Excerpt - The Elders of Arkhide

CHAPTER ONE

Everybody in the Cooperative Realm thought the planet Arkhide was filled with monsters.


What would they think of this garden, then?


Mondrian Delacroix stepped through the door-field from Arkhide Orbital Station’s airless metal corridor into the gorgeous abundance of its garden. Her boots sank softly into the sandy plasticrete flooring. The gentle give stood a stark contrast to the unyielding metal of the rest of the station.


Arkhide Orbital had been built first for synthetic humans, not bags of bones and muscle like Mon.


Why in Safra’s name had Aimee Five asked her to come here, anyway?


She knew why.


Heather. It had to be Heather.

Mon pushed back the helmet of her atmosuit, corralled her wayward hair again, and took a deep breath of clean air. The rich loam of actual soil was a novelty sweet enough to awaken childhood memories of long walks with her foster parents.


Heather hadn’t been so lucky with her parents. How she’d become Mon’s responsibility, though, was all on Mon.


Blasted damsels in distress.


She tried to cast her thoughts toward the sweetness of the new grass and the old roses. The tang of moisture in the light breeze, the dew allowed to linger before being whirred away by the air scrubbers. The foliage, shimmering greens and golds like an emerald tapestry, rustling in the artificial breeze as if greeting an old friend.


Mon’s lip twisted wryly. She’d been here only once before, a short  eight months ago.


She’d come on a sort of diplomatic, mostly deliriously painful mission, towing seventeen-year-old Heather Quostov along with her like a stray kitten. A seventeen-going-on-thirty, astromechanical genius of a kitten.


With the synthetic humans’ help, they’d solved their mystery, and also found a temporary home for Heather. Well, Heather had found it. She’d begged to stay, to dive into all the new tech the synths might show her.


Thank Safra, Arkhide had said yes.


Staying here had saved the girl, for now, from the Cooperative’s greedy claws. Heather, like Mon, had an extremely rare skill. They could “hear” certain wavelengths normally far outside normal human range. The perception wasn’t just through their ears, but that’s how their brains liked to interpret it. 
Heather’s Listening abilities might be greater even than Mon’s. A fact Mon had omitted from the report she sent her Co-op bosses after she’d done the girl’s initial screening.


Living in the world was hard when you could sense every machine hum, every power line, every magnetic wave. Most Listeners couldn’t really function outside of special environments that offered a lot of accommodation. And a lot of training in self-control—which the Co-op was good at.


And then they owned you.


Until now.

Heather had devised a way to modify noise-canceling headphones to also block nearly eighty percent of the sounds only Listeners could sense.


It was going to change everything.


Now they could choose when to Listen and when not to. And they didn’t need the Co-op’s help to do it.


Mon slipped off her gloves and dipped a hand into the rich, loamy dirt of one of the flower beds. The cool, moist earth against her skin mirrored its tangible connection to the vibrant life it nourished. Not a Co-op base, for sure.


Heather’s invention had helped all the known Listeners in this sector. All one hundred twenty of them.


After Mon mustered out of Cooperative Central Command—her twenty years done done done!—she’d spent the last six months delivering Heather’s headsets far and wide. Watching the faces of the people the first time they switched the earphones on was sheer delight.


Arkhide’s patent attorneys had ensured Heather’s claim before Mon had let the Co-op see the headphones. Now Co-op Central had a license for the tech, and Heather had a passive income.


She would never need to muster in.


No Listener ever would.


Walking slow, avoiding the meeting she wasn’t quite late for, Mon trailed her fingertips over the delicate leaves of a nearby vine. Its buds might be berries soon.


Arkhide’s sun gave a lot of light to this garden, tucked into one of the two squared-off donuts that made up the space station. Half the garden’s outer wall and all the ceiling was clear to space, letting in the light and also giving a fair view of the planet below.


It was a strange angle, not quite center, not quite at the one-third mark. Mon didn’t doubt that it was the perfect angle for the light. Synthetic humans surely preferred precision over aesthetics.


Except, look at this garden. All manner of plantings separated into precise squares and triangles of foliage but allowed to be wild within them. Practical vegetable plots across the walk from a riot of pansy-like flowers. Balanced, beautiful, true.


Creepy, how pleasing they’d made it to human senses.


This new patent of Heather’s, surely it was just the first of many clever, patentable, things she would devise. She was the perfect kind of person for Arkhide, the system’s only world of synths and enhanced humans.


Were the Arkhideans really about to boot her off now? And why did they have to tell Mon that in person?


To collect her and take her away.


Blasted teenage damsels in distress.


Mon rounded a corner, heading toward that clearing in the center with the benches where they’d held the big negotiations. Back when she had a job. A job she never wanted, but at least it had given her a direction. Now, who was she? And who would she be to Heather if the synths decided to send the girl away?


Humans must seem so slow and ponderous to a people who could communicate with one another at the speed of thought. At the speed of multiplexed thought.


She remembered this stand of thick bamboo stalks, backed up to the open space. Focusing on it, and tuning down her Listener sense, blocking the clashing waves of all the mechanisms holding this station together, she could imagine she wasn’t on a station at all. But she was, and there was a problem.


As Mon stepped into the tiny diamond clearing, everything stilled for a heartbeat, the very air holding its breath. The familiar woven bamboo benches radiated an aura of tranquility, their graceful curves inviting peaceful repose.


Perfect place for an ambush.


“Captain.” The dramatic soprano shattered the illusion of solitude.


Mon wheeled towards the sound, hands half-raised to defend herself, every muscle tensing before her brain could override the well-trained response.


And then override the jolt of distrust and fear.


Aimee Five glided into view from the opposite corner, a human-shaped synth, at least from the shoulders up. Her shimmersilk headwrap and wide-skirted gown of vivid crimson were perfectly set against the bronze of her skin and the bed of shoulder-high corn behind her. Her elegance was meant to unsettle, Mon knew from experience. All crisp, porcelain lines and fluid movements.


Of course, she did have fancy wheels under that skirt for feet. But it wasn’t just her body’s composition that contributed to the perfection. Aimee Five was a well-practiced politician, having led the planet’s High Council for five eventful years.


“Station Chief.” Mon willed her shoulders to relax into a casual slouch, aiming for nonchalance. Trying not to let the synth know how much her presence raked claws of disquiet down Mon’s spine, even as her logical mind tried to tamp down her body’s ingrained fear of synths. “I’m surprised you called.”


Aimee Five’s full lips curved in a shadow smile. Her copper eyes, wide in their bronze human shape of a face, sparkled.


“Have a seat.”


Mon settled gingerly on one end of the curved bench where Aimee Five had sat during the negotiations. Where Aimee Five’s colleague, Allen, had sat. Where Mon’s ward, Heather, had begged to stay here on Arkhide.


Aimee Five propped her butt on the garden bench, nowhere near its woven-bamboo back. Her cool gaze roved over the lush garden surroundings.


Mon followed her line of sight. In the warm sun, the swaying bamboo had an almost hypnotic quality. All of it, such a sense of abundance, such a thrum of life.


A weighted pause hung between them as Mon grappled with her unease. Synthetic humans, with their artificial near-perfection and their enigmatic ways, creeped her out. Augmented humans were shocking, but full synths? They were the stuff of nightmares, the villains in every space opera she’d ever seen.


But despite the sheer alienness of Aimee Five—and despite that Little Miss Society voice inside Mon’s head screaming “Abomination!”—Mon had felt a begrudging respect for her from the first. It wasn’t just the woman’s sense of resilience, or her unruffled self-possession.


Aimee Five had led the government that sent the negotiator who bested the Cooperative on its own terms. Aimee Five herself, not even raising her voice, had talked down an infuriated diplomat during a murder investigation.


Mon had been sitting right next to the diplomat, watching it happen.


“Captain,” Aimee Five said. “We have a problem.”


Mon’s chest went tight, a flicker of apprehension. She had hoped to speak with Heather first. Find out what was up, before facing the authorities. But the girl was on off-comms, apparently helping out in some emergency.


“Is it Heather?” Mon asked, her voice carefully neutral. “I know she can be a handful.”


To Mon’s surprise, Aimee Five shook her head, her expression softening.


“Not at all. Heather is doing remarkably well. Her insights and innovations—and her energy, oh my—have made her many friends here. We’re thrilled to have her as part of our community.”


Relief washed over Mon, as if a heavy air tank had lifted from her shoulders. One less damsel to save.


But if she wasn’t here for Heather, what was she here for?


Obviously reading the unspoken question in her expression, Aimee Five leaned forward, her gaze intent.


“Actually, Mondrian Delacroix, it’s you I wanted to discuss.”


Click to read Chapter Two

from The Elders of Arkhide, available in January 2025 in ebook and paperback