Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Soulless: A History of Zombieism in Chiitai and Mihari Culture

Originally published in The Z Chronicles (Windrift Books, 2015), edited by Ellen Campbell and Samuel Peralta, and part of The Future Chronicles anthology series, created by Samuel Peralta.

Sandis was one of the first to stumble into the classroom. The last day of the spring term wasn’t known for high turnouts, not with the Festival of the Revealed Trinity the following day. Most skipped class and blamed clan or religious obligations for their absence.

Their teacher, a visiting professor from Sandis’ own homeworld, was a lot more tolerant of the honest ones who simply wanted a chance to lie in or over-indulge. The festival was simply another day, albeit one where the three stars of the Sirian system revealed themselves together in all their glory. But born on a planet of eternal twilight where the entire horizon was a net of stars, Sandis wasn’t easily impressed by three of them.

Sandis liked the chance to have a day off like any other student but today was Ask Anything Day, a tradition among the staff where they would talk about whatever their students wanted to know.

“Morning Sandis!” Rheia called. “A little eager, aren’t we?”

“Oh I’ve been waiting for this for months. After all, I get to ask you anything.”

“Within boundaries, you do.” She sounded intrigued, intentionally not reading Sandis’ mind to find out what he wanted to ask about. “It should be good way to spend a morning, then.”

Rather than teaching from the podium in an amphitheatre, Rheia had chosen one of the smaller rooms for the day. She descended to the floor and indicated the students, wandering singly or small groups, should join her. They pulled cushions and low chairs into a circle. Today they were not teacher and students, physician and trainees, today they were people, and most of those who had turned up had been trying to word their questions like you might a genie’s offer of three wishes.

Rheia was dressed in purple skin and goat ears, soirei tattoos flowing under the summer dress she’d chosen instead of her normal red physician’s uniform or teacher’s garb. Appearances could be deceptive and most of the students knew that was just an outfit she wore, that Rheia of the Ashterai was born on another planet a long time ago, one that had just been contacted by the Union.

Some people asked about life and the cessation of it (“Not my area but you’ll find out when you die, you’ve done it before, after all.”). Others wondered about space-time (“It’s a river, you can see the whole thing but if you get too close it pulls you under.”) and one girl even asked what the answers to next term’s examination questions would be.

Rheia had laughed at that one: “I’m not telling you that! It’ll get me fired. You’ll have to wait, be patient and revise. Now then. Sandis, you mentioned having a question for me. Care to surprise me?”

“Is there any scientific basis to the human belief in zombies?” Sandis asked.

She stared. “Zombies? Really?”

“Yes. It’s a valid question, right?”

He’d said the world in English, zombie. Contact with the planet, known locally as Terra or Earth, had only happened a year previously, and while Rheia understood the interest in a new world, Sandis was sure it baffled her that someone would be so curious about a creature that didn’t actually exist.

“Have you been reading Wikipedia again?” she asked, unable to hide her surprise. “Because if I find you using that or any other source not supported by the medical faculty’s peer review panel, I will fail you.”

“It was in a book I read, a horror novel I found in the archives.” The others looked at him. “What? I like medical fiction. It was a book about autopsying a zombie with long and complicated medical notes at the back. Oh, and pictures, anatomical drawings. I thought it was a real record for the first hour or so.”

“What’s a zombie?” Malani asked.

“It’s an Earth legend,” Rheia said. “Originally, zombies were supposed to be the dead who had returned to life, animated by people who said they had magical powers, abilities to control the dead like mindless slaves. Then popular culture embraced the idea, but re-cast zombies as caused by a plague. You die, you turn into a zombie. They bite you, you die, you turn. The only way to kill a zombie is to sever the spinal column or destroy the brain.”

“So it’s caused by an infection? A virus?” Sandis asked

“Sometimes, but not always.” Rheia was speaking carefully, as if she couldn’t believe she was entertaining a discussion on zombies in the same way she might the Arcadian plague. “Traditional zombies were slow, but popular culture began talking about slow and fast zombies. Faster zombies usually means they haven’t been dead long.”

“So a fast one was bitten more recently?”

“Generally yes. Some sources suggest that the reason most zombies are slow is that their brains are functioning at the lowest power setting: no emotion, no memory or conscious thought, just the core brain. All they have to motivate them is the need to feed on living flesh and, by extension, to infect other people with their condition.”

Sandis saw that Rheia continued to treat this as if it was a disease, a scientific discussion, and not a random trope from an alien civilisation. The young men, woman and others sitting around her were all destined to be doctors, nurses and members of the School of Medicine and so she was hell bent on treating even the most outlandish conversation in a clinical manner.

“Are they real?” another young man, Gaavi, asked.

“Real…” Rheia murmured.

Sandis clarified, not just for his own benefit but for his classmates as well: “Do they actually exist?”

Belief was personal and many humans—he knew from his reading—believed zombies not only could exist but that their appearance would herald an apocalypse. Some humans even stocked up on supplies: food, water, and basic survival tools in anticipation of the end of things, and bought weapons that would offer protection from a zombie horde.

“There are visual narratives, movies and television shows produced for entertainment purposes focusing around their existence, or around a world overrun by zombies. Of the various apocalyptic scenarios for Earth, it’s one of the less far-fetched, especially if you add in human scientists tinkering with viruses they didn’t quite understand.”

“That’s insane,” Tahi muttered.

“That’s sensible,” Sandis retorted. “Everyone should have an emergency kit.”

“There’s a difference between flooding or winter storms and a plague of mindless aliens who want to eat you. Cannibalism? Mindless monsters? Really, Sandis?”

“Before you start judging, Tahi, remember other races’ histories.” Rheia said. “The Mihari, for example. Half their society is held in place by a subjugated underclass—”

“Yes but the Helot talk, they have minds and feelings, they’re just subjugated by the aristocracy,” Tahi interjected. “There’s a difference between soulless and mindless. Plus the Helot, they’re not cannibals.”

“I didn’t mean the Helot, the lowest caste. I was referring to the Sankai, specifically the Rulani, the Mihari’s engineered clone army. In fact, a bit of history for you, who’s heard of the Chiitai Conglomeration?” Rheia asked. “Come on, some of you must have. Malani, you’re from the outer rim of Union space, you must have heard tales of the Great Hiveworld? They were the ones who first realised how to control another being so completely that they are, effectively, zombies.”

“Deep space trader talk. Legend, nothing more than that. Hives of sugar and coloured glass…mothers and daughters left while the clans warred. Black creatures that descended like locusts.”

“What about the Sankai?” Rheia asked. Not giving them the answers, but instead prompting them to start asking the right questions, as anyone wanting to go into the medical sphere should.

“Clones?” Tahi asked. “I saw one once, one of the free-range ones before the Mihari took over their maturation-farms.”

“They didn’t start that way,” she replied. “And sometimes, once a generation or so, the process doesn’t work.”

The chimes signifying the start of lunch rang, melodic and calming. Rheia rose and the students waited a moment before following. For most, the discussion had just been a fantastical one, a thought experiment. Sandis headed to the library and went looking for answers in the archives.

Sandis sat at one of the booths by the reading windows, with a view of the gardens and enough of a breeze to rival even the carefully temperature-controlled stacks. He had books and a terminal linked to the medical, historical and general archives, as well as records dating back to An’she and Elys, one of the first to swim deep into the star-filled sea.

Even amongst the Union, whose territory is the smallest but most stable of the carved up Milky Way galaxy, knowledge regarding the Chiitai Conglomeration was scarce.

The Chiitai kept to their own worlds for a reason; initially it was because of their culture and the order of their hives. At one time they had apparently wandered the universe but at some point decided to keep to their own worlds. However, it was known that, before the Union’s formation, they became embroiled in a territorial dispute recorded as ‘the War of Bloodied Fields’. Though that conflict was now, by all accounts, concluded, the Chiitai retained their isolationist stance—to rebuild their worlds, too focused on that to pay attention to anything other than their own affairs.

The records didn’t go into specifics about the cause or the ending of the war. Sandis checked scholars’ accounts, rumours jotted down by passing ships, annotated musical maps of the explored universe—but for naught.

Sandis laid out a sketch done based on An’she and Elys’ recollections, of a glorious city of spun sugar and domes of glass hives which caught and channeled the sunlight, of rooftop gardens and arching foundation vines. The city had survived for a single reason, the same one which gave the war its name: because it was fought in the endless fields of the Chiitai homeworld, in trenches and pits so that the highest caste of queens needn’t see the violence or hear the cries of the dying, the fallen gutted in their names.

Were they still out there? Why did Rheia mention them in class? What did their feud have to do with zombies anyway?

The rains battered the triage tent where Muzzac, warrior of the Gefaia Hive, lay resting after his brush with death on the front lines. His mandible had been crushed and it still pained him, even bound and splinted up. The scurrying nurses and medics had more seriously wounded to worry about, and so he bore his pain stoically.

The injury meant his days on the battlefield were over and he was almost glad. While lying injured on the field, surrounded by the dead and dying, he had had an epiphany: If this war did not end, then the Conglomeration and every Chiitai within would be consumed. Their species would fight until no one was left. Such an ignominious end for such an old and mighty civilisation.

The females, the Jiha Queens would live on. War-making was for the warrior classes, the drones. He imagined hives of spun sugar and sweetglass on other worlds after all the lower rungs had been trampled in the mud. For a moment he almost saw a new empire, not a conglomeration but something different, a place where the Queens ruled with impunity, controlling a select number of worlds and billions, be they Chiitai, mammal or others entirely.

Their burden would be the fallout from this endless, bitter war.

“Ah, you live!” Velok, second-in-command, slipped under the tent flap, exo-armour scraping together as he ducked in, the scent of ash, blood and smoke washing in behind him as he searched for his commander and old friend.

“Velok! Come, and let us talk strategy.” Muzzac beckoned him over, his chittering notes and pheromones garbled slightly by the weather and by the lingering scents of pain and death.

“We must finish this.” Muzzac said, his remaining mandibles translating a mournful song, not only his thoughts but the depth behind them. “Or this entire quadrant of space, our territory and those of the others will all suffer for it.”

“You mean the Demons’ Empire and the mammals, that biped Queen’s coalition of worlds?”

“I do.” He propped himself up, comfort still eluding him. “This war, it has no end, not unless we finish it. We need to take control.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Velok asked, entertaining his commander in what he was sure must be the trauma of his injury.

“We alter a batch of drones and then we seize power.”

The movements, the noise Velok made betrayed his shock. “A coup d’etat against the Jiha Queens? Against the Conglomeration itself?”

“A necessary evil. If we take their minds, control them, we control the hives and the Conglomeration.”

“For what?”

“To end this war.”

“And afterwards?”

“We bury this and move on. Drones have short lifespans; we send them in, we take control, they die off and we begin writing a new chapter in our history. Once we put this stupid war behind us, we can move and grow.” Muzzac was suddenly reflective. “Do you even remember how it started, old friend? Who exactly stepped over the lines and into another’s land?”

“Only the stories, and those feel more like myths than fact. Did nearly dying do this to you?”

“It clarified things somewhat, yes. We only get one life, after all.”

“Almost dying will do that,” he agreed. “The Queens…if they knew, they would unite against us.”

“We do this amongst ourselves, the warrior caste. The Jiha are figureheads. They control the hives but the power has always lain with us, the defenders of the hives. The drones are the foot soldiers and we are the strategists, the brute force.”

It was another year, five seasons and much healing, before Muzzac could put his plan into action, but war can be a slow thing, and warriors the most patient souls ever born.

The time away from the front line allowed Muzzac to prepare: drones came with the winter moons, destined to die before the same moons rose again the following year. They would steal a generation and win the war.

Altering the drones was simple. A change in the genome, modifying the chemistry of the jelly used to mature them. Rather than a Jiha Queen’s genome, Muzzac instead replaced it with a substitute based on his own. Drones would be born loyal to him, not to the Hive Queen.

And so the end of the War of the Bloodied Fields began.

The Jiha’s attention was normally focused on birthing and grooming their heirs, that one embryonic Chiitai in a billion who was literally born to lead. Rather than a golden daughter with wings the colour of the sky and the shifting green seas, a Jiha Queen was born to Muzzac’s own Gefaia hive with a body black as the warrior’s own. She was his daughter and the Jiha realised too late that control had fallen from their grasp.

The civil war was easier in some ways, less bloody and quicker. It was over in days rather than generations, with a minimum of causalities. The drones died quickly but the Black Queen remained and a new hive, the Hedrim, was created to ensure that the War of Bloodied Fields would never be repeated. The Chiitai would learn to police themselves with a hive that was part mediator, part peacekeeper, with a queen who did not sit with the Jiha but instead watched from the sidelines.

Muzzac met his end as he had lived, and died a hero, his name remembered and his remains preserved.

But he had only ended one war. Another much more deadly one would take its place…and it was for something none of them, not the warriors, the drones or the Jiha had ever suspected: the Demons had arrived.

Sandis went to the refectory, his stomach growling, to get a late lunch and then returned to the blissful silence of the near-deserted library. The Academy had cancelled afternoon classes for the festival. With another load of source material, more terminal-based than books this time, Sandis turned his attention closer to home.

The Mihari were a part of his history, their expansion having been the driving force behind the Union’s formation. The Mihari—referred to by some races simply as the Demons—were the sea monsters who would devour unwary wanderers of deep space, races who were beginning to explore the galaxies. The Union had formed to combat the Mihari Empire, based on the idea that together the races were stronger than they ever could be alone. That one idea had allowed for eight millennia of peace within their borders.

He knew from his childhood history lessons that the Mihari Empire held the least stable but largest span of stars. They ruled with an iron fist, headed by an Emperor who demanded the very souls of his subjects to feed a creature that gave him near-immortality, a creature they named their Shadow God. The wraith, more a parasite than a deity, gave the leaders of the ruling dynasty long life and then jumped from father to son at the moment of death. Each generation was forced to offer their most precious commodity—their souls and the souls of their children—to ensure the continuity of the Empire.

Like the Chiitai, they had also gone through a period of expansion, but the Mihari continued, descending on weaker worlds not protected under the Union banner. That was how Earth, a world Sandis found oddly curious, came to be Contacted years ahead of schedule, because the Mihari’s watchdogs, the Rulani, had been snooping around the Sol system for decades, trying to decide if the planet was worth their interest.

Mihari Prime orbited an old sun, one in the last vestiges of its life cycle and it was a given that, if the Mihari Empire was to continue, it would need to search for another homeworld. They seeded planets in a particularly brutal and irreversible way, wiping out all other life with nuclear weapons, and returning eons later to reclaim the planet. Others they mined for resources and a few they just subjugated because they found the natives useful.

That was how they had stumbled across the Chiitai Conglomeration and stolen the race’s greatest secret.

On Mihari Prime, a dust storm had blanketed the city for five long days, the air so thick you couldn’t see more than a footstep ahead. The Helot would die in droves, then more of them would have to go out and dump the bodies in the magma river that encircled the capital like a moat of fire.

Death came, even here: the Slow Drowning. The dust mixing with the air and moisture in their lungs and killing them slowly. Sticky mud that would drown them even as they breathed, lungs gasping for air. Anyone forced to roam the streets was a walking victim to the sickness. Sometimes it took weeks to die, sometimes months or even years, but all Helot succumbed eventually. Such was their lot.

The Emperor and the aristocracy had no such problems. Current incumbent to the Shadow God and aging Emperor of the Mihari, Arokae’s only concerns were focused on the survival of his Empire and for the sons who would come after him; the hosts for their god.

Their sun was burning up and that meant they had, perhaps, a half millennia left before Mihari Prime became uninhabitable. The star would expand and burn their world to a crisp, but even before that happened, they would all be dead. The heat was already rising, too hot for even the Mihari, the dust storms becoming more violent, more frequent as the planet convulsed around them.

Darak was the Emperor’s emissary and one of many warriors given leave and ships to search the stars for a new home. His task was grave and of the utmost importance, but it also proved that all was not well on Mihari Prime, despite the facade.

He stood watching from the shadows of the Emperor’s court and it hit him: the Shadow God living inside their ancient emperor didn’t want to die, and Darak could understand that desire. He believed the Shadow God would survive the supernova, but over the aeons since it had found its way to Mihari Prime, it had grown used to corporeal hosts and physical forms, perhaps even comfortable with them. So this problem of the dying sun and what it was doing to its hosts was what Darak had been tasked to solve.

Face covered to protect from the Slow Drowning, Darak left the Emperor’s audience chamber with his orders—to go as far out as it was possible, to seek out promising systems for a new homeworld. There were old star charts from the period of expansion long ago, worlds ready and waiting if they could only find them. Every Mihari, be they Helot or aristocrat, knew there were a myriad of places in the universe that could sustain life, if you knew where to look.

But he had not expected to find the insects’ world or that they would fight back.

After three years journeying, of diving into unknown space, they found the planet almost by accident. It had too much water, too much green for his liking, this jewel in the starry void of heaven that they stumbled on outside the rim of known space. There were minerals though, mountains of them that could be refined into fuel even if the world was too harsh for their liking. To the Mihari, this world was the equivalent of an icy tundra and certainly not suitable for habitation.

They landed their craft outside the main city, making no attempt to hide. The city was made of sugar spun into buildings, delicate in appearance, but strong. Light filtered through coloured glass and tall structures, and creatures flittered from high gardens, the air almost vibrating with the noise.

Darak found the whole thing repugnant, the light, the smell, the alien vista. Black creatures with exo-skeletons like armour began to land, standing between the Mihari and their precious city. The Mihari were outnumbered, but the creatures looked fragile enough. As their wings beat and their legs moved, sound transmitted and the translation matrix turned sound into words they could understand.

“Who are you?”

“We are the Mihari, servants of Emperor Arokae. We claim this world in the name of the Shadow God and our Empire!”

“This is our land,” the aliens responded. “We have fought hard for our peace, and we will not yield to invaders!”

Darak didn’t know of the Chiitai’s history, of how the War of Bloodied Fields had begun and ended. Had he, his strategy might have been different. Instead, blinded by lust for the resources, he raced into battle and the aliens decimated the Mihari until the remainder were forced back to their remaining ships.

But not before Darak discovered their secret.

While his troops were being slaughtered, he watched with a veteran’s eyes and quick mind. The black soldiers were the main fighting force, joined sometimes by a caste of what seemed to be strategists or more experienced commanders.

But if their commanding officer was killed, these soldier-drones were useless, almost like the Helot of his own world, the ones the Emperor summoned to his palace so the Shadow God might devour their essence. The pesky alien insects were left blank-eyed and incapable of movement until another commander took the place of the one who had fallen.

Darak saw a resource more valuable than even the planet, so he led a mission into the black hive, the one set apart from the city, and stole the matriarch, their Jiha Queen, and a half dozen incapacitated drones. Then they ran across the alien fields and the familiar stars, heading home with a prize that Darak was sure would ensure the Empire’s continuing strength for millennia.

It took them nearly five generations to crack the genetic code linking the Black Queen with her warrior drones. But once they found the key, it was the moment the Mihari Empire truly became a force to be reckoned with. They took a single iceberg of a planet and turned its inhabitants into a perpetually-renewable army.

The Sankai were one of their earliest discoveries, a race of identical mammals who reproduced via cloning and communicated purely on a non-verbal level. Their reliance on cloning made them the perfect choice for enslavement, especially as they had already achieved a high level of technology which saw them beginning to travel to the stars.

Their world was an iceberg; their star of origin a speck on the horizon, but on this one occasion, the Mihari had endured their hatred of the cold in pursuit of a larger goal. Their combined forces swamped the tiny unprotected planet and took control of the cloning centres. Within a year the first Rulani—the name the few remaining Sankai-in-exile, the ones who ran and hid, gave to their successors—began to make noise across Mihari and Union space.

Sandis turned to his terminal where a black and white movie was playing, dialogue and sound piped through his wireless connection. The neural rig he used to understand alien languages was proving useful when it came to digesting Terran media. The humans might not have heard of the Mihari or the Chiitai but they knew the Rulani.

Known on Terra as Greys—and their place cemented by a much-publicised crash in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico—these creatures were in truth the Rulani, the Mihari-enslaved foot soldiers. Through sheer numbers, these mindless clones and soulless abominations turned the Mihari Empire from a civilisation on the edge of collapse into the most feared force in the Universe.

Rumours preceded them but it was sometimes a generation between the first reports of abductions and the ships descending with Rulani pawns and Mihari overseers that overran their chosen targets. In the last half century alone, the Rulani had been responsible for subjugating fifty worlds.

The maturation chambers on an iceberg-asteroid on the edge of the Zeta Reticuli system were a sight, rows stretching as far as the eye could see and still further, a sea of artificial wombs that would birth generation after generation of clones.

Once they had been the Sankai, scholars and scientists, advocates and artists, but since the forced occupation of the system all the chambers now decanted were soldiers. The Rulani were born loyal, decanted with a single purpose: to conquer and die for the Mihari Empire.

On the edge of the forest of chambers, two overseers stood and surveyed the latest batch, their eyes settling on a single individual.

“It’s defective.”

Clone 873e, decanted a month previously, stood silently as one of the overseers looked it over. Functionally identical to its batch mates, the only difference was a marker tattoo, a barcode-like sequence that identified it. It was naked, unblinking, and the Mihari treated it as if it were a stupid animal, even as they tried to place the nature of its defect. Behind those black eyes, however, a mind was listening, comprehending their words even as they decided its fate.

Behind the grey skin and eyes deeper and darker than a black hole was a mind stripped out by genetic manipulation. 873e was different—but no one could quite explain what it was that made it stand out amongst its hundred identical siblings, born on the same day from the same genetic sample.

To recognise a soul, you must first possess one yourself. It had been generations since the Sankai’s own enslavement, and the Mihari guards had long ago surrendered their own to their Emperor. No one remembered what a soul was anymore.

“It doesn’t look defective,” the other overseer said. “Physically it looks just fine. It’s obedient, it follows commands. Aside from that blip after decantation, it seems just like the rest of the batch.”

“And the mental interface?”

“It seems to have settled down. The neural readings are certainly more active than its brethren, but they’re within normal parameters for a clone.”

The superior nodded. “Keep an eye on it then. As long as it remains docile and obedient there’s no problem. Where is it assigned?”

“The next world on the list.”

“What was the local name? Saruvoi?”

“Yes, sir. Apparently the radiation killed off the mammals but it also pushed the reptiles to the top of the food chain; they have a basic level society.”

“Well they won’t for much longer. This planet is top of our list for resettlement, it’s the most viable candidate.”

“Sir? Is he…does that mean the Emperor is going there?”

“That information is above our grade. Get that clone to where it’s supposed to be and let’s move on. We’ve got a new batch due for decantation in two hours.”

873e let itself be guided, or herded more like, to the waiting pods. It and thousands like it were about to be dropped on a hostile world as shock troops, trained to subjugate the native population and assert control within a few days.

873e was disturbed by this knowledge, although it wasn’t aware of the name for the emotion it was experiencing. The blip the overseers had mentioned hadn’t really been a blip, but a suppressed panic attack that had almost broken its sanity. 873e was defective, but not in the way they assumed. 873e was self-aware.

It had woken to self-awareness moments after decanting. The neural link between it and its siblings was silent; they were blank slates and it was not. It had been like standing in a cavern and shouting, only the sound of its mental voice echoing back. If any of the others heard, they didn’t have the capacity to answer. It was alone in a sea of identical faces and blank minds.

Stasis forced 873e to contemplate, its mind never quite switched off as the others were. Through the link, 873e had access to a million other minds and senses. It felt the cold of its home-world, saw a nebula spinning in deep space, watched a family cowering as they were taken so the Mihari might know their potential enemies better, understand the weaknesses to be exploited when they landed on that world’s doorstep and decided to move in.

It understood it was alone but as long as it kept silent, 873e would live. There was no one else like it, not amongst the Rulani or the Mihari. The latter might be sentient but they were still under the thumb of a higher power; 873e had free will and the knowledge that it could disobey at any time, even if that moment would be its last.

So 873e kept silent.

Saruvoi was a hot world, dusty and parched from residual nuclear radiation dropped so long ago than no one remembered why or who had been responsible. There was water, and from all other standpoints this planet was similar to Mihari Prime—but without the peril of a dying star.

It would make a suitable home, once the natives learnt their place. That was where 873e and its brethren came in.

When the invasion began, the Rulani moved in formation, quickly, killing what lay before them. 873e kept back, knowing what death was.

“Search the dwellings!” the Mihari overseers ordered. “Find the stragglers, kill anyone who resists.”

The city was ordered, built in the caldera of a dead volcano and offering protection from dust storms. The Rulani fanned out, moving like ants down streets, and 873e found itself forcing its way into a house, the door hastily barricaded.

As it entered, words came to him, the tone making the inhabitant’s threat obvious: “Come one step closer and I will kill you.”

873e stopped.

The native was protecting a female, her legs obviously defective as she used a staff to walk. They were trying to escape the house through a tunnel bored into the bedrock, likely an escape route out of the city. The male was a boy, anger and terror in his eyes, his scales the calm blue of childhood.

These two weren’t like the rest of their race. The natives of Saruvoi might be sentient but what 873e saw in his eyes was deeper, memory that went beyond existence. Worse, they saw the same in it, understanding that behind the blank expression there was a conscious mind screaming for release.

873e stepped back and lowered its weapon. Then it focused and projected a thought, hoping the native would hear.

“Go.”

The boy cocked his head, then realised this wasn’t a time for questions, rather it was a chance to run, and motioned his companion further into the bolthole. “Alia, quickly.”

There was no time for questions. 873e watched them go as the male sealed the entrance behind them and it returned outside. Its superiors knew there had been people in the house and it realised retribution would come, swift and unforgiving. Had it been worth it?

“There it is! You two, follow the two who escaped! Find that hobbled girl, she’s the what passes for royalty here, and we’ll need her if the rest of the populace are to be tamed!”

The overseers sounded angry and advanced on 873e, their spittle landing on its skin as the Mihari vented their rage with kicks and blows. 873e was grabbed; it dropped its weapon and made no attempt to fight back. There was no point. They forced it to its knees, then a weapon was pressed to its temple and fired. Its body slumped into the dust but, in the microsecond before its death, 873e realised that its batch number wasn’t just a designation, it was more than that.

It was a name.

The hologram of the Rulani, one of the engineered Mihari zombies, rotated on an invisible axis, spinning slowly a few inches above the library floor. Sandis sat looking at the creature, transfixed as he mulled over an afternoon’s worth of research.

They were drones, shock troops, and yet once they’d been a vibrant society with their own customs and technology. Most people thought of the Rulani, not of the Sankai, their precursors, the ancient culture the Mihari had almost completely wiped out. Did they even exist anymore? Were they hiding on some distant moon, some forgotten asteroid waiting for the Empire to burn itself out?

Rheia would know; there wasn’t much she didn’t. He wondered if anyone had asked her that. Disabling the emitter, Sandis collected his things and decided, as it wasn’t too late, to see if she was still in her office. He had a few more questions to ask that only she, he suspected, could answer. It was, after all, still Ask Anything Day, even if classes were done.