Aarpaa station was a planet, was being the key word when describing it. After four hundred years of mining, six massive fragments of rock were all that remained tethered to one another by snarled wires and tubes that looked like nothing so much as a spider’s web from the window opened on each chair while the Interdex Liner made its approach.
The liner rumbled as Yi Cao watched the stones approach and listened to the voice in the ceiling explain the history of the station responsible for ripping the planet in half. Stations, equal in scope to the one they’d just left shimmered and flashed within clouds of debris and dust at the heart of the massive fragments or spun in orbits around the networked rocks attended by ships that moved around the quarry in the thousands. The view narrowed as the stones grew, and pinprick geometries resolved into domes and vast structures stitched across the cratered surface of the nearest stone. Another interdex liner, tubular engines tapering to cubed nose, passed between them and the approaching “station”, the massive ship barely large enough to make out as a shadow against the sparkling station lights where other ships stood lined up with their noses to the ground, engines pointed to the sky like the heads of tiny mushrooms, or a tiny skein of moss across a corner of the giant chunk of rock floating in the void.
Yi Cao had heard of craters left by immortals in their battles and even seen the scorched wasteland of one from a skyship as he rose towards Elleppu station, but this beggared his comprehension. What kind of power did it take to rip a planet into six pieces? What did it mean when the voice in the ceiling said they’d shipped a quarter of the planet’s original mass over a half a light second to the Massu prime? How far did you even have to go for light to be… timed?
Zihan slept through most of the history lesson, or at least paid it very little mind. After the captain told them it would be another half hour until they docked he’d kicked his chair back and kept one eye open to watch the “station” on approach while he relaxed.
The ship rumbled as it slowed to a stop above one of the station’s rocks. “Just a short delay for the traffic control to take over.” The voice announced.
The shape of the words felt wrong in Yi Cao’s head, for all that he understood them.
“Please take this time to prepare your belongings for debarkation.” The voice went on after a moment. “Those of you with contracts to any of the sub-corps or service agencies should use this time to contact their representatives. We will be disembarking at gate forty eight B of the Karum port, section three. Port authority has requested that all liners remind new arrivals that hallways are not for defecation. All relieving actions are to be taken in the facilities marked for that purpose. Welcome again to Aarpaa station. We wish each and every one of you a prosperous future.”
The liner shuddered as it lurched back into motion. The view from the chair mounted displays showed nose down skyships rising from long rectangular structures that ran like worm tunnels across the face of the planet sized gray rock. Lights from constructs in a dozen sizes shifted and danced like a shoal of fish beneath the massive inter-dimensional ships.
Yi Cao stared at the moving display until Zihan gave him a bump and indicated the bag underneath his seat. The construct hanging from the ceiling whirred by overhead as Yi Cao scooped up the damaged and sodden bag, and the warrior in the corner pulled his Jian off the wall and, oddly, pulled it partway from its sheath to inspect the blade.
“Not planning on using that I hope.” Zihan said.
The warrior, Su Xialu, glanced up at him. His eyes slid to Yi Cao then he snorted and slid the sword back into its sheath. “My sect has a contract with the Nine Spears Security Group. I plan on using it however they command.”
“That doesn’t look like a spear.” Zihan pointed out.
Su Xialu studied Zihan and pursed his lips. “Sure.” He said. “It’s not.”
The windows in the seats flickered then disappeared and the trajectory of the ship shifted abruptly. “Now docking.” The voice in the ceiling announced.
“I should check in.” The warrior, mercenary, next to them said. He pulled some kind of construct from his robes and brought it to life.
Yi Cao realized he was staring at the little construct and jerked his head around. He looked down at his pitiful looking bag, then touched one finger gingerly to the medallion still radiating Ki around his neck.
The liner rumbled, thumped. Fell still.
They had to jump into the station. Yi Cao followed the other passengers as they worked their way to the front of the ship, down the shoulder wide corridor, up the stairs to the nose where a circular gate waited for them looking, not out onto a floor filled with benches and waiting passengers, but straight down at a concourse that bustled with people twenty yards below.
“Take my hand. Take my hand. Allow me to assist you. Careful with your bags.”
A pot bellied golem in white plating with a friendly smile painted across its chest offered each passenger a hand as they approached the door. Some of the passengers took its offered hand, but others, who looked less shocked by the expected method of exit just grabbed a handhold in the ring of the door and let their feet drop, flipping to match the orientation of the people below before they slowly dropped to a disc set into the yellow tiles of the floor.
One woman with a child who couldn’t be more than three years old backed violently away from the gate when she saw the drop and the golem scooped her up to toss her, screaming, through the door before directing the three year old to follow suit. The boy jumped with a whoop of glee then laughed as he spun out… down… in relation to the actuall hallway, to join his mother on the disc.
Yi Cao felt his mouth go dry as his turn approached.
“Take my hand.”
He took the metal hand, then stared out… down… through the gate. Something huge and humanoid moved in the crowd before him, but all he could see of it was the top of its head and the contours of its shoulders, as though they were walking on the wall instead of… beneath him.
The machine nudged Yi Cao and he felt down change abruptly. He flinched as his feet slid out the door and closed his eyes as his whole body clenched. The metal hand turned him until he was upright in relation to the station and sideways to the ship’s floor, then it contorted out of his grasp to let him fall, slowly, towards the floor.
He heard it offer its hand to the person behind him as it faded behind and above him, and he opened his eyes to get his first proper glimpse of the station’s interior.
It wasn’t much to look at.
It was, still, marvelous, certainly. The constructs and machines and flashing lights were beyond anything Yi Cao had seen anywhere but Elleppu station, but Aarpaa… lacked… the grandeur of the station above Yi Cao’s home. Where Elleppu’s halls had been lined in brilliant white and walled by glass, Aarpaa was floored and walled completely in the off yellow of cheese well past its prime. The bright white stars used to illuminate Elleppu station were replaced here with floating tubes of yellow phosphorescence. Ugly glowing tombstones decorated with flashing images of men, women, and, other things, stood where potted plants and swirling infographics decorated Elleppu. The air stank with the taint of something burnt, and at the same time, fouled, like the Junior Disciple’s barracks in winter time when they preferred to use the hearth than brave the snow for a piss.
The people though, the people were something else entirely.
The huge thing Yi Cao had spotted from above was a man, or something like a man, but stones had been embedded in his skin and thick green plant material seemed to grow between them across his shoulders. Sai-borgs moved everywhere. Women with silver faces, men with spare limbs, creatures who must have been human but had no decipherable human features beyond an amorphous torso, a right arm, a head half encased in shifting mirrored silver. Normal folk moved among them, normal except for their clothes which were a mix of something like the traditional robes of his home and the garb they’d purchased form the Puka during their escape from Elleppu station. Even among the more normal among the crowd he spotted odd creatures. People whose proportions seemed off, whose eyes seemed too dark or skin too pale, men and women who moved together in a tangle of hands and arms and legs, always maintaining physical contact through clothes that seemed to cover too little.
Yi Cao barely heard the voice that told him to watch the landing as he drifted down to the floor, though he caught the hand the sai-borg offered to him as he dropped. He didn’t fully register that he was on the ground until the man smiled at him, and he realized he was standing on a disc of something hard and elastic, holding an amorphous gel attached to a blonde haired man where his hand should have been and staring at him while he smiled back through eyes that were black to the very edges of his eyelids.
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The Sai-borg said something and it took a moment for Yi Cao’s new circuitry to interpret it for him.
Zihan landed with a thump behind Yi Cao and brushed down the half cloak that still billowed around him in the disc’s field. He stepped off and the gray cloak dropped like rain from a cloud. Yi Cao extracted his hand from the Sai-Borg’s… ooze… and followed suit, clutching his bag. The sensation of weight returning was like waking up.
“Well.” Zihan said, eyeing the crowd as the mercenary dropped behind them. He turned and smiled at Yi Cao. “Time to join the crowd I’d say.” He looked around, then nodded in the direction half the foot traffic seemed to be moving. “Let’s go.”
People bustled around them as they followed the concourse away from the interdex liner. They passed more of the circular pads like the one they’d come down on and Yi Cao watched people moving up and down from the gates set into the ceiling. Small square windows occupied ceiling space alongside those gates yielding narrow glimpses of long gray ship’s hulls and the unvaried black of the void between the station’s floating lights. People floated overhead on occasion, in silvery mechanisms or fields of an unidentifiable energy. Yi Cao felt the occasional tickle of Ki as he walked and they passed stalls whose smells of sauce and cooking oil mingled distastefully with the stinking taint in the air.
Animated signs and placards everywhere ordered them not to piss in the halls.
“Can you handle that?” Zihan asked.
Yi Cao jerked his attention away from a painted man on a small stage performing for an audience alongside ghostly shades that shimmered like a mirage around him.
“What was that?” He asked.
Zihan looked back as he pressed on through the crowd. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
Yi Cao grimaced and shook his head.
Zihan stopped with a sigh and glanced around at the crowd and the performer. They watched as he pretended to summon lightning from his hands, the paint on his bare arms shifting and twisting to become writhing yellow bolts while the shimmering projections around him writhed beneath hazy thunder clouds.
“Technomancy.” Zihan snorted. He shook his head. “There’s a saying that anyone can be a technomancer, and a good technomancer can pretend to be anyone they want to be.” He looked around. “This place? I think I’d believe it.” The lightning writhing along the performer’s arms changed to red flames and Zihan snorted again. “Except of him.” He said. “I’ve seen peasants do better.”
One of the decorated gravestones behind Yi Cao flipped from images of very busty women in bulky suits of yellow armor to something that resembled a cow in a field of grass. The Cow screamed, and Yi Cao jumped away before the cow disappeared to be replaced by text.
“Do not an animal be,” the tombstone whispered to the crowd, “piss in the facilities.”
A green golem appeared sitting on one of the letters, then it stood, pressed a dot that summoned a rush of wind, and posed as a triangle appeared around it.
It faded to be replaced by a muscular shirtless man who rippled with moving tattoo dragons while the voice in the tombstone whispered about some place called “The Ink Emporium on the I”.
Zihan bumped Yi Cao’s shoulder to drag his attention from the mesmeric stone. He nodded towards an offshoot from the gallery.
“Come.” He said. “I think I need to break some rules. May be a bit quieter over there too.”
Yi Cao nodded and followed.
The hallway stank of piss. A man in traditional cultivator’s robes stood pissing against a wall beneath a sign proclaiming that “pissers will be prosecuted” alongside numbers and denominations for fines. As the man finished, Zihan took his place while Yi Cao took his own opportunity against the opposite wall. He’d gone an entire day, or something like it, without eating or taking a break on Elleppu station. He took his time.
He made sure to avoid the other pools of human refuse that lined the wall as he followed Zihan out the hall onto another concourse that ran perpendicular to the one where they’d arrived. The noise of people and sai-borgs moving across the concourse behind them abated and the hum of caged machines spinning in alcoves in the wall muted the normal hubbub.
Zihan stopped when they came to the head of a long moving course of stairs that looked out over a circular court enclosed in a dome of stone.
“Now the adventure begins.”
A flyer buzzed by overhead, weaving deftly between floating bars of light that drifted slightly in his wake. Yi Cao closed his eyes in a hard blink, then opened them to focus on the Young Master who stood rubbing his hands together.
“First things first.” Zihan said, turning to him. “As I was saying before our stop, you’ll have to procure us a room. Just one. The cheapest you can find, the absolute cheapest, but make sure it has some kind of common room where we can eat or drink and find others living cheaply in this place.” He looked around as though the station might be hiding something interesting in its walls. “The shadier the better.” He added.
Yi Cao frowned when the order didn’t twist in his soul. He touched the source hanging around his neck while he thought. “What are…” he turned to regard Zihan. “Pardon, but, what are we doing here?”
Zihan looked at him like he must be a simpleton. “Doing?” He asked. “Looking for trouble. That’s what we’re doing. Getting a room somewhere we can start an adventure, that’s what we’re doing. Finding somewhere to sleep while we’re on station. That’s what you’re doing, or will be doing. Obviously.’
“Yes, but…” Yi Cao felt the weight of the pendant at his neck and the Ki tickling his channels. “I thought you plundered the sect.” He said quietly. “Aren’t we… aren’t you… rich?”
Zihan smiled. “Rich?” He asked. “Maybe back home, but I think you underestimate what it costs to live in a place like this.”
A siren whooped once on a wall and a light stabbed out from a contraption underneath it, spearing a woman who squatted against one wall beneath a balcony. Buzzing constructs like those deployed with the Elleppu station guardians zipped out of recesses in the wall to fly towards her while she shouted something and flicked her thumb at them in insult. The machines stopped above her and one of them dropped wires that wrapped around her limbs to lift her into the air while the other worked some magic to conjure one of the sings claiming that “pissers will be prosecuted” on the wall.
“If we sold everything we took from the sect.” Zihan said, “and sold the junior disciples into slavery, we might have enough to stay here for a week.” He glanced significantly towards the source hanging from Yi Cao’s neck. “Even that.”
The construct carrying the woman buzzed by overhead while the woman growled abuse and thrashed in her bonds. They watched it carry her away.
Yi Cao scowled as she disappeared. “Then… why stay?” He asked. “Why come at all? There’s plenty of… trouble… back home.”
Zihan shrugged. “Sure. This is just our first stop.” He looked out at the court and the passing pedestrians. “It’s sort of impossible to leave our world without coming here first. Maybe not, here here, but to Massu at the very least. This dimension.”
Yi Cao didn’t say anything and Zihan looked at him hard. “I could make this an order.” He said. “If it would make things easier.”
“No.” Yi Cao shivered. “No, no. I mean, I don’t care. I’ll do it. I just… I don’t understand what we’re trying to accomplish. What you, are trying to accomplish.”
“That’s my concern.” Zihan told him, and shut the hell up.
Yi Cao glanced at Zihan but looked away quickly when he saw the ice in the other boy’s eyes.
Zihan leaned on the railing overlooking the bustling floor twenty yards below.
“You… put this around my neck.” Yi Cao said. “When you could sell it to become an immortal yourself.”
“I did.” Zihan said without turning to him.
Yi Cao looked at him and waited for Zihan to meet his eyes.
“Why?”
Zihan turned back to the busy court below. “Manchange de bisai.” He said. “Have you heard the term before?”
“The long game?” Yi Cao asked.
“The long game.” Zihan confirmed. He snorted derisively. “It’s the term trotted out any time the elders want to justify some pet project.” He grinned at Yi Cao. “You’re going to be my pet project.” He said. He waved a hand at the station and turned back to the concourse of moving people down below. “This is just going to be the setting.”
A small swarm of spherical constructs flew through the dome in the ceiling above them and Yi Cao allowed the Young Master to watch them pass in silence.
“Just look at this place.” Zihan said with a grin. “Nothing like it any of the worlds. A wonder, in its own right.”
Yi Cao nodded, but turned from the wonder to study the boy beside him. “There were rumors,” he said, “before we left, that you’d already begun the ascendancy.”
“Were there?” Zihan snorted without looking at Yi Cao. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
Yi Cao looked at his hands then looked out at the station. “Why me?” He asked. “Why pick me for your, long game?”
“Why not you?” Zihan asked. He looked at Yi Cao. “What makes you different from any other cultivator?”
Yi Cao met the Young Master’s glare and felt something inside of him quail at the ice in his gaze.
Zihan snorted again and looked out at the courtyard. “You’d probably sell me your own mother if I offered you the resources to jump to the second ring.”
Yi Cao flushed at the insult and one hand balled into a fist. “I would not.” He said.
“No?” Zihan raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “Wei Chun did.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Just another cultivator I knew.” Zihan replied. “Made a stupid deal with an elder for the chance to bypass fate. Same way you did.”
“Have I told you enough?” Zihan asked after a moment of silence. “Or do I need to order you on your way?”
Yi Cao shook his head. “I don’t-“
Zihan turned back to him, eyes like chips of ice, and Yi Cao fell silent.
“My purpose is my own.” Zihan snapped at him. “Yours is to obey. I can make myself clearer, if you require.”
Yi Cao forced his face into an impassive expression and tucked his fist behind his back as he made a bow. “This simple Yi Cao humbly thanks the Young Master for his explanation.” He tried hard to keep the sarcasm from his tone.
Zihan snorted, then raised a hand in mock blessing. “You might yet learn to serve this Zihan Beigao well.”
Yi Cao maintained his bow. “Your servant goes now to find the lodging.” He intoned. “Cheap and shady, as the Young Master requested.”
“Cheap and shady and with a common room or bar.” Zihan replied.
“As the Young Master commands.”
Zihan waved a hand. “Don’t worry about finding me. I’ll find you, once you find a place.”
Yi Cao held himself rigid as he straightened and turned to go. He’d stepped gingerly onto the living staircase humming on the edge of the balcony when Zihan spoke.
“Yi Cao.”
Yi Cao turned.
“You do have a choice you know. You can defy me.”
Yi Cao’s fist curled a little tighter. “And sacrifice my cultivation forever?”
Zihan smirked “Still a choice.” He replied as Yi Cao was drawn away by the stairs. “Still a choice.”