Two towers stood at the mouth of the Emperor Valley’s Sensor Perimeter, twenty meters tall and six across, with bones and hide of structural steel. Both were capped with guardhouses and U-cannon batteries. Another sixteen batteries stood along the shoulders of the mountains, between the valley opening and the Pinnacle Holdfast.

No literal wall separated Liberty Corps territory, no gate or antique drawbridge, no stone ramparts. The Liberty Corps’ wall was the spine of mountains. Their ramparts were made of firepower – enough firepower to reduce those same mountains to rubble. Any attacking force faced the tectonic power to reshape continents.

Inventory Captain Daine waved to the westward gatehouse before he drove his skimmer beyond the sensor perimeter.

“Four hours, Felth.” Daine guided them out of the valley, above the low grass. They followed an unmarked route that skimmers had taken for decades of development. The first generations of Earth-built skimmers were once tested on that roadless expanse of formerly-IHSA land. “Four hours and we’re loaded, we’re back, and we’re finished for three days.”

“I just hope they still let us leave the valley,” Corporal Felth answered. “Did you get your approval yet?”

“I did not.” The valley walls gradually fell away, lower and lower in altitude, as they drove northwest. From genuine mountain peaks, sharp and snowcapped, sparse in vegetation, the valley was soon ringed in mounds of forested hills. As they traveled, the snow lessened above them, like they were passing between seasons.

“Whatever’s up with the Alliances is turning into something, something real.” Felth pressed his gloved right fist against the side of his gray helmet. The knuckles cracked. “Another month, there might be no more standard rotations.”

“No way the Alliance can hit us with Thunderworks firepower,” Daine said. “And that’s what it’d need. Nope, we’re gonna beat them economically. This is a cold war. We get the good Pharma. We get the good supplies. We get the good tech. And we return the favor, keep everybody safe and cozy. Then that’s it.”

“I don’t think so.” Felth cracked the knuckles of his left fist. “Geek shit ain’t doing it this time. This is different.”

“Nothing’s different,” Daine said. Around them the snow was gone, only trees. Many pines stood there, but also birch and maple and alder, some still crowned with blossoms. “We’re still one nation. We’ll teach the Alliances that weakness is no way to survive. Then we can start worrying about the rest of the world.”

“I don’t know.” Felth stretched his fingers. “But we’ll find…”

A wave of light passed over the skimmer, bright like lightning but with no thunder to accompany it, no sound. Daine blinked, eyes watering, vision dominated by a massive purple afterimage.

As his eyes cleared, the skimmer slammed down into the grass and skidded along the ground. The wheel was dead in Daine’s hands. The scopes were dark.

Daine heard two more crashes. The other skimmers fell and skidded behind them.

“I.F.!” Daine slammed his palm into the dash.

“More bandits?” Felth stood, his blaster drawn.

Daine nodded. He checked comm and radio and heard only silence and static.

“No,” Daine corrected. “Too good for bandits. They’re jamming everything. We’ll get all of us together in one skimmer and send out the flare burst.”

“Skimmer three has the spare cells.” Felth nodded.

Daine led the way back to the skimmer’s rear hatch. It opened. The world outside was enshrouded in a thick fog. Nothing could be seen. Even the edge of the hatch vanished into the coverage when it pressed down to the unseen ground. Out of the corner of his eye, Daine could still see the early-morning sunshine through the windshield.

But he had no time to question the enigma-fog or process its purpose. Something struck him between shoulder and breastplate. Pinpricks stabbed through his bodysuit and into his flesh.

Two feet of arrow stuck out from Daine’s shoulder. He had no chance to respond or to warn Felth.

Electricity surged from the arrow tip and all through him, like a full-body static shock, racing everywhere, along his skin.

Then he felt nothing for a long time.

* * *

Orson Gregory checked the abandoned substation’s locks. The door didn’t budge.

“When they wake up, they’ll have food and water.” Orson walked around the squat, concrete building. All machinery around it was gone, long since stripped away for some unknown purpose. “Oxygen in that room should last for over a week. Their air won’t be too nice with their, uh, waste buckets in there with them, but that shouldn’t kill them.”

Orson wore the Inventory Captain’s white armor, blaster holstered at his left hip. The man stood a few inches shorter than Orson. The stolen armor fit tight at Orson’s knees and thighs, but tight looked better than loose.

“You’ve gone through a great deal of work to spare them.” Dr. Stan wore one of the Mountain Patrol armor suits. “I hope they don’t escape.”

“Escape to where?” Orson laughed. The substation stood at the cleft of a long hill, surrounded by trees. The remains of a gravel road ended beside it, but it was overgrown with grasses and low shrubs. “They have no tools and no way to communicate.”

The building, the Aesir, and the three stolen skimmers were the only signs of human influence. Nothing else could be seen but nature in springtime. Nothing could be heard but wind and birdsong.

“This sends a message,” Orson said. “I’ll be violent in a battle, if I have to. But we’re not assassins. Well… Maybe for Helmont. He’s gotta go.”

“Rendering them inert via electric shock is nonviolent?” Dr. Stan asked.

“Ugh!” Jaleel tugged at his armor as he stepped from the Aesir. “How did this work so well on the Death Star? Harrison Ford is tall, but Star Wars didn’t talk about how the armor fit Han Solo. None of the armor fits me! None of it. And I don’t get an easy fix, like Enoa wearing her own clothes underneath to make her armor fit.”

“This is real life.” Orson walked to him and pulled his right shoulder plate higher. “This ain’t the movies.”

“Think about how nicely this armor will fit in your trophy case, Jaleel,” Dr. Stan said.

“She’s right,” Orson said. “You can have it on display when you’re Captain Yaye with your own ship. Great conversation starter too – ‘I got this back when I was just a lad in the Aesir crew’.”

“Who says lad?” Jaleel asked. “Are we in Scotland now?”

“You’re grumpy today,” Orson said. “Do you have the inventory cart ready for us?”

“We do.” Enoa also stepped from the Aesir. Wearing both armor and helmet, she looked like any other trooper. Her sex or ethnicity could not be determined. Her voice took on the generic monotone of Liberty Corps forces when projected through her helmet’s speaker. “You should check it out, but your sword, coat, and boot are in there. And the floppies.”

“Awesome,” Orson said. “Thanks. Yeah, I’ll give it a look and get the rest of my stuff secure. Well, we have our uniforms. I have the Card Key and the Captain’s ID.” He tapped two fingers to his belt. “The floppies are ready. We know our maps and our jobs. Jaleel, you’re okay to drive a skimmer?”

“It’s easier than what you’re making me do with the sorting system,” he said.

“Dr. Stan, you’re sure you’re okay driving this with people watching you?” Orson continued.

“I was rusty,” she answered. “But I’ll be just fine.”

“Good,” Orson said. “Then I think that’s all of it.”

“The Aesir’s summon command,” Dr. Stan reminded. “We all need to know that.”

“Oh yeah.” Orson sighed. “Yeah, you do need that. Now, I want you to know that Franklin and Wayne set the code phrase. It wasn’t me! And more importantly, remember, if things really do go that bad, and you need to use the summon without me, you still have to mess with the Liberty Corps air defenses. The Aesir can skim the valley floor, but it would probably need to be at a higher altitude to pick you up. If I’m okay, I have some ideas for those defenses. If I’m not okay, Jaleel, you’re flying. Enoa, do one of your fog things for cover.”

“What can they do if something happens to both of us?” Enoa asked.

“Whoever is… Whoever is okay has to mess with their guns somehow.” Orson shrugged. He hummed to himself. He found the tune he still hadn’t heard in over half a decade. “Alright, the Aesir’s deep clearance code is, ‘Oh, won’t you heal me with your hands, Sirona. Oh, won’t you fill my heart with sound’.”

“This is so much better than we thought!” Jaleel laughed and cheered. Enoa fought her own laughter. Her small, girlish chuckle sounded bizarre, filtered through her helmet’s distortion.

“I expected a generic love song,” she said. “I didn’t think there would be a real song with your girlfriend’s name in the lyrics! Did you write that, Orson?”

“Welcome to the Aesir-class prototype exploratory vessel command terminal.” Ruby’s voice came from the Aesir’s open door. “I speak for the vessel’s main computer. How may I be of assistance?”

“No, I didn’t write it!” Orson said. “I’ll get you printouts of the pass code. Just say that into your ship comms and then you can give the auto command. But we need to destroy wherever it’s written down. The Aesir is still voice-locked. It won’t probably matter if someone else says it, but I still don’t like anyone else knowing it.”

“The ship code is about your, eh, former romantic partner?” Dr. Stan asked. Jaleel laughed again.

“I think it’s sweet!” Enoa said. “Orson has his girlfriend’s glowing fire weapon. He has a song about her as his pass code. It’s really heartwarming, in an Orson way.”

“Fire weapon?” Jaleel said. “Oh! I almost forgot the lantern! That’s pretty neat. You literally carry a torch for her. That’s a saying, right?”

“It is,” Enoa said. “I didn’t think of that. Of course the torch Orson carries for his old love can shoot fire at people.”

“If I don’t die today.” Orson laughed despite himself. “Sirona meeting the two of you would kill me. I didn’t do the lyrics. The song is this celtic folk metal thing. Don’t ask me how Franklin and Wayne found it. I was already living in the Aesir at the time so Sirona was there a lot.”

“The Aesir was your hot bachelor pad.” Jaleel spoke in an affected deep voice. “Hey, honey, wanna see my prototype spaceship camper?”

“She was part of the original crew too.” Orson shook his head. “Alright. I’m glad we’re feeling good, but we need to be serious now. We’ve worked hard on this, and if we do it right, we’ll be all set for information. We’ll get Enoa her teacher. We’ll avenge Dr. Stan’s colleagues. Jaleel already has his trophy armor.

“But this is also the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done together. If we mess up at all, we’re all dead. I think this is important, stopping the Liberty Corps, resolving an old problem that the Hierarchia and the dead governments left behind. It might even break into my top ten, or bottom ten, or whatever.”

“Your rankings don’t mean anything,” Enoa said. “You told me that getting chased in Nimauk was top twenty-five.”

“One, I knew then there was a seriously powerful person there who flipped the train,” Orson said. “And two, I do tend to skew my current problems and rank them higher than I do in hindsight. I’m serious about this, though. I have faith in us. I have faith in the plan and our preparation, but we need to keep our heads or it’s the end of us and everything we’re trying to do.”

Orson forced a smile across his face. It was a weak smile and distracted and melancholy. He missed the clear mind and anticipation he’d had, a decade earlier, instead of the thousand mixed memories that fought to fill his mind with sadness and with doubt.

“Alright,” Orson said. “Let’s go meet big pharma. Captain Daine likes to arrive really early for their drop-offs, but we can’t be too late. We’re doing the Lord Baron’s business today.”

* * *

Baron Reidel Khunrath Helmont still wore an olive IHSA jumpsuit in his meditation. It was the same generation of garment he’d worn in the earliest Neurzodone trials, many decades ago. It was the same cotton twill. In his care, it had the same precise, sterile smell and felt the same against his skin.

And it transported him back to that time.

Shaping came easier to him when he felt his mind surrounded by the plain, gray walls of the IHSA refinement center’s examination rooms. He bore no command then. His only responsibility was excellence, wresting control of some power from the universe. Wielding that power had been his sole purpose.

Politics in the Liberty Corps, politics with the Pacific Alliance, requisitions and inventory – all the tawdry days of mundane concern could atrophy his power. The way long days in an office chair can atrophy muscle. The way long days of leisure can atrophy a mind.

Helmont allowed no such atrophy. At his most focused, his strongest, his command became an extension, a lens through which to view his power.

He knew his valley. He held a clear and full map of it in his mind, three maps truly.

Helmont had a map of stone and structure.

He’d explored the mountains ringing his valley, from root to peak, from subterranean cavern to his own summit stronghold. He’d touched the water under earth and the adamantine depths of stone, and his touch expanded his map.

His map detailed the great weight of 10,000 feet of earth and the slumbering seismic forces that had birthed his mountains eons ago. His map pinpointed the lives around him, from those squirming, blind, through lightless water, to the perching avian, nesting in crag no human could ever reach on foot.

The biological details of those lives needed their own map – though plotting their presence was a worthy power.

Helmont had a map of energy and light.

He’d stood beside the great nuclear reactor that fed his holdfast. He’d mapped it during its construction and his map expanded when it became operational. His map showed him the nervous system of energy, of electrons racing through the valley, from his towering artillery to the lights in the crew quarters to the radiant heat that rose from his holdfast’s floors and held at bay the almost-permanent winter of such high elevations.

Helmont had a map of blood and bone.

He’d explored the minds and bodies of most who arrived at the Pinnacle, from prisoner to pilot, from engineer to rifleman, to his own knights. He’d touched his enemies and his pupils, alike, and his touch filled in the blank edges of his map. His map detailed emotion and thought and intention, but also the movements of muscle and cartilage and skeleton.

He knew the pilots in the wheeling Saw-wings and the gunners crewing his artillery. He felt their cool command and their unyielding focus. None would he allow to fly if he did not map them, could not track their unwavering attentiveness.

He knew the prisoners in their cells, the failures, the traitors, the political foes. Some awaited their plummet with fear. Some awaited an endless incarceration, resigned or consumed with fury.

Kolben Maros faced both death and prolonged incarceration. Finally, Helmont sensed no defiance in him. Only weariness and acceptance. And power – what a shame it was that Maros had betrayed them. He held a rare gift.

Helmont savored Kol’s fear and his instinctual, desperate protective nature. He savored the blooming power he felt in the younger man. He savored the feeling of Shaping, mapping the enigma of real magic, alive in its wielders.

Helmont knew his students best, his knights. From training and instruction, he’d mapped them many times. He knew them down to the flow of blood in their veins, to the marrow of their bones, to their smallest cells and the organelles moving inside them. All the teeming life of their bodies was clear in his mind. This was the greatest of his knowledge, a truly living map that only he could perceive.

Lives he had not touched stood out on his map like shadows without owner. Like empty picture frames, he saw the space they occupied on the wall, but without detail.

Three men entered his chambers. Two he knew. They were mapped. They delivered his daily meals. Both were quiet and polite. Both feared him as ancient heathens feared their pagan god. Even after years of such service, if Helmont watched them on his map, he saw their bodies flood with adrenaline and cortisol as they approached his door. They wore plain white uniforms, without armor.

The third man was a blank, an empty frame.

All three men knew to wait. They waited for him to conclude his meditations. They waited for him to address them.

“Steak and eggs today?” He stood. His observation room was spare and gray. It had no decorations and needed none. Three walls were lined with shaped quartz glass, with a panoramic view of the Pinnacle and ten thousand feet of the Emperor Valley.

Only a long black table stood in the room’s center. A cloche-covered meal waited for him at the head of that table.

“Yes, sir,” the culinary specialists answered. All three men stood at attention. He left them standing there, arms at sides, backs straight. He did not acknowledge them further until he crossed the room and collected his dressing gown.

“My favorite,” Helmont said. “You two may leave. What is your name, Lieutenant?”

“Greenley, sir,” the unmapped said.

“Greenley, yes,” Helmont said. “You are here to interview as my new Ledgerman, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

Helmont offered his hand. Greenley shook it.

From the place where their skin met, Helmont’s awareness spread. The blank portrait revealed itself. He saw the wheeling cells and working organs of the man. And better yet, he could read meaning in the motion of heartbeat and hormone. He knew the man then. He knew his ambition and his fear, his anticipation and apprehension both.

When their hands parted, Helmont’s sense dimmed, lessened, but only slightly. He’d plotted the man on his map, even if it required focus or strained his eyes to see him clearly. Greenley shivered and drew back his hand.

“I would like you to read my morning briefing.” Helmont returned to the head of his table. He sat and spread his linen napkin across his lap. He lifted the cloche and savored the smells of food prepared exactly as instructed. For an instant, he ignored everything but what his nose told him. He ignored every other sense and every map in his mind.

“I…” Greenley took a deep, composing breath. “I am prepared, sir.”

“Then go ahead.” Helmont lifted knife and fork. “What news do you bring for me, Lieutenant?”

* * *

Enoa watched Orson and Dr. Stan meet the Derzelas Pharmaceutical team. Three wore quasi-military vests and helmets, rifles slung across their chests. The fourth was dressed in a button-down shirt and dress pants, under a pinstripe overcoat.

They met at the edge of a road, where a line of broken macadam ended in a wide, paved loop. It was just large enough for the trucks to turn around and take the same road back and away from the outskirts of the Liberty Corps territory.

Pinstripe shook hands with Orson. They spoke briefly, but Enoa could not hear them. Pinstripe smiled. He laughed. Orson moved his head back, maybe laughing too, beneath his helmet. Then Pinstripe returned to the cab of his truck.

The guards opened each of the trailers for Orson. Enoa watched his stolen white helmet turned down toward a datapad. He lifted a stylus and signed three times. Then the Derzelas guards unhooked the trailers from the cabs of their semi trucks. They climbed back into their cabs and drove away.

The Derzelas crew left them alone with the shipment.

Orson stepped back aboard the skimmer. “Let’s hope the cargo repulsors really do work. So far so good.”

* * *

Kol Maros found a tub of salve with his breakfast. He hadn’t recognized the second plastic container next to his bowl of cream of wheat. Writing across the lid read, ‘for burns’.

The salve stank with a chemical odor that made him cough. He set the tub away from his food tray.

Kol ate first, and he ate fast. He shoveled the cream of wheat into his mouth. He did the same with his bread and his water. He used the cell’s uncomfortably angled toilet and cleaned his hands at the cell’s small sink.

Only then did he take the salve and spread it across his wounds. He considered the possibility that they’d decided to poison him.

He accepted this, but he doubted it. Helmont wanted him to face his plummet, and so they would keep him alive.

The burn on Kol’s shoulder from the day before stuck to the fabric of his tunic when he pulled it off over his head. It was still beet red. That burn hurt the worst when the salve touched the wound. But then it went numb.

The burn on his stomach hurt the least and it was the least severe. His breastplate had taken most of that blast. Even the superheated plasteel only cut through his bodysuit in two places.

The burn on his hip leaked pus. He cleaned it away, but the mark where the flame had consumed the side of his belt cut the deepest. The flame had touched him there the longest. But soon that too was numb from the salve.

Then Kol sat back against his bed. He waited.

As expected, the salve calmed the pain in his burns. Soon, he could move his shoulder and his waist without discomfort. The salve had not been meant to poison him.

And if they didn’t plan to kill him, it was only a matter of time before testing began again.

* * *

Orson drove the lead skimmer into the mouth of the Emperor Valley.

There, the line of mountains rose to 10,000 feet above sea level. The sheer cliffs were lined with sixteen city-destroying U-cannons and ten hidden launch pads for mechanized forces. The base was a small city set inside a single building. It could store up to three hundred fighter craft and house one hundred thousand personnel.

Those were the facts Orson had studied, the data, the numbers that made his plan possible.

But facts were nothing compared to the sight of it. Data about elevation and topography was nothing compared to the wall of mountains that swallowed out the sun and left the valley floor in nearly endless dusk.

Data didn’t prepare him for the sight of the cannons, each one of them a weapon of mass destruction. He’d stood in the rubble left behind by such weapons. He’d watched cities erased. He’d seen seas brought to boil. He’d felt the yellow-green glass remains of obliterated sand – left behind in the wake of Thunderworks.

Facts about hangar space couldn’t prepare him for the sound of wheeling Saw-wings, shrieking as they circled the mountain peaks. He’d heard that sound before, of course, but never so far from the Aesir or from help. He’d never been utterly trapped on the ground when the Hierarchia’s birds of prey took wing.

Confronted with the legioned Liberty Corps forces, he saw its truth beyond what numbers could teach his imagination. This was the Hierarchia’s ultimate dream, made real. Power, open power, and in five years on the Wayfarers Highway he’d done nothing to halt its resurrection.

“Are you okay?” Enoa asked. And her distorted voice reminded him inescapably where they were.

“It’s different seeing it.” In the shadow of the Emperor Valley, even Orson Gregory’s voice had the unique helmet-distorted timbre of the Liberty Corps.

He tried to keep his eyes at the ground. He tried not to look at the cannons, perched cliffside. He tried not to search for the hidden mechanized forces. He tried to find the core of his role, a bored man, an overworked trooper.

Orson found common ground with his character, with his cover story. Both wanted nothing more than for their work to be done. Both wanted nothing more than to put that valley behind them.

“Some of the times I’ve been on these kinds of missions,” Orson said. “I’ve felt like… You’ll think it’s really dumb and lame…”

“What is it?” she asked. “You’re really not okay, are you? You need to tell me if you’re not.”

“I feel sometimes like I’m supposed to do something, like as much as the forces of the world are against me, there’s something else that wants me to win. You know in legends, where the person who seems like they’re just a farmer or just a villager is secretly magic or a genius or fated to become the strongest person alive?”

“What legends are we talking about?” Enoa asked. “I think that might just be a European cultural thing.”

“Maybe it is,” Orson said. “I don’t know. God, I wish my friend Haydn was here. I wish he was here for a thousand reasons, actually. He was so much better at plans… He could explain what I mean. He’d be really literary about it, but he’d make sense of this. Anyway, I know I’m still just some guy. I don’t have a power like you’re learning and I’m no genius, not like Jaleel and Dr. Stan.

“But I feel the legend sometimes, like I can make things work out anyway. Like the unique things that make me who I am, if I train and fight my hardest – I can be good enough. I felt it when I went up against Thunderworks. When I got to Norlenheim, all the ships and robots and explosions were just more stuff to think about. Nothing felt impossible, because I was carrying legend that day. Damn, this is really not what I mean…”

“Are you trying to say you feel that way, right now?” She asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t. Not even a little bit.”

“Well, I don’t believe in it, what you just said. I think for whatever reason you were just pumped-up or something at Norlenheim. You’re just as skilled now. Just because you’re not a Shaper, that doesn’t mean you’re ‘just’ some guy. I think maybe you feel like you need this outside legendary whatever to give you permission to be great, because you don’t feel, I don’t know, worthy on your own. And that isn’t true.”

“Maybe.” Orson kept his eyes away from the view of Liberty Corps might. He watched the valley floor as it rose higher toward the final wall of stone, still miles distant. He could already see the first of the lift cables.

The cables were as thick around as tree trunks. Electromagnetic energy danced along the spooled metal, stretching thousands of feet from valley to the Pinnacle’s summit. That magnetism carried cars and cargo lifts alike.

Orson checked his dash. He watched the sensor profile of the two skimmers just behind him. Jaleel and Dr. Stan followed, safe.

“We’re taking cables fourteen through sixteen?” Orson carried a cheat sheet in his pocket. It was a jumbled mess of writing, chronicling their entire plan, all on a standard note card. Sometimes he wrote left to right, sometimes top to bottom, sometimes interspersed with numbers or symbols. From a distance, the card looked colored in, solid black. But it was still stuck in his pocket.

“Yep,” Enoa said. “Fourteen through sixteen.”

Orson brought the skimmer to a stop at cable fourteen. The cable anchors ended in solid steel blocks the size and shape of an average garden shed. None were labeled. Orson counted them.

The other two skimmers came to a stop alongside their cables, until all three waited in position.

“Next, the fun part,” Orson said. “So far so good.”