[b]Dogpatch[/b]

"It is vital to this mission that I concentrate." he said, flicking switches and adjusting the cockpit. "I will be blocking out your sounds. Do not compete for my attention."

He flicked another switch and a smooth blue-green field of energy filled the windows. Their driver was a hulk of a man despite his Asian features. His arms, bared by his corrugate armor-grade plastic cuirass, were bulging to a degree that suggested genetic alteration. They were covered in tattoos. There were dragons, and symbols from the ancient languages of Asia. There were birds, there were daggers. There was a full-colored geisha on one shoulder, her kimono peeled to the waste and her breasts obscured by a unfolded fan. On the other shoulder, there was what looked like the silhouette of a gear tucked behind a banana. Laz had seen the symbol before, but he could not place it. The tattooed man's hair was long and braided so completely that it looked like dread locks.

"He's IU." Laz's nervous companion said. He nodded so rapidly when he talked that looked spastic. "Real IU. Yes. Not the bureaucracy guys. No. From space. From space. From a citadel. Yes."

"A citadel" Laz said. His mouth was dry. He hadn't expected to be taken by land, but the pirates insisted that this was less conspicuous. The attack on the IUSS had been an attack on an IU ship. It was news. The IU would be paying attention to Kartago now. They could keep a close eye on what moved through their spaceports and airports, but they had no eyes in the jungle. 

"I bet you on Frankie Pallo's grave." the other prisoner nodded. "I bet you on Mozarts grave. I bet you on Elvis's grave. He is a citadel man. He escaped from a citadel. Yes."

"If you ran from a citadel..." Laz said. "This is the place you would go."

"Yes. Yes. I bet on Tupac's grave. Yes."

Stories about the Citadels belonged, as far a Laz new, in the realm of conspiracy theories and fiction. It was known there were massive battleships patrolling the edge of the system, but so little was known about them that their mystery bred wild stories. Popular knowledge claimed they were warrior cults, the children of the crew trained from birth so that they could replace their parents. Each citadel had its own identity. Some, it was said, built themselves around the image of the chivalric knight's of history. Others the Spartans, or the bushido Samurai. And then there were those who drew from fiction. Soldiers who saw themselves as demons, or as the Einherjar of Nordic myth. There were elf warriors from Tolkien's fantasy and Cazadors from the Precipice cycle. The most outlandish Laz ever heard was of a citadel where everyone dyed their skin green. 

"Mhm..." Laz heard the other man still babbling. "...Captain Cornhole's grave."

They began to move, following the craft in front of them. Laz felt the vibration of the repulsors through the cushions. He could hear them too. Hovercars in the city rode smooth, and they hardly made a sound. This thing sputtered and spat. When it had started, Laz thought there was something wrong. He suspected that he was right. No machine in perfect working order should sound like this did. When they moved, it coughed. And when they began to move over the rough surfaces of the Brahman jungle, he felt it. 

"Where did they pick you up? Mhm?" the other prisoner asked. He stuck his hand out awkwardly. "Kessler Reyes. Friends call me Kess."

Laz shook his hand. "Lazarus Paladino. Laz. And I was on the Aro."

"Aro." Kess whislted. "Yes. IU ship that one. You are IU?" 

"Yes. Airguard. I got transferred to Spaceguard eight months ago."

"Ooh, poor guy you. Poor guy. You people had to kill the monster."

"Yes." Laz looked at him. "You didn't have to do anything?"

"No." he shook his head. "No no. I'm a Bucket Boy, guy. I didn't have to do anything."

"The Bucket. The satellite?" Laz said. "I haven't met one of you. I thought you guys never left?"

"Some do." he replied. "I had to. It wasn't my type of life. I like gravity. I mean, I didn't like gravity when I first got it. The heavy part. Up there, we call the outside world 'Gravity.' I like the stuff to do, and all the people you get to see. It was hard having weight at first. We take the shots, we have the bodies to survive it, but it is hard to get used to."

They hit a bump. Laz umphed. "You are all like monks up there, right? Living for the music..."

"No no." Kess replied. "There is not as much work as you'd think. We clean disks. Mix tracks. The rest of the time was like a slow party." he paused for a moment. "And we had girls up there, you know. We did. We do. We had sex."

"I know." Laz said. They hit a bump. 

"We used to call it 'The Satellite of Love' " Kess snorted. Laz forced a grin.

"Did you listen?" Kess asked.

"Yes. Of course. I think most people do."

"The sacred tunes of old earth." Kess inhaled. "I swear on Louis Armstrong's grave, we did the most important work in the universe."

"Do you miss it?" Laz asked.

"Yes." Kess nodded. "Yes. It was better than being a prisoner. Yes. I shouldn't have left."

The convoy moved into the wild. Here, their Tkrai could guide them over the thick trunks that webbed across the understory of jungle. He could see glimpses of them, skipping across the canopy as elegantly as men walked on the ground. This place was not like the Mango groves that grew outside of Nai Kolkata. The plantlife here could be strong in ways that were almost geological. The largest were the bulbous fungi growths. They looked like exaggerated coral, branching out so far and growing so tall that one could dominate entire square kilometers of jungle. They were white, and beige, and pink and blue. Some arms reached into the ground, and they began to knitted together near the core so that they created a wicker wall around their main trunk. Others were stubby and round, but they were as thick as rock formations. In their centers, their flesh was long dead and petrified. 

The layers of jungle intertwined and wove together, contrasting vegetation twisting and melding with one another. There were leaves and vines and puffy growths, and though their colors varied the gestalt seemed to vary between turquoise and lilac. Patches of phosphorescence grew on fungal trunks and twinkled in the shadows. Laz could still feel the life here. It was a force on its own, and it felt heavy. It felt dangerous. 

Most of the hovercars were armed. Some had turrets mounted on top of the crude frames outlining their bodies. Others had sonic-dishes. There was a mix of models in the convoy, some old enough that they could have been manufactured on earth. They looked like platforms with makeshift cabins constructed on top, and they had been dented and dinged from years of use. Laz recognized a several of the models. Most of them weren't made for combat. There were joyriders, and delivery skiffs and food rafts, and they all had been converted by the pirates. 

Laz watched the landscape go by. He watched the Tkrai nervously. They were armed. It was not just the ankle and wrist mounted medieval weapons that he had seen them with before. Some of them had railguns strapped to their backs. Others had rocket launchers and plasma throwers. It was strange, seeing armed Tkrai. Laz wondered where they had got their weapons. Was Kartago arming the Tkrai? The IU would surely know about that. What did it mean? The fear caught up with him. He was a prisoner. How did they treat their captives? He was being shanghaied, forced into their military. Would he get away? Would he escape? It felt like his stomach was trying to come up through his neck. This was no use. He had to calm down. He had to think.

Eury. Where was she? He had vowed to make that his singular mission here. He would find this out. Everything else was secondary.

Laz heard a familiar sound. It was like the air near his ears had taken a massive gulp. An ultrasonic cannon. He looked behind and saw the bowls swivel on their mounts. Another pulse. He was prepared for this one. He could see that they were tracking something through the sky, and he looked up to see what it was. 

A shadow passed over, blotting out the sun like a cloud. The jungle obscured the light. Laz saw it. A black shape through gaps in the canopy. A Mayura.

"Shit, man!" Kess shouted. "What by Yeezy's grave is that?"

"Mayura." Laz mouthed. He watched it intently, looking for any sign that it would swoop, but he couldn't see it in any detail. Did they behave differently down here? Were these a different species all together?

"It can't get us through the woods. It can't." Kess chanted. His voice shook, more now than it had before. 

"Yes." Laz said. He was intent on the bird. If it came down, if it could rip through the canopy, it would easily take a hovercar with it. He suddenly realized that the pirates had not sounded off against it for a few minutes, and he knew what they were doing. They had seen signs. They knew it was going to come down.

The Mayura roared. Its voice shook them and caused their sound-blocking field to flicker. Laz looked at their driver's face. He was serene. Calm. His eyes were fixed on the sky, braids hanging around his face. No movement. He looked like a predator waiting to pounce. 

There was another roar, and then a whirlwind. Cracking, splintering, exploding. It all happened at once. Laz realized where they were, on a thickened branch several dozen feet from the ground. Delicately balanced and ready to fall. To one side, the jungle was in cataclysm. It was coming closer, and like a tornado it was creating a cloud of debris behind it. Instinctively, Laz prepared himself for impact. And then the volley.

It ended all at once. Not in a hail of gunfire, but rather in a sound like thunder drowned in a deep cenote. The attack ended. Roaring destruction swept out of the jungle. The Mayura had retreated. Laz realized very suddenly that his head was in his lap. He was trembling. It was one thing to fight a Mayura with your hand on the trigger. It was another to have no control. 

The silence was potent. Laz looked at Kess, the Bucket Brother curled into himself in the corner of his seat. He had never seen a Mayura before. As far as Laz could tell, he hadn't been able to see it this time either. Laz never did. Laz looked at the pilot. He sat in the same position he had been in when the attack started. He had not moved. Laz believed what Kess had said before. This man had escaped from a Citadel. He was exactly what Laz expected a Citadel warrior to look like.

They continued through the jungle quietly. As evening came, the glow of Brahmapura brightened the northern sky like a second sun. When they were high enough in the canopy of the forest, Laz could see it poking over the wilderness. Laz was unsure what they would do that night, but that question answered itself. They came over a rise created by a wall of solid rock following the landscape like a titanic snake. Once over its spine, he saw it. A white tower stood above the jungle. Parts of it were in disrepair, an the plant-life within were overspilling their bounds. It was a skyscrape that opened to the world, its structure like the tapering mouths of conch-shells stacked one on top of the other so that each level had one side entirely in the open air. Laz recognized what he was looking at instantly. It was a sanctuary to the people of the Edenic cult. An Edenite spiritual site. And it had been abandoned.

The caravan wormed down from the arms of the forest, following branches that looked as if they had been trained to reach down like some sort of biological infrastructure. They were soon in a valley cut by a small stream. Water trickled down from the walls, cutting rivulets across the land. Some of them flowed with liquids other than water. They carried instead the sweat and waste of the jungle's fungal colonies. In the rising dominance of Brahmapura's pink light, those ones caught a rainbow sheen and glittered.

As the cliffs rose, Laz saw that something geometric about the rock. He struggled to focus in the dark. As he made out where lines connected and what shapes they formed, he held his breath. There were forms [i]carve[/i] out of the stone. They were deliberate, and they were not human. Standing dozens of feet tall and popping from the rock in complex detail, there were several Tkrai forms. They all held up a single pelt from some creature Laz could not identify. The monument, it seemed, was honoring a successful hunt. He reached over to show it to Kess, but the Bucket Brother was asleep. He left him be. 

The Edenite tower came into view when they turned a corner. It was framed by the semi-circle rise of Brahmapura peaking over the horizon and dominating the night sky. The caravan began to slow, and he realized that this is where they were stopping for the night.