A Brotherhood of Crows.

Zularna found Tobias at the entry ramp to the SkySkimmer, wiping his hands on a rag as he descended. “All good?” she asked.

He nodded. “All good. Ready to go?”

Zularna adjusted the strap of the duffle bag she’d found in the armory. It clanked, audibly, with the sound of the grenades, trip mines and ammunition she’d loaded into it. Slung across the small of her back was a quiver, which she’d packed with bolts. In the workshop area, she’d found some explosive tipped heads, and had liberally applied them half the bolts in her stock. “All good.”

“Grand,” Tobias grinned, and spread his arms dramatically, “Welcome aboard!”

As Zularna passed him, she brushed against his outstretched arm, and for a second, found herself staring at a desk, flanked on either side by stern parental figures, as a distant voices, warped by years passage, intoned; “...complete unacceptable to the ethos of the school…”

She broke contact, and flushed.

Inside the Skimmer was a small cargo area, with a few uncomfortable jump seats bolted to the walls. The bulk of the space here was taken up was a colossal net gun: shaped for all intents like a flak cannon, but instead of barrels, a tight wodge of netting wrapped around a catapult like mechanism. Up a narrow ladder was the cockpit, just big enough for the pilot, co-pilot and a navigator, it perched at the end of the wedge shaped vessel, and through its viewports, she could see down the length of the Arthur’s Seat hanger bay, and out into the distant blue of the sky. She took a seat in the co-pilot’s chair and buckled herself in as Tobias took the pilot’s seat.

“You know how to fly?” Tobias asked her as he began flipping buttons. From beneath them came the loud clunk of the entry ramp closing.

“Afraid not. Do you need me to do anything?”

“Just...don’t scream if we explode in mid air? Haven’t really tested this thing.” Tobias took hold of the control column. “Okay, engines going live...now...hold onto something...here we go…”

A great hum filled her ears, as the Skimmers twin pulse engines came to life. Tobias pulled back gently on his joysticks, and Zularna felt the giddy feeling of the craft lifting away from the earth. Tobias pressed down on the throttle, and they shot forward, down the length of the hanger, and out into the sky.

The skimmer emerged into the light of day, and began to climb. Edinburgh and her skyline fell away, and passed through wispy cloud that amassed and thickened and then disappeared altogether as the breached the cloud roof and burst out into open sky.

“Twenty five thousand feet and climbing,” Tobias said, his eyes flicking from the canopy to the skimmers instruments and back again. “The thing about Shockstreaming is that you can’t do it at low altitude, not unless you want to kill someone. We’re about to tear a hole in the fabric of space, and then fly through it and out another hole. Does tend to cause some disruption, hence the name ‘Shock’...”

He stopped speaking, and glanced over at Zularna. “Something on your mind?”

Zularna sighed. “Earlier, when we brushed into each other...I saw something. About your past,”

“So, I thought you did that all the time?”

“No, but I feel like I shouldn’t have seen what I did...I saw you getting expelled.”

“Oh,” Tobias turned his gaze back to his instruments, but she saw his hands tighten on the control column. “Well.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have -?”

“It’s fine. I mean, come on, you may have noticed I don’t go to school. Best thing that happened to me, in some ways. Did you know I’ve got three degrees? Did ’em on the holo, when I was bored last summer. Physics, Manufacturing Engineering and Interdisciplinary Fromage Studies. Last one was because I was hungry, to be fair…”

“What happened? With your school?”

Tobias shrugged. “Eh, not that much. My parents sent me to a Catholic School. I’m gay. Always have been, not that they cared. Catholics and gay men don’t tend to get along, really.”

“I’m sorry, Tobias.”

“S’ok. If I hadn’t been expelled, I wouldn’t have left home, and if I hadn’t left home, I would never have met Eli. Why go to school when you can live an old factory, building whatever you like and only going out to fuck up bad guys, right?”

He spoke jovially enough, but the hands remained tight on the control column, and there was an unusual widness in his eyes.

“How did you meet, you and Elijah?” Zularna asked.

“Oh, he was working a job down in Manchester. I was bumming about Ardwick, trying to find a place to live. He caught me trying to pick his nose.”

“Don’t you mean pockets?”

“I know what I mean.”

“Okay then...I’m sorry. About what happened.” she extended a fist in his direction. “LGBT Solidarity?”

He smiled and fist bumped her back. “Always, sister. Always. Okay, about ready to Shock. Hold onto something...three, two...one…”

Shockstreaming in a skyskimmer was far less unpleasant than her journey via Crucius’s device. There was a sudden jolt, and the skimmer leapt forward as if stung. Outside, the clouds blurred away for a second, and then returned. Zularna gaze out the canopy.

“Did it work?”

“Yep. We’re currently cruising at 20,000 feet over the Aegean Sea. You ever been to Greece?”

“No?”

“Shame. Lovely place. At least, I think it was. We were there a few years ago, tracking down vrykolakas.”

“Vy what now?”

“Think vampire meets zombie. Nasty little fuckers.”

They shocked again with another jolt, careening into thick cloud somewhere over the Caspian Sea. Tobias had taken longer to plot the route this time - “Problem is, right, that the Middle East is a fucking mess. You’ve got Commonwealth in what’s left of Northern Israel, the Severance have Egypt and the bits of Libya which haven’t been abandoned, and then in the middle you have the Army of Christ, from Damascus to Bethlehem and about as far east as Tehran. Oh, and all of them want to kill each other. We can’t shock over the whole region with a skimmer like this, and I really, really don’t want to fly into the middle of a battle.” - and they had come out in the middle of a high altitude storm. Rain spattered angrily against the canopy, and high winds threatened to blow the skimmer off course, as Tobias fought with the controls to keep her steady.

“One more Shock should do it!” he called over the bellow of the wind, and then they snapped forward again, one last time. “Systems all green...welcome to Kazakhstan. Or, what was Kazakhstan.”

Zularna peered out the canopy. The skyskimmer was beginning to descend, and as they went beneath the clouds, she saw a great brown expanse of land below them. Dull rocks punched out of high sand dunes, and earth was pockmarked with craters, like the face of a plague carrier. They flew over what appeared to be remains of a small city; shattered wrecks of buildings, a few walls here and there, the faint impressions of a street, most of it lost in the sand.

And everywhere, across the scorched earth, the wrecks of airships lay like charnel bones.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“Nothing good,” said Tobias, grimly, “About forty, maybe forty five years ago, when the war was just kicking off, the Commonwealth and Severance clashed here. Kazakhstan wasn’t allied to either side, but most people reckon that both side wanted to get their hands on the Aral Sea; the biggest water source, and site of minerals and natural gases in the region. Others reckon the two sides just wanted to have it out, once and for all, after years of skirmishes, and that Kazakhstan was picked at random, because it was far away from the civilian populations of each side. Dozens of fleets Shocked in, thousands of airships, hundreds of thousands of men...and what you’re seeing down there, is the aftermath.”

“Who won?”

“Does it matter? Funny thing, though. All that fighting pretty much decimated this whole area of the country. The Aral Sea itself was hit by so much fire that it drained. We’re flying over it right now. Doesn’t look like much, does it? Used to be one of the largest lakes in the world. Now...well, take a look for yourself. It’s a desert.”

Zularna gazed down on the great brown expanse of nothing below her. “I’d never heard of any of this before…”

“Not surprised. Only reason I know is the dark holo. Commonwealth and the Severance did a pretty good job of wiping all trace of the battle from history,” he looked out of the canopy at the wasteland below, “Given the number of dead and conscription, I’d say if you’re my age, there’s a good chance your grandfather is down there, somewhere…” he smirked, mirthlessly, “You can see why they call it the Graveyard of Giants, can’t you?”

His hands began to dance over the controls. “You said you saw a dome in your vision, right?”

Zularna nodded. “It was the only building I could see…”

“Hmm...it’s odd that. Pretty much everything was levelled in the battle...I’ll see what the scan turns up -”

Picture the scene:

The valley starts off wedged between the jagged fang mountains and then suddenly erupts out and down like a waterfall, plunging into a great expanse of sand, dry bare rock, and scattered shrapnel. The wasteland, uneven, broken, as if it were build out of smashed shards of glass, seems to go on forever. Every building that had ever stood that had been levelled; every flat plain of land punched in by artillery fire; every road faded into the land itself like an exsanguinated artery. Against the wasteland is placed the sky, rich blue, soft pastel clouds, a picture perfect scene superimposed above a dead land.

Somewhere in that sky, a skyskimmer flits like a sparrow on the thermals.

Five hundred kilometres north, the land dips again into steppes, as if it were dropping, wearily to its knees. Eyes that trace the land might find themselves here inclined to try and look, vainly, below the horizon. Were they able to, they would have seen, nestled among the crags and cracks of the earth, a domed structure.

Look closely. It is the size of a small city district, kilometres in diameter. From above, it looks like a parrying shield abandoned, face up, upon the earth. It is chrome, and apparently featureless, an artificial aberration on the dead brown land.

Yet, among the cracks and crags of the surrounding steppes, light glints on something: heavy rail gun emplacements, design for surface to air fire, peek out, almost furtively, from caverns. Invisible tracking beams lance out from sensor arrays hung beneath their cannonade barrels, tracking the sky like the slowly turning heads of predatory beasts.

Somewhere far above a skyskimmer flits towards a sky lanced with targeting beams.

It cuts away from its course, suddenly, as if startled, and begins to descend in a low arc towards the earth. It’s landing gear slides out from beneath it, like talons.

The cannons, hidden within the cracked earth, remain silent.

Somewhere, in the depths of the dome, Elijah Avaron screams.