Chapter 15

“The magic has been available since before most species ever make it to space, but cloning is still considered anathema in most cultures. Some, in desperation, turn to it as a means of procuring organs for the injured or sick, but for the most part, it has been almost entirely unexplored as a result of various cultural taboos. Yet as with most things that are driven beyond the limits of acceptability, among those who are already outlaws, acceptance of certain practices can be found.”

—The Clone, Liev Olcras

The ship felt as still here as it had when they were on the ground. They were hurtling across the universe faster than the speed of light, but there wasn’t a single tremor to be felt. The closest they’d come to turbulence was the brief moment when they’d been pulled out of all the gravity of the actual universe and into the nothingness, but even that had been so easy to account for that Sylvas had done it instinctively.

“So here’s what I’ve dug up on Glamrock 9 so far…” Hector began, all three of them taking up slightly awkward positions around the cabin so that Sylvas could still be included in the conversation. He didn’t need all of the consoles and screens feeding him information, it all flowed directly into his mind through his implanted parts, so he wondered idly how practical it would be to remove some and implement some seating. Then he remembered that this wasn’t his ship; he wouldn’t be keeping it. He wasn’t free to make those changes. “It started out like most of these rim worlds do, a mining colony with a mostly fiend population, dwarves passing through on trade with some settling down. Hostile environment keeps most people off the surface, which means that they can get away with a lot more down on that surface because folks aren’t as likely to come wandering by, by accident.”

“We still have nothing to say about Glamrock?” Kaya tried to start that up again, but Malachai delivered the corrective elbow this time, and given their height difference, his jab hit her on the side of the head.

Hector carried on as if he hadn’t seen or heard a thing. “The original ruling family got ousted about the same time as the business switched from mining to trading and moved up into the orbital refining stations. They’re kept around, along with some of the fiend miners, to keep up the appearance of the colony being productive, but there isn’t much value in what they’re shipping. It’s mostly just a good excuse for freighters to go by.”

“So who runs things now?” Kaya asked, a bit more astutely than Malachai seemed to expect.

“Got some mixed reports on that, which usually means there’s a fight going on. The Consortium definitely has its fingers in the pie, but I’m hearing more and more reports coming through about the Saizen Brothers ousting them. Which is bad news for Glamrock and good news for us, since we’ll probably get a lot more intelligence out of the new bosses.”

Sylvas cocked his head to one side, his mind still extended out beyond the bounds of the ship. “Why are these Saizen Brothers bad news for the planet?”

“Oh, they’re old-fashioned break-your-legs sorts of gangsters.” Hector said it with such wry amusement that everyone else was a little taken aback. “Or one old-fashioned gangster who’s cloned himself so many times nobody knows who the original is anymore. Family business.”

Sylvas cleared his throat. “I’m going to need a little clarification on some of those terms.”

“A clone is an identical duplicate of a person, usually made through biological or magical means,” Malachai informed him.

“A gangster is a…” Kaya said a few words of dwarvish and then mouthed out the sounds, trying to find the right translation. “A caste of professional organized criminals?”

Malachai seemed to consider this. “They are known to be extremely violent while also operating under a fixed set of rules and conventions designed to ensure that profit is still put before vengeance and ego.”

“Anyway, if the Saizen Brothers are driving out the Consortium, they’ll probably be happy to feed us intelligence that will lead us to the Consortium’s other bases of operations.”

Sylvas nodded along. “Because we might serve as a distraction, helping their purposes.”

“And it’s never a bad idea to have the mob owing you favors instead of the other way around.” Hector grinned.

“I would prefer not to have any dealings with them whatsoever.” Malachai crossed his arms. “But I can see how it is advantageous in our situation, and I have no intention of making a moral outcry before there are any complaints.”

Kaya pouted at not being able to bully him anymore, now that he’d caught on to that particular angle of attack.

Sylvas moved the conversation along. “Anything else that we need to know about the planet?”

“Don’t breathe the air without a filter mask, don’t drink the groundwater, and don’t sleep with any of the locals, no matter how good a price they’re offering you.” Hector checked them off on his fingers. “That last one’s a good rule of thumb for every planet, actually.”

Sylvas ignored that pointedly. “Anything in particular we should keep an eye out for?”

“Whatever the Consortium’s selling should point us in the direction of where they’re shipping it from.” Hector looked mildly annoyed that his last joke had been ignored. “And maybe where they’re sourcing it. Both will help narrow down our list.”

“So what is the actual plan for when we make planetfall?” Malachai asked, clearly trying to clarify the parameters of the operation to his satisfaction.

“We’ll see when we get there.” Hector shrugged. “Probably some variation of the usual plan: find the black market, find the criminals, and ask them things until they get mad at us for asking things.”

That clearly wasn’t the answer that Malachai had been looking for, but he fell silent all the same. Hector clapped his hands, hoisted himself off the console, and headed for the door, calling back over his shoulder as he stripped out of his shirt, “Shout before we arrive. I’m going to go wash up.”

Kaya tottered over to the door to watch him go, looking a little unstable on her feet. “Hey, if we’re not allowed to sleep with locals, who am I meant to sleep with?”

From the back end of the corridor, Hector laughed. “Try Malachai. I’d love to have a little necro-dwarf baby crawling around the ship.”

She turned back to the cockpit with a grumble. “Am I being too subtle?”

Sylvas was trying very hard to keep the amusement off his face. “Subtle as a brick. Same as always.”

Kaya huffed and then nearly walked into Malachai when she turned again to leave. He looked like he had seen a ghost, which, given his arcane predilections, was entirely possible. “I fear that I, too, have not been entirely upfront about my feelings, Ms. Runemaul.”

That stopped her dead in her tracks. “What?”

“It is important to me, given what was just said, to clarify my position.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she looked ready to gnaw it off if she needed to escape. “That position being that you are one of the most singularly unattractive women that I have ever encountered in my life.”

She looked him in the eyes, set her jaw, and then let out a sigh of relief. “The feeling is mutual, bone-boy.”

He removed his awkward hand from her shoulder and nodded. “I am glad that we could come to this concordance.”

She shoved past him to head back into the ship. “Let’s never speak about it again for the rest of our lives, ever.”

“Agreed.” Malachai stepped aside.

Sylvas chuckled from where he still stood in the circle. “I never thought I’d meet someone worse with women than me.”

“I assure you, my friend, I have no trouble in that regard. I may not be able to boast the prodigious number of marriage proposals that you used to receive, but there has never been a shortage of demand for my company from the fairer sex. Being both royalty and extremely physically attractive in my own right ensured that.”

It was difficult to tell when Malachai was being boastful, making a joke, or genuinely believed what he was saying. Sylvas was getting to the point where he just let those moments lacking clarity pass by without comment. Something about it did strike him this time, though. “You know, Kaya and I, we didn’t really give anything up when we agreed to fake being dead. You were the crown prince of a whole system. Why didn’t you think twice?”

He seemed to consider this for a moment. “What I want now remains unchanged from when I left my home and joined the Ardent to begin with. I desire to be the greatest. Not the most powerful in the universe, as some factors will always be beyond my control, but the greatest version of myself that it is possible for me to become. Ascension is the path of the mage, and I mean to walk that path as far as it will take me. This choice seemed to lead me where I wanted to go.”

Sylvas’ eyes never left the vast blackness stretched out before him, but he inclined his head towards Malachai. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here with us.”

“If nothing else, the Dusont inheritance drama currently kicking off will have been worth publicizing false news of my own death.” Malachai didn’t look happy exactly, just intense. “There should have been several schisms and open talk of rebellion by this point in proceedings. All very exciting.”

Sylvas wasn’t sure what to make of it. “You don’t think that it might have been better to not cause a succession crisis?”

“Oh no, royal families need this sort of thing. Things become very stagnant otherwise. Dangerously so. This is like enrichment for their enclosure.”

Sylvas chuckled despite still being entirely unsure if Malachai was joking. The man had such an incredible straight face that he could have been cracking a dozen jokes a minute and Sylvas still wouldn’t have been sure.

“Anyway, if you will excuse me, I believe I shall seek some of the promised coffee. Can I fetch anything for you?”

Sylvas’ attention was drawn back out into the beyond. “No, I’m… I’m all good.”

He flew along in silence for a moment, only his will and the emptiness of null-space, and then he realized that without any forces acting on them outside of those they brought with them, now would be the perfect time to experiment a little with the maneuverability of the ship, and to test out the propulsion spells that had been set into it. He let Mira take over the direction of his will, keeping them flying on at a steady pace as he began to tinker.

By the time that everyone else had sauntered back to the front of the ship, he had put it through its paces, flipping and twisting along every axis he could conceive of, combining the thrust of the engines, the spells embedded in the ship, and the push of his will in every direction, too. The others would never know they’d spent half of their journey through null-space flying backwards, upside down, or in a cyclone of motion.

Hector did not sneak up on Sylvas this time, not with all of his senses having been attuned to detecting him and keeping track of him as he moved through the ship. “Having fun driving through the desert?”

Sylvas didn’t really get the reference, but he smiled all the same. “It has been a peaceful journey.”

“Not bored out of your skull yet?” Hector settled against his accustomed spot on the consoles. “Then you’re a better man than me.”

Sylvas stretched his back, still somewhat unsettled at the ceramic and metallic plinking noises his metallic and rune-etched spine made. “I imagine I’ll be just as bored as you after the novelty wears off.”

There was nothing in the darkness ahead to differentiate it from the darkness behind. No indication on any of the many instruments aboard the ship that it was any different from the rest of the nothingness. But just as Sylvas could feel when someone had mass in their cold storage on the other side of the veil between dimensional spaces, so too could he feel their destination rapidly approaching. Hector cleared his throat. “Do me a favor and slow us down when we come out on the other side. It’s usually better if people who might be chasing you later don’t know how fast you can go.”

“Given that I have no idea the layout of the system ahead, I thought that would probably be wise anyway.” With the second half of the teleportation spell already on his lips, Sylvas spoke them back into reality.

Even space seemed bright after null-space, the ambient energy and light and magic of a living universe so much more intense than its absence that it took a few blinks before Sylvas could really see again. When he did, he regretted it almost immediately.

Glamrock 9 was a hideous, sickly yellow color, and the other nearest planets across the system were similarly garish in red, blue, and purple, with a green-tinted one just barely visible at the periphery of his scrying. The star that they all orbited was similarly discolored. It was a giant in comparison to the stars that Sylvas had seen before, but a giant in the latter stages of collapse and decay. The corona leaked matter in every direction, giving it less of a spherical shape and more of an uneven and badly squashed together look, and the visible light that it was putting out alongside all the various radiations seemed to flash and flicker across the rainbow like they were under some deranged disco ball. “Oh, I hate it here.”

Hector chuckled. “Welcome to Glamrock. If you wanted pretty, you should have stuck to the inner core systems. Out here, it’s nothing but ugly and chaos as far as the eye can see.”

“Oi,” Kaya interrupted him, shouldering her way past Malachai and into the room. “I grew up out here.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t some diamonds in the rough”—Hector chuckled—“just that if you want things pristine and polished, you’re better sticking to the heart of the Empyrean than its wriggly extremities.”

“I never knew that a star could be ugly.” Malachai couldn’t tear his eyes away. “But for all of our complaints, it is generating a delicious amount of death mana as it collapses in on itself.”

Kaya chuckled. “Always looking on the bright side, eh?”

Once his senses had adjusted to the general wrongness of the whole system, Sylvas was able to pick out the details more easily. The orbital manufactories and ore-processing hubs were not circling only the ninth planet but were also spread throughout the system, with the largest doing its own solar orbit between the sixth and seventh worlds. Presumably, this was the home of the deposed original owners of the system, now fallen into some degree of disrepair. Automated ships flitted to and from its docking bays from various planets across the system in a never-ending production line, but from what Hector had told them, the majority of these fleeting little vessels were running empty. More substantial freighters and more esoteric-looking ships were gathered in high orbits around the ninth world. Some tried to use the various satellites and moons to hide themselves from plain sight, but none of them put in much effort. There was little point in hiding when everyone else was there to commit equally criminal activities.

Hector pointed out the various designs and designations of some of the ships as they moved in closer for their own descent towards the planet’s surface. “The ones with the wings swept forward like that were usually built in the Dominion—that’s their signature style. Probably not actual Obsidian Dominion ships. Most likely sold second hand or scavenged. The curved arc around the back of the engine block there, that’s classic elven shipbuilding. Oh, and that there, the little blocky one with the massive backside…”

“Dwarf made.” Kaya nodded. Then she pointed to a massive freighter with a bulbous head almost as big as the dwarf ship’s engine blocks. “What’s that one?”

“That’s one of the Consortium’s. Look how it flares out at the back, and the engine outputs are arrayed around it in a circle. They connect nose to tail.”

With that information, it was simple enough for Sylvas to glance over the other ships and calculate that a solid quarter of them belonged to the Consortium or had been made by them originally. The Dominion-built ships were the rarest, with only three that he could see. None of the markers that the ship usually looked for to confirm ownership were actually on display, and nothing was being transmitted from any of them that might tell a passerby who they were or what side they were on in any given situation. It was a strange experience.

Sylvas guided them down through the atmosphere as slowly and gracefully as he could, trying not to give anything about his or their ship’s capabilities away as they descended. Once they came down into the toxic clouds, visibility became basically zero, and all of his other senses had to take over the slow process of navigating. The maps that Hector had provided of the planet’s surface were inaccurate at best. The topography that he was able to feel out with his gravity sense was vastly different, and for a while, he wondered if they were coming down on an entirely different land mass than the one that they’d aimed for, but, of course, the same clouds of poison that rendered his sight useless had done the same to the long-range scrying. The maps were inaccurate, not because anything was different, but because the Empyrean had never gotten a close look.

It meant he had to raise them back up rapidly once or twice when their gentle descent would have splattered them across mountainside, pulling away from the slope as they came into the limited range of his awareness. 

The landscape itself was as yellow and unpleasant as predicted but still at least looked like stone for the most part, even if it was stone that had been slowly melted away by acid over centuries. But the landscape rapidly became the least of Sylvas’ worries as they began to encounter other ships flitting up and down from the surface to their carriers in orbit. Some were no bigger than the auto-miners constantly going back and forth to the ore processers, but some were almost as big as some of the freighters they’d seen. Big enough to house a city’s worth of crew, that is if the space inside hadn’t all been turned over to cargo storage. Big enough that Sylvas had to make a full desperate maneuver every time one of them loomed into sight or risk destroying them both in what all but certain to be a fatal collision.

It was as effective a crash course in piloting a ship in an atmosphere as anyone could have ever asked for, and while Sylvas handled it, he would have greatly preferred to practice these skills in literally any other scenario. Finally, and with a line of sweat pouring his down brow, they came upon an empty and rock-strewn field where various other ships had set down and made their landing. Once again, there was some clapping from the others that Sylvas didn’t pay too much attention to, his whole body still thrumming with tension and adrenaline. 

“Let’s never do that again,” he said while disengaging himself from the ship. “Never, ever, ever.”