The Stars Are Legion(8)

“Welcome to the Outer Rim of the Legion,” Jayd says in my ear, speaking to me now from the vibrating worm casing. “You see now why I couldn’t explain. We are a Legion of worlds. Ours are the Katazyrna worlds. But the Mokshi is something else. The Mokshi has escaped the Core, there beyond the misty veil that shrouds the sun. There are worlds there, we know, but no one from the Outer Rim here has ever been able to pilot a ship from the Core. Somehow, the Mokshi was able to leave the Core. Our mother must understand its secrets, and so, we must make it ours.”

I power my vehicle to the point of the arrow formation my army has made. It’s facing a world that appears no bigger than my fist from this distance, and I know that world on sight the way I know my own left hand.

The world called Mokshi is not supposed to be there among the others, Jayd says, and I can see that now in how it moves among the other worlds. The other worldships have far more fixed orbits; even the spaces between them are regular, but not the Mokshi. The Mokshi wobbles in the Outer Rim like a weary, derelict traveler, altering the orbits of its nearest neighbors, shimmering with blue and green auroras that snake across its poles, promising a thin atmosphere . . . yet the surface I can see from here is barren.

I raise my arm and close my fist, and I lead my army forward across the dark spaces between the worlds. We move quickly, far more quickly than I thought these vehicles could take us. There is a massive amount of detritus spinning among the worlds, and I see long lines of people tied to the tentacles of some of the worlds we power past. They are salvaging the junk that orbits their ships, packing it away into the worlds’ soft underbellies. These crews are alarmed at our passing, and though we are never close enough to see their faces, I note their hasty retreat from open space into the welcoming tentacles of their worlds, hiding among them as if they were foliage. After we pass, I gaze back at them and see the scavengers carefully resuming their work.

As we approach the Mokshi, I keep our distance as I scout along the equator. I’m looking for an entry point. Circling its equator reveals a wasted wreckage of once-great cities, a forgotten empire asphyxiated by lack of oxygen, perhaps? What strikes me about this worldship are these structures—I see nothing like them on the Katazyrna or the others we have passed. I dip closer to that surface, daring the world to wake, and see now that the structures are not cities but fields of crushed bone and rocky debris that pockmark its outer skin. I cannot help but sense the world is not so much dead, though, as . . . slumbering.

And though I do not remember anything on seeing it, I do have a sense of familiarity. Perhaps it is the feeling old enemies have on meeting again, and again, and again. How many times have we danced like this: me with an army and no memory, the Mokshi with an erratic orbit and no masters?

As we come over a bone-white expanse on the Mokshi’s surface, my army breaks up into two teams and fans out around the equator, as if seeing this terrain has triggered a directive that I don’t know about. The soldiers are equipped with shimmering weapons and spray-on suits that catch the light of the great slumbering sun there in the misty core, which is winking awake now, unshuttering after half a turn to bathe them and the rogue world in orange radiance. I squint. The mist hiding the core swirls with light as if on fire.

The Mokshi is still moving, though, eclipsing the great orange sun, and we must move faster to keep pace with it. I look out behind us, back toward Katazyrna, and am overwhelmed at the idea that we are a Legion of worlds hurtling through an immense darkness, a space so vast I can see nothing but twinkling lights beyond Katazyrna. Are those other suns like ours? Other Legions? If they are, the distances involved make my head hurt. I turn back to the Legion. It is breathtaking, impossible, like something conjured out of my black, sticky dreams.

But this is my reality.

This is home.

Isn’t it?

“Yours is the first team to enter the Mokshi’s orbit in a full rotation,” Jayd says, her voice so close that I jerk in my seat. I had forgotten her.

“What’s a rotation?” I say.

“A turn is one sleeping and waking period,” she says. “A rotation is four hundred turns.”

“Then who retrieved me,” I say, “when I broke free of the Mokshi?”

“The Mokshi spits you free,” she says. “You come out in a pod, ejected beyond its gravity well. And no, we don’t know why, and you always say you can’t remember.”

“What happens on that ship?” I say.

“That’s what you’re here to find out,” she says, but of course, I’m here for far more than that. I’m here for Jayd, and her lord mother, and whatever it is they want to do with the only ship that can leave the Legion. I gaze out at those twinkling lights beyond the Outer Rim.

The wrongness in my gut roils.

“What’s that debris circling the Mokshi?” I ask, trying to get a better understanding of taboo subjects.

“Our sister Nhim’s dead army,” Jayd says.

The scattered remnants of Nhim’s army still orbit the great disk of the Mokshi: desiccated bodies in blistered suits, escort vehicles mashed into spongy, unrecognizable shapes, and warped, melted weapons that appear to have imploded, eating themselves from the inside out.

“We sent teams to recover them back when it first happened,” Jayd says. “The War God wants nothing to go to waste. But they fared no better than Nhim. The Mokshi obliterated two teams outright. Six simply . . . disappeared.”