Both daughter moons were high in the sky, and the twisted forest was bright enough to navigate in their combined orange light alone. The warband traveled the night in the fashion of generations that came before: on foot. It was a grim march of heavy breath and occasional hushed profanity, as they worked up the back of the nameless mountain. Beasts of burden and their minders carried the humming machines that hid their progress from outside eyes, and no one dared to make the mistake of leaving the safety of the cloak. They passed above the treeline late in the night, and all that was left to see was rock covered in lichen and low brush. Progress slowed to an excruciating shuffle as the air grew thinner, and those who had never climbed so high before began to whisper regrets. One of the beasts slipped on the loose shale of the mountainside, shattered a leg as it fell, and dropped its burden. The furry creature tumbled down the hill, dragging the crushed body of its keeper at the other end of a lead. Screams reverberated on the cliffs until someone finally silenced the animal, and the line of breathless people waited in tense terror. The mobile cloak would obscure vision, it would do nothing for sound.

When no reprisal came, the beast’s replacement took its place in the line, shouldering the battered generator with a groan. It could not be said that the animals were any more careful in their progress, but the people around them may have walked more gingerly, eyeing the ground and cringing at each threatening whisper of more rock coming away.

The front of the line reached the saddle between two mountain peaks near midnight. The back would not finish the journey until two hours later. Here they halted for rest, though they could not risk a fire. Even if the light was obscured by the cloak, escaping smoke might be seen beyond its border in the moonlight. Food would have to be eaten cold. Up this high, the whipping of the wind disguised their noise, but conversations remained hushed and intense.

The stars ahead had disappeared as they crested the mountain, and the sky over the valley before them was closer to a pale gray than any shade of night. Below, the forest that had run to every horizon was hewn away at unnatural angles, replaced with spires of architecture on a foundation of concrete. Thousands of lights in tidy rows blazed up into the night sky, throwing a sickening yellow hue over the valley. As the tired band watched, screaming artificial stars fell from the sky, resolving into ships covered in their own lights, that would land, refuel and supply, and take off again.

Elanus watched the space-faring traffic come and go, her raptrin eyes able to see in far better detail than most. As the rest of the procession caught up with the front, she stood perched on a boulder, her head bobbing and lolling first to one side, then the other, neck extending and bending as she watched an approach or departure. A predator judging distance.

She noticed DuCaine, standing at the base of her boulder, in its insufficient shelter from the wind, and he could find no better word to describe her expression than ‘irate’.

“This is not supposed to be here,” Elanus declared.

Malice beamed, though took care to do so from a distance. Their saurian traitor was in her camouflage armor, but had pulled on a thermal layer. She could not tolerate the slicing wind as well as the rest of the warband, and shivered as they rested, while pretending that she didn't. 

DuCaine did not like how her teeth looked in the moonlight when she smiled.

“That strip is ten times larger than it should be, from orbital imaging,” Elanus continued, and the fury in her voice was unmistakable.

“It’s a sensor trick,” Malice responded, “cloaks are a hassle.” She gestured to the exhausted animals straining under their burdens. “Easier to just feed false data. A lazy trick, but effective when very few fly with bare eyes.”

The march had been at Malice’s insistence, who had spent weeks arguing it was the perfect target. A supply depot, she claimed, that would solve DuCaine’s every problem. More than enough food to sustain a rebellion, both fresh and preserved. Weapons, ammunition, power supplies, clothing. The data core held scheduling of the shipping lanes, as a prize for Elanus and her mercenaries. Malice had not requested any of the spoils for herself, as a gesture of friendship, or whatever she thought mimicked friendship.

DuCaine could see far more detail than Elanus could. He could not find, for all his searching, anything that indicated the depot was anything more or less than what Malice had said. There did not appear to be an army laying in wait, and the ships that came and went barely had armament of their own. The stores were full, though it was hard to distinguish at this distance what they were full of. As the Mask fed him everything he asked for, he mulled over every possible way Malice could have mislead him, but all the evidence was there.

She had done something more sinister still, and told him the truth.

“You’re going to go through with this,” Elanus called from her perch above him.

“You came a long way if you thought I was going to turn around,” he shouted back, above the wind.

Elanus made a gesture that he did not quite understand, and perhaps was not supposed to see in the dark, but gathered was supposed to be rude. “You have believers. They’ll run on promises and dirt. I am not as lucky. I bring a profit or I do not have a crew, or maybe I do not have blood, if they are angry enough. A cache of crystals that large will feed us for two years. Very good bait.”

“Three,” Malice corrected, her seething pride audible. “If anyone pays you less, you are being swindled.”

Elanus made an expression that, again, he suspected no one was supposed to be able to see. The raptrin went back to inspecting the depot, squinting and swiveling her head as she did. “Is this a better course of action than agreeing to the Artificer’s terms? There’s at least three Taveal freighters down there. They will not come as easy.”

“Surely your little band of pirates has taken more impressive game,” DuCaine said.

“Losing men on a little resupply is poorer return on investment than simply having someone else away the Empire entirely.”

Malice clicked her tongue in disgust. “You are doing your math poorly.”

Elanus glared down from her perch, her feathers ruffling either in anger or from the gale. “Your calculations and mine are not the same.”

“Clearly not,” the saurian agreed.

“What does it matter what the old men want, if they clear out this annoyance?”

“The Artificers are not simply old men,” Malice said, moving closer so she could not be overheard, almost hissing with the wind as she spoke, “they are the oldest. The first. They crawled into consciousness at the center of the galaxy and spread through it while your species were barely bacteria.

“The only reason any of us were permitted to exist was not by their benevolence, it was by their schism. They spread too far, and the power at the center did not like that the fringes were drifting. They realized those at one tip of the galaxy would become something totally unlike those at the other, and they could not tolerate it. They culled and pulled back into themselves, and we were permitted to rise in what is left by their absence.”

“Then they play in politics, like everyone else.”

“You want to strike a deal with a civilization so poisoned by ideology it ate itself rather than allow deviance?”

 “I see a power that offered to remove yours,” Elanus shrugged. “If their squabbles are internal, that makes them a better landlord than Avarice.”

“I heard your species has hollow bones, fool I am, I didn’t realize it included skulls,” Malice spat. “They’re no different from Avarice. They play for control. Their terms of alliance are intended to make sure none of us can be a threat. You trade one master for another. Avarice bleeds you dry, but the Artificers intend to smother you in the nest.”

Elanus said nothing else. DuCaine himself had been pushed out of the conversation, except that, by placing themselves on either side of him, they had both ensured he had heard their opinion.

Dawn found the warband under a cloudless sky.

The beasts of burden were surprisingly quick on the downhill journey, once spurred. They were their own thunderous, invisible stampede that moved with the forward line. It was Korok that lead the charge, the raw fury in his voice carrying the devoted in his wake. Korok was one of those creatures that lived in bloodlust. He was surprisingly swift for his size, and despite his insistence that he was too old for the foolishness of traversing a mountain, he had done so with an agility and stamina not matched by most of the company. He had, perhaps, played up a bit the gravity of the battle ahead—they were only falling upon a lightly guarded installation. But, it was a victory and supply that they needed, and perhaps the ease of the battle would bring welcome optimism.

Promises and dirt, DuCaine repeated internally with a cadence following his own footsteps. Promises and dirt. Promises and dirt.

Malice gave the charge a wide berth, unwilling to get snagged in its tangle, just in case someone willingly or accidentally forgot she was their informant. She slipped through the trees with her camouflage activated, light footsteps hidden under the thunder of a couple hundred running people. He intercepted her as she neared the last thousand feet, before the trees gave way to the clear-cut perimeter of the base, and called her to a stop. They made it to the edge together, as Korok and his most fervent troops fell upon the wall, taking out the light gun turrets as they did. It appeared that their animals carrying cloaks had worked well enough that the walls were entirely surprised.

The fresh scent of cold morning, wet soil, and healthy green trees turned to smoke and ionized air, as DuCaine and Malice and watched chaos unfold.

“There is a lot of confusion in a battle,” DuCaine observed.

“So there is,” she said, carefully, her voice wavering in the field that cloaked her.

“I think it would be advantageous if our friend the merchant learned this lesson,” he said.

She was still invisible to the naked eye, but he could see the palpable disappointment as she sagged. “The merchant? The little cowering twig that overcharged for his damp cargo? Not the mercenary and her puppets?”

“Elanus complains at every suggestion that is not her own, but she does as she’s told, eventually. The merchant has been double dealing. We know his supplier, and leaving him alive is going to hinder us.”

There was smoke rising from one of the landing pads now, and true pandemonium had erupted, a mix of shouting, gunfire, explosions, and klaxons. 

“Do you think your pet has not also taken money from whoever will offer it?” Malice asked.

“I’m sure she has, but her career has been stealing from the empire. Our merchant friend has been selling people.”

Malice tilted her head to the side, a sly, patronizing smile on her lips. “And Elanus has not?”

“My people,” he clarified. 

“How sneaky and underhanded,” Malice said, her smile growing.

“Yes, that’s why I want him gone.”

“Not him. You. I didn’t think you had the stomach for intrigue. Why, I could almost say I’ve been a good influence on you.”

The Mask would have hidden any actual expression, but he hoped it was obvious enough that he was not amused.

Malice looked back the way they had come, up the mountainside. “Coward won’t be down here though. You could have said something about an assassination before it meant walking back up that hill. I could have just pushed him off.”

“You walked up it once already today, I trust your ability,” he said.

She made a frustrated growl, but hesitated in her turn away from the fray. “You’ve dealt with them before. You must have.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Artificers,” she pointed at his face, implying the Mask. “That is a very distinctive aesthetic.”

DuCaine shook his head. “This didn’t come from them.”

Malice scowled. “You think you can play little evasive word games with me, as if I wasn’t raised in a pit of silver-tongued frauds. What bargain did you strike with them, for that toy of yours?”

“No bargains,” he said, evenly. “I never spoke with them, not before the meeting you were at. The meeting you arranged.”

“I know you didn’t build it yourself, you barely know which direction is up. You can’t convince me that you know the first thing about programming,” she continued, leaning to one side, and then the other as she thought aloud. “Your little revolution is a collection of exhausted labor that doesn’t know the difference between magic and tech. They don't know you have something you shouldn’t.”

“Malice, you seem to be under the impression that you are in any position to expect my confidence.”

“I’ve endured your constant paranoid scrutiny for months. The questioning and harassment and demeaning tasks. I complied with every humiliation you’ve devised. You, on the other hand, haven’t even told me your name.”

“Drake is my name.”

“No, it isn’t. That isn’t anyone’s name. Maybe that’s what they called you, but it’s not the name anyone gave you.”

“What possible difference could that make, right now?” he gestured to the chaos behind him.

“All the difference!” she shouted, her amusement inflating more. “The Empire isn’t built on an unbroken line, though it likes to pretend it is. A lineage of names that they recite and revere, because names are a source of power. Not as strong as other powers, but power all the same. Legitimacy, inertia, authority.

“It is odd to me that you’ve chosen to have no name, just like it’s odd to me that you have no family, no history, and a little piece of tech that should not exist on a planet so far from the galactic core.”

“Are you going to do your job or not?” DuCaine demanded.

“Of course, but because it’s fun, not because you want me to,” she gave him a sarcastic flourish of a bow, and bounded between the trees with an alarming, fluid speed. He watched her work through the brush and past the streams of fighters still joining the battle, until he was satisfied that she was doing as he asked. 

Drake DuCaine turned to the clearing, and the depot, and the fire, and surveyed the situation again. The battle appeared to be going as well as was planned, and there was still no sign of a cohesive opposing force pushing them back. The animals had been brought to the landing pads to act as cover for moving the supplies out, using the saurian’s own tech to hide their trail. They would need to leave before reinforcement arrived.

Promises and dirt, the internal voice echoed again, as he stepped forward. Promises and dirt.