Chapter 9

  Dalex hadn’t meant to tell her. It wasn’t any big secret, but it seemed like one of those things you kept to yourself. He couldn’t say why. Maybe it was just too unbelievable? But he had told her a lot of things that were unbelievable, and, while she had questioned him at first, she accepted them as truth now.

  But dying was different.

  “Do you mean metaphorically?” Hitasa asked.

  “Nope. Literally. Before I came here, I was sick for most of my life. All of my life, really. I was born with a disease for which there was no cure. It didn’t rear its head until I was about five years old, but it never let me go. I died a few days before my eighteen birthday.”

  Hitasa looked at him quizzically. “Then how are you here?”

  “Someone brought me back.”

  “Seventh?”

  Dalex rocked his head side to side indecisively. “In a manner of speaking. She works for the people who did it. They introduced me to her and set me up with my starship and all of the stuff you’ve seen me use. None of it is really mine, though I’ve made it my own. The world I come from doesn’t have magic or access to the kind of advanced technology you’re starting to learn about.”

  “Earth,” Hitasa said, her voice soft.

  “That’s right.”

  “You and Seventh have mentioned it many times, now.”

  “It’s very different from here. Unlike the Seven Worlds of Gaia, Earth is the only place in my home realm where people can live. There are other worlds, but they are lifeless rocks or balls of gas, and they’re very hard to get to. There aren’t any convenient Waterfall Portals you can stroll through and be on a different planet. We actually have to build massive, volatile, expensive flying machines to reach even the worlds closest to us. In fact, the prevailing thought where I’m from is that we are alone in cosmos. We suspect there are other worlds with people living on them, but we can’t prove it.”

  Hitasa only looked more confused. “But you traveled here.”

  “I had help. The people who resurrected me aren’t human, and they aren’t native to my home realm. I don’t really know what they are. But they made Seventh and my ship. They made the astral mortar. Where you and I might struggle to cross the inter-astral void, they can do it effortlessly, in the blink of an eye. Seventh calls them my benefactors.”

  Hitasa’s lips bent into a worried frown. “Why did they send you here?”

  Dalex had known this question was coming. He had told her about his mission before, but it hadn’t come with any context. It was possible she might have even forgotten about his interest in a certain kind of metal.

  He manifested his armor and laid his palm flat on the chest plate. “This armor and all the things I can do are only possible if I have access to a certain kind of metal. I call it {adamantine}. You’ll probably hear Seventh call it [benefine]. It is the basis of most of my benefactor’s abilities. They can do some things without it, but they can’t make more {astral mortar} and they can’t power their technology.”

  Hitasa nodded in understanding. “And there is [benefine] here?”

  “All of the Seven Worlds of Gaia seem to have at least some of it, but it’s hard to find. I came across a little while fighting that hydra before Castreier’s siege, and a bit more after the incident with the attempted mutt invasion.”

  Her eyes widened and Dalex saw a spark of an idea in them. She was a sharp elf.

  “The mutts,” she muttered to herself. “Do you know what they are?”

  “Sort of,” Dalex said. Hitasa had actually been there when he discovered the truth behind the mutts, but they had only been together a little less than a day at that point and she didn’t know everything she knew now.

  But everyone in the Seven Worlds of Gaia, including her, knew that the mutts were a new phenomenon. In all of the thousands of years of recorded Gaian history, there was no mention of animals that took on the forms of woodland creatures and amphibious monsters like hydras, making them grotesque and very difficult to kill.

  “Mutts are also from a faraway world,” Dalex continued. “One that neither I nor my benefactors know anything about. They came here looking for the same thing Seventh and I are looking for. When they swarmed out of the east and threatened to consume Batulan-bar, they were on their way to an {adamantine} deposit. Batulan-bar was just in their way.”

  Now Hitasa looked genuinely afraid. “Are you telling me that my home is the center of a war between you and someone just as powerful as you are?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it a war. More like a skirmish. And the mutt forces on Gaia Eta came from a tiny scouting vessel. Seventh and I have most of their forces bottled up around a black hole. They won’t be going anywhere for another twenty-five years or so.”

  Hitasa blinked a few times before asking, “What?”

  “Let’s just say the mutts are dealt with for now. The dragons and humans are far more of a threat to your home.”

  She didn’t look satisfied with that answer, but she didn’t ask any further questions about mutts. Instead, she changed the subject.

  “Tell me about Earth.”

  ***

  Request #4560: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

  Seventh floated invisible above a small house at the center of the town of Gonbon, running one hundred different conscious processes and a million unconscious ones. Before meeting Dalex, she had not thought of herself in female terms, but that was no longer possible. She listened to Dalex and Hitasa talk, she monitored the four drones mapping Gaia Zeta from the upper atmosphere, and she studied the beastkin around her, learning their habits, their mannerisms, and their relationships.

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  Dalex was saying, “Earth doesn’t actually look all that different from Gaia Eta. There are the same trees, lakes, oceans, and mountains. But there is only one dominant race of creatures, and that’s humans. Some Earth animals are clever, but not like you or me. There used to be races somewhat similar to humans, but apparently we bred them out of existence something like 20,000 years ago.”

  40,000 years ago, Seventh thought.

  One of her drones picked up the edge of another town approximately sixty kilometers to the north. Seventh marked it on her map as a potential investigation point and told the drone to stop when it was directly over the center of the town. It would hover in place and wait to detect any kind of benefine distortion.

  “I finished my chores, mama,” a little beastkin girl said in the house below Seventh. “I want to go and play with Chiknaiz.”

  “Are the blankets hanging up to dry?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, mama. I’ll take them down when I get home.”

  “Okay, my sweet blossom. Come back before dark.”

  “I will, mama.”

  The little girl tore out of the house and ran down the street toward her friend, humming a broken tune to herself. Seventh tasked one of her drones to track the girl’s position and then flew away from the town to rendezvous with the others. She landed right next to Dalex and Hitasa as they were getting deeper into a discussion about life on Earth.

  “Wait, did you say fifteen million or fifteen billion?” Hitasa asked.

  “Billion,” Dalex said. “With a B.”

  “There aren’t that many people in the whole of the Seven Worlds, let alone humans,” Hitasa said. “And they’re all packed on one planet.”

  “It’s a real problem,” Dalex said. “There’s still lots of room on Earth, but not enough resources to go around.”

  He turned to face Seventh. “I didn’t realize you had left. What were you up to?”

  “Gathering more information on the patterns of my subject. I am prepared to enact our plan. If you are ready, I will begin now.”

  Dalex smiled, and Seventh detected a slight increase in his heart rate and dopamine levels, suggesting excitement.

  Request #4561: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

  “Let’s get started,” Dalex said.

  Seventh gave new instructions to the hologram surrounding her physical body. Her appearance changed, matching her chosen subject.

  Dalex’s eyes went wide and Hitasa covered her mouth. Their gazes followed Seventh’s apparent shrinking form.

  “That’s not what I was expecting,” Dalex said.

  Now speaking with the high-pitched and quick voice of the little girl in town, Seventh said, “I liked this one.”

  While Seventh did not actually change in size, she still appeared to be the height of a small beastkin child.

  “Oh, that is very strange,” Hitasa said. “Are you really Seventh?”

  Seventh balled her hands into fists and set them on her hips. “That’s a stupid question. Of course, I am.”

  “You were right, Seventh,” Dalex said. “This is very convincing. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  Seventh adopted a smug expression. “Hmph, I told you so. Can I go talk to mama now?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Dalex said. He turned to Hitasa. “Do you know what that means?”

  The elf shook her head.

  For just a moment, Seventh spoke in her normal voice. “Do I have permission to commence the plan?”

  Dalex chuckled. “Are you sure you picked the right person to imitate? We’re trying to find out usable intelligence, not what toys she’s getting for Christmas.”

  Hitasa looked at him sideways. “Christmas?”

  Seventh ignored the elf’s inquiry. “Children are often expected to ask odd questions, and parents frequently inform them of local dangers and basic information they might not otherwise speak of. I have determined that Tayu and her mother have such an intelligence sharing relationship. The right question should elicit a response that may lead us to more useful sources of information.”

  “You’re the expert,” Dalex said. “Why don’t you go back to your mama, little girl.”

  Request #4562: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

  Seventh took off again and returned to the town, landing in an empty side street near the little girl’s house. She skipped home while humming the same tune the girl had used before. When she reached the front door of the girl’s home, she wiped her little shoes on a ratty doormat and then walked inside.

  “Tayu, is that you?” Tayu’s mother said. “I thought you went to Chiknaiz’s house?”

  “It’s too hot,” Seventh said in Tayu’s voice. “Can I bring a hat?”

  “That’s fine. You take one of mine from under the bed.”

  Seventh trotted through the house to the room she had identified as belonging to Tayu’s parents and searched under the bed until she found a hat. Rather than putting the hat on, she simply programmed the head covering into her disguise and walked back out into the main room of the house.

  “Mama?” she called.

  “Yes, blossom?” Tayu’s mother responded.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  The girl’s mother walked into the main room from an adjacent storage room. “What is it?”

  “Chiknaiz told me that the dragons want to eat us.”

  Mama knelt in front of her and put a shushing finger to her lips. “We don’t talk about them, blossom. You should tell Chiknaiz not to, either.”

  “But are they going to eat us?”

  “No, no. They won’t come here.”

  Seventh modulated her emotional output, trading the childlike fear for mild curiosity. “Where are the dragons?”

  “Far away from here,” mama assured her. “They only live in the biggest cities, and they only come out for wars, but those are all happening far away from here.”

  Seventh intensified the curiosity. “But the dragons are fighting? Where?”

  It wasn’t necessarily a natural question for a girl of Tayu’s age and temperament to ask, but information on current Gaia Zetan events would be useful, and there was a statistical likelihood Tayu might ask this question.

  Mama paused, indicating that she may be about to lie in order to preserve her child’s sense of security.

  “It’s okay, mama,” Seventh said, increasing the amount of bravery her facsimile of Tayu was exuding. “I’m not afraid. I want to know. Dragons are scary, but they’re also exciting.”

  Mama gave her daughter a wan smile, but, when she spoke, Seventh did not detect any hints of a lie. “There are dragons fighting far, far away to the north. Do you remember when Uncle Zariahk went to Acks-hon three winters ago? Even farther north than that.”

  Seventh had recorded an individual in the village that was likely this Uncle Zariahk. He was a healthy middle-aged male beastkin.

  “I remember,” Seventh said. “Did he take the big road? How long was he gone?”

  Mama giggled. “My, you’re full of questions today.” She put a finger to her chin in thought. “Yes, he took the big road. That one goes all the way to Acks-hon. And if I remember right, he was gone three months. So, you can imagine just how far away the dragons are.”

  “Thanks, mama,” Seventh said. “I’m going to go play with Chiknaiz now.”

  She abruptly turned away from Tayu’s mother and ran out the door into the street.

  “Tayu!” mama called. “Oh, child. You just can’t sit still, can you?”

  When Seventh was sufficiently far from the house, she cloaked herself in invisibility and flew into the air, traveling back to the well where Dalex and the others waited. She settled down next to them and undid her invisibility.

  “Wow,” Dalex said. “That was creeeepy.”

  Hitasa nodded in fervent agreement. They had both been watching on their armors’ heads-up-displays. They now stood almost shoulder to shoulder, giving Seventh a look that suggested a one percent decrease in trust toward her.

  Request #4563: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

  “I believe the intelligence I have gathered to have been useful.”

  Dalex smiled. “It certainly gives us a more reliable direction. How far away do you think this Acks-hon is?”

  “Given the health of the individual likely known as Uncle Zariahk, the observed socioeconomic status of the family, town, and region, and the anticipated road conditions during this hemisphere’s winter, I estimate a journey of three hundred to six hundred miles.”

  “How could you know that?” Hitasa asked.

  “There are several figures I used to—”

  Dalex interrupted her and said, “You’re just going to have to assume she’s right. There’s a lot going on in that brain of hers.”

  Request #4564: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

  “But a war between dragons seems like a lead worth running down,” Dalex continued. “I bet we could learn a lot about Gaia Zeta from just watching something like that.”

  “Indeed,” Seventh said.

  “I’m guessing the ‘big road’ you mentioned is the one we saw north of the town?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then we might as well go check it out. I’ll grab Erban and Balgoth. You two make sure we’re ready to depart.”

  Without another word, Dalex walked away towards the beastkin and the demon.

  Request #4565: Engage restricted targeting functionality. Response: DENIED.

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