- Randall Eaton

- William Blake

Lilianthi was playing a game, of course, a game all females all across the galaxy have known how to play since the dawn of creation. Laying scents and with none-too subtle body language, she was drawing him on, wanting to hear the testosterone coursing through him, the hot blood engorging muscles. A dangerous game: his blood would be so high as for his concern for her welfare to be minimal, unimportant. Durn would take her on the run, if he could, sweeping her legs out from under her as she hurtled through the narrow wooded tracks, on the scent of the bafalla, knowingly laying her own smells for the enraged suitor. He stopped at a track junction where she first feinted left then turned right, but Durn was no virginal cub. A full Simba warrior and royal bodyguard, he was expert in the ways of the tracker. He picked up her trail, his erection banging uselessly against his hind quarters, redundant for now but soon..... Durn snorted at the thought and urged his body on, on, four paws clawing in turn at the loose, loamy earth in an effort to produce more speed. I’m coming, princess.....

He saw a flash of her distinctive mottled fur against the dopplering background of the forest edge. She is clever, he thought, using her natural camouflage. No pampered princess this one, a true child of the forest. She carries the mark of the Impahl on her coat even though she is pure breed Simba. Kara’s curses on any that cast doubt to that fact! Durn halted at the intersection of a delicately scent-marked track and sniffed. She wanted him - he was sure of that. Her message was clear.

He took her several minutes later on one of the forest’s wide exit tracks leading to the bafalla grazing plains. As he expected - as she had designed? - he took her at speed as she crossed his path in a foolish defensive manoeuvre. He was much bigger and heavier than her and his inertia bowled them both over in a tangle of limbs and claws. She blooded him casually and deliberately as he they struggled and he pinned her to the forest floor, leaning over her arched muscled back and biting the back of her neck, as was their way. Her howls of pain and delight as he penetrated with his barbed penis echoed along the wooded tracks and through the dark hollows, sending winged things and crawling things scurrying from their hidey-holes. On the nearby plain, a herd of bafallas looked up as one from their grazing, sensing danger, but they were stupid and slow-witted creatures, with nanosecond attention spans, and soon returned their heads to the coarse veldt grass. Lilianthi disturbed them again, moments later, with a cacophonous orgasm.

Pleasure subsiding along with his unwieldy erection, Durn prowled around the reclining, grooming Lilianthi, proud of himself, swelling his chest with satisfaction at what he had done. She deferred to his male ego, but he was far, far below her on the social scale, and there would be no talk of this liaison when they were back in the company of others. Alpha females, especially heirs to the throne, rutted with whom they pleased. But that didn’t mean they had to gossip about it later.

The forest spoke in quiet tell-tale words of leaf-rustle and branch-breaking. Durn’s ears pricked, eyes flared. Lilianthi was preoccupied with cleaning her fur.

<Someone is coming, Respected One. Would you have me leave?>

<And what if they are Impahl assassins, my Durn? Who would protect me then?>

He examined the superficial wound on his foreleg. <I think, Respected One, that you are in as much need of a bodyguard as Kara is of worshippers.>

Durn remained alert as a delegation approached them through the forest. Several Simba flanked by outriders of the Igri breed, the workers and warriors. At their head the old Simba Goran, custodian of the forest shrines, chief legendteller, much trusted confidant of the king and queen, Lilianthi’s venerated parents. Lilianthi was pleased to see him, he was her favourite ‘uncle’, but today his grizzled features bore a weight of sorrow. She saw this at once. She knew him so well.

<You must come with us to Nagara, Respected One,> he said, and laid a heavy grey paw on her shoulder. <There has been a terrible accident.>

The ruined city of Nagara was older than any living Felinian. It had been built on Anskar by the descendants and followers of Kara when the worldships had crash landed here many centuries before, the remnants of a civilisation fleeing the destruction of the Felinian homeworld. Then, Simba architects and Igri labourers had worked with stone and rock to fashion a fantastic metropolis to rival the fabled cities of Felidae, a city fit for the children of Kara. But the Migration had come and the Impahl rediscovered their old ways and the nation split, Impahl heading north to the plains and the uncharted mountains, and the Simba and the Igri returning to the welcoming darkness of the primeval forest, their natural home. Nagara seemed to symbolise all that was bad about Felinians, cursed to forever repeat the mistakes of Felidae. And so it fell into disuse and disrepair, the forest closing over and reclaiming it from the land it had it despoiled. Lilianthi’s parents, Shilka and Leonka, had become fascinated with the old city as youngsters and made trips there to excavate and explore. Goran warned them many times of the dangers of the decaying structures. They paid no heed to his warnings. And now they were dead.

They had been found by an Igri patrol earlier in the day and pulled from the ruins. No tears wet Lilianthi’s fur as she stood over the crushed bodies. This was not a time for tears. As she looked down at their ruined faces she felt her body slump momentarily, as if her soul was about to plunge and join them in their journey to Kara’s realm, but Goran’s touch at her shoulder emboldened her. After all, she was a monarch now. Ruler of the Felinian nation. To be an orphan was secondary. Unimportant. For later, private contemplation.

She became aware of the gathering crowd around her. Her closest friends, her lover, her denmate Cassia, her bodyguards, members of her parents’ court - her court. All looking to her, waiting for her reaction, her instructions. She raised herself to her rear legs. This was how she liked to stand. Like the humankind in their metal city.

<Come,> she said, gathering her people around her, leading them back into the forest and their womb-like city within the darkness. There was a funeral to prepare, for a dead king and queen.

1

Commander Gideon De Souza watched the sun rise over the blue-green curve of Anskar from the jump seat of Sergeant Angel Smith’s lifter as it skipped the planet’s atmosphere like a well-thrown stone. The lifter’s canopy swiftly polarised to a burnished gold before the light could damage unprotected eyes. The fireball of Anskari Prime dimmed to an angry orange, and the blue of the planet’s sky deepened to the impenetrable indigo of an animal’s eyes.

"First visit to Anskar, Commander?" Smith was friendly and chatty, like a cab driver. Maybe all of twenty years old. Blonde, short, pretty, dark kohled eyes, dancing pictogram holotattoo of a kanjii symbol on her left cheek. She handled the lifter like she had been born in a cockpit.

"I’m not here on a visit, Sergeant. I’m taking over as colony commander."

"Oh sure, sure. They told me. I meant, have you been here before?"

Gideon found her manner irritating. He had just spent a physically exhausting week inside the parascientific hell they called Curve Drive and was preparing to begin the most prestigious appointment of his career. Smith’s verbosity and her apparent disregard for his - by any standards she could employ - lofty status and the badges of rank on the breast and epaulettes of his immaculate CASPAR dress uniform, were intensely distracting and adding to the pounding headache building in his temples. He wished she would shut up and fly the lifter. He nearly told her so. Instead :

"No. Perhaps now the Curve ships are operational we can all make transgalactic trips at the drop of a hat."

His sarcasm was lost on her. "Hey, I understand. This is my third tour of duty out in this sector. I’ve spent the best part of twenty years in deepsleep, just snoozing between star systems. Would you believe that I’m forty one? No treatments, either."

She turned and grinned at him from beneath a tigerstriped helmet that had FALLEN ANGEL stencilled across the brow in military type. A floppy blonde fringe fell across her dark eyes. Perfect skin, straight white teeth. She looked, as he had suspected, not a day over twenty.

"The years have been very kind to you," he said.

She snorted. "That’s very funny, commander. Hey, it’s a painless enough way to make a living. I’ve had some wicked dreams, I can tell you. Years and years of nothing but dreams."

Gideon was in no mood for erotic anecdotes or dream interpretation. He decided that if she was going to chatter, he might as well make use of her. He leaned over he shoulder and pointed down at the planet.

"Where exactly are we, Sergeant?"

"Well, at the moment we’re just about over Anskar’s equator. The land mass you can see is Nessus, a small sub-continent connected to the main continent of Tyria by a narrow land bridge. It’s a protected place, as you probably know. Designated a Galactic Area of Natural Habitat a few years ago, so it’s out of bounds to colonists. The Felinians go there, of course, but then the Felinians go anywhere they damn well please. Could be the last unspoilt wilderness in the galaxy, they say."

Gideon shifted position in the jumpseat. He wished he was dressed more practically - his gold braided epaulettes got in the way in the confines of the cockpit. The wide velcro webbing was digging into his shoulders and thighs as he strained to look over Smith’s shoulder at the planet below. The lifter did not appear to be moving. It was if they were stationary and Anskar was rolling by beneath them, just for their benefit. Gideon caught a glimpse of a fertile, tropical landmass, mountains and forests wreathed in white cloud, before it slipped by and they were over blue ocean again. Smith was momentarily occupied by her instruments, giving the port wing thruster a little squirt and sending them off on a new heading, into the northern hemisphere. Anskar’s sole small moon rose to meet them, far above.

"Nessus is a tropical continent," Smith continued, "We’re heading north now, to Tyria. That’s where you’ll find Citadel, and the elevator, and the Felinians. But then you probably know all this, don’t you?"

He glanced up and saw her reflection grinning at him in the polarised canopy, overlaid by the green lines of the Head-Up Display. She caught his gaze and made a quick feminine appraisal - square face, firm purposeful jaw, intense eyes (blue, she saw later), military crewcut greying slightly at the temples, stocky but fit and looking every one of his forty-five years, unlike herself. It was her first good look at him - she had been head down in her instruments repairing a short in the HUD when he had silently clambered aboard in the bay of the Curveship Outrider and a stroppy cargo boss had ordered her to take the new colony commander on a whirlwind tour of the space and skies above his new home before the ship docked at the elevator station. She had just worked a ten hour shift and was hoping to ride the next ten in an unused bunk aboard the Outrider as it completed its journey, but for the second time that day she had been out of luck. Earlier, the Outrider had requested the supply of new docking arms for its cargo bay over the transspace net, and Smith had been sent racing out to meet the request with the huge arms loaded in the belly of the lifter. She had bemoaned the mission to the wrangler boss at Citadel Field, why couldn’t they wait until the Curveship was closer, but hey, she was just a jock and jocks carried out orders. Far be it from her to know that a Curveship was unable to manoeuvre safely in the orbit of a world like Anskar, and it was unwise to have it circling the planet while new arms were delivered and fitted. So she grumpily took the arms and then found herself with an equally pain-in-the-ass mission straight back home again.

"Yes," he said, finding her mildly amusing now, " if there’s one thing CASPAR is good at, it’s providing briefing materials for new colony commanders. I feel as if I’ve lived there already."

"You should get one of these," she said, brushing back her hair at the nape of her neck, just below the helmet rim. The pink pucker of an implant socket sealed with a black mesh plug.

"Lifter flight manual," she said. "Jockeying’s not my original trade. Out here, it pays be to adaptable."

Gideon suppressed a shudder. He’d seen enough computers crash to never want one wired to his head. "I’ll stick to infocarts and hypertexts. But I’m sure they’re very useful."

"Coming up on Citadel," Smith reported, returning her attention to her instruments. Gideon leaned over her shoulder again and looked down into a green valley, colours softened by evening light. It was not the intense green of the tropical Nessus, rather the darker tones of a more temperate climate. Smith dropped the lifter through the thin cloud base and curved west out over the ocean. Pinprick lights beneath them, mining platforms in a scimitar-curved bay , and a jewel glimmered to the east, a city at night. From the jewel a single beam of light ascended, the thin shaft of the elevator, rising to the satellite station several thousand metres above them. Searchlights, coloured neon and sodium mingled and blurred as the lifter cockpit smeared with moisture. Gideon saw for an instant the sharp orange of something else, something unmistakable. Fire. Fire, in his city.

"Any idea why the local CASPAR weren’t too keen on letting me down, Sergeant? They seemed mightily aggrieved when I told them I was jumping ship early."

"Who knows? Maybe they had a military band and a red carpet ready. But it’s Saturday night. Citadel is a port city, in all manner of the word - air, sea and space. You know what happens in port cities on Saturday night?"

Gideon pushed himself back into his seat and breathed out nosily through his nostrils. He thought he had left all this behind on Watson’s Station.

"Fighting."

"You got it. And Citadel’s got one or two unusual problems of it’s own, too. You still want I should go down?"

"Take me to Citadel Field, Sergeant. I better see what all this fighting is about. After all, it is my responsibility now."

2

Omar Tannenbaum had seized control of the CASPAR public broadcast net and was projecting thirty metre images of himself on to the sides of Citadel’s largest towers and pyramids, rallying his troops to war. The image frustrated and enraged the internal security policemen of CASPAR’s Fifth Legion as their panzers and combat lifters attempted to clear the area around the religious district of Mercy Street with passive sludge cannons, maser rays and ultrasonics. But still Omar’s vast brown face beamed down at them from every corner, every mirrored window, every grey crete slab, ranting : "Fight back! Remove your skintags! Don’t be numbers, be free people! Fight the oppression of CASPAR!"

The riot had built slowly, earlier in the evening. There had been a CASPAR-licensed demonstration in Citadel South, colonists protesting against the imposition of implants in place of identification discs, a galaxy-wide move that had inflamed passions on many of the Rim worlds, where independence rumblings were often heard. But here on Anskar, rich, prosperous, peaceful Anskar, jewel in the CASPAR crown? Every world had its militants, of course, those who wished to be self-governing and not follow the orders of a lumbering beaureacracy millions of light years away. But Anskar was the last place where riots would have been expected. Enter Omar Tannenbaum, the most wanted man in the galaxy. Ruthless terrorist, if CASPARNet was to be believed, but freedom fighter and messiah to the grassroots forces of independence. Omar reckoned he could whip up support for independence on Earth itself, but had so far resisted that particular challenge. Instead, he had made it his solemn and sworn duty to cast CASPAR out from every world he set foot on, ostensibly as a ‘military advisor’ to the various independence movements who operated under the umbrella title of the FreeSpace League. His track record was impressive. Seven worlds had so far successfully seceded from the CASPAR union, two peacefully, five in bloody civil wars. Seven worlds out of seven hundred. Omar had a lot of work ahead. The fires and smoke staining the skies of Citadel that night were evidence of an Omar Tannenbaum still fully committed to his task.

Omar himself was, of course, long gone, either off-planet or gone to ground somewhere, leaving the footsoldiers to face the angry armoured hornets of the Fifth Legion, attempting to scour the streets of Citadel clean of rioters before their new commander arrived - the orders from the outgoing Commander, Joe Carter, were explicit on this matter. He did not want CASPAR’s golden boy landing in the middle of the worst riot Citadel had ever seen. The city was crawling with panzers and combat lifters. It resembled a warzone more than a port city.

Sergeant Angel Smith’s lifter vectored in over Citadel South, the fires of the riots smudging the landscape below. A huge holographic Jesus Christ the Colonist, clad in quilted jacket and engineer boots, flickered and appeared to battle with the flat image of Omar Tannenbaum, like two soapbox preachers squaring off. Smith’s broadband net came to life.

"All air and orbital traffic, please be aware we have a military emergency in Citadel Sector South. All weapons are free, CASPAR forces will fire without warning on any vehicle that approaches in a threat pattern. Please transmit IFF codes or leave Citadel airspace."

Smith tapped the codes into her Identification Friend?Foe? panel and an icon lit up on the HUD.

"Safe," she breathed. "Unless some freedom activist has cobbled himself together a garage surface-to-air missile. It’s not unheard of, you know. Stay warm."

Gideon was flung from side to side as rising thermals bucked the lifter, flying low in a northerly direction over Citadel. He watched as a battle unfolded below, CASPAR panzers herding rioters into dead-end streets like wolves chasing sheep, then the streets filling with fast-stiffening foam to seal in the perpetrators. Detonations rocked the buildings, from what source he could not tell. It could have been terrorist bombers ambushing a panzer, or one of the same vehicles blowing away a roadblock with its powerful turret-mounted chainguns. Only one thing was obvious - Anskar was not going to be the peaceful bucolic posting he had been promised for himself and his family. Someone, somewhere along the line, had kept him in the dark.

"No wonder they wanted to keep me in orbit," Gideon said, half to himself, half for the benefit of Smith, who was blissfully unaware of the political storm that was brewing in the back of her cockpit. "Thought they’d clean up their mess first and leave it for me to discover later. These aren’t brawling truckers and deep spacers. This is an organised insurrection. I’ve seen it before on so many other worlds."

"Got Citadel Field coming through," Smith said, turning. "Commander Carter is waiting there for you with an armed escort. He apologises for the situation, but said if you had followed procedure and stayed on board Outrider - "

The lifter was rocked by a sudden blast. Something had exploded close by and the starboard VTOL had been flamed out by an unexpected thermal uprush. Smith wrestled with the controls as Gideon watched a similar lifter, fuselage marked with the white CASPAR star sigil and one of its wings torn away, flip out of the sky and crash into an apartment block below, orange flame staining the night.

"Guess you were right about the SAM," Gideon said. "Can you get us to Citadel Field?"

Smith did not answer him for several seconds as she adjusted and compensated and appeased the angry displays on the HUD. "Yes, I have control. That was close. Too close. Citadel Field, ETA ten minutes."

Gideon pressed himself back into the jump seat. His back was cold with sweat. He realised that, quite briefly, he had been scared. Why? He had been shot at more times than he cared to remember. He guessed it was because this time he had been a helpless passenger in an unarmed craft. He could have been blown from the sky, and there would not have been a damn thing he could have done about it. The riot, which was fast assuming the characteristics of a small civil war, receded beneath them as they crossed Citadel Central, Citadel North and finally broke out over dark, rolling countryside, and Smith picked up the lines of red sodium markers that led them to the sanctuary of Citadel Field.

3

Commander Joe Carter, sixty-five years of age and looking every year of it that night, was dressed in the armoured garb of one of his Internal Security legionnaires - protective vest with neck and groin guards, chincupped helmet. He looked incongruous, like an old man on a tour of a military base who had been dressed up as joke. The helmet was ill-fitting and tilted back on his head. He was much shorter than his legionnaires and was dwarfed by a phalanx of them, all young and burly, as he waited on the hardpan of Citadel Field for Gideon’s lifter to touch down. It was dark and had started to rain. The harsh sodiums of the lifter field cast searching beams through the wet night, reaching out and guiding the aircraft safely on to illuminated crosses. The lifter lurched into sight from out of the darkness, listing to its starboard side on a single VTOL turbofan, and settled, none too gently, on to the green cross. The single remaining engine cycled down with a relieved sigh.

Smith popped the canopy of the lifter. Gideon stood up and pulled a small nylon flight bag from between his knees. Smith turned and saw for the first time the small silver sigil above the ribbon of campaign medals on Gideon’s left breast. Clan Octagon. Shit. She wished she had kept her mouth shut. She had no idea that this man was a member of one of CASPAR’s archaic but powerful industrial clans. She swallowed hard as she watched him clamber down the short ladder to the hardpan. He paused and looked into her cockpit. He knew what she was looking at. He smiled at the knowledge.

"Don’t believe everything you read," he said. "But thank you for a pleasant flight, in any case." He jumped the last two rungs of the ladder and dashed across the hardpan toward the glare of panzer headlights. Smith pressed her head to the rain-slick carbon fibre of the lifter’s instrument panel as field technicians secured her aircraft, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Angel, girl, you really must learn to keep your big mouth shut.

Gideon saw the diminutive figure break ranks from the legionnaires in front of the panzers and stride toward him, arm extended in a handshake.

"Welcome to Anskar, Commander De Souza," said Joe Carter, grasping Gideon’s hand and pumping it solidly. There was no irony in his voice.

"Thank you," replied Gideon, "but there was really no need to organise a pyrotechnic display on my behalf."

Carter smiled and nodded. "A sense of humour will be invaluable here, Gideon. Come on, we can talk in the panzer. You must have a million questions."

A million and a half, thought Gideon as the IS legionnaires ushered them both in to the dry warmth of the rear of one of the wheeled panzers.

Citadel was situated ten klicks south of its eponymous Field. The three CASPAR panzers formed a small armoured column on the snaking metalled road toward the city, following the line of an elevated maglev rail that was empty of monorail cars, that in turn followed the twists and turns of a coastline. Gideon peered out through the periscopes in the panzer’s hull, trying to take in as much detail as he could through the darkness and rain.

"Too dangerous to use the maglev right now," Carter commented. "Activists blew it up last year, thirty people died."

Gideon tore himself away from the periscope and settled back into the webbing seat. He took a deep breath.

"When I was appointed to the position of colony commander here, I was assured that it was a peaceful world, with no anti-CASPAR or indigenous alien population problems, and none foreseen. I chose this posting as a possible retirement home for myself and my family, a place where my sons might grow old with me. A place far from the wars and strife that so far have marked my career. You’ll understand, Commander Carter, that I’m a little - how can I put this politely? - fucking perturbed by what I’ve seen in the last hour."

Carter reached over and gripped Gideon’s elbow. "We’re a long way from Terra, Gideon. And a long way from CASPAR edicts and documents and protocols. This is the Rim. Things happen a little differently here, some things a little faster, some things a little slower. And some things never get back to CASPAR at all. Do you understand what I’m saying?"

Gideon glanced around the gloomily lit interior of the panzer. There were three IS legionnaires sat with them. All had their heads down with helmets shielding their eyes, as if embarrassed by the exchange between two high ranking officers, or as if a switch had been thrown to turn them off like toy soldiers. Gideon self-consciously fingered the sigil of Clan Octagon on his chest.

"Do you know who I am, Commander Carter?" he hissed. "Do you know what I am?"

"I know Clan Octagon. And please, call me Joe."

"I can’t believe you’re telling me this. I can’t run a colony that doesn’t report along strict CASPAR lines of communication, has civil wars that don’t even mention comment on CASPARNet. What the hell is going on here?"

Carter settled back into his seat and steepled his hands under his chin. "Like I said, we’re a long way from home. It’s going to take you a little while to get the hang of the way things are done around here."

Gideon leaned forward. "So try me."

4

The armoured column entered the suburbs of Citadel. Gideon watched the city grow around them while questioning Joe Carter about the security situation. The panzers halted and formed a defensive formation on several occasions, and deployed the IS legionnaires to clear barricades and dispel knots of rioters. Joe Carter briefed Gideon as best he could.

It was evident that the CASPAR administration on Anskar faced two major problems. The first was the arrival of Omar Tannenbaum, apparently prompted by the introduction of the CIProg, Citizen Identification Program, or skintagging as it had become known, and he had had little difficulty in whipping up support in the form of riots and demonstrations. Gideon snorted at the mention of the man’s name. In the past few years, their paths had crossed several time. His exact current whereabouts were unknown, however CASPAR had a heavy price on his head and Joe Carter’s gut feeling and intelligence sources suggested he was still on Anskar. Gideon made a mental note to make his early capture a high priority for his new administration. Secondly, the population of Felinians, the cat-like aliens who populated the veldts and forests of Tyrian’s southern tip, had recently lost their ruling monarchs who had kept the society in a stable state for many years. The Felinians were in a period of flux and had experienced conflict between their nomadic tribes, the Impahl, and their settled ones, the Simba and the Igri. The conflict had spilled into Citadel where there was a small population of Felinians of all breeds, known as Copycats, living and working within the human society. There had been incidents of racially-motivated attacks on Copycats and some particularly gruesome human murders that had been attributed to rogue Felinians. Tempers and tensions were running high. Carter had considered banning all Felinians from human settlements, but had so far resisted this under advice from his Protocol Provost, Sibson, the CASPAR-appointed arbitrator of human-alien affairs.

"Sibson was a good man," said Carter sadly. "I lost him in a lifter crash a month ago. He knew more about the Felinians than any one since Jonathon Straker, and they trusted him too. Your new Protocol Provost should have been on the Outrider with you. Did you meet him? His name’s Kane, I think."

Gideon remembered a small irritating man with incongruous spectacles and the studious demeanour of a professional civil servant who had introduced himself when they had boarded back at Mars Station. He had spent the rest of the voyage conspicuously avoiding him.

"I heard that Straker wrote a book about the Felinians," Gideon said. "I tried to get a copy back on Earth." The convoy slowed, nearing the densely built up area of Citadel Central. Burnished gold pyramids, reflecting the light of street fires, neon signs and the strobes of overflying lifters, rose sheer to either side. The situation was much calmer here - there were still many citizens on the street but they seemed docile in the face of a massive CASPAR Fifth Legion presence.

"I have a copy for you.," said Carter, peering out of a hull periscope. "You’ll find it invaluable. Read and learn. You’ll need all the information you can get. They’re a society in a state of rapid decay, absolutely fascinating for your xeno-types. Ever seen one?"

Gideon shook his head. "Only pictures."

"Then come here. Take a look."

Gideon peered from a periscope at a CASPAR roadblock that was obscuring a sidestreet. Two long, low shapes moved around the legs of several CASPAR legionnaires manning the barrier. Gideon could not tell what they were until one reared on to its hind legs, towering over the legionnaires by at least a metre. One of the men shone a weapon-mounted magbeam into its face and Gideon saw the features of a tiger on an alarmingly expressive face snarling at the intrusive light. The sound could be heard even inside the panzer. The Felinians backed away, dropping to all fours and sliding sinuously out of view down the blocked alley. The legionnaires’ magbeams followed them but they had vanished like ghosts into the darkness. Gideon swallowed hard.

"It was wearing a leather jacket," he said.

Carter smiled. "You’ll get used to it. That was an Igri, the worker tribe. They have a kind of opposing thumb that makes them capable tool-holders. Not ever so smart, but strong and dependable. They’re the most common Copycat too. Some of them get religion or into cults. I hear there’s a few who are big Elvis fans."

Gideon looked at Carter and blinked. "You’re kidding, right?"

Carter smiled and shook his head. "Uh huh. Welcome to Anskar, Commander De Souza. Jewel in the CASPAR crown. And a long, long way from home."

The armoured convoy moved on, through high angled perimeter fencing into a huge compound surrounding a massive mirrored pyramid, bigger than any Gideon had seen until now. The CASPAR star sigil danced subtly in the light across one of its angled flanks, a projected hologram. This was Citadel Central, CASPAR planetary headquarters and seat of power, and Gideon’s new home. As Carter guided him from the panzer and into the safety of the vast pyramid, he felt like a young boy on his first day at a strange new school, and nothing like a powerful colony commander about to assume control of a planet. However that was supposed to feel.

5

- Kara’s Prophecy as interpreted by Jonathon Straker in Chapter 7 - Oral Legends, ANSKAR - A STUDY OF THE PLANET, INDIGENOUS LIFE AND INHABITANTS

They met in a dark hollow that was rank with secretion and urine, matted into the flattened grass; a mating chamber, vacant. Goran’s nostrils rankled with the tang of Lilianthi, on heat, but he was restrained. He was, after all, very old, and this was his new queen. If she chose him as a mate - as if! - he would be honoured and perform his task to the best of his waning abilities. But as the chief legendteller and prime minister to the royal family he had seen the Queen raised from a cub and looked on her as he would have a daughter. He remembered well the night she was born and he had watched and muttered and committed it all to memory. Somewhere in a Felinian’s ancestral past, none of that would have mattered. But Goran liked to think they had advanced beyond that, at some point. Sometimes, he had to question that belief.

<Follow me, Respected One. They are laid in state, in preparation for the funeral.>

Lilianthi padded silently behind Goran through a darkened glade of trees. The light garment she wore rustled against leaves and branches; Goran was unclothed. She was a turmoil of emotions. Her parents’ death in the crumbling ruins of Nagara had coincided with her season cycle. As the alpha female, part of her was urging her to rut with every male in the immediate vicinity - old Goran included - while part of her was torn apart by the tragedy of her situation and the enormity of the responsibility that had landed on her shoulders. She was trying to bury the personal conflict deep and stay in control, attending to the tasks that Goran - visibly aroused, the horny old cat - was arranging for her. The tension between them was palpable, chemical.

They reached the tiny clearing where the bodies of two Felinians lay partly covered by leaf mold and deadfall. Leonka and Shilka, the king and queen. Lilianthi whimpered and licked at her father’s face, disturbing the arboreal covering. Goran muttered rituals, telling tales, remembering new ones.

<I will invite the humankind to the funeral.> Lilianthi said, nuzzling her mother’s cold, stiff flanks.

Goran stopped his mutterings stone dead. <Why? They have no place here. They must not see the rituals of our mourning. They would not understand.>

<They have a new leader, just as my people do. Those who live amongst them tell us so. It is time, Goran. It is time to unite the tribes of Anskar. In accordance with the prophecies.>

Goran cleared his throat. <I rather think, Respected One, that the prophecies refer to our own people. Simba, Igri, Impahl - not humankind.>

<We are all alien to Anskar, Goran. And prophecies can be interpreted, can they not? After all, what are prophecies for?>

Goran dropped to his haunches and pressed his greying muzzle into the deadfall. <Long have I been your parents’ trusted legendteller. Long may I be yours.>

<Of course, Goran. You are the wisest old cat that I know.>

<Then heed my advice, born of old wisdom, Respected One. Do not invite humankind into our veldts and into our cities.>

Lilianthi paced the chamber. <Every year the humankind city grows larger, their people greater in number, while we have difficulty even in maintaining ours. Anskar is becoming their planet. If we cannot live side by side with them, they will destroy us, of that I am sure. Already we see reprisals against us for lone Impahl attacks. Soon they will turn their envious eyes on our veldts, our forest, to Nessus -"

Goran’s eyes flared, yellow fire in the dark of the forest night. <If they were to violate Nessus, Respected One - >

<Violated they have. Their vehicles land there, drill the rock and soil. And what will we do, Goran? What will we do? War with them?>

The word held great resonance for Felinians. Goran let out a low grumble. Lilianthi dropped her muzzle until it almost touched his.

<War is what has brought us to this state of fine decay. War destroyed our homeworld. War drove us into the void of space, with only the worldships between us and the cold between the stars. War made us strangers on this world. War took Kara from us.> She dropped her head at the mention of their prophet’s name. <And war will see us exterminated by humankind. Have you seen their weapons, Goran? Fire, old cat, fire. Enough fire to burn us all and this fine city in the trees. Is that what you want, Goran?>

<No, Respected One. Of course not. But I counsel caution. Leonka and Shilka were wary of human contact. They despised the cult of the Copycat that defiles our name. Would you have us all live this way?>

Lilianthi looked down at the swathe of gold-edged red cloth that covered her, winding around her muscular shoulders and under her loins. Not exactly a leather jacket, but still..... Her affection for it had begun to spread among the tribes, particularly among young Simba females wishing to emulate her. <That is not what I want, Goran. But we must allow Felinians to live free. If that means some choose to live among the humankind, then so be it.> Besides, they have their uses. Spies and agents and informers and messengers. A useful network that even Goran is unaware of.

Goran slid up on to a mossy boulder, so that momentarily his head was higher than his queen’s. A vague slight, but a slight all the same.

<Respected One. It is my belief that humankind is entering its last days of peace with us. Three Copycats have been killed in the past seven days in revenge for Impahl raids. Should we aid their effort by inviting them in to our city, to plan their attack?>

<Goran, Goran. They have no need of visiting us to find out information. They have eyes in the sky that can see through forest canopies, day or night. No, our only chance is to embrace them and rely on their - what do they call it? - their humanity. And as for the Impahl - the prophecies say I must unite the tribes, Goran. I will call a summit. All the nomads, all the renegades, all conflicts forgotten, all scores settled. No more will they be a threat to the humankind once they are back in the bosom of Mother Feline.>

Goran drew a sharp breath, an expression of exasperation. The legendteller flicked his long tail. To a true Simba, Impahl were filth, nothing but opportunist scavengers. How could she even consider talking to the murderous barbarians who were bringing such shame to the Felinian race?

<And all, Impahl and humankind, will attend my parents’ funeral, Goran. And yes, they will see our rituals of death. And they will understand.>