The Stars Are Legion(7)

“You straddle it,” Jayd says, patting the seat. “Your suit sticks to it. To unstick yourself from it, press here.” She shows me the release control. It looks like a massive white pustule.

As Jayd smiles at me, a memory bubbles up: Jayd with her big eyes and full, round face reminds me of Maibe. But I have no idea who Maibe is. I want to ask how many “sisters” there are, and where all the other people are who live on the ship, like Sabita, and who all these bottom-worlders are, but there is no guarantee I’ll even survive this assault. Why bother to ask about a place I have a good chance of never seeing again, with a zero chance of Jayd giving me a straight answer, anyway?

I heft the weapon. “How do I use this?” I ask.

Jayd taps the butt of the weapon, just above a soft, hooked trigger mechanism made of the same spongy stuff as the walls. “Just point and shoot,” she says.

I lower the weapon, and Jayd bats it away. “Not at me.” She pulls something from her pocket, a wormy little thing that she tells me to put in my ear.

“No,” I say.

“It’s the only way we can speak after you spray on the suit,” Jayd says.

I wince. She raises her hand to do it for me, and I snatch her wrist. “I’ll do it,” I say, and I do as the thing slithers into the whorl of my ear canal.

I want to turn back, then. But a part of me knows that if I refuse to go on this assault, something far more terrible will happen, and this mother of ours—hers?—will recycle the lot of us, and death in service to the War God sounded a fair bit more glorious than death in the mouth of some recycler monster.

That name, that entity, the recycler monster, blooms into my thoughts the same way as the words speculum and haystitch had. My memory provides an image: a great lumbering one-eyed beast snarling at me from the guts of a rotten refuse heap of decaying bodies.

And then I stop thinking, stop coming up with questions, because I am terrified of what other horrors still lay locked in my broken mind.

“Time to drop,” Jayd says, and a broad door unfurls from the other side of the room, and in walks my glorious army.





“THE KATAZYRNAS THINK THEMSELVES THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE LEGION. I AM NOT THE FIRST TO HAVE PROVEN THEM WRONG.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





3


ZAN


The army the Lord of Katazyrna has rallied for me is more a squad. They are nearly two hundred strong, and when I gape and ask Jayd where they have all come from, she shrugs and says, “They had no choice,” and tells me to spray on my suit.

Jayd retreats into an upper bay adjacent to the hangar. The two hundred women mount two hundred vehicles. I squeeze the bulb of the spray-on suit, and it releases a thin sheen of translucent, spidery goo that hugs my body and seals off sound. For a moment, I hyperventilate, claustrophobic, but I’m able to breathe with ease, and the suit absorbs my sweat. I marvel at my suit-covered hands for a long moment until Jayd’s voice tickles my ear, relayed by the worm in the casing, “Mount up,” she says. “The door will open soon. You’ll be pulled adrift if you aren’t on a vehicle.”

I sit snugly on the great purring vehicle and give it a solid pat. Above me, flickering red lights flare across the ceiling. The skin there begins to ripple. It’s not opening so much as it’s stretching. It becomes translucent, then tears open.

I’m sucked up toward the hole in the sky, where outside I see blackness speckled in stars. All around me, the other vehicles whoosh up and away, hurtling toward the void. It happens so fast, I gasp. Yellow and green puffs of spent fuel whirl around me while the vehicles tumble upward. It feels like drowning.

As I spin through the tear in the ceiling, I punch at the controls of the vehicle until it jerks forward of its own volition. I’m spinning slowly, but it’s enough to make me dizzy and sick. I shift my weight, and the vehicle responds, sending little jets of propulsive fuel into the black. When I find my equilibrium, I raise my eyes and find that I am far above the world from which we were ejected. It hangs below us, a great brownish-green sphere covered in fleshy tentacles. It’s so massive, I cannot see the bottom of it from this far away, only the curve of its top . . . or are we at the bottom? The spinning has me unsure of what’s right-side-up. It’s only as I gaze out at the long lines of my army, all of them flipping and pivoting into formation, an arrow pointing away from the world called Katazyrna, that I think to look beyond the world.

What I see stuns me.

Across the flat black matt of the sky, sprinkled in stars, are massive floating orbs. They hang out here in the vacuum as if attached to strings, slowly orbiting around a misty core of soft light so obscured by that mist that I can’t see what is emitting the light that’s reflected and refracted. My memory tells me this is the sun, and right now, it is sleeping. The orbs all around me are varying sizes but roughly spherical, like the Katazyrna below us.

It’s still another long moment before I understand that these are not orbs but other worlds, other ships, made larger or smaller by how far or near they are from where we sit. Their surfaces swarm with red, blue, and purple lights; some flickering, some blackened, some clearly terribly injured. These have faces that are curled back, and they wobble in their orbits. Some have great tentacles lining their surfaces, like the Katazyrna, and when I look back again at our world, I see that toward the poles of the Katazyrna, the tentacles are blackened with rot in places, the outer skin peeling away. What happens to the people below, when the skin is breached? I watch the breach from which we’ve been expelled begin to close up again, like a fast-healing wound, and gaze again at the poles. There is rot and death here.