hands and knees in time to knock the gun from the pilot's hands, retracting my cythorn to grapple. I saw Dufore approaching with blood on their face and blade at the ready and yelled at them to hold. The pilot kicked at me, but I swiped the blow aside with the hard-barked outside of my free forearm. With the strength advantage of my cystem, it was the work of a moment to pin her, my knee across her upper legs and my left hand around her wrists.

She looked me in the eyes and hissed, in her own language, "What are you waiting for? Kill me, treeborg!"

I have been remiss, I realise, and not provided any general description of myself or my soldiers. Here is what the pilot – whose name, we were shortly to learn, was Saffa – saw when she looked at me. I am tall, two hundred and eight centimetres when I stand normally, and slender, in a uniform that hugs my figure closely.

(I am beginning to have some grasp of how the system that conveys my words to you works; if I provide a quantity, it translates that quantity into your units. If I say that in our language my height is given as one point zero two standard person-heights, the system attempts to find a way of conveying the sense of our term for the units instead of translating directly).

My head is hairless, my cheekbones and brow pronounced. My ears are small and sit high on the sides of my head, well above the line of my cheeks; this is the product of a genetic alteration to accommodate the placement of the head-and-neck-support limbs of my cystem. These are fingers of grey-white living wood that sprout from the top of the main stem at the back of my neck, one running up the back of my skull to the crown of my head, one splitting off from it each side to run to ground at the points of my cheeks, and a second pair down the undersides of my jaw.

My skin is dark, as is the tendency of Federation soldiers, and shows my age in its coarseness and wrinkles, especially after that first month of exposure on Nine. Along the edges of the bark where my cystem lies on and burrows into my skin it appears paler, but this is mainly due to the fine white roots of the cystem itself connecting down through into my bones.

From my shoulders drape the metre-long, ten-centimetre-wide planes of my two cyleaves, which contain the photosynthetic cells that sustain me in the field. They have a thin silver frame, but the main panel is a dull green. They flex enough to be springy with my motion, but when I am standing they hang somewhat away from my back. Although they look delicate, mine survived the entire battle with the spider-tank intact.

My uniform is a silvery-blue, though surrounded by chronium and in the strange light of that place, the colour looked much deeper. A small diamond-shaped ornament in the middle of my chest holds the seed cluster indicating my rank. I might carry all manner of equipment in the field, but at that time I was wearing only a belt with a few utility pouches and my holstered sidearm, plus the small monitor/camera unit bound to my left wrist.

The fit of my uniform follows the shape of my musculature, except down the backs of my arms and the sides of my legs, where it tents over the four main limbs of my cystem, which also fills the recess behind my spine. My wrists are bare below the short cuffs of my sleeves, with only a nub of wood at the heel of my hand visible when my cythorns are retracted.

My boots are cut almost like slippers, with a heavy covered arch and toe, but an open back that the ending tendrils of my cystem lock into for support. We do not wear armour, generally; we make war in an era in which the destructive power of even the most portable weaponry makes a mockery of the idea. This, then, is the appearance for which Commonwealth soldiers give us the epithet of 'treeborgs'.

A note on language before I describe Saffa. I refer to her here with pronouns drawn from her language, as my tongue lacks the Commonwealth concept of gender to differentiate by. What the translator will make of that in your language I cannot begin to guess, but Saffa insisted consistently on that form of address from the first time we spoke to her, and eventually it became habit. Even after our hatred of one another dulled to routine, though, that habit took a long time to form, so that she was always chiding us for it.

She stopped fighting once she realised I had her pinned. Although she was sturdily built, her short frame stocky, especially around the neck and shoulders, she had no cybernetics and no chance against the strength my cystem gave me. Her jaw was wide, her face somewhat flat, and at that time her bob of black hair was a sticky mess. There were spots of blood on her face, stark against her pale skin.

Her eyes were a very deep blue, so that when she narrowed them in thwarted fury they became fathomless holes in her face. Her voice was hoarse. She wore a dark green vest, on which there were more bloodstains, but she didn't look to be bleeding herself. Her trousers were baggy and festooned with bulky pockets.

Rather than answering her challenge, I looked round to Dufore. We didn't have the resources for taking captives, so we were going to have to improvise. I said, "Jump in the spider and see if you can pull out some flex to bind their hands with."

I could tell immediately that Saffa understood. She jerked her wrists against my grip, but though sweat made her skin slippery, my fingers were too long and she didn't get free. For a moment she looked like she might speak again, then she grunted and broke eye contact.

A quiet, hard tramp announced the arrival of first Vittar and then Yarbe, rifles half-shouldered ready. "Hold fire!" I snapped, before they could take aim. "I want them alive."

That drew another twitch of struggle from the prone pilot. "Her," she snarled through gritted teeth.

I did not understand immediately. I knew that the Commonwealth language had different grammar to my own, and that it differentiated pronouns on a partly-arbitrary basis related to the perverse systems of reproduction that seemed to structure their entire culture, but though I had often fought the Commonwealth and sometimes taken their soldiers prisoner, it was to be a long time before I grasped exactly what it meant to Saffa.

Vittar raised their rifle and took aim. "We should kill them. What if they get loose?"

"Weapon down, soldier," I said, in a tone not much less hostile than Saffa's had been. The pilot wasn't fighting hard, but I couldn't risk relaxing, either.

Yarbe was wavering, and I saw the muzzle of Vittar's rifle dip slightly. With the advantage of our cystems, Saffa posed no danger unless one of us was careless enough to let her steal a gun. Even if she found a knife from somewhere she would need to basically catch us all asleep to do much harm. But to the hatred of soldiers, especially with the adrenaline still burning and the image of comrades torn apart by autocannon fire so fresh, that calculation carried little weight.

"Weapon down!" I said again. "This is our only source of information on Commonwealth movements outside the timescar, we need to know what we might be up against next." I wasn't happy to be having to explain my decisions to the enlisted, but hopefully it would damp the tension a bit. I looked up into Vittar's face. "Or do you want to get surprised by two spider-tanks next time? Or five?"

"What if they won't talk?"

That brought another wrenching heave against my grip from the pilot. "I said she," she ground out through clenched teeth, speaking Federation except for the pronoun. Then, in her own language, "I will not be made one of you eunuch freaks!"

If she intended the insult to sting, it missed its mark. I knew the word she used, 'eunuch', only because I have dealt with captive Commonwealthers before. It has no equivalent in my language and I doubt Vittar or Yarbe had any idea what it meant. They must, however, have grasped the hate in it, because their rifles twitched up again.

Saffa saw the movement. "Shoot! Kill me, you treeborg fucks!"

I stuck out my free hand, leaning forward, and pushed Vittar's rifle down again, quick enough to stop them firing. "Hold, soldier. Or it's mutiny."

Even that wasn't enough to get Vittar to stand down all the way. "They won't tell us anything, look at them."

"They'll talk or they'll be lonely," I snapped back. Saffa's self-destructive antagonism was a clear enough sign she didn't expect to be rescued. With no-one in the pit but us, I judged her likely to crack before long from solitude. At my words, though, she fell silent, and even gave up what was left of her struggle.

Dufore emerged from the wrecked tank with a metre or so of black cable and we used it to bind Saffa's wrists. Finally able to stand up, I stretched and discovered just how badly I'd wrenched my shoulder clinging to the spider's hull in the fight. I collected Saffa's dropped handgun, surprised at the high calibre it packed. We could ill afford to leave viable weaponry lying around with our ammunition stocks so low.

Saffa's capture provides some illustration of what I mean when I say that soldiering is hatred. My soldiers hated Saffa because they were still decelerating from the fight, and because she had killed six of us – at least; at that point I had not confirmed the casualty count – before we had stopped her. Saffa hated us because we had bested her, and destroyed her tank, and probably also for casualties that her unit had suffered from one or more of mine before reaching the timescar.

The hatred clings to circumstances such as these, but at the same time it is the presumption on which all military engagement is built; the first soldier hated their first victim before injury or revenge could provide the emotional context for that hatred. Not all murders are born of hatred, but for a killing to be military is for it to be grounded in hatred.
All soldiers come to feel this circularity in time, if they survive long enough. We who live our lives in armed service realise that we have given ourselves over to something hollow, and so our hatred yearns towards other justifications. Left unattended, this would be fertile ground for mutiny and desertion, but our masters understand this, and so our culture issues us justifications much as our quartermasters issue us our uniforms.

Here is as brief a summary as I can make of the justifications by which we hate the Commonwealth. We hate their treatment of their young as property of the binary reproductive pair that produced them. We hate their preservation of the binary reproductive mode, with its uncontrolled genetic lottery. We hate the bifurcation of their entire society according to the symbols of biological reproduction, their language with its arcane tangle of pronouns, their coddling condescension to – which really amounts to imprisonment of – their gravid.

In turn, they hate us for our aspirations to harmony and balance with our environments, which they declaim as atavistic. They hate us for our rejection of their binaries, which to them is a rejection of humanity and expression. Our organisation of reproduction around the patterns of plants disturbs them as a repudiation of the core forms of attachment that bind their turbulent societies together. Above all else they find the appearance of our cybernetically enhanced soldiers – myself and my men – horrible and haunting.

In those early days, too, I suspect that Saffa feared we would try to make her one of us, implanting in her a cystem by force. Though this is a horror story that Commonwealth parents tell their young, it is impossible. Implantation is a complex surgical procedure that must be performed before full bodily maturity. Soldiers do not carry spare seeds in the field, nor are the seeds from which cystems grow implanted before they have germinated and grown to considerable size. Just as it was a long time before we understood her sensitivity to pronouns, it was a long time before she stopped eyeing our bark with distrust.

In the interests of completeness: we hate the Alliance for their zealotry, and they us for our heresy. The Affenstrin we hate because despite their miniscule numbers, any one of their Warmakers constitutes enough firepower to wipe out one of our battalions, scuttle a mid-sized warship, or flatten a city. They hate us – and it is hate, though undoubtedly a Warmaker's emotional landscape is much different from ours – because our humility before nature is a stinging reminder of the worlds they must consume to wield such power. I shall have more to tell about these hatreds later.

With Saffa secured, there was a terrible, yawning question of what to do next. We had arrived at our destination, a place so unmistakably final that it felt like the end of time itself. The only danger was the smoking ruin of Saffa's tank. We were not archaeologists, and as stranded soldiers we had no-one to report back to of our arrival. Our triumph?

Injuries among my surviving soldiers were few. Dufore had been caught by a ricocheting fragment of Saffa's bullet, a shallow slice across their forehead. It was the kind of wound that bled far out of proportion to its severity. My arm ached with the strains from clinging to the tank, and my chest was lightly burnt from sprawling on the autocannon housing, the plastic of my rank marker singed black at the bottom. Several of us had cuts from the shrapnel of autocannon rounds, but nothing needing medical attention that anyway we had no equipment for.

As if drawn by its ineffable iconographic gravity, we made our way back to the chasm and the door. It was a long walk to reach a place where Saffa could be lowered down the cliff with her wrists still bound. The whole way, she said nothing, and put up no resistance. She was nimble enough to have no difficulty on the strange footing of the white stone.

Approaching the door from the same direction as the first time, we came on the blood splatter of our dead comrades at the edge of the smoothed plaza. The blood had not stained or dried on the rock at all, but had run down it and pooled in whatever crevices it found, beading like mercury. We could see its faint trails in the thin layer of chronium dust, and in the main, the chunks of gore torn up by the autocannon had slid down into the puddles too.

Issor's body was mostly intact, but their head was missing, their neck a bloody hole from the breastbone up. Aranani's remains were little more than the broken frame of their cystem. Pras and Sornten were in a worse state than that, but Mahosh was mostly recognisable. All of this was where we had first been caught by Saffa, right at the edge of the plaza. On the flat right in front of the door were the wide-sprayed spatters of blood that were all that remained of Sujib.

Like the blood that had pooled where the ravine met the plaza, Sujib's blood appeared to have no adhesion to the white stone at all. It sat there in small lozenge-shaped droplets, the ground so flat and level that it had nowhere to run. In the space marked out by the door and its buttresses, there was no chronium at all.

Of the door itself little more can be said. It seemed to be a single, solid piece of the same material as the chasm walls, but with that uncanny smooth finish. It fit its frame perfectly, resting on the ground and with not so much as the width of a piece of paper around its edges. Up close one could almost tell oneself it was just a carving in relief and not a door at all, but stand far enough away to see the whole panel and there was the inescapable reality that it could open, had been open in the distant past, and would open again in the future.

In this it felt different to its buttresses and plaza, which I was sure were of a piece with the chasm itself. Although Saffa must have fired dozens of autocannon rounds at us when she attacked, we never found any evidence that any of them had so much as scratched the stone. We did find fragments of the explosive shells, some of which had travelled a kilometre or more up the ravine in their ricochets.

I said that there was no chronium at all in the confines of the plaza, and this is not quite true. About a hundred and sixty centimetres off the ground on the buttress to the right of the door – the non-hinge side, the side that would eventually open – there was a small patch of silver-purple dusting. It was thicker than the chronium around the edges of the plaza, but also textured as if it had formed around something.

For that reason, when Dufore pointed it out to me, I decided to risk brushing off the chronium to see what was underneath. Most of it came off easily, the crystals glittering as they drifted down from the sleeve I wiped across the stone. I had thought something underneath would stand proud from the surface, but nothing did, and for a moment I feared I had destroyed whatever I had hoped to investigate.

On closer inspection, though, there was a faint pattern remaining on the buttress where the smallest chronium crystals still clung to a tiny score in the surface. The marks were like those that idle soldiers will scratch into any metal or plastic object left to hand with a penknife or even a fragment of slate or pointed rock. Soldiers are unimaginative, and often their graffiti is little more than initials or an obscenity.

In any other context I would have dismissed the markings without much further thought, but though the scratches were almost illegibly thin, they were on a material that had taken no marking from explosive autocannon shells. Indeed, in all the time since I first came to that place, I have never seen a weapon capable to making any impression on the white stone. Someone had stood in that corner, by the unopened door, and scrawled a message, apparently by hand, using some tool unlike any I know. And even then, they made no deeper an impression than one might make in plastic with a fingernail.

The message was short, no more than two dozen characters. Like a lot of writing we found in the camps around the pit, it was tauntingly familiar to look at. It was unmistakably writing, and the shapes clearly had something in common with systems of writing that I knew. But with the exception of one character that was, if one squinted slightly, a reasonable match for the negation particle in Federation script, I could not read any of it and neither could any of my soldiers.

We settled on the plaza to rest. I set Gogi to guard Saffa; their hatred was young and pure, still swaddled in loyalty to the Federation, and they had perhaps the weakest grasp of the Commonwealth language among us. Jieruk did their best to strike up a new round of the story game, and it was immediately clear to me that they did not quite have Sujiib's inventiveness – "You see two spider-tanks up on the edge of the cliff. What do you do?"

I stood leaning against one of the buttresses, listening to the soldiers trying to get the game off the ground. Saffa listened too, with an intensity that somewhat surprised me. I do not think she noticed me watching her. Once she seemed about to speak, while Jieruk described one of their invented tanks unloading some distinctively implausible armaments at Yarbe, but she cut herself off and set a deliberate posture of disinterest instead.

In the absence of day and night, or even the most basic camping equipment, our rest was a strange thing. I am not sure any of us had slept since entering the timescar. I do not remember anyone sleeping that time – even with everything I still want to call it an 'evening' – although those habits would eventually return.

After some time, Vittar approached me. When they spoke it was with the plain, pragmatic deference they might have shown to their sergeant under normal circumstances, and certainly not with the fear I expected as captain. "Sir, about them…" and they jerked their head in Saffa's direction.

Although there was nothing in Vittar's manner of the murderous rage they had shown earlier, I assumed they would be arguing again for death. "My orders stand, soldier."

"No, sir," they said, not seeming at all intimidated, "it's just… if you want them alive, they're going to need food. And water. Sir."

That problem was actually much bigger than I kicked myself for at the time. Not only would Saffa need food and drink – unlike my soldiers who could rely on their cystems almost indefinitely – but she would need somewhere to relieve herself. Meanwhile we lacked the tools for any infrastructural development at all, and everything around us was coated in chronium. Indeed, there wasn't even soil for us to till or cultivate. We believed ourselves kilometres deep in Nine's crust, and that crust seemed to be made of chronium.

While I contemplated the limited window I then had into those issues, Vittar was waiting for a response. Eventually, they said, "Sir…" It didn't sound like a question.

"Do you have something to suggest?" I am finding I remember much of what we have experienced on Nine better than I thought I would. Those words, though, I remember saying so crisply and clearly that it is almost as if the breath of them still hovers between the tip of my tongue and the ridge of my gums behind my front teeth. Perhaps they do – time does not flee as it should here.

Vittar leaned closer and lowered their voice, though the game behind them was by that point lively enough that no-one was likely to overhear us. "Well, I think… a couple of the bodies… their cystems are salvageable, sir, I might, uh-" Something in my face must have spooked them and they hurried on. "Not, I don't mean implantation, sir, but I think… I think I could convert one to produce an edible syrup, at least, sir. It wouldn't cover all their nutritional needs but… uh…"

I know that some cultures – not least among them Saffa's – would consider the prospect of reclaiming nutrition, especially for a captive enemy, from the bodies of fallen soldiers, to be so abhorrent that even voicing the idea would be cause for ostracism. If your culture is among those, please understand that it is not quite so distasteful to us. In the Federation we mark graves with trees, or even leave the bodies of our fellows naked in wildwood where it is available. Corpse-fungi number among our objects of reverence.

This is what we understand by balance with nature, that we do not own our bodies but only borrow living matter from the wider ecosystem, so that it must eventually be returned. The Commonwealth with their ideology of property, and the Alliance with their ascription of all worldly matter to their gods, feel differently. You will have to come to your own conclusions; at least you may know that, in virtue of the likely great temporal distance between us, my agendas and biases cannot harm you.

I did feel a degree of horror at Vittar's suggestion, though doubtless less than Saffa felt when she learned of it. It was not for the idea itself, but for the ghoulish images it called to mind of what Vittar might have to do to Aranani's or Issor's or Mahosh's remains. Perhaps too the preserved, clinical atmosphere of that place, the stillness of survived millennia, prodded at my mind.

For those reasons I hovered on the edge of decision, though I think I knew even then that Vittar's voicing the suggestion was enough to see it so. The alternative was watching Saffa starve to death, or dehydrate. I hated her, of course, but I was sincere in my belief that she would be of use to us. Summary execution was an unpalatable prospect, too, and it is never pleasant to watch a life fade from hunger and thirst. What any of those options would have done to morale, in the absence of Aranani's insight, I felt unqualified to risk.

I told Vittar to wait and walked over to where Saffa sat, her back straight against the buttress, waving Gogi aside to keep their distance. When I squatted down beside her, she tried to pretend she had not noticed my presence, but I could see muscles working in her jaw. In her language, I said, "Are there rations in your tank?"

She did not answer. A Commonwealth spider-tank would normally deploy with a small provisions reserve, but I had no way of knowing how much of that Saffa might have consumed in her traverse of the steps.

I said, "Is there a supply of water?"

This time she did a better job of hiding that she had heard the question. I could, of course, send soldiers to check, but I was concerned that in searching the vehicle's unfamiliar interior they might either miss something or damage exactly what they were sent to find.

Next, I asked, "Are there waste disposal facilities?"

At that, she flinched. Not violently, and without any particular emotion showing on her face, but enough to show that the topic was uncomfortable. I waited, but she did not speak.

"We will endeavour to provide you with sustenance if you have none," I said. "But we cannot help with waste recycling, unless there are surviving installations somewhere under all this chronium."

In the Interstellar Fleet, our cystems, by a combination of direct connection into our guts and sophisticated bioculture of intestinal fauna, enable us to recycle the scarcer nutrients with almost perfect efficiency. Our cyleaves take care of carbohydrate needs, the waste from which goes to maintenance of our bark, and also contain condensers that make up for the slight loss of water over time. Commonwealth personnel benefit from no such sustainability.

Eventually, Saffa said, "Hygeine kit."

"Do you need it now?"

Stiffly, she nodded.

"I will send two of my soldiers to escort you. You'll have to excuse the lack of privacy." I saw a hint of colour rise in her cheeks, but my understanding is that the privacy taboos that cluster around Commonwealth culture hold less power among soldiers in the field, so I assumed she would be able to cope.

After a quick consultation with Ermsan, during which I told them without explaining why that Vittar and I would move the corpses, I dispatched Jieruk with Gogi to escort Saffa. Then I returned to Vittar. I did not tell him that I approved his idea; instead, I simply said that we should find a place that the other soldiers would not quickly trip over in which the bodies could be worked on.

We set out to explore the pit, leaping up to the rim of the chasm with the full strength of our cylegs. I had deliberately brought us up on the opposite side to where the wreck of Saffa's tank lay. On that side, we could see not just the still-smoking tank but also the ruins of the cabins it had landed on. I made a mental note to send someone to check on the contents once Vittar and I were finished, but led off away from that side.

The camp city was big enough that I could probably simply have assigned Vittar an alley somewhere between two permatemps and had them do their macabre experiments there, but seeing the broken cabins seeded the idea that we could break into a building on this side for extra security. Indeed, chronium's preservative effect meant there might still be usable equipment inside some of them.

The difficulty lay in guessing which oblong box was most likely to be appropriate. We walked for some time, a snaking route around the buildings that drifted steadily out towards the side of the pit. Vittar said little and I nothing except terse answers to their questions. I had not forgotten their disobedience at Saffa's capture.

Finally I picked a two-storey cabin, perhaps eight metres wide and a dozen long, mostly because as we were walking along its long side, I saw a ridge in the chronium coating it that had to be the shape of a door. Looking ahead past the end of the building I could see the boundary of this section of the camp, and beyond that only a small open patch of ground before the footings of the nearest foundation.

Setting the tip of my cythorn against the chronium, I cut a groove down the outside of the doorframe. The silver-purple surface flaked away from the blade in individual crystal tiles. Chronium is not particularly hard or durable, but it is lazy in its interactions with conventional matter, sapping energy from any motion that comes into contact with it. What we learned in our time in the pit is that clearing any amount of chronium is possible, but doing so will be a tedious and draining experience.

As I cut, I realised that the chronium on the door was loose. Really what was happening was that it adhered better to itself than to the reinforced plastic panel underneath. Experimentally, I worked my cythorn across the door, as flat against the panel as the thorn's position on my wrist would allow. With a little leverage, the chronium peeled away in a sheet, and Vittar had to catch it before the coating along the whole wall came loose.

Almost as soon as they had grabbed the edge of the sheet, they jerked their hand back from it, and I had to reassure them that chronium is not toxic. Indeed, had it been, we had by that time already been in the pit long enough to have doomed ourselves. Short of imbibing and choking on a crystal, or filling one's lungs with the dust, chronium is too inert to pose any danger to humans.

The door we revealed was dull grey, with a small, recessed handle whose well had filled up with more chronium. That was easily dislodged, and when I tried the handle, the mechanism slid stiffly but smoothly open. I may have imagined it, but there seemed to be a very faint inward movement of air as the panel began to swing inward.

As when we had descended into the shadows of the scaffolds around the edge of the pit, the darkness inside the permatemp was unfamiliar. The air was dry and scentless. There was a faint shimmer of chronium not-glow, but far less than outside.

My eyes took a little while to adjust, but the room that greeted us was fundamentally unsurprising. It ran the width of the cabin, and was about three metres wide. The far end was divided from the rest by a counter that joined a worktop round the walls; there were cabinets under and suspended above the worktop, and a pair of sinks against the back. Unmistakably a kitchen.

Nearer to us, the low shapes of a sofa and two armchairs sat with their backs to the internal partition, which was covered in plastic flimsies that presumably comprised a mix of warnings, advisories, plans, procedures and all the other documentation a scientific expedition generates. Opposite that, a low table supported a large free-standing display unit.

The condition of the room's contents was incomprehensible. The chronium we had pulled off the door had been two centimetres thick, fully crystallised. That deep a layer on a vertical surface spoke of thousands of years without disturbance. Before I could warn them against it, Vittar leaned down and pressed a hand to the cushion of the nearer armchair. Satisfied with its spring, they sat, looked up at the reflexive worry on my face and nodded cheerily.

"Oof, that feels good after all the stone." Then their better judgement caught up to them. "Uh, sir."

The sofa did look inviting, but I resisted the urge. "Time for that later, soldier. Let's make sure this building is suitable for your purposes. There'll be others like it for comfort."

Vittar made a show of levering themselves back to their feet. Immediately to the right of the entrance, an internal door opened into a narrow passage where the light was even stranger than outside. The passage had windows along the external wall, but these were still covered in chronium. From the underside, the crystals looked like felt, faintly sparkling, and it was their dim shine that revealed the doors opposite them, two down the far end and two in the middle.

The middle pair opened into what were clearly laboratories. There were stickers on them with agitated icons and stark colours that clearly indicated warnings about the contents – between the gloom and the unfamiliarity of the characters, I could not read any of the script accompanying them, but I could recognise the stylised face with safety goggles in one icon easily enough. The two rooms had mirrored layouts of counters and benches, tightly packed cabinets, and many instruments in common.

I had put my hand across the doorframe to prevent Vittar rushing inside, concerned that there might still be active hazards in there, and I turned to them. "Would this suit your… project?"

They glanced awkwardly over their shoulder. "I'll need light, uh, sir. For the cyleaves."

Of course. Suppressing an inward curse at my mistake, I nodded. "Maybe you can find some tools in here to help."

The gloom hid the subtleties of Vittar's expression but I could tell they were unconvinced. "What about the roof, sir? Do you think there'd be a way to get up there?"

My first instinct in response was tactical; on the roof, Vittar would be exposed to any enemy units descending the pit, and potentially conspicuous to the rest of the soldiers. On the other hand, they did need the light; that was the whole point. I was concerned for what agreeing would do for my authority, but I nodded.

Fortunately, roof access was not hard to find. At the end of the hallway, beyond the second pair of doors which opened to the tight-packed stalls of washrooms, a staircase went up to the left. We climbed it to a corridor between smaller rooms, five on either side, that were laid out as cramped bedrooms, with two bunks each. We did not inspect these closely but it was clear they had been abandoned in a relative hurry. A few trinkets sat abandoned on small shelving units opposite the bunks, and in one room an ancient shirt lay rumpled and perfectly preserved on the floor. At the end of that upper hall, rungs in the wall led up to a hatch that would get us out onto the roof.

If we could open it, that was. The hatch had a viewport in it, from which the shimmer of chronium cast a muted puddle of light. The chronium on the roof, of course, was much thicker than on the exterior walls. Hanging off the ladder and pressing up with one hand was insufficient to move the hatch at all; when Vittar started to apply the strength of their cystem, the rung on which they had braced their foot visibly bent.

After a few moments' consternation, they told me to wait by the ladder and went outside. The instruction – delivered casually, in thoughtless expectation of cooperation – rankled at the time. I have become used to that manner with my surviving soldiers now, but that is a trust slowly earned.

There was a muffled thump from above, and I realised what Vittar had gone outside to do. Their tread crossed the ceiling above me, sounding much darker than felt natural. There was something horrible about it, reminiscent of too many desperate, confused battles in tight urban environments. I froze in the act of reaching up to bang on the underside of the hatch to help Vittar locate it.

Fortunately, the hatch must have stood proud enough from the roof that they didn't need my help. The noise as Vittar dragged their cythorn through the chronium was even worse than the footsteps, the whole roof of the cabin acting as sounding board for the scraping, ragged splintering of the crystals. Once I had taken refuge in an underfloor ventilation shaft while an Affenstrin Warmaker had torn the bunker above apart with energy scythes. I had to cling to the faith that it was in fact one of my own soldiers above me while shivers went through the sore muscles of my back and upper arms.

I flinched when Vittar tore the chronium off the hatch, from more than just the sudden light. Gathering myself, I took the first couple of rungs of the ladder pushed at the hatch. It still wouldn't quite open, obstructed by more chronium round the hinges. With something like natural light streaming through the window and clear line of sight to Vittar, the noise as they cut the hinges clear wasn't nearly so terrible.

The roof felt large when I climbed out onto it. It also felt exposed, as if we would be spotted any moment by Commonwealthers descending the pit wall, which now towered over us, no more than a hundred metres from the cabin. More practically, it might not be high enough up to conceal whatever Vittar got up to up here from the other soldiers if they happened to explore in this direction.

There was a different character to looking out over the camps from this angle than seeing them from ground level or up around the rim of the pit. Here, it did look more like a city, and some buildings stood out by their size. I tried to form a mental map of where the larger ones were, but the uniform shimmering purple of it all played too many tricks on the eye.
I did see, not far from where the long, drooping cyleaves marked the elevator shaft we had descended, half-hidden under the thicket of spars that were the base of the scaffolding, one shape much too large to ignore. We could only have failed to notice it on our arrival in the pit because of the angle of approach.

It must have been the better part of a hundred metres tall, and maybe twice that wide, up against the base of the pit wall. More striking than that, though, was the length. The vicious clarity of the air meant I could see the ridge of its roofline stretching away round a significant fraction of the camps' circumference. That would have to be our first target for serious exploration, though it would likely take weeks to even get a sense of the full interior.

"This will do," Vittar said, interrupting my somewhat dazed staring. "I can probably salvage some gear from the labs, that'll help. And I'll keep to the middle of the roof, not stand anything too high up, that should minimise visibility. Uh, sir."

I nodded, glad they were at least thinking about that aspect. Still grappling with the layout of the camps, I screwed my eyes shut and rubbed my forehead. "Will you be able to find your way back here?"

"I think so." They pointed over at the elevator cyleaves. "Not far from those. We should take a look over there, too, might be more surviving cystem material. They can't have only been for the lift."

"One thing at a time, soldier. Let's get back to the others and get those bodies moved."

For a moment, a muddle of conflicting expressions crossed Vittar's face, their lips twitching beneath a frown. Then they nodded. The unease of that attitude held us silent as we made our way back to the chasm.

Raised voices, their echoes oddly crisp, drifted to us as we came in sight of the ravine. I hastened my step, and Vittar followed. It was Ermsan's voice we'd heard first, I thought, and one of the soldiers answering, heatedly. Mutiny had seemed a distant prospect when I had left Ermsan in charge, but Vittar's insubordination had seeded some doubt in me on that score.

I ran the last few steps of the way and jumped down, bracing my cystem and launching myself to land on the flat of the plaza. The scene in front of me, frozen now in tableau with the participants all turned towards my arrival in various states of surprise, was not quite as severe as I'd feared. Jieruk and Ermsan were facing off, true, but Ermsan brandished no more than a pointing finger, and Jieruk's only armament was a plastic packet that looked distinctly like a ration bar.

Gogi, in the stance of a youngster well out of their depth and unsure which authority to answer to, stood a little way behind Jieruk's shoulder, holding Saffa's arm. The pilot's wrists were no longer bound. The rest of my soldiers hovered at the edge of the confrontation, only Dufore anywhere near the stack of rifles in the corner by one of the buttresses.

I straightened up and strode forwards. In the parade-ground voice I have used rarely since I became Captain of the 24th Marine, I barked, "Sergeant, report."

Taking their cue, Ermsan snapped to attention, jerking their pointing finger up and opening their hand flat in salute, elbow a sharp right-angle level with their shoulder. That was enough for the other soldiers to follow suit, Jieruk half-raising whatever the packet was before realising they would need to switch it to their other hand. I stopped a clear three metres short of where they had been standing off, leaving the space as proxy for my authority.

"Lance-Corporal Jieruk found what they believe to be preserved rations, sir," Ermsan said, their voice loud and harsh, every bit the sergeant's. "They want to try them. I warned them that we have no idea how old they are."

I looked at Jieruk, who was visibly wrestling with the urge to speak out of turn. It was understandable that they would feel the temptation of the wrapper. Our cystems can sustain us almost indefinitely, but we have not lost the pleasure or the instinct for eating – this is more resistant to genetic engineering than the position of our ears or the configuration of our reproductive organs. And it had been weeks since any of us had last had actual food to bite into.

If Aranani had still been with us, I was sure, they would have had some witty way to defang the confrontation before I even returned. However, I thought I could see a way to lay Jieruk's – and the other soldiers, whose attentive tension was palpable – desire to rest. I held out my hand, palm up, in their direction. "Show me."

Gait stiff, as it should be in a chastened soldier, they walked the few steps over to me and placed the thing they had found in my hand. The wrapper was off-white, labelled with a double-row of ancient text that I couldn't read, and still, as far as I could tell, sealed. Whatever was inside was a lumpy oblong bar, about twenty centimetres by five and two thick, and dense, perhaps as much as half a kilo.

I turned the side with the writing on towards Jieruk. "Can you read this, soldier?"

"No, sir." They lowered their head a moment, then looked up again, reaching towards the bar with a finger pointing. "But this character looks-"

I closed my hand, pulling the bar out of their reach. "Do you know how old it is?"

Their hand relaxed, but they didn't lower it. "No, sir."

"And how long are our ration bars rated for?"

"Twenty years, sir. But everyone knows you can get-"

"Yes, Jieruk," I cut them off. "And I have seen the infirmary reports of what happens when you try." With my free hand I gestured at the walls around us. "Do you have any idea how long this place has been abandoned?"

They shrugged, the expression on their face making clear they did not relish thinking about it. "I dunno, sir. Chronium forms pretty slowly, right? So a hundred years, maybe?"

At this point I felt I had gained the upper hand. I let my tone soften. "This is your first time seeing chronium, isn't it?"

Jieruk nodded, looked about to speak, and stopped.

"When the 24th were in retreat on Ihona," I began, hoping to drill the point home and prevent any future incidents like this one, "we strayed into a timescar left by the detonation of unexploded time-war munitions which were unearthed a little over four hundred years ago. The densest chronium deposits we saw there were a fine dusting, only visible on the smoothest surfaces."

I gave Jieruk, and the others, a moment to absorb this. In a way the point was somewhat diluted by the strangeness of the white stone of the plaza and its apparent resistance to chronium, but none of them could have forgotten the ground we had crossed to reach that place. Jieruk's jaw hung open, their mouth a dark lozenge surrounded by paled lips.

"The kind of crystallisation we have seen here," I said, "is the work of millenia. We must be in the centre of an actual Time War battlefield. That packet, whatever it is, might predate the Federation."

That drew a sharp jerk of the head from Saffa, while my soldiers all stood there stunned. I looked around the assembly, reaching Ermsan last. They were not as surprised as the rest, although I doubted they had put together as much of the background of what we had encountered together on Ihona as I had. I, after all, had been the one who had to explain the decision to retreat into timescar to the 7847th's admiralty. They shook their head slightly, and I took it as a signal to tell no more of the story then.

That was probably prudent, to avoid spooking the soldiers, and anyway the point was already made. I spoke more openly, to the group as a whole. "Keep that in mind as you explore this place, all of you. Take nothing for granted just because it looks familiar." I held up the wrapper. "This could be food. But it could be soap, or plastic explosive, or… some sort of solvent or something used for experiments or the like."

"Sorry, sir," Jieruk muttered unsteadily.

"It's understandable to feel hungry," Ermsan said, stepping up to my shoulder. "But we've gotta be careful."

Before I could press the point, Vittar came to stand beside me on the other side. Voice low, they said, "Sir, with those labs we found, I might be able to-"

I cut them off with a raised hand. Still speaking more to the group as a whole, I said, "In due time. These camps were clearly a scientific expedition, or several. Vittar and I found well-preserved laboratories and there will likely be more. When we can, we will test what we can. If there are ways to get us actual food here, we will figure them out. But we must be careful. Am I clear?"

There were nods, and the shuffling of feet that indicated a desire among the enlisted to accept their dressing-down and move on. Satisfied, I nodded a little to myself. "Dismissed."
They accepted their dismissal, and after another brief discussion with Ermsan, I went with Vittar to move the bodies. When we returned, the soldiers were playing another round of their game. I noted with a degree of amusement that while Jieruk and Gogi had brought the packaged bar, they had not brought back any blankets or cushions. Perhaps they had not found any in whichever building they had strayed into exploring. That could be a priority for the next round of assignments.

Saffa had taken a seat against the door itself this time, close enough to the soldiers that she could hear them but far enough away to not be part of the group. Her hands were still unbound. The stack of rifles was ten metres or so from her, though the soldiers were a little closer to it.

I went and knelt beside her, my back to the soldiers' circle, but between her and the guns. She made a point of looking away, across the plaza. Keeping my voice low, I said, "You were able to do what you needed?"

She didn't react, holding herself stiffly immobile.

"And food or water?" If she had found any, likely there would have been friction with my soldiers, unless she had managed to keep it hidden from them, which would raise other concerns. Taking her continued silence for a negative, I said, "Well, we have begun to investigate ways to provide you with sustenance. I hope it will not take long."

Again Saffa said nothing. She breathed slowly and deeply, through her nose and heavily enough that I could hear it. I judged that the product of anger rather than fear.

Not expecting a response, I broached the question that was my notional reason for keeping her alive. "Will you not tell us whether we need worry about your reinforcements?" I gestured towards the soldiers. "This is all that is left of my company. You can hardly think we pose your army any threat. I would just like to see to the safety of my soldiers."

"Your men," she answered sharply, emphasising the word in her own language. "Might as well call them your limbs with how you treat them."

The aggression took me aback, and I confess my own anger was piqued by her condescension. "As you do your young?"

That brought her head round, her eyes finally meeting my own, striking with the force of her tank's projectiles. "You know nothing of the love of a mother for her child," she snarled.
That was true. It is perhaps even more true now that I have listened to Saffa's accounts of her relationship with her mother. But I had gotten her talking, however aggressively. It seemed prudent to try to keep the conversation going.

I began, "Please, tell me. You know that we do not have these words in our language, for reproductive pair and offspring." There are, of course, words in our tongue to translate the Commonwealth word 'love', but none that accompany reproduction.

My request puzzled her, her scowl losing some of its focus. Her eyes left mine, and the tilt of her head shifted. I realised that my choice of phrasing had been awkward, attempting to deploy our words for reproduction and young into the context of Commonwealth grammar. I tried again, struggling with the pronunciation. "This love of 'mother' and 'child'. We don't have it in the Federation, could you-"

"You said 'Federation' again," she interrupted. Her tone remained hostile, but confusion, or perhaps curiosity, sapped its intensity. "You still call it that?"

It was my turn to tilt my head in confusion. "Do you not?"

"I thought you became the Lucian Empire two hundred years ago. 'Federation' is an old name."

"Lucian-?" I gaped at her. She frowned back. "There is a Praetor named Lucius, but…" I said it without exercising much control over my tongue, or even my thoughts. The Praetors are the leaders of the Federation, or at least if they serve a higher authority I do not know its name. To say 'they are our leaders', though, makes them seem far closer than they are. At that time I had no evidence that they were real people; in the 7847th, we talked about them not much differently to how Alliance zealots describe their God.

"The Emperor Lucius was a Praetor until his coup," said Saffa, then faltered. "At least, in the history I was taught. How long have you been cut off here?"

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and checked my cystem. "About a month since we made planetfall. Two weeks since we came through the timescar."

"And you've never heard of Lucius being Emperor?"

"No." My head was swimming, a slight sensation that my brain floated free of my skull, some distance away from my eyes. A thought struck me and I seized it. "You must have strayed through a temporal rift when you came through the timescar. Two centuries back would be a big jump, but it's a big timescar…"

"Are you sure? What if it's you who travelled? Forward is more likely than back, right?"

"But there are fourt- there were fourteen of us, on foot, to your one vehicle." For all our losses in the passage through the timescar, we had not experienced anything as wrenching as rifts are rumoured to be – of course, none of us had ever met someone who had survived one. It seemed at the time more plausible to me that Saffa's tank might have shielded her to the extent that she had travelled without realising it.

The anger had drained out of her face, leaving something haunting and vacant in the set of her eyes. "Maybe," she said, quietly.

I took a deep breath, feeling as unsettled as Saffa looked. "Though it might be unreasonable of me to ask, might I impose on you not to tell my soldiers of this?"

Her eyebrow flickered. "Now you don't want me to talk?"

I mustered a single muted chuckle. "Sorry. We will get you fed as soon as we can. Would a blanket be welcome? I intend to see about salvaging some from the camps."

She frowned at me for a long moment, then nodded, once, back to her former stiffness. "Thank you."


Look at that, actual opened doors! Not THE door, of course, but I -can- do it after all.

Starting to get into a rhythm with this now, maybe, and it looks like it'll be fortnightly. I think it's going to be six chapters overall, and I'm not expecting it to get much more gross or bloody than this chapter.

update: chapter 3 is here


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