Uriah 82. Once rim boomtown, now penal/dregs colony. Like everything else here, the once-rich ground is now a hollow shell, milked for all it was good for, then left to rot. I can see from the landing port that most of the buildings are empty, derelict. There’s activity, though. Some poor souls forced to call this place home; the ones who couldn’t afford to leave when the mines dried up. The people sent here because their birth colonies deemed them a ‘bad match’.

Or people like me.

The transport that dumped here me takes off back into orbit, not bothering to see if it can pick up passengers. They probably need a permit to take passengers from here.

There’s no one to greet me, though I’d half expected a ‘welcome party’ to see if I had anything worth stealing. Disappointing. An old terminal at the end of the port railing stutters to life. It doesn’t even do audio.

WELCOME TO URIAH 82! REPORT TO SUPERVISOR FOR DWELLING AND RATIONS ALLOTMENT…

A grainy picture of a spike-haired blonde and a name with way too many letters flickers over the screen before cutting off like I’m not worth wasting further power on. Even a broken computer can be right once a millennium.

Hopefully the info isn’t as out-of-date as the hardware.

I don’t have luggage. My hands are as empty as this planet’s future.

As empty as me.

…

The city is more overgrown than it looked from the skyport. What had this place even been? Who dumped skyrisers into the middle of a full-on nature preserve? Or had it been a park once, now out of control but growing on some super steroids? Possible. Some colonies had really weird waste control issues.

I find the colony leader hauling scrap, though neither of those terms carry much weight. A male running things is a sign of how far they’ve fallen from any pretence at civilisation. As I watch, he pulls in a net full of metal being lowered from the wreck of a skyriser; sparkling in the sun, all its glass punched out, already half overgrown and propped like a drunk on its nearest less-than-sober friend.

Hmm. Nice arms.

Eh. Shame he’s male – and he definitely is. Nothing says ‘Drone pride’ quite as loudly as spandex. I don’t know if I’m more impressed that he’s surviving out here in something so impractical, or that he got it here in the first place.

‘You the supervisor I’m meant to find? Didn’t catch the name on the screen.’

‘Yeah, that’s me. Utipweitahnahn.’

‘You… Tip… What?’

He laughs – golden sunshine smile with predator’s eyes. ‘Tip works.’

‘Rations and dwelling allotment?’

‘There’s a Hub where you can stay while you build your own pad. Food is earned by contribution. What can you do?’

‘I can strip and scrap.’ I tip my head towards the building behind him.

I don’t think they need the kind of skills I have, here.

He whistles up to the building, and a kid shimmies down the rope.

‘Take a breather, Scar.’ Tip slaps him on the shoulder. ‘We’ll send up the Fresh Meat.’

The kid glares at me. ‘Don’t knock it over, Big. I’m not done yet.’

I’d be insulted, if it didn’t look like a stiff breeze would do just that.

I don’t, for the record. Tip even nods appreciatively when I come back down, the scrappers’ net full despite the fact that it’s both a death-trap in there and not the first time someone’s been over it. ‘Yeah, you can scrap. Old hand?’

Sort of.

This is more legal.

Lower stakes.

No weapons involved.

I don’t answer, but he doesn’t seem to expect me to, nodding for me to help haul the net onto the trailer of a grav bike that’s seen better centuries.

‘Come on, I’ll show you the Squat.’

What an inspiring name. He motions for me to sit behind him on the bike.

Unless I want to ride with the scrap, there isn’t really any other option.

For a guy, he is unlawfully hot.

Like, literally. I can feel his legs against mine, and unlike him, I’m wearing the kind of leathers you can take a full-speed racing crash in without getting a scratch.

I would know.

But those days are gone now, just one more hollow space inside my hollow shell.

…

The Squat turns out to be some hybrid combination of down-town living quarters and shops, all stacked in and around the crumbling bones of a blocky building complex. Most of the original building is either gone, hollowed out, or scabbed over with a wild assortment of other building materials obviously scavenged to reinforce the actual inhabited bits. And there are pieces of brightly coloured cloth draped randomly around that seem to serve no purpose at all. The only practical ones seem to be curtains and shades over the shop stalls themselves, which look like little more than tables with boxes on them. They would be ridiculously easy to steal from, which seems very… trusting. I know the kinds who get sent here.

They sent me.

We unload the metal at a shack where an old man works a port-a-forge. Those things were obsolete a century ago. It’s impressive he’s got it working. To a certain definition of the word. I try not to breathe while we’re standing next to it.

‘Food’s this way,’ Tip calls and waves me on, just leaving his ride behind. Keys and all. It can’t be that safe here. This place looks rough and raw, held together with spit and string. How are they so casual? How do they hold it together?

Fear?

I look again at Tip, but I’m not seeing it. He’s solid, sure. Not to have that kind of rep, though…

Then I see her.

She’s small and starry-eyed and wearing ridiculously bright orange overalls with a magenta tee, which should be an insult to the eyes of everyone looking.

But her skin is rich as the earth, her hair darker than my soul, and her eyes… are laughing. Her voice… her voice is soft and sweet and the emptiness inside me has never ached so much. If she weren’t a child, she would be Queen here. But maybe she already is; everyone speaks softly, moves gently around her. She’s… handing out actual fruit and vegetables, bizarrely.

‘Who’s that?’ I ask. Probably too quietly. But Tip himself is whispering.

‘That’s Iri. She’s ... well, just talk to her.’

She has to be the only innocent left in the whole entire universe, that’s what she is. I don’t want to talk to her; I don’t want to go near her.

But I go, anyway.

It feels like dying all over again when she looks up at me and smiles.

…

Out past the Squat, the ground falls away, edges raw with scaffolding and piers; the detritus of machinery left by the miners who stripped the planet and left it hollow and worthless. The pit at my feet probably goes all the way to the core, but the gaping wound has filled with lapping silver waves in parody of a beach with cliffs. Not water; something local. Water is worth too much. They would have stripped that, too.

Footsteps; not threatening. Tip sits next to me.

‘She’s…’ I’m lost for words for maybe the first time in my life.

‘Yeah,’ he agrees, quiet. ‘She came in one day – like, actually chose to come here – with nothing but a crate full of seeds, saying something about our soil being good. And she grows things, and gives them away as often as trades them, and there isn’t a person here who would mess with her. She is…’

‘Special,’ I finish. I’m still holding the pit of the fruit she gave me. She told me to plant it.

I don’t know what that means.

‘Come, I’ll show you where to bunk.’

He gets up and holds out his hand. And yeah, he’s a guy, but I let him help me up. They’ll hate me later. When they know.

But for now, they don’t.

It won’t help. It won’t make it better. I take my hand away from his.

It’s cold, now.

‘Have you thought of a name yet?’ he asks.

Of course. No one who comes here would use their own, would they? But if you’ve fallen this far, is there any further to go?

They might have heard of it, though.

I turn away, and he doesn’t push me. He doesn’t seem surprised.

‘You’ll earn one,’ he says softly.

I want to tell him he’s barking up the wrong tree. I shouldn’t lead him on.

But… it’s kind of nice.

A roaring, rattling blast of low-altitude engines tears through the silence, throwing up dust and shaking the earth itself. A pair of ships shoot past overhead, taking pot-shots at each other. Interesting. Fly-by pirates? They wouldn’t have any interest in stopping here – there’s nothing left to steal.

‘Shit, they’ll wake the star whale!’ Tip grabs a strut of old scaffolding, hair as wild as his face. Before it’s even really safe to move, he’s sprinting, yelling out.

‘Harpoons up! Scar, take the tower! Skips out!’

The kid from before is already half-way up the outside of some kind of derelict coms tower. People are dumping lumps of cobbled-together scrap with outboard motors strapped on into the water-stuff. And out of the churning waves comes the biggest creature I’ve ever seen; its mammoth skin a pearly wash of luminescence, bellowing its rage.

It’s coming straight for the Squat. And they’re not getting in those ‘boats’ to run – they’re heading straight for it. To what, save their shacks? From that?

I’m not going to lie; the first thing I do is look back and estimate the impact zone and if I have enough time to get clear. Which I do.

But.

There’s Iri, stacking boxes of fruit onto the trailer of a pushbike like each is her child. A freaking pushbike. I didn’t know those even existed any more.

I’m out on one of those sorry excuses for a boat before I can think better of it.

What have I got to lose, anyway?

I’ve never been on water before; it’s worth more than gold in most Orbit Cities. It’s messy. The riff-raff skips skim the waves shockingly fast, but the waves don’t care – they crash over and through, soaking everyone. I get a mouthful of the stuff, and holy hell, it’s foul!

Then we’re on the leviathan, and things get real. Running alongside it, hurling harpoons by hand like freaking kids. Harpoons made of sharpened scrap, trailing weird, spongy ropes. Grabbing the ropes and hauling when they stick in that incredible hide; all hauling on the one side to turn it. It can’t possibly work. My vision narrows. Water. Desperation. Heave and haul. It has to work. It has to.

Because the darkness is coming, bleeding in through the torn cracks of my mind, rising to the ragged gasps of my breath and the pain in my arms, my chest.

I’m screaming.

Then the creature is turning, huffing a spray of water over all of us, shaking and rolling until all the little sticks fall out of its magnificent hide, and it sinks back beneath the roiling silver waves again.

I slump against something that definitely doesn’t deserve to be called a gun-whale.

‘What the hell?’

‘Yeah, that about sums it up.’ Tip laughs, and sinks down beside me. He waves and the skips head back. Was he actually next to me the whole time, working alongside everyone else?

I guess that’s why they let him lead.

They’re reeling in the harpoons. Of course. They couldn’t afford to waste anything, here. I should probably help, but it looks like they’ve got it under control.

And I need a minute.

‘Good job,’ Tip says, and grins. Like… he enjoyed that. ‘It was a lot to jump in the middle of with no warning.’

‘What even just happened?’

‘Star whales rely on a kind of sonics that get messed up by the communications we use, the pitch of our generators. It drives them crazy,’ Tip explained. ‘I imagine it’s like having a bug in your ear.’

‘So they try and squash us to shut us up?’ I raise my eyebrows. ‘Often?’

He huffs a laugh, but the tightness is back around his eyes. ‘There’s only one star whale, and he’s an old guy. He usually stays asleep, if fume heads don’t come round using us as a free rally course. We just have to keep him distracted while the colony hits full shutdown. Once he’s back asleep we can start up the power again – afraid we’ll be cooking old-school with wood tonight.’

‘Wood.’

He looks at my face and laughs. And you know?

It’s kind of a nice sound.

For a guy.

But I can’t get involved, attached. Not to any of them.

It will only make it hurt more, when they hate me.

…

I didn’t even last the month.

That pit from the fruit that Iri gave me? I hid it in some dirt. Then it turned into a freaking plant. Literally. She hugged me, and she sang to it, and it grew more. What even is she? Angels don’t belong in a place like this.

Tip put one of the flowers in my hair.

I had to go scrapping for hours to stop shaking.

They’re calling me Cat. Some old-world reference to climbing and silence and possibly snoring, I think?

The emptiness hurts so much.

I shouldn’t let them like me.

They don’t need to hurt as much as I do, when they find out.

But I can’t. I can’t hate them for when they will hate me, later.

That night, right on cue, a secura-hover drops out of orbit and turns its floodlights straight on the colony, broadcasting out to everyone.

‘Uriah 82, you are harbouring a Rogue Enhanced Entity. Co-operate, and there won’t be any trouble.’

Well shit.

It’s a one-man craft. A Bounty Hunter.

So much for loyalty. My crew wouldn’t talk under pressure – if my whereabouts leaked, it’s because someone wanted it to. I would have died for them.

I did.

Turns out people are more comfortable with that if you stay dead.

Tip is strutting straight into the spotlight. ‘I’m flattered you came all the way out here to see me,’ he calls, arms spread wide. ‘Welcome to our colony!’

‘Don’t fool around,’ the voice grates. ‘Who’s in charge?’

‘That’s me! I know I’m unlawfully beautiful, but it’s not actually a crime,’ Tip flirts, actually batting his eyelashes.

If he can keep them talking long enough, maybe I can get a harpoon into the rotor and bring it down. I’m not alone in thinking that; Scar is already up the side of the building ahead of me. Others across from us. Guess I’m not the only one who can’t see any good coming from a secura-craft, here.

‘I don’t talk to Drones or Workers. This isn’t a colony – it’s a rotting husk waiting to die,’ the Hunter sneers. She flips her shield, showing herself, exerting her influence. She’s mature, a Queen-in-waiting, looking for her own colony. But she won’t take this one. She’ll destroy it. ‘Turn over the Planet Seeder now.’

I nearly lose my grip, high above her. Planet Seeder?

Shit. Iri. She means Iri.

I brace to resist, but… I can barely feel the tug of her will. Instead I feel… Tip?

That’s not possible.

‘You will touch no one in my colony,’ Tip tells her, chin tipping up. Light, blinding. And he changes, right there in front of us all. Hair suddenly long and tumbling loose, form sleek and curvy and… female… and… Tip is Changeform? My brain is frying.

Gods, she’s beautiful.

And Tip is Queen. I should have known; no one just earns my trust that fast. Like the fool I am, I ignored it because it was impossible.

A man can never be Queen; it’s more than law, it’s simply fact. But that was before Changeforms. They should have left the genetic engineering alone. Sure, it got them valuable results like Planet Seeders. But they got greedy. They made Changeforms. They made me.

They probably didn’t see the catch at first. After all, no one gives a damn if you gender-change from Worker to Drone. But a Changeform that is a Queen?

If a male can be Queen, it turns the fundamental rules of our whole civilisation on its head.

The war would tear the universe apart.

So Utipweitahnahn was sent here, to rot.

Yeah, I might have been faking when I pretended I couldn’t say it.

‘Mutant!’ the Hunter is screaming, ‘Abomination! You should have been cut from your cell before you were grown! I will crush you!’

She should just use her guns, but she isn’t thinking clearly; she tries to ram, screaming her hatred and prejudice. Scar and I both jump at the same time, scrap-javelins thrust into the same rotor so hard that the ship tilts and spins. I jump free and still hit the side of a building with a crunch I’ll feel tomorrow. If we live. Because she’s letting loose with blasters and something is on fire. Half a building falls when her ship hits, exploding with enough force that I’d be pleased if I wasn’t scrambling back out of the debris as fast as I can, because I can hear the star whale bellowing…

Heat. Softness. Tip pulls me free. I can’t… I can’t even… I’m staring.

A smirk. Amused. Shit, this is not the time!

‘The whale!’ I scream. Can’t they hear it?

Tip sobers up, glancing between the Cliffs and the Squat.

It’s on fire.

‘Get the skips on the whale! I’ll get Iri,’ she calls to me, already running to the Squat.

Like she trusts me to take care of it.

Nonono. What have I gotten myself into?

They weren’t supposed to care. I wasn’t supposed to care. They can’t rely on me. They don’t know what I am!

Shit! ‘Scar, get the tower!’

I’m already running with the others to the boats.

Too much smoke. The hollowness in me echoes as I slow. The Hunter crashed here.

There are three boats left. They load them and push them out, but I look past them to the roiling waters, the star whale already too close.

It won’t be enough.

There isn’t any other option.

I was a fool. All I had to do was not get involved. Not care.

So I had nothing to lose.

I step up to the edge of the pier, split my hollow shell. My armour segments peel back, but there’s no core to expose; there’s nothing there. So much more nothing than there should be.

‘Shadow-Soul! Shadow-Soul!’ I hear the panicked shouting behind me. Hear them scrabbling for the harpoons – and they won’t be for the star whale, this time.

But I don’t have it in me to care as I fall into the water, all of the darkness inside me uncoiling in writhing tentacles. Bursting from my tiny, brittle shell. Containing so much.

Yet.

So.

Empty.

And the water still tastes like shit.

For Iri.

For my beautiful Utipweitahnahn. Who I never even honoured with their own name.

Lost to me now.

The star whale is upon me, and this I can fight. My rage, my fury, my confusion, my pain, my slipping grasp of reason; equal to his in every measure. Neither of us hold back in the clash.

We unconquerable.

Unassailable.

Impotent.

Trapped.

Then the other beast is turning, sinking away, the sound of his sorrow unbearable. My own scream follows him.

He did not finish me. He did not end my pain.

Even as he disappears, I feel the searing of a harpoon hit my shell in the back. In response my monstrous soul, my vastness, furls back into that inadequate shape, losing the harpoon as readily as I lose myself. Down, down into the waves and into the deep, deep darkness.

…

Light. An unforgiving slab of wet sand.

Even the sea spat me out.

I lift my head, and he’s there; sitting on a broken piece of wall, watching me.

This is it, then. I sit up, body heavy.

‘Is that your preferred form?’ I ask. Stalling. Tired.

The hard edges are there, around Tip’s eyes. ‘If people are going to keep insisting I’m not Queen just because I’m also male – then, yes.’ He gets up, stretches, eyelids hooding. ‘But I can make an exception, for you.’ That blinding light again; like being far, far too close to a star. Her eyes soften, waves of pale hair falling around that perfect face. Coming closer. I can’t move, but the weakness has nothing to do with my ordeal.

‘I’m a monster,’ I grate. She doesn’t stop. Those eyes fill my whole world. Her hair is so soft.

‘I know,’ she whispers, leaning closer. Lips so soft, so warm, so wild and sweet and stealing my breath. ‘So am I.’