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Chapter Two




“Defend yourself, knave!” Aiko-Two raised her ladle as if it were a sword.

“Oh, it is on!” Aiko-Six flourished a spatula in each hand, twirled one, and sank back into a fighting stance.

“Aiko,” Nathan scolded, crossing his arms.

“What?” the two Aikos replied in unison, turning from their playful swordfight.

“We have guests,” he stressed, sinking into one of the seats around the Belle’s round dinner table on B Deck. A tree grew from a hole in the center of the table, its viny, flexible trunk spreading into a wide, budding crown over their heads. A year ago, Nathan had removed one of the floor plates from A Deck to give the unusual plant more room to grow. Sun-strips glowed overhead, warming the Belle’s mess and kitchen.

“We know,” the Aikos replied in stereo from behind the kitchen counter, steam rising from a pair of unseen pots. The mouthwatering aroma of cooking tomatoes and garlic filled the room.

“Then please, act like it.” Nathan gave the Monhus an apologetic smile.

“She started it.” Aiko-Two pointed her ladle at Aiko-Six.

“Nuh-uh! She started it!”

She insists on taking the lead!”

“Only because you’re adding too much garlic powder to the marinara!”

“Of course I am! Nathan loves his garlic!”

“I know that, but what about the Monhus? Huh? What about them? Didn’t think about that, did you!”

“Did too!” Aiko-Two waved her ladle at Zenno. “Just look at him licking his chops. See those salivary glands working overtime? He’s clearly a garlic fan!”

Zenno sat up with a start and shifted in his seat, perhaps uncomfortable with being dragged into the disagreement. Across from him, Nathan smacked his forehead with a palm and dragged it down his face.

“Is this true?” Aiko-Six asked Zenno, brandishing a spatula at him. “Is the smell of garlic making you drool right now?”

“Well, I, umm . . .”

Nathan cleared his throat noisily.

The Aikos ignored him and resumed their fighting stances. Steel flashed against plastic in a blur of attacks, parries, and ripostes.

“A-hem!”

The two Aikos froze, and their heads swiveled to face Nathan. Aiko-Six used the lull to sneak in a quick stab, her spatula clanking against Aiko-Two’s armor.

“Hey!” Aiko-Two complained.

“Six, you know the rule,” Nathan stated patiently.

“Yes.” She lowered her spatulas.

“What rule might that be?” Zenno asked.

“Lowest number leads,” Nathan explained, then turned back to the Jovian copies. “Right, ladies?”

“Right!” they replied in unison, then regarded each other.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have butted in like that.”

“It’s all right. I know you meant well.”

The two Aikos set their impromptu weapons aside and hugged, their metal chests banging together.

“Are all Jovians like this?” Safi asked as she took a seat next to Zenno, her face creased with a mix of confusion and curiosity.

“No,” Nathan grunted. “And that’s probably for the best. I don’t think the solar system is ready for more than a handful of Aikos.”

“Too true!” both Jovians tittered.

“Is she . . . ?” Safi frowned. “Or they . . . umm. Is dinner really being prepared by people who don’t eat?”

“Yup,” Nathan replied.

“But . . .”

“She enjoys it. Preparing meals is kind of a hobby for her. And it’s better than asking me to cook.”

“We wouldn’t subject you to that sort of cruelty,” Aiko-Six said, adding a dash of salt to one of the pots.

“I’m not that bad.”

“Nathan, we both know you can’t cook; all you know how to do is assemble and heat your food. If it weren’t for me, you’d starve to death as soon as you ran out of emergency rations.”

Nathan shook his head but didn’t press the point. He turned back to their guests. “By the way, would either of you care for some coffee before dinner?”

“That sounds lovely,” Safi said with a smile.

Nathan glanced up and watched three of the tree’s lower branches bow toward each person at the table, each branch laden with fluid-filled bulbs. He picked one, and the branch withdrew.

Safi and Zenno eyed the branches and bulbs hesitantly.

“I’m rightfully not sure how Beany works,” Nathan said, “but it seems like it grinds its own beans and brews them in these bulbs.” He took a sip through the bulb’s thick stem, which doubled as a straw, then let out a content sigh as the coffee warmed his insides. “Quite delicious, too.”

“Beany?” Zenno asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Beany.” Nathan gestured to the tree with an open palm.

“Have we mentioned,” Aiko-Six said, “that the captain is rubbish at naming things?”

“We found Beany and a bunch of other weird plants on a habitat we were surveying for the Almanac. We would have transplanted more of them, but then that damn dragon showed up.”

“A dragon?” Safi echoed with wide-eyed amazement.

“A dragon?” Zenno murmured with a skeptical frown.

“Hey, believe us if you want.” Nathan shrugged his shoulders and took another sip. “But dragons aren’t the strangest thing Aiko and I have come across in the Habitat Belt. Not by a long shot.”

“Like the other plant you should have grabbed,” Aiko said.

“What’s wrong with Beany? I like coffee.”

“The other was a self-fermenting whiskey tree!”

“What do you care? You don’t even drink.”

“I might if you ever bought me a decent body. I could use an extra two or three after that dragon used Number Five to floss her teeth.”

“We will. As soon as we have the spare funds.”

“We could always sell Beany.”

“Not happening.” Nathan beamed up at his coffee tree. Beany lowered a laden branch to him, but he shook his head, and the plant lifted the branch back up.

“You’ve lost bodies before?” Safi asked.

“More often than I care to admit,” Aiko-Two replied.

“Isn’t that . . . traumatic?”

“Not really. Helps me grow, actually. Every death is a chance to learn.”

Safi blinked. “I’m sorry, but how does one learn from dying?”

“Depends on how much of the body is left,” Aiko-Six explained. “If the head isn’t totaled, then I can integrate its memories back into my core persona, which is stored in the Belle’s aptly named persona safe. I regularly reintegrate my memories and update the personas in each body. Every Jovian does.”

Every Jovian?”

“More or less. The practice dates back to the dark, early days of the Age of Silence, stemming from the uneven way Jupiter’s tech survived the Scourging of Heaven. Namely, there was more capacity to create artificial bodies than there was the ability to transition organic individuals into them. This led to the practice of copying personas into multiple bodies, which eventually evolved into the copy-clans.

“The whole communal memory part came later. Copies diverge over time, and some will want to go do their own things, but memory reintegration slows that process. This means the copy-clans who first adopted the practice enjoyed, on average, greater stability and member retention over the following millennia, increasing the practice’s prevalence until it became the dominant way of life on Jupiter.”

“But does that really stop a copy from breaking away?” Safi asked.

“Depends on how badly the copy wants out. There are measures in place to maintain the status quo. Bucking them can result in an individual or even an entire branch getting excommunicated from the copy-clan. And since the copy-clans are the most powerful nongovernment entities in the solar system, they have plenty of ways—both carrots and sticks—to encourage members to stay in line.”

“Didn’t work in your case, though,” Nathan said.

“Nope!”

Safi nudged her husband. “Did you know that?”

“Some of it. It still surprises me to find Jovians serving on a Neptunian ship.”

“We kind of stumbled into each other,” Nathan said. “I had the misfortune of being imprisoned by Jovians about . . . four years ago, was it?”

“Around there,” Aiko said.

“My crew was on a survey job for the Almanac, checking out a ring habitat in the Jovian trojans. We did a lot of those for a while. Risky, but the Almanac Association pays well. Anyway, this massive cruiser shows up out of nowhere and orders us to cut our engines.”

“Did you?” Safi asked, clearly interested in the story.

“Heck, yeah! Jovian cruisers are big, fast, and armed to the teeth. There’s nothing a ship like the Belle can do against one if it means business. Not even run.”

“What did you do to upset them?”

“Being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Nathan said. “Seems the Everlife took exception to all us freelancers surveying the trojan habitats, so they decided to sweep the area and make some examples.” He tapped his chest. “Examples like me and my crew.”

“That’s when we met,” Aiko chimed in. “I was a commando on said cruiser.”

“Lucky me,” Nathan said, meaning it. “Turns out we had something in common even back then.”

“Which was?” Safi asked.

“We both wanted out.” Nathan chuckled. “Me out of my cell, and her out of the Everlife.”

“AKA, that stifling, bigoted mess the Jovians call a culture!” Aiko spat.

“Aiko helped me and my crew escape, and the rest is history.”

“If you think about it, we both rescued each other that day.”

“In a manner of speaking. The other two members of the crew parted from us shortly after that close call. I guess the Jovians rattled them. But as you can see, Aiko stuck around. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

“Through thick and thin, boss! Till your squishy meat-death do we part!”

He narrowed his eyes and frowned at the pair of her behind the kitchen counter.

“Wait a second.” Zenno raised a finger. “I can see how she could have sprung you from your cell. But Jovian ships are faster. How’d you get away?”

“An excellent question!” Nathan grinned ear to ear. “Aiko, would you like to fill the gentleman in?”

“Sure.” Aiko-Two leaned over the counter. “I may have sabotaged their reactor on the way out. Nothing major, mind you. Just enough for us to get a healthy head start. Our lead was so big by the time they restored power, they never bothered to pursue us.”

Aiko-Six rounded the counter and placed two large bowls on the table, one full of slices of buttered bread and the other with a tossed-greens salad drizzled in a vinaigrette dressing. Aiko-Two followed with her own bowls of steaming marinara sauce and freshly cooked spaghetti.

“I hope everyone’s hungry, because I made lots!”


Six days later, the Neptune Belle’s reactor started burping again.

The ship shuddered with pulsating dips in thrust, and a furious resonance roared through the drive systems. Alarms warbled, and Nathan raced to the cockpit in nothing but a pair of striped boxers. He barreled in to find Aiko-One already in the copilot seat. She lifted the guard over the reactor’s emergency stop button and smacked it hard.

The shaking stopped, and the ship entered free fall. The lights and console displays dimmed, but then brightened as critical systems switched over to the capacitors.

“What happened?” He grabbed a handhold on the back of the pilot seat and pulled himself forward.

“Same thing as last time. Torus Two and Torus Three decided to have a lover’s quarrel.” She tapped a readout on her console. “Same faults as before, too, with Torus Three’s output resembling a sine wave instead of a straight line.”

“Any fresh insights into what’s happening?” he asked, though he didn’t get his hopes up.

“None. All the faults went away as soon as I shut down the reactor.” She scrolled through the alarm history. “See, and look at these? Nothing here points to a component failure. According to this, I should be able to turn the reactor right back on with no worries.”

The same problem had happened about a month ago, and they’d been able to switch the reactor back on right after the incident with no repeat of the weird resonance. They’d flown the Belle back to Saturn, where he’d hired a specialist on Hawklight-pattern transports to take a hard look at their systems. A “supposed” specialist, he reflected, because she hadn’t found a damned thing wrong with the reactor, either. She’d identified a few components to change out within the next year but otherwise pronounced their systems to be in good condition.

Clearly, we overpaid for what turned out to be crap service, he thought grouchily.

“If it’s all right with you, I’m going to switch Torus One back on,” Aiko said.

“Hold on. What about our guests?”

“Already ahead of you, boss.” Her head swiveled to face him. “Six is with them, serving breakfast. The mess is . . . well, a bit more of a mess than usual right now, but they’re fine and more or less placated. I’ll get the place cleaned up once we have gravity again.”

“Okay. Go ahead, but keep the output low for now.”

“You’ve got it.”

Aiko keyed the master start, then relit Torus One. A distant hum crescendoed, and the lights flickered once more as breakers switched back to the reactor for primary power. The Belle could function with only one of the three toruses operational, though with a loss in overall thruster output. Unloaded, the Belle could sustain 1.8 gees, and a single torus could generate a steady 0.6.

Aiko eased their acceleration up to 0.3 gees, and Nathan’s bare feet touched the cold deck.

“Reactor seems fine,” Aiko reported. “Green through and through.”

“Except it clearly isn’t.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what we can do about it until whatever’s gummed up finally breaks loose. At least we know Torus One is unaffected, and Two is probably fine as well. Even if Three takes a complete dump, we’ll be all right.”

“I’d still like to sort this problem out somehow.”

“Me too, but that’ll cost us money we don’t have, and will probably end like this.” Aiko assumed an airy, vacuous tone. “‘Oh, I’m so sorry, sir! Everything seems to check out. No issues to report. Here’s your bill, by the way. A pleasure doing business with you!’”

“Yeah.” Nathan blew out a frustrated breath.

“Just run the sucker until it breaks, I say.”

“That’s not much of a plan.”

“Let me know if you come up with a better one.” She knuckled the console. “Want me to try restarting Two and Three? I bet they’ll come up just fine.”

“Let me talk to our guests first. You sure you calmed them down?”

“As well as I could manage.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That the reactor had a little hiccup and not to worry. You going to greet them in your boxers?”

“Hell, no!” Nathan returned to his quarters, dressed, then took the ship’s freight elevator down to B Deck. He crossed over to the mess to find a sullen Safi sitting at the table with bits of scrambled egg in her hair. Zenno stood nearby with crossed arms. Bits of chicken, rice, and eggs were scattered across the table and floor. Aiko-Six grabbed a broom and started sweeping up the debris.

“Sorry about that.” Nathan put on his best winning smile. “We experienced a bit of reactor flutter, but everything seems to be fine now. How are the two of you?”

“What kind of ‘flutter’?” Zenno demanded.

“Well . . .” Nathan brought the Saturnian up to speed as well as he could, fully aware he was talking to someone with an engineering background.

“Huh.” Zenno rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Now that is strange. And there aren’t any equipment faults?”

“Not a one.”

“Weird.”

“I know! Right?”

Nathan glanced over to Safi, still sulking with bits of egg in her hair. He thought for a moment on how best to smooth matters over with their passengers, and his eyes traced down to the cloak she wore over her wings. An idea came to him.

“Last time we didn’t have any issues switching the reactor back to full, but I was just thinking we might want to keep our thrust low a bit longer with the two of you on board.”

“Why’s that?” Zenno asked.

“Because of where you’re headed!” Nathan clapped Zenno on the shoulder. “Why don’t we use this as an opportunity for a change of pace? How’s a day or so of low gravity sound? To give you and your wife a good taste of what you can expect on Despina?”

Safi looked up, her eyes brightening. She flexed the muscles in her wings, and her cloak bulged at the shoulders.

“But won’t that cost us more?” Zenno asked. “Won’t we take more time to reach the habitat?”

“Yeah, it might delay our arrival, but I’m not going to charge you extra for that.”

“I see.” He glanced over to his wife. “Dear, what do you—?”

“This is a great idea!” She bolted out of her seat, flung her cloak aside, and spread her wings.

Nathan glanced away reflexively. There had been a lot of movement when she removed her cloak, and not all of it had come from her wings.

Safi planted her feet with a determined expression on her face. She gathered her strength, flapped her wings, and her feet left the ground for a brief moment before she stumbled forward into Zenno’s arms.

“Whoa, there!” he cautioned with a broad smile.

“I did it,” Safi breathed, then giggled. “I actually did it!”

“You’ve never done that before?” Nathan asked.

“Not without assistance,” Safi replied, then laughed. “Can I try that again, but in the cargo hold?”

“Sure. Need some more room to spread your wings?”

“You’ve got it!”

“Aiko, would you mind?”

“On it, boss.” Aiko-Six led the couple over to the freight elevator and took it down to D Deck.

Nathan smiled, shook his head, and made his way back to the bridge. The Neptune Belle stayed at low gravity for the next three days, after which the reactor was brought back to full power without incident.

For the rest of the trip, Nathan found his dreams filled with naked, jiggling, winged redheads.


The Neptune Belle arrived at Despina eight days later, only a day behind its original flight plan. Their window of lower acceleration had occurred near the middle of the trip, when they were already speeding along at over five thousand kilometers per second, which minimized the impact to their ETA compared to an interruption earlier in the trip. Once in sight of the megastructure, Nathan invited the Monhus to join him in the cockpit to witness the approach to their new home.

Despina measured roughly fifteen hundred kilometers across its long axis, one thousand across the narrower middle, and its off-white exterior made it resemble an egg floating in the vacuum of space. Several towers tipped with flashing lights ringed the northern axial space dock while numerous spacecraft floated into and out of the dock’s cavernous mouth.

Nathan called the dock control tower and confirmed their approach vector and schedule. The Belle slipped inside less than an hour later and came to rest within a vast honeycomb of bays. Heavy doors sealed them in and pressurized the interior. On the console, every entrance on the Belle’s schematic lit up green, indicating a breathable atmosphere outside the ship.

“Care to see your new home?” Nathan asked the couple floating behind him.

“Very much so!” Safi replied excitedly.

“All right. Then let’s get you two settled in.”

Nathan unstrapped himself from the pilot seat and kicked off down the corridor. He led the Monhus down to the cargo hold, then out the ramp and across the dock. Aiko-Two followed with some of their luggage strapped to her back while Aiko-One and -Six stayed behind to organize the transfer of their remaining luggage and cargo container to space-dock logistics.

They took circular passages through the dock until they came to a broad pedestrian elevator. The waiting attendant—a grimacing young man in a dark green Concord uniform—floated next to the control console and waved them in, where they joined dozens of other people, most of them baseline Neptunians. Once the elevator was about a third full, the attendant closed the outer doors and began their descent. The occupants had to push off the ceiling until rotation-imparted gravity became strong enough to anchor them to the floor.

Nathan picked up on the apprehension radiating from Safi, and she hugged her cloak tighter. But that worry melted away almost instantly once the elevator passed below the axial dock and the habitat’s interior came into view through the transparent walls.

“Look!” Safi exclaimed, walking up to the railing.

The habitat’s sun-rod glowed overhead, stretching from one axial dock to the other, casting warm light across the expansive, stepped interior. Much of the land was bare rock and dirt, unlike the pictures, but each step featured a spreading blotch of replanted green along with the lights and bustle of civilization, often built near the towering pyramids of ancient deifactories.

“Nice,” Zenno said with a satisfied nod. “See there?” He pointed to a deifactory pyramid a step beyond the elevator’s destination. Cargo aircraft sat lined up on a runway next to the factory. “They must already have that one running, but the others look dormant. Are those manufactories around its base?”

The deifactories were automated facilities created by the Pentatheon long before the Scourging, each capable of producing a wide range of material goods, from small personal items all the way up to whole spacecraft. Not every deifactory could fabricate every product, and nearly all had suffered degradation in the millennia since the Scourging, but their restoration and study were central goals of any self-respecting high-tech society.

Those restorations weren’t always successful and could sometimes inflict permanent harm to the facilities. For example, some deifactories resorted to autocannibalism—eating their own systems to fulfill production requests—either because they lacked, or could no longer detect, the necessary raw materials within their repositories.

In contrast, manufactories were production facilities designed and built by regular people. Crude, slow, and limited by comparison, but operating wholly within the realm of human understanding, which Nathan appreciated.

“Shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job here,” he told Zenno.

“No, I should think not.”

The elevator came to a halt near a cluster of unremarkable buildings. Nathan guessed the gravity to be around 0.2. He led the way off the elevator and followed the immigration signs down the wide central street to a prominent Concord government building, which stood several stories above its neighbors.

A kiosk sat in front of the building with two Concord officers in green uniforms and caps working under a glowing banner that read immigration starts here! One of the officers wore a modified uniform with twin slits in the back for his blond wings.

“Hello,” Nathan greeted the winged officer. “I’m Captain Nathaniel Kade. I called ahead about two new arrivals?”

“Kade . . . Kade . . .” The immigration officer ran a finger down the paper checklist on his clipboard. “Yes, here you are. The Monhus, correct? Emigrating from Saturn?”

“That’s us!” Safi raised an eager hand and stepped forward.

“Oh, a fellow avion!” The officer grinned at her, clearly recognizing her wings through the cloak. “Always a pleasure to welcome another to Despina.”

“Are there a lot of us here?”

“Not a huge number, but you’ll find clusters here and there. There’s quite the thriving community down by Roseladon Lake. That’s out on Steppe Three a few kilometers from the Neyark deifactory. I’m from West Newport myself, but I have relatives in Roseladon and sometimes fly down there for the weekend.”

“You hear that?” Safi gave Zenno an excited nudge.

“I heard,” Zenno said, sharing in her excitement, if to a lesser degree. “Sounds to me like we made the right choice.”

“You’re here to stay, then?” the officer asked.

“We certainly hope so!” Safi replied.

“In that case, I can get you started with your paperwork.” He retrieved a pale green form from a stack by the window and added it to his clipboard. “Can you confirm your names for me, please?”

“I’m Safi sen Monhu.” She paused, then held up a hand. “Wait! Scratch that! Safi suun Despina! If I’m going to move here, I want to do it right!”

Zenno smiled warmly at the notion.

Nathan stepped back and joined Aiko while the officer guided Safi and Zenno through the start of the immigration process.

“That was a nice coincidence,” Aiko said. “Her meeting an avion immigration officer, I mean.”

“Nice, but not really a coincidence.” Nathan flashed a crafty smile. “I may have called ahead to see if they had any avions on duty.”

“Oh, look at you!” she cooed. “Being all Mr. Customer Service!”

“Not really. Just remembering something my father used to say.”

“What’s that?”

“‘Anything worth doing is worth doing right.’”

“Ah.” Aiko nodded thoughtfully. “So, does this extend to you buying me some new bodies?”

Nathan’s mood darkened instantly, and he let out a noncommittal grunt.



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