“Is he dead?”

Coop didn’t bother trying to respond. His HUD told him he had severe damage throughout his armor and body. The liver cells of the Slickscale viper, far more effective than any nanomachine repair program, were working furiously to repair the damage, diverting the majority of his energy to do so. Even so much as a grunt was too much to ask at the moment.

Kamala’s indistinct form came into view of his limited scope. Coop was pretty sure it was him who nudged him with the toe of his boot, though he barely registered the touch.

“I sure hope not.”

Coop was pretty sure that was Lieutenant Azor. A few moments later her face eclipsed Kamala’s form. She must have knelt next to his head.

“He’s got one hell of a repair system, from what I’ve read.” She’s pitched her voice low, so as not to carry. Or at least Coop hoped she had. It was hard to tell with his hearing dimmed.

“Damn he’s heavy. Are you going to help me with this harness, or…”

Coop realized Lieutenant Azor was shifting him about. He caught the faint sound of buckles snapping and straps tightening.

“He’s all covered in…”

“Well there’s no way to clean him off right now. Jack said the intake team will be here any minute. I’ve got to get this harness on him.”

“I should go get that sword of his or it’ll be left behind,” Kamala said. “I think it’s some sort of tech. Doesn’t act normal and we don’t need our cover blown.”

Coop tried to push to his feet, to call out a warning, but he couldn’t move. All he could manage, pushing hard to demand the energy from the greedy viper cells, was the barest of groans.

“Wait,” said Lieutenant Azor. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. If you’re right and it is tech, it’s probably keyed to his biometrics. Touching it might set off a defense mechanism.”

Kamala scoffed. “You black ops types are so paranoid.”

“You’re as much black ops as me. And paranoia saves lives.”

“I’ll use the sheath. Won’t touch the metal.”

Coop relaxed, glad they’d figured it out, more or less. It was interesting to learn that Kamala was one of their contacts. If Lieutenant Azor was the lawyer, he wondered what Kamala’s job was. He seemed too cavalier for typical military duty. His field of vision narrowed and blurred, the conversation dulled to unintelligible. He tried to let his mind drift, to meditate, as Dr. Ark had insisted he learn.

• • •

“Deep breaths.”

Can’t breathe. Don’t have lungs.

“Focus, dummy.”

That’s uncalled for.

“You’re smarter than this. You can figure it out. Just be still. Be quiet.”

It doesn’t help that you keep telling me to take deep breaths when you’ve trapped me in this armor with no lungs. I literally can’t breathe.

“Stupid.”

• • •

His fingers and toes buzzed uncomfortably, which is how he knew his systems were coming online. The healing shutdown his HUD had forced upon him was not unlike coming to in the charging pod. He was glad for the external stimuli. They chased away the uncomfortable memory.

His HUD blinked on and surveyed the vicinity. Coop wondered how it did that. There had to be something in his armor that sensed the world around him and translated it into the lighted display overlapping his vision. It bothered him that he didn’t know what it was. Just as it bothered him he hadn’t known that only his brain had survived. Why hadn’t he known that? Perhaps he should ask Lieutenant Azor for a look as his file. Perhaps he should demand it of General Ashpholt when this job was done.

Several yellow dots appeared on his HUD. One was marked as “Unique: Jack”. One pulsed red. He hoped that was Kamala and made a note to mark the man as “unique”. As his HUD expanded its awareness, it mapped the area, marking solid objects. The ground was largely smooth, and rounded up to hill, the peak on his left. Upon the peak was a structure. A susurrus took up gently roaring in his hearing. Light grew in his vision like a slow dawn in deep winter. His HUD told him he was 72% repaired and at 61% power. The fight had taken more out of him than he’d expected, but it would do.

“Uncle Coop? You in there?” Lieutenant Azor asked.

He tried to speak but could only grunt.

“Glad to hear it.”

Coop wasn’t great at interpreting tone of voice, but he thought she sounded genuinely concerned.

His auditory and visual senses improved rapidly. Feeling flowed up his limbs to his center. He pushed to his feet and stretched. For a moment, he felt limber, relaxed, and sharp. Then a spot near the middle of his back stabbed with a cramp of pain. He grunted again.

“Come on. Let me show you to the tavern. Jack wants to buy you a drink.”

Coop looked around. He stood just outside a small copse of trees. They were thin and springy, not at all like the ancient titans in the wooded wilds he’d just been in.

“Where are we? Is this the giant turtle?”

“No. Well, it’s definitely a big turtle, but not the big turtle. This is an intake station, where some representatives of the Father will interview us and decide if we’re allowed to join the cause. Not everyone gets to live on the Gaia Beast. There’s only so much space, after all.”

Coop followed Lieutenant Azor through the sparse woods, up the gently sloping hill, to the structure his HUD had detected. The building was low beamed and largely open-air. A few circular tables were arranged on the packed-earth floor. A bar stretched the width of the building. The refugees from Conway, those who’d survived the gorillanoid attack, were here. They congregated in small groups. Most of them had cups in front of them. They looked exhausted.

“Did you say this is a tavern?”

“Yes. Apparently the Father doesn’t approve of alcohol.”

“Have we taken up with moonshiners?”

Lieutenant Azor giggled. “I doubt anything happens on the backs of any of these turtles without the Father knowing about it. I get the impression he’s fine with it so long as it’s removed. Now come on. Everyone wants to thank you for saving their lives.” She took hold of his right forearm, the upper one, just below the elbow, with both hands. Her expression brightened as they approached the others.

The refugees noticed their approach, and Jack stood from the table where he sat with Mary and a few others. He raised a carved and polished wooden mug. Everyone fell silent. Coop shuffled to a stop. He’d have blushed and cleared his throat uncomfortably if able. He hated being the center of such attention. Or any attention for that matter. He did his best not to come to attention or hunch his shoulders or move at all. The knotted ache at the center of his back tightened.

“We could not have hoped to stumble upon the assistance of a more competent warrior. This is a wild world. It doesn’t care for or need our expectations of civilization. We are lucky to have the company of a man who understands that. To Uncle Coop.”

The rest of the gathered raised cups and mugs and repeated:

“To Uncle Coop.”

The ache in his back spread to his shoulders, all four of them, and he clenched his hands. He didn’t know what to say, how to respond. He felt mortified. He didn’t do what he did for appreciation and he didn’t think it was deserved. After all, he was here on an assassination mission. Fortunately, no one seemed to think he was required to respond.

Lieutenant Azor took him by the elbow and gently lead him under the roof and to the bar. She settled on one of the wooden stools. Coop stood, certain the weight of the power armor would crush any of these stools. Likewise, he didn’t lean against the counter.

A man in a leather smock approached. “Glad to see your uncle is doing okay.”

“This is Coop.” Lieutenant Azor gestured at him.

The bartender in the leather smock extended a hand. “I’m Haver.”

Coop shook the man’s hand with deliberate carefulness.

“What will you have to drink?”

“Nothing,” said Coop.

“Beer for me,” said Lieutenant Azor. She reached into a pocket and handed the man a few coins. Coop didn’t know much about currency. He got paid electronically and the few personal purchases he made were also electronic. His experience with money was a spreadsheet on his HUD.

The bartender, Haver, accepted the coins with a nod and walked back to a set of taps against the far wall.

“I don’t have any money,” Coop said.

Lieutenant Azor shrugged. “Not to worry. I commissioned a variety of coinage for the mission. Anyway, the economy of the folks on the Gaia Beast seems to be… ad hoc.”

His HUD told him when Jack stood from his table and joined them at the bar.

“Let me buy you a drink, Uncle Coop.”

Coop spent several moments trying to figure out how to gracefully decline, but Azor came to his rescue.

“Uncle Coop can’t drink. He doesn’t have an esophagus. Or a stomach for that matter. He appreciates the offer though.”

“Oh,” said Jack. He paused for several moments. “They really did a number on you, huh?”

Coop shifted and cocked his head slightly.

“Yeah,” said Jack. “Well, I just wanted to say thanks again.”

Coop shifted his gaze to look at the man and noticed the shoulder of his jacket and the shirt underneath had been torn away and was soaked in blood and covered with fresh gauze.

“I did that,” Coop said, nodding at the injury.

“Hmm?” Jack looked down at his shoulder and nodded. “You did that saving my life. Don’t worry about it.”

Coop grunted. It’d been a desperate move, and it had worked, but still he regretted injuring a man he’d meant to protect.

Haver brought Lieutenant Azor her beer. “You want a another, Mr. Peterson?” He looked at Jack.

Jack nodded and set his mug on the bar.

They didn’t bother making small talk while Haver fetched Jack his drink. Jack gave the two of them another nod before rejoining his wife and the others.

“The intake team was set to leave you behind,” Lieutenant Azor said quietly. “They thought you were dead. Jack insisted they couldn’t. We put a harness on you and hauled you up the side of the turtle. It was real patient. Just settled on its belly and waited for us to all climb aboard. It’s a hell of a thing, sir. You should have seen it. And this is a small one. Only room for a tavern and a bit of forest, but it’s like a moving hill.”

“Why am I not still covered in frozen saliva and beast gore?”

“The refuges insisted on cleaning you off. There’s a spring behind the tavern. Don’t ask me how there’s a spring on the back of a giant turtle. No idea. Kamala was no help at all.”

“He’s one of our contacts.”

“Yeah. Specialist Fosro. Reconissance”

Lieutenant Azor took a long drink of her beer then let out a long, shuddering breath.

Coop didn’t know how to ask her how she was feeling. He knew soldiers, no matter how well trained, could not always hold up under trauma. For all its faults, the UPSF employed an extensive mental health division and regularly assessed its personnel. Coop did not avail himself of the service and sat through his evaluation with grunts and shrugs, but he wished he could do something for Lieutenant Azor now.

“Did you know the Salivdors had a baby?”

“Who?”

Lieutenant Azor gave him a funny look before schooling her expression. “They were killed, by the beasts.”

Coop remembered the young man backhanded across the clearing and the young woman taken into the canopy. He’d never learned their names.

“Anyway, they had a baby. Her name is Hope. She’s with the Petersons now. There's some discussion of who will adopt her.”

Coop thought it was a bit on the nose, a young pair of refugees naming their newborn baby Hope during a time of crisis. It seemed to him like a trope from one of Dr. Ark’s dogeared paperbacks. Too perfect a metaphor for real life.

The uncharitable thought flitted through his mind, but he didn’t voice it.

They were silent for a while. Lieutenant Azor got another drink. Eventually, Jack called for their attention and explained that representatives of the Father would come to interview them in the morning. Haver had tents and sleeping bags to loan but tavern was the only building.

Kamala, Specialist Forso, approached. Despite that Coop hard marked him unique, his HUD tried to mark him hostile. The pink-haired man with purple-tinted skin set Coop’s sword, snug in her wooden sheath, point down on the floor beside him and let it lean against the bar. Then he sat on the stool on the other side of Lieutenant Azor, finished his drink, and set down his thick, clay mug with a mild thunk.

“That was a hell of a thing, huh?”

Coop put the palm of his upper left hand upon the pommel of her handle. She sighed gently, the song of wind in high mountains, far away. He wasn’t sure how to respond to Specialist Forso, then realized he was talking to Lieutenant Azor.

She nodded.

“I thought maybe we should discuss the strategy for tomorrow. How do we get invited to the Great Gaia Beast?”

Coop glanced up and down the bar, his faceplate hiding the look, even though his HUD told him Haver was busy with others at the far end of the bar and no one else was near. He assumed Specialist Fosro already knew that.

“Seems to me they’re interested in helping refugees and recruiting true believers.”

Specialist Fosro nodded. “I can play the part of a zealot pretty easily.”

Lieutenant Azor shot a glance at Coop. “I thought we’d continue as uncle and niece, seeking refuge. I’m open to the idea of joining the Voice of Gaia.”

That name triggered a ghost of a memory. Specialist Magoro had mentioned them back at USPF Excelsior, but he thought maybe he’d heard it before that. Somewhere at the back of his mind, a tingle flickered a moment. It bothered him that his memory might be failing him. As far back as it went, he could recall all manner of details, but this…

Specialist Fosro leaned on the bar to look across Lieutenant Azor at Coop. “I take it this isn’t the kind of strategy you prefer to discuss?”

Coop took a few moments before realizing Specialist Forso was looking for a response. He shrugged.

Forso shifted his gaze to Lieutenant Azor. “Maybe you and I can pound out the details this evening?” He cleared his throat.

“Sure,” she said, finishing her beer. “You don’t mind if I leave you alone for a while, right Uncle Coop?”

Coop shrugged again. The two stood, and Coop raised a hand.

“Thank you, Kamala, for returning her to me. My sword, that is.”

“Ah, right. Of course. Was careful not to touch it.”

“That’s good.”

Specialist Forso cleared his throat, then looked at Lieutenant Azor. “Shall we?”

She nodded and they left together.

• • •

Coop had expected being on the back of a giant turtle would be more obvious. He expected to feel the motion of the beast under him, hear its great footfalls, notice the passing of the landscape as they moved through it

The tavern was not quite at the apex of the hill. Coop walked up the gentle slope and at the top was a thick piece of stone jutting at an angle, showing the striations of geological age. The stone was split on one side, and water burburled to the surface. It collected in a natural basin formed by the jutting stone and a second jammed against it. The basin was several meters long and just over half that wide. It was difficult to tell in the failing light of sunset, but he thought it was deep enough to sit in.

Coop wondered how long the beast had lived, how long it took for rock and soil and trees to build upon the creature, how a phenomenon like plate tectonics might play out upon the beast’s shell, where the water came from and whether it was safe to drink.

He walked around to the other side of the jutting rock and stared out over the sparsely wooded slope. Refugees had spread across the hill of the turtle shell. The hill grew steeper the closer to the edge.

Coop sat, put his back to the side of the jutting rock, set his sword upon his knees, and tilted his head back. The sky was still white-pink in the west, darkening to its apex where stars were already visible. He cast his gaze to the horizon to find the giant trees of the wilds. He couldn’t tell if they moved between them. And further off, through the haze of distance and evening, he could just make out a pale, reddish rocky outcropping of mountainous proportions, and he wondered if that was the back of the Great Gaia Beast.

It was a placid scene, beautiful perhaps, though he was no judge. He let the view remove his thoughts from the ugly act he’d commit when he got there, until the sun was well set, the sky dark but for twinkling stars and a sliver moon and the mountain was hidden to all but his memory.

• • •

Dr. Ark appreciated the taste of something new. A new food, a new book, a new beast to study. Once the bite of the Firetooth mosquito had turned her into a vampire, she’d sought out blood from every beast upon Gaia IV that had it. Some had been easier to sample than others, some had been impossible.

The Arkblade was similar.

She’d not tasted the blood of a Rocknuckle gorillanoid before. At least, not as a sword. Now, with Coop’s thoughts quieted, she reveled in it.

It was a thick taste, simple and straightforward, heavy at the front and satisfying going down. It was fill, better in small doses. It wouldn’t overpower, only compliment, brining others to the fore should they accompany, but was a solid enough presence on its own.

• • •

The Inquisitors of the Father flew in on a trio of Kitewing condors. Coop saw them from where he sat with his back to the jutting rock. He thought they were wisps of cloud for a while, but they moved with deliberateness. He grasped the sheath of his sword in one hand but otherwise didn’t move. The quiet sitting had left him with an insistent crick in his neck on the right side. He wasn’t keen to exacerbate it.

By the time he could make out the birds and their riders, he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. The refugees were waking, Haver was firing up his oven, and the wildlife of the turtleback chirped and trilled. Coop watched the condors. He knew Dr. Ark had pioneered hunting and harvesting the beasts of Gaia IV. He knew she had tried domesticating some, or at least living alongside them, but as far as he knew, she’d never gotten so far as riding a condor.

The birds had massive wingspans and a dozen different kinds of feathers and a razor beak. They were supple and adroit and though they weren’t terribly strong, they could carry much more in flight than would have been possible without the specialized bladder in their chests. They could inflate and deflate their bladders with precise breaths, adjusting their buoyancy with precision. It was the same organ residing in Coop’s chest, powering his jumpack. He envied the beasts’ precise, graceful flight. Soaring above the world and away from its troubles was a tempting thought.

Haver provided breakfast of strong coffee, scrambled eggs, and thick bacon. It was all hunted and gathered from the regions they traveled through on the backs of the turtles. The Voice of Gaia, it was explained, had a dedicated coterie of hunters.

The inquisitors interviewed the refugees in familial groups. Lieutenant Azor came to sit with him but they didn’t speak. She held a clay mug in both hands. The coffee steamed in gentle curls. When it was their turn, Coop let her do the talking. She described their backstory: her attending law classes online, him working in private security and getting convinced to undergo cyberization. They’d heard of the Gaia Beast from rumors around town and hoped a life more in tune with the movements of Gaia IV might be less tumultuous. She shared enough details to seem believable but not so many as to seem rehearsed.

“And you, Mr. Coop?”

The inquisitor was an older woman with dark skin and a weathered face. Her hair grew in tight curls worked into thick braids and held back with a simple scarf. Her dress was simple and homespun. She, like the other inquisitors, wore a red armband, badge of her office, he assumed. She had a kind expression and a brisk tone and she looked at him with authority.

“It’s like Jennifer said. A quieter life would be nice.”

“You seek a quieter life, but you carry a sword?”

The inquisitor and Lieutenant Azor sat upon chairs in the tavern. It was only them, and Coop’s HUD confirmed no one lurked nearby. He’d chosen to stand for fear of crushing one of the chairs. He gripped the sheath of his blade a bit tighter.

“I do.”

“Does that not seem contradictory to you?”

He took a moment, then another, and considered. Eventually, he said, “A person can be more than one thing.”

“Did you know the Father employs those with the talent and predilection as hunters?”

Coop nodded.

“It’s not indiscriminate killing, you understand, but careful harvest for food, clothing, shelter, tools, and all manner of other goods. Being invited to live on the Great Gaia Beast, or any of her progeny for that matter, requests that you contribute. Contributing can come in a variety of forms. Have you any experience with hunting, Mr. Coop?”

Coop shrugged. “I can fire a rifle. I’m generally familiar with beasts, how to kill them, which can be eaten.”

The woman nodded. “There’s a thriving city on the back of the Great Gaia Beast and a variety of domiciles on the backs of her progeny. We are a community who has learned to live with Gaia IV, not in fear of her. It seems to me a bright young woman and a competent hunter would fit nicely. The decision is not mine alone, but I will recommend the two of you be admitted as probationary refugees.”