Na’Sara loved the sensations of spaceflight. Her psionic senses were attuned strongly enough that she felt the shift into hyperspace, and it always did pleasant things to her physiology, sent shivers down her spine, and left her tingling with delight. It was rare, really, that she didn’t enjoy the flight between planets…

…but having to handle all the paperwork from her last mission would do it. She barely even registered the shivers as her mind was too deeply in the minutiae of the report, and even that wasn’t going as fast as it should be.

Her mind kept going back to the masseur, the human in whose hands she’d literally dazed off, who’d (she was fairly sure) drugged her with a serum her species was uniquely vulnerable, and who’d fucked her when she reawakened. There was nothing in what he had done that she shouldn’t take offence to. She knew that, objectively, but somehow when she thought about the liberties he had taken, the deliberateness of his preparing drugs just for her species, she found only a slow-burning happiness and contentment.

After a while her reports ceased to be written. One hand moved from the keyboard and rested on the desk; her head-fronds twined behind her head, stroking and rubbing against each other, and her other hand crept between the folds of her robes, fingers quivering with something between sense-memory and Starsoul-honed recall.

The idea and the memory were seductive, she decided, enjoying her own wetness as her fingers curled within her. Her eyes closed, the better to relive the experience, and she lost herself for some time, floating on a sea of pleasure.

Fragments of conversation passed through her mind, something between memory and dream.

“You’re doing so well. Such a good girl, and so happy. The happier you feel, the easier it is to comply. And you want so much to comply, don’t you?”

“….Yes. I want to comply.”

“Compliance makes you happy. You’re so used to taking guidance from the Starsoul, after all. You have plenty of practice complying with the wishes of others. You’ve been trained to it. And the Order trained you well, didn’t it?”

“The Order trained me well. I’ve been trained to comply.”

“So if you simply comply with someone else’s wishes, not the Starsoul, it will still feel fulfilling, won’t it?”

“It will still feel fulfilling.”

“Such a good girl.”

Imagining that moment of unguarded, enthusiastic praise pushed her over the edge. She bit down on her lip to keep from crying out, but just as she had less than a day earlier, she allowed the masseur’s voice and intent to control when and how she felt pleasure.

It was a forbidden fantasy, of course. Perhaps, she told herself, that was why it appealed so much, why she might imagine those words. It would, of course, be a terrible violation of her oaths to the order if it were to happen for real. But perhaps she’d enjoy fantasies like that again.

Duty was so often a reason to deny herself pleasure, to deny herself the things she’d earned, worked hard for, deserved. Duty in this context seemed a lot more enticing.

*

Gradinar was an old world, one whose original civilisation had risen, built towering structures, begun to settle its moons, and destroyed itself on the surface through mighty weapons when the Order was still developing. By the time the planet had been found again through further explorers, the survivors of its war - the moon settlers - had also died out, though the reason for this was hotly disputed by scholars; their own records had chronicled the terror on the ground, but had left what was happening with their own deaths uncertain.

The old cities had been colonised afresh, the technology of the ancients lovingly if uncertainly restored, and new plants cultivated in soil enriched by the slow death of an older agriculture. Far from Homeworld, Gradinar was one of many fringe worlds which made their own law and did not pay their taxes on; they were not, however, outside the reach of the Order. And that was especially true when rumours abounded of sorcery, a practice which had been carried out openly on many worlds before the Order.

All this Na’Sara knew with certainty; she believed that the issues on Gradinar had been exacerbated by rampant sorcery among its original inhabitants, who had not understood how dangerous it could be to curdle the Starsoul with their rage, but was not so sure. She did know, if only through Tanner’s briefing, that they were to attend the clandestine sale of artefacts of sorcery. It was easy to assume sorcery had ruined everything there, but she reminded herself again - the Order required rationality and precision. It frowned on emotion when that emotion was not channelling inspiration from the Starsoul. And if you were not sure, it taught that you should assume you were not inspired.

Sitting in the cockpit alongside Marshal Tanner as they approached the planet, Na’Sara studied the scars of Gradinar’s ancient wars, great rents in the surface of the planet visible from above the atmosphere, foul green clouds escaping from some of the deeper trenches. Erosion and natural processes had had centuries to begin to soften these scars, but had had almost no effect so far.

“Where are we going?” she asked. Tanner drew a deep breath. “I don’t know yet. We land at the one spaceport, and I imagine any auction will be within easy travel of the same place - but I can’t be sure. We’ll have many leads to run down.” He glanced across to her. “I know we rarely work solo now, but it might be essential here, Na’Sara. I assume you have the same confidence as ever?”

She inclined her head in a slight bow, eyes still on the planet. Her head-fronds were more expressive, twitching with anticipation. Even without looking at her superior, she could feel the smile on his lips, the confidence he had in her. Not because he had been the one to teach her, but because she was proven.

“Good,” Tanner said. While he said nothing of the sort, through the Starsoul she could feel his pride.

Another member of the Order might have rightly chided the Marshal for pride, which could misdirect - but not one whose training had come from Tanner.

She called up a map of the area surrounding the spaceport, a holographic globe shimmering in front of her seat. The scars of the planet were still visible here, as were six not-quite-evenly spaced constellations of lights, with various single lights scattered between. “Five central settlements,” Tanner remarked as she did, “aside from the usual town full of logistics surrounding any spaceport. Plus various smaller hubs as the new agriculture expands. There’s no budget here for terraforming - reconquering the planet has taken a century, and is far from complete.”

Na’Sara put out her hand, gripped the side of the projection, and turned the planet slightly, revealing another small constellation a little more than a quarter of the way around the planet from the spaceport.

“Very good,” Tanner said, his voice heavy with amusement. “Is this instinct, impulse, or the Starsoul?”

“Only time will tell,” she replied. If she was correct, it would be ascribed to the Starsoul and her own intuitive power in reports. If she was incorrect, he would joke about her impulses for months, but the report would suggest instinct.

“I take it you want to look for this one, then?”

“Many human settlements are happier to talk with another human than an Ouhanian,” she said. “There will be far more talking on the other path.”

She looked across to him this time. He shook his head gently but she could see his amusement. “It’s not a good excuse,” he said, gently but firmly. “It will suffice today, though. Because you found it. Your intuition is strong here - and we will need that.”

*

The spaceport was busy as they came in for landing; a couple of commercial traders but also a number of private craft, many of them visibly sporting defensive weapon emplacements. It was a perfectly reasonable precaution to take out on the fringe, where official support was rarer, but she was suspicious of these craft all the same. There were many reasons this might happen, but enough of them were bad that she wanted to be aware of them.

After disembarking she and Tanner secured groundskiffs for themselves at a rental hut, said their temporary goodbyes and set out in different directions. Na’Sara followed what was obviously a safe route out of the city for five minutes before turning off the road and cresting a hill. There she spent an hour quietly watching traffic out of the city, studying the skiffs and tractors that passed by on the route she was taking.

Three of them were rental units. There were multiple offworlders travelling the same way she was going; that brought a smile to her lips. On this ruined world, less than half repaired, with a total population of not much more than a million, how many offworlders would travel this way unless something special was happening?

She knew the trip would take her, along with the others, several days. The charge on a groundskiff would last days at a time; knowing now that she would have competition, once she settled back into the groundskiff’s control chair she closed her eyes and centred herself.

There was something off about the Starsoul as she reached out to it, something about it that felt wrong, somehow, a shadowy slipperiness that made little sense to her mind and which she had never experienced before. Yet it came as easily as ever, and with her Order training she took an infinitesimal portion of the Starsoul into herself. This was part of an Order secret; it allowed her to send portions of her own mind dormant, the Starsoul filling those spaces, operating for her. A puppet of the Starsoul, she thought whimsically, then shivered at such an obviously-wrong idea, burying the thought that there was any pleasure to that shiver.

It must just be something about how the Starsoul was different in this place, probably the result of the grand sorceries once worked there. A taint to the Starsoul which would cleanse only with enough time.

If she had not brought some of it inside her to achieve her goals, she would have seen this as a cause for concern. Would have fought to clear her mind and cleanse herself of the effects. And if she had not, recently, become more devoted to her duty than her instincts by the intervention of another, Na’Sara might have realised even then.

But duty demanded that she reach her destination ahead of the other offworlders. How else could she be confident her goal was still there to secure?

And so she gave herself up into an Order-trained focus trance, in which the Starsoul replaced her waking mind, her body settling into stillness except to twitch the controls of her groundskiff.

She would have passed her competitors long ago, simply because they must sleep, before she woke again.

Her eyes took on a lavender sheen as the Starsoul piloted her toward the seeds of the same strange, mystical taint which now spread through her nerves…

*

Despite her planning, her conscious mind started to unfurl from within her before she had expected. Another skiff had been travelling at similar speeds and she realised, later than she should have done, that her rival had simply brought two or more drivers. She snapped to, eyes clearing of all but the faintest touch of lavender, when the other skiff, engine roaring, sped up behind her and slewed across in a collision course.

Na’Sara took this in within a heartbeat. Muscles which had been as dormant as her mind uncoiled without ache or cramp. Her brain jerked back into full activity - well, almost, but the portion still containing the tainted Starsoul left the rest of her mind thinking she was firmly in control of all of her faculties.

She jerked at her own controls and stomped on the brake, slowing the skiff even as she spun away from the collision, avoiding her opponents’ first pass.

As the other groundskiff appeared before her, she disengaged her drive harness and leaped, calling on her psionic focus and the might of the Starsoul.

Her energy blade ignited a heartbeat before she landed atop the engine block of her attackers’ vehicle; she reversed her grip on the blade and drove it down into the engine.

There was a gout of unpleasant black smoke, a sudden change from engine roar to whine, and the vehicle lurched.

Her intuitive faculty was ahead of the lurch; she stayed upright, anticipating instinctively just how the vehicle would rock.

She kept the blade alive as she leaped again, a graceful backflip the arc of which ended back on her own slowing skiff. The blade tore through more of the engine as she leaped.

In a twinkling she was back in her seat and accelerating away again, her sword doused and returned to her belt. Her aggressors, meanwhile, would be left behind; even if they had an engineer, too much of their vehicle had been destroyed by the intensity of the blade for repairs to be quick. They would still be on the path when other competition caught up with them, and as such the couple of energy bolts that blazed past her vehicle were the last interaction she expected to have with them until she was ready to return.

Na’Sara felt her adrenalin fall away to be replaced by a rush of satisfaction. Not, she told herself firmly, of gleeful triumph, which would be completely wrong, and which in any case was not what she felt. That… enthusiasm… in the hindbrain wasn’t anything unreasonable.

She had stranded her enemies for a while, but there were others on the road; the lavender hint was starting to deepen again in her eyes as she reached back into the focus trance.

*

The other settlements they’d observed on the map were named as cities. This one was known as Farside; a sign she passed on the last day of her trek gave a fuller name. Farside University was an unprepossessing place. It had some attempts at agriculture nearby; a series of quarter-mile-long hydroponic growhouses and, in the one field where plants grew again, a few animals grazed who doubtless provided eggs, milk, or in one case, both. There were dozens of squat, unprepossessing buildings which were festooned with lights, communication dishes, and all manner of activity. And beyond them, Na’Sara could see a dark mountain, its rock black enough to shadow against the darkened sky, and on its slopes, the shadows of a city much older than Farside.

She saw at once what was happening here. The pursuit of knowledge was, even on Homeworld, often followed into pathways that endangered not only the seeker of knowledge but those who happened to live around them. On any world with space enough to tuck advanced studies away from the uninterested eyes of the general populace, the pursuit of knowledge would often see at least some scholars walk paths that should never be trod - sometimes those universities were exclusively to teach forbidden knowledge. (Or more often, knowledge which had never been forbidden but should certainly have been forgotten.)

Somewhere in all of what lay before her, she was certain, were artefacts of sorcery. Forbidden items, whether benign or evil, because their very presence was always a detriment to the lives of those around them - even, perhaps especially, when nobody saw the difficulties.

Someone had found them, or at least found some of them.

That was why she was there.

As the groundskiff moved ever closer she debated whether to start in the ancient city or in the university. There was every likelihood thieves looking to sell them might hide them in either place, and there was no logical reason to bet on one over the over. And yet…

Na’Sara felt an unpleasant conviction that the artefacts would be somewhere in the dead, old city, at the site of their use, at the heart of the corruption of the Starsoul. Her eyes still held that faint lavender sheen, though she had no way of knowing it, but it spoke of the connection she already had open, the power amplifying her instinctive intuition.

Those sorcerous afterthoughts were pulling her, little by little, toward them, the Starsoul so deeply tainted on this world that it became a trap for any who tried to channel it.

As Na’Sara climbed from her groundskiff, a thought appeared in her head, seeming as far as she could detect to be her own.

They will be suspicious of the Order. I should go incognito.

Without hesitation or consideration she unsnapped the belt which bore the tools of her work and placed it across the groundskiff, then shed the robes of the Order. Underneath she wore close-fitting leggings and a torso-wrap in a pale grey, as she always did when combat might be expected. There were times when robes would get in the way.

She snapped her belt back into place, idly wishing she’d bought the dress she’d contemplating Tanner with. This outfit still made her look dangerous, but nobody would look twice at an Ouhanian dressed for pleasure. It would be a small deceit, but a satisfying and useful one.

Locking the skiff, she turned back to size up her task. In the middle of deciding a course of action, her deliberations were abruptly interrupted by another fully-formed thought which somehow emerged where others had been developing, leaving them gone.

The artefacts are in the ruins. Deep in the undercity. I should go there.

Her feet were leading her forward before she consciously registered the idea. From within Farside University, students, faculty, and support staff watched in confusion and tried to invent explanations which suited what they saw; a member of the Order had arrived, had removed their ceremonial robes, and now marched past the buildings where they might expect to find people into ill-lit, half-unexplored, messy ruins of a lost world, without so much as a check for guidance.

None of this made sense to them, and it would not have been clearer had they seen the dull violet tint to Ouhanian eyes, for which that was as alien a colour as it is for humans.

*

Whatever had once lived in this city had been taller than a typical human or Ouhanian, Na’Sara thought idly after her third or fourth turn deeper into the ruins. The ceilings were unusually high, the doors not only taller but wider than usual. There was almost nothing to be a source of light, and at first she had drawn the hilt of her energy blade, expecting to need it to guide her way.

As it happened, she hadn’t felt the need, and while a brief tremor of disquiet disturbed her mind at that, it left her thoughts as quickly as it appeared. Na’Sara went back to not worrying about that, and instead drew more deeply on the Starsoul to augment her senses. The more she did that, too, the better she felt, the more confident. She even found herself more certain of the directions she should be taking.

She wondered vaguely what the sorcery practised here had been intended for. Was this place part of the fall of Gradinar? Was there something done here which led to rampant destruction? Did the magicians who worked here strive to better their species, simply not understanding the terrible cost involved in corrupting and twisting the Starsoul? Or was this a den of those who turned power into pleasure, shutting out the world beyond in favour of ever greater debaucheries?

The truth was almost certainly some fusion of all. One of the Order’s most important teachings regarding sorcery was that its study was usually begun with good intentions. To understand something which seemed beyond your species. To sweeten a failed harvest. To win true love. To drive back aggressors bent on your conquest. There were as many reasons as people. But they were none of them worth the price, and Gradinar was proof of that. An ancient, advanced civilisation, lost because sorcery had become so common it had changed their world, turned the temperament of those on and around the planet, given them a shortcut to give in to their baser instincts.

The Order focused on the importance of rationality too strongly, both Na’Sara and Marshal Tanner believed, but this was not wrong, simply an overcorrection. Instinct was only to be trusted in places where the Starsoul remained pure, and therefore where you could be sure your impulses were born of your own intent.

Na’Sara found herself wondering how she’d avoided that problem. She’d drawn on a tainted Starsoul with confidence, and her every turn took her closer to the artefacts she was hunting. Proof if proof were needed that she was achieving her own goals, not any pushed on her from outside.

The bright purple glow of her eyes lit her way as she rounded corner after corner, head-fronds dancing with anticipation. Ahead of her, very dimly, only accessible through her heightened hearing, was the sound of voices, sibilants made harsh through echoes. She couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t know if they were in a language she’d recognise, couldn’t even tell how many speakers. Knowing they were up ahead was enough to make her cautious, though, and the energy blade hilt was unclipped from her belt.

Best to be ready. I should expect threats.

Proceeding more carefully, she found herself climbing now as well as turning, following the city’s paths further into and up the ruined mountain. Sorcerors gravitated to great heights or subterranean lows. Had the sorcery begun to save the city? Or had the city been formed around an auspicious place?

The whispers grew louder as she neared her target, and eventually resolved into words. Her own words or at least her own voice, it seemed, as if some strange clone had already made it to her goal.

The Ouhanian is coming. The circle is charged. I should make ready.

Worry and doubt penetrated her determination. She frowned, her head-fronds curling in on themselves in concern, and she faltered. And a moment later, her doubts vanished, her expression smoothed, and she continued walking, her eyes glowing a dull purple, casting the light she needed to see by.

A sacrifice is needed for full power. If she does not die, it will be me. I must be ready to kill.

It was like the messages that had appeared in her head earlier, but it made no sense to her. Instead it was part of someone else’s chain of thought. And yet…

…and yet it sounded like her? She felt her worries surge, abruptly remembered they had surged before, and wondered where they had gone.

She was struggling to hold onto her fears and worries as she rounded a corner into a large ritual space. Braziers had been kindled at the eight points of the ritual circle, emitting a sweet-smelling white smoke, their flames a pinkish red. Within the circle were two waiting humans. Na’Sara saw the violet glow in their eyes and immediately recognised the tainted corruption of the Starsoul in each. She was going to have to be on her-

The time has come. The time is right. I should walk into the circle.

Even as she recognised the thought as being not her own, Na’Sara walked forward into the circle, energy blade still dormant, the hilt held loose in her hand.

She knew now she was to be the sacrifice. Knew now that some of her thoughts were not her own. And that those thoughts were tricking her, pulling her away from her duty, would have her stand there to be gunned down, her blood to power whatever sorcery was happening here.

She felt so helpless.

But a member of the Order is never helpless…