The Stars Are Legion(9)

“Disappeared?”

“Eaten by the world . . . or perhaps cast out of range of the Legion’s gravity. When you are lost to the Legion, you are lost.”

“Why does Anat want this world if it just eats her daughters?” I say.

“She must make it hers,” Jayd says. “There are too many others trying to gain control of the Legion, including the Bhavaja family. The Bhavajas are winning, though Lord Katazyrna will not admit that.”

I cannot imagine conquering worlds like this, not this scattered necklace of ships spinning and spinning around the core. My memory sparks and kicks and quails like a captured beast of pure, terrified energy.

I sweat hard in my suit. From my position just above the swarm of my army, I sign at them to attack. My body knows the signal just as it knows how to breathe.

The wailing starts then.

It rises from the Mokshi itself. Hearing it should be impossible, as we are still far outside its thin atmosphere. I can’t even speak with my team once they are in suits.

Yet I feel the wailing in my bones, like some mournful monster roused from sleep.

I steel myself and navigate the vehicle forward, weapon raised. I am the first to pass across the Mokshi’s outer security zone, and the first to see the great crimson wave of its defense grid light up. The wailing goes on and on. It shudders through my army like a physical force.

The keening brings with it a terrible memory of Jayd going in for treatments—why, or for what, I don’t know. She is hidden behind a black door that pulses in time with the heartbeat of Katazyrna. Jayd had wailed like this, on and on, while I pounded my fists against the door until my hands bled and a large, squat woman—Lord Katazyrna?—slapped me and told me soldiers must endure sacrifices, and every one of her daughters is a soldier, and what Jayd had to bear would never be allowed on her ship. These were the prices the Katazyrnas must pay to rule the Outer Rim and, eventually, the Legion, she said.

If this is real memory and not dream, it confounds me further still. What would Jayd bear that is so dangerous?

The first red wave of the Mokshi’s defenses peels away from the atmosphere: a massive red flare. I turn my vehicle neatly toward the Mokshi’s southern pole, deploying the thorny defense scrambler at the head of my vehicle and twisting my trajectory so the vehicle collides with the wave at its weakest point. The energy wave bursts around my vehicle like a soap bubble, flashing past me toward the squad coming behind. Another wave coalesces below. I mash my hand into the indicators on my dash, recharging the scrambler or whatever it is.

Two of the squad light out ahead of me, burning so much fuel I see the yellow spores of their spent charges rippling behind them; two young, stupid kids without a burst of sense between them.

I start to sign at them, “Stay in formation,” instinctively, wondering where I’ve gotten that sign, but they are clearly intent on being the first to cross into the atmosphere. They aren’t looking behind, only forward.

“What’s happening?” Jayd asks, but I am moving now, my body acting on instinct, as Jayd had promised it would. It’s like being piloted by some stranger, a bag of meat pushed along at the end of a stick.

I go into another wild roll, falling past the next wave issuing from the outer defenses, pushing for the speed I need to break below the grid. I know I need to get below the grid, have done it a hundred times before, but the defense grid is only the first hurdle. Assaulting the world is like feeling my way over a familiar path.

I catch up to the kids just as they plunge through the atmosphere, skimming above the surface of the tumbled cities of calcified bone, weathered stone, and twisted amber deposits.

I see the older one sign to the younger. I swerve my vehicle close enough to that one to catch her attention before I sign, “Fall back with the formation.”

The two girls fall back behind me, where six more of the squad have broken past the grid, skipping above the surface now like world-walking mechanics out on a repair run. They are below the world’s defensive security zone now, but the greatest danger is yet to come. I can feel it. My whole body is taut with expectation.

I take the lead again, speeding ahead, and then I see it: a great yawning chasm at the center of the world. This is where we were going, a colossal crater that doesn’t give one the impression of something having crashed into the world so much as something impossibly large having burst out of it.

I am very glad then that I have no memory of what that might be.

The fighters that remain form a long, jagged line at the rim of the crater. I take a fast count; sixty of the two hundred I brought with me have made it this far. The world’s defenses took out the rest, or they fled from the field or collided with debris or had some malfunction along the way. It’s a massive loss; more, I feel, than I should have lost to the defenses alone.

“Heavy losses,” I say out loud.

“It’s the Bhavajas,” Jayd says, low and grim.

“That family?” I ask, scanning the horizon, looking for some other army, some mad group of monsters, maybe, crazy enough to come out here after us.

“They don’t like the Katazyrnas,” Jayd says. “We conquered eight of their worlds in our grandmother’s time.”

“We’ll get on well, then, won’t we?” I say, and Jayd laughs, and I wonder what I can say, what I can do, to hear that laugh again in this black place.