Swarmworld Arcturus 2: Gilfaethwy

By Brandon Perdue

Maris remembered the night after she’d found the nameless faun. The petals were slowly closing as Antillia drew toward nastic night. Each of the bloom’s five petals were a long ovate shape, narrow where they met at the central pinion, broadening several kilometers up-petal, then tapering to a point over several more kilometers. They were curved, and their concave surfaces supported a contained, Earth-like environment, complete with soil, plants, and even occasional clouds. When the bloom closed, and the sky was lit only by the artificial lights of structures on the opposite petals, the whole of Antillia was a vast, scalloped chamber.

Gilfaethwy and Hati, the wolf-type mechafauna, were just moving past the settlement’s weather station to arrive at the moot hall, the largest of the Ophan’s prefabricated structures. Like most of the settlement’s main structures, it was assembled from parts of the ship that had carried the human colonists to the Arcturus star system. These component parts had been designed to be disassembled and reassembled in a dozen configurations, depending on the terrain they had found to work with. The result wasn’t much to look at, blocky and stout, but it was very space-efficient. To Maris, though, it was a huge step up from the environment she’d been born into: limited to the rooms and corridors of their rootship, attached to the Corax, in-transit between Earth and Arcturus.

Gilfaethwy started unloading first. He lowered to the ground, stretching his legs like a dog in repose, each shift of his room-sized paws sending a small tremor through the ground. The seam that gave Gilfaethwy’s unmoving face the impression of a mouth split, and the upper half of the head rose and bent back in an uncanny yawn. Where the throat of a biological creature would begin sat the control sphere, opaque and black, as if Gilfaethwy had tried to swallow a bowling ball. The control sphere slid apart, revealing Lynd among a cluster of displays and interfaces. He uncoupled his harness and climbed out. Once Lynd was clear of his mouth, Gilfaethwy closed his head again and shook at the shoulders.

Like Maris, other colonists had come out to help unload, and they unhooked the containers from Gilfaethwy’s flanks while the faun remained impatiently low to the ground for them. By now, the process was familiar, automatic. Once people had started to line up to take boxes from one of the containers, Maris looked for Lynd and saw him across the central square.

Lynd was less than a year older than Maris. He was fairer than her, his dark hair was a mess of tangles. His jacket matched Maris’s: faded orange with the patch of wheels-within-wheels on both shoulders. Crew jackets for the rootship; both had been inherited from their parents.

“You should make yourself scarce or someone will ask you to carry a box of soybeans,” Lynd warned.

Maris agreed to carry a box of soybeans—and one of barley, too—so that she had time to work up the courage to tell Lynd what she had found. Maris wasn’t afraid of Lynd’s reaction—he was Lynd, after all—but speaking about the lost faun in the cavern almost felt like tempting fate. Like she might be calling it to her, inviting it in like an evil spirit.

“Gilfaethwy seems weirdly relaxed. Are you two friends now?” Maris asked, gesturing toward Gilfaethwy. The lupine faun, now fully detached from the cargo containers, slinked tremorously out of Ophan’s heart to a nearby open field, kept vacant for fauns and occasional large cargo craft from the tower-city of Corax.

“I don’t know how to tell if Gil likes me,” Lynd said. “I don’t know if Gil can like me.”

“Don’t they tell you anything that isn’t available on the public network? I was really hoping you would have secrets to spill.”

Lynd shook his head. “Not really. Some First Wavers have been handling their fauns for years and still don’t know much about them. It will take me a big longer than a couple weeks to understand Gil, I think.”

“There’s not a secret handler induction ceremony where everyone is naked and talks in funny voices, then watch a bunch of how-to videos?”

Lynd snorted. “The videos have to come first. The naked funny voices are the reward for sticking it out.”

“Maybe,” Maris offered with a shrug, “you need to survive your probationary period so they can make sure you aren’t going to open the vault.” In the distance, Gilfaethwy’s lupine silhouette folded to the ground. “Do the fauns tell you anything?” Maris asked, voice flat as Gil was.

Lynd tried to perfectly align one box on top of another while he thought. “They don’t exactly communicate like that,” Lynd answered at length. “The more time I’ve spent with Gil, the more I think I can tell what he’s thinking or feeling, if either of those words even apply. I thought that maybe actually being in the cockpit might make him really open up. But Gil can’t talk in my head or send me a message through my console. I don’t think Gil really understands language, or even has the capacity to.”

Maris leaned against the building. She took a gulp from one of the drink pouches that had been handed out to everyone who helped unload. “Maybe Gilfaethwy doesn’t like having to wear all that extra stuff.”

“I don’t think there are any tamed mechafauna without a few retrofits,” Lynd said.

Maris shrugged. “I doubt Gilfaethwy would care how many retrofits other fauns have,” she said. “He seems kind of petulant.”

Lynd smirked. “And you’re the expert on Gil now, are you?”

“Well, I do know his handler.”

***

Maris regrets that she didn’t tell Lynd everything.

Fire and crackling smoke consume the settlement. Directly ahead, Gilfaethwy stands in a cloak of coolant mist, one paw resting exactly where she and Lynd had that conversation. All around her, displayed on the interior of the nameless faun’s control sphere, Maris can see structures burning. Hati is beneath her, sprawled inert at the feet of the nameless faun, with too much coilgun damage to be an accident.

Crack-crack-crack.

Maris winces as the burst of magnetically-accelerated slugs strike the armored shell of the faun. With each impact, her seat jabs her, gently but firmly, in her midsection, a few centimeters apart. The faun is letting her know where it has been hit.

Not the faun. My faun.

She’d found it asleep in a cave. She’d woken it up. It doesn’t belong to her, but they are connected.

And Gilfaethwy is trying to kill them.

Gilfaethwy exhales another cloud of coolant mist from his eyeholes: three on each side of his face, six in total. Lines spread around Gilfaethwy’s eyes, crisscrossing at sharp right angles, a deep-scratched checkerboard that Maris is certain had never been there before. The two hornlike coilguns mounted on Gil’s head glow hot. She has a few seconds before Gil can fire again.

“Lynd!” Maris shouts for what must be the fourth or fifth time. If Lynd is in control of Gilfaethwy, he does not react. Maris grasps at the hope that he simply cannot hear her. Since her faun is not modified, maybe what she says is not being transmitted. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe Lynd thinks that her faun is wild and needs to be subdued.

Maybe.

Gilfaethwy’s coilguns finish their cooldown. Before Maris hears the crack of the next shot, her faun is moving. She didn’t order it to do so, but she is relieved that it does. Her faun bounds right with surprising speed for such a large machine; she knows that Gilfaethwy and Hati, the other wolf-type quadruped, can reach impressive ground speeds, but her faun is a different, almost reptilian configuration and standing on two legs.

Maris feels a slight pressure against her right foot as the faun’s foot throws aside a parked velo. Gilfaethwy turns his head to track her faun’s movement, but is always a few meters behind. One slug rips through an antenna dish on the roof of the house next to Maris’s.

“Watch where you are dodging!” Maris admonishes the faun, for all the good that would do. The faun doesn’t even pause.

Maris reaches into the gauntlet-like control sleeves and gropes around inside for something—anything. Her fingers find the stippled texture of a cylinder, about the length of her palm; it fits nicely in her hand, like a bicycle’s grip. The sleeves tighten around her forearms, securing halfway to the elbow. The faun stops moving. The control sleeves around her arms and legs tremble anxiously.

“Weapons. We need weapons.” Maris looks around the cockpit sphere for a sign of anything that looks vaguely weapon-like. She’d seen images of the interior of faun control spheres before, but they always had clusters of monitors showing the status of various systems, control yokes with triggers for cannons, and heads-up displays overlaid on external camera feeds. All of that gear was added by humans, though. In the nameless faun’s sphere, there are only the control sleeves. It feels disconcertingly less like helming a giant machine than floating in a pressurized void.

Gilfaethwy bounds from the shelter of his cloak of mist, closing the distance between them all too quickly. Gilfaethwy’s claws glow orange-white with heat, setting blue-green grass ablaze with each step. Maris feels completely exposed in the nameless faun’s control sphere, like Gilfaethwy could easily pluck her from it and swallow her whole. The wolf-type swings his forepaw. Maris jerks backward, pressing against her seat and pulling on the grips within the control sleeves.

Her faun’s forelimbs raise, taking the brunt of Gilfaethwy’s attack. The control sleeves tickle the back of Maris’s forearms with haptic feedback.

“Which one of us did that?” she asks her faun. Her grip relaxes for a moment, and the faun’s arms drop, giving Gilfaethwy an opening. Molten-hot claws rake across the armor plates of the nameless faun’s torso. Maris feels the heat from those claws. Gilfaethwy nearly cut into the cockpit itself. Cut into her. She wants to run. Hide. Scatter. Dive into a burrow, where the predator cannot reach.

Maris realizes she isn’t breathing. She gasps suddenly, chokingly, trying to take in air and failing. She is a diver breaking the surface of the ocean only to discover more ocean. Something pounds, again and again, and she can’t tell if it’s inside of herself or outside — something that might claw out of her or cave in her cockpit sphere. Where is the threat what should I do I have to escape I’m going to die how do I even do this is Lynd trying to kill me —

While Maris is frozen, one of her faun’s hands covers the chest hatch that leads to the cockpit, obscuring most of Maris’s forward view. She doesn’t see much of what happens next, at least not clearly.

Her faun whips its tail around to smash across Gilfaethwy’s face with a crack that makes the coilguns’ bark sound like pleasant rain. Gilfaethwy stumbles several mechafauna-sized paces, nearly crashing into the moot hall. The wolf-type manages to stay on his feet, and snaps off several shots with his coilguns even before he is fully upright again. They miss, but they weren’t the primary attack; Gilfaethwy leaps again, trailing coolant, this time aiming the full weight of his chassis at Maris’s faun. And there’s not enough time for her faun to maneuver.

Dozens of tons of armor and armament hit Maris’s faun head on, slamming him to the ground. Her faun grasps Gilfaethwy’s head with both hands, the tips of those half-Maris claws digging in. The wolf-type’s face is directly in front of Maris’s cockpit, so close that it feels like she could reach out and touch his nose without leaving her seat. The left side of Gilfaethwy’s head faceplate is cracked from the blow of her faun’s tail, a scar across the middle eye socket. Coolant mist leaks from the crevice. That etched lattice Maris noticed earlier flickers angry red.

Gilfaethwy strains against the nameless faun’s grip, pouring gouts of mist from all six of his eyes in predatory rhythm. The lupine mechafauna is now all gnashing of teeth, despite having no actual teeth to gnash. There is a flash of red—of fury? of rage?—and Gilfaethwy’s small cutting laser burns to life.

A section of the control sphere interior cuts out, going back to bare black. A pinprick of red wells up through the hard shell, then starts to draw downward in a slow, flaring curve, an arc red on black, as Gilfaethwy starts to cut into the sphere.

***

The glittering arc of a reaction-thruster trail traced through the darkening sky, curling toward the tower-city above. White on blue.

“Corax,” Maris confirmed. At this time of day, Corax, the base of which was at the pinion where all five of Antillia’s petals met, spanned across the sky for much of the length of the petal. “Maybe not forever, but at least for a little while.”

They were nearly done with school. Maris sat on the white-and-gold velo as Lynd tinkered with its faulty generator. He had asked where Maris planned to seek a posting, once the final assessments ended, but the answer caught him by surprise. His head emerged from behind the velo’s maintenance panel. His eyes were largely concealed by his maintainer’s goggles.

“Don’t give me that look,” said Maris.

Lynd goggled at her further. “I just thought you’d want to be somewhere with, you know, wilderness,” he said, waving a spanner broadly at the forested upward curve of the wilder edge of the petal.

“I guess. Maybe.” Maris didn’t want to tell Lynd that the idea of staying here felt awful. Lynd had passed the required practicals to sign on to Ophan’s faun team, and though he didn’t have his assignment yet, Maris felt sure that he would end up attached to Hati, same as Bowen. Maris didn’t have the numbers for that. She had strong aptitudes, sure. But they looked for a very particular balance to work with the mechafauna.

“Are you homesick or something?” Lynd asked.

“Homesick,” Maris repeated. She drew her legs up onto the velo’s canopy and turned to sit cross-legged facing Lynd. “I don’t really think of Corax as home anymore. It’s not the same as it was, anyway. A lot of the habitation blocks have been converted to shops and eateries and entertainment venues.” Maris spoke with the authority that only a tourism brochure could impart.

“I don’t think I’d ever want to live cooped up like that again,” Lynd said.

“I don’t, either,” Maris said. “Not forever. But it would take, what, twenty minutes to ride a lift down to the pinion and go to any petal I want? That I can deal with.” She knew Lynd wouldn’t be convinced by that, but she couldn’t tell him what she was really thinking.

You’re lucky you have a future out here.

***

A burst of heat roils over Maris. In moments, Gilfaethwy’s laser will pierce her control sphere. Her faun still tries to force Gilfaethwy back, sharp fingers grasping at the wolf-type’s faceplate, but Gilfaethwy is determined. Maris stops hyperventilating and goes still. Do all animals have the instinct, when death is inevitable, to just stop and let it claim them?

But that burst of heat was not from Gilfaethwy’s laser.

An energy beam, far more powerful than Gilfaethwy’s cutting laser, bursts from her faun’s head. If Gilfaethwy’s laser is a rain shower, this is a waterfall. The beam sears through Gilfaethwy’s left ear; the coilgun mounted next to it glows for a moment before melting into useless slag. Maris’s view is still mostly filled by Gilfaethwy’s head, but she can imagine what that beam might do to the rest of the wolf-type faun’s body.

Her faun shoves Gilfaethwy away at last, and the lupine faun tumbles away, stumbling and falling. Maris cranes her neck to see over the bulk of the pilot cradle. Gilfaethwy’s left flank is a mass of melted metal. He tries to stand, and armor clumps off in drips and gobs. His hind leg gives way, and Maris sees that Gilfaethwy’s hip assembly has been fused together in places.

“Poor boy,” she murmurs.

Gilfaethwy falls, head lolling to one side. The cockpit sphere inside of Gilfaethwy’s head is visible where the nameless faun’s beam opened a gap in the faceplate. The sphere is still recognizably round, but deformed from the intense heat of the weapon. Gilfaethwy’s four remaining eye-exhausts weep coolant non-stop, creating a low-lying fog that obscures the damaged faun completely.

The feeling of heat returns as the nameless faun’s laser begins charging again.

“No!” Maris yanks on the control gauntlets. “He’s down. He’s not a threat.” Her hands search for any sort of cockpit hatch release to let her exit the faun. She grabs and pulls, pushes, and twists anything that protrudes enough from the pilot cradle or the interior wall or the control gauntlets.

The control sphere cools, but does not open.

Below, she sees people scrambling toward the prone forms of Gilfaethwy and Hati. Gilfaethwy is so swallowed by azure fog that she cannot track any of the rescuers, clad in masks and protective suits, once they get within a few meters of the fallen faun. Hati’s faceplate pops up to reveal the control sphere, intact, and already irising open. Bowen lurches out of it, his orange jacket gone wet red, and two rescuers run over to him, each taking a shoulder and supporting him away from Hati.

Maris knows everyone down there, though their protective equipment keeps her from being able to identify any individual besides Bowen. She can’t identify who it is that fires a defensive rocket at her faun as it towers triumphant above the two fallen wolves, but she knows that they are just trying to protect the settlement from further destruction. The rocket’s impact rattles through her and she receives a firm warning jab low in her midsection.

The nameless faun seems to understand that Maris does not want it to retaliate. He hunches, then pushes off the ground. Maris’s stomach twists. Somehow, gravity does not stop them from going higher, ever higher. Maris, and her faun, fall skyward.

The faun stretches himself out, head and long neck pointed upward, tail dangling behind. They cut through clouds until they are surrounded by stars. Small fires still smoldering along the faun’s body suffocate into streams of wispy smoke. Slivers of armor, damaged during the battle, flake off and fall back to the petal below.

All five of Antillia’s petals are spread wide at this time of day, nearly perpendicular to the long column of Corax at the center. As a ship, the Corax had been built as little more than an engine cluster attached to a long, hollow cylinder, with docking points along its length for colony ships. Since it was decommissioned, it had become a cylindrical arcology, housing some of the most advanced technology available to the colonists (and those people who had little interest in trying to scrape together an agrarian settlement on the petals below).

Corax grows in Maris’s view as they get closer. From the surface of the petals, especially during the day, Corax looks almost dangerously thin, but the closer they get, the more Maris is reminded of its real scale. Atmosphere slips away behind them; they enter the vacuum between the petals. After all that has just happened, Maris doesn’t have the capacity to worry about whether the control sphere is sealed enough to keep her pressurized, breathing, and warm. But no air hisses out through the laser scar, and if the temperature drops a few degrees, maybe she’s just imagining it.

They whip past the gleaming lights of Corax, still falling, or flying, Maris is not really sure which, toward the giant red-orange ball of the star Arcturus at the center of the Swarm. Then, with a strange tugging sensation at the base of Maris’s tailbone, the faun tilts their arc back toward the bloom. Maris’s stomach turns over several times. She closes her eyes, demanding that the rising nausea go back into its burrow.

Finally, she opens her eyes again. They continue to plummet. Ahead (above? below?), waves furl and unfurl in a vast sea. They must be dropping toward Encantado’s petal; it is the only one that has a large body of water, the Sea of Antillia. Maris’s home petal is now little more than an ovate sweep of shades of blue-green and gold in the sky behind them.

The rocky shores of the Sea of Antillia rise rapidly to meet them. Maris feels that tug at her tailbone again, and that dizzying lurch of all of her insides abruptly deciding they are in the wrong place. The faun’s plummet slows as if it has opened a parachute. Even so, the sharp, dark rocks stab toward them in giant spears. The faun did not wait for the hunters to throw their spears at them; he threw himself at the spears.

The faun hits the ground on all fours, slamming through smaller rock formations like a child flopping onto a sandcastle. The impact jars Maris, but not as much as she’d been worried it would. Gravity is kind to fauns, apparently.

The cockpit springs open. Maris dumps herself out and into a shallow pool, gasping. In her reflection, she sees how caked in dirt she is from crawling around in the faun’s grotto. There are trails down her cheeks from crying. When was that? When she thought Lynd might be dead? Or was it when she thought she was going to die?

She still isn’t sure she isn’t going to die.

Waving away the dust that the faun had kicked up, she gulps in air, hoping it might steady her racing heart or her spinning head.

It does, a little. She stops feeling that her entire life is happening in this one moment.

Waist-deep in the tide pool, Maris washed her face and arms. The nameless faun, standing in a deeper part of the sandy pool, seemed to watch her. Maris crawled out of the water and sat, knees drawn to her chest, arms resting on them. “Why did you bring me here?” she asked.

Unsurprisingly, the faun offered no answer.

She looked upward. Her home petal claimed an ovoid slice of the sky. From here it was just patchwork shades of green and blue; she could not make out the settlement itself, much less the state of any individual buildings or people. She wondered about the state of destruction. She’d seen a few structures damaged, but maybe people had had time to evacuate before anyone got badly hurt. Bowen had survived.

Had Lynd?

Maris wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. She didn’t want to believe that Lynd would use Gilfaethwy to attack Hati, much less the settlement. She’d never heard of a tamed faun going wild if it had a handler, but she couldn’t think of much else that would explain what had happened.

Her faun abruptly shifted. It turned to climb on all fours over a spray of large crags, making his way toward the sea. The faun looked almost like one of the small lizards she’d seen in encyclopedias, or like some small biots that resembled them, if it weren’t large enough to flatten a house with a misplaced step.

She looked up at her home petal again. Night would come soon enough, and all of Antillia’s petals would close. By now someone would be looking for her. More importantly, they’d be looking for the mystery faun that had arrived and fought Gilfaethwy before retreating. Maybe they even suspected her faun was the real attacker.

No, Bowen would tell them what really happened, wouldn’t he? At least Bowen had seen what happened. More than Maris did, considering that Hati was already damaged when she and the nameless faun arrived. The smart thing for her to do would be to get back to civilization (well, human civilization) as soon as she could. There weren’t any permanent settlements on Encantado’s petal, but if she started walking down-petal, she could reach the pinion eventually. Then she could offer what she knew.

That would be the smart thing to do.

Instead, she turned to follow after the nameless faun and disappeared among the rocks.