The Game Wardens showered many apologies onto Oberyn for the lax security regarding the fusion bomb, something that seemed increasingly suspicious to me, learning just how seriously the Rhodeshi people took security.

  After suspending the tournament for several hours, something nearly unthinkable to the Rhodeshi, the games commenced once again with far stricter procedures. All fighters now had to go through several intense scans before being permitted to enter the coliseums. And on top of making an example of the offending player, Oberyn was granted several starting bonuses in compensation for the incident.

  I watched this all over the course of the days and weeks. And while there were countless fights and strategies and distractions, the only other player I was interested in was the Tyrell man, who true to Oberyn’s word, was placed near their starting position.

  Tyrell, seeing the oncoming storm that was Amon Russ, promptly picked up all his pieces and fled, abandoning his homeworld system entirely. He cut a bloody swathe across the digital galaxy even as Oberyn chased after him. And for Amon, he fought countless eidolons all the way, just to catch up to the target of his true hatred.

  Some of the replicoids were identifiable to Ingrish, others not. The faces of family, friends, loved ones, Amon tore through them all without hesitation. It was an army of the images of the dead against the thing that could scarcely be called human. And each time, it was Amon who emerged the victor.

  Having discussed with him after the tournament, I questioned how it was so easy for him to dispatch the unliving. We as humans, for better and for worse, see the whole of a person in their face—in their eyes. Was it the Armor? Was it the nails driven through the brain that allowed Amon to be so merciless?

  It was true that the Carapace Suit destroyed everything human of the human brain, but that wasn’t the deciding factor. Amon Russ was a veteran of the Fifth Aberrant War. He was one of the few living beings left in the galaxy who possessed intimate knowledge of the things that pretended to be alive, just to torture those who actually were. Severing the head of an eidolon that wore the face of a childhood friend meant nothing to him. It was less than nothing. Amon knew everyone he had ever cared about had already passed. All he was faced with in the tournament were the imposters of the long dead. And of them, he was more than happy to deliver a second death.

  …

  I watched the display orb as General Kairon hunted his invisible prey in a freezing blizzard. His clawed, metal feet dug deep tracks in the ice as a black cloak billowed in the wind. The camera zoomed in on his face—a gaunt funeral mask that had been forged far too prematurely and adopted after the fact. With one hand clasping the long folds of cloth tight around him, I wondered of the point. Why should something of metal and servo-parts feel cold?

  After experiencing cybernetics myself, I fully understand the General. It is not the phantom pain of long lost limbs that you try to stave back. It is the stillness. It is the numbness which takes the greater toll, as your nerves slowly forget there had been anything missing at all. And so the General hunted his prey, trying to shake feeling back into a body made of metal.

  I squinted my eyes at the display orb, looking for the General’s opponent. But it—they, were nowhere to be seen in the howling snow.

  The Krynacht were an answer to the long-pondered question of whether biology or machine were the most efficient killers. After all, since the advent of the first autonomous fleets, it seemed that the artificial could replicate all of biology’s most advantageous functions with none of the downsides. A machine does not tire, a machine cannot lose focus, a machine won’t stop until its target is dead.

  But a machine, no matter how intelligently designed, is simple. It does not think on a level of amino acids and proteins and organic molecules. It cannot, for its materials are themselves unthinking, unscheming. And while there are whole portions of the galaxy that are devoured by nano-bots and rogue simulacra and even the remnants of the Ranon Autonomy, you’ll still find mold growing on their metallic exoskeletons and parasites gluttonously feeding on their silica matrices.

  And so too, you will find the Krynacht swarms forever existing on whatever world they have been deployed on, even a million years after the atmosphere has been stripped and all sanity has been burned away by solar winds.

  General Kairon unsheathed his zero-sword as the swarms erupted out of the ice. The deep blue shimmer pulsed in the false night as they flew towards the General. They struck him as viciously as the blizzard wind, a great many erupting in flecks of fire as the General’s ion shield flickered on. However, a handful of the lights burst past the shield and began voraciously burying themselves in the metal and bits of exposed flesh. Like midnight embers, they began chewing away at the metal warrior, slowly eating him alive.

  Several more swarms of the Krynacht erupted in the long distance, and the great clouds converged on him. They chittered with horrible alien song as they rushed General Kairon standing alone on the ice sheet. Kairon didn’t move a muscle—or rather—servo-tendon as the tornado of blue light struck him, engulfing the metal warrior entirely.

  The insects overwhelmed his ion shields, hundreds more wriggling past the burning screen and sinking their mandibles into Kairon.

  As I believe now, the matchup was gambled on the faulty premise that General Kairon was something that could be worn down. Perhaps the war hero could not be beaten conventionally, but if only the General could be eroded, even bit by bit, then eventually he would fall over dead.

  This is not an unreasonable claim in most cases. To assume the basics of life and death is an entirely fair perspective for most of the galaxy. But the General was a veteran of the Fifth Aberrant War, and what’s more, he had been a prisoner. And the Aberrants did everything possible to make sure their prisoners would never die.

  Within the maelstrom of blue insects, General Kairon flicked off the safety of his zero-sword. There was a great flash of white light, and Krynacht began to burn. Bombarded with subverse particles, the zero-sword took them apart by their very DNA. General Kairon’s cloak erupted into fire. His metal exoskeleton turned white-hot. His flesh—or what I thought to be his flesh—sizzled. But if you knew anything about the General, you would know those extensions grafted from experimental surgery were not him. The parts that burned were not his real skin nor his blood nor his bone, only a fabrication. Those had been the parts cloned and added onto what became of the original.

  By the end of it, General Kairon was left standing in a pool of melted water in a large crater. Afloat were the tens of thousands of motes of dust that had been the Krynacht. They fell like ash rain, molting off the General like a dusty second skin. There were deep sores where they had eaten into Kairon’s armor. And although nothing of his outward organics remained, he shivered all the while, standing victorious in the Rhodeshi arena.

  …

  The hunched-over General did not entertain questions nor interviews as he trod back to his shuttle, guards clad in bone following behind. A metal hand violently shoved aside anyone who dared get too close. The melted, silver eyes behind the funeral mask glowered at all of them, and he did not waste one last glance of pure hate as the shuttle’s doors closed shut.

  The small craft flickered invisible, and then he was gone, transported to some private, unknown location in the system. And there he would remain, until the next engagement.

  Now, as Rykar broke down the problem of finding General Kairon, it was not that Rhodeshi stealth technology was particularly advanced. Rather, it was getting past the thousand other layers of security. The Rhodeshi had contracted the most advanced surveillance technology available to the galactic community. There were entire industries, testing their prototype tech on the happenings of the games. The security around the shuttle included micro-thermal detectors, high-end telescopics, and even quantum friction detectors. All of whom, upon finding anything suspicious, were contractually obligated to report their findings to the Rhodeshi.

  As the General’s shuttle shimmered invisible, there was no hope of following the vehicle itself to its home destination. It would likely change its trajectory three or four times before arriving, and any attempt to get close enough to scan for a stealth signature was going to get caught. Nor was there any hope of piecing together a trail. The entire Rhodeshi system was strewn with a satellite network of neutrino disrupters, constantly stippling the vacuum with random background noise. Everything, including randomizing the albedo distribution of planets, was taken into account.

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  A billion cheaters had come before Rykar, and as I have researched from that period, the race between the rule-breakers and the Game Wardens had progressed into the former planting needles in Dark Space. Too small to be blocked by real-space fortification, they created micro-perforations into the vacuum from which sensor readouts could briefly be taken. This method was rather scattershot, extremely expensive, and completely out of reach for someone like Rykar.

  From the outset, it seemed the old bird had an impossible task.

  However, the pirate had one advantage that most of the galaxy didn’t. He had detailed instruction into the exact specifications of how zero-swords operated, and he was taught by a human on secrets even the Dalfaen knew nothing about.

  As according to the myths of the galaxy, each zero-sword is thought to contain a black-hole, so as to trap the consciousnesses of the deathless Aberrants. And while this is true speaking from a vague set of terms, the truth is much more complicated. In reality, each zero-sword contains a fold in the fabric of spacetime, called a Moebian-Hethor bridge, linking to the event horizon of one the black holes in the center of the Milky Way. Such was the only death capable of temporarily containing the Aberrants. And coincidentally, Rykar knew how to trace them.

  The trick, as Rykar taught it to me, is not to look inward, focusing on a myopic and narrow view of spacetime. That, in order to find your target, you must sometimes step back and look at the whole picture to finally find what is out of place. And so while every eye in the galaxy was trained on the Rhodeshi worlds, the coliseums, the space-stations, the pleasure cruises, all squinting through the fog of neutrino haze, Rykar set his eyes hundreds of light years outward. And there he found what he was looking for, the transient, near invisible leylines connecting the zero-swords to their hellish destinations.

  And from these slightest disturbances in gravity, small bumps from the tunnels under spacetime, Rykar traced these straight paths right back to their owners.

  However, it wasn’t as simple as simply running threads on the map. With the eighteen zero-swords excluding Amon’s, Rykar had to painstakingly identify which of the leylines belonged to whom. And determine, over steady weeks of monitoring the Rhodeshi system, where exactly these trails began.

  With materials on the Aphelion, Rykar carefully created seventeen makeshift probes. He purchased counterfeit Rhodeshi transponders and then strapped holo-banners to the satellites, effectively creating gigantic scam advertisements. And underneath, he hid the scanners. He then set them at various orbits around Rhodon’s sun, not following anyone, but coincidentally passing through much of the system. And using these snapshots, cross-referencing with public appearances, Rykar painted a precise trail of every zero-sword in the system.

  I once stumbled upon him tinkering with one such probe in his workshop. The bird was hunched over a satellite of spare parts and welding two pieces of plate together. I watched for some time wondering how he expected this broken thing to avoid detection. Of course, it didn’t. His drones probably set off every alarm in the Rhodeshi system down to solar orbit.

  But as Rykar pounded into my head later in life, it’s never about fooling the cameras. It’s about fooling who was behind them.

  Because also at that very moment, there were thousands of daredevils strapped to oversized engines, trying to make it big on the galactic wavecast. Countless illegal satellites and bootleg scrap were flying out there, attempting to scam and cause as much trouble as they could. You had the contraptions of every smuggler, thief, and low-life with a wedding tool—all flinging whatever they could into the Rhodeshi system. Yes, the authorities had Rykar’s probes marked down to the molecule. And I’m sure they sent a garbage hauler to pick them up whenever they got around to it.

  …

  Rykar stood in front of the holo-table, reconfigured to show the sixth planet in the Rhodeshi system, a green gas giant. Its emerald light reflected off the old bird as he examined his target. Buried in a section of space off-limits to the public, much like where we were docked, was an unassuming methane refinery. It was a very low resolution image, a grey station nestled in the upper clouds, and with seemingly no activity.

  “So that’s where he is?” Ingrish asked, pacing around the table.

  “If he keeps his zero-sword close, yeah.” Rykar shrugged, the bird scratching his talon on the table. “I hope you understand that there’s no sane way of getting to the General. We so much as start the Aphelion’s engines and the patrols are going to be on us. It was a headache just getting the probes out—which reminds me, you now owe Amon a few thousand heat-units and three photon exchangers.”

  “What about a shuttle?” Ingrish asked.

  “You want me to somehow commandeer a Rhodeshi shuttle, fly it to the other end of the system with no one raising any questions, and then randomly show up unannounced at this space station? Yeah, I could do it. If we weren’t stuck in Oberyn’s personal coop.”

  Ingrish gritted her teeth. “But there is a way, right?”

  The bird sighed and waved a talon. The map zoomed out to encompass the whole Rhodeshi system. “As I said, nothing sane.” He clicked a button and an overlay appeared on the map. Thick orange lines interconnected and wove around all the planets. Some were like thick trunks while others split off like a thousand tiny hairs. Alongside them were four nodes forming a rotating diamond around Rhodon’s sun.

  “What is this?” She peered at the new details.

  “This is the supply network for the death games. Call it a mega-highway. You’re looking at the infrastructure to feed over a half a trillion individuals. That, and ship whatever else to keep them happy.” Rykar pulled up an image of a freight container. “It’s far too expensive to use conventional engines. So, the Rhodeshi use mass drivers for supply and distribution. They launch the freight and then use these four nodes and the gravity of the planets to angle them along their flight.”

  Ingrish looked up at Rykar. “What are you suggesting?”

  “General Kairon’s station receives supplies like anyone else. We’re on the same network. I’m saying maybe you should hitch a ride.”

  Ingrish paused for a moment, taking in the audacity of the plan. “How do you know we’ll arrive at Kairon’s ship?”

  “It wasn’t hard to pinpoint ration schedules once I knew where he was. The trick is making sure your freight container is the one routed to the station. Kybit will have to hack into the Rhodeshi computers.”

  “Won’t that be detected?”

  “We’re talking about one freight container in an ocean of billions. The Rhodeshi systems are tight, but not that tight. Kybit only needs to make a minor adjustment.”

  “What about patrol scans? What about everything else you told me about?”

  “The vast majority of that sort of attention is spent on the pleasure cruises, independent ships, satellites, and the like. They should have no reason to think anything is wrong to check. And even if they do, they’re looking for contraband and bombs—not people. As I said, no one’s going to think to look for people on these things.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Rykar pulled out a leather harness. It was little more than a plastic mask which extended over the face, a small oxygen tank, and two chest straps with long rows of very large vials and very large needles.

  “You won’t have to worry about radiation exposure, but these freight containers travel de-pressurized. And as it happens, spacesuits are going to set off the security systems. So that means we’re going to have to get creative.”

  “We weren’t already?” Ingrish groaned, looking concerned at the harness, which in no way looked like it was safe.

  “We used to use these devices back when I was running blockades during the Haskur Sieges. It injects a drug cocktail made from stasis fluid and a few other choice ingredients. Puts you under and keeps your blood from boiling from the vacuum. Lasts up to twelve hours—give or take. We used it to lash certain individuals to the outside of our—”

  “Is there no other way?” Ingrish suddenly asked, overwhelmed.

  Rykar stared at her. “Always, but you would like the other options even less.” He shook the harness in front of her. “You wanted a way in to talk with the General? This is it.”

  “I’m sorry. I know I asked you to do this. I shouldn’t have been so forward about it.”

  The bird squinted at her. “I’ve never seen you get cold feet about anything in my life. You were thinking of taking the kid, weren’t you?”

  Both of them glanced my way. I had been sitting quietly in a corner, not moving a muscle or saying a word.

  “General Kairon isn’t going to care about me.” Ingrish explained. “But he might care about Vas. I don’t know what he thinks. I just know it’s my only chance. But I’m also not going to risk Vas’ life on stasis fluid and vacuum.”

  ”I’m not here to convince you either way. All I’m saying is, you have a short window. Rations are delivered to General Kairon’s station every four weeks. You either go in the next three days, or you’re waiting till the next shipment. And odds are at this rate, that’ll be after the fight between him and Amon.”

  “I don’t know if I can do this on a hunch.” Ingrish shook her head, trying to convince herself that it was just a hunch.

  “You do what you have to do.” Rykar set the harness down on the holo-table. “As I promised Amon, I’m only here to get you where you want to go.” He promptly left the mess hall, leaving me and Ingrish alone together.

  The Bakke was silent for a moment before glancing back to me. “I can’t tell you what to think,” she told me plainly.

  As I reflect back, that seemed more like a personal confession than an admission. And what did I think? I realize that I have left much of my own personal thoughts out of these early times. And this is because there was no complexity to the calculus in my head. I felt the horror of the Carapace Armor, but I did not understand it. I watched the violent struggles of the death games, but I did not comprehend the reasons behind them. I knew Amon Russ meant something deep to me, but I grasped so little of what.

  I suppose there’s a cosmic irony that the Bakke—the one who should’ve known everything—was asking the former Urtaph, the one who knew nothing, what to do. But as I have come to learn, there are certain choices where it is not the inputs, the variables, or the predicted outcomes which are important. And trying to find certainty in those things only leads you to being paralyzed, and the choice being made anyway.

  In those moments, the only thing you can cling to is the spirit in which the decision is made, or rather, as I perceived at the time, a clarification in command orders. As it stood to me, Amon was the P’taph or its equivalent on the Aphelion. Therefore as Urtaph, the only logic I was really familiar with, the judgement fell to a simple question.

  I finally looked at Ingrish. “Does Amon want help?” I asked.