Chapter 5

  Dalex itched to see more. He wanted off the {voidstalker} and onto this new world. What would he find? Who would he meet? What incredible things would he do? He tried to moderate his expectations. The population of Gaia-BH1-G might not be capable of communicating with him. They might not have any magic at all. He could be totally wrong about calling this a fantasy world.

  The excitement won anyway.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, lez go,” he chanted like a kid on Christmas morning, waiting for his parents to let him go downstairs so he could see all the presents under the tree. It was an experience he had only really been able to have once or twice.

  Seventh did not pay attention to him. She maneuvered the {voidstalker} into a stable orbit around the world and then started making preparations for their descent in the shuttle. Several smaller vessels left the {voidstalker’s} aerodrome, along with a few other objects Dalex couldn’t recognize. When he asked what they were, Seventh said, “Support craft and [orbital satellites].

  Dalex spent the remaining time before they left for the shuttle thinking of a good fantasy name for a [satellite]. Maybe {heavenly familiar}? He also needed to come up with a name for the world, but he would wait to see if it already had one.

  Finally, Seventh left the helm and led him to another room with a number of large storage lockers against the walls and a circular platform raised six inches out of the middle of the floor. Mechanical arms surrounded the platform, sticking out of sockets in the floor. Seventh walked around the platform, physical examining each arm until she came back around to stand next to Dalex.

  “Please stand at the center of the armory,” she said, indicating a pair of highlighted yellow footprints on the platform. Dalex followed her instructions, placing his feet over their marks and facing an empty wall. It felt like the prelude to a medical exam. Considering Seventh already had enough information on him to create a clone in a few seconds, it probably wasn’t that.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “You are heading into a dangerous environment,” Seven explained. “You will need protection. Hold your hands out to your sides, parallel to the floor.”

  As soon as Dalex complied, the arms went to work, pulling various objects from the storage lockers and gently affixing them to his body. At first, he flinched at their touch, but their operation was so smooth and careful, he eventually settled into it like a massage. They didn’t screw anything into his body or fuse any metals to his skin. Each element they attached simply pressed against his body and then floated in place an eighth of an inch away from him.

  After a few seconds of watching the arms work, he realized they were giving him a suit of armor. They started with his feet and moved up his body until the arms settled a helmet over his head. Despite covering his face, it didn’t obscure his vision. An outside observer would call the material opaque, but he could see through it perfectly fine. He worried momentarily that the suit of armor would be cumbersome, but the moment the arms finished and he stepped off the platform, the outfit vanished.

  Dalex froze. He ran his hand down his torso but didn’t feel the chest plate. No extra weight bore down on him. He felt the same as before stepping onto the platform.

  “Did I leave too quickly?” he asked.

  “The armor is still there,” Seventh said. “It will dematerialize when you don’t need it, manifesting only when you are in danger or if you want it to. It also carries a number of weapon systems you might find useful, some onboard and some linked from the satellites and support craft. However, the [stealth frigate] sustained significant damage during our battle with the unknown faction. Certain systems will not function yet.”

  Dalex remembered how pristine the exterior of the vessel looked on their approach in the shuttle. He hadn’t seen any damage during his time in the ship.

  “Seems like everything’s fine to me,” he said.

  “The [stealth frigate] was engaged by an electronic warfare attack. The damage would not be visible. Still, it is repairable.”

  From the armory, they returned to the {aerodrome}, boarding the transport vessel to travel to the surface of Gaia-BH1-G. While Dalex had been asleep the night before, Seventh had sent out {spy golems} to do a survey of the world and they had discovered many inhabited settlements. Those settlements covered most of eight distinct continents and a few even floated in the calmer waters of the seas and oceans.

  The settlements ranged in size from tiny villages to metropolitan areas the size of Victorian London. None of the {observation golems} got close enough to a city to determine what kind of inhabitants might call them home—she didn’t want the locals to spot the {golems} just yet—but they certainly looked like the kind of habitats bipedal mammals would live in.

  Seventh refused to speculate on what the residents of Gaia-BH1-G might look like. She said it was both beyond her capacity and impossible to extrapolate from the available information, which felt like a cop-out to Dalex. She just didn’t want to make a silly guess.

  The transport descended through several layers of clouds, down to just above the treetops of a thick forest. They skimmed the forest canopy until Seventh found a clearing big enough to set the vessel down. Dalex hovered next to the loading gate that led outside, feeling giddy.

  “Come on, let’s go!”

  Seventh didn’t leave the bridge. The transport remained powered up. “You can open the door yourself. I must return to the [stealth frigate] to finalize repairs.”

  Dalex turned back toward her. “You’re not coming with me?”

  “I will join you later. The armor can instruct you on using its systems, and we will be in constant two-way communication via the satellite. I can guide you through anything you don’t understand.”

  Dalex frowned. The idea of setting off into this new world alone certainly had an exciting ring to it, but he liked having Seventh around. Her deadpan explanations had been a major contributing factor to him keeping his cool during the battle, along with her occasional flashes of humanity. But if there was work to be done on their home base, he wouldn’t complain if she left.

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  “I’ll hold you to that,” Dalex said. “It might get lonely down here.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. Figuring the transport’s systems operated similarly to those of the E7, Dalex said, “Open door,” and the loading gate swung open, extending a ramp for him to walk down. Only when he stood on bouncy green grass did he think about breathable air. Seventh probably would have told him if that was going to be a problem.

  Dalex closed his eyes and took in a big breath through his nose, smelling both the artificial carbon of the transport and the rich earthiness of the forest. He heard the squawks of unfamiliar birds and the breeze through the leaves. When he opened his eyes, he stared at a vast wall of pine trees, creaking back and forth in the wind. A line of great limestone cliffs circled the clearing, waterfalls pouring down from their precipices.

  Even if this wasn’t a fantasy world, it was still paradise. For a boy who had grown up in a hospital, only seeing the natural world through a screen or on the pages of a book, it made everything that came before worth it.

  He missed his family; he missed his friends. But, in that moment, he thought they would be happy for him.

  He started by stretching, examining his surroundings as he extended his hamstrings and rotated his back. Seventh took off in the transport behind him. It made a soft buzzing noise as it ascended, somewhat pleasing to the ear.

  Dalex decided to test their {sending} connection. “Can you hear me, Seventh?”

  “Yes,” her voice appeared directly in his head. “The communication equipment in your armor is functioning.”

  “Good, good,” he muttered, and then, “{Region map}.”

  Another three-dimensional map appeared to hover in front of him. Dalex oriented himself toward the nearest settlement and set off. At his command, the map reduced to a tiny arrow in his peripheral vision that would tell him if he deviated off course.

  “Do you know much about geography?” he asked Seventh. “Are these really pine trees? They look exactly like the earth flora.”

  “They are not,” Seventh answered, “but they are similar in structure and life cycle. Perhaps a common ancestor.”

  As Dalex left the clearing and began walking among the trees, he found pine cones littering the forest floor. The idea of a common ancestor didn’t sit right in his mind. How could two trees in different parts of the galaxy have a common ancestor?

  He asked Seventh as much and she said, “I am not prepared to go into the subject at this time, but, in brief, there has been some spread of biological life through the Milky Way. You are not the first human to leave Earth. Your Benefactors were not the first interstellar species to visit your planet. There has been exchange over the eons of this galaxy’s existence.”

  That information was quite exciting, but Dalex understood why Seventh wouldn’t want to explain more to him. An entire history of the universe sounded like a lesson that might take an eon itself to deliver. Rather than worry about the common ancestor of two pine trees, he decided to familiarize himself with his gear.

  “{Inventory},” he said. As usual, he was not disappointed.

  Dalex had forgotten about his protein bar. Before leaving the {voidstalker} he had used {create food} to make himself a snack for the journey. He reached into his pocket and grabbed the bar, peeling apart the protective wrapping the magical items had sealed it in. Seventh had also given him a rundown on what his {adamantine heavy plate} could do.

  While he munched on his snack, Dalex selected [Multi-use Combat Gel]. A cloud of liquid jelly seeped into the air from his shoulder, released from one of his invisible armor plates. A new menu manifested in front of him.

  Theoretically, the weapons and gear he could manifest from the {astral mortar} were infinite. The system provided him with blueprints for a few weapons that would be familiar to human hands and sensibilities, but the only true limit was his imagination and ability to explain to Seventh what he wanted to make. A civilization capable of blowing up a sun could outfit their bushwacking explorer with enough gear to defend himself.

  For now, he selected [scattershot], and the cloud of jelly solidified into a {blunderbuss}, the perfect weapon for an amateur that might need to defend himself in a hurry. He inspected the weapon, read the system’s brief guide on its use and interchangeable ammunition, and then allowed it to dissolve back into jelly. Part of him wanted to test these weapons, but he didn’t want to disturb the peace of the forest.

  He marched for almost an hour, scaling two mountains and crossing a frothing river. His armor did more than protect him. It imbued his body with incredible strength and agility, allowing him to move quickly and efficiently over the roughest terrain. Seventh even told him it would allow him to fly, but he decided to wait to make serious use of that skill, only testing it for a few minutes to get a feel for the experience. He stopped when he slammed headfirst into a boulder, breaking the rock in half and planting himself in the dirt.

  Occasionally, he used {detect precious metals} to check if his armor sensed any {adamantine}. Seventh had told him this skill was unreliable and would only detect {adamantine} within a short radius. The detectors on the E7 and the {voidstalker} were powerful enough to confirm this world had the stuff, but were useless for finding its direction. That left Dalex to do some ground pounding, exploring the surface of the world and hopefully asking its populace about a few telltale clues that might lead him in the right direction.

  Finally, his destination settlement came into view. A small town squatted at the center of a wide river valley. A tall palisade wall ran around its perimeter, with gates on either side of the valley and in each direction of the river. It seemed like the kind of wilderness colony that needed significant protection. Dalex wondered what from. Predators? Monsters? Bandits? Enemy armies?

  He spotted movement near one of the land gates and was about to invoke {far sight} when something beeped in his head and the region map manifested in a small window to the right of his vision. A warning message flashed “motion detected.” Just as Dalex began to understand what was happening, something slimy snaked out of the shadows behind him in wrapped itself around his belly, dragging him back into the trees.

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