It was the scented garden of paradise where the young men awoke, their senses stupefied by the spoonful of hashish they had taken down in the silken-draped tent of the grand Iman – erected at the front line west of the district of Khalkhal. Washed back into slow consciousness by the clean, fragrant scents of orchids and wild jasmine, and safely seconded within the high walls of the mountain-fortress of Alamut, their ephemeral visit to nirvana was complete; they were reborn as Fedayeen – engines of divine destruction.

On this, the first day in their new eden, the Isma’ili Iman, who was named Rukn al-Din Khurshah, was to raze the illusion of heaven that his captives were so beguiled by. After protracted negotiations with the leader of the Mongols, Khurshah had agreed the systematic and symbolic dismantling of his grandest fortresses, and the invaders’ mangonels had been secreted to the base of the castle walls during the night. Now, at daybreak, both engines of timber and iron, and engines of flesh and bone were awakening at once, and the walled garden of Alamut was to be changed forever.

The youngest and most beautiful of the newly-born Fedayeen used to be called Jalal Al’Haman. Now he was a faceless weapon, spellbound by the green and humid confection. As the first boulders smashed against the inner cloister, Jalal was already rappelling down the outer walls, curved ceremonial knife fixed tightly within his jaws, sailing like an eagle through the cool morning air. Farther back from the line, the Mongol leader watched in horror as his men drowned in rivers of blood, realising only in this terrible moment what sort of offering the Iman had gifted him.

The steady knight takes sword in hand

And wends his way through that misted land

Across the endless seas of sand

To the wood at the end of the world

Beyond the vale of ruined towers

Behind the hill that fog devours

Across the plain of impossible flowers

He rides, with cape unfurl’d

With tired eyes, behold at last

The fallen keep – a crumbling mass

Where Merlin’s ship of twinkling glass

Once sailed on a wave of pearls

He hears Queen Alice’s guiding grace

“Go forth,” she says, “to a wicked place,”

Where demons pace with a buck-goat’s face –

Saint Dwynwen’s power observe!”

Such tricksy mirth – too great to measure!

A forest feast; unending pleasure

Candles, flowers – every treasure

Dances through the night.

The song of pipe, the wail of fiddle

Our knight is waltzing in the middle

His fae dance partner whispers riddles

But he cannot get them right.

The knight feels sleep come o’er his head

Sweet Avalon’s roads his feet soon tread

That topsy-turvy path hath led

Through the curtain of twilight.

Sabatons strapped o’er boots of leather

Proud knight, thou art steel’d for great endeavour

The May-Queen speaks: “Our child, forever,

In the garden of delight!”

It was the scented garden of paradise where the young men awoke, their senses stupefied by the spoonful of hashish they had taken down in the silken-draped tent of the grand Iman – erected at the front line west of the district of Khalkhal. Washed back into slow consciousness by the clean, fragrant scents of orchids and wild jasmine, and safely seconded within the high walls of the mountain-fortress of Alamut, their ephemeral visit to nirvana was complete; they were reborn as Fedayeen – engines of divine destruction.

On this, the first day in their new eden, the Isma’ili Iman, who was named Rukn al-Din Khurshah, was to raze the illusion of heaven that his captives were so beguiled by. After protracted negotiations with the leader of the Mongols, Khurshah had agreed the systematic and symbolic dismantling of his grandest fortresses, and the invaders’ mangonels had been secreted to the base of the castle walls during the night. Now, at daybreak, both engines of timber and iron, and engines of flesh and bone were awakening at once, and the walled garden of Alamut was to be changed forever.

The youngest and most beautiful of the newly-born Fedayeen used to be called Jalal Al’Haman. Now he was a faceless weapon, spellbound by the green and humid confection. As the first boulders smashed against the inner cloister, Jalal was already rappelling down the outer walls, curved ceremonial knife fixed tightly within his jaws, sailing like an eagle through the cool morning air. Farther back from the line, the Mongol leader watched in horror as his men drowned in rivers of blood, realising only in this terrible moment what sort of offering the Iman had gifted him.

The steady knight takes sword in hand

And wends his way through that misted land

Across the endless seas of sand

To the wood at the end of the world

Beyond the vale of ruined towers

Behind the hill that fog devours

Across the plain of impossible flowers

He rides, with cape unfurl’d

With tired eyes, behold at last

The fallen keep – a crumbling mass

Where Merlin’s ship of twinkling glass

Once sailed on a wave of pearls

He hears Queen Alice’s guiding grace

“Go forth,” she says, “to a wicked place,”

Where demons pace with a buck-goat’s face –

Saint Dwynwen’s power observe!”

Such tricksy mirth – too great to measure!

A forest feast; unending pleasure

Candles, flowers – every treasure

Dances through the night.

The song of pipe, the wail of fiddle

Our knight is waltzing in the middle

His fae dance partner whispers riddles

But he cannot get them right.

The knight feels sleep come o’er his head

Sweet Avalon’s roads his feet soon tread

That topsy-turvy path hath led

Through the curtain of twilight.

Sabatons strapped o’er boots of leather

Proud knight, thou art steel’d for great endeavour

The May-Queen speaks: “Our child, forever,

In the garden of delight!”

The nitrofuel in the engine ignited just as the needle shot from its pressurised canister with a hiss and pierced the artery in Toxine’s neon-tatted neck. The coloured inks beneath her skin swirled and shifted like a Neptunian sky as the synthokrome surged through her bloodstream and into her brain. Her fingerless leather gloves squeaked as her knuckles tingled and tensed, and her grip tightened on the cockpit’s steering panel . She yanked the volume dial on the inbuilt AI synthesiser all the way up. One jackbooted foot smashed the jet pedal, the XTC-class skimmer thrummed and growled, and she sped off down the superhighway that led out of the industrial Spaceport District and back to Merchtown.

Toxine lowered her head as it rushed with the crackling euphoria of a hundred thousand electrified nerves, but kept her eyes up on the striplights of the deserted air-road. No one drove up here at this time of day – the only people you’d find in the industrial hyves in the evening were junkies and psychos. Like Toxine. She swept a hand back through her neon-pink mohawk, then put on her mirror-chrome box shades and grinned, exposing a colourful array of teeth mods in the shape of skulls, whose eyes lit up when she laughed. Everything was going as it should, as it always did. She glanced down at the hold-all beside her on the passenger seat of the skimmer. Inside was a haul of 500 million nupounds – at least six weeks’ rent. She reached up and clicked a glowing button behind her left ear. The vehicle interfaced with her corto-link firmware and gently wrestled control of the steering away from her hands, which she placed behind her head and thought about reclining the seat. The seat heard her, and slid slowly back as she closed her eyes. A thousand-thousand impossible fractals danced across the backs of her lids – this was the best ‘krome she’d had for a while. The synths rippled and pounded, and the skimmer purred smoothly as it raced towards the sparkling sunset of hydroclouds and asteroid dust. 

Then, in that moment of total oblivion, in that endless sea of plasma and electricity and rainbow-lightning that rushes and flows away towards a neon sunset for ever and ever… in that moment, everything fucked up. The dashboard displays of the XTC flickered several times and went dark. That fantastic kaleidoscope was bleached out by a harsh red wall of corto-alarms in her brain, and an irritating syntho-human voice proclaiming: “major malfunctional error detected in this skimmer – suspected sabotage. Warranties auto-voided. Please corto-link with your insurance policy holder. Your nearest law enforcement company and/or general corpolice unit will be automatically notified. Please have all twelve forms of legal identification ready. The vehicle doors will autolock in five… four… three…” 

“No, no, no!” Toxine screamed, opening the glovebox and grabbing her lazpistol, and fumbling with the seatbelt button. 

“Fuck!” she hissed, releasing the belt lock and grabbing her ‘krome spiker with her free hand.

“Two… one…”

Toxine rolled in mid-air and her titanium shoulder smashed into the tarmac. She tried to ignore the fractal patterns as she shut her eyes tightly and tumbled over and over, opening them just in time to see the fireball that used to be her XTC-class skimmer light up the clouds of carbosmog that hung low over the Spaceport District. Her modded arm auto-caught the safety barrier and gripped hard, and she hung there for a moment, unfathomably high while unfathomably high . 

Pulling herself up and over the railing, Toxine rappelled off the top of the nearest service gantry using the grappling wire of her utili-hand, and bounded down the stairs four at a time. She was a driver, a smuggler and a thief. She had spent the night doing all three and now she had lost her ride, her bounty and her anonymity. 

Her teeth mods lit up in a rainbow of LEDs as she dipped her face into her pack of smokes and pulled one out with her lips. She tried to fire up the lighter inside her index finger, but her modded arm was busted up from the crash and had shorted out. The wrist-grapple wouldn’t retract, either, and she hastily wound up the wire and stuffed it into her belt as she raced down the stairs towards the surface of the Saturnian moon of Hyperion. 

“There are seven million, two hundred and seventy eight thousand, eight hundred and forty six steps remaining before you reach the planetside,” the CPU in her brain explained, without being asked.

“Thanks,” she panted, spitting the unlit cigarette over the side of the creaking gantry. Beneath the electrical hydrostorms below, she could already see the blue-and-orange flashes of corpolice wingships, their lights amplified by the clouds of noxious industrial smog. She teased the grip of the lazpistol with her fingertips and tried to ape-walk in the shadowy sections of the gantry to stay out of sight. Howling nuclear winds shook the rattling metal and she held on tight to a girder and closed her eyes against the blasting particles. The ‘krome had peaked, but she still had half an hour of smooth stimulation left, and one more shot in the canister stashed in her uti-belt. 

An explosion rocked the gantry fifty metres below as the first corpolice wingship hovered smoothly upwards through the storm. An auto-generated voice boomed from speakers on the patrol drone: “Anti-citizen, please do not move. You have been found… pre-guilty… of… fourteen… transgressions… and… three… supertransgressions. Your estimated punishment has been calculated at… four… Years… on the Titan mining colony… and… eighteen… months… of corpolice incarceration. Thank you.”

“Welcome,” Toxine muttered, as she unravelled the bunch of grappling wire from her belt and swung it lasso-like towards the dorsal fin of the hovering wingship. It connected, and she kicked her jackboots off a support girder as hard as she could, and launched forward into a sprint, hurdling over the railing and swan-diving through the air, falling into a pendular swing on the wire as lazbeams shot through the clouds and blasted chunks of molten metal away from the superhighway’s main struts. As she swung smoothly through the stormy air, the grappling wire conducted the electrical storm and cracked and flickered with forks of blue lightning. 

Toxine smashed into the port-side fin of the wingship and gripped it tightly. Synthetic adrenochrome had been produced and marketed on the Saturnian colonies for decades, but it was only the homemade, back-alley, pressurised synthokrome that would really hit the spot for connoisseurs like Tox. Her skull-teeth shimmered in rainbow waves as they cackled through tiny speakers, and she basked in the glorious madness as she dug her boots into the ship’s rain-soaked fuselage and crawled towards the cockpit’s hatch.

A lazbeam whined overhead and she pressed her face flat against the cold metal of the ship to avoid it being blown off. While one hand found grip inside one of the exhaust vents and pulled her forward, the other felt the singed tips of her mohawk. “Shit,” she said, as her jackboots slipped and slid, trying to find purchase on the smooth hull. As she belly-crawled to the edge of the window hatch and fumbled with the emergency-release catches, she could just make out the riot-helmet of the corpolice executor in the cockpit, through the steam and condensation. The pneumatic catches depressurised, and the hatch lifted away, to reveal the pilot frantically trying to spin in his seat. Toxine saw the glint of steel in his hand, but she was quicker. “Hey,” she grinned, pressed the barrel of her lazpistol against his shocked face and squeezed the trigger. She shut her eyes for a moment against the plasma-bright flash of energy, and opened them to see the smouldering, smoking U-shape that used to be the pilot’s head, a neat hole mined through it and into the dashboard controls on the other side.

The lazbeam had shorted-out the ship’s electrics and it was a dark, dead weight in the stormy sky as she frantically climbed into the pilot’s seat and started hitting switches. There was a deep, metallic creaking as the wingship began to nosedive by its starboard side, and as Toxine looked through the windscreen she could see the lights of Hyperion’s Downtown below. “Shit, shit, shit!” she exclaimed, banging her fists on random panels, and pulling at the primary breaker switch to try and reboot the ship’s control system. Nothing. The ship’s aerofoils were whining and screaming now as it fell through the fluro-orange sky with greater and greater velocity. Lazbeams shot past the ship in every direction, lighting up the noxious clouds. Tox could still hear the other wingships auto-generating newer crimes as she commited them. A second corpolice fleet was hovering silently into view in front of her, their smartguns already whirring up into rapidfire mode.

Toxine stood up out of the pilot’s seat, the acid rain stinging her face as she raised her modded titanium arm skyward, and the lightning of the electrical storm once again began to crackle and conduct. As the current surged down through her metal fingertips , she smashed her hand down as hard as she could against the ship’s hull. Hundreds of spiderwebs of blue and white electricity rippled over the wingship and the electrical systems flickered into life, to the sound of a dozen warning alerts from the control panel.

Toxine laughed uncontrollably at the euphoric chaos as she yanked the steering panel down as hard as she could, and reversed the wingship’s nosedive, sailing upwards through the electrical storm. As she looked around and saw the heavy gunships surrounding her in every direction, she loaded her last dose of synthokrome into her spiker and tilted the ship towards the sunset. Then, there only was the hiss of the canister, the tingling fingers and toes, the kaleidoscope of colour, the glorious oblivion, and the endless, sparkling, Hyperion sunset, stretching off into infinity.

The morning mist makes not a sound

Queen Alice’s feet touch soft the ground

On either side her bed surround

Soft muslin drapes, quite thin.

Her eyes move slow from thing to thing

Her breakfast tray, the feast within

But in her spread no letters seen

She calls the messenger in.

“My Queen,” he starts, then his words trail

Away – she stares through muslin veil

“A strike, ma’am, in the Royal Mail,

Has caused us much chagrin!”

She smiles sweetly, and with no word

She grasps quite firm a nearby sword

“I strike you back!” is quickly heard

And his head falls in the bin.

He rises from his knee, to stand

Queen Alice lifts her patron hand

Upon her finger rests a band

Of garnets set in gold.

His grateful lips receive her gift

Her golden charge is taken swift

His want is given shortest shrift

For she knows her knight is bold.

Queen Alice must remain in power

Resplendent in the tallest tower

He will not pluck her fairest flower

She gives, and he beholds.

The autumn night falls swift indeed

The sun’s rays duskways fast recede

Cantering on his chestnut steed

The bold knight sings a song.

He picks his lute so daintily

‘Neath the peach-warm sky so painterly

The road is long but later he

Shall rest where he belongs.

The faeries from their slumber ‘waken

His melody for their feast, mistaken

Their jollity remains unshaken –

They join the evening throng.

The giddy hours pass on and on

The road wends forth, and thereupon

The tower, the faeries flee beyond

The veil of Avalon.

The nitrofuel in the engine ignited just as the needle shot from its pressurised canister with a hiss and pierced the artery in Toxine’s neon-tatted neck. The coloured inks beneath her skin swirled and shifted like a Neptunian sky as the synthokrome surged through her bloodstream and into her brain. Her fingerless leather gloves squeaked as her knuckles tingled and tensed, and her grip tightened on the cockpit’s steering panel . She yanked the volume dial on the inbuilt AI synthesiser all the way up. One jackbooted foot smashed the jet pedal, the XTC-class skimmer thrummed and growled, and she sped off down the superhighway that led out of the industrial Spaceport District and back to Merchtown.

Toxine lowered her head as it rushed with the crackling euphoria of a hundred thousand electrified nerves, but kept her eyes up on the striplights of the deserted air-road. No one drove up here at this time of day – the only people you’d find in the industrial hyves in the evening were junkies and psychos. Like Toxine. She swept a hand back through her neon-pink mohawk, then put on her mirror-chrome box shades and grinned, exposing a colourful array of teeth mods in the shape of skulls, whose eyes lit up when she laughed. Everything was going as it should, as it always did. She glanced down at the hold-all beside her on the passenger seat of the skimmer. Inside was a haul of 500 million nupounds – at least six weeks’ rent. She reached up and clicked a glowing button behind her left ear. The vehicle interfaced with her corto-link firmware and gently wrestled control of the steering away from her hands, which she placed behind her head and thought about reclining the seat. The seat heard her, and slid slowly back as she closed her eyes. A thousand-thousand impossible fractals danced across the backs of her lids – this was the best ‘krome she’d had for a while. The synths rippled and pounded, and the skimmer purred smoothly as it raced towards the sparkling sunset of hydroclouds and asteroid dust. 

Then, in that moment of total oblivion, in that endless sea of plasma and electricity and rainbow-lightning that rushes and flows away towards a neon sunset for ever and ever… in that moment, everything fucked up. The dashboard displays of the XTC flickered several times and went dark. That fantastic kaleidoscope was bleached out by a harsh red wall of corto-alarms in her brain, and an irritating syntho-human voice proclaiming: “major malfunctional error detected in this skimmer – suspected sabotage. Warranties auto-voided. Please corto-link with your insurance policy holder. Your nearest law enforcement company and/or general corpolice unit will be automatically notified. Please have all twelve forms of legal identification ready. The vehicle doors will autolock in five… four… three…” 

“No, no, no!” Toxine screamed, opening the glovebox and grabbing her lazpistol, and fumbling with the seatbelt button. 

“Fuck!” she hissed, releasing the belt lock and grabbing her ‘krome spiker with her free hand.

“Two… one…”

Toxine rolled in mid-air and her titanium shoulder smashed into the tarmac. She tried to ignore the fractal patterns as she shut her eyes tightly and tumbled over and over, opening them just in time to see the fireball that used to be her XTC-class skimmer light up the clouds of carbosmog that hung low over the Spaceport District. Her modded arm auto-caught the safety barrier and gripped hard, and she hung there for a moment, unfathomably high while unfathomably high . 

Pulling herself up and over the railing, Toxine rappelled off the top of the nearest service gantry using the grappling wire of her utili-hand, and bounded down the stairs four at a time. She was a driver, a smuggler and a thief. She had spent the night doing all three and now she had lost her ride, her bounty and her anonymity. 

Her teeth mods lit up in a rainbow of LEDs as she dipped her face into her pack of smokes and pulled one out with her lips. She tried to fire up the lighter inside her index finger, but her modded arm was busted up from the crash and had shorted out. The wrist-grapple wouldn’t retract, either, and she hastily wound up the wire and stuffed it into her belt as she raced down the stairs towards the surface of the Saturnian moon of Hyperion. 

“There are seven million, two hundred and seventy eight thousand, eight hundred and forty six steps remaining before you reach the planetside,” the CPU in her brain explained, without being asked.

“Thanks,” she panted, spitting the unlit cigarette over the side of the creaking gantry. Beneath the electrical hydrostorms below, she could already see the blue-and-orange flashes of corpolice wingships, their lights amplified by the clouds of noxious industrial smog. She teased the grip of the lazpistol with her fingertips and tried to ape-walk in the shadowy sections of the gantry to stay out of sight. Howling nuclear winds shook the rattling metal and she held on tight to a girder and closed her eyes against the blasting particles. The ‘krome had peaked, but she still had half an hour of smooth stimulation left, and one more shot in the canister stashed in her uti-belt. 

An explosion rocked the gantry fifty metres below as the first corpolice wingship hovered smoothly upwards through the storm. An auto-generated voice boomed from speakers on the patrol drone: “Anti-citizen, please do not move. You have been found… pre-guilty… of… fourteen… transgressions… and… three… supertransgressions. Your estimated punishment has been calculated at… four… Years… on the Titan mining colony… and… eighteen… months… of corpolice incarceration. Thank you.”

“Welcome,” Toxine muttered, as she unravelled the bunch of grappling wire from her belt and swung it lasso-like towards the dorsal fin of the hovering wingship. It connected, and she kicked her jackboots off a support girder as hard as she could, and launched forward into a sprint, hurdling over the railing and swan-diving through the air, falling into a pendular swing on the wire as lazbeams shot through the clouds and blasted chunks of molten metal away from the superhighway’s main struts. As she swung smoothly through the stormy air, the grappling wire conducted the electrical storm and cracked and flickered with forks of blue lightning. 

Toxine smashed into the port-side fin of the wingship and gripped it tightly. Synthetic adrenochrome had been produced and marketed on the Saturnian colonies for decades, but it was only the homemade, back-alley, pressurised synthokrome that would really hit the spot for connoisseurs like Tox. Her skull-teeth shimmered in rainbow waves as they cackled through tiny speakers, and she basked in the glorious madness as she dug her boots into the ship’s rain-soaked fuselage and crawled towards the cockpit’s hatch.

A lazbeam whined overhead and she pressed her face flat against the cold metal of the ship to avoid it being blown off. While one hand found grip inside one of the exhaust vents and pulled her forward, the other felt the singed tips of her mohawk. “Shit,” she said, as her jackboots slipped and slid, trying to find purchase on the smooth hull. As she belly-crawled to the edge of the window hatch and fumbled with the emergency-release catches, she could just make out the riot-helmet of the corpolice executor in the cockpit, through the steam and condensation. The pneumatic catches depressurised, and the hatch lifted away, to reveal the pilot frantically trying to spin in his seat. Toxine saw the glint of steel in his hand, but she was quicker. “Hey,” she grinned, pressed the barrel of her lazpistol against his shocked face and squeezed the trigger. She shut her eyes for a moment against the plasma-bright flash of energy, and opened them to see the smouldering, smoking U-shape that used to be the pilot’s head, a neat hole mined through it and into the dashboard controls on the other side.

The lazbeam had shorted-out the ship’s electrics and it was a dark, dead weight in the stormy sky as she frantically climbed into the pilot’s seat and started hitting switches. There was a deep, metallic creaking as the wingship began to nosedive by its starboard side, and as Toxine looked through the windscreen she could see the lights of Hyperion’s Downtown below. “Shit, shit, shit!” she exclaimed, banging her fists on random panels, and pulling at the primary breaker switch to try and reboot the ship’s control system. Nothing. The ship’s aerofoils were whining and screaming now as it fell through the fluro-orange sky with greater and greater velocity. Lazbeams shot past the ship in every direction, lighting up the noxious clouds. Tox could still hear the other wingships auto-generating newer crimes as she commited them. A second corpolice fleet was hovering silently into view in front of her, their smartguns already whirring up into rapidfire mode.

Toxine stood up out of the pilot’s seat, the acid rain stinging her face as she raised her modded titanium arm skyward, and the lightning of the electrical storm once again began to crackle and conduct. As the current surged down through her metal fingertips , she smashed her hand down as hard as she could against the ship’s hull. Hundreds of spiderwebs of blue and white electricity rippled over the wingship and the electrical systems flickered into life, to the sound of a dozen warning alerts from the control panel.

Toxine laughed uncontrollably at the euphoric chaos as she yanked the steering panel down as hard as she could, and reversed the wingship’s nosedive, sailing upwards through the electrical storm. As she looked around and saw the heavy gunships surrounding her in every direction, she loaded her last dose of synthokrome into her spiker and tilted the ship towards the sunset. Then, there only was the hiss of the canister, the tingling fingers and toes, the kaleidoscope of colour, the glorious oblivion, and the endless, sparkling, Hyperion sunset, stretching off into infinity.

The morning mist makes not a sound

Queen Alice’s feet touch soft the ground

On either side her bed surround

Soft muslin drapes, quite thin.

Her eyes move slow from thing to thing

Her breakfast tray, the feast within

But in her spread no letters seen

She calls the messenger in.

“My Queen,” he starts, then his words trail

Away – she stares through muslin veil

“A strike, ma’am, in the Royal Mail,

Has caused us much chagrin!”

She smiles sweetly, and with no word

She grasps quite firm a nearby sword

“I strike you back!” is quickly heard

And his head falls in the bin.

He rises from his knee, to stand

Queen Alice lifts her patron hand

Upon her finger rests a band

Of garnets set in gold.

His grateful lips receive her gift

Her golden charge is taken swift

His want is given shortest shrift

For she knows her knight is bold.

Queen Alice must remain in power

Resplendent in the tallest tower

He will not pluck her fairest flower

She gives, and he beholds.

The autumn night falls swift indeed

The sun’s rays duskways fast recede

Cantering on his chestnut steed

The bold knight sings a song.

He picks his lute so daintily

‘Neath the peach-warm sky so painterly

The road is long but later he

Shall rest where he belongs.

The faeries from their slumber ‘waken

His melody for their feast, mistaken

Their jollity remains unshaken –

They join the evening throng.

The giddy hours pass on and on

The road wends forth, and thereupon

The tower, the faeries flee beyond

The veil of Avalon.