CHAPTER 1
ANDROMEDA
The crimson forestof Zairion Prime is cool, dark, and moist. It reminds me of Earth. The trees are similar but with gnarled, winding trunks that grow wide instead of tall and throw off strange clusters of blood-red leaves.
The crunch of the litter underfoot, the smell of decay—that’s identical. Elements are elements, no matter how weird and fucked up the planet. Convergent evolution and all that.
I let out a bitter laugh as I follow the holo-map on my wrist along a deer path. Well, notliterallya deer path; there are no deer here. But there’s some herbivore in the same ecological niche, and it trampled down the underbrush and leaves enough that I don’t need to hack my way through.
How many lives ago was I a biologist? Four… no, six? I always forget about the stint as a priest… Was that before or after the holovid production assistant? Definitely after the apprentice hydrotech mechanic…
My dad used to tell me I could be anything I wanted. I made that a reality—but I don’t think a special skill for forging identities was what he had in mind.
I had real dreams once. They died when Earth did.
Seeing your home shatter into listless chunks of rock will do that to you.
We were supposed to be good little refugees, sorted by our skills to wherever we’d be most useful, wherever we’d make the return on the investment it took to scoop us up and house us all.
Treated like livestock, analyzed down to the atom, all the decisions made for us in order to achieve ‘optimum health markers.’
And the worst part?
Those decisions were pretty damn good. Humanity was certainly doing a shit job of managing itself. All in all, becoming the pandas of the Intergalactic Coalition of Sentient Species was an upgrade.
But I don’t do well with other people making choices for me. As soon as I’m told to do something, I become pathologically unable to do it. Changing identities like I changed clothes gave me a sense of control. Every time I slipped under their radar, every time I stacked the inputs so the ICSS’s algorithms put me exactly where I want to go, I felt a little alive again.
But it’s not enough anymore.
It hasn’t been enough for a while.
I need to go off-trail. Get out of the ICSS systems entirely. Find some real danger.
Thus: hiking across Zairion Prime with nothing more than the stained navy coveralls on my back, a handful of supplies, and an ungodly amount of stubbornness.
I’m sure I look like a hot mess—ponytail of unruly auburn curls, pale face streaked with sweat and dirt, broad thighs doing their very best to wear through the fabric between my legs.
At least the air here is breathable. I hate masks and helmets and filters. They give me headaches. The atmosphere here is more than just adequate—it’s particularly high in oxygen. That’sgreat for me, though it also enables the unique traits of the primary sapient species, about which I have… mixed feelings.
This plan is so unhinged, nobody sane would evencontemplateit.
Which, of course, is why it became my obsession.
I was either going to spend every day trying to not think about it, or I was going todoit.
I’m a woman of action.
“Hurry up,” I hiss at the pack droid over my shoulder.
The dented metal sphere with chipped white paint hovers precariously. Even though it barely holds enough water and rations to last me a couple of days, it still strains under the mass.
It was a discount model with a habit of malfunctioningbeforesome sapient punched it in frustration and tossed it in a trash compactor. I pieced it back together. I havesomeof the skills I claim in my identities. Tech is my strong suit.
It’s kind of funny: the sapients of the ICSS have such advanced technology, with automated factories constantly learning how to make things better, faster, stronger, they’ve forgotten the basics.
Servos. Circuit boards. Soldering. If this, then that. I still know how to tinker. Even the anti-grav engine is pretty much just an electromagnet with a little chunk of dark matter at its core.
So, I’d been able to make the little robot function again. Though I could only partly fix?—
