When Dorja first laid eyes on Wyrmdov, her instinct was to turn off Veringulf’s drives and look around for the Brood. The giant serpent with its decayed wings was curled around the moon of Mago like a creature protecting its egg. Its immense shadow fell over the pocked surface of that fell-dark moon, moving slowly as the serpent continued to orbit. Its body glowed red and green in large paths as wide as continents. Winks of light in the space around it made it look like fireflies were dancing around its body, but it was only the flashes of exhaust ports as ships moved all around it, docking with any of a thousand ports that stuck out of the serpent’s flesh like pins in a pincushion.
“Dorja has seen many things,” she whispered, gazing out the forward viewport. “But her eyes have never seen such a thing. Her eyes must be lying to her. This cannot be real.”
“Your eyes aren’t lying,” said Kirek, buckling into the copilot’s seat next to her. “That you see there is Wyrmdov, my good lady, just as I described it to you. No other place like it in all the Kingdom. A city filled with refugees, all of them fleeing the Doom.”
“A city? On the back of that thing?”
“Yes, and many sublevels, too. Subcutaneous levels, that is. Beneath the scales and flesh itself. It’s called a World Serpent, the largest kind of wyrm. It’s not dead, but it was found dying by the people who founded the city, the ones who put up the first domes. It has lots of nutritious meat that’s still being mined even as the scales are being pried off and used for building homes, roads, all sorts of things. And there’s as much water in it than in the ice caps of a Class-III terraformable planet, maybe even more so.”
Dorja watched from the pilot’s seat as the World Serpent continued to turn, revealing more contours, more facets to the city growing like a tumor on its back, with many offshoots like rivers and canals. She gasped. There was a horrific gaping wound in its midsection, across which tube bridges had been built, and when she zoomed in on her cams she saw citizens traversing the canyon. She used Veringulf’s sensors to get more readings, and zoomed in further and see more detail.
“What gave it that wound?” she asked in wonderment.
“That deadly blow came from a battle with a broodling, most people figure,” Kirek shrugged.
Dorja sat there taking it all in. She looked at the moon, then down at the planet it orbited. The planet was called Porhl, and it was a lifeless rock covered in red regolith. Now that she was close to a habitable city, Veringulf’s computer could connect to the local grid, and was able to look for information on Porhl. According to the Visitor’s Directory, massive dust storms often raced across a mountainous landscape filled with the relics of old starships, none of them human-made. Half the planet was also covered in trash, space junk, toxic waste. It seemed it had been used as a dumping ground for some long-dead civilization.
She looked back at Mago and the World Serpent encircling it. She moved her cameras to examine the snub-nosed head of the creature. Its huge face was missing an eye, and the other was closed. It had several large gashes across its scaly nose, with its massive scale-plates ripped free and orbiting its head. Its teeth were exposed in a lipless grin, almost all of them shattered or cracked, the fragments orbiting its head. Its wings, which Kirek went on to explain had once captured solar winds that gently pushed the monster through the void, were torn and full of holes. They didn’t move. All in all, the World Serpent appeared to be a dead snake trapped in amber. Or else roadkill.
Dorja pulled up a holopane and began reading up on the history of Wyrmdov. She was so engrossed that she almost missed the hail that came over comms. “Incoming ship,” said a static-filled voice. Male, emotionless, curt. “This is Wyrmdov Defense Fleet. You are broadcasting as an Agamorrtek-class ship, designated Veringulf-81/a Epsilon-C322-91. Please confirm and state your business.”
A weeping hand touched the button. “Verify Veringulf. We seek to dock at Wyrmdov.”
“Are you part of the Itinerant Fleet?”
“No, we are not merchants.”
“Your business?”
“We are refugees from Herenov.”
A moment of silence. Then, “Herenov? Refugees?”
“Yes. It fell to the Brood.”
“We’re aware.”
“You are?” Dorja was surprised by this. “How? Did others make it here?”
“A single freighter, but it didn’t stay. It moved deeper into the sector. Not sure where it went. Can you confirm Herenov did not survive?”
“Does anything survive the Brood?”
“Broadcast your ship’s manifest.” The man sounded overly officious, didn’t seem to care much at all that they’d brought more Doom survivors.
“Sending manifest now,” Dorja said.
Another pause. Dorja imagined the owner of the voice was conferring with a commanding officer, probably dealing with this new information. If Herenov was truly gone, they might expect more refugees here soon. That could cause them trouble, strain their resources. “Are you certain Herenov is gone?” another voice said. Probably the commanding officer.
“Yes,” she said. “At least, when we left, the moons were completely obliterated.”
“I see. Our condolences. Do you bring criminals with you?”
“No. Just a family. With children,” she stressed.
“Is there disease among you?”
“No. At least, none that show.”
“You require a vector to a docking port?”
“Yes, please.”
A minute crawled by, then the first speaker said, “You are cleared for Stack Twelve, Port Seven, up along the Headward Docks. Do you know what that is?”
Dorja started to say no, but Kirek muttered, “It means one of the ports up near the World Serpent’s head.”
“Oh.” She tapped the button. “Yes, we understand.”
“I’m sending you the necessary password for the dock door,” said the voice. “When you receive the next hail, you will be sent the handshake protocols to slave your ship’s pilot controls to Air Traffic Control. Make sure your AI is set to allow it.”
“Of course. And thank you.”
“No problem. That’s an escort ship coming up behind you. Take care, Veringulf, and welcome to Wyrmdov.”
* * *
The manta-ray-shaped escort ship, Dorja suspected, was not required for safety or expediency. It was there to make sure they were who they said they were, and to make sure they went where they were told. She set Veringulf’s AI to follow the prescribed vector and to allow itself to be slaved to the auto-landing computer of the local grid. It took them an hour at quarter-burn to match the speed of the dying leviathan’s head. They passed through a thin debris field of space stations and dead satellites and random dust, and as they got closer, the scales and contours of the city down below grew in scope and detail. The domes over each section of the city glittered when they came around into the sun, revealing a complex weave of buildings and bridges made out of scale-plate.
“Many of the girders are large strips of bone, harvested from the sublevels,” Kirek explained. “And by sublevels, I mean the tunnels dug into the World Serpent’s gut.”
Dorja went through her breathing exercises, filling her belly and weeping-hands with chi as she stared in wonderment at the size of the operation. She saw huge clouds of gray dust being vented from the sides of the World Serpent. She imagined that was noxious fumes from factories.
“And you said this great creature is still in its death throes? Dying?”
Kirek checked heat levels of the reverse-burn thrusters. Nodded to Dorja. “That’s right. The first settlers were gun-runners, I heard. Just outlaws on the run. But soon they attracted traveling merchants. Groups like the Itinerant Fleet come through here all the time, trading, selling, bartering. This place picked up over the last couple hundred years, developed its own architecture, its own culture. Hells, it even has its own genre of music—they call it glitter-rock g’inth. G-rock for short. I’ve never heard it, but apparently it’s spreading throughout Saito Sector.”
Veringulf mated with a docking claw, which reeled them in and attached their airlock to a long plastic tube that connected to one of those “needles” that jutted out of the World Serpent’s body. Dorja went to find Turtle, and sent Kirek to inform the Kennisons that they had arrived. Turtle was in her room, playing with a set of marbles and cards in a game that Joshua had taught her. The game was called Load, and it had been popular with kids on a world called Zatistroffi-II.
“Turtle,” she said.
The girl jumped, startled.
“It’s time to go.”
“Do I have to leave the ship?” the girl said.
Dorja shook her head. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
Dorja nodded. She thought to hug the child, or show any level of affection that Dorja’s own mother had shown her. That’s what she needs right now. A mother. Her weeping-hands fidgeted. She took one step forward, and thought she detected Turtle shrink away slightly. It’s this place. She knows we’ve come to the place where the Hekkites brought Senjelica. She’s nervous. Dorja stepped back from her. “Then you don’t have to go,” she said.
Turtle went back to playing her cards on the floor, tossing out a marble to try and hit one of them. Dorja thought again that it might be appropriate to hug the girl, but she knew that that was also partly selfish of her, for she wanted to reestablish the trust. Turtle didn’t need it right now. Dorja wanted it. It would be wrong to force Turtle to give affection.
Still, during this trip, it had been good to know someone’s trust again…
“Make sure you eat,” she said. “And don’t forget your lessons before bed. Train Form One first. Dorja will test you tomorrow.”
Turtle gave only a fractional nod. Flicked another marble.
Dorja took a light travel bag and her glaive and walked to the airlock, where she met Kirek and the Kennisons. The family all gave her cautious looks, but said nothing to her. Won’t they be happy to be rid of Dorja the Blade? she thought.
“What about Turtle?” asked Kirek, grunting as he hauled his own knapsack over his shoulder.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Dorja shook her head. “She’s not coming.”
He gave a doubtful look. “You’re leaving her all alone? On a ship?”
“Dorja will not make her go. Not yet. Eventually Turtle will need to go down below so that a doctor can look her over. But she will be safe here for now. Dorja told the AI to go on lockdown once we leave, and the ship will not open again unless Dorja returns.”
“What if you don’t come back?” Kirek said. When Dorja looked at him, he shrugged. “I’m only asking. What if something…happens to you out there?”
“If Dorja isn’t back in a daycycle, Veringulf’s AI has instructions to inform local authorities of the girl and her needs.”
Kirek nodded, but he still looked unsure.
Once the airlock had finished pressurizing, the door slid to one side, screeching on old rotting mechanisms, and both Dorja and her guests stepped out into a steel turbolift, which had windows on all sides allowing them to view their descent to the dome below. The door behind them moaned shut and the lift went down through the transparent tube. Free of Veringulf’s well-drive, which also produced a sphere of artificial gravity, they were now exposed to the relatively lighter gravitational pull of the World Serpent and its spin.
Down they went, passing small frigates floating past, some of which were on their way to their own docking ports. Halfway down, they came to a center station where they could get off and receive emergency medical attention if they needed it, or else begin an immediate search for any friends or relatives that might have taken refuge on Wyrmdov—Dorja learned from Kirek that that was common in this place, where so many refugees came when they fled the destruction of their homeworld. The station also boasted a Library. Those were becoming increasingly rare in the Kingdom.
They continued down, down, down to the transparent dome. A huge square panel slid to one side and admitted them. They watched through the windows as their lift car was handed off from the tube and onto a kind of sky rail. The car swung from immense gantries, and was eventually handed off to another huge claw that extended from the tallest building in this section of the city. Dorja marveled at the efficiency of it all, and felt disoriented to see the city streets coming up at her.
But their car did not go to street-level, not yet. Instead, they were sucked into a tube atop that tall building, into a shaft of darkness. When the car finally came to a halt and the large steel doors opened, Dorja found herself facing a huge reception area, not unlike many other spaceports she had been to with Master Jerrod. Wide and expansive, with a hundred or more travelers coming and going, a variety of species wearing runes or sigils that represented their ports of origin, all dressed in an array of different customs.
It was a feast for the eyes. Long, golden gowns embroidered with stygian edges and rough-hide laces indicated monks of high station; the short hats of the pious men of Ravigni-III were on display, along with their ward spells sewn into the cloth; large insectoid Millarians walked about naked except for strips of cloth that hung moss-like from their largest appendages; and, of course, humans dressed in both rags and finery. Humans were the dominant species in the Kingdom, everywhere one went, you could expect to bump into thousands of them.
Here they all were in this huge hall, with steel walls and decrepit floors made out of rotting scale-plate, with glowing fungus growing on parts of it, and plants from a dozen different worlds adorning fountains and fed by sunlamps. The place had a kind of utilitarian beauty to it, functional, with a taste of the individual cultures that had made this place. The very quintessence of a melting pot.
And it was chilly. And it stank.
The odor was so oppressive that Dorja was suddenly very happy she hadn’t brought Turtle. Poor thing has suffered enough, she thought. She started out.
That’s when her eye caught the sigil. A short, rotund and bearded man walked by with a green slashcoat, one sleeve torn off, showing his arm. It was a colorful tattoo of a three-headed serpent. Dorja, as stubborn and direct as her Master had always accused her of being, started forward.
Kirek put a hand on her arm. “No,” he whispered. “Not here.” He looked at the bearded man in the slashcoat, then back at her, and shook his head. “Not wise, first thing off the boat.”
Dorja watched the man go. She wanted desperately to go ask him if he knew where Senjelica was. Would have, too, if not for Kirek. Her blood was up. She could smell that she was close. The journey she began when first she challenged the Amon’tha was close to its end.
A rakishly thin Gower walked over to her, its yellow exoskeleton glittering with light from the same fungal growth that was on the walls. His prehensile tail whipped around randomly behind him, as if swatting away gnats. He looked at the humans, then at Dorja. Dorja was conscious of the Gower’s five eyes glaring at her strange blue flesh and long glaive. Likely it had seen many humanoids before, but none like her.
It gave off a series of clicks and clacks, which the translator box dangling from its long neck emitted as, “Do you have identification?”
“We do,” said Luke Kennison, rummaging through his pockets to provide a data-slate, which the Gower snatched with one clawed appendage that extended from its chitonous carapace. Kirek also handed over a slate.
“And you?” the Gower said.
Dorja shook her head. “Dorja has no identifiers.”
“Do you have a full name? A family lineage I can search in the Library?”
“No. Dorja is Dorja.”
“What does that mean? What is Dorja?”
Kirek stepped forward, smiling. “Eh, my friend here does not speak very good NewGal. She is Dorja. She means only that she has no family left. It’s just her. As you can see by her body and attire, her race has departed this galaxy, done in by the Brood. Sir,” he added.
“I see.” The translator box’s tone was always monotone, so Dorja had no idea if the Gower was bothered or uncaring. He used his own micropad to scan their slates, then perused the records of which ports they had been to, and which fiefdom had claimed them as citizens. “You are subjects from Skyreach,” he said to the Kennisons, his prehensile tail snapping at the air. “Lord Oric Lamplight’s fief, it says here.”
“We are,” said Hela Kennison, stepping forward with her youngest in her arms.
“The word from the Defense Fleet is that you’re reporting Herenov is dead.”
“It is, my lord.”
“There are no lords here, gentles,” the Gower said, handing them back their data-slates. “Only the governor and the Fanes of Inzytt. Their laws are the ones you follow now, I suggest you familiarize yourself with them.”
“We will,” Luke said. “We promise.”
“Do you have micropads? Good. See that you connect with the Library so that you know how things work around here.” He stood to one side, his tail now waving slowly in the air like seaweed in a gentle current. “Welcome to Wyrmdov, gentles. Step carefully.”
Kirek and the Kennisons moved on.
Dorja remained behind a step, and muttered to the Gower, “There are Hekkites in this city, yes?”
The xeno’s five black eyes filled with a cloudy substance, like milk pouring into ink. A common sign of surprise in Gowers. “You may as well ask if the Scales house the homeless. Count the stars, you’ll have an easier time than counting the number of Hekkites in Wyrmdov. Why do you ask?”
“Dorja is looking for someone. Someone they may have taken.”
“Then, as one gentle to another, might I suggest you count this person as gone. Think no more of the Hekkites, gentle, instead enjoy any number of convivial establishments the city has to offer.”
“If the Hekkites have her, Dorja will not leave this girl in their hands.”
“Enjoy our convivial establishments,” the Gower repeated. “And if you have further inquiries, direct them to the Keepers. They are the governor’s instruments.”
“Law enforcement?”
He shrugged. “If you like. Please be courteous to others, gentle, and do not mind the Harbingers.” With a gesture, he dismissed her and walked away.
The Harbingers, Dorja thought as she and the others walked through the concourse. The last time she had heard their kind mentioned was in the Cave of Whispers, when the swordsman said, Do you know, the Harbingers all say we should surrender ourselves to the Doom. She knew about them. She knew the Harbingers were brown-robed priests or criers who stood about city streets and shouted that everyone ought to take their own lives, that they themselves existed only to convince a hundred people to suicide, and once they were done, they recruited another Harbinger to take their place, and then finally killed themselves.
There were five of them standing outside on the steps, shouting up at the sky. Or, rather, up at the dome. They screamed, “Give in! Give in! Your life exists now only as a module for your suffering! Let slip your mortal coil! Be done with despair and hardship and pain! Let slip, let slip, let slip!”
Dorja curled her lip in disgust. She hated Harbingers. Despicable little quitters that they were. Perhaps it is best Turtle stayed behind. It would not do for her to hear such words.
There were cloth canopies that hung from all the buildings flanking her, often keeping her from getting a solid view of the dome above. She found Kirek waiting for her near a fountain filled with what looked like blood, but upon inspection was actually wine. Several people were walking by, pouring a bit of wine from their flasks into the pool. She thought it was strange, but before she could comment on it, she noticed something else.
“Where are the Kennisons?” she said.
Kirek shrugged. “They’ve already gone.”
“What? Where to?”
Again he shrugged. “To their new lives, I suppose. Want to grab a drink?”
Dorja looked around. Eyes were on her. Humans and xenos alike were wondering at her species, her attire, her weapon, her weeping-arms. “Dorja does not drink alcohol.”
“Then I’ll drink alcohol and you can drink whatever. Come, I know my way around a bit.”
They stepped out from underneath another canopy and got a look up at Mago. The moon appeared to move quite fast at this distance, its cratered surface so close it almost seemed like it might graze the top of the dome. As they walked, the World Serpent they were walking on continued to orbit Mago, and soon an immense shadow fell over the entire city, for the sun had just disappeared behind the moon. The city was still lit by neon lights and that bioluminescent fungus that grew on everything, including a few people that walked past.
“At these levels, the city never knows true night,” Kirek said. “To experience darkness, you have to go well below, down to the Scales.”
They moved down steps made of old compristeel, then up spiraling wrought-iron steps, across platforms made from scale-plate. They walked for half an hour, looking up at the skyrakes racing overhead, their red lights flashing to let other ’rakes know their position. While ’rakes were dominant in the sky, a large, gray, crustacean-like draft animal on six legs carried groups of ten or twenty passengers across streets.
“Those are called Unkta,” Kirek said, his breath coming out in a chilled cloud. “Native to the World Serpent’s gut, easily tamed.”
Dorja marveled at it. “They are parasites?”
“To the World Serpent’s innards, yes. Large enough and smart enough to be ridden.”
Dorja looked to her left, at a row of huge stone buildings with mucous-y vines growing from the eaves, but with zero fungus on their walls. The lack of glowing fungus made them stand out. “Where do they get the stone?” she said.
“It has to be imported,” Kirek answered, waving her down another street. “Either from an asteroid or a moon or planet. Usually rich people have it because the fungus doesn’t grow on the stone walls.”
When they came back around to the sunside, daylight splashed on the city with breathtaking suddenness, and here Dorja laid her eyes on wyrms for the first time. She gasped. The creatures danced across the sky, undulating like serpents under water, sometimes coiling and uncoiling, other times diving between buildings. One flew right over their heads and deposited a heap of dung onto the street ahead of them, bouncing off of shop canopies.
“Now you see why all the canopies,” Kirek laughed.
“They are…” She was at a loss for words.
“The small ones are called hatchlings,” he explained, guiding her down a narrow alley between two buildings, whose walls were made of a mix of scale-plate and corrugated steel. “The next biggest are coils, then serpens.”
“They…they look like the World Serpent,” she said, her mind dazzled by the elegance of the creatures in midflight. “Only smaller, and with fewer wings.”
“Yes. They are beauties,” he said, leading her across a street that smelled of offal. “They lay eggs once every few hundred years, but they live a long time. There’s a hatchery here that protects the next generation of them.”
A massive shadow fell over the entire city block. When she looked up, Dorja saw a huge chunk of scale-plate moving through space, orbiting the World Serpent and momentarily blocking out the sun. It was gone in a few seconds, bringing back daylight. No one around her seemed to notice or care, not even Kirek.
The buildings were usually built like needles, or like knives stabbing straight up into the sky, aspiring towards the dome’s zenith. Kirek said that was to save space—as big as the World Serpent was, space was limited, for not all parts of its body were ideal for habitation.
“How long can people live like this?” she said when they topped another platform that overlooked an industrial district—the Tail-end District, she learned. “They’re feasting off of a dying thing.”
“Yes,” Kirek said. “But almost all terraforming tech has been lost, so we can’t exactly reconfigure any planets, now can we? And even if we did, the Brood would just come kill us, so all that work would be wasted. The Brood, for whatever reason, have never been spotted in this sector. Habitation domes are easier to set up—they come with their own set of problems, sure, like the constant need for air-scrubbers and recyclers and overpopulation concerns—but we can at least do it. These people, they’re doing what they can, each year trying to avoid the call of the Harbingers.”
“The call to darkness,” she murmured to herself.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
She checked her micropad, making sure Veringulf was still parked and locked down. The camera feed showed Turtle was sleeping in her room. Joshua and Newpik were parked next to her bed, domed heads slowly panning.
Suddenly, Dorja felt a coldness. She stopped, looked around. For a moment she saw a spirit, the ghost of a young woman with golden hair. She was staring at Dorja from across the street, her lips moving, her eyes pouring tears. She looked like she was trying to scream something at Dorja, but Dorja couldn’t hear what.
After a moment, the ghost vanished, and Dorja trembled a moment before looking around, trying to spot trouble. She saw nothing but people, mostly humans, going about their day.
“You coming?” Kirek said.
“Yes,” she said, shaking off the feeling. And she followed him.
image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]