CW: insectoid biology, gun violence, bombardment, discussion of ethnic cleansing, close combat, gore, antihuman rhetoric

Even through my metabolic symbiote, which would probably wear off within a few days if we didn’t find a few specific nutrients it needed, the air up here stung in a way that felt a bit like breathing rust. It had been easier underground than up here where these huge green-grey clouds rolled across the pinnacle where I lay basking like a lizard, except I only let myself rest when the clouds rolled over and the bombers couldn’t see us. Sometimes it rained really hard. Aqueduct had fabbed a gizmo shaped like a harmonica that could roll over any surface by hand and dry it out with a blade of wind, itself powered by chemical reactions with the air. But I didn’t really mind being wet out here.

The bombers. If I was less self-critical, which unfortunately isn’t the same as more imaginative, I would just call them dragons. Their bodies were made up of ten to twenty flattened, opaline shelled segments that rippled and rolled in the air, from only one of which, near the middle, dropped a set of symmetrical talons or mandibles, three on each side, like a UFO grabber. Every third segment a blur of translucent wings like a dragonfly’s flickered and hummed out of the narrow gaps in the sides of the shell. Although their most evocatively draconic feature - in the Chinese sense - to me was probably the mustache of two trailing feelers that twirled and twitched lazily in the air from the segment I interpreted, partly by association, as the front (the back stabilized itself with a sort of propeller).

Every few minutes, I would watch a ball of golden slime roll from some hidden cloaca into the basket of claws, hang there for a minute while the body circled and spiralled around some coordinate, and then let go.

As we began to fall again to Earth, I peered through the bottom of the Corpuscle to follow the orb as it disappeared - and a plume of pulverized white mineral dust rose where it had last been.

Halation just called them the Ribbons.

They were a well-known species, but she hadn’t known they had joined the war, or how many, on one or both sides. They used their aerial bombardment to hunt, though normally the thing they dropped was a kind of sticky bolus of toxic mucus that paralyzed their prey. They had long been able to synthesize different chemicals in it, however, and had used explosive ones in carving out canals, accessing rare minerals and otherwise terraforming their planet before developing their own circular production systems and offworld supply chains for necessities and returned, like a number of other species, to a kind of idyllic managed reproduction of their natural state, which had been something of a tourist attraction for body-surfing Weirs in particular. (Their typical prey were usually replaced in the interest of scrupulous (but not-too-scrupulous) Meteorologists with low-interoperability automata.)

Halation had never been to Waterfall. It wasn’t her kind of vacation.

Head swivelling loosely at the end of its body as it relaxed after its bombing run, the closest to us paused when it swung slightly in our direction, the two feelers rising, pointing and twitching as we began to fall faster - and it coiled in the same direction, accelerating after us. At least two more, further back towards the distant orb, noticed and pivoted toward us.

I sent a thought frantically through the Halation-veins to Aqueduct - Wait why are we falling. We didn’t reach the Network’s altitude did we.

The Corpuscle isn’t the size and weight of the units that were supposed to go through these. But it’s not just that. I think we hit a Weak Asymmetry Field.

I stared at the spherical hive - the innermost circle of one of its indentations dilated and one of the Ribbons flittered in - in horror. They probably have these at all the launch points then… does that map to the bombing range we know?

How would I know the bombing range?

The Sunbites hadn’t even known where they were. I had almost forgotten that just because I was at war didn’t mean I was dealing with soldiers - a fact I normally found somewhat comforting, as it made me less the outlier. But I had also gotten used to having soldiers around who could answer a non-soldier’s questions - and here I was stuck in a giant bullet with another civilian, the only soldiers in sight (if that was even what they were) the enemy.

At least I knew how to control the bullet.

As three ball joints, three atoms in a molecule. This was such a weird halfway point between a regular vehicle and a mech, it made sense for aesthetic reasons and none for military reasons, it was a generalist which was a different way than how I was used to thinking about technology. Heidegger shit everyone in my department had pretended they believed but had never figured out a way to make anyone who runs a lore wiki take seriously.

The Corpuscle had one empty sphere, since there were two of us in it - Aqueduct had moved down to their own after we finished the cartridge - and so that would have to be our hitter. I swung it over coming down onto their head as they caught up on us, and they rolled over in the air and launched another ball of something at us. It was fast and sharp, but still at the end of the day trying to hit something in free fall by throwing a ball. We, on the other hand, were trying to hit a flashing, swirling Ribbon with a clunky abstract shape. Neither of us had an obvious way to hurt each other so it just backed off.

Until it got more of them in to hover above us, in a tightening circle like the Eva prototypes over Asuka in the lake, and just start dropping them.

Most of them didn’t hit us directly. That wasn’t entirely the point. They were bombing a hole beneath us - a pit for us to climb out of.

Fortunately the pit wasn’t right on top of the Internexus. Maybe the network at least had been thinking of this kind of exigency.

As the pillars of dust unfolded themselves up towards us, I pointed both guns through the membrane, firing the opposite direction of the nearest outcropping I had seen standing before it was swallowed. I didn’t want to fire until shortly before the clouds covered us so they couldn’t just track us. If they were dense enough, we might also be able to use some of the Corpuscle’s own aerial movement capabilities, designed for the denser atmosphere of Contemplation, although we would get less momentum from the guns.

I had emptied 80% of a magazine and fallen six standard units thirteenth-exponent when we crashed into something and rotated ourselves slowly around it. A huge flat slab had settled across the top of the twisting pillar giving us an overhang we could hide under as the dust cleared and we could place ourselves in the middle of a vast canyon.

Most of the vastness, from the looks of it, had already been there. They had bombed all the way down to some kind of wide open channel, a thin black rivulet draining along its lowest trough, trypophobic clusters of tunnels maybe even leading back to the Internexus - another pillar three or four units whose artificial shape made me think it was probably the launch tube we had shuttled through. But the flower-shaped window of sky through crumbling layers of stone above us was small by human standards, for that many bombs, if I tried to map the shells of stone above us to the OSINT I'd seen of MK-82 craters.

Ragged strips of cloud covered where the alien sphere had been, but it was probably too high up to see anyway. The bombers had evidently returned to it, but we had to assume they could be back.

We used the navigation programs within the Corpuscle to try and calculate where we had landed relative to the launch tube, and its most likely location range had been entirely covered by rubble - the second-most-likely was out of sight and we couldn’t see around to it.

Jax had said his group would get a message to us somehow, but we had no idea where we were, and they had less. The smartest thing might be to try to get back to Tuber Plug? At least that might be recognizable on a skyline.

I… I need to go back to my default form for a little bit, Halation’s voice seared our minds with urgency. I’ve never strained myself like this, not in training, not in space. I feel like I’m going to fray into nothing.

So we rested, Halation sealing off their bubble and filling it with an emergency supply of their atmospheric compounds from Aqueduct’s Fabber supply. Faint fish-scale clouds drifted overhead, layering the turquoise sky sulfur-green and tile-grey. The rock this close to the surface, or maybe just here, was chalky enough to look as much like pumice as it did at scale, or like I was in an endless version of those giant sandstone beach caves. With things with wings similar in structure to the Tower Scouts darting in and out of tunnels overhead.

I couldn’t shake the feeling - especially without Halation in me to regulate it, their willpower honed by decades alone in space and dozens more impossible situations - that I was already too resigned to dying absurdly somewhere out here. My plan for the future of the Earth, the future of the war, relied on staying alive at all costs - but did I really believe that, or had I just arranged things so that I could die without being responsible for anything I couldn’t have on my conscience?

A pale thing with three tough semi-tentacles like a starfish crawled out of a hole in the rock onto me and Aqueduct skewered it with a needle-like implement, informing me it was edible. That distracted me for a bit. I thought of watching another Phantasy with them, but I felt like I needed to absorb the atmosphere planet more if I was going to interfere with it, or die here. I checked a terrestrial bias of that metaphor, and the perversely literal fact that I was feeling it more strongly aboveground.

Aboveground is… a place of nostalgia for us too, Aqueduct said. Look at those. They pointed to what I could only make out as a haze of small white circles that had blown in from the edge of the sky-window and already settled all along one side of a ledge above us facing the sun. As it shone on them they started to take on a flush of different colours, pink and green and blue and purple pastels. You’ll see them in 6 out of 7 historical Phantasies about the time before the Cataclysm - some people are calling it the First Cataclysm now, since the network collapsed - even though they’re only native to one continent. Even the abstract ones, there’s a whole genre of pointillism inspired by how they bloom like that… it was a labour of thousands of lives to ensure they survived at all.

At some point a scent or a sound I couldn’t perceive alerted Aqueduct - we should get moving soon. It’s going to rain.

Halation was sluggish and unresponsive in the Corpuscle. She didn’t participate much in our discussion of where to go, beyond telling us which ways up the froth of shattered stacking archways rising in a crater around us would take too much energy. Aqueduct made some packets of rock-melting and -solidifying stuff that got us around and over rough patches, carving a roundabout trail where we didn’t have to use the Corpuscle’s speed and surface tension directly against gravity.

The things that had landed on the ledge lifted off again, before the rain which I could now following us could reach us. They flew close overhead and a few landed on and slipped off us, but I couldn’t get a close look at what exactly they were, besides about the size of a potato chip and petal thin. Now, once again, all silky white.

When we finally reached the highest lip of the blast radius, we kept going until we could look down.

It was the most sublime, most disorienting landscape I had ever seen. It was completely different from within than through the Hiawatha’s display from overhead. Deep pits like ours followed overlapping, semicircular patterns, probably from bombing runs. Blue and yellow grasses and lichens of some sort capped the highest crest, and occasionally things that looked like stacks of succulent lilypads. Elsewhere, still higher towers rose; branching pinnacles like a witch’s in a fantasy book, mesas woven together out of a grove of other mesas. I could see one tooth on the crenellated horizon that by its rough shape might have been the Tuber Plug. I could see milkweed-fine strands of rain brushing it from flat clouds that moved lazily over it like robotic vacuum cleaners.

We waited again, to let Halation rest, and it was a good choice because in time Aqueduct heard a faint, low frequency overtone they told me was a signal to round up stragglers of a caravan that had left the area.

That particular overtone is only used by Ferrous Masks, Aqueduct informed me. Or people who have a Ferrous Mask vocalizer, or reverse engineered the vocal recognition from something that had access to the Network database. There are codes embedded in it so it’s probably real. But they’re probably ready for a fight.

Which side are they on? Are Ferrous Masks just like, a group?

Not just a Waltz like the Sunbites - they’re a large meta-group, with a lot of historical baggage, and the leaders of the anti-Adipose faction, at least from stuff I heard from my old leaders. Who didn’t like them very much. They’re… a lot of people blame them for the First Cataclysm, although we had a full planetary government then and everyone agreed to it. I think. Nobody knows which sets of records going around by the time the Network started cataloguing and authenticating are legitimate any more. But they believe it enough themselves to be pretty obviously committed to technological caution, at the same time as having a lot more of it in their own transmission networks than everyone else. Which makes it look like they’re hoarding from everyone else under the guise of ideological scruples.

Oh that’s not good. I mean I might be thinking from a human experience and perspective here, but that’s not a good set of starting conditions.

They do share just about everything they make that’s useful - under the conditions of good diplomatic relations with them and playing by some of their technological rules - so they have a wide alliance. I’d say of people who have an opinion on the war at all, about a third are with them. But the other two thirds have… well I think anyone who’s actually destroying ground here must be a pretty extreme interventionist. Or maybe that’s for psychological effect against them specifically.

The other two thirds? I reminded them.

Basically just think it’s insane to refuse a technology like the Adipose when we just lost the Network. Think the Adipose could be a better replacement for the Network. I think some people think it could even fix the planet? But I haven’t heard any of this firsthand.

I knew a bunch of this in outline already from my briefings, but I'd asked again just to see how much accounts lined up. The Ahasurunu had their own names for the meta-groups, for instance - I hadn’t heard “Ferrous Masks”, even though that was presumably who had invited us.

Didn’t the Adipose blow up everyone’s network?

Is that what you heard happened? You probably know more than me, but… it was part of one of the big anti- blocs, so that makes sense, but the story a lot of people know around here is that we were going to hold a planetary plebiscite on whether we’d permit Adipose construction - that part is true, I remember it - and the Network had agreed to abide by its results - I think it did but I’m not sure. So it was an inside job by its own bloc, to prevent it from defecting. Nobody knows, though, it’s not like anyone can get up there to do forensics.

Oh. I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising that on a planet where such a huge event had the potential to move so much public opinion, both sides had their own narratives about it. And in the absence of communications infrastructure, these narratives could develop in isolation, such that we wouldn’t even have been briefed properly on them.

But the Tuber Plug would have known if they had been considering a defection, presumably? I prodded at Halation to gauge if it made sense - if it was something we would have done. That kind of thing happened in the early days of the war, but by now that bloc would disconnect first as a matter of policy. If they tried an attack while they still had data mirrored it would be a huge risk. I don’t buy it.

We rolled through formations like if detergent froth had been frozen into place and the wind and water had worn overlapping topographic patterns into it, through slanted clearings of glass-green sunlight and cathedral shadow, incomprehensible echoes crossing around us. The natural channels narrowed and became more twisted and intricate as we followed Aqueduct’s sound, until I started to feel like I was back underground, or even in the Playscape.

Aqueduct had already been sending out their own subsonic messages by the time I spotted them leaping along the underside of an overhang. Their transport morph, smaller and considerably faster than the Sunbites’, had four corners with a head, a jumping leg, a gripping hand and a weapon hand at each, bodies interlocking in an intricate knot supporting a patterned fibre stretcher onto which several wounded bodies had been strapped. There were Gatherers riding behind it on ropes with their wings out, a buzzing cluster of Scouts ahead. As soon as they saw us a vanguard of two Gatherers latched into the rock and let the ropes stretch away from them.

They brandished their weapons, but Aqueduct sent a reassuring impulse through the Corpuscle, and an instruction for me to raise, then drop my guns. At least some things were universal.

Halation reformed in their default body in their bubble as the Corpuscle stopped close enough that they could climb down the jagged slope and inspect us. Up close I could see the eponymous “masks” - a bar of reddish ore softened and piled up like a cement, around the front ridge of their head and the inside edge of each eye-protrusion, almost like a pince-nez or a comedy robber mask. They had other presumably iron-based markings up and down their crests, and wide billows of fabric off their limbs.

“A Weir. You’re from Tuber Plug, then?”

“You know about us. Do you know how to get there?”

“I don’t know about you. Are you a prisoner or something? It’s the Adipose faction that have been bringing offworlders here willy-nilly.”

“I’m… new reinforcements. I’ve only been on this planet for an eleventh exponent. Assume I don’t know anything.” “What is that weapon?”

I grinned and lifted, bounced the PX4 in my hand. “Want a demonstration?”

I pointed it at a delicate-looking spur of rock hanging off the top of an outcropping behind us. I didn’t even drag Halation in to enhance my senses. I worried for a moment as my finger pulled whether I should have used the rifle, but even the pistol was enough to send hand-sized chips flying. The Gatherers doubled back.

“…directed energy? Does anybody still use that?”

“Mineral projectile.” I stepped out of the bubble and opened the cartridge to show them.

“What do you do with its waste?” the other asked, interjecting with clucking sounds I hadn’t heard any Towers make yet.

The Waltz had stopped up ahead, and when they determined that we were friendly as we said we were (but confiscated my guns) they wrapped two pairs of arms around each of us (I had folded the Corpuscle back up, they took that too, and let Halation flow back into my brain) and let the rubbery ropes pull them back, one anchoring grip in the ground at a time. They were wearing something skatelike on the palms of their lowermost arms as well that allowed them to zip almost as frictionlessly as us when they wanted to.

“It’s a cliche on my planet - and this might tell you some unflattering things about my planet - that when aliens land somewhere, they ask ‘take me to your leader’.”

“Makes enough sense. Our leader’s a sixteenth-exponent ahead, at the Listening Station.”

I couldn’t tell for sure if they meant time or space. But that gave me a good excuse to practice the exponents - we travelled with them about an hour and a half, maybe 80 miles…. Anyway I’m going to be using metric for the next little bit because it’s what the IIEF uses so you don’t get totally lost.

We came to a long, semicircular ridge of overhang, under which a cavern stretched some 800 metres back and another 300 overhead, meandering three times as long across, with marked tunnels vanishing everywhere into the darkness at the back. It was exposed to sunlight on one side but still mostly invisible from above. It was in fact the densest foliage I had seen - both above, where there were meadows and hedges of fiddlehead-curled grasses of similar shapes at widely varying sizes, and below, where the bright areas around the mouth were patched with separate plots of each size, deliberately maintained by a mix of Gatherers and Fabbers, as well as rings of fronds and fruiting bodies. Unlike the underground plants, these had a pastel palette of recognizable colours (although I didn’t see any more of the floating wind-things, whether those had been plant or animal or something else). Further back were clusters of tents and Towers milling between them, as many as the Internexus. They had been calling this place the “Listening Station”, but it looked at least as much like a refugee camp. The transport morph split off from us here, scuttling over to some sickbay where three or four similar transport morphs were lined up, while our guides passed most of the refugees with minimal interaction (about half seemed to be Ferrous Masks themselves) and when they reached a pit near the back marked with voluted metal stakes, started climbing down. Halation helped me climb myself, which seemed to impress them. There were carved, non-random handholds in the walls of the pit, which cut straight down as if a core had been removed, although many of them were too far apart for me.

The pit dropped at least another 60 metres down until it reached a widening chamber like a low slice of a cylinder, the centre sinking toward another narrow well, larger versions of the Sunbite leader’s tuning fork embedded in the ground all around its edges. With multiple pieces fit together they looked more precision-built, less artistic (in the sense of an Olympic archer’s bow as opposed to a medieval one) except for the complex, dreamcatcher-like arrangements of wires between their forks. They made a constant background ringing, to human ears, just sounded like an ambient track in a New Age store or museum exhibit. We had to wait for the “leader” to emerge from another tunnel.

They were a Fabber - enormous and ancient (although I wasn’t sure how I knew that part). Their limbs had a quartz or marble glitter that suggested they weren’t entirely made of their natural cartilage. Their thorax dragged along the ground like the body of a tank, with its own small supplementary limbs to help it move. Their masks covered more of their faces, extending a ways up their crests.

They had three heads.

Aqueduct tapped lightly on my hand. A real triple Aurifex, I’ve only seen in Phantasies…

Then they stood straight and silent. Halation extended over their hand and up to their head and I heard from their mind: They’re speaking through the ground.

Yet another language, of taps on the ground with their leadership instrument, completely inaudible to me.

They want the Weir to come forth and share directly.

I crossed the threshold of the skylight, the sickly Matrix pallor sloughed off my skin and replaced by Halation’s writhing rainbow, and grasped a proferred finger.

To my surprise, they recognized Halation.

We had heard you were coming to visit the Tuber Plug but overshot.

Yes. I ended up where my companion is from, and ricocheted.

Oh, on Algal Bloom? This was, apparently, the Meteorological convention for Earth. About another third of Ferrous Masks, Aqueduct estimated (though I was beginning to suspect this was as much a cultural convention as a real measure) were Meteorologists, and many more used their taxonomic conventions. I remembered for almost the first time since Halation had told me that Earth was known to the rest of the universe, just obscure. I thought its interoperable inhabitants hadn’t achieved interstellar travel yet.

I introduced them. There’s a force at Tuber Plug, and a small group at the Spinefish Internexus. I believe they will make extremely valuable reinforcements.

Withdraw. We must consider this.

We connected and withdrew, connected and withdrew, for minutes at a time. It was a bit of a respite from my usual repeating the same information over and over again - although I noted they hadn’t gone for the rituals of species or even group introduction first, like the Sunbites or the Internexus. I had barely even been noticed walking through the camp.

Finally they understood enough that I was able to ask my questions about what was going on up here.

This area - there wasn’t exactly a name for it, it had been known by the Network node that serviced it but since the bombing run had probably shifted somewhat to our provisional “East” - was known for having a high concentration of Ferrous Masks, surrounded by large forces of radicalized pro-Adipose groups described as “mobs” on three sides, as well as the Ribbons from above. Their ostensible primary target - which the “mobs” had said they would give up bombing if it was destroyed, but only one of three heads believed this - was the Listening Station, which had been moved five times since the Network collapsed. Listening Stations existed all over the planet, and were the most sophisticated sensing system besides the Network - they scoffed at the potential of Entangleweed or the idea of a hidden network bloc deep in the crust. They were capable of picking up mere sound from hundreds of miles away, in 360 degrees, and isolating the data with the help of powerful computation blocks (in the shared visualization they looked a lot like the ones Halation’s research base had used: mass-produced bricks of quantum-entangled lattice, some of the network blocs basically excrete them). The Listening Stations were of monumental importance, the heads insisted, worth sustaining bombardment and ecological damage and constant forced movement, because they were the only way to prevent someone from just building an Adipose node in secret. The global network of Listening Stations had isolated specific sonic signatures from the advanced Asymmetry Fields used in node construction, and could muster any fighting force of Ferrous Masks and their allies in the area to descend on a site with suicidal fervour. But already large areas of the foam had gone dark with Listening Stations destroyed (and some assumed compromised).

Our reinforcements in Tuber Plug and the Spinefish Internexus are at your service, if you can help us get in contact with them, Halation assured. We have vehicles that can get in the air - more consistently than the one you found us in - and probably fight that base the Ribbons have, especially if we know what it has.

I didn’t form a conflicting thought to add to the mix but Halation responded distinctly before me. I was slightly disturbed by the analogies to mass surveillance as I knew it - analogies? was there really any meaningful difference? - although it now seemed like an extrapolation of the logic of the war that should have been obvious, not only here but anywhere, if battle lines weren’t obviously drawn and all the enemy had to do was build a node - could a node be pushed back once it was built or was the Adipose simply too powerful? contained like in the Tuber Plug? could secret nodes already exist somewhere?

All we know is it almost certainly has an Asymmetry Field, but probably a very limited one - they don’t have access to any consistent sources of energy on this planet capable of supplying it, said one head, at the same time as the other reminded us: Although they have some sonar capabilities, the Listening Stations are one-way, their signals can’t be received at distance except by the finely tuned instruments of another Listening Station. But we can find the Spinefish Internexus easily.

Wait, can it transmit or receive radio signals?

The three heads conferred.

The ancient copper ones further down… maybe, if we Fabbed the right kind of transmitter…

The left head peeled itself off the main body, along with a full set of limbs and a narrower Fabber organ, to follow us as we climbed down the well in the centre of the room. The skylight narrowed rapidly above, thicker and purer darkness folding over us from the sides, handholds lit by phosphorescent markings. This descent was twice as long; we stopped at another ring, then descended further.

“This is just like in Love’s Loss Listening!” Aqueduct whistled out loud in a kind of oral cursive. “When Edgevine goes down the abandoned shaft to listen to Riversalt for days at a time without anyone disturbing them, and all you hear for a tenth-exponent is animals moving around and these fragments of conversation between characters that are never named, all in real time. But the Phantasy includes this loop of the the darkness and the lights in the walls overlaid with the stars…”

“Is it just you, or is the rest of the planet this into slow cinema?”

“I remember that one," the Aurifex mused. "The frame story was pretentious sentimentality for people who wouldn’t be interested in what a real listening station does, but it captured the kinds of things one hears down here 3/7 of the time, the way it washes over you.”

“What did you do with these before the Adipose War?”

“Rescues, in areas the Network couldn’t reach. Geological monitoring - we fed it information. We didn’t really use them to listen for lost lovers and things like that. There’s a cartridge of the old privacy rules if you’re curious.”

I felt silly and didn’t pry further.

(How long was I going to keep saying I and not we? We should be the protagonists of this story, shouldn’t we? I may write these on my own when Halation’s in their default body, for a certain privacy or clarity of voice, an ability to form feelings about them separately, but I’m not alone in my body or even my mind making most of these decisions, these judgments. They’ve already started to imprint certain parts of me, the pronoun we’re still not really sure about…)

We spent about an hour trying to figure out how to Fab a basic radio transmitter/receiver and attach it to a weathered copper fork that looked like a single twisted wire, in the light of horseshoe-shaped fluorescents on the walls. I leaned against the processing block, like a giant salt cube, and felt a half-comforting half-trepidatious tingling from Halation as she ran along it, connecting with the surface of its information flows. In fact, I realized we had made contact with the Azoth Denpa frequency when the Clamp network opened a backdoor on the block. If surveillance was already the hand we were being dealt - we agreed not to alert our hosts, unless we thought they would need it.

This meant I could make two calls simultaneously: one on the Denpa command channel, with Beek, Flagg, Bennett-Fog and the rest, and one through Halation with Rho Aias on the secret Clamp network. As much as I would rather hear Jax’s voice than any of the jarheads’, we partitioned our minds so as not to overwhelm each other. I’d get the memory either way (say miss you for me). In any case, first I needed to grill the Aurifex’s left head, to make sure I had all the information I would need.

“This is going smoother than you could ever have guessed,” Beek bragged when I finally got through. “Their healing tech is so good there’s barely any casualties - although that means some of them wanna just brawl forever unless you get a couple good headshots in to show them who’s boss. We’re taking an encrypted registry of people’s alignment in the war as we let them back in, so we can estimate demographics and break up any potentially hostile gatherings.”

“They’re letting you do that?”

“The ones who come back. Sounds like a bunch of them wanted to do something like this already and couldn’t figure out how to coordinate it. Military discipline, baby.”

“Dammit, that only works as long as they really believe we’re neutral, and we might have to start moving soon. I’ve got an allied force up here that needs backup.”

“Well, we could always pretend to be different factions.”

I had thought about something like this in the long run, but in the current balance of power that would give him too much leeway to act as a different faction. Thankfully Bennett-Fog anticipated and backed me up: “That’s not a good idea for an already incredibly diverse and fractious force in an incredibly chaotic tactical and- actual landscape. Friendly fire and communication gaps could escalate very fast. Is there a neutral pretext for backing up the group you’ve found?”

“It’s… hard. They’ve got a kind of surveillance station, and I don’t think they’ve used it for offensive operations here but it’s supposed to, if anyone starts trying to build a node. On the other hand their enemies are destroying the ground, which is a big taboo under normal circumstances. The pro-Adipose mobs and the bombing itself cleared out a bunch of other neutral and pro-Adipose groups that were opposed to it, so we could theoretically align ourselves with them but they’re probably hundreds of miles away by now.”

“If we take over or align with the remnants of the Entangleweed network,” Flagg suggested, “which I’ve been trying to patch things up with - and I’ve been mapping it out with probing signals, right now home base is readying expeditions to four more Internexes, at least one of which has been taken over already, it was apparently a coordinated thing that we just happened to get in the way of - we could make the case for restoring a legitimate governing structure. Remember we were briefed that normally planetwide geoengineering decisions, like connecting to the Adipose, were made by a direct democratic deliberation process through the Network. Now they can’t do that, but if we could get some kind of planet-unifying network up again…”

“The Adipose would win, by majority vote. Or what are you seeing in your demographics?”

“Hmmm. Yeah, I guess we… don’t want that?” He sounded unconvinced. American soldier, democracy; I felt a twinge of nostalgia, remembering the faint purity of believing in that, even if not at the tip of a bayonet, which we were bringing anyway. “It’s about 4 to 3, with another 3 neutral or with Entangleweed.” That was less outnumbered than the Ferrous Masks had made it sound, but maybe the bombing had polarized people in this area. “I thought there were a whole bunch of extra processes to make sure it didn’t go the way it did last time.”

“Yeah, I heard they tried that already.” There was a slight quaver in my voice I hoped nobody noticed - I myself hoped I was imagining. “Would it have gone the same way before, or did the Network collapse shift things?”

“Normally it would have involved years of scientific modelling and consensus groups. They barely got into the first stages.” At least Bennett-Fog had been keeping up with this. “Do it now, it’ll just be a dumb referendum that leaves more people than you can avoid dealing with pissed off either way.”

“Do we know if the Network… had committed to abiding by the results? Even if it meant going against its bloc?”

“Well, it sounds like our hosts had their own negotiations going about that, but they’re classified to me at least, you’d have to come back and see if you can wrangle them out of somebody.” That sounded both perfectly reasonable and maddeningly unconvincing. “The Ferrous Masks also historically claim a veto, but it’s never been tested in practice.”

“Forget all this, it’s obviously impossible to get a physical landline network all around a sponge three times the size of Earth. Fucking think about it for five seconds,” Beek growled. “I’ve fought in caves before, unlike some of you, albeit nowhere near on the level of this clusterfuck. But we’ll take five and lose three we moved on from by the time we get shit set up. Do you want a real Forever War?”

“I hope I don’t need to emphasize how self-evidently right he is,” Bennett-Fog sniffed.

“What we need is an overwhelming show of force. Commander Lillywhite, what would you estimate is the radius of those bombs they’re dropping?”

“At most 100m. And actual rock penetration only about a dozen. The fungus the Sunbites were using was actually way more powerful.”

“And we’ve got MOABs at home.” I could hear Beek grinning through the phone. “Do you have coordinates for these enemy forces?”

“Right now I think we should focus on the aerial enemy, they’re widely unpopular and we’re the only ones who touch them. They’re actually a whole other species, from another planet. But their base has an Asymmetry Field, so we’d need to be able to get one of ours in the air. They probably don’t have much in the way of air defenses besides that - the aliens actually make the bombs biologically. In the meantime a small anti-aircraft defense would probably do a lot against the Ribbons - sorry that’s the bomber aliens, they look like Gyarados.”

“Can’t wait to fill out my Pokedex here,” Zach Flagg said, and laughed nervously.

“Edison Lens scientific division and the Weirs have been discussing fitting Halation’s Inchworm Drive with an aircraft body for a while now, so let’s sit down and look over blueprints and you can compare with what you’ve seen.”

“I only saw it for a few seconds. But I don’t think they have any kind of air superiority that would make sending up a recon drone a bigger risk than anything we’ve already done. If we end up shooting anything down in the meantime, we’re almost certainly going to attract ground forces to our location, so we’ll need some regular infantry here. We aren’t getting overstretched, are we? What’s the strategic value of the Internexes right now?”

“Resources, dummy. And if you wanna start calling up the rolls we’re taking of potential anti-Adipose partisans, manpower. Nobody’s doing this systematically yet and I’m already arming and training avowed neutrals for security right here. Your guys are dealing with what, a lynch mob? We could whip up a counter-mob with everyone on our side in this sector of the underground. People they don’t even know are here. Also, more transport morphs.”

“So order of operations,” Bennett-Fog focused us. “Get anti-aircraft weapons and a handful of ground backup just in case to Leona and the FMs. We got two transport morphs already from the old allies - they’re a FM group, actually, does the group you’re with know Rusty Moon?” Rusty Moon was who the Aurifex had assumed we were with as soon as we’d mentioned Tuber Plug; they were “extremists” the Listening Stations and Meteorological associations dissociated themselves from so they could take actions they wouldn’t publicly. “Each of those can take a Vulcan, four men -”

“Might be good to have Weirs down here too if any are willing to volunteer. Not for combat unless absolutely needed, but there’s computers and stuff they can interface with.”

“Noted. So let’s say that’ll take as long as getting to the Internexus did - and in the same time, we’re going to try and take one to three more. And in the same interval, we send a spy drone to check out this floating station you saw. Sometime after that, once they’re taken depending on the state of training belowground and urgency aboveground, you guys engage the bombers, the mobs start to move, and we mobilize our forces to ambush them from beneath. And last but not least, once we’ve finished our secret weapon, we launch it at the base.”

“And then once the bombers know our name,” Beek added, champing death between his teeth like a bit, “we promise massive territorial retaliation adjacent to anywhere they’re bombing - anywhere on this continent - if they don’t withdraw, no ground combat necessary.”

The Aurifex component climbed the tunnel above me, and reached down the bottom hand of its body to tap in tap language on my head. Halation wasn’t invited at contact, and retreated behind their partition. I noticed you hesitated earlier.

I realized I shouldn’t have. I returned what I found I remembered, from having it in my head so long, of the tapping language. You and your symbiotes are… so integrated. My planet doesn’t really have a culture of it, we’re very individualistic even for a parasocial species, but I’m hoping as we keep making decisions together…

I don’t think your bond is weak. Maybe your will to fight - you’re here at least partly to keep it in check, after all?

I’m new to this, it’s something I always avoided because on my planet it was usually so… bad. But it sounds like it is here too and we especially - I take this personally seriously - have a responsibility to stand up against… ethnic cleansing.

Ethnic cleansing? They had no translation of the concept. Even though it was happening to them.

“I…” I used to fantasize about going on these kinds of anthropological tangents, explaining features of the world around me like it was. Like I said. A lore wiki. Now I was just getting sick of it. Halation, I think the awkward part is over, can we try to share something complex and intuitive.

They stopped on the stairs for over a minute at some of the mental images that were hazy to me as if they had rotted in my mind. Things like this have happened here, but we don’t associate them automatically with the mere fact of forced population movement. At least since the acts of our curse-parents (a concept that would expand as widely in me; it was related to the idea of debts of violence we had observed so gruesomely firsthand) we all move anyway, and the planet is big enough to hide. Like healing when we are injured, moving when we are attacked is neither dishonourable nor onerous; it is the natural course of action. And so we have largely avoided living with anyone we dislike, and besides the Network, our code has prevented technologies that would affect the whole planet. By the standards of the universe this is true of Towers, but by the standards of your people - savannah predators stuck on a tiny island - this must be true of the universe. And this, you must understand, is why no matter how uncomfortable our methods, we must oppose the Adipose. Because in a space without space, a space where any distance can be reached from any distance, this will no longer be possible. War has not possessed the universe as it possessed your planet, even now - but connected by the Adipose, it will. It will shrink to the point that battles can be fought for all of it.

I nodded, with a lump in my throat. Stopping the Adipose from landing here, then, would be like stopping the boat that set my ancestors on the shores of my country, everywhere. Even if for Earth, or for Towers, I was like them.

The contact, the communication, none of those are evil for us. None of them imply the impossibility of independence. The Adipose does.

I understand. What would you have done if the Network had agreed to it?

The Network was never going to agree to it. It had multiple responsibilities between which it was torn - to its people, to its bloc, to protecting this planet from offworlders who could have imported nodes or targeted its citizens. It was fulfilling its representative duties as a symbiote and stalling for time when it was assassinated, trying to find a mutually satisfying solution, much as your Tuber Plug is doing in its own way. Everyone in the computational polities, however, could simulate how its decision algorithm would resolve in the last instance. The Adipose alliance took it out before it could make a final decision and take stronger measures - cutting off travel from pro-Adipose worlds, intercepting messages - taking this planet out of the whole hideous game.

I exhaled, not sure if I needed to say anything. I could feel something of the dead weight of billions of immovable decisions pressing down from the atmosphere above us - even though that mass was gone.

The next few days were for settling in with the Ferrous Masks as much as possible. Planning a proper species introduction. Practicing new combat techniques with Halation, getting the hang of the local weapons and showing a select group of Gatherers handpicked by the Aurifex how to use guns. Getting to know the various groups rotating in and out of the sickbay. Many didn’t stay here for long - they just got healed, collected supplies, and went straight back to their bombed-out ranges to rebuild, or headed somewhere else. There were an astonishing range of divination rituals for deciding which direction to go, even when only one “cardinal” direction was considered broadly safe - they rarely even thought in terms of this, and had a whole navigational language involving ratios of size/number/distance of openings and perspective cones.

I did, however, for the first time here, witness a number of funerals.

We did too, Jax had mentioned. They take apart the body, like a lobster at a restaurant. They give the internal and external skeletons to Fabbers, and make things - these days, mostly weapons. They gather the liquidy insides into a soluble sphere and then they… lower it… on a fishing line… into the river.

They didn’t do that here - the fishing ritual was probably less important. They carried it in a procession that wound between the different plots, sprinkling a bit on each plot the deceased had eaten from, or that represented its community in an analogical layout. They poured some into the small artificial stream that looped through the encampment, and burned the remainder to the sky.

At night it felt like the bottom of the ocean. Even when it rained, the thin atmosphere was rarely fully overcast. And there was nothing resembling the light pollution on Earth; but I still hadn’t seen a full sky of stars. Always thin layers, far apart, creating subtle interplays of colour and light I could stare into for long enough to feel guilty during the day, casting a soft chainmail of dapples over the grasses. (I found a few of the little round things from earlier among them, ran over to Aqueduct to check if they were the same - they had a ring of pseudopods like a millipede around their rim on one side, curling and uncurling weakly. Their white petal-parachutes had been rotted, or torn. A few Gatherers conducted a small funeral for them too, cremating them with a fingertip-mounted acetylene torch.)

I lay in a hammock suspended from the underside of the cliff, as most of the Towers did. Rain slanted almost directly under me in the wind, cut off by the overhang, and watered the plots of foliage. I watched whichever of three night-time moons came into narrow, zigzag, torn-paper gap between the overhang and the meandering horizon at a time - one oblong, one shaped a bit like a puzzle piece, one round and darker than the others. Maybe that was the “Rusty Moon”. No, it’s a phenomenon under specific atmospheric conditions, Aqueduct corrected from their hammock next to mine. It can happen to any of them. One, two, three nights I waited for those conditions to appear.

I’ve always liked hammocks. Some of my happiest childhood memories were from when we’d had one set up on the big tree in the backyard - I’d wrapped myself in it like a cocoon, pictured its tie dye around my legs as a dress - until it had been removed as punishment over some fight I didn’t remember in five months. And the texture of the materials here, as always, was a whole new sensory pleasure; a plastic smoothness and stiffness at the same time as the give and variation of hand knitting. But the tingling on my skin still kept me up when I slept, which was in shifts here anyway.

I had rolled over, watching dull coppery flakes of moonlight cross and overlap on the stream, when I saw something round and slick bobbing down it. Several somethings, like a passel of reptile eggs.

I wasn’t the only person who noticed. There were whispers among the hammocks, watchers at stations along the stream. I had a sinking feeling what it was early on that I might have acted on, but there were so many things I didn’t recognize in this ecology. Later I was told the bombs had been covered in grass and the shells of a ubiquitous pest species that for convenient visualization I will simply call turtle-beetles, so they weren’t recognized by the guards, who reached out with their staffs to fish them out of the water -

As limbs and chips of stone and charred grasses flew as high as my bunk, as Halation surged through every vein of my body and shot our brain full of adrenaline and organic nootropics, and reached for the rock above us, the overhang shook.

Tremors proceeded from one side to another; weakly connected pieces showered below. A section of the lip cracked from one end to the other, and fell across both ends of the stream.

From massive vocalizers set up around the projecting back wall of the shelter, a sound I couldn’t hear but loud enough I could feel - everyone was awake and moving at once.

We fell and landed on our feet like a cat a few metres from where a battle morph was forming over the pit of the Listening Station, while some Towers I’d seen huddling with groups of fighters crawled down it. Others - the fighters themselves, and transport morphs - scattered towards the opening.

And were met by the flailing carapaces of Ribbons.

One bullying its way in, rearing and shaking like a dragon parade float in the left of the entrance was enough to overturn a transport morph and tear half a dozen tents out of the ground. A volley of acid packets hit its shell and left spots of glowing, fizzling tarnish. It swept further in and barrelled through the line that had bombarded it in a clean arc, leaving explosions in its wake. The weight of seven, eight, nine Gatherers climbing on top of it, trying to jam the points of their staffs into the gaps between its plates or through its wings, slowed it down even as it twisted in a spiral throwing them into the walls and smouldering grasses. It was almost still for a second, turning. I was more focused, on solid ground, and more furious. I slept with the SCAR-L. I opened fire.

Most of the bullets ricocheted off - in fact, the acid packets seemed to be doing more damage, still corroding in some places - but one landed between its plates and a jet of golden blood darted out. It writhed and reared back and round of Geoplaque packets pinned it to the wall, followed by a more powerful acid I hadn’t seen in drill-like cones that ate straight through. One after another after another whistled over my head from a coordinated arc of slingers like I hadn’t seen on this planet so far, until even its moustache seemed to be melting off its face and I turned back towards the formation where another - two, three - were coming up behind them.

Halation powered a dash between the ranks, slamming my left hand straight into the centre Ribbon’s face, the SCAR-L angled one-handed beneath (no, I obviously couldn’t pull that off without her and my right arm was going to kill me for it the next morning), enveloping its mind enough to freeze it (maybe even, if we could reach past reflex, freeze its wings). We were - Halation was - hit by a shock of - recognition. The mental attack almost backfired - we didn’t recognize them, but somehow, from a contact so immediate it shouldn’t have even transferred any information… Then the colossus - another colossus, the one guarding the pit was still at its station, launching its own ranged attacks on either side from semicircles of combined slings - stepped over the battle line and slammed into them, grabbing them at two, three joints and twisting them like a towel. The Ribbon responded with its own twisting maneuver and broke loose, only to be pushed back by several blows from a pair of massive notched stone blades I had taken for stelae embedded in the ground. As it fell back - its companions avoiding fire as much as they could while pushing the lines back by rolling bombs into the camp, which daring Gatherers intercepted with the nets of slings and lobbed back at them - the enemy offworlder started singing in Ahasurunu.

Its voice was to an Ahasurunu’s as a church organ recorded through a hissing phonograph on stereo was to a Casio on an organ preset. The offworlder is here! it whistled as it rolled into the air and rolled a new bomb out of its belly to drop on the colossus. And if anyone wants a surprise trophy, so is Halation, the Orator of Death!

The fire was now overpowering the “water” - someone was hoisting a bulky hose out of the Listening Station pit, but steam was billowing off the stream’s surface. The lines facing the Ribbons were all but cut off from those behind, and everyone trying to escape was crowding underground, folding up huge tents into book-sized squares they could tuck into their clothes. I had no idea where Aqueduct was - hopefully they had gone underground and abandoned me. And amidst all this I stood still for almost a whole second before Halation - orator of what? - pushed me into motion.

We ran up the colossus’ leg and leapt off. The colossus had swept the bomb aside with one of its catcher’s mitt multi-slings but, aiming for one of the other Ribbons, hit the still shaking overhang and knocked a huge chunk loose. We threw something at it that we’d thought to add to our armament soon after we got here - the bungeelike cord the Gatherers who had brought us back here had used. One end of it was wrapped around the Corpuscle in its compressed form. It sprang open in midair and knocked the rock towards the Ribbon - rather than using part of my body, like Bashtaev’s finger, Halation had fit to the grooves in the Corpuscle, then connected us along the length of the cord. I was glad we’d had a few days to train this formation (and as many limit-pushing experiences as we’d had already) - the totally separate mental-sensory interface of a Corpuscle was much more complicated to coordinate with than even a virtually extended body-part; Bashtaev probably couldn’t have managed it in the time they’d had to interface with the traitor. The Ribbon demolished the rock with a bomb as the Corpuscle flipped and spun on and over its flying fragments, onto the Ribbon’s head and around its body. Down its length one way, then leaping to the other side of its wave form, around, folding it up on itself, then over… and as the cord pulled me through the air right up to its faceless, moustached head as it fell, Halation sent mathematized Ahasurunu along every nerve that touched the restraints: Who are you and how do you know me?

Who are you kidding? Who in this war doesn’t know you? it sang out loud as she tried to creep to its brain without breaking under the strain. Besides this invasive species you’ve brought from a Code Francium planet. Even for you, warmonger, that’s madn- The colossus wedged a giant staff into its second segment between two plates and levered it like cracking open a lobster.

It had gone for the segment with the explosive-excreting organ first; strings of small guttering explosions tore the exposed flesh as the accumulated chemicals mixed as they spilled from their torn sacs, until a final smoky crack ripped its body in half. In that time the colossus had done the same with the head.

A swarm of Scouts had pinned the other two Ribbons with weapons like tasers.

Already well out from under what remained of the overhang, a pile of golden globules fell straight from above and incinerated the colossus, scorching my back.

A flood of viscera, brains and nerves and torn tracts and digestive juices and a fluid like hot corn syrup spilled out over me and mingled with Halation, along with it the final soup of images and words and self in its dying nervous system:

A research station in orbit around the planet Waterfall, receiving transmissions from a survivor of an attack by their own side they had watched in horror, hurtling through space in a microship.

Their own side - it wasn’t, was it? It was just their patron network bloc - they were doing research that would benefit everyone, whatever everyone was left after all this was over - just like that research colony on Contemplation, though not even on the Adipose directly, more fundamentals of cosmic computation that might help the rest of the galaxy understand what it actually did-

Of course they needed the patronage of a network bloc that could spare more computing power than you could safely house on a planet. Of course with the Meteorological synods all locking down research that had once been hoped to establish the very fundamentals of their beliefs, the source of agency at the level of reality itself, and the only blocs willing to support such dangerous research were the ones that had backed the Adipose in the first place. Even the kinds of work being done under the auspices of places like the destroyed colony or the hidden laboratories on Towers were too constrained.

They gathered around the packet receiver to listen to the survivor’s transmission.

It declared the total, universal culpability of their bloc. It called for the bloc to be removed from Waterfall in all its instances, if not voluntarily, then by force. That any such instance was a threat to any anti-Adipose activity nearby, however peaceful; that the planet as a whole, and its Meteorological communities, could no longer risk remaining neutral. That the warm relationships many enjoyed with symbiotes from Contemplation called for their solidarity now.

That wasn’t how it worked. The instances on Waterfall and Contemplation couldn’t even communicate without long-distance packets (like they could if they had the Adipose), they knew each others’ decisions at months’ delays, they were practically different minds. Sure, they had to equilibrate eventually, but they would see reason…

The orator - who had never been to Waterfall - had been invited to visit the research station. Now they had to shut it down.

The anti-Adipose groups they had been collaborating with climbed the space elevator en masse and stormed the station, taking the move as a declaration of allegiance. By the time they were done they had smashed so many processing blocks with hammers and industrial chemicals they couldn’t have invited her back if they tried.

If I hadn’t already thought of it Caroline Bennett-Fog would have beaten it into me in our first week of training but I wasn’t an idiot: of course I had wondered, how did I know that I had access to all of Halation’s mind, which I didn’t, any more than she had access to all of mine, we had our respective privacies, like this journal, this was a standard condition of Weir symbiosis, even though I had access to more of it than I’d ever had to any human, even you Mai (I address this to you now out of desperation). How did I know that Halation didn’t control everything she showed me, that I had been seeing a movie the entire time, that there wasn’t a whole other mind with a whole other worldview and real set of information about everything in the galaxy behind the curtain. How did I even know my own judgment of this knowledge, that I hadn’t been rewritten from scratch the moment Halation entered my brain, my utility function twisted out of my own recognition.

The answer was just trust - the same as it would be with another human, the same as it was with reality. The same way I knew I wasn’t being fed all my knowledge of Earth in the first place by a Cartesian demon - even though I had just invited one into my head. (Mab had said: Descartes’ horror was always not solipsism but that something else could be in there with you, deceiving you.) Halation understood this trust better than anyone I’d ever met, her culture understood it better. Her memories were too thick and coherent to be invented to fool me.

But I knew I always had something in there with me in the first place, and Halation did too. Culture, upbringing, trauma, the “unconscious”. (Mab had said: And only a fragile scrote would feel terror at that either.) Nothing had to be false about the experiences I’d shared with Halation for this to be true; we even remembered some of the words of the speech. Halation hadn’t advised people to go to war, she had warned them it was already there. News of worse battles, worse massacres had already reached her from the surface of Waterfall. And yet… she had never been there.

Halation’s mind, suffusing mine, was quiet, blown out, grieving yet guiltless.

Above us, their circle formation wheeled, and another voice wailed out in Ahasurunu that sounded electrified, distorted, feedbacked: The third nest-sibling I have lost on this aborted planet because of you, Orator of Death! And for all I know you really didn’t imagine it, but it wouldn’t have bothered you either, admit it. You would never have visited Waterfall, that would be vulgar, and indulging a predation fantasy would hardly be Meteorological… Us predator-descended sapients, even if we don’t eat flesh ourselves, endure so much suspicion from you neutral arbiters of all possible existence, while these Algal Blooms you’ve dragged out here are exactly what we are in your most psychotic fantasies. A superpredator specialized into total domination of its entire ecosystem, to the point that they’ve turned the same technologies on each other, and now us as well…! Don’t pretend that planet hasn’t been a horror story of sapient development researchers for fifteenth-exponents, that the synods haven’t blocked requests for an ecoremediation contact mission twice because they were scared of being blown up with atoms.

The bombs rained down around us, bigger ones, the ground buckled under us and we slid down a broken rib of stone into a boiling pot of rubble - I pulled the Corpuscle back to me and myself back into it, Halation retreating into a black hole of shame in my throat with enough peripheral functions to pilot it up and over and through and between, where had she learned any of this in a single spaceship for so long anyway, it had dodged space interceptors but that was mostly a matter of calculating and waiting, it had training sims but what she had learned was the absolute plasticity of her neurons in an aloneness with nothing for them to cluster around, a hollow and general will.

The bombers followed us, destroying in front of us every time we zigzagged - and eventually stopped.

It was a biological process. They had to be exhausting themselves. Of course their runs were limited.

Then we heard the thunder of the anti-aircraft guns.