One of the tricks to a successful infiltration is not to admit that you’re caught even when you clearly are. Confidence and simply looking like you belong where you are can cover a wide variety of tells that you’re an intruder. Generally I use invisibility to cover the rest but, when the people looking to capture you are seated directly to your left and directly across from you, disappearing into thin air can look somewhat suspicious.

“So do you get motion sick too?” Darius asked the women as he took his seat and completed our little dining table foursome.

“Motion sick?” the senior agent asked. Technically the two women were probably here posing as a couple, but their body language did not say “romantic evening” at all.

I saw alertness in both their eyes and a deference from the younger woman towards the older one that could have been shyness except for how she examined me when our eyes met.

A shy person will often look away when presented with direct eye contact. The younger agent didn’t flinch from my gaze though. She looked me up and down, blinked in exactly the manner I do when I’m taking a quick peek with magical vision, looked me in the eyes again and then glanced away only when I failed to present any aggressive signals.

That took all of three seconds. Time enough for someone trained in evaluation to do a quick scan and get a reasonable sense of the person they were evaluating, at least in terms of whether they were a threat.

A paranoid or anxious person might have done the same thing, but the young agent’s gaze had been clear on another point too. Whether or not I intended to threaten them, she wasn’t afraid. I knew that feeling. I also knew the broken bones that came with that kind of arrogance. I was lucky enough to enjoy the services of some galaxy-class healers though so I hadn’t yet learned my lesson about treating everyone as a potentially serious threat.

Plus, to be honest, it was kind of fun to dismiss big aggressive guys as not worth my time. It inevitably annoyed the hell out of them and the brawls that followed were usually short and extremely one-sided. As someone who’d been threatened by big aggressive guys everyday when I was growing up, I still got a kind of childish glee from feeding them their own front teeth.

Neither of the women seated across from Darius or I seemed like people I would be feeding anything to though.

“A lack of motion sickness is one of the benefits of these tables. We can eat while staying nicely on the ground,” Darius said.

“They’ll also offer a better view of the new recruits,” the senior agent said.

“Isn’t that why the flying tables will be flying though?” I asked. “To see things better?”

“What most people want to see is Her Royal Majesty,” the senior agent said. “So the table’s flight path is set accordingly.”

“You sound very familiar with how this is arranged, you must be locals?” I asked. Questions were safer than statements since questions could never be lies. Without any anima spells on them, I knew the agents couldn’t personally be under the effects of a true seeing spell, but I also knew that Royal Security wouldn’t be working an event like this without support. The agents at our table might not know immediately if I lied, but when they reviewed the logs of the evening I’m sure our conversation would have all sorts of annotations on it.

That didn’t mean that I couldn’t lie of course. Regular people lie all the time. I just had to be careful and clever with the lies I told.

“I take it you’re tourists then?” the senior agent asked, playing the same game I was.

“Fari, want to come pretend to be me for a while?” I asked on our telepathic link. I could be careful and clever with my words but I could also be impatient and I was pretty sure that if I gave into the urge to punch either of the agents in the face and make a break for it, we’d be swarmed by enough of the Royal Security Forces that they’d need a mop and a bucket to take me into custody.

“What’s up?” Fari asked.

“We’re sitting with a pair of women who I’m pretty sure work for Her Royalness,” I said.

“Have they started interrogating you yet?” she asked.

“They just started,” I said. “But Darius is deflecting it with small talk.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll see if I can set something up with Ilya then. We’ll need to be careful not to raise their suspicions though.”

“That’s going to be tricky,” I said. “They’re going to think to ask why the fate weave sat them next to us sooner or later.”

“Well sure, tricky is why they send us in isn’t it?” Fari asked. In her own way, my best friend has just as much hubris as I do, which is probably one of the reasons I love her so much.

“We’re here on business travel,” Darius said. “But we’re kind of making it a well deserved vacation too.”

“You have good timing,” the senior agent said. “The Review only comes once per year.”

“Is that why there are so many guards here?” I asked, gesturing to the men and women in the beautiful and pointless armor. “I thought Abyz was the safest planet in known space?”

“It is,” the younger agent said.

“Safety comes at a cost though,” the senior agent said. “The more mundane precautions we take the less we risk overconsuming the natural Aetherial magics that provide us with our little piece of paradise.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Darius said. “Is that a problem with large natural disasters though? My home planet was subject to megaquakes a few years ago and after seeing them, its hard to imagine any amount of Aetherial magic keeping everyone safe.”

“We don’t have a problem with such things on Abyz,” the senior agent said. “We have plenty of resources for our needs today, but as good stewards, we try to make sure they’re preserved for the next generation as well.”

“That sounds very enlightened,” I said.

“We try to set a standard for galactic society,” the senior agent said.

“How did a philosophy focused on consequences arise on a planet where people don’t need to fear the results of their actions?” I asked.

“We didn’t always have the weave to fall back on,” the younger agent said.

“Yes, it’s a modern invention,” the senior agent said. “Just under a century old. Our society developed its traditions and values in a much less forgiving age.”

“And you’ve managed to retain those values across several generations of prosperity?” Darius said. “That’s an impressive achievement on its own.”

Impressive wasn’t the word I would have chosen for it. More like “unnatural” or “constricted”. Cultures change and grow over time. It’s the reason that despite millennia of violence and bloodshed across the stars during the era of the Galactic Warlords, we’re starting to see real progress across the million worlds of the Crystal Empire in just over twenty years of peace.

The Crystal Empress united the galaxy as much as she conquered it. The popular narrative paints an image of the Empresses as an unstoppable force sweeping aside the legions of warlords who stood against her. As Captain Hanq is evidence of though, many of those Warlords simply joined her cause, and hundreds of thousands of other worlds joined the Crystal Empire out of the belief that they’d benefit economically from the transaction.

Abyz had been one of those world. A “quiet convert” where no fighting had been required to bring it into the fold. Partly that was because the Queen of Abyz signed the treaty as a direct act of royal will. No debates had been necessary, or requested, or allowed.

In exchange for joining the Empire, the Queen was required to restructure her advisory council into a parliament that provided representation to all of the people of Abyz. A check like that on royal authority didn’t go over well on most planets but the Queen had pledged her firm belief in it at the time.

The cynic in me noted that the Empire had fought a brief war in a neighboring star system and broadcast the whole thing for everyone in a three jump range to see. Daimos, the neighboring system to Abyz, was the strongest military power in the immediate region. The Imperial forces had allowed Daimos the opportunity for a sneak attack, and had pre-published their entire battle plan. Despite those advantages, Daimos was utterly disarmed, without casualties on either side, in under an hour. I was pretty sure that had an impact on the Queen of Abyz’s thoughts on resisting Imperial rule.

“We’re an ancient civilization,” the senior agent said. “The fate weave is just one benefit that we gain from that. A stable society is another.”

“Is that why tourists can only stay here for so long?” I asked. “They would make things unstable?”

“There’s no danger of that,” the senior agent said. “As you see with the new police recruits, we can keep things well under control.”

“Do you ever have tourists go missing here?” I asked. “I’m guessing there’s got to be a temptation to stay longer since everything is so nice?”

I tried to be clever with that question since I needed information on what had happened to Yael and Zyla. My explanation would show up as a lie to any truth seer since I didn’t, in truth, believe there would be many people who would risk permanent expulsion when leaving and returning on a new entry visa was relatively straight forward. It was the kind of lie that someone might use to cover up their own curiosity about staying longer themselves though so I thought it might be safe.

And, of course, I was wrong.

“No one goes missing here,” the younger agent said and looked me in the eyes. I could almost see the wheels starting to turn in her head as the questions about who I really was rose to her awareness.

Her senior partner, perhaps due to greater experience was a step ahead of her though.

“Interesting that you bring that up though,” the senior agent said. “We had a disruption just yesterday and we’re still looking for the person responsible.”

“A disruption?” I asked.

“Yes,” the senior agent said. “While they can’t harm us, there are those who seek to cause chaos anyways. They’ll engineer elaborate jokes like replacing all of the whipped cream on the desserts with shaving lather or replacing the evening’s music with an illusion of donkey’s braying.”

“We’re trying to find someone like that,” the junior agent said.

“Who would do something like that?” I asked, thinking that it seemed like a pretty childish manner of protest.

“Misguided off-worlders perhaps,” the senior agent said. “One’s who might have fallen in with the wrong crowd and been misinformed as to the penalties for such acts here.”

“That sounds like you take stuff like more seriously than other places do?” I asked.

“We do,” the senior agent said. “But we’re more interested in who is ultimately responsible for those sort of acts. If the other people involved cooperate, their sentences are usually very minor.”

I thought back to Halli and the scam they had worked out to sell convicts into virtual slavery. Would that count as “minor” in the eyes of the agents here? It seemed an unlikely prospect for explaining Yael and Zyla’s absence if only because I would expect them to be able to break out of a jail in less time than it took for someone to put them into it.

“I can’t imagine anyone wasting their vacation on silly pranks like that,” Darius said.

“Some of the ‘pranks’ can be more serious than others,” the senior agent said.

“Are we actually safe here then?” I asked, wondering how they would chose to lie to me.

“Of course,” the senior agent said. “Just because someone has decided to try to disrupt things, doesn’t mean they can succeed.”

“We have all plenty of guards covering every corner of the building,” the younger agent said. “And the Central Authority building was planned with security in mind. It’s the perfect venue for tonight’s Review.”

I’ve made the mistake of saying things like that myself. It’s called tempting fate and as soon as the words were out of her mouth I saw the younger agent become aware of the roll that fate had bound her to play.

I wasn’t in any danger from the explosions that triggered right on her final syllable so the slow ache of cold that gathered in my chest felt odd.

The rest of the guests, barring my fellow crewmates, reacted poorly to all of the glass on the lower floors blowing outwards from the room. The explosions that caused the shattering glass also left the air filled with a noxious, though non-lethal, smoke that I had to cast a quick Physical spell to avoid breathing in. From the coughing and wheezing that I heard all around me, I guessed that most people didn’t have the same survival training that I’d been given.

The next round of explosions triggered the same sort of panic and screaming, but this time they came with a more definite stab of danger.

“Protect the guests!” both the senior agent and I said at the same time.

I turned to look at her and saw that she’d done the same thing I had. Both of us were covered in Void anima shields, and she looked a lot more familiar as a result.

In the smoke I heard voices calling out other orders. Then I heard the screams.

Whoever set off the bombs wasn’t any more restricted by the fate weave’s prescription against violence than I was.

“You are under arrest,” the senior agent said.

“Trust me, you don’t have the authority,” I said. “There’s people being hurt right now. We stop that, then we work out what’s going on here.”

I saw her hesitate for a moment but another scream decided the issue and with a nod from her, we plunged into the smoky center of the room to face whatever it was that fate hadn’t had in store for us.

We arrived at the Honji Royal Review and Charity Gala late enough to be stuck in crowds. Wall to wall people from dozens of different worlds and twice as many species were massed in front of the Central Authority Building waiting for their chance to storm the doors and enter the Grand Hall where the “event of a lifetime” awaited them.

While the advertising for charity events can be a bit overblown, this particular occassion had a decent chance of living up to its billing. Normally the fate weave that permeated Abyz was focused solely on preventing injury and violence. As a “royal” event though, the Review and Charity Gala enjoyed the privilege of an enhanced version of the weave. The presence of Her Royal Highness meant that fate would go above and beyond “keeping you safe”. People thought of it as the fate weave giving you a “Happily Ever After” but that was out of reach even for the weapons grade magic Abyz was drenched in. What fate would actually do is conspire to “bring you together with someone special” at the ball. For some reason a lot of people thought of that as being a good thing.

Most royal events were for open only to select members of the Queen supporters, but each season there was at least one event to which the public could purchase tickets. When I asked Fari how much she’d paid for the three tickets we had, the price she quoted made me gulp.

My formal attire was an expensive luxury, especially with the “extra durability” enchantments that were woven into each piece. On a planet where everyone was protected from harm every hour of the day, the need for armored gowns was pretty much non-existent. I was able to find a shop that could manage to craft one on short notice only because the wealthy people who lived on Abyz occasionally had to travel off-world and were ten times more paranoid about such flights than the usual interstellar traveller.

The dependable thing about shops that specializes in providing rare clothes for desperate clients on short notice is that they don’t really have fixed prices for their ensembles. Usually they don’t even specify what the pricing is. If you care to ask, you’re probably not rich enough to afford it.

Despite that, my ticket to the gala was still more than the cost of my entire outfit by an order of magnitude.

“We should make sure we have our pictures taken,” Darius said as he took my arm. For a crowd of the ultra-wealthy, they were behaving not unlike drunken sports fans so becoming separated was a real possibility unless we clung to each other.

“Only if we can send them to your Dads,” I said.

Darius had an odd fascination with seeing me dressed up, while at the same time thinking that every formal suit he wore looked terrible. The crazy thing was, as far as I could tell, every suit he ever dressed in made him look smolderingly hot.

Granted I’m biased, but we don’t get to that many formal balls and it takes more than all my fingers and toes to count the number of times someone has tried to “cut in” and steal a dance with him. I joked that someday I would need to get into a knock-down, drag-out brawl just to fend off his overly eager admirers, except I wasn’t entirely sure I was joking about that.

For my own part, I never felt that comfortable in gowns or dresses but, when the mood struck me, they could be fun to wear for a bit. A formal gown is like a costume for me. It’s not who I am, or even who I want to be, but it’s still nice to pretend (and blend in) some times.

“They would love to have more pictures of you,” Darius said, and steered us a couple of steps forward as the crowd filtered into the Grand Hall.

“They’re very kind,” I said. I got along with Darius’ dads, Hector and Osgood, very well with despite having virtually nothing in common with them. They’re politicians with years of service on a world that had been beset by warfare for longer than any of us had been alive. I’m an orphan, street rat who managed to get recruited into one of the most prestigious peace-keeping groups in the galaxy. We literally come from different worlds, but despite that we agree on a shocking number of things.

Like how wonderful Darius looks in formal wear.

“They’ll be happy to have pictures of me, but you’re the one they miss,” I said.

“I send them a letter every week!” he said.

“Somehow I’m thinking that’s not quite the same as having you at home.” I said and guided us into an opening in the crowd that got us a whole three feet closer to the door.

“I wasn’t at home much before though,” he said. “I was in the field three weeks out of every four as a scout.”

“Yeah, but they still felt like they knew what was happening with you,” I said.

“I suppose they did see the troop distribution reports each day in the Council meetings,” he said.

“Right, so they knew when you were safe, and if you’re team was heading into danger they knew to worry extra hard.” I said.

“Not that extra worrying does much good,” he said.

“It gave them a sense of being in control,” I said. “Even knowing that it was crazy, they said it still helped them.”

“It’s hard to accept that my parents are that crazy, but I guess the evidence kind of supports it,” he said and guided us into one of the entry channels that led to the Grand Hall.

“People will do a lot to feel in control of their lives.” I got my ticket ready for inspection as we finally got close to the ticket takers.

“This from the girl who’s dressed in a blast proof gossamer gown,” Fari said over our telepathic link.

She was strolling around in our doppleganger body, looking like Ilya’s identical twin. Ilya, meanwhile. was waiting in the chauffer area after dropping us off. In an hour she was going to step into the back of the rented carriage we’d arrived in. Twenty minutes later Fari and I would join her in the carriage and once we finished dressing, they would emerge together with the doppleganger configured to look like me. I would exit at the same time, but I would be cloaked by an invisibility spell and wearing my proper battle attire (since Fari would be wearing my dress and Ilya would be wearing the one Fari was currently robed in).

The logistics of getting changed in the back of a carriage were a little tricky but it offered us the best chance of passing undetected since Fari and I could veil our subterfuge pretty easily as long as we out of direct sight of anyone.

That gave me about an hour to scope out the crowd and determine the sort of security that was in place for the event. In a sense, I was courting disaster with that approach. With the Queen attending the event, security was extremely heavy all around the building. In practice though that almost made it easier.

An event like the seasonal appearance by the Queen wasn’t put together in an afternoon. There had been heightened security on the Grand Hall for weeks leading up to the event and for the last three days the place had been in a constant state of high alert. The arrival of the Queen had intensified that but it had also focused it. The entrances were watched, and the Grand Hall teemed with armored security troops. They were almost all focused on the Queen herself though.

Two hundred guards and I had to laugh when I saw them. Their armor was beautiful and ornate and practically worthless. The police of Abyz still have all sorts of criminal matters to attend too, from burglary to fraud to arson and vandalism. Abyz even had a standing space navy, since the fate weave didn’t reach much beyond its atmosphere. What the planet was lacking though was any sort of domestic force that dealt with violence among or directly against its people.

On other planets, that would have been one of the prime roles of any governmental security force, but yhe security on the Grand Hall wasn’t in place to safeguard the Queen’s life. They were there to preserve her dignity at all costs. Anyone who tried to harm the Queen would find the most ridiculous of events occurring to foiling their plans thanks to the fate weave. Magic is finicky though. Dropping a paint balloon on the royal brow might be unpleasant but, as it posed no danger to the royal health, the fate weave would remain blissfully ignore it.

The current Queen enjoyed a fair amount of  popular support, but no one, not even the Crystal Empress, is beloved by everyone. With regicide being off the table on Abyz, the opposition was limited to attacks that were little more than pranks, though from what I’d read it wasn’t a good idea to underestimate how nasty a non-lethal prank could be.

It also wasn’t good to overestimate the effectiveness of the fate weave. Abyz billed itself as a paradise world thanks to the safety provided by the magic that surrounded it. From what I could see, there were a lot of wealthy people, locals and off-worlders, who bought into that. The Queen however was not one of them.

Evidence to that fact came from the presence of a second, less obvious set of guardians. These weren’t garbed in beautiful and ridiculous armor. They wore simple servant uniforms which Void sight showed me were devoid of enchantments. Not even a simple “Stay Clean” cantrip.

“There’s a whole lot of wait staff here who are primed and ready to fight Void anima casters,” I said on our telepathic link.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Darius asked, also silently.

“Only if they catch me,” I said. “And only for them in that case.”

“I just put your organs back in place,” Ilya said. “Could you please try to keep them there?”

“I always try,” I said.

We reached the ticket takers at last and were waved through without delay. It’s always nice when you can use legitimate credentials in situations like that, though if Fari had been forced to counterfeit us a set of tickets the results probably would have been  the same.

“We’re in,” Darius said.

“Same here,” Fari said. “How’s the drain on the animation spell Ilya?”

“Not bad yet,” our medic said. “I’m resting in the carriage now, so I can manage it for as long as you need. If you get into a fight though, or have to wander farther away, I reserve the right to change my answer.”

Inside the Grand Hall was a space that more than lived up to its name. The Central Authority Building was a sixty story tall skyscraper. The bottom twenty floors though were dedicated to the Grand Hall and it’s support offices.

I flicked my vision over to Void sight briefly to see the rich latticework of Physical spells that made the hall possible. In place of proper walls, the Grand Hall was built on graceful, curving swirls of a colored glass filigree. During the day, the hall was flooded with natural light, but at night it truly came alive. Thousands of tiny lights rested in the air above us with thousands more casting light into the vast room from outside.

I’ve traveled in space and seen nebula from afar. I’ve been inside several of them too, but the Grand Hall captured the essence of being surrounded by brilliant points of light that stretch into the vastness of the universe far better than any natural phenomena ever could. If there was a spot for finding your Happily Ever After, it was easy to imagine why people might mistake this for being it.

I looked over at Darius and then searched for Fari in the crowds. Surprisingly, I saw that Captain Hanq was in attendence as well, which meant some of the rest of the Horizon Breaker’s crew was probably here too.  Without any prompting, Darius chose that moment to hold my arm a little closer and I felt a warm blush radiate through me. If I had a Happily Ever After waiting for me, something told me I didn’t need Abyz’s fate magic to find it.

“I think the tables will be lifting off soon for the Review,” Darius said. “We should probably stake out our seats sooner than later.”

To complete the illusion of being adrift amidst the stars, some of the dining tables (meant for the more adventurous of the gala’s attendees) were enchanted to float  about the room as the parade of new police cadets made their journey to the Queen’s throne for their formal presentation to her.

The idea appealed to me, but since floating in mid-air would make it hard to wander around and inspect the facility, we had to make sure that we got seats which would remain boringly anchored to the ground.

As I expected those weren’t the first ones to fill up and we were able to find a nice little table with four seats that was towards the edge of the gathering space. I was about to suggest that Fari head over and join us when I heard someone step up behind me.

“Are these taken?” a tall woman with skin a few shades darker than mine asked, referring to the two open seats. Another woman, who looked to be a few years younger, stood beside her watching me as well.

“Not yet,” Darius said and stepped to the side to allow the two women easier access to the chairs.

“Thank you,” the tall woman said and moved to take the seat that was opposite from me, while her companion took the seat to my left.

Out of reflex, I flicked my vision over to Void sight for a second to check them out as they sat down.

There were no enchantments on them. Not on their expertly coiffed hair. Not on their radiant and lovely gowns. Not even on the sparkling jewelry they wore. If we were in a low class bar on Halli I wouldn’t have been surprised. This venue however was packed with people who had so much money it wasn’t anything more than a cute number to them. All of the attendees were enchanted in some fashion.

Except apparently for the Queen’s special line of defense.

The Gala was reputed to connect you with someone special. I hadn’t considered that might mean I’d be connected with exactly the people I was looking for.

Falling asleep immediately after a fight leaves you with a good chance of not waking up again for a variety of reasons. My first thought after opening my eyes therefor was a little cheer of gratitude that luck had been on my side.

The I remembered where I was. Abyz didn’t believe in luck. Here everything was governed by the fate casting and no one was allowed to die to violence or accident.

For that matter no one was supposed to be able to commit violence against another either, but Shadow Lady had done a pretty thorough job of pounding me into mulch. It seemed weird to argue for the beating being unfair when I’d at least received the benefit of not dying, but given how things had gone I wasn’t in a generous or reasonable mood.

At least not until I noticed that I was resting on a very comfy bed, in a pleasantly dark room. If I’d been captured, it was by the nicest jailers in the known universe. In fact, if the bad guys were offering rooms like this, with soft downy blankets and gentle warming spells hugging me lightly, I’d have to consider asking them for an job application form. I mean my bunk on the Horizon Breaker was nice, but even in the dim light I could see that the room was far beyond nice and well into opulent.

Of course it was lacking in the “cuddly young man” and “translucent best friend” departments, which made it significantly less appealing than my bed on the Horizon Breaker, but I was content for the moment with it. I figured if I had fallen into someone’s clutches they’d be along soon enough to gloat and make me an offer I’d have to seriously consider if I wanted to refuse.

I rolled over gently onto my back and slowly pulled myself up in a sitting position. Something seemed oddly wrong with that, but the smell of fresh coffee waiting beside the bed drove all other thoughts out of my mind until I drained a long sip.

The flavor of the coffee was exquisite. Nice and strong, but with with a complex mix of components that worked together rather than one overwhelming bolt of bitterness that some brews hit you with. There was also a light sparkle of magic on the lip of the cup that had kept it at the proper temperature for me. I drank the magic in too and it was delicious. Feeling the anima coursing through my system left me warmer than coffee itself did. Part of that warmth though was probably because I recognized the enchantment, having woken up to it most mornings for the last two years.

“You look like you’re feeling a little better,” Darius said, pushing the door to the room open and letting in a few rays of early morning sunshine.

“Can’t talk,” I said. “Enjoying heavenly coffee.”

“We have breakfast waiting for you too when you’re ready,” he said.

“I love you,” I said. “Seriously, I will make babies with you right now.”

“It’s good to see a patient fully recovered so quickly,” Ilya said, following Darius into the staggeringly large bedroom.

I finally noticed what seemed wrong. My body wasn’t a shattered mass of pain. There were remnants of healing spells still working on me, but sometime while I’d slept I’d received the kind of top quality medical care that only psychotically overtrained medics could provide.

“I love you too,” I told Ilya. “Babies for you as well.”

“Aww, I almost feel like I’m missing out here,” Fari said, joining the other two in her ghostly blue form.

“You get double babies, with a side order of cute pets,” I told her. “Seriously though, where are we, and, not that I’m ungrateful, but why are you here?”

“Sorry, kind of my fault,” Fari said.

“She put a medic alert spell on you,” Darius said. “So when your vital signs went haywire we knew you were in trouble.”

“It was just a variant of the signalling spell I gave you,” Fari said. “I figured if you were conscious and still hidden, the alert effect wouldn’t escape your cloaking spell and if it did, well, then you probably needed us.”

“I was right about the double babies,” I said. “How did you get here though?”

“Grabbed a shuttle and flew here as soon as we could,” Darius said.

“We got lucky,” Fari added. “I didn’t even need to scramble their schedules. There was one waiting when we got to the shuttleport.”

“That probably wasn’t luck,” I said.

“Yes, the planet’s fate magic, we thought of that,” Ilya said. “But that was even more reason for us to go. If the global fate weave was pulling us to you then we were probably your best hope of surviving whatever situation you fell into.”

“Isn’t it going to look suspicious that you traveled here though?” I asked.

“A little, but we improvised a cover story,” Darius said.

“You two had a vicious verbal battle,” Fari said.

“I think Black team has been corrupting our good Tactical Chief,” Darius said. “You should have heard the things she made come out of your mouth.”

“Actually you probably will need to hear it, just in case anyone questions you on it,” Fari said.

“A little later I think,” I said. “So how did a big fight cover coming here?”

“You stormed off after saying you wanted nothing to do with him,” Fari said. “Ran right to the shuttle port to get away.”

“I managed to hop on the shuttle at the last moment and then tearfully declared my undying love for you in front of all the passengers,” Darius said.

“It was very moving,” Ilya said. “But the tears were a bit much.”

“One of his concessions was to take you to see the sights in Honji,” Fari said. “You’re more cultural than he is, since you’re more obviously a galactic.”

“Hence the reason we’re staying here now rather than Raddox,” Darius said.

“And the reason we’re staying at such a nice hotel,” Fari said.

“How did you find me though?” I asked.

“We got here fast enough that you hadn’t been discovered, so I was able to home in on the location I sensed the medical alert originate from.” Fari said.

“She showed me where to go and I carried you back here after doing some basic first aid,” Darius said.

“I hate to think what you looked like if what I worked on was after a round of first aid spells,” Ilya said.

She was one of our company medics, so I knew she’d seen worse but I didn’t envy her that knowledge. My awareness of my injuries amounted to little more than “Oww, that hurts”. She got to see exactly what had happened thanks to her diagnosis spells and that couldn’t have been pretty at all.

“So what army beat you to hell like that?” Darius asked.

“No army, just one woman,” I said.

“That’s not good,” Fari said.

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” I said and proceeded to tell them what I’d discovered about Yael and Zyla’s disappearance, including the trail that led out to the office park.

“So you think Yael left that trail for you to follow and this shadow lady just happened to be waiting for you at the end of it?” Ilya asked.

“No, I think the trail was meant to lead me to the shadow lady,” I said. “We’re so covered in Aetherial anima here that I can’t tell for sure if there’s any from Yael or Zyla clinging to me, but I’d bet next months paycheck that’s the case.”

“You did part with Yael on good terms right?” Darius asked.

“Yeah, she’s even sent some letters, so I think she keeps an eye on my career,” I said.

“So she wanted you to know there were other Void casters here then,” Darius said. “And give you a chance to evaluate how good they are.”

“I think she gave me another clue too now that you mention it,” I said.

“She’s letting you know that there’s Void casters on both sides of whatever conflict is going on here,” Fari said.

“How do you get that?” Ilya asked.

“I came out of the fight with a lot of information,” I said. “The shadow lady called for support, so she’s part of an official agency of some kind. She’s damn skilled and she’s used to fighting.”

“I believe you’ve just described both yourself and Guardian Blackbriar, not to mention five or six casters on Titanus and my evil former boss.” Ilya said.

“Actually, your evil former boss is a good example of this,” I said. “He was a Void caster but I beat him because he wasn’t used to fighting other Void casters. The shadow lady I fought knew exactly how to fight other Void casters though – quick bursts of anima only, no shield spells and you maintain a constant void sheath so that your opponent can’t drain your life energy out.”

“It sounds like she was ready and waiting for Mel too,” Fari said. “If all the other Void casters on the planet were on her side then she wouldn’t have been looking for someone approaching the investigation site under an invisibility veil.”

“Speaking of invisibility, how did you folks get me back here?” I asked.

“You’re not the only one who can manage an invisibility spell you know,” Darius said.

“Technically with Energetic anima it’s more of a camouflage field than true invisibility,” Fari said. “But yeah, our good Blue team leader valiantly snuck you back to us leaving no one the wiser.”

“Our Tactical Chief is omitting that she left a wide area mental distortion field over the site too so that any postcognition spells will be disrupted.” Darius said with a tip of his head in Fari’s direction.

“For spur of the moment work, that’s very impressive,” I said.

“We had a lot of motivation,” Fari said.

“Now we need to turn that motivation towards finding Yael and Zyla,” Darius said.

“I’ve got an idea there,” I said. “I think the shadow lady was more than a warning from Yael, I think she was clue.”

“It’s very likely that whatever organization she’s a part of either has Yael or knows who does,” Fari said.

“She was covered in shadows though right?” Ilya asked. “How do we find her or the organization she works for?”

“We start with the people who are working for her,” I said.

“You want to raid the central police bureau?” Darius asked.

“Well, ‘want to’ is a strong sort of phrasing,” I said. “Let’s say I think we’ll find some useful information there, and that I’m pretty sure I can manage to stealth in and out if I go at the right time.”

“That sounds insanely dangerous,” Ilya said. “Doing it surreptitiously at least. Can’t you walk in there as an official Imperial agent and demand their cooperation?”

“In theory, yes,” I said. “But given that two other official Imperial agents came here and are missing-in-action, I’m inclined to think that there’s a significant and dangerous fraction of the local power structure who isn’t that impressed by Imperial credentials.”

“The Imperial ambassador here hasn’t issued an official call for help either,” Darius said. “So there’s no telling how extensive the corruption is.”

“Captain Hanq is working that angle for us,” I said. “If we run out of leads to follow, we can break cover and check back in with him. Until then though, it’s going to be safest to assume that we don’t have any friends on Abyz, except, maybe, the two who are missing.”

“Maybe?” Ilya asked.

“We don’t know for sure why they’re missing,” Fari said. “It’s unlikely that they’ve turned against the Empire but it’s not impossible.”

“I think I liked it when the enemy was always a scaly lizard,” Ilya said.

“Except that was never true,” I said, thinking of the Garjarack families I knew. I’d been put off by their lizard-like appearance at first, but after working with them for over half a year to found the new colonies on Titanus I found it impossible to see them as anything other than regular people.

“Don’t remind me,” Ilya said with a rueful smile. She’d changed a lot since her days as an interstellar terrorist, but I knew she still carried a lot of guilt over the things she’d done. Working with us was a little about making amends and a little about running away from the people she hurt. I knew she’d go back there eventually, but there was a still a lot of healing she needed to do first.

“So how do we break into the central police bureau?” Darius asked.

“We could let Mel wander in there alone, without immediate backup again,” Fari said. “Or, and I know this is a crazy idea, there is an official charity ball being held in the Grand Hall there tonight.”

“You already have tickets for the four of us don’t you?” I asked.

“No,” Fari said. “Just for the three of you. If I’m going to pose as you while you sneak off under an invisibility cloak, we can’t show up together.”

“How will we get my doppleganger in though?” I asked

“I can change it to look like me,” Ilya said. “When you arrive, Fari will speak for me. When you need to disappear, Fari can walk outside, meet me and we can walk back in with the doppleganger looking like you.”

“That seems elaborate and complicated,” I said. “I could just sneak in in the first place right?”

“You could,” Fari said. “But this buys us two benefits. First, you can scope the location out before you begin your infiltration, and second it gives me a chance to speak to people twice without them realizing it. I think I may be able to root out a little of what’s going on here in the different answers the people give to a Galactic like you compared to someone who could pass for a local like Ilya.”

“That make sense. Why do I have the feeling that you three had this all planned out before I woke up?” I asked.

“Because you’re naturally brilliant,” Darius said and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

“Also, we had a lot of time to kill while you healed, so this is just one of about forty plans we had waiting for when you woke up,” Fari said.

“What’s the next stage of your plan then?” I asked. “After breakfast and a shower that is.”

“Our luggage is being sent over from Raddox but you don’t actually own any formal clothes anymore,” Darius said. “So, the first order of business is to fix that.”

I grinned. A shopping trip sounded delightful and doing it in the line of duty meant I got to expense everything I bought!

Somewhere, on a planet many star systems away, an Imperial Accountant heard my terrible laugh and began to weep for the Empire’s bottom line.

It’s one thing to attack a foe from ambush. Void anima casters are exceedingly good at that and its one of the many reasons for people who know what we can do to be afraid of us. The woman who climbed onto the roof with me didn’t try for a surprise attack though, despite the invisibility spell that was wrapped around her like a blanket.

That wasn’t a good sign.

Based on the kinds of situations I hurl myself into, it’s an easily demonstrable claim that I have an exaggerated idea of my own capabilities. Even with that, I’ll start a fight from ambush ten times out of ten if I have any choice in the matter. My opponent didn’t share that philosophy which meant she was either a masochist or dangerously talented.

Or both. I really shouldn’t confine people to labels I suppose.

We circled each other, gauging form and stance and measure of control over the anima we displayed. I was tempted to taunt her and try to throw her off guard but I bit my words back. Void anima cloaked my form preventing her from getting a clear picture of what I looked like, the same as I couldn’t see her as anything more than a three dimensional shadow. The effect didn’t extend to our voices though. I could hide my voice, but then she wouldn’t hear it at all, which would defeat the purpose of speaking. Also, anything I said that wasn’t hidden could be retrieved by investigatory spells and my true voice extracted from it. My opponent however was under no such restriction.

“You should let go of that veil,” she said. “You’re not going to like it if I have to beat you out of it.”

I ignored her. Or tried to. Playing head game with my adversaries was the best part of most fights. It was also the one tool I had against people with superior skill, power or training.

“Maybe you need a lesson though,” she said. “Who taught you how to move? You walk like a clumsy duckling.”

Insult my form, insult my teacher and probe to see if my ego was fragile enough to respond to petty snipes. I had to give her credit, it wasn’t a bad line of patter. I could let it roll off me, but that would tell her almost as much as if I responded to it aggressively.

Part of me wanted to play her game and beat her at it. I could go berserk and make it seem like I was much more of a novice than I was. It’s always handy to have your foe underestimate you in a fight after all. The problem with that approach though was that I was certain neither of us was going to end the fight in a single blow and in any extended exchange she was going to see me demonstrate a level of skill well beyond what a novice could manage.

So I slid one foot forward, rolled my shoulders and beckoned her to come at me.

“Oh? You’re not going to run away?” she said. “Well that will make this convenient. And brief.”

She then flawlessly cast a spell to gain a burst of enhanced speed. One ultra-short flash of Physical anima, followed a tiny fraction of a second later by a hyper-speed rush and an uppercut that would have knocked my head into next week if it connected.

Great technique for an opening blow, but the real mark of her skill was the follow-up right cross to my nose. She knew better than to assume her haymaker would lay me out and she pressed her advantage as hard as she could without opening herself up to my counter attacks.

If I tried to play the novice against that kind of assault, she would have floored me in under a second, so I had to match her ferocity and speed with my own.

Neither of us could afford to weave any long term enhancement spells, or the other would absorb them for the magic they contained. The same trick she used to start the fight, a micro-burst of magic for instantaneous effect, was one we both leaned on heavily.

I dodged her first haymaker, and the jab towards my face, then tried to grab her arm to bind her into a hold. She responded with another micro-spell to escape my grasp and went into a series of body blows without pause or hesitation.

My grab for her arm was as much as a defensive move as an offensive one though so it served to parry the first few punches she threw. I weaved back from most of the rest but a few landed anyways. She was just that fast.

Quick rabbit punches like the ones Shadow Lady hit me with aren’t meant to take down anyone. They’re meant to create openings. If they’re unanswered, or unavoided though, they can do serious damage. Broken ribs don’t sound life threatening but if those bones are turned into inward pointing spears and used to shred lungs and other vital organs, they can ruin your day pretty thoroughly.

Fortunately for me, I had an answer ready for her attack. A half step back into a split brought me out of her effective range while my front leg snaked forward in a low kick to knock her off balance.

She hopped over my leg and twisted into a spin kick that begged me to grab her leg and smash her into the roof like a rag doll. It was a trap but I snatched at bottom of her pants anyways. It was too good an opportunity to pass up even though I knew she was better than the move suggested.

As I anticipated, the spin kick wasn’t the real attack. It camouflaged a flying sidekick that would have no power behind it at all if she hadn’t boosted it with a quick snap of anima.

I had a hand free though, which left me able to counter her. She tried to enhance the kick again with a quick burst of anima, but that was her first mistake. I had a hold on her other leg and I knew what was coming. The energy she tried to add to the kick flashed for less than an eye blink but I snagged it with a tendril of Void anima as she cast her spell. Briefly charged up with her power, I refocused the force into meeting her kick with a straight punch.

As a note, meeting a kick with a punch is usually a terrible idea. Legs are lots stronger than arms and feet are noticeably tougher than hands. One of the exceptions to that rule is when the punch is backed with a superhuman level of force and durability.

My punch slammed into her so hard that her leg buckled and the force of the hit knocked us apart by a dozen feet or so.

The shadow lady landed right on the edge of the roof and hopped on her good foot for a second. I could have pressed the attack at that point. In fact I really should have, but the chance of sending her flying completely off the roof was a little too high. I didn’t have any intention of losing the fight, but I didn’t want to kill the woman either since I had no idea who she was or who she was working for.

I needn’t have worried though. Her “injured leg act” was well played but completely fictional. With the distance between us she was able to build up a nice big anima charge and slam her fist down onto the rooftop.

It crumbled beneath her blow. The whole thing. I had a flight pack on but extending anima wings seemed like an excellent choice only if I wanted to give her something to drain for power to beat me senseless with. So I tumbled into top floor of the building with debris raining down around me.

My Void sight let me see in the dark, but a heavy bank of dust and roof particles was another matter. Actual physical objects leave me as blind as anyone else. The shadow lady had an advantage there. She saw where I fell, which was enough to aim herself right at me. The first clue I had about that was when I felt my danger sense flare.

With milliseconds to react, I dropped into a roll to escape her attack.

That worked great, except for the part where I rolled over a jagged piece of metal from the roof that stabbed through my lower calf.

I bit back my scream and started calling up the most vicious curses that two years with a crew that were little better than pirates had taught me.

Shadow Lady was good. No mercy at all. She stomped after me, trying to land a kick on my injured leg and completely cripple me.

Scrambling away from her blows sucked. It was all pain and desperation and new wounds in my hands and sides.

I had to burn a bright stream of Physical anima to close the wounds and gain the speed and strength to ward off her attacks. Against any other opponent that would have worked great. Against her it meant that I left myself wide open to feed her a big chunk of power, which she very gracefully ripped right away from me.

I’m great with magical shields. Normally that would have protected me wonderfully from her bone shattering punches. That strategy doesn’t work so well though when your opponent can consume the shields themselves and gain even more power from them.

The fight was basically over at that point.  Shadow Lady hit me so hard the world spun and I tasted blood that was definitely my own. She wasn’t trying to kill me either. I knew that because our relative strengths were incredibly mismatched in her favor and I was still alive.

The beating she lay into me wasn’t designed to be lethal. It was designed to damage me so thoroughly that I wouldn’t be able to heal myself or resist any further once she stopped. I’d had to deliver the same kind of smackdown to people who were too skilled or dangerous to capture any other way. It came as no surprise that it was exceedingly unfun to be on the receiving end of that sort of attention though.

As much as I was able to rationally applaud the shadow lady’s technique, I knew I couldn’t afford to lose this fight. Which meant I got to take the stupid risks.

Spell casting requires concentration and finesse. Neither of those are easy to come by when someone is pounding your face into pudding. Fortunately there’s an alternative to concentration and finesse; really sloppy casting backed by an inefficiently massive amount of power.

None of my spell instructors would have been happy with the Acceleration spell that I managed to pull off. It was more poorly constrained than even a six year old’s would be. I wasted a tremendous amount of Physical anima to no advantage whatsoever. The rest of the magic I spent though served its function perfectly.

For just an instant the world slowed to a crawl and I was able to act.

The first thing I did was lash out with a wave of Void anima, not at the Shadow Lady (that would have been useless) but at the splashes of my blood that were splattered around the room. I couldn’t leave them any forensic evidence that I’d been here.

Then I put some distance between Shadow Lady and I.

By diving backwards through a closed window.

That was pleasant and enjoyable experience, said no one ever.

I let myself fall about twenty feet, far enough to be out of Shadow Lady’s view and unfurled the wings from my flight pack.

I wanted to soar upwards and put the city and maybe even the whole planet far behind me while I went and licked my wounds, but instead I dropped down to about fifteen feet over street level and cast a larger invisibility cloak around myself to hide my wings too.

The open sky offered me no protection. Soaring among the buildings, I could rely on their solid, physical presence to shelter me from Shadow Lady’s Void sight.

When I’d flown about thirty blocks away, I dispelled the wings and Shadow Stepped inside a building to catch my breath.

The chill of ice in my chest that signaled danger was diminishing, which let me know I was safe to rest for a moment, but the aches of my internal wounds told me I needed to get back to Ilya as soon as possible. Thinking about the hours of travel that lay between us though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it that far. I tried to stand up and felt myself wobble unsteadily. The betting pool in my head that had been putting wagers on me making it miles from here adjusted it’s guesses down to yards instead.

I closed my eyes for just a second and felt weariness and blood loss carry my consciousness far away, which settled the question of how much farther I’d be able to go.

Infiltration work is, almost by definition, full of surprises. You scouts into the places you don’t have intel on so that you can discover things before you commit your forces there. You send spies in to unearth the secrets your enemies are hiding from you. If you knew what to expect then you wouldn’t need to send in a specialist like me.

In the two years that I’d spent on the Horizon Breaker, I’d learned a lot of things. Captain Hanq had made it a priority that I learn about proper stealth, security and infiltration techniques from the best people he could connect me with. His theory was that, as with my martial studies, my magical abilities would be greatly enhanced if I had a suite of non-anima related techniques to fall back on.

Given that “Captain Okoro” was formerly “Warlord Okoro”, I expected my tutors in defeating security systems to be a bunch of outlaws and criminal scum. As it turns out though, most criminal scum don’t have the requisite knowledge or cleverness to defeat serious security systems. If they did, they would be making a lot more money than petty or violent crime can provide and would be living safer and more comfortable lives.

If you want to learn how to defeat security systems, the people you turn to are the ones who design them and the people who help test them. Those people are the really scary ones. Scary smart, scary prepared, and scary insightful, and I say that after hanging around with certified geniuses as my two best friends.

I don’t consider myself to be dumb (well, most of the time), but I was probably not the best student that I could have been while I was growing up. Learning from Captain Hanq’s friends though was the kind of schooling that touched a live wire in my brain. I don’t know if it was because my instructors were brilliant or because they had to be able to understand how people thought in order to create systems that could be used and remain secure. It might even have been because the subject matter was intensely interesting but, for whatever the reason was, I took to those classes like I’d been born to absorb the information.

Two years wasn’t a huge amount of time though. I had decades of study and work before I could consider myself a master. Coupled with my Void anima abilities though I was kind of a nightmare for most security systems to deal with.

Which isn’t to say, I didn’t run into nightmares of my own. For example; Abyz. The whole damn planet.

I turned invisible and ghosted out of the room, using a short range “Shadow Step” teleport spell I’d learned. Teleporting is difficult and risky but, by limiting it to moving from one shadow to another, the anima was constrained enough that I could manage it without too much worry. Most of the time. On this occasion though, as the spell faded away leaving me in the hallway outside the room, I discovered I was blind!

My first reaction was to cast a shield around myself. That’s pretty much my first reaction to any kind of surprise. It never (or rarely) hurts to be tougher than a battleship. When no attack materialized, I turned my attention to figuring out why a teleport spell, of all things, had blinded me.

I had a brief mental image of having left my eyes behind but it didn’t take long to discover that they were still in my head where they should be and not in pain or damaged as far as I could tell. Checking myself with a simple Physical spell I found that I wasn’t actually even blind. The problem wasn’t with my eyes but with the ley lines on Abyz.

Ley lines are pathways of natural anima that flow within a planet and through the vast darks of space. Some casters can manipulate them to produce incredible effects. I mostly tried to stay outside of the major nexuses where they met because having too much anima surging through a spell can be as bad or worse than having too little.

The problem I’d encountered was that there were even more ley lines coursing through the hotel than in the heaviest nexus I’d ever seen. Abyz wasn’t rich with magic, it was practically drowning in it.

That was a problem for me, because while I am under an invisibility spell, my own natural vision is cut off and I see through “Void sight”. It’s the one sort of magical sense that the invisibility cloak can’t block because they’re both based on Void anima.

With practice I’ve gotten to the point where I can see the physical world as a light shadow in my Void sight. Mostly what I perceive though is the presence of anima. People glow in the colors of the anima that they’re strongest in and material objects display a light echo of the Physical anima that is connected to them. I can see other animas as well. The Energetic anima of a fire burning for example or the mental energy of a spell web that’s active.

In the case of Abyz what I saw was Aetherial anima. A literally blinding amount of it. Everywhere I looked there was a solid wall of Aetherial anima surrounding me. It was the same effect as if the air itself became opaque.

“Well this sucks,” I whined and waited to see if Fari would chime in, but she’d been good and let our mental link drop.

Normally, we stayed connected during a mission so that she could coordinate everyone’s efforts but in this case any telepathic link we maintained would be a liability. While Fari was exceptionally talented with communication spells, any active link between us could possibly be detected merely by the presence of the anima that created it. It wasn’t common to scan for that kind of thing but in the high security areas I was going to be ‘visiting’ it was far from unheard of either. As bad as being detected would be for me, having the bad guys notice my rescue squad would be even worse, since Darius, Fari and Ilya couldn’t escape pursuit quite as easily as I could.

I wasn’t completely cut off from them though. I had a signal stick I could use to contact Fari in an emergency but that was more like sending up a flare that she was sure to notice rather than a direct connection to her. A flare that I could also destroy with a light brush of Void anima in case someone did manage to capture me.

With my friends safely out of the picture, I turned to solving my problem myself. Ultimately it was just an issue with my Void sight spell, so I tinkered with that a bit. Normally it’s set to show me all of the anima in line of sight. With a few quick tweaks I changed it to ignore the Aetherial anima that was around us and the world sprang back into view.

The modified spell was a little harder to maintain, but not perilously so. I was going to need a nice long bath and a head massage to ease away the fatigue of the extended spell casting I was planning to do, the little extra effort for the modified sight spell would just call for a little extra downtime.

With my sight restored, I slipped out of the hotel and off to the local shuttle station. We’d selected Raddox as our destination because it wasn’t the city that Yael and Zyla landed in. They’d started in the capital city of Honji. Since we didn’t want to step into the same trap they’d been snared by, Raddox seemed like a safer base to work from. As far as we knew though, Honji was where Yael and Zyla disappeared, so I had to head there and I had to do it quietly since that seemed the most likely spot for our foes to be watching.

I entered the shuttle with another Shadow Step spell and spent the better part of two hours holding still and silent under an invisibility veil on the passenger ship. Even a very  paranoid opponent would be hard pressed to detect my arrival since to all observation, I had landed in Raddox for a vacation and was still there.

The trip to Honji proved fruitful almost immediately when I arrived. The starport in Honji was right next to the inter-city shuttle station I arrived at. Ten minutes after I disembarked from the shuttle, I was in the records room for the starport and had the flight manifest that told me which ship Yael and Zyla arrived on. It was still docked and undergoing repairs, so I took the opportunity to check out the cabin the two of them had traveled in.

None of their belongings were present, which wasn’t a surprise, but I still got a sense of what the trip had been like for them. It was a plain cabin, not one of the “executive class” suites which the ship boasted, but also not the cramped quarters of a “worker transport bunk”. They’d been posing as low key travelers, not interested in a vacation (they’d have gone to Raddox or one of the other vacation towns if they had that in mind)  and their entrance visa had listed them as having clearance for “archaeological exploration”.

Since neither Yael or Zyla had training in archaeology, that seemed designed to give them access to the museums and colleges that thrived in Honji.

From the travel records, I was able to glean the Interstellar bank account information they had used to pay for their arrival and acclimation fees. Unlike many worlds, Abyz had specific magical requirements for anyone who planned to stay on the surface longer than two weeks. There were a variety of rituals and ceremonies the prospective long term visitor had to take part in to acclimate themselves to the fate bindings that kept Abyz safe. Yael and Zyla had opted for that, probably because they expected their investigation to take longer than two weeks, and had paid the ritual fees from a bank account tied to a private research group.

The “private research group” may not have been enough of a blind to keep them safe, but it was effective in keeping me from figuring out what they were after. Fortunately though it was another breadcrumb to follow, and it led me to another hotel. Yael had checked Zyla and herself into two separate rooms and paid for them both from the private research group’s bank account.

I ghosted into their rooms to find that both had been cleaned and then rented to other customers. A little more invisible investigation and I learned from the hotel’s register that their belongings were “Shipped Out Per Customer Request”, next to an entry that showed them checking out several days earlier than their reservation was set for. I noticed no extra fee was charged for the early checkout and the rate wasn’t adjusted to reflect the higher, short term stay value. Most importantly though, their “check out” time was after the timeout on the message that Yael had set up for us.

So someone was cleaning up the traces of them after they went missing. In a sense that was comforting to know. It meant there definitely were bad guys out there and that they were still active, or at least had been as of a little less than a day ago.

The shipping on their baggage was more difficult to follow up on. The hotel shipping department had no record of the delivery, which appeared to mean that it was shipped by special courier, as many of the more important packages were.

I double checked the gate logs at the parking garage under the hotel and discovered that less than a handful of courier trucks had come in since the disappearance.  Of them all but one came from the same shipping company with the last being a truck which the gate clerk had not recorded a company or identification number for.

I found a secluded area of one of the capital’s parks to rest in after that while I pondered my options. Holding the invisibility spell wasn’t getting any easier, but I thought I could still maintain it for a while longer. Pushing onwards didn’t seem fun, but speed was still critical and I wasn’t overextended so I decided to continue on a bit further.

On a hunch, I raided the offices of the largest local taxi service to see what their pickup and dropoff records were like for the time span when Yael and Zyla went missing.

That turned up another lead in the form of a payment from the research group’s bank account for a ride out to an industrial park. That smelled like a diversion to me, Yael wasn’t clumsy enough to leave a clue like that if she wanted to hide where she was going. Despite that,I was still curious where she would send someone who was following after them.

Unlike my missing Guardian, I couldn’t catch a taxi, so I had to get out there on my own. Another few hours of walking let me tired and drained but it turned out to be worth it. The industrial park was closed, not because we were after business hours but because there was an active police investigation underway.

I smiled and thought about how fun it would be to raid the police evidence room to see what they’d found. Yael might have sent their pursuers off on a aimless hunt, but she tended to play deeper games than that. If there was a clue to be found, this felt like the kind of place she would have left it.

I got up from my perch on a building across the street from the industrial park to head into the investigation area on the chance that they hadn’t found Yael’s hypothetical clue when a fresh pang of cold lanced through my chest.

I turned slowly, shield already in place, to find someone else cloaked in shadows, climbing over the edge of the building.

As they stood up I saw them put their wrist close to their mouth and Energetic anima flared around their hand. I braced for an attack and then saw that it was much worse. They were speaking into a communicator.

“I have a veiled intruder on the top of the Koshi building,” the shadow cloaked newcomer said. “Preparing to engage. Have the neural-inhibitors ready from when I bring them down to you.”

It probably says something about my life that I expected the shuttle trip down to Abyz to be interrupted by explosions, falling and general mayhem. As it turned out though, we managed to land safely at the starport in Raddox, Abyz’s largest tourism-approved city, with the ship in one piece and everyone still onboard.

“You owe me a hundred gold pieces,” Fari said to Darius.

“Law of averages says I can’t win them all I guess,” Darius said.

“Wait,” I asked. “Were you two betting on whether I was going to jinx the shuttle again?”

“What do you mean ‘betting again’?” Fari asked.

“Yeah,” Darius said. “That’s a standing bet we have. Where do you think I get the money for half our dinners out?”

“I am not cursed!” I said. “And I don’t make ship’s crash.”

“Of course not,” Fari said. “It’s just a statistically unlikely streak of isolated incidents, which has clearly come to an end.”

“I’m willing to go double or nothing on her next flight,” Darius said.

“You know I was wondering why the other pilots were laughing when ‘the new guy’ got this flight,” Razawan, the shuttle’s flyer said on the private telepathic link we shared. For most of our missions we defaulted to talking on a Fari-provided and secured spell link. It made the crew of the Horizon Breaker seem a little creepy at times, since it looked like we were silently moving together, all with one mind, but looking scary often suited our needs too.

“Don’t worry Raz, she really doesn’t crash ship’s that much,” Darius said. “They mostly explode actually.”

I hit him, which wasn’t precisely fair as he wasn’t precisely wrong. I had a recurring string of bad luck with flying vessels. I’d have several different Aetherial casters check me out to ensure that I wasn’t carrying a secret curse, but it seemed like the disasters were all natural. Or at least natural for someone in my line of work. Crystal Guardians, even initiate-class ones, draw a much higher share of unfriendly attention than a normal traveler. In part that’s because if trouble doesn’t come looking for us, then trouble is making a grave mistake and we’ll find it first.

“Thanks,” Razawan said. “That makes me feel so much better.”

“Maybe you’re good luck?” Darius suggested. Feelings don’t translate over the telepathic link, but I could still tell that Raz had winced at that. There was no better method to jinx someone than to suggest they might be lucky to have around.

“Maybe we should let Raz get back to the Horizon Breaker?” I said, hoping to get him out of the inevitable bad luck blast radius.

“I’d be delighted to!” Razawan said. “I’ll keep the engines charged up for a quick evac if you need one.”

We all stood back as the aether thrusters on the shuttle lit up and propelled the craft skyward. I whispered a silent blessing to keep Razawan and the rest of the Horizon Breaker’s crew safe. It wasn’t a spell, I’m not at all talented with Aetherial anima like that, so the only force the blessing held was the weight of my good wishes. As a magical shield those wouldn’t protect them from a stiff breeze but sometimes the point of saying kind words is just to let the universe (and ourselves) hear them.

“This is going to be a nice safe mission though isn’t it?” Illya asked. “Or were you not being entirely honest with Captain Okoro?”

“I said this was going to be the safest investigation option we had,” I said. “I never claimed it was actually safe though.”

“Oh yeah, speaking of which, have you figured out how to sabotage her idea yet so she has to take us along?” Darius asked Fari.

“I’m still working on that,” my translucent friend said.

“And that should tell you something,” I said.

Technically we were on Phase 2 of our operation on Abyz. Phase 1 had ended about ten seconds after we exited the warp portal when Fari cast a long range scanning spell on Abyz which told us the planet wasn’t suffering any global catastrophes. The planetary spell web had reports of things like local sporting competitions and promotions for various tourist sites, instead of the global evacuation orders we’d been afraid we would encounter.

With ‘cataclysmic crises’ off our list of worries, we were free to turn to our second priority;  finding our missing Crystal Guardian and her partner. That’s where my team came in.

Normally I don’t get to poach Darius for a team since we have different specialities. The same was true with Illya who was part Gold team, aka our medics. Even Fari and I hadn’t been able to work together exclusively much since she was promoted to the Horizon Breaker’s Chief of Logistics and Tactics.

This mission was special though. Of the crew of the Horizon Breaker, I was the only one with skill at manipulating Void anima. That gave me an edge in infiltration missions that was hard to match. It also meant that I tended to work best alone. Turning myself invisible was easy. Hiding other people wasn’t hard either. At least for me. For them the experience was like being blinded and deafened, with even their supernatural senses being suppressed.

Darius, Fari and a few other trusted allies were willing to work with me under those conditions, but even with practice and coordination they couldn’t perform at their full potential with that kind of a limitation in place.

Which isn’t to say having a support team wasn’t useful.

Fari was the Chief of Tactics for the Horizon Breaker for a damn good reason. She was naturally brilliant, and due to her unique circumstances had a better handle on Mental anima casting than anyone I’d ever met. She was vital to the operations of the Horizon Breaker and frequently had the task of coordinating the actions of the entire crew in real time.

I’d thought I would have to argue with Hanq long and hard to get her assigned to my team, but he’s almost insisted I take her along. The Horizon Breaker would function less efficiently without her onboard but having her with me gave my team a much higher chance of success. With her help, no one was going to ensorcell themselves into eavesdropping on our telepathic conversations, and no one was going to be able to casually read our minds.

Darius wasn’t a slouch in the Mental anima department either. He had a excellent reserve of Mental anima to draw on and he was quick and clever enough to use it well. Where he really shone though was in manipulating Energetic anima.

In part I’d brought him along because I needed him for the cover story we were presenting. The shuttle that dropped us off was independently warp capable, so we arrived posing as nothing more than ordinary tourists. Darius and I were a young couple in love, just like the thousands of other young couples in love that were visiting Raddox. Given that we actually were a young couple in love who hadn’t had a vacation in far too long it wasn’t exactly a difficult role to play.

As nice as the resort we checked into was though, the real reason I wanted Darius on the team was that there was only one person on the crew who had his ability to blow things up in a hurry even when “unarmed”, and that was Captain Hanq.

The mission, as I’d conceived it, was for me to quietly investigate Yael and Zyla’s disappearance. If everything went well no one would even be aware that anyone was looking for them.

The last time “everything went well” for me was “never” though, so when things got loud and unfriendly, I wanted to be able to call on some support that could be even “louder”.

That was also why I’d insisted on bringing Ilya on the team. One of my best skills is weaving shields. There’s relatively few things that can break a protective spell that I cast. No matter how good you are though, if you go looking for a fight you have to assume that you’re going to get hurt.

I’ve trained since I was six under a variety of tutors. Master Hanq taught me how to use nothing more than my raw physical strength, dexterity and speed, unaided by magic, to take out spellcasters more than twice my size. Master Raychelle taught me how to use my Void anima to make an absolute wreck of other casters and multiple opponents at once. For the last couple of years, I worked on refining everything they taught me and adding to my store of tricks techniques from anyone who was willing to work with me (or against me, you can learn a surprising amount from the right kind of foe).

Despite that (or maybe because of it) there wasn’t a bone in my body that hadn’t been broken multiple times. Without the healing magics of people like Ilya, I’d be a gelatinous mass of goo at best or (more likely) dead several times over.

Ilya had another purpose on the mission team though beyond the seemingly inevitable need to patch my broken body back together when things went poorlya.

I needed to be able to move around without drawing any attention at all. Invisiblity is great for avoiding notice, but sometimes the most obvious clue you can give your opponents is not being where they expect you to be.

We’d registered with Abyz immigration as a group of travelers out of Hellsreach, Darius’ old home planet. It made it easy to generate the proper identification, and fairly hard for anyone on Abyz to verify that the documents were faked. They could contact Hellsreach, but it was entirely under Imperial ownership with only a small population remaining on its surface to search for ancient artifacts. Everyone else had fled the artificial “war world” for the relative safety of life anywhere else at all.

That meant Abyz customs had no reason to deny us entry, but that irregularity could be noticed by anyone who was sufficiently paranoid and hooked into the Abyz global information web. While we didn’t know that there was anyone like that on the planet, past missions suggested it was always better to plan for that eventuality. Sometimes the troublemakers are dumb as a bag of bricks, like on Halli, but people who are that stupid probably wouldn’t have been able to take down Yael.

What we needed against a smart opponent, was someone to take my place and remain visible even while I was off skulking around. Between Ilya and Fari, we had a trick to make that happen.

Fari was a genius with mental anima, so she could pretend to be me pretty easily. What she lacked was a body or the Physical anima to manipulate one. That was what Ilya’s primary role was.

As a medic, Ilya had Physical anima to spare. Take a few drops of my blood and a suitcase full of enchanted medical quick-fix gum, aka “body parts in a bottle”, and, within an hour of checking into our rooms at the resort, our bathtub was home to an exact, if lifeless, replica of me. Add Ilya’s Physical anima so that it could move around and link the body to Fari’s gem and we had enacted, officially, the creepiest plan I’d ever come up with.

It was freaky watching Fari do her disturbingly accurate impersonation of me, but it really gave me the creeps when she and Ilya released their hold on my doppleganger and it dropped onto the bed like a discarded doll.

“Ok, I know what nightmares I’m going to be having tonight,” I said, looking at the perfectly still version of myself.

“Are you really sure you want to go through with this?” Darius asked.

“We have worked under invisibility veils together before,” Fari said.

“Yeah, but this isn’t going to be a straightforward investigation,” I said. “I’m going to need to break into all kinds of places and do it really fast. We don’t know how much time, if any, Yael and Zyla have left.”

“Let it be noted that I hate this plan then,” Darius said. “And that you better come back to us, with or without Yael and Zyla.”

“I will,” I said. “But I’m not going to give up on them either. We’re critically short of Crystal Guardians as it is. We can’t afford to lose two good ones.”

“Or a great Initiate Guardian either,” Fari said.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “Just be sure to stay safe yourselves. When I call for the cavalry…well you know how that tends to go.”

“Oh, before you go, one second,” Fari said and slipped back inside my doppleganger. Ilya recast her part of the spell and my double rose back to life.

Before I could turn invisible and head out, Fari hopped off the bed and hugged me.

“I never get to do that,” she said and stepped back to give me a thumbs up.

“You all are the best,” I said and drew the three of them into a return hug, with Ilya looking a little confused by the show of affection.

Then I disappeared.

This was going to be hard enough and they didn’t need to see the tremors that shook my hands. The center of my chest had taken on the familiar chill of peril and it was deep enough and cold enough that I knew something big and terrifying was waiting for me.

We left Halli and the corruption there behind us the moment the Imperial dreadnaught that  Hanq had called for arrived. Fari gave them a compressed memory dump with the names, dates and verifying records for each of the false trials the Magistrate had presided over during her tenure. I guessed there’d be around a dozen or so Imperial High Court judges who were going to be very busy in the months to come, not to mention a similar number of private penitentiary companies that were going to be greeted with the news that they were no longer in business and several thousand people who would be tasting freedom again for the first time in far too long.

For as tempting as it was to stay and make sure that was all sorted out properly though, I felt a surge of eager anticipation when the Horizon Breaker jumped through the portal to warp space.

“Your danger sense acting up yet?” Darius asked as we scrubbed down to get the grime from Halli out of our skin.

“Yeah,” I said as I scoured his back with a rough washcloth under the hot water. “It went off as soon as Fari told us about Yael’s letter.”

“What’s she like?” Darius asked, stepping out of the spray of water and letting me get underneath.

“Yael?” I asked. “The last time I saw her, we fought off a warlord armada together. She was only an apprentice then and there was only one person I saw who lasted more than three seconds in a fight with her.”

“You?”

“I wish. If we’d fought she’d would have splattered me across a disturbingly wide area,” I said. “No, it was one of our enemies, a girl named Zyla.”

“Is this the same Zyla who’s been partnered up with her since then?” Darius asked, rubbing me down with some industrial strength detoxifying soap.

“The same, although I believe Yael is technically Zyla’s parole officer,” I said.

“How long of a parole period is it?”

“Just a year before she could apply for a review,” I said. “Xyla was instrumental in helping us stop her father and she worked pretty hard after that to make amends for the things she did too.”

“So why is she still on parole?” Darius asked.

“She gone review yet,” I said. “Last I heard, Zyla had a few gray marks on her record for how she handled some of the situations she and Yael had been in and she wasn’t willing to stand in front of the parole review board until they were cleaned up.”

Darius followed me out of the shower and passed me a towel so that we could dry off. I felt the tingle of a small spell on it and gave him a quick kiss. With his talent at manipulating Energetic anima, it was a trivial effort to enchant a towel to be warm and fluffy. Trivial but still appreciated.

“That makes sense,” he said. “But it sounds like you think there’s more going on there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t kept in touch with them that well, I’m just wondering if it’s a question of Zyla holding herself to an unrealistic standard or if Yael’s been encouraging that brand of craziness in her.”

“Yael’s a Guardian isn’t she?” he asked as he pulled on his pants.

“Yeah, but she’s probably the tightest wound Guardian I’ve ever met,” I said, pulling on a fresh set of my combat robes. In theory I was safe onboard the ship, but I like to be protected by both theory and heavy duty environmental spells whenever possible.

“So wound up that she’s likely to make mistakes?” he asked.

“No, just the reverse,” I said. “She and Zyla are both ridiculously skilled with Aetherial anima. Watching the two of them fight was like watching master gamesmen at work. It was all plans with plans and maneuvers that come out of nowhere and should never work but somehow turn out in their favor anyways.”

“Could the two of them have had a falling out?” he asked.

“Maybe?” I said. “That would explain why they’re both out of contact but if Yael had seen that coming she’d have left more information in her message.”

I leaned in to bury my face in his hair and drew in a nice long breath. It was a little weird, I’ll admit, but I loved the smell of his hair. When I held the embrace a few seconds too long he put his hands over the arms I wrapped around his chest and hugged them until I relaxed and let go.

“You’re going to be careful on this one right?” he said. Despite the phrasing and tone of voice he used, it was a request not a question.

“As much as I can be,” I said.

“And you’re going to come back to me?”

“Always,” I said. We both knew it was a statement of intent more than a promise. The Horizon Breaker had been very successful in the two years we’d been a part of its crew but  even so we’d lost people, and come close to losing each other a few times too. In fights like the one on Halli, I still had a tendency to show off and not take things seriously, but that was a situation where we were dealing with an opposition so far below our weight class that we would have been in more danger from excessive worry than from anything they could do to us.

In this case, I had no idea what kind of opposition we were up against, but excessive worry didn’t seem like it would be an issue.

Once we were dressed, we joined Hanq, Fari and the other team leads in the Captain’s briefing room.

“We’re going to be arriving at the planet Abyz in sixteen hours,” Captain Hanq said. “Officially our reason for visiting is to convey a diplomatic parcel to the Imperial Ambassador there. The parcel is part of the yearly budget discussions and contains an offer from the Empire to assist Abyz’s efforts to renew and revitalize it’s main orbital station.”

I winced. We were going in undercover. That was good in the sense that I’d get to be in the vanguard but bad in the sense that we’d have to be restrained and tactful in how we looked for answers. I’d been trained in a lot of things, but restraint and tact were areas I was still working on.

“Our true purpose will be to ascertain the whereabouts and status of these two Imperial personnel,” Hanq said and called up holo-vid representations of Yael and Zyla in the center of our conference table. The scrying bowls in front of each of us changed and a book appeared which listed the vital information for each of our missing persons.

I watched the other team leads take in the relevant details and saw more than a few force themselves to hide their surprise. Rescuing a Crystal Guardian wasn’t an everyday mission and everyone at the table had been with the crew long enough to know how tough the “non-standard” missions we took on could be. One-by-one I saw them glance over at me and I could only shrug and try to look like I had a handle on things in response.

“We’re going to be very limited in our investigation though,” Fari said, taking over the briefing as Captain Hanq often had her do. “Abyz has tight restrictions on immigration and tourism. Apart from the primary spaceport and a half dozen resorts, off-worlders are barred from the rest of the planet.”

“What about Imperial inspectors?” I asked. Worlds that tried to bar Imperial inspectors tended to be worlds where the corruption was obvious enough to be visible from space, but a few of them were paranoid for other reasons.

“Inspectors have full access, but it takes a month to ‘acclimate’ them to the planet,” Fari said.

“Toxins in the air?” Tym, the other Black Team leader asked. “Is this another cesspit like Halli?”

“No, supposedly its beautiful there,” Fari said. “Very safe too. The whole planet is bound up in fate magics.”

There was a round of collective cursing from everyone at the table.

Aetherial anima dealt with many different immaterial qualities of reality. My danger sense, for example, drew on my Aetherial magic stores. Precognition spells, illusion casting and all sort of other unique and interesting effects could be created with Aetherial anima but the most basic use for it was fate binding.

In theory a fate spell simply altered a number of random events so that a given overall effect the caster desired occurred. Rather than shooting a lightning bolt at someone like an Energetic anima caster could, a fate binding might cause an electrical power line to fray and land on the caster’s enemy. Or they might get caught in a particularly bad thunderstorm and struck naturally. Or a hovercar from the Lightning Fast Delivery company might run them over.

Fate magic was, generally, imprecise which made it lousy for achieving very specific ends but excellent for encouraging broad trends, or executing attacks that were incredibly hard to see coming. As a Void caster I had some level of protection against it since I could devour any anima that touched me, but that wouldn’t necessarily help when a Lighting Fast Delivery hovercar was barreling down on me.

“From Guardian Clearborn’s note we know that they were investigating an anomaly in the Fate bindings themselves,” Hanq said. “She indicated the need for care due to the possibility for a cascade failure in the spell matrix and advised us to restrict our investigation to ensuring that a planetary crisis hasn’t been triggered.”

“How much damage are we looking at if there is a cascade failure of the fate bindings?” I asked.

“Abyz bills itself as a ‘Paradise Planet’,” Fari said. “And they can support that claim largely thanks to the fate bindings. Check out their crime and accidents statistics.”

I looked at the scrying pool in front me as the personnel reports on Yael and Zyla changed to a datasheet on Abyz.

“Did they forget to fill in their numbers here?” I asked.

“Nope,” Fari said. “The Imperial Ambassador’s seal is on these. They’ve had no accidents and no violent crimes since their induction into the Empire.”

“That’s not possible is it?” Darius asked. “What would you power that many Fate spells with?”

“According to the Queen’s senior staff, the ley lines on Abyz are naturally unbalanced towards conversion to Aetherial anima and are exceptionally suited to fate spells,” Fari said.

“And has anyone ever confirmed that?” I asked.

“The fate spells were in place before Abyz joined the Empire,” Fari said. “The few efforts that were made to probe them resulted in partial collapses and so the research was called off.”

“That’s why Guardian Clearborn advised us to avoid tampering with the binding spells,” Hanq said. “Abyz is home to over six hundred million people, and another sixty million tourists. The fate bindings are their primary safety net. If they fail, we’ll be looking at a backlash that could kill all of them.”

“What are our mission parameters then?” I asked.

“Our primary goal is to preserve the lives of the people on Abyz,” Hanq said. “Guardian Clearborn was concerned that if they went missing it might be due to an event severe enough to trigger a cascade failure. We need to make sure that’s not the case and have a contingency plan in place in case it is.”

“And if everyone there is happy and healthy?” I asked.

“Our secondary mission is to locate and assist Guardian Clearborn and her assistant,” Hanq said.

“What about catching the bad guys?” I asked.

“We don’t know that there are any bad guys here,” Hanq said. “Its entirely possible there was a natural disruption in Abyz’s ley lines that caught Guardian Clearborn’s attentions. It’s also entirely possible that her failure to stay in contact is due to perfectly normal difficulties encountered in pursuit of the case.”

He waited a moment to make sure that the official message had been conveyed, before continuing.

“We are not idiots however, so we’re going to assume that there are bad guys at work here until we have proof otherwise,” he said. “Guardian Watersward, please assemble a team for deep infiltration.”

I looked at my former mentor and smiled. I’d already been thinking of that exact idea, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be a fan of the team I had in mind.

The problem with following the rules, is that they can lead you to all kinds of places you don’t want to go. I pondered that as I waited my turn for sentencing. It was an annoying thought to chew on but at least it was better than chewing on the stench that wafted off the slime cauldrons which lined every office and corridor of the headquarters of the Supreme Magistrate of Halli.

Halli was a minor little backwater on one of the many edges of the Crystal Empire. If it had been just two star systems further from the core it would have been outside the jurisdiction of the Crystal Guardians and therefore not my problem to deal with. As one of the Crystal Empress’s sworn defenders though, I was duty bound to investigate all claims against any planetary government that involved the violation of the Imperial Rights granted to all of the citizens of the Empire.

In practice that usually involved showing up, telling the offending party or parties to knock it off and dragging one or two of the principal culprits back for trial before an Imperial Court. It wasn’t a smooth or stress free life that I led by any stretch of the imagination but it was interesting and rewarding in its own ways.

Standing in the sentencing line that lead to the Magistrate’s theater left me questioning those rewards though. On the positive side, I had power and privilege and loved ones who’d been with me for years. On the other hand there was the stench of Magistrate’s hall coupled with the fact that no matter how much I wanted to, I was not allowed to call down an orbital strike and obliterate the facility and everyone inside it.

“Prisoner ‘Mel Watersward’, step forward and receive sentencing,” the bailiff said.

I smirked. The Magistrate was about two minutes away from giving me all the evidence I needed and if I was really lucky she’d push the issue just a little farther than that.

The bailiff pulled me forward onto the rusty steel scaffolding that ran across the room to the platform that was suspended over the bubbling vats which packed the lower levels of the Halli Central Justice building. The catwalk swayed as we walked and with the lack of railings I was pretty sure more than a few defendants wound up in the slime smelting pots below before charges were even read against them.

Halli had once been the haven of a Warlord named Ney. It was the stinky jewel in his crown for two reasons; first, it was home to a rare form of goo that held destructive enchantments extremely well. Weapons fabricated with Halli-slime were more damaging than standard military gear by a noticeable margin. The slime was self-renewing too, in fact it was hard to come to Halli and not wind up splattered with the disgusting stuff at some point or other. It was pretty much everywhere.

For Warlord Ney’s purposes though the prime benefit of Halli was that it lay off the standard trade routes so most of the work done there was invisible to his rivals. The warlords he fought with knew he had a hidden base to work from but were never able to locate it, at least not before one of my predecessors found Halli and brought down Ney’s reign entirely.

Once Halli was accepted into the Crystal Empire, a new government was put in place, one that answered to the people of Halli and agreed to abide by the Imperial rules of conduct towards its citizens and neighbors.  That practice worked better in some place and worse in others, with Halli being one of the “worse” places.

In Halli’s case, the Empire had simply failed to provide the oversight needed. Over twenty years ago, in the wake of the Galactic War, there’d been a million systems that joined together to form the new Empire. The Crystal Empress and the Prime Crystal Guardians had been at the spearhead of that and while they were inhumanely powerful, even they had limits in terms of how many problems they could deal with at once.

People often make the mistake of thinking the Crystal Empire formed during the few months of galactic scale warfare where the Empress swept the old Warlords outside of the star systems that make up the Empire. That was just the beginning though. Even two decades later, the Crystal Empire is still being built from the remains of the violent and lawless era that preceded it.

It’s not a perfect Empire, but it wasn’t meant to be. Perfection is something we work towards, not something we are. Usually that means striving to be better and looking for ways to improve what we do and who we are. With situations like Halli though, it’s more a matter of deciding if there’s anything left worth salvaging or if we should just burn it all to the ground and start over.

I was ruminating on that as the bailiff and I arrived at the central platform for my “sentencing”. The Magistrate was sitting above us on a separate platform. To her left and right a dozen bodyguards lounged in various states of inebriation. None of them were too drunk to fight, but it also wasn’t likely that any of them would have to thanks to the anti-armor turrets that were trained on the defendant’s platform.

If the guards decided to shoot me, I’d be facing about a dozen bolt casters that could punch holes in steel plates. If the turrets opened up, the platform I was standing on and everyone within about fifteen feet of it would be reduced to a fine mist unless they had personal shields that were stronger that starship armor.

I noticed the bailiff was quick to leave me alone on the platform.

The wimp.

“This one looks like she’ll fetch some coin,” the Magistrate said. “What are the charges against her?”

“Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to incite rebellion and falsifying official documentation,” the bailiff read for a safe distance away from me.

“Ah, good a Class 1 felon,” the Magistrate said. “Any signs of mental deviations?”

“No,” the bailiff said. “The arrest was clean. No resistance and no delusional claims.”

“Good,” the Magistrate said. “The Zera Asylum is behind on their payments, better that we keep them out of the bidding on a good catch like this. What about witnesses, where’s our case against the convict?”

“I’m still here Magistrate!” the same witness the prosecution had called in the last three cases said.

“Do you have enough authorizations left this month Gurge?” the Magistrate asked.

“This will tap me out,” he said, “But I think it’s worth it.”

“You’re probably right,” the Magistrate said. “Enter your account.”

I saw Gurge type a code into a holodisk before beginning his testimony. Witnesses in trials on Halli couldn’t be paid for their testimony, but they could be reimbursed for the time away from work. Apparently many such witnesses worked on ludicrously profitable short term jobs right around the time of their testimony. Authorizations for such jobs were at a premium though since there was only so much demand for witness testimony to go around.

You’d think that would breed for a better class of witness. One capable of recounting their testimony in a compelling and convincing manner. Sadly with Gurge that wasn’t exactly the case.

“I was approached by that woman there,” he began and pointed at me. “to overthrow the Halli government and kill the senior government officials in the process. She said she was a member of the Devil’s Brigade and that she could use a strong guy like me when the time came.”

Gurge continued to spin an elaborate tale about the offer I made him and the incredible resources I had at my disposal. By the time his tale was done I was kind of wishing I was the person he described. I mean she had a fleet of cloaked warships at her disposal and was going to take over Halli and the whole empire if she wasn’t stopped!

Sadly, the reality of our meeting was a lot less exciting that that. It went kind of like this (our scene begins in a rundown spacer’s bar on Halli named “Mun’s”):

“Man, aren’t the import tariffs here a pain?” Gurge, aka the random guy sitting next to me, asked without any other lead-in.

“Eh, what are you gonna do?” I replied.

“I heard some folks might try to get the bums in charge kicked out,” Gurge said.

“More power to ‘em,” I said.

“Want to go back to my place?” he asked.

“Nope.” I said.

“You’re under arrest for sedition,” a uniformed guard said about fifteen minutes later. “Please state your name and planet of citizenship.”

“She said her name was Naru and she’s from Yedo,” Gurge said from behind the guard, making up both a name and a home planet that had nothing to do with me. I’m not sure “Yedo” is even a real place.

I went along quietly from there because the whole reason I’d been hanging out in the dive where I found Gurge was so that someone would arrest me. I hadn’t expected it would be as easy as “be in the wrong spot and look like a foreigner” but I’d decided to see how literal our informant was being.

Since there was still the outside possibility that the arrest was a result of Gurge’s trumped up charges and delusions, I stayed the night in the local jail cell and listened to the tales of the rest of the people who were there with me.

The other prisoners were all as new to Halli as I was, but the guards were more than willing to let us know what we’d gotten ourselves into.

It turned out that even slime has its limitations and thanks to the demand for it, the Halli slime colony had been over-harvested. They tried raising prices to make up for the dwindling supply but there were other alternatives so the buyers went elsewhere.

That’s apparently when the Magistrate decided that if they couldn’t sell slime, they’d become slime and start selling people instead. The Crystal Empress has this little rule about slavery being illegal though – to the point where active slave traders are on the short list of targets that I’m allowed “unrestricted judicial authority” in dealing with. That’s not exactly the same as saying I can kill them on sight, I still wind up before a review board if I do, but that’s one of the easier conversations to have with an Imperial judge.

The Supreme Magistrate of Halli found a clever loophole around that prohibition though. She never sold anyone into slavery. She just transferred convicted criminals to penitentiaries owned by private companies and received a “processing fee” to cover the transference costs. The private companies then put the convicted felons to productive use for the duration of their incarceration.

The difference between that arrangement and slavery was a slim one at best and was made completely irrelevant when the “felons” were falsely accused and convicted.

“The evidence is clear,” the Magistrate said. “We sentence the defendant to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Next case.”

“Oh, you’re not done with me yet,” I said.

“Guards, remove the convict and bring the next case in,” the Magistrate said.

“Do you need to see anymore of this?” I asked. The question wasn’t directed at the Magistrate. It was meant for my commanding officer, and childhood mentor, Captain Hanq Okoro of the Crystal Empress’s ship the Horizon Breaker, formerly “Master Hanq” when he was teaching me to fight and before that “Warlord Okoro” when he ruled a couple of star systems and fought against the Empress in the Galactic War.

Whenever I think of how strange my path through life has been, I just turn and look at my old teacher and see that it could be so much weirder.

“Oh, I saw enough of this place about five minutes after you landed,” Hanq said. “Fari, do we have recordings of the other trials that came before Mel’s too?”

“Of course sir,” Fari replied. Knowing my best friend, I was pretty sure she’d not only recorded the trials over the telepathic link that she established for me, but at this point had also raided every spell web and ship’s memory cluster on the planet.

“Shall I bring them in then?” I asked.

“Who are you talking to?” the Magistrate asked.

“Hush,” I told her. “I’ll get to you in a second.”

“I will not be spoken to like that!” the Magistrate said. “Guards, get her out of here.”

The bodyguards on the platform with the Magistrate stirred but it was the regular guards that jumped at their leader’s words.

“I’ve got warrants ready for basically everyone in that building with you except for the convicts,” Hanq said. “Take them all down.”

“No fair, she has a headstart!” Darius said. “Give us thirty seconds to get ithere at least!”

I loved Darius. We’d been together for the better part of two years and had somehow avoided driving each other completely insane. Technically his talents lay in working with mental and energetic magics but as far as I was concerned it was his abilities to understand me and put up with my particular brand of craziness that were his real magic powers.

Which wasn’t to say that we weren’t a little nuts in our own way. I was part of “Black Team”, basically the infiltration wing of Captain Hanq’s crew. Darius was part of “Blue Team”, basically the engineering and enchanting wing of the crew. Both teams had combat roles in a lot of the missions that we engaged in, so there was a bit of a running competition between the two groups, to the point where, though I loved him dearly, there was no chance in hell I was going to hold off on starting with the arrests and let the Blues catch up with us.

The first two guards reached the platform I was on and pulled out standard issue stun sticks. A talented caster could replicate the effects of one easily enough, but the stun sticks made it much easier to invoke so that even relatively weak and untrained troops could take down superior foes.

That of course assumed that they could hit their foes in the first place.

I was kind to them. No broken bones, no torn ligaments, just gentle holds and a simple spell to rob them of the energy that they needed to stay conscious. I couldn’t afford to hold back like that against serious opposition, but the armed forces of Halli seemed to be composed of swaggering idiots and poorly trained cannon fodder.

“Just so you know,” I said, “you are all under arrest.”

“Who are you to arrest us?” the Magistrate asked. I saw anger, fear and confusion warring on her face. I also saw her bodyguards getting up as their interest was peaked.

“I am Guardian Mel Watersward, of the Crystal Empire,” I said. “I accuse you of high crimes against the citizens of the Empire you have sworn to protect. Come along peacefully and you will be treated honorably.”

I’m not sure anyone on Halli had reference points for either “peaceful” or “honorable” but I had to make the offer anyways.

“A Crystal Guardian?” the Magistrate asked. “And you’re going to arrest all of us?”

“Technically I’ve already arrested you,” I said. “The only question now is whether I’ll need to use force to bring you into custody.”

“You’re one girl,” the Magistrate said. “Even if you are one of the Crystal Guardians, I have a planet full of troops at my disposal and the Empire is very far away. You’ve made a grave mistake coming here, one that I don’t think we can let you walk away from. Kill her.”

I heard the rotary motors of the anti-armor turrets that were pointed at me spin to life. In response, I raised a shield that was, as it turns out, significantly stronger than starship armor. That meant the sustained barrage accomplished nothing except to charge me up with the energy I leeched from away from it.

“You poor dear,” I said to the Magistrate. “You got two things wrong. First I’m not alone.”

Two of the other squads from Black team emerged from the shadows when I nodded my head.

“And second,” I waited a moment and heard the series of explosions I was expecting. “Your troops have no vehicles or equipment to fight with. In case you’re wondering, that means your reign here is over. The Empire’s going to shut Halli down completely, put you in a nice Imperial run facility, spring all the people you “convicted” and then arrest everyone that you’ve ever done business with.”

That didn’t go over too well with the Magistrate or her bodyguards. With the regular forces added in that put the odds at three-to-one against us. Sadly, that meant the next few minutes were disappointing ones for pretty much everyone.

The Halli forces were disappointed when they woke up (later) and found that despite numerical superiority they hadn’t stood a ghost of chance against us.

Black team was disappointed because there just weren’t enough targets to go around. We kept poaching each others arrests to the point where it got almost comical and people were escaping because we were “helping” each other with the arrests too strenuously.

Blue team was the most disappointed of all though. By the time they arrived there were so few targets left to capture that Black team’s victory was already assured.

“You could have saved at least a few for us,” Darius complained when he arrived.

“We did!” I said. “There were like four or maybe even five that got away!”

“Bah! You caught seven of them yourself!” he said.

“Well, they kind of…fell onto my fists repeatedly,” I said.

“Oh yeah, please try that one at the Captain’s debriefing,” Darius said. “I really want to see you sell that to him.”

“We may be skipping the debriefing,” Fari said. “We just got a communique from Guardian Clearborn.”

“Yael sent a message?” I asked. “What’s up?”

“It was an automated note,” Fari said. “It was scheduled to send in case she went missing or someone killed her.”

“We’re going to treat this as a Guardian down scenario,” Hanq said. “I want everyone back on the Horizon Breaker asap. I’ve got an Imperial dreadnaught inbound. It’ll be here in four hours. They’ll take over this situation and I want us to ready to move then.”

Four hours was pretty quick, but I had to wonder if was even possible for us to move fast enough now. Crystal Guardians, particularly fully trained ones like Yael as hard to stop much less take down. In Yael’s case she had a special advantage too. Zyla. The daughter of an immensely powerful warlord and a Guardian-class caster in her own right. Between the two of them, they should have been able to handle almost any threat that came up.

That hadn’t been the case and given that Yael had a note setup to cover their disappearance, they’d known how bad it would be even when they first went into whatever mess they discovered.

I looked out to the stars that awaited us and felt a chill run through me. Whatever else was true, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.