Years in the future, but not many, a Careworn Traveller trudges across a frozen wasteland, leaning into the wind. Snow has piled up on collapsed buildings and the rims of small impact craters. She is dressed in a nice thick quilted coat, but her exoskeleton still feels brittle with cold. There is no sign of life in the ruins ahead. The only things moving in this bleak hellscape are Careworn Traveller and her party of six armed guards.
Their guns are non-lethal. They simply make you spasm with pain and lie immobile on the ground for quite a long time. She found this out the hard way. The guards' faces are blotched white and red. Fear and aggression, not a good combination. They glance warily at the tumbled structures as if they expect to encounter lurking snipers. She can't help thinking that all this fuss is just going to attract hostile attention, not discourage it. With her hood up, you'd have to get pretty close to see that her face is hard and black instead of squishy and multicoloured.
The morning sky is clearing now, and through a gap in the clouds she can see part of the gleaming arch of silver that spans the heavens from horizon to horizon. This moon has rings now. They're rather pretty, if you don't think about what they cost. Up ahead stands a tall, sloping rampart of earth that seems to stretch across the entire width of this island. As they get closer, she sees steps carved into the permafrost, leading up and over.
To either side of the staircase are laid tributes to the dead. Photographs, ribbons, coral wreaths, drawings, preserved starfish…. It's a meagre display. She doesn't know if that's because not many died here, or because not many survived to mourn them. Everyone on this world was supposed to be dead by the time she got here. The fact that some survived just makes the place even more melancholy, somehow. Plus, it's really inconvenient.
They go up the steps in single file. At the top, the guards pause to let her take in the view. The ramparts curve gradually forwards on either side. Far below is a great circular plain of ice. To the north and south, twin arcs of black rock run out across the frozen sea, enclosing the level surface, and the nearest island stands tall on the horizon with a great semicircular chunk bitten out of it. They want to make her look at the crater. It's not like the meteorite impact was her fault, was it?
The Station is at the exact centre of the frozen lagoon. She recognises it instantly, though it doesn't look like any of the pictures. It is tall and narrow – shaped like a dagger, with a thick hilt, cross-guards, and a tapered blade half-buried in the ice. She had expected it to be either black or white, but this one is pale violet with a yellow S'Glub logo of a tall arrow-shaped house divided into six segments. Six Players, six Exiles, six Stations, six towers divided between the moons of Derse and Prospit. Well, at least that much of her intelligence was correct.
They descend more stairs down to an ice-car waiting at the bottom. The guards wave her in, and two of them drive her across to the Station. There are ladder rungs set into the flat of the blade, but instead of letting her climb, the guards strap her into a sling hanging from a rope. She is drawn up through the chilly air, spinning queasily. At the top, two more madrigogs help her onto the cross-guards. One unstraps her while the other keeps his gun at the ready. The helpful one seems to be a civilian specialist rather than a soldier.
Inside the hilt, the cramped control room is pretty much how she expected it to be. However, sat on the prompt console is a laptop of madrigog design. It is showing a video call, with the sound turned off. Five round faces: two shiny black and three plain white. They got all of us, she realises. This is to show her that if she doesn't co-operate, she can be disposed of. She takes a closer look. None of the three Prospitians is familiar, which is hardly surprising. One of the Dersites is likewise a stranger. But the other –
A wave of pressure surges through Careworn Traveller's haemocoel. Her knees buckle, and the confused guard has to catch her before she hits the deck. That face. The sharpened teeth. The gleaming white scar that narrowly misses his eye. The striped collar, the habitual sneer.
Jack Noir.
Arch-agent. Usurper. Torturer. Fanatic. Mass-murderer. His arms are bound to his sides, she can see now. Maybe he stabbed a few of them before he was caught. She holds her breath, waiting to see if he recognises her, but after a long moment he gives a contemptuous shake of his head and looks away from the screen.
At that moment, one of the Prospitians blinks four times.
She almost misses the twitch on the man's bland white face, but then he does it again. Long, short, long, short. The letter "C" in firefly code. She blinks "C" back to him, and he gives an almost imperceptible nod. They've done it. Against all the odds, the Continuity Committee has made it through.
Her mind is racing with the possibilities. If she can just get out of here…. The civilian closes the video call and brings up a script. It's written in Broodfester, but somehow she can read it fluently. She almost laughs when she glances through it. After all that, they just want her to say what she would have said anyway?
An image appears on the station's main monitor. A narrow, cluttered room panelled with fake coral. There is a bunk-bedtub built into one wall, with a young madrigog asleep in the upper basin. Careworn Traveller cracks her knuckle-segments and types into the prompt box:
YOU THERE. GIRL. WAKE UP
