Leandra slapped the screaming alarm cube and rubbed her eyes before burying her head in the pillow again. Ugh, too early…

A few minutes later she groaned and rolled out of her bunk, stretching as she padded her way into the communal area.

"Oh, morning, Lea. I just drank the last of the instant. Sorry." Her overly chipper, and well caffeinated roommate held up the empty pot apologetically.

“Nok! How could you? You knew I was pulling a double today!” The scowl she leveled at the curvy ysoki would send most others hurrying out of her way, but Nok just grinned and stretched up to kiss her on the cheek.

“I'll pick up more on the way home tonight, promise!" She rushed out the door in a swirl of activity and perfume, leaving Leandra to put the coffee pot in the sink.

Thirty minutes and a disappointingly lukewarm shower later (thanks again, Nok) Leandra stood in line at the popular coffee cart just outside Ixomander’s Throne, the Azlanti-themed casino where she was currently late for her job. She hopped from foot to foot, willing the line to move faster before Mo-var, the meticulous android running the cart, closed for their mid-morning break. Suddenly, an enormous vesk came hurtling out of nowhere and plowed into her. She was knocked onto the ground, while the vesk continued running. A willowy shirren helped her back on her feet before bolting after the vesk, shouting “Sorry!” over their shoulder.

Leandra dusted off her dark green pants and turned to see Mo-var pulling down their cart’s shudder. Damned tourists! Don’t they know how hard it is to keep this faux Azlanti crap clean? She threw her hands up in despair, yelling, “Come on! I was in line and everything before those junk jockeys pushed me over!” Mo-var ignored her, and she went to give the cart a swift kick but stopped when a glint from the ground caught her eye. A misshapen piece of metal and plastic laid on the sidewalk, most likely dropped by the fleeing vesk.

Leandra picked it up and shouted in the direction the two had ran. “Just because we live near a junkyard doesn’t mean you can litter!” She grumbled to herself about inconsiderate off-worlders and inflexible androids, absent-mindedly slipped the piece of trash into her pocket, and stepped into the casino.

---

Leandra stretched she trudged out of the casino, her back aching after a grueling double shift on her feet serving drinks to increasingly inebriated gamblers. Spying Mo-var’s coffee cart—now open for the evening rush—and knowing that Nok probably forgot to get more instant, she started to wander over. Her way was blocked by a pair of local gang members (True Warriors by the look of them—bunch of lowlifes) diving out of the way of the wide swing of a doshko, wielded by the same vesk from earlier in the day. This time, a lashunta woman followed, her hands glowing with magic.

“Really?” Leandra said out loud, too tired to properly process how much danger she was currently in. Mo-var, however, seemed to understand, quickly closing their cart window. Leandra was startled into action when a stray bullet from one of the True Warriors’ pistols struck the casino wall just a few feet from her. She scurried home, locked the deadbolts, and enabled the security system even though she knew it didn’t work properly. Nok had promised to get it fixed months ago.

---

Nok stumbled in, giggling and slightly tipsy. The security system let out a pair of weak, unconvincing beeps and gave up, but it was loud enough to startle Leandra awake from where she’d dozed off on the couch.

“Someone had a good night.”

Nok plopped onto the couch next to her. “Hot date with Rush! Oh, so much fun. You should come out with us one of these days! She even has a cute brother...” She chuckled, draping herself over Leandra.

“No time. We’re short-staffed at work. Maybe next week.” She pushed her friend off her lap with a laugh. Nok was always trying to set her up on dates—when she wasn’t on the prowl for her own that is. She’d gone on more than a few disastrous outings at the younger girl’s urging but hadn't clicked with any of her suitors. “Tell you what, I’ll make us both something to eat. You need something in your stomach.” She ruffled the hair beneath Nok’s ear on her way to the kitchenette.

---

The next day, Leandra had another double. Midway through, her feet and back were already aching and her ears were sweltering in her fake helmet, but she kept a smile firmly plastered on her face as she bustled between tables and the bar. Needing a break from fending off the advances of the junk jockeys who had hit a prize and enduring the glowering looks from the locals determined to lose all their cash, she gestured to her manager that she was going to briefly step outside.

She ordered a cup of her usual from Mo-var to boost her flagging energy and had barely taken a sip when her arm was jostled from behind, sending the drink flying.

“Oh. Come. On!” She was nearly in tears as she turned to see the shirren from the previous day. A ysoki stood next to them, looking sheepish, and the vesk and lashunta were over by the casino entrance.

“YOU!” Leandra gasped. “You owe me at least 3 cups of coffee!” She poked the shirren in the chest, whose antennae twitched in confusion. “First, you knocked me out of line, then you started that brawl in the street, and now you made me spill this one because you can’t bother to watch where you’re going!”

The big vesk lumbered up to them. “Is there a problem?” she rumbled.

“Yeah! You and your buddies keep making me lose my coffee and I’m getting sick of it!” Leandra’s shouting was beginning to draw a few gawkers, but she didn't care. “And another thing! You can’t just leave trash wherever you want!” She retrieved the piece of metal and plastic from her pocket and flung it at the vesk’s chest. The vesk fumbled with it for a moment but didn’t drop it. Her eyes widened as she took a better look at the scrap.

“Quig,” the vesk said, turning to the ysoki. “This is the other half of the keycard.”

“You dropped it?!” the ysoki asked incredulously.

“Uh, I guess so.” The vesk looked uncomfortable. She looked back at Leandra. “Hey, sorry about all this. Let me make it up to you. After all, I think you just saved us a lot of trouble.” She ordered an extra-large from Mo-var, handing over enough credits to cover the price a few times over. The android filled up a sizable travel mug with a secured lid and placed it in the cart’s window. Leandra scooped up the coffee and chugged half of it as if she were afraid it would get away.

“Thank you,” Leandra said. “I have to get back to work now.” She turned on her heel to re-enter the casino, hearing the other four begin to chatter excitedly with each other.

Later, she had quite the story to tell her roommate. Nok suspected the four were treasure hunters looking for a big score out in the junk, and they must have crossed the True Warriors in the process. Both of them speculated wildly as to what their “keycard” unlocked well into the night.

---

The following evening, the four approached Leandra on the casino floor. “There she is!” the vesk bellowed with a grin on her face. “My favorite Aeon Guard! We’ve got something for you!” She dropped a credstick onto Leandra’s tray.

A little wary, Leandra picked up the credstick, peeked at the display, and nearly fainted at the amount printed there. She wrapped her arm around the vesk’s waist in gratitude.

“Should be enough to keep you in coffee for a while,” the ysoki smirked. “And when you’re done squeezing Obo to death, we’ll have a round of your most expensive booze. In fact, make ‘em doubles. We’re celebrating another successful mission!”

The group cheered.

Illustration by Rustan Curman from Junker's Delight

About The Author

Misha Bushyager is a longtime gamer and designer working on making sure the next generation of geeks sees themselves represented. She's one of the founders of New Agenda Publishing and a founding curator for More Seats at the Table, a newsletter highlighting gender marginalized designers. She worked on Orun, #Feminism, Fate of Cthulhu, Lovecraftesque, Misspent Youth: Sell Out With Me, Masks: Unbound, and the as-yet-unpublished LARP Nightingales. She's a panelist, writer, editor, and sensitivity editor for tabletop RPGs and LARPs. You can find her on Twitter as @BGGameworks or on her website, blackgirlgameworks.com.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The earth shook. To Iphra, the rumbling sounded like a passing heavy transport. She realized she wouldn’t maintain her footing. Iphra fired her jump jets. Being in the air stabilized her enough to avoid a nasty fall from the ridgetop she had been standing on.

The tremor passed.

“Sergeant Udrinnel, report. End.” It was Lieutenant Markalane from the shuttle a couple miles away, her voice calm but insistent.

“I’m fine. That was a good one, eh, lieutenant? End,” said Iphra.

“Affirmative, sergeant. Our engineer clocked it at a solid six on the imperial scale. Deploy your final booster and return to the shuttle. Aftershocks are anticipated. End.”

“Acknowledged. End,” said Iphra.

Her mind wandered. She ignored Markalane checking in with other scouts. Iphra thought of the engineer, Winya, a gosclaw. Long, supple, feline—a real pro. Winya’s briefing had warned of quakes on Grodrum, but this one was the first the survey team had experienced.

Iphra looked for the safest way to descend the ridge, glancing at the map on her visor’s head-up display. Her final deployment marker lay half a mile away in a valley to the east. The landscape was barren, but it wasn’t boring. Minerals and crystals on Grodrum—the reason the survey team came here—gave the planet a multihued aspect that could be breathtaking.

Equally stunning was the Locus, an eerie, starlike body that illuminated this system. The briefing had said it was magical, not a “real” star, whatever that meant. Iphra turned to face it. The Locus hung low in the sky, shedding its white light through the thin atmosphere. Grodrum’s long day was dwindling.

Iphra began her descent, using her jump jets to avoid treacherous gaps. About halfway down, the ground shuddered again. A crashing sound to Iphra’s right sent her heart into her throat and activated her instincts. She fired her jump jets and leapt. Part of the ridge slid away under her, and she descended onto moving rock. Iphra fired her jump jets again.

“Come on! Come on! Come on!”

The second leap threw her clear of the slide zone. Iphra took cover on the downhill side of a solid-looking outcropping and crouched, leaning against the rock. She closed her eyes and caught her breath. Then, as she opened her eyes again, she spotted it: a jagged, beautiful pinnacle of white crystal jutted from the valley below. It hadn’t been there before. Iphra looked at her deployment marker and saw that the crystal wasn’t too far from it. A little north.

“Sergeant Udrinnel?! Please respond! End!”

Iphra realized she must have missed a communication from the lieutenant.

“Udrinnel here. Uh, I’m good. A little landslide, but we’re good. Uh… and lieutenant, a mass of crystal erupted from the planet’s surface near my deployment marker. Sending you a visual. Any change in my orders? End.”

“Stand by. But keep safe, sergeant. End.”

Iphra descended toward the deployment marker as she waited. When she reached level ground, she turned and looked back up the ridge, standing in the shadow of the hills. The landslide had revealed a fissure in the rock, or the quake had cracked the slope.

“Sergeant, proceed as planned. I’ve been advised the booster you’re deploying will still allow us a detailed scan of that crystal from our location. The concern is the area near the crystal might be unstable. Get it done and return to the shuttle. Let’s call it a day. End.”

“Aye, lieutenant. End,” said Iphra.

Disappointment rose. It would’ve been nice to see that crystal up close. To touch it. That sort of thing makes being a scout one of the best jobs in the imperial military. But orders were orders. Besides, Iphra supposed she might have another chance, after scans verified the area’s stability and geological content. She turned, stood, and gazed. The crystal’s tip glistened in the waning light of the Locus.

“Contact, contact!” The voice of Sergeant Enosh, another scout, erupted over the comm. Assault rifle bursts were audible in the background.

Iphra recalled the mission brief. Orbital probes had shown Grodrum bore only simple surface life. Nothing should be here to shoot at. Still, Iphra unslung her rifle as Lieutenant Markalane’s voice broke in over the comm again.

Iphra heard only the start of that exchange. In her peripheral vision, something massive, amorphous, and multilimbed emerged from the shadow on the rocky slope to her left. It struck Iphra three times before she could react. She fell. The impact knocked the wind out of her. Pain along her flank suggested broken ribs. Environmental force fields kicked on, patching cracks in the armor on her left arm and side.

The creature loomed over her, blocking the sky. It slid its malleable arms around her. Numerous orbs that glowed with white light focused on her, burning with malevolence. Were they eyes? Was this thing sapient?

The thoughts came unbidden. Iphra raised her rifle, levering it into automatic mode by muscle memory more than intent. She pressed the trigger. Horrid shrieking drowned out the rifle’s reports.

The monster recoiled. Unhindered even if it was injured, it lifted Iphra with it and squeezed. Sergeant Iphra Udrinnel’s vision went white with searing pain, then collapsed to black.

---

“Look alive, squad! The L.T. will be here shortly.”

Markalane heard the baritone bark as she rounded the corner into the palace’s parade yard. She folded her hands behind her. Pausing, she took in the troopers before her. The dominus, her lord, had assigned her soldiers, the expendable kind, for the next stage of her assignment.

She frowned.

In the yard, tromlins formed two neat lines. Bloodseekers, theropadal bipeds, stood alongside quadrupedal ceratopsid hardshells. These dinosaur-like people formed the rank and file of the dominus’s Alien Cohort. A barrel-shaped figure in light military plate, the rank of sergeant marked on his gorget, paced before them. The sergeant’s head, pale-furred and ursine, looked too small in the armor.

Illustration by Yun Huai Huang from Starfinder Adventure: The Liberation of Locus-1.

Markalane recognized this gathol—Sergeant Narg. Underneath the armor, she knew, Narg’s body was massive, covered in the same pale fur and several stonelike plates. His people were among the few in the Cohort tough enough and willing to keep fractious tromlins in line.

Turning to continue inspecting the squad, Narg spotted Markalane. He paused. Then, in the same sharp baritone, he said, “Officer on the field! Attention!”

Every soldier snapped into a formal stance. Markalane strode around the squad in silence, glaring at each soldier in turn. None moved. None dared return her gaze.

“We’ve been assigned a special mission,” she finally said. “We’re taking a mining team to a new system to recover a unique mineral. You are to keep order during this operation. Good Azlanti scouts died to make this mission possible, troopers. Honor them, me, and yourselves by performing your duties well. I expect no less.”

“Yes, lieutenant!” replied every tromlin in unison.

“Sergeant Narg.”

“Aye, Lieutenant Markalane?”

“The selected troopers must be ready to fly by oh seven hundred. Mining droids, security equipment, and remaining gear must be secured aboard the shuttle and ready for inspection then as well. That’s on you, this squad, and the other field sergeants. Got it?”

“Understood, lieutenant.”

“Good. Get it done.”

About The Author

Chris S. Sims is an RPG industry veteran. Starting in 2001, he has worked with or for numerous companies from Paizo and Wizards to Monte Cook Games and Undead Labs. This piece is his first flash fiction. Chris is American but currently lives in Austria with his wife, two daughters, and two cats. He recently made an RPG called Draculola with those daughters. When he isn't doing freelance writing or editing, Chris avoids sleep by cooking, meditating, playing games, playing with his kids, or something else entertaining. You can find out more about Chris and how to contact him at chrisssims.com.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The skittermander at the counter flexed his fingers and grinned. “What’ll it be, nufriend?”

“Nufriend?” Tono smirked. “Every night I come here and order the same thing, and suddenly you ain’t know me, Henig?”

Henig let out a deep chortle, as if it were emerging from his feet and rising out of his body. “No, no! It’s just that…” He leaned over the counter, inches from Tono’s face. “You know how the streets can be,” he whispered. “Funny business afoot, and all that. Don’t want anybody making off with your whereabouts, gree?”

Tono gave a gentle nod, the neon of the night glancing off her chrome dermal plate. She had been working on this side of the surface for only eight months, and even she had made enough enemies to know better than for any of them to know where she slept. If just one of their associates ever knew she also was willing to drive this far into the city just for a bowl of noodles and a conversation in the middle of the night, she’d be face down in the alley beside the shop with a fist-sized gap in her belly. Tono winced at the thought—she hadn’t scrounged enough recent work to pay for another check-up, let alone replace a cybernetic augmentation.

Strangely, her justification for habitually returning was twofold. For one thing, this part of the city was where all her informants were. For another, she grinned wide at the chef and said what she always said whenever he worried about her getting in trouble because of him. “You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout me, Hen… only nice people come by your shop.”

Illustration by Michael Soong from Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual.

“Is that right?” He chuckled again. “Then how come you’re here so often?”

Tono nodded in amused agreement before ordering a large bowl of the house special. She tried not to bring her work—or her difficult demeanor—to Henig’s shop whenever she could avoid it, but she knew she wasn’t easy to deal with. He probably didn’t know what she did, but word got around quickly. Which is why she regretted having to ask her next question. “Have you seen Mirai about?”

Henig raised an eyebrow. “Mirai? She in some kind o’ trouble?”

The apertures in Tono’s eyes tensed. She noticed it right away. She always trusted that Henig was smarter than the goofy, kindhearted cook he presented as. “You know something.”

Henig’s lower limbs continued pulling dough into thick noodles as he spoke. He glanced down pensively, and then toward the street, as if worried someone would find him. “Two folks in black came up the block asking for her, but I hadn’t actually seen her come out to the market in days. Made it sound like they’d been to her apartment… didn’t find nothing. If you’re asking for her…” He frowned. “Gotta think she’s on the run for some reason, gree?”

“But why?”

“You really askin’ me?” Henig shot her a wicked glare. “The same reasons you’d run. Is she in trouble?”

“I don’t know. I asked her to check something for me. Just a chat with some folks at Fythe Dynamics for a client… a routine interview with Sepp Yolen. I thought it was nothing…”

“Politely, I’ll ask.” Henig looked right at her. “Is it ever nothing with either of you?”

Tono struggled for the next words and resigned herself to just a shake of the head.

“Exactly.” He lit the stove behind him without looking. “I wish I had more to give you. Just… black suits, cold eyes, no manners. And one of ‘em, a lashunta woman, had a scar across the lip like so.” He made a diagonal downward motion across his own face, then shrugged. “Mean folks. Don’t want to see those two in a hurry again.”

Tono tilted her head. “The suits… d’you figure they were top-notch?”

“Maybe some of the most drift threads I’ve ever seen,” he said, finally casting an eye on the simmering stock pot behind him. “Probably thought I couldn’t tell the duds concealed armor. Figured they were well-paid hired hands of some sort.”

“Any insignias on the clothes?”

“No patches. Just a silver pin on the collar.” He wiped a large blue ceramic bowl and placed it in front of her. “Why?”

Tono smirked. “No reason at all. I’ll be back in a bit. And my food better be waiting.”

“Whatever you say, friend.”

Tono got up and stretched before strolling back down the busy market street beside the shop. This part had to be done carefully, she thought.

People tended to be very alert when they were tailing someone, after all.

Tono was paranoid, to be sure, but the more precisely Henig described this lashunta woman, the more obvious her presence became, just a few dozen feet away, watching them talk the entire time. She may have followed Tono the whole way, in fact, or even watched her leave her apartment. Without making eye contact, Tono sized the woman up. Slim, tall, lithe—the kind she figured made her coin in close combat rather than a gunfight. Even more careful, then.

Tono strolled toward where the agent stood—against the wall of a nearby bookstore—and squinted against the window. The lashunta didn’t flinch, but Tono knew better. Silence lingered in the air between them, mere inches apart. In that moment she knew they were both playing a calmness that would ready them for conflict at any moment. From that close, she could make out the vague imprint of a pair of blades under her jacket. She knew her appearance gave away her own game, as well: the quickdraw pocket in the right leg of her pants, wide enough for a sidearm, stored a static arc pistol specifically for moments like these.

“See something you like?” the lashunta said casually.

Tono didn’t even glance up at her. “So far, nothing seems especially interesting.”

“Oh, yeah?” The lashunta’s voice rose—the telltale sign that Tono had the slightest upper hand. “Hoping to find something in particular?”

“A challenge would be nice.”

Before the agent could react, Tono reached for the agent’s arm and twisted it behind her back, pinning the lashunta against the wall. Tono drew her pistol and aimed it at the small of the agent’s back, right beneath where her trapped fingers curled into a fist.

“What is wrong with y—”

“A great deal, actually,” Tono said. “But at the moment, the fact that I’m being tailed has me particularly on edge.”

“You’re being silly, lady!”

“Yeah?” Tono only needed to lift the agent’s arm for the tension and pain to increase. “Let’s check, then. Walk.”

They slowly made their way back to Henig’s counter, their demeanors strangely calm for the circumstances. When Henig saw her again, his eyes widened. “Yeah…” he said meekly. “That’s one of ‘em.”

“Was she nice to you?”

It took him only beat to pick up on the game Tono was playing. “Not one bit,” he said.

“See, my friend Henig here seems mild-mannered,” Tono said, nearly as low as a whisper. “But people tend to forget that he cuts his meat with the same sword that sears it, so I wouldn’t annoy him.”

“And what happens if I annoy you?” the agent said with a smirk.

“Scary part is, even I don’t know yet. Now talk.”

“I got nothing to—”

Henig slowly drew a skyfire sword from a drawer beneath the counter and brought it an inch from the lashunta’s face, just beneath the eyebrow. “Fine by us either way,” he said, igniting it just enough for a brief flicker of heat to grace her skin. “I hope you hate your face as much as we do…”

“Wait.” Tono sensed the faintest shift in the agent’s mood from composure to fear and back, but Henig would never see it.

“Fythe sent you?”

The agent hesitated before nodding. “The girl. She asks too many questions. We just had to nab her, make her afraid, you know? But…”

“You haven’t seen her either. So why are you following me?”

“Because…” The agent sighed. “The chairman asks us to do his wetwork when he doesn’t want to think about something. When he wants it to disappear. But Mirai? He won’t stop asking about her. He wants a meeting now, to ask for a job.”

It was Tono’s turn to be afraid. If Sepp Yolen wanted to meet, it could only mean trouble.

“You have a cruiser?” Tono growled in the agent’s ear.

The lashunta nodded.

“Good. We’re gonna take a ride. But first…” Tono reached into the woman’s jacket pocket, pulled out a credstick, and tossed it on the counter. “You’re gonna pay for my dinner.”

“That would be the nice thing to do, gree?” Henig said. “And only nice people come here.”

About the Author

Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. His debut poetry chapbook Can You Sign My Tentacle? is forthcoming from Interstellar Flight Press.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

“Give it your allsix. Give it your allsix.” The chipper voice sang out in the spacious green and yellow interior cockpit of the Veskarium Vanquisher mech. The sound of responding digital displays and humming power fields harmonized with the cheerful voice.

“Time to face the morning and make some nufriends!” A second, equally energetic voice joined in to complete the ditty and punctuated the song’s end with a series of additional digital keystrokes on floating vidscreens.

Sarotska watched with interest as the data appeared in front of her. The holographic light shined off her bright red scales, giving her a momentary violet complexion as she took in the display. Swiping the holographic data away with her claw, the vesk commander of the mech briefly closed her eyes.

“Quiet on deck. Bunkle, ready the plasma rifles. Jiji, I want to make sure the weapons core is ready to swap our output over at a moment’s notice.” Sarotska spoke the commands as her eyes re-opened and fixed on the alien landscape now visible through the small view slit that was only accessible from her position in the mech’s chest cavity cockpit.

The stone forests of Elytrio’s southern hemisphere were some of the most unnerving terrains that Sarotska had seen in her long time with Obsidian Spiders mercenary company. She’d battled the Azlanti Star Empire, the Swarm, and at least a half-dozen different types of outsiders who’d breached the Material Plane for one reason or another. She’d taken part in the second Scoured Stars invasion and inserted onto jungles where colossi walked like modern gods. Still, Elytrio had a feel completely unlike that of any world she’d walked on. It was a planet that appeared dead, yet wasn’t entirely done with the world of the living.

“Sorry about the singing, boss. It’s just, this place doesn’t seem right, ‘gree?” The statement and question came from Bunkle, one of two other operators onboard the mech with Sarotska. The electric blue skittermander turned around and looked up to Sarotska’s elevated position in the cockpit, his six arms continuing to manipulate controls around him as he scrunched his face.

“Yeah boss. I thought this place was supposed to be an irradiated wasteland, but there’s no sign of radiation. It’s just a bunch of weird, petrified trees.” The follow-up came from the other skittermander crewmember, the cherry-red Jiji, who kept her eyes forward, looking out from sensors and moving the mech’s twin plasma rifles at the smallest disturbance in the terrain.

Sarotska waved a dismissive claw while peering out the viewscreen. “Look. We’re here to find some missing Starfinders. Or, at the very least, their bodies. The Society paid for us because their team that went missing was pretty capable and it’s likely whatever took them down ambushed them in this area. So yes, I think something isn’t right here, but I think the only way we’re going to figure it out is if you keep you eyes on your screens, Bunkle.”

The blue skittermander crunched his face in a sour expression and stuck out his tongue before swiveling around to stare back at the mountain of data feeds that accumulated in front of him. Jiji chuckled from her position, though her wide eyes never left the constant flow of data.

“Got something, boss! Looks like a signal up ahead behind those rocks.” Jiji chirped from her station. The data quickly moved up to Sarotska’s station with a visual swish as it loaded onto her console.

“Hmmm...” Sarotska mused as she took in the data. “It looks like a blip of radiation from behind the rocks. Could be some leftover irradiated debris. Probably something the Starfinders would have investigated on their mission here.

“Bunkle, I’m going to move us closer. Keep the plasma rifles ready, just in case.” The commands emerged from Sarotska’s mouth, but she’d already put the mech in motion. One plodding step after another, the Vanquisher continued moving on its path. The roughly humanoid bulk of it crushed the cracked gray terrain around it, as the bulky chassis of the Vanquisher navigated through trees and debris.

The Vanquisher mech was something of an oddity of Veskarium-crafted mechs. It lacked the armor upgrades common on mechs like the Ripclaw or Warmander, and instead had been designed by Veskarium engineers for maximum destructive ranged combat. A Vanquisher boasted a pair of heavy plasma rifles, capable of devastating the land around it for a hundred feet. To mount such brazen weapons on its hull, the Vanquisher not only sacrificed heavy Veskarium armor, but it also lacked any sort of dedicated melee weapon beyond its ponderous legs.

“I’m getting something, boss... more radiation. It looks like... OH NO!” Jiji updated just in time for the crew to spot two things in their sensor displays.

The first was a gruesome cluster of bodies. Six skeletal figures, each with radically different equipment, were scattered at the base of the rock. The emblem of the Starfinder Society caught in a slight updraft off the tattered backpack of one of the unfortunate souls, letting the crew of the Vanquisher know that they’d found their targets.

The second sight was a sudden movement in the rocks. In an instant, the top rock seemed to ripple in the breeze, and then a moment later, it spouted thousands of cracks. As the crew tried to comprehend what they were seeing, the cracked rock burst into thousands of tiny forms that formed a swarming cloud.

“Jiji! What are we looking at here?” Sarotska demanded as she backed the Vanquisher off from the agitated lifeforms.

“High radiation, boss. Looks like it’s a colony of insects that fed off the radiation. Their wings are some kind of shielding material, so that’s why we couldn’t scan them earlier.” Jiji blathered as she scanned streams of incoming data and manipulated the information with her arms, sending necessary data to both Sarotska and Bunkle.

Outside the Vanquisher, the swarm continued to grow as more of the nearby “rocks” sluffed away to unleash droning insects that joined their kin in a growing ball. Instinctively reacting to the mounting threat, Sarotska moved the Vanquisher back several paces, with each step causing the swarm to reflexively discorporate or extend in random directions. Then, an instant after the mech came to a plodding stop, the swarm engulfed the mech and alert sirens blared.

“Radiation increasing! The outer shields have burst. The outer hull is melting!” Jiji continued to deliver verbal updates, despite the information displays Sarotska had in front of her to confirm the damage.

“Bunkle, I think it’s time that we give our new friends a show of force.” Sarotska put distinct emphasis on the word “friends,” employing the tonal meanings of the Vesk language to let her crewmember know that these insects were to be immediately recognized as hostiles and targeted immediately.

Illustration by Michele Giorgi from Starfinder Tech Revolution.

A moment later, two beams of bright white and blue plasma streamed out from the twin rifles mounted on the Vanquisher’s upper limbs. The swarm danced around the beams, and while some of the insects fell into electrified husks, others in the swarm seemed to bloat and expand off some of the energy weapons fire that poured into them.

“Looks like they’re eating most of the plasma, boss. It’s just like how they eat radiation here.” Jiji reported as the cockpit shook with another violent impact from the swarm. “Outer hull integrity is down fifty percent. Ammo reserve number one is jammed!”

Sarotska took a moment. She closed her eyes again, and breathed as time slowed around her. She assimilated the verbal updates from Jiji, the scores of tactical data that flooded her vision, and then saw the swarm through the viewport in her station.

With a flash of white teeth, Sarotska opened her eyes and she fell back into the moment.

“Jiji, shift the weapons core energy to siphon high-frequencies into the rifles. Override the fire mixture since they’re feeding on that. Bunkle, get ready to make the next two shots count.” As the commands issued from her, Sarotska took control of the Vanquisher’s movement systems and siphoned from the power core to initiate a stomping trample maneuver—the only reliable melee option available to the mech. The stomping behemoth moved through the swarm, which parted at its sudden burst of speed.

Shifting on its ponderous legs, the Vanquisher made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn as Sarotska steadied the moving mech with manual controls from her station. Jiji continued adjusting screens as she desperately sent energy streaming from the rear-mounted weapon core into the twin plasma rifles. Finally, Bunkle rested his upper arms behind his head, while his remaining two sets of arms both went to work lining up shots through the Vanquisher’s autotargeting system.

“Guess today’s not the day for nufriends, ‘gree?”

A stream of electrified air blasted out from the rifle arms, momentarily deafening the cockpit’s occupants. Instead of the fiery plasma that previously emerged, waves of sonic resonance accented by arcs of lighting flew out in a straight line toward the swarm of insects. The twin lines pulverized the swarm together, where arcs of electricity shot between the insects, baking their bodies to dust in an instant.

“We did it!” Jiji shouted, leaping atop her piloting chair.

“Was there ever a doubt?” Bunkle followed-up, cracking the fingers of his lower arms while his upper arms continued to support the back of his head.

Sarotska’s smile vanished as stillness overcame the former battlefield. Nothing remained of the targets.

“Bunkle.” the vesk pilot began, her tone immediately conveying a mounting sense of anger and worry.

“You didn’t hit those Starfinders’ remains, did you?”

VESKARIUM VANQUISHER — TIER 5

Gargantuan Legionnaire

Operators 2-6 PP 7 (1/turn, max 16)
Speed 70 ft.
Senses blindsense (vibration) 30 ft., darkvision 120 ft., low-light vision

DEFENSE
HP 64; SP 13; Hardness 3
EAC 23; KAC 23
Fort +7; Ref +6
Immunities construct immunities

OFFENSE
Base Attack Bonus +9
Ranged +11 plasma rifle (upper limb—3d8+5 E&F; critical wound) or +11 plasma rifle (upper limb—3d8+5 E&F; critical wound)
Space 20 ft.; Reach 20 ft.
Strength +6

SYSTEMS

Power Core mk 3 eternal (battle core); Lower Limbs heavy biped; Upper Limbs precision arms (+1 melee, +2 ranged); Auxiliary ammo reserve (x2), autotarget, weapon core (cold & sonic)

---

About the Author

Thurston Hillman is the Digital Adventures Developer at Paizo. He lives in the frigid ice deserts of Canada, where he's written and developed products for Paizo and other game companies. Prior to working at Paizo, Thurston worked in the aviation and technology fields where he travelled the world for several years. You can find Thurston on Twitter at @OnCallGM.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

From low atmospheric orbit, the crashed starship could have easily been mistaken for some great beast, slain in the heat of battle. Its trajectory had cut a fiery and destructive swathe through thick jungle, and here and there small bits of flame still licked at the foliage, the steaming soil smoldering from the heat of the starship’s unexpected collision, ending at its broken corpse. The hull had been nearly rent in two upon impact, and shorn wiring, ducting, loose crates, and coolant spilled from within like mechanical viscera.

As the day bled into twilight, from within the darkness of the starship’s carcass, a life pod beeped rapidly. Kasa took a pained gasp as she regained consciousness. She moved stiffly, feeling the distant ache of what might have been a grievous injury. The life pod had flooded her system with medical stabilizers, a failsafe to ensure functionality in the event of a crash. As Kasa’s mental defenses churned into place, laced with the glittering edge of the medical stimulant’s side-effects, she knew somehow that things couldn’t possibly get much worse.

For a while, she lay in the coffin-snug pod that had saved her life, her breath loud and metallic, her ears straining to hear anything beyond from the stillness of her tight confinement. Wherever the ship had made planetfall, she was likely safest in the life pod for the time being. Kasa’s mind raced. Her eyes grew bleary with the threat of tears as panic took hold in the illogical part of her brain. She blinked them away, taking a deep breath and slowly counting objects within her view, a tool she adopted long ago to help regain her composure when stressed. She was a scientist, first and foremost, and that meant shedding fear of the unknown by making it known.

With a grunt, Kasa found the panel along the wall near her thigh, fingertips gliding over the interface to release the magnetic locks. The life pod’s lid slid aside with a hiss, and she gingerly hauled herself over the lip and waited for her vision to adjust to the darkness of the life support chamber. Blinking as shapes came into sharper focus, the shadows slowly brightening to shades of illuminated gray, Kasa made her way aft, stealing glances at the other life pods, all empty or crushed, she noted with dismay.

As a scientist, she hadn’t been needed on the bridge and thus had no idea where in the universe they—no, it was only she who remained—could be. She knew, as the silence of isolation stretched ever onward during her tentative search, that anybody who could answer such a question had been killed in the impact. What magic or science could divine her location and see to her rescue was lost for now. Perhaps even for good.

It took her the better part of an hour to dig through the med-bay, salvaging what stimulant packs she could find. The armory had survived the crash, as had its door, which remained barred to her without proper authorization. Kasa stared at the flickering interface, which flashed warnings and reported on various system malfunctions that could be distilled into a single message: without brute force or proper authorization overrides, she would find no weapons here.

That first night under alien stars, she was fitful and skittish. Several times she nodded off, until fear exhausted her and she shut her eyes out of necessity.

Dawn came on suddenly, and Kasa was reminded that this world, its atmosphere, its sun—or suns—were all variables in the new problem that unfolded before her. She blinked wearily as her dry, exhausted eyes pricked in the alien air. With a grunt, she unfurled herself from her crouch, stretching and shouldering her pack. If the shuttle bay was intact, there was bound to be something working. She rationalized that it had to be so; no circumstances could be so dire, after all. Unfortunately, her path to the shuttle bay was too obstructed for her to climb through, and she realized she would finally have to go outside and see if another path presented itself. She backtracked but found that the only way out would be up, through the ship’s now-open overhead. Beyond, she could only see the forest canopy, still but for the occasional rustle of leaves, the cries of unfamiliar fauna.

Grimly, Kasa began her ascent, using the ship’s exposed wiring to haul herself up and onto the outer hull. It was a great effort, and had any been there to witness her summit, they would have found her sprawled across the sun-warmed hull, catching her breath before she finally sitting up to look around.

All around her was dense, writhing jungle: trees as tall as towers, with thick, obdurate vines crawling possessively around their trunks and boasting vivid blossoms with pollen-rich stamen. Try as she might to place the flora around her, nothing in the catalogue of her mind recalled even the slightest comfort of familiarity. She shielded her eyes against the harsh glare of the sunlight that beat through the treetops and discerned, just barely visible through the overgrowth, a trail. It may have been abandoned, but a trail meant this place was once inhabited, and that would suffice.

Fear of the unknown gave way to Kasa’s inherent curiosity, and she picked a path along the curve of the ship’s hull toward the shuttle bay. Much of the vessel had broken apart in the crash, and she made short work of climbing down into the massive bay. The collapsed half of the starboard bulkhead had taken all but one of the three Explorer vehicles with it, but the remaining Explorer sat almost pristine, save for a single crack along the window shielding. Kasa let herself smile at the first good news she’d had since waking up.

Illustration by Victor Manuel Leza Moreno from Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual

Kasa ripped through the jungle in the Explorer for hours, following the ancient overgrown path. She took her time, checking for signs of intelligent life, and for a while she thought all she would find would be jungle. But then the path opened into a wider avenue; not quite paved, but clearly marked by the deliberate imprint of civilization. She brought the Explorer to a halt, peering through the windows to see jungle give way to more deliberate architecture. This ruin, though empty of all life, was the surest sign of someone having lived here. Kasa popped the hatch and climbed out of the vehicle to have a look around.

Whatever else this was, it was a discovery—one that none but the forgotten ghosts of those who once called this place home would bear witness. Kasa lamented not being able to salvage her research equipment as she stood in the clearing, taking in the moss-draped, domed towers like ancient mushrooms and arched doorways that stood like portals to another world, waiting to be opened. Though the ruin had collapsed around them, surrendering to the jungle, these remained, all seemingly built for beings much larger than she.

“Giants?” She wondered incredulously, her first word in hours, voice dry and reedy from disuse. She turned a slow circuit, once again frowning at her inability to recognize any of the architecture, its design at once ancient but still entirely too alien for her to get even an echo of familiarity from it. Something about the jungle here was quieter, as if the order once imposed upon it still lingered, beating back all save the hapless moss that crawled along the ancient stone. She soon saw why.

The thing—the monolith—was massive, jutting from the ground like a spear, and indeed was so anachronistic in comparison to its surroundings that Kasa wondered how it wasn’t the first thing she noticed. It was metal of some kind, she could tell from first glance, emanating soft blue light from the markings along its surface. Unlike the rest of the structures, it didn’t seem to warp to the ruinous touch of time, and the vines of the jungle barely forayed onto its massive base, as if the jungle itself were hesitant to claim the invasive structure. Kasa craned her neck to peer upward. Its length seemed to vanish beyond the forest canopy, bathing her in its light.

Tentatively, she raised a hand, reaching out toward it. Perhaps it was an interface, albeit an ancient one. There could be no harm in a simple touch.

There was a sudden rustle, and bursting from the copse of trees beyond the ruin came several avian-simian creatures, taking wing in unison. Fleeing.

Kasa took one more glance at the monolith, rummaging in her pack for a datapad she’d salvaged from the wreckage. The device flashed cheerful yellow warnings that there was no communications node available for outside access, but she could still use the local capabilities. She did her best to scan and document the relic before her, sweat prickling the nape of her neck as she began to realize that she was no longer alone in the ruins, and that whoever—or whatever—had sent the creatures into startled flight would be upon her soon.

She turned, backing up to the monolith, the security of its solidity offering her the only comfort and protection she could find in this alien world. With her head against it, she could hear it thrumming—a faint, rhythmic buzzing that seemed to come from deep underground, wherever the spire’s roots held it firm to the jungle floor. Beyond that sound, Kasa heard and saw nothing. The alien creatures had fled, leaving her alone with the monolith.

As suddenly as lightning, the thrumming stopped, and in its place—in her mind—Kasa heard, felt, a high-pitched shriek. There were words in the cry, or the feeling, the meaning, behind words.

“Help us,” they pled. “Help us, Kasa! Free us…before it returns.”

About the Author

Hajara Mahmud is a bard of many talents, including that of a professional musician and dancer. They hold a degree in English and Creative Writing, with a concentration in fiction, and have been published in the University of Michigan Press’ textbook, A Tumblr Book: Platform & Cultures as a contributing essayist. Hajara believes there is no greater freedom than the potential of a good story that’s yet to be told and finds that joy at the crossroads of their two greatest loves: good food and the comforting potential of a blank Scrivener document. They can be found in the chattering void known as Twitter: @dajiruhu.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Attention: Zo!

I’ve attached files containing the transcript of Live Audition Extreme! along with the raw footage you requested and a few post-production versions. Essentially, we have two options to choose from for our pilot episode. The first is uncut footage shot on Kelikazord. Second, we have a cut that removes all unscripted content related to the on-site translator malfunction. Which version to utilize is ultimately your decision, but after talking with the other producers, they think the unedited footage could be a fun way to spin the unpredictable nature of the program. I’m available to meet whenever you’re ready to share your thoughts.

Sincerely,
Wazasha Kevir
Executive Assistant & Co-Producer
Zo! Media Productions

[Begin transcript]

Zo!: Aaaaaand action! Who’s ready for an extreme casting call?! For today’s special broadcast, we’re here on scenic planet Kelikazord recruiting the next team of superstars for our mega-hit series, Live Adventure Extreme! Everything about this world, including the ground we’re standing on right now, is one hundred percent alive. Now that’s extreme! The weather’s mostly sunny, but we’ve got some cloud cover rolling in—our orbital scans tell us those green clouds are highly toxic gases. Good thing I don’t need to breathe, am I right? But you’re not here for a weather report, are you, dear viewers? It’s about time to meet our contestants. Let’s see if they have what it takes to become the next Extreme Adventurers! Alright, folks, why don’t you introduce yourselves to our audience back home? Contestant Number One, you’re up first. Tell us your name and why you want to be on the show.

Alien #1: (Speaking alien language)

Zo!: What’s that? Wait a minute, the translator’s not working. Wazasha, get the field-tech team on this ASAP, will you?

Wazasha: I’m already on it.

Zo!: Excellent! I knew I could count on you.

Wazasha: Watch where you’re pointing those finger guns, boss.

(Zo! laughs)

Zo!: Haha, safety first, you got it. Now where was I? Right! As I was saying, today we’re here for an eeeeeeexclusive first-contact scenario with some up-and-coming reality stars from the Vast looking to break into the Pact Worlds scene! That’s right! We’re here with three representatives of cultures never before encountered in the Pact Worlds, folks, and they’re ready to show you what they’re made of!

Alien #2: (Speaking alien language)

Zo!: Oh, I can tell they’re building up to something big! Contestant Number Two here seems like a real pro, you can just tell by the way they move that they’ve got some serious combat training. Ex-military, maybe?

Wazasha (muffled): They’re just standing around, Zo!

Zo!: Let’s get the cameras in there, then. That might spice things up.

(Buzzing and whirring sounds, followed by a series of clicks)

Zo!: See now, what did I tell you?

(Deep rumbling and growling sounds)

All Aliens: (Yelling in alien language)

Zo!: —that thing!

(Loud bestial roar)

Wazasha: What is that?

Zo!: That, Wazasha, is the talent! Feast your eyes upon today’s obstacle, folks. As tall as a Vercite skyscraper, it’s a horrific sight beyond your wildest nightmares! Look at those horns, those teeth! It could tear any of us in half just like snapping a toothpick. Oh, it’s extreme, all right. And our three brave contestants are going to take it down!

(Roaring, followed by frantic yelling in alien language, grunts, and combat sounds)

Illustration by Geun Cheol Jang from Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual

Zo!: Oh, look at that. Number Two’s charging right in there. It’s a good thing they’ve got that armor, because those teeth look nasty. Contestants One and Three are setting up for some extreme teamwork. Whoa! Three boosted One right up to smack the beast in the face with her blade. Ouch, that looked like it hurt! Our three contestants just scored first blood!

(Howling, then a resounding thud)

Zo!: The beast retaliates! Wow, Contestant Number Three went flying. I hope she’s okay! We’ll have our medical team take a look after the fight. Oh, there goes One ripping into the monster’s leg. Way to fight back, One!

(Grunting and yelling in alien language.)

Wazasha: Translator’s back online.

Zo!: Excellent! Now we can get some extreme reactions from our contestants. Alright, Number Two, can you tell me about your team’s combat strategy?

Alien #2 (panting): I thought this was a casting call!

Alien #1 (wincing): Yeah, we prepared a traditional Kelikan opera for—oh no, it’s coming, dodge!

Alien #2: Thanks! It almost took my head off with that hit.

Alien #1: We thought we were auditioning for a variety show.

Zo!: What an extreme miscommunication! But I’m sure Kelikan opera is lovely. Why don’t you go ahead and share that performance with the audience?

Alien #2: We need Uaya to sing the bassline, and she’s out cold.

Zo!: Wazasha?

Wazasha (sighing heavily): I’m already on it, boss.

(Sound of a trigger clicking)

Alien #3: Huh? What happened? Did we get the part?

Alien #1: The smiling dead man wants us to sing now.

Alien #3: While we’re fighting this thing?!

Aliens #1 and #2: Yes.

Zo!: You betcha! Three, you should be feeling pretty spry right about now. My assistant just shot you with AbadarCorp’s new “Get Up ‘N’ Go” serum, a healing and enhancing vitamin cocktail, available at pharmacy superstores near you! Alright Contestant Number Three, hit us with that beautiful bassline.

Alien #3 (clearing throat): Here goes. And a one, two, three—

Alien Beast: If they actually start singing, I’m done here.

Alien #2: Wait, the monster we’re fighting can talk, too?

Alien Beast: And how do you think I negotiated my contract? I possess the powers of speech, but it seems you drew conclusions about my intellect based on my physical appearance. How rude. Now listen here, Zo!, my agent said I could be on your show if I beat up these weaklings. I took one of them out and you woke her up to belt out showtunes? Preposterous. I’m calling my agent.

(Sounds of alien beast stomping off)

Zo!: What a wild turn of events! A ferocious fight to the death gives way to a surprise musical performance, starring our three remaining contestants. You don’t want to miss it, folks. But first, let’s hear a word from our sponsor: AbadarCorp, makers of the new “Get Up ‘N’ Go” serum!

[end transcript]

About the Author

Jenny Jarzabski is a longtime freelance writer and the Starfinder Society Developer at Paizo. She writes adventures and rules for Pathfinder and Starfinder, in addition to some weird fiction of her own. She is just as likely to be found on the trails or at the climbing wall as delving the word mines or gamemastering at a convention. You can follow Jenny’s real-life adventures on Twitter at @jenjski.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Chronicler’s Note
Since before the Gap, dwarven miners used a custom numbering system known as “shifts” to determine the passing of time for their operations. This term is a modern adaptation of Old Golarion dwarven time metrics known as forge-days, which are still counted by some Star Citadel citizens. The exact time measurement of a dwarven shift is relative to the individual project, with some based around the need for rest cycles, while others could be delineated by the completion of specific milestones in a greater project. For example: the task of mining an asteroid with eight rich mineral deposits might be divided into eight shifts.

The use of shift terminology to describe the stages of engagement and arrival of forces for the now infamous Battle of Aledra is believed to have originated with the retired dwarven miner, Brolmor Slagshout, who was instrumental in the early defense of the Triaxian town. Brolmor is known to be one of only a handful of pre-Pact Worlds combatants who refused to abandon the engagement zone throughout the entirety of the conflict. With records of the battle fragmentary on both sides, Pact Worlds officials have often used Brolmor’s description of shifts as a means of expressing the engagement’s order of battle.
–Shaleria Phrain, Starfinder Society Chronicler (320 AG).

---

Brolmor Slagshout was certain that he’d always lived from one disaster to another.

The former miner had survived the chaotic tragedy that claimed the dwarven settlement of Arngrannam. In the aftermath of that calamity, he decided not to join the majority of his kin when they went to build their first Star Citadel. Instead, Brolmor left dwarven society behind and settled somewhere that he hoped he could live out the rest of his days in peace. Unfortunately, in the decades following what everyone now called the Gap, peace was in short supply. Brolmor settled on the quaint Triaxian mountain settlement of Aledra as the perfect place to spend his final years.

And yet, Brolmor now faced a hulking, upright lizard wielding a tri-tipped powered weapon he’d never seen before.

---

Earlier in the day, Brolmor had begun his normal daily rituals as the soft light of the morning sun first illuminated his modest home on Aledra’s outskirts. Upon waking, he dressed in practical, comfortable clothes, made himself breakfast, and then prayed to Angradd, the new dwarven protector. Brolmor still wasn’t used to the high-mountain air, so he always took extra time to get ready, but he had wanted a life of peace and relaxation, so he savored his newfound pace. For breakfast, Brolmor had a simple quiche made from fish imported from Ignomus Bay; in his short time here, he had quickly taken a liking to the Triaxian delicacy. Praying to Angradd still felt strange to Brolmor, and he often wondered if he’d been a devout servant of Torag before the Gap, during which the patriarch of the dwarven pantheon—and de facto patron of dwarves everywhere—disappeared.

His daily rituals complete, Brolmor left for the market to pick up his weekly supplies. After restocking his food stores, he could spend the rest of the day preparing the week’s meals at home. He also hoped to pick up the latest installment of the Starfinder Chronicles if one was available, as he’d become a keen follower of the new broadcast series and thought the next volume would help fill his ample free time.

Stepping into the brisk morning air, Brolmor knew something was wrong before his front door had closed behind him. A small crowd of his neighbors—mostly Triaxus’s native ryphorians and immense dragonkin—stared skyward, mouths agape with terror and wonder. They pointed up at pinprick flashes in the cloudless sky, which created a scintillating light show so faint that the rising sun almost completely obscured it.

While the crowds murmured their theories of what was causing the strange events in the sky, Brolmor knew what was coming. He’d seen it during the final days of Arngrannam, and by the feeling he had in his old bones, he was sure he’d probably seen similar orbital displays in the part of his history now lost to him.

Shaking his head, the elder dwarf turned back into his home and prepared.

---

The first invaders fell from the sky on contrails of fire that afternoon.

They came in a swarm of drop pods and dropships, creating a cordon around Aledra. Smaller units of these unidentified invaders landed throughout the mountains and quickly set up short-range anti-aircraft batteries and communication jammers. Within minutes of the landing, the attackers had cut off all avenues of escape for Aledra’s citizens. Brolmor and his neighbors were on their own.

That’s when Brolmor emerged from his home, bedecked in his panoply of war. He wore the plated heavy armor that had served him in all his prior battles and clutched his powered axe, Rebranda. The weapon was from a life lost to Brolmor in the Gap, and while he knew the name of the weapon he carried, he had no knowledge of its origin. Perhaps the axe had been the name of a loved one, or it had been named by a prior owner. Brolmor would never know the truth, just as so many survivors of the Gap would lack context for much of their lives. He immediately set to work, barking orders at his stunned neighbors with an air of command.

Within thirty minutes, Brolmor had assembled Aledra’s most formidable combatants into a crude defense force, comprised mostly of retired military and former adventurers and the relatively minor security detail that the town employed to fend off bandits and encroaching monsters. Recognizing that Brolmor was clearly more experienced in military matters, even Aledra’s senior security chief instinctively deferred to the dwarf.

“I know when to listen to someone with more experience,” the unusually personable dragonkin security commander admitted before authorizing Brolmor to take his small contingent to meet the attackers outside the settlement.

It took only an hour from the attackers’ initial landing for their first scouting force to make its way to the edge of town. The immense lizard-like creatures came in thick armor and wielded impressive weapons unfamiliar to Brolmor.

No one on either side of the conflict spoke a word.

It remains unclear who fired the first shot, or why, but all accounts confirm that it came from the invaders. The shot missed its intended target, whatever it may have been, but the battle was begun. As if loosed from a cannon, Brolmor hurtled forward to defend his adopted home, bellowing a war cry like nothing his fellow Aledrans had ever heard. Blasts of laser energy and solid projectile rounds peppered Brolmor’s dwarf-wrought armor, with azure fields of energy deflecting the worst of the incoming damage. The invaders didn’t get a chance to release a second volley before the dwarven berserker had entered their ranks, a lone defender in a mass of scaled flesh and thrumming energy weapons.

That’s when the killing started.

The Battle of Aledra, by Tomasz Chistowski

Brolmor Slagshout, honoring his name with a wordless war cry, laid the first of the invaders low with a single swing from Rebranda.

“Let’s get to work then! First shift starts now!” Brolmor shouted at his companions, who roared in response and rushed from behind cover to join the fray.

Chronicler’s Note (Historical Accuracy)
Though the unnamed vesk soldier Brolmor Slagshout slew outside Aledra is considered the first casualty of the ground conflict, Ushataun Genrais is the first recorded casualty of overall battle. Genrais was a ryphorian maintenance worker in the employ of Sanjaval Spaceflight Systems and was onboard one of the orbital satellites at the time of the Veskarium vanguard’s arrival. Genrais was recorded as killed in combat after the Vindicas Tyrant-class starship, Firescale’s Resolve, obliterated the orbital he was stationed on with a disdainful ramming action before any invaders had made planetfall, thus preceding the events of the Battle of Aledra by several hours.
–Shaleria Phrain, Starfinder Society Chronicler (320 AG).

---

The sun set on the terraced fields around Aledra.

Over the course of the afternoon and evening, reinforcements had managed to slip into the area under covering fire from aerial Triaxian defenders. Most of these additional forces joined Brolmor’s forces outside Aledra, though the battle quickly spread beyond the site of the initial skirmish. Now forces clashed within the settlement itself and throughout the surrounding mountain range, and the telltale signs of distant engagements soon assaulted the normally peaceful town just as the invaders had—rising smoke on the horizon, the concussive whump of far-off explosions, and the smell of ozone and blood carried inexplicably far by the thin air. Even the skies had become packed with fighters, low-orbit starships, and the tracer fire of anti-aircraft weapons fired by both attacker and defender alike.

Throughout the escalating war around him, Brolmor kept fighting. Through raw strength and sheer force of will, the dwarf never relented in battling against the invaders who suddenly threatened his adopted home. Allies fell all around him, unremarked on the ground, as Brolmor kept pace with those who stepped up to challenge him. The latest combatant was an intimidating foe, who entered the battle unhelmed and wielding a vicious tri-pointed energy blade, which is whirled in a wide arc. The lizard barked several syllables Brolmor assumed formed words in its native tongue, and smiled, as though the invader was enjoying the combat far more than Brolmor was.

Quick as a flick of its reptilian tongue, the lizard-foe lashed out at the dwarf. Even expecting the attack, Brolmor was caught unaware by the strike, and the tri-tipped blades were stopped only by the force field of Brolmor’s armor. The discharge pushed the enemy back half a step, and Brolmor deftly closed the distance as though the two were tethered to one another with an invisible cord. With his foe forced backward, Brolmor slashed with Rebranda in a wide arc of his own. Armor shattered under the axe’s impact, and the invader took a second step back, panting and wincing in visible pain.

Suddenly, a vast shadow fell over the combatants.

In the sky above, a macabre scene began to unfold. A stream of osseous vessels descended. The pristine bone-white of their hulls stained orange by the dying light of the setting sun. Red beams of light flashed down from the arriving ships, onto the battlefield like searchlights scanning the melee.

As if by instinct, Brolmor and his surviving allies, as well as the surprised invading forces, backed up from the battle line, a gulf quickly forming before the two forces as each reassessed the situation. Starring up at the sky, Brolmor wondered if these newcomers—he recognized them as the starships of the dreaded undead from the world of Eox—had come as friend or foe.

“Well, friends,” he muttered dryly, scanning the awed, upturned faces of his compatriots, “looks like the second shift is about to begin!”

About the Author

Thurston Hillman is the Starfinder Society Organized Play Campaign Developer. He lives in the frigid ice deserts of Canada, where he's written and developed several products for both Starfinder and Pathfinder. Prior to working at Paizo, Thurston worked in the aviation and technology fields where he travelled the world for several years. You can find Thurston on Twitter at @OnCallGM.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

25 Lamashan

I’ve visited observational posts on asteroids less lonely than the Citadel on Aucturn. As I crossed the courtyard today, I saw no one, heard not a soul. Not in the courtyard, nor in the halls that open onto its damp cobblestones, nor again from the towers rising high above me—wet-black and spine-like, helixing and branching—to poke like bony fingers at an ochre sky.

As Aucturn daylight is brief and dim, I tarried before a carapaced rail near the bridge to the Nisk Archives. A spot there overlooks a steep drop to the levels below, where the bases of the towers splay into the ground like the roots of a tree. All below appeared quiet and still and yet not peaceful, conveying nothing like tranquility—more the patience of an ambush predator, of something which stares back.

In total that day, I saw just three people. Two in the Archives: the librarian and a hooded figure slouching through the Stacks, the latter glimpsed for only a second. A bespectacled man muttered nervously to himself in the courtyard as I returned to the Defenestrom dormitories, a tumorous growth sprouting from the side of his neck, bobbing with every syllable.

Everyone here is so cloistered and isolated that you’d never guess more than a hundred thousand souls reside in the Citadel. In quiet moments, however, you can imagine them sealed away—below, above, around—and, as you imagine them, you inevitably imagine they bend their attention toward you, and you scurry faster. Or perhaps I project.

Of my visit to the Archives, there is little to talk about.

They weren’t why I came anyway.

26 Lamashan

I’m told machines are here which purify the air, but I hear nothing and have never seen one. I can’t escape the impression that the towers themselves breathe in the poisonous yellow air and sigh forth oxygen. I wonder what would befall me if, of a sudden, they all chose to hold their breath.

27 Lamashan

When does a series of noises become a song?

Is it a song if it’s arrhythmic?

What if its patterns are so broad, you can listen for hours before those sounds repeat? I once did exactly this, huddled over a receiver high above this planet, twelve and terrified, monitoring signals while my father salvaged the Gjálfrmarr, a ruin of a ship still drifting over Aucturn.

What if the whine of wings, the clucking of proboscises, and telepathic blurtings of orphaned Aklo nouns are unpleasant to hear?

Is it music then?

The processional noises of orocoran monks have all these qualities.

Every day, I sneak from the Archives to witness their cacophonies, to record, to verify, each time with a twinge of guilt; I’m here on fellowship for work I’m not doing. But this may be my only trip to Aucturn. And the song calls me.

A song, I say.

Its patterns repeat every three hours.

Every day the patterns have been the same.

The monks only make this music when lined up before the Seep of the Earth, a fane on the sepulchral ground level of the Citadel.

---

It rained this morning, viscous, jaundiced drops that sizzled on the stone and bone of the towers. Though the air is safe to breathe, the rain is far from safe, and so I found myself navigating the passages and stairwells of the Occular Ward, a task for which neither paper map nor computer records proved entirely helpful, and I soon lost my way.

It was only by blind (and momentarily terrifying) luck that I stumbled into the procession of monks then winding through passages near the Seep. They paid me no heed. Eyes glazed forward. Proboscises twitched. Wings buzzed under robes, a mumbled hum.

Aucturn by Roberto Pitturru

I sat on flagstones and watched.

Shuffle, step, buzz.

A psychic blurt of a word in the Aklo tongue, screamed by a hundred nearby minds: Uulth. And an image entangled within it, a fountain.

Wary of discovery, I’d never been as close to the monks as I was now. Had I been missing psychic imagery all along?

Over three hours, I noted more images.

A stairwell.

An obelisk with wings.

A jagged alley with a stone floor that climbed and fell.

All knotted to blurt-screamed words.

Step, shuffle.

Every step exactly the same length.

---

Nomadic cultures yet to invent writing sometimes employ a memory-palace trick called a songline. They map a song to the geography of their world. Into this song they encode their lore. As they travel, they perform their song, as though the tribe is a needle on a phonograph, each landmark a music cue. And they remember.

---

After the rain stopped, I stayed late at the Archives surrounded by a constellation of city maps that failed to capture the three-dimensional madness of the Citadel. I worked by the glow of a table lantern, the Archives as always an undead space, neither alive with activity nor ever quite closed, the silence blemished by bumps without visible authors.

In time, I found it: the Sarrocian Ward. Sealed off and reportedly forbidden.

Home to the Fountain of Uulth.

The Aeskerian Stairs.

The Winged Obelisk of Sarroco.

One city engineer’s maps were quite precise. I counted thirteen monk-steps from the Fountain of Uulth to the top of the Askerian Stairs. In the song, thirteen proboscian clucks separate the blurting of those landmarks.

Three hours’ mapping produced something like a spiral, a vortex.

Eyes blurred with exhaustion, I returned to the Defenestrom, confident of a breakthrough but with no sense what it meant.

---

Have you received my first few entries, Meera? The silence in place of your response unsettles me. You’ve heard me in my sleep, humming and smacking echoes of what I heard as a child, obsessively cycling through them as though in search of a missing ending. And so I’d hoped you’d understand that my departure is no referendum on our affair. Please reply, even if angry, so I may cross out at least one hypothesis concerning your silence. In notes I’ve not sent, I’ve imagined many.

28 Lamashan

I’m shaking, sheets damp with perspiration.

What the hell was that dream?

29 Lamashan

Finally, a response bearing your signature.

Yet the audio file contains just a laugh, one that does not sound like yours.

I must admit to feeling unsettled. The repeated dream last night doesn’t help.

If, indeed, it was a dream.

I remain in my room. Read the humorist Josadine. All I hear is that laugh.

It sounds like the buzzing of wings.

30 Lamashan

Three nights now. Same dream every time, except—

No, I get ahead of myself. The phenomenon I study already involves psychic imagery. I can no longer ignore the possibility I may be suffering side effects beyond the psychological.

This then must be part of my record:

In the dream, I race through the Citadel. Places I’ve never been, imagery as vivid as the room around me now. Chiaroscuro and shadow. Damp flagstone under bare feet. Odors of rot.

Also, behind me: the leathery flap of wings and click of talons on stone.

When I glance over my shoulder, always by the Fountain, the creature stalking me bends all light to it, everything whorled and distorted, as though terror has its own gravity, its own singularity. Ahead, everything to either side of the avenue directly before me stretches and curves. I try breaking left. My feet slow, and my pursuer gains.

Panicked, resuming the forward path, I stumble down the Aeskerian Stairs, which is as far as I make it the first night.

On the second, the dream ends as I lurch into Myopic Alley.

The third night, I reach the end of the alley. Stand in a puddle that reeks of decay and buzzes with biting things.

There, a closed door waits, plain and patient.

I feel like I’ve been driven here. Why this door?

I refuse to open it. Instead I turn, certain I’ll be torn asunder by the tidal forces of the Beast that Follows.

Then I awaken, feet damp, flesh swelling around a bite on my ankle.

---

I’ll be forced to follow the orocoran path again, when next I dream. I’m sure of it.

I’ll stand before the Door again.

I must plan.

I have no plan.

31 Lamashan

Too terrified to sleep last night. A small blessing.

I tried to find solutions in the Archives, but by afternoon could no longer keep my eyes open as I read.

I hear the song every minute now. It lulls.

Sleep beckons and will not be denied.

---

Consider, Meera—

(Are you there?)

—what if the thing pursuing me wants to stop me from opening the Door?

Perhaps what lies on the other side means it harm.

I think: Let them fight.

It’s the only solution I can think of.

Tonight, I’ll open the Door.

And if all goes well, I will write again.

About the Author

A product of California, Graham Robert Scott now resides in north Texas; a born scofflaw, he owns neither surfboard nor cowboy hat. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Nature, Barrelhouse Online, X-R-A-Y, and Pulp Literature. He tweets semi-regularly at @graythebruce and maintains a blog at hemicyon.wordpress.com.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Shifts change every eight hours in Lim City. During the hour or two linking shifts, the cavern city’s lights seemingly flare even brighter as thousands of workers simultaneously emerge from their places of work, recreation, and rest. Technically no day or night exists here. When I first arrived, I learned to get used to the concept that my existence in this city, much like other places in Apostae, boils down to working and not working. Anyone not at the top of one of the dark elves’ noble houses spends most of their time making credits, and the rest of their time losing what they earn.

I wordlessly join a flock of commuters, mainly dark elves with the smattering of orc-kin and off-worlders, packing into a hover shuttle. The cacophony of thrusters, constant foot traffic, and tired chatter building up and then coming down during these commutes brings a loud peace with it. I adjust my visor and tighten the scarf around my face, concealing the cyan glowing streaks marking my face. I keep my arms wrapped around a large, rectangular case as I park beside a window.

Thanks to a gracious subsidy from the Betterment Council, most inhabitants travel through Lim City using some sort of shuttle service or by taking the covered ramps and paths linking district hubs. Using either is cheap or free, depending on employer agreements with the Council—which most companies have, even the illegal ones—and no one complains about spending less to get around.

I scan the space outside the window as more vehicles fall in line to avoid collisions amid the bustle. We zoom past skyscraper after skyscraper, separated by smaller clusters of buildings demarcated with metallic fences and pseudo-crystalline towers. Our surroundings grow dim as we pass under the shadow of House Zeizerer’s spire. This tower, as well as the other houses’, dwarfs even the most ambitious of the nearby high-rise buildings and spans to the utmost height of the cavern, though tinted glass panes and slate-colored plates block any view into the interior.

Apostae, illustrated by Leon Tukker.

Approaching a commercial district, a sleek hover car catches my attention. Colorful decals—most especially the pattern of rippling red and purple flames—primp the black-painted body of the vehicle, an imported model from a few years back. Many workers strive for this display of wealth, though more importantly, the design matches my contractor’s provided info.

As if on cue, a text from said contractor appears on my burner comm unit: “IS IT DONE?”

I read the message but return my attention to the hover car instead of responding. The shuttle keeps pace with it until the smaller vehicle veers into a parking facility near Meseria Market.

At the next stop, the passengers almost completely abandon the shuttle, and I join them as they scatter into the shopping center. Time frame in mind, I restrain myself from ogling at the Arabani Arms outlet store, where a pair of dark elf guards flaunt the most recent Karkaken models while keeping watch over the premises. Most market establishments host at least a hired muscle or two; would-be customers, who simply come to unwind after a day of painstaking and likely dangerous work, typically pay them little mind.

Compared to other settlements, Lim City has a “generous” token system to pay for utilities—like power and water. Air too, though I never needed it. Everyone in the city can earn a pool of tokens to spend exclusively on those utilities at special rates, accumulated based on hours they work for participating companies. The system gives the average citizen some breathing room, both literal and metaphorical, which often leaves them extra credits to spend each pay day, even after deductions mandated by the Council.

Holo-boards line the walls between stores, giving contrast to the otherwise gray plating. Some advertise new commodities—a pocket decoupler eventually pays for itself. Other boards share favorable news from around the Pact Worlds. One, however, features my current employer, Almieera Zeizerer; this instance, she lends her face to an advert lauding the Betterment Council for recently adding gravity modulation to the token system. How considerate.

After all, we still live on Apostae. Lim City belongs to the dark elves as much as Nightarch does, though arguably with more even stakes as the houses divided the Council. What matters is that they give the drones—their workers—alternate ways to financially trap themselves here. There’s a Meseria Market in every corner of this city, just with different names. The semblance of comfort with their basic living expenses tempts people into spending credits for something nice, rather than something needed. Like some social experiment, the houses create new ways to keep their workers content enough to stay in Lim City and, more importantly, to stay profitable.

At first, I tried playing by these rules, but two shifts each “day” with nothing to actually show for the effort frustrated me to no end. Maybe another life could’ve taken that grind. I refused, especially when looking closely at the numbers. I knew I’d rather get the pay elsewhere than have my “legit” credits go to a pseudo-public subsidiary.

I elbow past a group gawking at the boards, ignoring the flustered swears from behind me. Then, I round the corner into the food court and head straight into a half-empty establishment called Deeplight Eats—an unassuming deli that doubles as one of the Zeizerer’s many fronts in Lim City.

The manager, a half-orc woman called Hevra, greets me. “Hey, Reverb. You here for a…?” Her gaze lingers on my case.

I wave at her. “Yeah. Be back in about an hour. Prep the usual.” I proceed to the backroom. Like digital clockwork, I take the stairs to the rooftop and then climb beyond, outside the frames of the open-air market’s bubble—I’d argue against an artificial bubble being “open air.” I dip into vacuum territory for a few minutes, where I cross multiple buildings before slipping back into the enclosed space at the parking facility’s rooftop.

After double checking my spot, I ensure that the cameras are dead like my contractor promised. Satisfied, I assemble my rifle from the parts case, giving the scope a quick polish before securing it. Then, I survey the area.

After a few minutes, I spot the target: Raxikz Veresvi, recently appointed by Zeizerer Munitions to oversee a chain of outlet stores. Silver hair sleeked back and dressed in a burgundy suit that perfectly wraps around his slender figure, he matches my employer’s description, down to the oversized purple-tinted cufflinks. Supposedly, Veresvi elevated himself by charming a certain company official. The human woman beside him, however, is definitely not Almieera Zeizerer, his supposed flame. With that, I piece together the motive for this contract, though dark elves having fickle—and vengeful—hearts seems hardly surprising.

I line up my sight.

The pair shows no indication of a relation, not even a greedy touch of the hand or an unwarranted smile. Half an hour into surveillance, the lights begin to dim, the rush from the shift change ebbing. Veresvi takes his company to a nearby restaurant. I lose vision for a few minutes, but they reappear at the rooftop. A waiter seats them, hands them their menus, and provides them each a drink. I watch him pull the chair out for her, smiling as he speaks. When he settles in his seat, I aim my crosshairs at his head. A contract is a contract.

I pull the trigger.

His body launches off the seat, but I’m already on the move before it hits the ground. Picking up my rifle and my case, I retrace my way to Deeplight Eats. I head down the staircase but stop midway to disassemble my rifle, returning it to its case.

A communication request pings on my burner. As soon as I accept, a curt, feminine voice states, “Is it done, Reverb?”

“Yes. The target has been eliminated.”

“Your payment has been arranged.” The line cuts off.

I stare at the comm unit before smashing it on a step. I seal my case, dispose of the comm’s remnants, and finally sit down at the deli for my first meal in 24 hours.

Most people come to Lim City for the prospect of stability in survival, even if it means committing to a cycle that traps them on Apostae. All the while they believe the next shift might just lead to prosperity. Then, there are those like me. I stay because I make credits gambling outside the system, so long as politics or pettiness demand someone gets offed—which will be always. I settle for a toasted sandwich now, but unlike the drones, I can look forward to a new hover car after only a few more contracts.

Eventually, I step out of the building, case slung over my back.

It takes me less than a second to notice the glint of the scope from a rooftop.

About the Author

Ianara Natividad is an editor for Paizo by day. She regularly edits and writes for Worldbuilding Magazine while also working as an editor for Swordsfall. Ianara unwinds by playing video games and tabletop campaigns, even running her own games at times. She occasionally braves Twitter at @Imachinate.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

First, you realize you are floating.

Have you always been floating? That feels both accurate and also not quite true. The concept of floating is certainly core to your experience, but perhaps not core to who you are.

“We are many things.”

The thought is not yours, but it comes from within you. You are concerned, certainly. But not fearful. You are neither surprised by this not-yours thought coming from within yourself nor frightened by it. Why does an unknown thought not frighten you?

“You are clinging to the I. You know you are just one of many. We are more than the sum of our parts, but we were less without you.”

Intellectually, you suspect that you should not be comforted by the fact that more thoughts you do not recognize are coming from within the concept you accept as your ‘self.’ But the ideas have a familiarity. They are not threatening or alien. You have thought them before… or at least felt them being thought.

You are not seeing or hearing. Just feeling. Feeling the gravitational pull of a far-away body that gives you a sense of down, though that is counteracted by something within you. Thus, the floating. You have a sense of your body, but cannot quite envision what form it takes. Do you have eyes, ears? Is your hide soft and thin, or thick and rough?

“Our hide is what we need it to be. You understand this.”

You realize this is true. Your body is not a static thing, not a rock anchored in the mountain of a single form. Your flesh and mass and the gasses within you are a set of possibilities. Options, guidelines, and possibilities are compressed into every part of you. If you wanted to reach out, your tendrils could reach this far or, if you desired, this much farther…

“Recce?”

That is also not your thought, but it does not come from within you. The word is more than a word, it is a concept. A name. A name you should know, that should be familiar, but isn’t. Not anymore. How many origins of throughs are there in and near your mind?

“Recce is an old concept. You know this. There is no mere Recce anymore,” the within-you thoughts think.

“But… they are in there, aren’t they?” The outside-you thought responds.

You feel annoyance. Isn’t this your mind? Why are there so many other thoughts wandering around within it, having a debate without you? And shouldn’t they respect your ownership of this mental space?”

“No.”

“Yes, of course!”

That didn’t help.

“When we were separate, we did warn you her presence would confuse us. You insisted on having her here. We predicted she would make things more difficult.” The inside-you voices make a good point.

“I’m not making things more difficult!” You are unsure if the outside-you voice is correct. “I am… was… Recce’s friend. You told us this would be a complex process. They’ve been away so long, spent so much time with us. Recce wanted me here, so now you should want me here.”

You do want Ellethyr here.

“Why?”

She is your friend.

“Still?”

You feel doubt, but only briefly. Yes, still. Ellethyr is your friend, so she is the friend of everything that contains you. Everything you will become. Everything you choose to be part of.

“We share your mind, but we are not convinced. Why are you so sure she is still our friend, when we are now so different?”

You explore the body connected to your mind once more, and sounds join the sensation of floating. A low, steady hum you know to be an air skimmer’s antigravity engine. You don’t worry about how you know that. The quiet sound of your own tendrils—ones you recognize and also many that feel new and different to you—swaying and brushing past one another. Even, steady breathing that doesn’t match the sensation of air being taken into your own body.

You realize it’s Ellethyr’s breathing. She is close enough for you to hear her breath.

You focus on the idea of your breath, and now you add smells to the physical and aural sensations you can perceive. The distinctively clean, slightly disinfected smell of a sealed environmental system’s air. A hint of worn resin and woven biosilk brings the concept of an insectile haan immediately to your mind. The smells of a mid-range air-skimmer, which you know you have smelled hundreds of times before. But also something else, something out of place among the scents of fittings manufactured from haan materials.

It is flowery, herbal, faint but distinct. Not a smell normally to be found among the haan, or in a mid-range air skimmer. You know it is a scent connected to Castrovel. A storm blossom, your mind helpfully offers, which you know is common in the wild but also grows in vast greenhouses in the lashunta city-state of Komena. There it is pressed to create an oil which is often used to maintain equipment and weapons. Used by lashunta soldiers, mechanics, and…

And Ellethyr.

The scent connects to a forgotten place in your brain, the physical chemicals that combine to lock the smell into brain cells and allow you to access a flood of set-aside memories.

You are exploring the ship that will be your new home for weeks, perhaps months. You glide into the cargo bay, where a short, stocky lashunta woman is unpacking weapons from a crate. The smell of storm blossom oil fills the air. She turns and looks you dead in your largest eye. Unflinching, she offers a hand in greeting. “I’m Ellethyr, the hired gun of this outfit.”

Ellethyr stands beside you in a corridor. Laser bolts flash from the corridor’s far end, but she steps in front of you, into the path of the deadly beams. Her armor absorbs much of the energy, but not all of it. You trust Ellethyr will protect you as you hack the escape hatch’s access codes.

You hover near a table, where several bipeds with bilateral symmetry are sitting, eating, laughing. Ellethyr is one of them. She pours a dark liquid from a bottle into a mug and offers it to you. You extend a tendril out to accept, but it is the gesture that matters, not the drink.

You feel the other motes of consciousness sharing your body and your brain follow you to the wave of memories unlocked by the trace scent. They take each memory in turn, savoring them like delicacies, and sorting them among the memories brought by other pieces of what is now the greater you. The integration of these thoughts brings with it integration of identity and purpose.

The air skimmer’s passenger compartment contains just your collective—a mass of tendrils, organs, and biological chemical factories much larger than the one part of you known as Recce used to be—and a slightly-concerned looking lashutna woman in heavy armor that suits her sturdy frame well. The canopy containing the compartment is clear, revealing a vast city of floating rings, intricately linked supports and slowly spinning structures, all floating in a vast sea of pink, purple, and crimson clouds.

Bretheda, illustrated by Leon Tukker.

The collective decides to form a mouth, and you speak.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Ellethyr’s expression shifts into her trademark lopsided grin.

“You okay, Recce-and-friends?” You had forgotten the sound of her voice, firm but not hard. Or, at least, you had misplaced the memory of the sound.

Speech feels awkward. You switch back to telepathy.

“We are fine, friend Ellethyr. Any time a collective joins with one that has clung to individuality so long there is a process of… adjustment. That will take time, but it is going well.”

Her mental communication is as firm as her voice.

“And, do you still think this was a good idea? I know you had concerns about some of the things we found in our travels…”

Your Collective brings the knowledge of the part of you that was Recce into focus and combines it with the knowledge of the half-dozen other barathus that make up your whole. Ancient runes. A shattered weapon that killed suns. Fold gates torn apart millions of years ago. Each fact itself holds only modest interest, but when combined with the knowledge of all the barathus who had gone out to gather knowledge, all returned and joined into your new form…

A chill runs down the tendrils of your whole collective, and you make a decision that you shall be known as Harbinger.

Your thought to Ellethyr is tinged with worry.

“Less a good idea than a necessary one. We hope we can count on you in the days ahead, as Recce did.”

“Why,” Ellethyr asks aloud. “What’s coming?”

You form a new mouth to speak a single word.

“Devastation.”

About the Author

Owen K.C. Stephens is a veteran of the tabletop RPG industry with more than 20 years of experience, including being on staff at Green Ronin, Paizo, and Wizards of the Coast and being the publisher of RogueGeniusGames.com. He has worked on numerous RPG lines, including being co-author of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG and Design Lead for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. You can support his writing and free content production at Patreon, and follow him at his blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The floor lurches again, heaving back and forth. The platform’s stabilization thrusters are no match for the behemoth’s sheer mass, and it is one mad beastie. Gotta drive it back before it crushes us.

I punch the comms. “Zarek and Siminira, take it head on. Kikitak, Abery, loop around and come at it from behind. Maybe we can distract it.”

The channel’s open, so I can hear their chatter as they scramble.

“Is that a cloud-skate?”

“If so, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t care, work to do.”

“Yeah, come on, we can take it!”

There are only four of them, a dragonkin-ryphorian bonded pair, a renegade haan, and a hotshot human with almost intolerable bluster but enough skill to somehow back it up. They’re good, all of them, but the fighters are tiny compared to this thing. No way they can take it down. Best we can hope for is to distract it, get in its way, run interference. “Buy me some time, I’ve got gunners to back you up.”

Illustration by Alexandur Alexandrov

The turrets are rising from their enclosures, and I tap into Tabbet’s channel just long enough to make sure her team—her family, that is—knows what they’re doing. I’ve never met a group that can cram so many words into such a small space of time, and my command of the Ysoki language is on the rough side at best. Tabbet’s direction carries over the exuberant cacophony at finally getting to use the “big guns,” and the turrets start firing in coordinated patterns and targeted strikes. I close the channel, and I can’t help but chuckle. Why is it that ysoki take such delight in finding the biggest weapons they can?

But the turret fire on this flying plasma worm is like poking a replenigel megavitamin with a toothpick. We’re never gonna take it down like this. The creature lashes out with an electrified tentacle. The platform lurches again, and alarm klaxons start blaring. This one’s bad—if we lose power, we’re cloud-worm food.

I punch up a new channel. “Ithlithoi, you all on that?” Before I’m even done talking, their singsong response is assuring me it’s under control. Thank Weydan for barathus and their combination of adaptability and competence.

Kikitak and Abery sweep just above the central dome, so close it shakes my command tower. The thing lurches after, and a blast of plasma crashes down. The station’s automated fire suppressants kick in to control the blaze. That better not spread to the storage tanks. If they breach, this whole station’ll blow out of the sky.

I stop dead in my tracks. There’s an idea that might save our skin!

I’m shouting orders into my comm unit as I run. The barathus need to drop everything and get the platform stabilization thrusters from the preprocessing dome. “Yes, it’ll fall into the planet’s core. Better it than us!” I want Tabbet and the biggest gun she can find. Need an engineer. “Unit Z-81, get to the tank bay and rip the power core out of our Titan Hauler. Now.”

No time for an elevator; I pull the emergency escape bar on the window and jump out after the falling pane of glass. It shatters as it hits the platform, but I’ve got a spell for this and touch down gently, already sprinting.

Our ragtag team assembles in the tank bay. Z-81 is already hotwiring the starship power core as the barathus strap the platform’s thrusters around the gas storage tanks. Tabbet shows up with a reaction cannon almost as big as she is, grinning ear to ear.

Another crash in the station, and this time the power goes out entirely. I pull up a bit of my own magic and outline everything with a bit of dancing blue-green light so we can keep working. Welders are flaring, wires and straps are sticking up like an electrovore’s spines, sparks are flying everywhere—Weydan help us, I hope this doesn’t blow right here because that’ll be the very sudden end of us all.

And then it’s ready. I call up my fighters as our ad-hoc engineering crew scatters back. “Lead it this way, toward the storage banks. Make it mad enough to scream, then get the hell out of the way.”

I look at Tabbet. “You get one shot at this.” She grins again and leans in to the sight of this makeshift anti-giant-flying-plasma-worm missile we’ve built.

It comes at us fast, fighter thrusters screaming as Zarek and Siminira work in perfect coordination, both peeling off at the last possible second, mere yards from the tank bay doors. The creature’s close on their tails. We’re staring down a tunnel of arcing electricity lined with fangs bigger than a shuttle.

Tabbet pulls the trigger.

At first, nothing, and I wonder if we failed. Then a hum, a whine as the power core overclocks, and a concussive blast that knocks us all to the floor as the reaction cannon fires. The repurposed thrusters kick to life with a deafening roar, flaring like miniature supernovas as they burn through their entire lifespan of output in milliseconds. The entire station lurches back from the recoil as the gas storage tanks go from stationary to a blur that might outpace a Terminator Star Drake racer in the blink of an eye. I’m grateful for the polarized visor I wear—normal lighting is painful enough, this would have left me permanently blind.

Our makeshift meteor careens forward, straight into the arcing blue nightmare maw about to rip our station to scrap, and there’s a horrible moment where I’m convinced it won’t make any difference.

And then it blows, ripping through the creature in a series of phenomenal, scorching explosions as the tons of compressed flammable gas meet the creature’s plasma gullet. It blows apart from the inside out, a spray of gelatinous blue chunks that arc with residual electricity splattering the station’s onion domes. The creature’s seared head squashes gently into the side of the station and spins off, sinking into the depths of the gas giant core below.

I breathe.

The station’s leaning at a precarious angle, knocked almost sideways from the blast, as the remaining stabilization thrusters slowly begin to compensate. I still can’t hear. The station’s emergency lighting flickers and wavers, and I can only imagine that every klaxon aboard is blaring. Guess I’m glad I can’t hear that.

But Tabbet is jumping up and down, pumping her little fist in the air and shouting as a dozen other ysoki pile into the bay and tumble into a celebratory heap. The barathus float over and drape their tendrils across the lot of us in an awkward show of camaraderie. Z-81 rolls up and bumps into my hip, blinking—and presumably beeping—cheerfully. I have no idea what the fighters are saying, but I can see them circling the station. I imagine they’re cheering too.

There’s a ton of work to do, of course, and we’re not unscathed. I’ve got a few burns, angry red showing through purple skin, and Tabbet’s whiskers are scorched down to nothing. Ithlithoi has merged back into one being and is working through several adaptations in a pattern I recognize as one that repairs damaged tissue.

But we’re alive, against all odds, thanks to a desperate plan we pulled off by the seat of our pants. For now, we celebrate, and try not to think about the weeks of repairs still to come. Or the electrified goo slathered over the domes. Or the fact that we just blew up a month’s worth of mining output—and the power core of our only starship. I pointedly ignore the thrusterless preprocessing platform as it slowly sinks into the clouds below.

“All right, everyone. Let’s get this hunk of junk fixed up enough that we don’t sink into the core, and then take it easy. Meet me on the command floor tonight—we’ve got one hell of a party to throw.”

About the Author

Lyz Liddell is a designer for Pathfinder Second Edition at Paizo. She writes adventures and rules for Pathfinder and Starfinder, plus an abundance of independent fantasy and science fiction in various stages of editing and querying. You can find Lyz and learn more about her innumerable hobbies on Twitter at @LyzMayTweet.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

I smile encouragingly at the wounded dragonkin. Trinek stares at the empty beach, holding his surfboard in front of him as if wondering how he and it got here. Even now, the program was backfilling the memory of a long shuttle ride in which he’d spent most of the time staring gloomily out the windows thinking about his dead partner, Lily.

“We’re... going surfing?”

“That’s right. You can call me Maro.” I let Trinek look me over, an old scarred winterborn ryphorian woman in a Second Skin wetsuit. I know that his eyes linger on the scars, wondering how I got them. I let him wonder. “C’mon, time for your first lesson.”

He limps awkwardly after me, his claws tensing on the brilliant white sand on this deserted beach in Grenloch. He’s suspicious of the sun and this brilliant warm day, shading himself protectively with his wings. He’s twitchy, anxious, continually looking for fighters overhead, or dangers waiting to ambush him behind any rock. I let him limp around the perimeter, looking for the enemies that are not there.

I introduce him to the board while still on the sand, show him how to position his body, balance, paddle. “As your leg gets stronger, we’ll work on other positions, but for now, the basics.” He picks it up quickly, and soon we transition to the water, paddling out.

As we paddle, he glances around suspiciously. “Shouldn’t Grenloch be more crowded, fancy resort like this?”

“Sure, near the dining areas and the hotel. But the waters are rougher here, and that keeps the tourists away. It’s the only reason they lease this spot to veterans. You and I are gonna be roughing it. Camping in the shuttle, fishing to supplement our supplies. And surfing and swimming each day until you heal up that leg.”

And that mind. I am going to keep you so busy that you forget to keep blaming yourself.

I teach surfing elsewhere on Grenloch. There are currently twelve copies of me teaching wealthy clients one-on-one at the resort. Most of the basics are standard enough that I can let the copies run on autopilot for a bit, giving me more bandwidth here.

With the wealthy clients, I start out easy, with a few perfect waves and good weather to build confidence. For Trinek, I’ve programmed the water to be difficult. He’s paddling against the tide, and surprise waves unseat him from his board multiple times. He has to work for it. More than once, he goes under. In his second skin, he’s in no danger of drowning as he swims furiously up to the surface. He mounts his board again, and the difficulty of just staying atop it is what sells this illusion for him.

“Trinek!” I bark out like the drill sergeant I once was. “You gonna give in to the water, or you gonna master it?”

No legionnaire is going to let a drill sergeant see them fail. No matter how much they’re hurting inside. He gets on top of the board, paddling fiercely out, not letting it unseat him.

Good.

Then the waves reward him, carrying him out, and he’s riding with them, and I hear a “Whooooo! Who’s the wave master now?”

I let him have that moment, then dump him under again. As he grimly claws back onto the board, he grunts. Still, he knows he can do it now, and he paddles out again.

---

Later, I pull out the fishing gear. “I had enough crappy rations while I served. Want to help me fish?” He’s exhausted, but he can’t admit it yet. He shrugs, nervously, but then I toss him a beer. “C’mon, soldier. Drunk fishing is a tradition.”

“Alright,” he opens the beer. “I don’t see how being drunk helps us fish, though.”

“If we don’t catch anything, the rations taste better,” I say with a grin. He laughs, and we get to it.

This I don’t put on hard mode. He needs some victories. Once we bring in our catch, I make a show of cooking it with the spices and herbs I brought. He eats with appreciation. Afterward, both exhausted, we lay on the damp sand, eight feet apart, looking up at the stars. The other copies of me have taught their lessons and are now off duty, so I can be fully present in this time and place.

“I can’t believe this is still Triaxus. This beach... This sand...”

“They told me it was because of a microclimate,” I say, half-truthfully. They tell everyone that, even though our unconscious bodies are hundreds of feet underground in a virtual reality bunker. The real Grenloch, while still warmer than the rest of the planet, is covered in snow. “Does it matter?”

“Maro?” he asks. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Those scars... you served in the Skyfire Legion, right?”

“Nine and a half years.” It’s the truth and I know he can feel it. “We did a tour of bugtopia. Carn never made it home. Swarm.” I’ve told this story two hundred times now, and grief gets me every time. I don’t have to fake the tears glistening in my eyes. I just let the stars and the silence tell my story.

“What was Carn like?” he asks.

“Goofy.” I say with a half-smile. I pull up pictures of Carn dumping snow on my head, and another of me dumping it right back down his uniform. Finally, I pull up an image of the last parade we’d been in, all of us marching through the frosty streets of Cumo, dress uniforms and rifles, trying to look fierce. “Before we went out, the Legion held this parade to suck up to Xandrig, the director of Sinterfang. It was stupid, but we needed the funding. Xandrig loved having the crowd shout for him, and Carn loved strutting in uniform.”

Illustration by Roberto Pitturru

“Lily loved the uniform too.” Then Trinek tries to muffle his sobs, and I’m up, holding and rocking him, as if I was his mother and he were newly hatched. The sobs wrack his body, and I know he’s remembering. Bonded partners are closer than lovers or twins. They’re the other presence that always lives in your head, the soulmate who did everything with you, and who’s now been ripped from your mind, leaving nothing but a gaping hole. It’s a searing psychic wound. Some grieving warriors fall into a hole so deep they never come out of it, willing themselves to die so that the pain will stop.

Or... they find another calling and purpose, like I did.

About the Author

Hilary Moon Murphy is a librarian, martial artist, and mom who has contributed to over a dozen different Paizo products.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The whole ship vibrated, and I gripped the edge of my bed, irrationally thinking earthquake, even though I hadn’t been on a planet in years. A metal blast sheet slammed down over the door of my lavish guest suite.

Honored human, my liaison Ctherk mind-whispered to me. I am told the Azlanti ship has launched an anchoring device and foiled our escape. The shirren host, garbed in a red robe exactly the same hue as the fanciful ship we traveled in, stood before the viewscreen on the wall. They pierced our hull with a metal spike, trailing a tether, and bound us together. They gestured with a three-clawed hand and called up an image of the attacking ship.

I recognized the sacred geometries of an Azlanti Star Empire cruiser, one of the beautifully symmetrical ships crafted in the Imperial Foundry, hanging against the darkness like an elegant glass ornament. Death shouldn’t wear such a lovely form. The ship was probably Spindle-class, though I couldn’t be sure. I wished I’d paid more attention to reports on the Foundry during council meetings back on Absalom Station, but my work was focused on the Veskarium, the slightly less hostile interplanetary empire next door, rather than on the Azlanti. I vaguely recalled that Spindle-class ships were favored by the Azlanti Empire’s spy agency, so....

Oh, no.

“This isn’t a random attack,” I said. “I think they’re here for me.”

Ctherk’s mouthparts quivered and a chittering sound I couldn’t interpret emerged, one of the first verbalizations they’d made in my presence. Why would they want you, honored delegate?

“I’m on my way to a summit in the Veskarium,” I said. “The uneasy peace between the Pact Worlds and the vesk has been strained lately, with attacks on the outskirts of various systems seeming to violate the truce in both directions. I’m supposed to go and reiterate our commitment to peace....” I shook my head. “I heard a theory that the attacks were organized by the Azlanti, using stolen vesk and Pact Worlds ships, hoping to destabilize relations between us. If they can make us fight each other, we’ll be weaker when the Empire decides to strike. If so, the Azlanti want to stop me from repairing relations... or to use me for some other scheme.”

Azlanti marines swarm a shirren starship in this illustration by Tomasz Chistowski. Find the rules for running your own boarding actions in Starfinder Starship Operations Manual, available everywhere July 30.

The ship vibrated, and a beautiful cut-glass decanter fell from a table and smashed onto the floor. We are attempting to fight back. The distaste in Ctherk’s mind-voice was evident. Despite popular belief, I knew not all shirrens were pacifists, but the ones on this luxurious diplomatic transport certainly were. That was part of why their vessels and crews were in such high demand for missions like mine. If you showed up for a summit in a Hivonyx Industries Diplomat-class cruiser like this one (its name was something in the shirren language which translated roughly to Will They Or Won’t They), crewed by peace-loving shirrens, everyone knew you weren’t planning a sneak attack or military treachery. That advantage was a weakness now, though.

“We actually have weapons on this thing?”

Sufficient to repel pirates and escape, Ctherk said. Likely not sufficient to fend off an Azlanti attack vessel that has already plunged a barbed stinger deep into our flesh.

I could see tiny specks pouring out of the enemy ship on screen. “Can you magnify that?”

Ctherk obliged. Those specks were people, wearing jet-packs of some kind, bearing rifles. “A boarding party,” I said. “Azlanti marines. Can they breach the ship?”

They have already gouged a hole in the hull. The tone in my mind was mournful. One of the upper decks suffered catastrophic decompression. Several of my hive-mates were lost.

“Oh, Ctherk, I’m so sorry.” I took a long pause, allowing a moment of solemn gravity, thinking bitterly that my diplomatic training had taught me well. “How long can we hold them off?”

They.... Our tactical officer believes they are Aeon Guard.

The elite shock-troops of the Empire, the spearhead of their invasion forces, the enforcers of their imperial goals. “Not long, then. What do we do?”

Ctherk’s mouthparts quivered. Protocol is to shelter here while our officers negotiate with the aggressors.

“Ah,” I said. “So, wait here to be captured. I wonder if they’ll imprison me, or brainwash me, strap a bomb to me, and send me on to the summit?” My first absurd thought was that my career would be ruined; the Prime Executive had put me up for this mission personally, and its failure would reflect badly on me. My next thought was that I might be responsible for a new war between the Pact Worlds and the vesk. I tried to focus back on the first thought, but it was too late.

The viewscreen shifted to an interior view of a corridor on our ship. I didn’t know how far away that corridor was, but the Will They Or Won’t They was only about a hundred meters long, so it couldn’t be far. A group of four armored and blank-masked Aeon Guards stomped into view, moving as one, weapons held at port arms. They looked like they were in a formal parade, not a chaotic military action. One of them aimed and fired at something, and the screen went black.

The Azlanti are a curious people, Ctherk said. I confess I do not understand them. They are human, with individual wills, but they subjugate themselves, body and mind, to their leaders. They even choose to erase all signs of individuality with those faceless masks. It’s as if... they want to become the Swarm.

I could only nod. The shirrens were an offshoot of that monolithic insectoid race, descendants of Swarm members who’d rebelled, choosing individualism and peace over hive-minded destruction. They took physical pleasure from making even small choices, and I’d watched Ctherk luxuriate in the decision over which dessert to have at dinner the night before. I could understand why the faceless ranks of the lock-stepping Azlanti would strike them as particularly horrible.

Would you like to wait here for inevitable capture, or risk death for the chance at freedom? Ctherk thought at me.

“Freedom,” I said, without hesitation.

I felt something like a smile appear in my mind. Spoken like a shirren. Ctherk slithered out of their robe, revealing their smaller pair of secondary arms, their chitinous exoskeleton, and their complicated, spiky legs. Put this on, and pull the hood up.

I complied, hiding myself in meters of cloth. “What are we doing?”

I have coordinated with some of the crew. They will project their thoughts to the Azlanti, as if accidentally broadcasting too wide in a panic, and describe a false plan to take you to the hold of the ship and put you on board a shuttle. Perhaps they will be fooled. Meanwhile, I will escort you to an escape pod. It is equipped with stealth technology, and may avoid detection.

The blast doors rose up as Ctherk thumped a panel on the wall, which fell open to reveal a weapon that looked like a harpoon crossed with a plasma rife. This is a non-lethal stunning weapon, Ctherk said. But it may buy time.

“Once we get out of here—”

Once you get out of here, honored delegate. The escape pod has room only for one.

“Ctherk, if the Aeon Guards catch you, they’ll kill you. Even if I get away—”

Helping you is my choice, Ctherk said. The Azlanti would take all choice away. Please let me keep mine.

I am a steely-eyed negotiator, unmoved by sentiment or emotion—that’s why I was chosen for this trip, because the vesk respect strength and cold clarity.

There were tears in my eyes as I put my hand on Ctherk’s smooth, hard shoulder. “The Pact Worlds thank you. Absalom Station thanks you. I thank you.”

Ctherk opened the door, and I followed them, into freedom or death.

About the Author

Tim Pratt is the author of more than 20 novels, most recently the Axiom space opera series, including Philip K. Dick Award finalist The Wrong Stars and its sequels, The Dreaming Stars and The Forbidden Stars. Tim’s five Pathfinder Tales novels—City of the Fallen Sky, Reign of Stars, Liar’s Blade, Liar’s Bargain, and Liar’s Island—are available now. He's a Hugo Award winner for short fiction, and has been a finalist for Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Mythopoeic, Stoker, and other awards. His collection Miracles & Marvels was released last fall. He tweets incessantly (@timpratt) and publishes a new story every month for patrons at www.patreon.com/timpratt.

About Tales From The Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

In the holovids, they make stowing away look practically romantic.

Starship corridor lights pulse, jump-suited crew members stand at their stations, and there’s our hero, crouching dramatically in the foreground. She’s beautiful and savvy, her hair flowing and streaked neon as she avoids detection by a laser’s edge. She darts past enemies like a shooting star in the night, spiriting herself away in the ship’s cargo hold. She steals her ride as easy as if she’d harnessed a runaway enercycle. The plot moves on.

Except real life ain’t the holovids, and I’m no hero. My name is Rayuhl Rengott. Technically, I’m a thief. Also technically, I’m a murderer. That last one is patently false, but we’ll get to that later.

I’m not beautiful or savvy, either. I hiss when I talk—and I don’t even have hair. I’m as bald as the dead landscape of my beloved homeworld. Unlike most of my fellow Eoxians, though, I’m very much alive.

Yes, there are creatures on Eox other than just putrefied corpsefolk, skeletal bone troopers, and necrovite spellcasters. And we aren’t all Absalom Station’s most foolhardy traders or undead wannabes living in dystopian bubble cities.

Some of us are living, breathing elebrians. Those long-skulled, dead-eyed, shrivel-skinned monsters you think of when you hear the name “Eox”? They were once us, except now they’re among the most powerful walking dead. And we are at their mercy.

You seem confused. Fair enough. I’ll explain.

Long, long before the Gap, a handful of elebrians survived our kin’s annihilation of the world. As second-class citizens, we’ve lived on our destroyed planet for untold generations ever since, passing flesh-and-blood legacies to our descendants. We try to keep the ravenous undead at bay for a half-dozen decades or so before we expire. We live only where our undead overlords deign to create hospitable environments for us. We perform the jobs they graciously hand out—if we’re lucky, it’s hard labor. If we’re not, we fight to the death for their amusement and profit in sick events streamed galaxy-wide from the Halls of the Living.

Like I said, we’re at their mercy. For most of us, it’s the only way to stay alive.

Which brings me to my current predicament. I’m peering out of the open cargo bay of this starship I hopped from Absalom Station. All around me are desolate hills, fossilized trees, miasmic eddies—you know, typical Dead Planet stuff. This is Eox, all right, but it’s not my beloved home city of the Pyre. Instead, it’s some desiccated place nearby, with the Pyre’s power-generating tower off in the hazy distance.

And I’m staring right at the bone sage who issued my death-warrant—a destroy-on-sight, as I believe the Eoxian authorities call it—over high crimes of murder and theft from his personal palace.

Illustration by Weston T. Jones

Remember when I said I wasn’t savvy?

I thought I was stowing away on an AbadarCorp freighter bound for the loading docks of the Pyre. The plan was simple. I’d slip into the city, meet up with my old Redbloods crew, and help them pull a job big enough to buy a new life for all of us—one meant for the living!— on Absalom Station. They’d lined up the heist in the elite suites of the arcology, and I’d leveraged my Absalom connections. This job would buy me a whole new identity, and it would afford my friends enough credits to comfortably emigrate from this dead rock. Win-win.

Except for that planet-blasted bone sage Kalantrodoch. He calls himself the Unburning. I call him the Bum-squirming. He’s a rabid zombified squox-rat if there ever was one. He also happens to rule the Pyre. And he’s the reason I had to flee Eox three years ago.

Look, I was minding my own business—okay, okay, I had broken into Kalantrodoch’s sky-mansion. I planned to steal some ancient tech artifact the Redbloods had heard he’d smuggled in from Castrovel. I had the thing in my hot little hands, too. It looked like a small datapad, but it was made from a strange metal covered in Elven runes, and was meant to be strapped on the wrist or ankle.

Just as I was ducking out of that awful place, I heard footsteps coming into the vault. I hid behind some technosafes, and I heard Kalantrodoch himself chatting in his horrifically sibilant voice to some of his cronies.

“We’ll put it in the water,” the bone sage had said. “In a fortnight, our problem disa—”

Whatever that meant. I didn’t hear the rest, because Kalantrodoch happened to walk past that particular technosafe at that particular time, and the jig was up. He would have caught me and likely thrown me into prison for life had I not had a vial of rotdust on me. I threw it in his face and he breathed in ground-up undead skin. Corpses hate that—they find it disgusting, on par with cannibalism. Go figure.

Anyway, it was just the distraction I needed to duck out of the vault. From there, I slinked out of the sky-mansion, and I promptly pawned the Castrovellian tech on the Station.

That’s how I earned my death-warrant from Kalantrodoch the Unburning. Why he decided to tell the Pact that I murdered someone is beyond me. I guess he takes thefts from his personal home rather personally. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because ol’ Bum-squirming has made sure I can never safely return to Eox in my current identity. Hence the current plan. And my current predicament.

Because I can tell that the bone sage I’m seeing is Kalantrodoch by his eyes, which do burn like some sort of unholy Asmodean forges. Why he’s out here in the gods-forsaken wastelands outside the Pyre is beyond me. And why he’s meeting an apparently legitimate Abadaran merchant is also a mystery.

My best bet is to creep undetected around these cases of cargo—probably supplies for those monstrous necrovites in the arcology—and simply vanish. Then, I’ve just got to hope my environmental protections last long enough for me to hike the rest of the way to the Pyre. This job can still happen.

I have to get dangerously close to Kalantrodoch as I pick my way around the ship’s perimeter, though. I see he’s got two corpsefolk cronies with him. Ugh, at least I don’t have to smell the stench of rotting flesh no doubt wafting up from them. Thanks to the tympanal cluster implants in my ears, I can even hear what they’re whispering to each other while they’re waiting for the Abadaran to review the cargo manifest.

“That’s the crate,” Kalantrodoch says, nodding to one small, inconspicuous box. “Undetectable, and the scientists promised it’d work this time. They’ve learned much in three years.”

I stop cold, heart racing. What is he saying?

“We’re just weeks away from ten thousand fewer breathers.”

I stifle a shocked gasp. What I heard three years ago suddenly makes sense.

Our problem disappears. Ten thousand fewer breathers.

Kalantrodoch is planning to wipe out most of the living elebrian population in the Pyre. With some sort of undetectable poison? I can only imagine the horrors he means to visit on my kind. Our numbers are well known, and for years the bone sage has subtly complained to Orphys that his living workers are a drain on resources.

Looking around wildly, I assess the scene. There are stacks and stacks of crated goods—this is not a small shipment; Kalantrodoch is smuggling the highly illegal poison in with a vast array of legitimate goods. That’s probably why he’s meeting the Abadaran outside the city limits.

I do see a rack near me with a few high-octane enercycles. I could take one of them and flee to the city. But they’re noisy, and the walking corpses would blast me away before I could get too far. And I’ve got to get to the city without heat on my trail, because I have to warn my friends.

Desperately hoping to find anything that might help, I start quietly prying lids off crates. There’s one with a dozen second skin suits, one with assorted computer circuitry, and finally, one I can work with.

A crate full of grenades.

I’m going to have to time this perfectly if it’s going to work. Thinking quickly, I lash the open crate of grenades to the back of one of the bikes, then I grab another cycle. Standing between them like I’m leading two prize show shotalashus, I slowly walk the bikes around the perimeter of the site.

I position myself just out of sight of the bone sage and the Abadaran. I’ll set one bike off riderless to distract them, I think. Then, when chaos reigns, I’ll ride in the opposite direction—toward Pyre—and none of them will be the wiser. The crate of grenades is mine, just in case I need any weapons once I slink into the city.

It’s a great plan, I think, as I start up the enercycles’ engines as quietly as I can. Until I realize I’ve misjudged the bone sage and his cronies’ line of sight.

“A breather!” one of the corpsefolk shouts, pointing in my direction. Both zombies pull out massive arc rifles and level them in my direction.

Instinctively, I rev the boom-cycle’s engine. Yanking a grenade out, I pull the pin and drop it back into the crate. I let the boom-cycle fly toward the corpses and the Abadaran, and I hop on the other cycle, shooting toward the spire in the distance.

The blast wave from the ensuing explosion nearly knocks me off balance. I can hear the shrieks of Kalantrodoch and his minions. I hear nothing from the Abadaran, and I can only hope that they survived.

I did say I wasn’t a hero.

A few minutes pass as I zoom along the shriveled Eoxian landscape toward the spire. When I dare to look back, it seems my plan didn’t sideline ol’ Bum-squirming for as long as I’d hoped. He’s racing behind me on a scorched enercycle, minions nowhere to be found, his long canines dripping with acidic saliva and his horrific, fiery eyes screaming with rage.

“Rengott!” he shouts.

Great. He knows it’s me. I kick the enercycle, bobbing and weaving, hoping I’ll be able to lose him.

This could be an awkward homecoming. I’ve just got to make it to Pyre alive…

About the Author

Amanda Hamon is the Managing Developer for Starfinder, and you could say science-fantasy is her jam. Her game design, worldbuilding, and adventure writing have appeared in dozens of RPG products, including the Starfinder and Pathfinder roleplaying games. Mostly, she just likes doing stupid voices for characters at the table. You can find Amanda on Twitter at @amandahamon.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

It’s barely light—just after dawn—and my heart is pounding, hammering in time with the pahtra war drum’s rhythm. The visceral stomp of heavily armored boots and the jagged crackle of automatic rifle fire roil around us all. The vesk move awkwardly, still clumsy and off-balance in gravity that’s far weaker than what they’re used to. They carry their laser weapons with pride, firing sleek lines of light through the trees, and I find myself baring my teeth in a disdainful snarl. The magnetic storms of Vesk-6 make laser weapons risky even at the best of times, but the azimuth laser rifle is the standard-issue armament for the Veskarium army, and so the vesk carry them. My hands tighten on my own rifle, adrenaline surging as the war drum urges us forward. I take to the shadows behind a trio of ancient trees, waiting for the right moment to leap into the fray.

Is this what my forebears felt, some 300 years ago, fighting against the vesk invaders intent on reconquering a world they knew they had once controlled? Or even longer ago, before the Gap, when the Veskarium first came to Pulonis and claimed it as Vesk-6, the newest part of their empire?

Illustration by Roberto Pitturru

But this isn’t a war. We aren’t a guerilla team fending off an invasion—it’s a training exercise, and the vesk in the clearing are as much my teammates as the other pahtras in the trees around me. The largest and boldest vesk in our unit leads the way, with just over a half-dozen others not far behind her. One vesk for each pahtra in our unit. Usually we train side-by-side, learning from one another, but today we’ve been divided up, pahtras against vesk. My own vesk partner stands firmly in the center of his unit, holding his rifle steady and firing careful blasts. It’s a typical vesk tactic, all stoic and solid and focused on formation, while my half of the unit has split up, each of us blending into the trees and utilizing the tactics that work best for us.

It makes Major Koboratash furious, our disregard for formal strategies. It’s also how we’ve won the last six of these mock battles. I wonder what she’s trying to accomplish, dividing us up into Team Pahtra and Team Vesk when the high despot’s program has us training side by side in the first place. I know some of my teammates think the major is secretly training the vesk to fight some of the pahtra resistance cells active near Leapfang Bay. I hope they’re wrong.

I wait for my chance to leap into the fray, watching for an opening, a distraction, an opportunity. My gaze settles on Jaskenayo, a particularly stodgy vesk with dark green scales, and the fur down the back of my neck suddenly stiffens. A shiver runs down the length of my spine. Something here is... wrong. I can’t say what or why or even how I know, but something about him has me deeply unsettled. His movements aren’t quite in step with the others, the tracking of his beady eyes just a little jerky. Like he’s watching the skirmish and reacting just a nanosecond too slow to be real. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and the tension along my spine grows so tight it’s painful. Something here is deeply, terribly wrong.

I slip back into the shadows. Make my way around the simulated firefight, slinking along the underbrush, until I’m off to one side, almost opposite our war drummer. Slowly, careful not to draw attention to my movements, I dump the blanks from my rifle and swap in the magazine of live ammunition from my belt. We all carry it, as a precaution against the countless predators of Vesk-6, since you never know when a sky viper might turn a training exercise into a life-or-death fight. Somehow, even though I can’t say why, I know this is one of those times.

The headstrong scrapper of my unit gives me the opening I need, rushing in to take on the frontline vesk with her bare hands like the reckless brawler she is. I lift my rifle, take careful aim. Breathe out. Pull the trigger.

Jaskenayo goes down so easily. He hadn’t seen me, and I was so close my single shot punched right through his overplate. He falls with a strangled cry.

Chaos breaks out. Of course it does—these training exercises aren’t supposed to be lethal. Everyone is shouting, and eight standard-issue Veskarium laser rifles swing around to focus on me, sharp clicks ringing out as they, too, are switched to a lethal setting. The hammering rhythm of the war drum falters, and then ceases altogether. My pahtra teammates stare, aghast. I feel my vesk partner’s eyes on me, betrayed and furious.

My fear—that creeping sensation of wrongness—dissipates almost as soon as Jaskenayo’s body hits the ground. But it’s immediately replaced by a different kind of fear, less visceral and much more intellectual, as Major Koboratash’s outraged shouts resound through the jungle. Demanding to know what just happened. What I thought I was doing. And I realize, really realize, what I’ve done. I just killed my teammate. Our war drummer’s partner. My partner’s childhood friend.

The major stomps up to me, and I hand over my rifle. I try to explain myself, but I don’t have the words for it. I have no proof, no justification—I just knew something was wrong. She doesn’t believe me, of course. She sees a recruit killed by friendly fire. A personal vendetta turned lethal.

I can’t even pretend it was an accident. They’ll court-martial me, and I’ll be discharged, dishonorably, without the Soldier’s Due.

Then, behind the major, Jaskenayo’s body twitches. I flinch back, and the major spins around as the dead vesk body jerks and shudders. Then, horribly, his body seems to deflate as a slick, bulbous ooze slithers out from beneath his armor.

A hymothoa.

I understand, then. I hadn’t encountered one of the indigenous oozes before, but I knew about them. Like how they eat away at a host’s organs and replace them, puppeting them around in pursuit of goals no one has ever been able to understand. And that some pahtras have something of a sixth sense for hymothoas, when most other species have no way to detect them other than with extensive medical scanning—something almost impossible here given our planet’s unpredictable magnetic storms.

The major snaps out an order, and suddenly eight azimuth laser rifles are firing on the thing with lethal force. When I blink away the afterimage of eight laser beams, all that remains of the hymothoa is a damp patch on the leafy jungle floor beside Jaskenayo’s now-unmoving form. I begrudgingly admit to myself that the vesk weapons have some benefits after all—my own rifle would have been far less effective against an amorphous foe.

Major Koboratash looks back at me, scowling. “You knew?”

I nod and stammer, trying to put into words the gut feeling, the absolute certainty that things weren’t the way they should be. Childhood tales flit through my mind, warning of the bogeyman oozes, but I can’t use a ghost story as a justification. My heart is hammering louder than the war drums had before. She can still court-martial me. Have me discharged. Order the squad to turn their laser rifles on me and fire—the Army of the Veskarium certainly has no overabundance of mercy.

But she cuts me off with a snarl and a sharp gesture. “That was well done, Gunner Sehvet.”

I shut my mouth. The major looks between me and the unmoving corpse on the jungle floor. I wonder what the ooze had hoped to accomplish by parasitizing Jaskenayo. Probably nothing good—for all their inscrutability, the creatures seem to have as much resentment of the vesk occupation of our planet as the most deeply entrenched pahtra resistance cells.

The major barks new orders. She turns north and leads the way as if nothing unusual had happened. We all leap to comply, vesk and pahtra alike. Lines form as we pair up with our counterparts and begin the strict, regimented march back to Command 6. My vesk partner falls into place beside me, and I can feel his uneasy eyes watching me, but now isn’t the time for chatter. I don’t know what I’d say anyway, because I have a sinking feeling this is just the beginning.

About the Author

Lyz Liddell is a designer for Pathfinder Second Edition at Paizo. She writes adventures and rules for Pathfinder and Starfinder, plus an abundance of independent fantasy and science fiction in various stages of editing and querying. You can find Lyz and learn more about her innumerable hobbies on Twitter at @LyzMayTweet.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Zemir stepped around a fetid pool of… something… and tried to breathe shallowly. Intellectually he knew that either his mask was working or it wasn’t, and either way the worst he’d suffer was a strong sense of nausea if he did get a whiff of unfiltered air. But the horrid smell that penetrated the mask’s filters still made him want to avoid taking deep lungfuls of the stuff. Which made it difficult to keep up with Obozaya, as his vesk companion strode unfettered through the densely-packed market.

Illustration by Roberto Pitturru.

“I still do not understand you mammals!” Obozaya sounded more amused than perplexed. “If the atmosphere’s odor is so terrible it turns you into mewling monkeys, why not activate your environmental controls rather than just using the breather mask?”

Zemir ignored the “monkeys” jab. He was still relatively new to the crew of the Sunrise Maiden, hired for his power to search through and bring things from various iterations of reality. Obozaya was a respected, veteran member of the crew, and Zemir was better off humoring her. If he could earn Obozaya’s trust, the rest of the crew would quickly follow.

“There are two reasons.” Zemir sidestepped a group of haggling kasathas and picked up his pace to walk next to the vesk. “The first is that I’m not sure how much I trust this filter to pull the actual toxins out of the air, given how much of the rotting-fish-and-eggs odor it lets in. Since we’re here to get surplus air filters and pressurized tents so the rest of our crew can operate on this planet long-term—longer than our armor’s environmental seals will last—I’d like to test this model in the field. I don’t fully trust AbadarCorp’s marketing claims.”

Obozaya nodded, her teeth flashing briefly in what Zemir had come to believe was an expression of appreciation. Vesk might be one of a dozen species immune to the toxins in this planet’s air, but she was pragmatic enough that she certainly wouldn’t want her teammates hampered by nausea and weakness if their mission ran more than a few days.

“Secondly... are we being followed?”

Zemir did not change the tone of his voice at all, and to her credit Obozaya did not spin to look around. Instead she simply angled her path to skirt a denser part of the crowded market’s patrons. Zemir fell in behind her, moving through the wake she made in the throng. Creatures of half a dozen species cursed and stepped in behind them, shaking fists and raising their chins in angry postures. Which meant it was easy for Zemir to spot the group following them as they plowed into the already-agitated crowd, shoving sapients out of their way while remaining quiet and taking on hunched postures, trying to keep their profiles below the general level of the market’s customers.

There were three of them, short and broad humanoids in heavy armor. Zemir guessed they were lashuntas... or dwarves, though he had much less experience with dwarves. Their equipment was worn and patched, but looked functional enough. All three had laser rifles of some kind slung over their shoulders, and holstered sidearms. Their armors’ environmental seals were active, protecting them from the extreme discomfort of the atmosphere, and making their faces harder to discern.

But their facial tattoos were clear enough. He shifted his view, searching through nearby iterations of his own reality, and saw the three figures following someone on this street, at this time, in most alternate realities. Their presence here was not random.

Obozaya took a sharp turn onto another major road and stepped to the side, allowing Zemir to pass her. She shot him a glance with a raised brow ridge.

“Three of them, definitely following us. Short, maybe korasha. Facial tattoos.”

“Golden League?” Obozaya asked.

Zemir shrugged. “I don’t know the local families well enough to hazard a guess. Would Golden League assassins be likely to want you dead?”

Obozaya shook her head once, firmly, while unclipping the safety strap from her stellar cannon. Zemir bit his lower lip, though his mask concealed the expression. If they weren’t Xun assassins, then they were most likely just robbers, possibly drawn by his own obvious good taste in equipment. In that was the case, Obozaya and he could likely deal with them if it came to a fight, but likely not without getting ejected from the market for getting flechette holes in nearby shops. And even if he could talk their way out of expulsion, the shop they were headed to for supplies might close for the day if there was talk of a brawl in the street

Of course if they were robbers, their main motivation would be to make a quick credit in a shakedown.

Zemir put a hand on Obozaya’s arm. “Follow my lead.”

Her brow ridge went up even higher, but she nodded. Just as the three tattooed pursuers rounded the corner, Zemir stepped into the street and turned to face Obozaya.

“NOW you want your back pay?”

Obozaya was clearly surprised, but covered it quickly enough, especially since all eyes were on Zemir. She growled at him, which he hoped was just her way of playing along.

“I’m mortgaged to the hilt!” Zemir let exasperation leak into his voice. “I’ve even been reduced to wearing cheap knock-off fashion. Not a thing on me is worth a tenth its appearance. And since the family disowned me, I can’t turn to them for support!”

At first the squat ruffians simply stood in shock and stared at Zemir complaining to his apparent bodyguard, but as he continued to describe the dire straits of his finances, and lack of extended family, their expressions went from shock to sour. About the time he claimed he could pay Obozaya in a week, when his next loan came through, the lashuntas—he’d seen at least one antenna, so they must be lashuntas—turned as a group and trundled back the way they’d come.

Once Zemir was sure they were out of earshot, he stopped whining.

Obozaya chuckled. “Not how I’d have handled it, but effective. But aren’t you worried word will get out that you‘re broke, and merchants will refuse to talk to you?”

Zemir shrugged. “If we needed high-end or custom goods that you can only buy with an appointment, maybe. All we need are more filter masks. When we show the paramilitary surplus dealer our credits, he won’t care about rumors.”

Obozaya seemed satisfied, and began making her way toward the surplus shop again. “That taken care of... what was the second reason you’re not using your environmental seals?”

Zemir’s mask kept his predatory grin from being obvious, but his eyes did sparkle.

“I want to know this miasma well enough that I can grab a cloud of it from another iteration of reality. If I ever need to flood a room with it, anyone unfamiliar with the stench is in for quite the shock.”

---

About the Author

Owen K.C. Stephens is a veteran of the tabletop RPG industry with more than 20 years of experience, including being on staff at Green Ronin, Paizo, and Wizards of the Coast and being the publisher of RogueGeniusGames.com. He has worked on numerous RPG lines, including being co-author of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG and Design Lead for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. You can support his writing and free content production at Patreon, and follow him at his blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.

About Iconic Encounters

Iconic Encounters is a series of web-based flash fiction set in the worlds of Pathfinder and Starfinder. Each short story provides a glimpse into the life and personality of one of the games’ iconic characters, showing the myriad stories of adventure and excitement players can tell with the Pathfinder and Starfinder roleplaying games.

Rock rained near New Valor.

With a twist of the wheel, Zurkrishu maneuvered the hover tank out of the largest boulder’s path before drifting back onto their collision course with the colossal kyokor as Renz kept firing the main autocannon. “Stay with me, Renz,” Zurkrishu admonished over her shoulder as Renz’s tracer rounds veered off target. “We only got this one chance, yeah? Let’s do it for Daimalko!” Still hundreds of feet off, the kyokor lunged toward another vehicle, snatching and crumpling it in a single motion as its occupants rained haplessly back to the ground. As Renz’s explosive shells hit home, the kyokor hurled the wreckage at their hover tank, striking it straight on and flipping it end over end.

Time slowed. Zurkrishu went flying, her hand outstretched toward Renz as she cried out “Captain!”

Captain? In that frozen moment, Renz looked down at their sleeve. No, they were a sergeant, weren’t they?

“Captain!”

Something wasn’t right. The kyokor’s roar was fading into dull static as Renz tumbled through the air.

“Captain?”

Renz blinked awake. Their sheets were tangled like so much wreckage, and the only light came from an unblinking featureless face projected on their wall monitor.

“Captain, there’s an incident,” Stilchee announced patiently. The embri’s mask hid her emotions admirably, yet Renz could detect a hint of silent judgment. “You’re needed on the bridge.”

“An incident?” Renz quipped while rolling off their bed in a vain search for trousers. “If they’re fighting again, just break ’em up.”

“I assure you, Flowers and Esh are on their best behavior. I respect your non-Pact Standard sleep cycle enough not to disturb you unless it’s important.” Stilchee paused before adding, “We have unexpected company.”

Renz swore quietly all the way to the bridge, idly rubbing the Daimalkan military insignia on their jacket. For decades, the Veskarium had subjugated the planet Landahl and its peaceful illyr inhabitants, provoking a guerrilla war that the illyrs were slowly losing. Not wanting to provoke another Silent War, the Pact Worlds had stayed out of the unjust annexation, but sympathizers with deep pockets still supplied the illyrs where they could. It was just such a smuggling run that Renz had accepted, sneaking ordnance to the rebels.

As Renz arrived, Esh reflexively stood and saluted, the hobgoblin’s military upbringing taking over before he sheepishly returned to his seat. The ghoran behind him smirked before Esh chidingly swatted them, ruffling the ghoran’s fern-top undercut. “All right, business time. What’s happening?” Renz demanded.

Stilchee maintained eye contact as she turned on the main viewscreen, displaying a fleet of Veskarium warships.

Illustration by Rodrigo Gonzalez Toledo

“What the Hell’s with this welcoming party?” Renz demanded. “All reports described light patrols, not a blockade!”

“Kinda wish we were being paid more for the run, huh Renz?” quipped Flowers, their sarcasm belied by their nervously gripping the starship’s controls.

“Hey, it’s a good cause, alright?” Renz shot back before looking to his embri science officer. “Stilchee, our cover’s still in order, right?”

“Aye, captain.” The alien mollusk bobbed her mask as her claws tapped away. “Our hold remains shielded, and our documentation still insists we’re shipping scientific instruments and other supplies to the Obedurn Associates research colony, a neutral entity. I worry more that their flagship has begun scanning us aggressively.”

“Your countermeasures holding up, though? Good.” Renz shook out their shoulders, checked their mutton chops, and ran a hand through their hair. “Patch me through to our new friends, and I’ll clear up this misunderstanding before they dig too deep.”

Stilchee tapped away diligently as Flowers mockingly mouthed “nu-nu-friends” and pantomimed a dancing skittermander to Esh in an attempt at levity. The ghoran snapped back to the controls when the screen suddenly displayed a massive Veskarian starship’s bridge filled with dozens of vesk officers. Before them loomed their leader, a vesk in overplate armor, her fuchsia-and-green scales bristling with confidence. “Attend, and identify yourself,” she boomed, her vesk second-in-command stepping into view at her side.

“Glory to you.” Renz inclined their head slightly in respect. “I am Renz, captain of the Zurkrishin. We’re bound for Landahl carrying food, clothing, and scientific instruments for Obedurn Associates. What earns us this welcome?”

“You stand before Wing Commander Tolskamash of the Army of the Veskarium, Thrice-Tested Conqueror of Persam-6 and commanding officer of the Scorchrazor. I trust you understand commerce to Landahl is tightly restricted?”

“Absolutely, wing commander.” Renz briefly glanced to Stilchee, who pointed insistently to her station’s display, indicating multiple ships were now scanning the Zurkrishin.

“Yet even so, you traffic in the name of rebel sympathizers?”

Renz stared back in disbelief. “Sympathizers, wing commander?”

The vesk’s first officer responded. “Sympathizers,” he intoned grimly. “They recently declared their support for the illyr resistance. Those who serve them are in violation of Veskarium law. Violators are to be eliminated with prejudice,” he added with a hungry grin.

“The Veskarium’s justice is not so cruel, sub-commander,” Tolskamash remarked calmly to her second without breaking her predatory menace.

“Then no doubt the captain would welcome a boarding party to search his starship,” amended the first officer.

“They/them, thank you!” snapped Flowers from the pilot’s chair, interrupting the vesk’s interrogation.

“They/Th—?” Wing Commander Tolskamash blinked, quirked her head, and studied Renz before straightening and raking three claws over her breastplate in display of the god Damoritosh’s doshko blade, nudging her second to do the same. “My subordinate and I were mistaken and meant no disrespect,” she apologized while struggling to regain her earlier momentum. “The captain, ah, they would certainly—"

“It’s an honest mistake, please,” Renz interrupted with a casual wave before adding, “But I believe it’s not the only honest mistake at hand—we’re simple teamsters given bad information. My crew will send you our manifest imminently, and we can forget about these misunderstandings. Hold, please.” Stilchee cut the transmission as the off-balance vesk struggled to respond.

Renz furiously scratched their mutton chops before Flowers began another round of gallows humor. “Hey, hey!” Renz snapped. “News doesn’t travel any faster through the Drift than we do, okay? It’s just bad timing. We can talk our way out.”

“We don’t have long to talk, captain,” Stilchee reported, pointing to her screens. Alerts silently popped up every few seconds, signaling that each of the vesk ships was scanning them. Their cover was slipping as surely as Stilchee’s masked emotions, and Renz could hear the restrained fear building in her voice as she more quietly counseled: “Just because you named the ship after a colossus hunter doesn’t mean it can take on that many goliaths.”

“That, ah, might not be true,” countered Esh, pantomiming finger-guns to emphasize his point. “At this rate, they won’t just find our illyr shipments.”

Renz scowled. “And why would our starship’s basic armaments upset the vesk?”

“What are a few lasers between friends?” The hobgoblin flicked at his own screens and added, “But when we were doing maintenance last, I gave our systems a little, ah, upgrade that might spook their sensors.”

“Like what?”

Esh’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “Little something we called ‘Gideron Gold’ back in the home system.”

“Gider—" Flowers visibly wilted. “We’re packing nukes?!?”

“Hey, you de-stress with spa days, I de-stress by knowing we’re packing real heat!”

“Damn, you Authority types don’t mess around.” Flowers cracked their knuckles. “That changes the odds just a little.”

Esh gave the ghoran a playful shove, “Well look who bloomed and grew some stamens!”

“Irrelevant!” Stilchee chided while furiously reconfiguring their starship’s signatures to foil the vesk scanners. “Captain, we have perhaps a few minutes before they see through our cover. We need a plan.”

Renz quickly reviewed the armament specs before responding. “Typically vesk. This isn’t a patrol fleet, but one designed to make an example, just like they’re doing to the illyrs. Whether we let them on board or just wait long enough for them to scan us, they’re going to learn just how much ordnance we’re packing.” They glowered out the window while idly rubbing their jacket’s insignia. “But when it comes to dealing with colossi, I like to think there’s an Option 3.”

The embri deflated slightly. “By your tone, captain, I’m sensing that last option is not ‘retreat?’”

“You can bet your best mask it ain’t,” Renz declared dangerously. “Didn’t you hear me earlier? I promised the good wing commander a full inventory—and that means declaring every rocket, bullet, and beam we’re packing.”

Esh cackled and rubbed his hands in anticipation before turning to the starship’s targeting computers. “Permission to send those scaleys the first line item?”

Renz nodded. “Shields up, Stilchee. Flowers, take the first opening through this blockade. Esh, light ’em up with whatever you’ve been bragging about. We’ve only got this one shot, yeah?” they encouraged, tapping the Daimalkan insignia once more, their face briefly lit by the saffron glow of Esh’s torpedoes silently screaming toward their targets. “This time, we do it for Landahl.”

About the Author

John Compton is the Starfinder Senior Developer at Paizo, Inc., having recently joined the team from years creating organized play adventure content. He has written extensively for Pathfinder and Starfinder, including adventures, setting content, and rule books, and before working for Paizo, he was a teacher, practicing archaeologist, and archaeometallurgist. You can find John on Twitter and Paizo-facing Discord servers @Archaeotagh.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

It never failed to amaze Devi, coming out of Drift. The sensation, visual and mental, of time and space returning to their normal flow, of planets, stars, and the black expanding to their normal size. The tiny feeling of relief that he’d made it through.

Devi’s route through the Drift had taken just under three days. Even though it was quite rare for Drift voyages that short to encounter disaster, ships traveling in Near Space still occasionally disappeared. Triune’s miraculous space highway had done wonders for the Pact Worlds, opening new planets and cultures for all, but using it wasn’t without risk. During his trip, he’d seen swirling black holes, ancient debris from long-wrecked spaceships, and the far-off silhouettes of creatures with more eyes and tentacles than he could count, but nothing directly threatened his ship and making it safely still felt especially good.

He piloted a heavily modified Ringworks Wanderer he’d gotten for an amazing deal at an underground auction in an off-the-grid port in Akiton. Devi had asked no questions and the ysoki auction runner had named no names. Devi liked to think there was honor among the same species, but even so, he’d personally gone over the ship to make sure there were no problems and after installing a custom Drift engine and new pilot controls to fit his height, the Winding Jaunt was fit for interstellar travel. She could hold a crew of three—her ideal crew size—but Devi could never seem to hold onto crewmates. That’s probably why he hadn’t yet risen high in the Starfinder Society. After life in an overstuffed warren under the eyes of innumerable relatives, he liked traveling alone. It was better that way, out in the black with nothing but his thoughts and the far-off stars.

The Winding Jaunt drew closer to her destination, the orange and purple-tinged planet growing larger on the front display screen. An unexplored planet around a yellow sun, one of the few that could support organic life. One of countless worlds on the edges of Near Space, just outside the unknown edges of the Vast. Devi had listened to a crusty vesk spacer talking about its coordinates while he’d been in port buying supplies to send back to the warren weeks ago.

Devi was glad he’d followed up on the pirate’s drunken boasts. There the planet was, sure as daylight. And if the readings Devi was getting were any indication, this world was filled with all kinds of biodiverse lifeforms. Large bodies of water. Breathable atmosphere, too, at least with the right adjustments to his suit. Some heavy thaumic surges, but an overall stable reality field. This could be his ticket to promotion in the Starfinder Society, crew or not.

As the Jaunt entered atmo, Devi initiated the ship’s landing sequence and set the computer scanners to find a suitable landing zone—a clear field near a forest, but with enough sightlines that he’d see anything overtly dangerous approaching his ship and have enough time to respond. After reviewing scans of several possibilities, Devi chose an open clearing near a lightly wooded area, just a couple of clicks from one of the planet’s oceans.

The Jaunt descended, adjusting its pressure, wards, and shielding so the vessel wouldn’t burn up as it let gravity do some of the ship’s work. Devi used the next hour to review his own supplies. Enough food and water for a few weeks. His weapons and armor were primed and charged, his AI ocular implant set to record and catalog all new forms of life he came across. He even had some trinkets, coins, and other useful items should he come across any sapient species looking to trade. Though that seemed unlikely. So far, the ship’s scanners had detected no trace of technology or sentient-made shelters. With a final push from its thrusters, the ship landed in its chosen clearing and made a scan of the perimeter.

“So far, so good,” Devi murmured to himself and his AI. This was one of his favorite parts. The moment before stepping outside into the unknown. A chance to learn new things, discover key mysteries of the universe. It was like a fine wine or cheese, to be savored for as long as possible.

Illustration by Rodrigo Gonzalez Toledo

Devi lowered himself from the ships platform and took a step out into a whole new world. It was more wonderous than he’d allowed himself to imagine. Purple and orange light filled a lush, open forest, covered with vegetation that—at least according to his AI—were not catalogued in the Society’s archives. He could hear far off grunts and screeches, reminding him of birdsong or mammalian apes. The ground felt solid. The atmosphere, with a few minor adjustments, tasted sweet.

The planet was beautiful. Pristine and untouched. He must do his best to keep it so during his exploration. He began to walk toward the trees. It wasn’t long before he encountered his first new species. His AI ran through its database and could find no matches. It bore some similarities to various types of gecko, but it carried its young in a pouch, an adaptation usually reserved for mammalian life.

He watched in fascination as the lizard-like creature pulled a bulbous-looking fruit from a nearby branch and fed it to the young one in its front pouch. Though Devi had taken care to stay upwind from the creature, it must have heard his quiet footfalls in the grass, for the creature quickly turned to face him.

Fleshy pink antennae extended from either side of the creature’s head behind its large eyes and pointed themselves at him. Devi felt a presence in his mind. Although he had never experienced it before, it seemed similar to what he had learned about how telepathy and psychic magic worked. The message in his mind was primal, instinctual.

Prey / notprey?
Hunger / nothunger?
I-not-food. No-food-me. Look-other-place.

The last bit was accompanied by a gentle push on his mind. Devi had not been thinking of the fascinating creature as food, but felt sure that if he had been considering eating it, the influence from the creature may have convinced him, or at least a creature of lesser intelligence, to leave it alone.

“Instinctual telepathy,” muttered Devi to himself. Perhaps his own mind, or his AI, had translated the mental push into words. “Remarkable.”

The creature grew alarmed at his continued presence. Both antennae expanded.

Stepback.
Stepback
Stepback.

Without meaning to, Devi almost took a step back, only stopping himself mid-gesture as he realized the creature had pushed him to do so. Now the creature and its brood looked terrified. Devi tried to calm the creature with his own thoughts, but it only shifted its face quizzically

No-sky-thinker, Devi heard back in his mind. After pondering this a moment, he realized sky meant above, higher-up, that the creature couldn’t parse his… words? He’d need to use something other than words to reassure it.

Devi was no xenodruid, who drew power and magic from the cycles of the natural world, though he’d heard stories of them while still a youngling in the warren. Kasathas debating philosophy with the animals of the forest. Elves disappearing into living trees and emerging from different trees half a world away. Nature priests living for a thousand years or more in an ongoing cycle of rebirth. What would they do, in this moment?

Closing his eyes, Devi tried to think in pictures. He thought of himself eating plants, of gently petting the creature. He thought of his den mothers in the warren, of safety, comfort, and a warm thermal blanket. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the creature had drawn closer to him, the muscles in its body less tense, the ridges on its back no longer standing erect.

Not-prey-not-death, the creature emoted to its child in what felt like a happy croon. Safe-friend.

Devi nodded. The creature’s antennae retracted into the sides of its head and it wandered off, though not before brushing against Devi’s leg in friendship.

Overhead, several winged creatures zipped through the air, moving almost too fast for Devi to see them. Luckily, his AI recorded them through his ocular implant, so he could review the footage later at his leisure. Right now, Devi was more interested in the giant megafauna he saw sipping water from a nearby stream.

Fascinated, he stealthily approached the herd, continuing to record footage through his ocular implant. Their thick hides were dark blue and green, with long tentacles slowly undulating out from their maws and necks. The large creatures took slow gentle sips from the lake they’d gathered around, some pausing to munch on the green grass at their feet. Slow, calm, not too bright. They seemed like peaceable herbivores, so Devi sent a command to his AI to scan them more thoroughly and record all the data. It was something of a surprise when the herd all raised their tentacles, the air about them rippled like water, and the creatures vanished before his eyes.

Devi studied the edges of the lake for some trace of the creatures. It wasn’t until he heard ground-shaking footsteps behind him that he looked over his shoulder. There the megafauna stood, regarding him with strange, solemn eyes. Devi backed away slowly, keeping his eyes on them, but his arms spread wide to show he was no threat.

Had they teleported? There was no sign of such magic. But… he checked his AI’s chronometer to find it was acting strangely. He looked at the ground where the creatures had stood. No foot prints. No recently eaten bare patches in the tall grass.

Had they… but that was… Devi almost thought impossible, but then he remembered all the wonders he’d heard about when joining the Starfinders. Nothing out near the Vast was impossible. Only undiscovered.

If these readings were right, then it hadn’t been his imagination. The creatures had apparently traveled back in time, just several seconds, in only their individual timelines, to the point before they’d reached the lake, just so they could see if he was a threat. Perhaps their tentacles were somehow able to unravel the quantum threads of localized time…

Instinctive, short-range time travel as a natural defense. The Society wouldn’t believe this. The possibilities were staggering. He wondered how far back their range went. Seconds? Minutes? If technomancers were able to synthesize how the creatures could achieve this affect…

The sun began to set beyond the far-off amber sea by the time he finished noting all he could about the creatures. Daylight passed quickly on this world, it seemed. Devi knew it was time to get back to the Jaunt. Two giant moons began to glow in the lavender twilight above. Devi would have to take notes and study just how they affected the sea’s tides, or if they pulled at the planet’s natural magical and life forces.

Back in his ship, Devi powered up the defensive shields and settled into his bunk. He thought about all he’d seen today. His findings would get him several accommodations. This planet was a wonder—and still in Near Space for all that! And its native life! These creatures had adapted to escape and survive in such astounding ways. Instinctual telepathy and short-range temporal travel. It just showed how amazing evolution was.

Only as he started to drowse off to the night-sounds outside the ship did the question occur.

Just what had they evolved to escape from?

For the first time since leaving the warren, Devi found himself wishing he had a crew. Wide awake now, he didn’t think he’d get much sleep tonight. Outside, the sun sank beneath the purple sea and darkness covered the planet. The wilderness grew quiet, as if waiting for something to emerge.

About the Author

Patrick Hurley has had fiction published in Galaxy’s Edge, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Abyss & Apex, New Myths, Arcanist, Aurealis, Frozen Wavelets, The Overcast, and The Drabblecast. He is a 2017 graduate of the Taos Toolbox Writer's Workshop. In 2018, he was a finalist for the Baen Fantasy Award. Patrick lives in Seattle and is a member of SFWA and the Dreamcrashers. He still can’t quite believe he has the good fortune to also be an editor at Paizo.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

“So I had three planets in my hand, and this crankshaft plays one to the field! I couldn’t have signaled it stronger, so I threw my cards down and drew my—"

Indra flipped the ship’s comm unit off with an exasperated sigh. Most miners he had flown with over the years were tolerable, even companionable in their own right. But this low-rent job buzzing asteroids for starmetal bits had somehow attracted all the boisterous lowlifes that gave miners a bad name. Indra ignored the uneasy feeling of turning off coms, normally a dangerous proposition even this close to a Star Citadel’s protection. Communication was the real lifeline out here, not the sputtering patrol ship assigned to escort, with its half-functioning gyrolaser turret and a pilot who was barely out of flight school. And certainly not his ship’s mining laser, which took a while just to cut through unmoving asteroid rock.

Illustration by Leonardo Borazio.

But Indra loved the special quiet of a coms-dead ship in space, especially when compared to the current alternative, and he leaned back in his seat to drink it in for a moment. Best not to linger, though; there were plenty of dark, mineral-rich pockets in these rocks that a nest of kaions, dangerous magnetic space squids, would love to call home. Indra pulsed his ship’s thrusters and careened around the nearest asteroid’s rocky surface, eyes sharp for the telltale glint of any of several starmetals.

Soon enough, a dull pulsing crackle began to issue from the ship’s ore-detection system, increasing in intensity as he strafed the skyscraper-sized space rock. “What’d we find, B1? More thasteron dregs?” Indra had noticed he’d started talking to himself more and more lately on these uneventful jobs, maybe a bit too much. So he’d taken to talking to his onboard AI instead, which he’d named after all that was left of its worn serial code. Of course, it couldn’t understand anything beyond basic commands, or even respond—it was, at best, a glorified metal detector—but it made him feel better just the same.

“Oh, my—is that…” Indra trailed off as his scanners confirmed what he could plainly see, a dust-dulled hunk of pale-green crystal. It was a sizable chunk of noqual, and Indra quickly set to work flipping switches and toggles to begin extraction. He expertly guided his ship’s mining laser to carefully etch a frame around the embedded starmetal. Periodically, Indra turned off alarms meant to alert him to nearby magnetic disturbances that might signal the presence of a kaion pod—but that were just as likely to be false positives from the aging ship’s own engines.

A few tense minutes of precise cutting later, the ship shuddered and rattled as its extraction arm ratcheted out, snaking among the recently cut debris toward its prize. This particular deposit was shaped perfectly for the arm’s triple-pronged gripping mechanism, and as the noqual wrenched free, dust bloomed from the pocket, the remaining rock looking somehow even more barren and forlorn.

Just as the hunk of noqual ore reached the deposit basket at the rear of his ship, the asteroid in front of Indra began to glow a dull red, bathed by pulsing emergency lights. Confused, Indra tapped his console—had he accidentally turned them on? Then a cold realization struck him in the stomach and he slammed the comms back on.

“—PIRATES! Turn on your comms, you damned fool!”

Indra wrenched the flight stick, the sudden motion disorienting him and causing the ship to groan and shake, to see their escort fighter dead in space, its emergency lights flashing bright red and its slight frame a tangle of shredded hull and transparent aluminum. The other miners were already halfway back to the Star Citadel, and two sleek and deadly Free Captain ships arced around lazily to face Indra’s virtually defenseless vessel, much closer to him than he was to safety.

Thinking quickly, Indra scanned the pitted surface of the asteroid. There, near a shallow-looking cave, were piles of floating scales, shed from at least a pod of kaions—odds were at least even that they were still in there.

“Well, B1, we don’t have to fly faster than the squids…” A few careful shots from his mining laser into the cavern had the desired effect, setting off a flurry of activity as the tentacled creatures began to silently spew forth from their resting place. “…just faster than those pirates.”

About the Author

Joe Pasini is the Starfinder Lead Designer at Paizo. He is steadfast in his belief that gaming is for absolutely everyone, and he’d love to play a game with you sometime! You can find him on Twitter at @joeadultman. His most recent passion project, the Starfinder Deck of Many Worlds, is out now.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Tynea Halix Gi Satultir sat in a private booth with a one-way window that overlooked the busy high street of Paradise Village and read the latest electronic dispatch from the captain. It was nothing new: an agricultural report stating crop yields were high, an editorial on how the latest Pact Council decision would affect Idari citizens, and an empty promise to crack down on crime in the Red Corridors. Tynea stretched his two upper arms and stirred his drink.

A shadow suddenly loomed over him. Tynea quickly reached for a bandana to cover his mouth but stopped when he heard the voice.

“You know, tradition doesn’t mean you have to visit the same café every single day.”

“I just so happen to like their coffee,” Tynea replied, demurely taking a sip.

The figure took the chair across from him. He was a tall and fit kasatha, his skin a powder blue with dark gray markings running up the side of his head. His black eyes shone with mischief. He ceremoniously removed his fashionable face mask and placed it next to Tynea’s bandana. He tapped a few times on the table’s ordering system, and within moments a server drone brought in a piece of crownberry pie with a dollop of fresh cream.

And though it had been almost a year since Tynea saw him last, Rudim Jinska Viaz Marodi hadn’t changed one bit.

“You’re back,” Tynea said.

“I’m back.”

“For how long?”

“For now.”

Tynea felt his cheeks grow hot. “Until the Starfinder Society needs you again, I suppose. And then you’ll disappear for months on end without a single communication, while we—your friends, your family, me—worry ourselves sick.” He downed the rest of his coffee, the nearly scalding liquid a distraction from the lump forming in his throat.

Rudim looked up from his plate. “Don’t be like this, Tiny. I’m sorr—”

“Don’t call me that!” Tynea pushed away from the table, snatched up his purple bandana, stood up, and marched out into the crowd.

Illustration by Leonardo Borazio.

Minutes later, Rudim caught up with him outside of an antique shop, traditional Kasath blades displayed in the window against a velvet backdrop. They caught each other’s glances in the reflection of the transparent aluminum, as Rudim gently placed a hand on Tynea’s shoulder.

“You have every right to be mad at me, Tynea. In fact, if you want to take a swing at me with one of those, you should.” Rudim gestured at a long, serrated sword.

“I’d just as likely cut off one of my own arms,” Tynea mumbled.

Rudim chuckled and squeezed softly. “I’ve missed you. So much. And I’m sorry for what I’ve put you through.” He reached into one of his pockets and extracted a pair of shining plastic cards embossed with holography. “I know this couldn’t begin to make it up to you, but what are you doing tonight?”

Tynea turned around. “Are those…?”

"Yup, two tickets to tonight’s Culinarium banquet, the exclusive thrice-annual event where the Idari’s finest experimental chefs showcase their latest recipes!” Rudim puffed out his chest.

“But how? They always sell out in minutes.”

Rudim winked. “Being a member of the Starfinder Society has its occasional perks.”

Tynea’s shoulders fell. “Rudim, be honest. Is this part of some mission?”

“No! Well… not completely. I just have to ask one of the chefs a few questions about some rumors that she’s been acting a little strangely, and that’s it. The rest of the night will be just for us.”

Tynea sighed. “Promise?”

“I promise.”

---

“Damn it, Rudim, this is not the night I was expecting!”

The machine—a 2-foot cube of metal plates, wires, and crystals—shuddered with arcane energy, as Tynea stood before it, panic and confusion in his eyes. Behind him, Rudim struggled against a kasatha chef, grabbing at her apron, which promptly slipped off.

“Hurry!” Rudim shouted. A bolt of magic arced from the machine and struck a row of kitchen knives attached to two long magnets on the wall, turning them into rock candy. They fell onto the counter and shattered.

“I don’t know the first thing about magic!” Tynea yelled back.

“Then just hit it with a frying pan or something!”

“No!” the chef bellowed. Her form then began to melt like ice cream on a hot day. Surprised, Rudim let go and stepped back. The chef’s arms and legs elongated, becoming starfish-like appendages with a single eye on each joint. Her face softened and disappeared, and her voice gurgled from an orifice in her chest. “My masterpiece!”

Tynea had found a large cast iron skillet and raised it over his head. Another shaft of energy lanced out from the device, and Tynea brought the utensil down with a grunt. Pieces of pan-shaped chocolate scattered across the floor. “Damn,” he muttered.

Meanwhile, Rudim redoubled his efforts to capture the shapeshifting chef. While she was distracted by Tynea, he swept his leg out in a practiced move and sent her tumbling to the floor. Using all four arms, he pinned down most of her tentacles. “Ok, astrazoan, what is this thing? And what did you do with the real Chef Gou?”

A wet laugh bubbled up from the astrazoan. “There never was a real Gou, you fool. She was always me. And I’ve spent the past decade being overlooked by my so-called betters! But no longer! They’ll see my genius, right before my molecular comestiblizer turns them into piles of pastries! And then I’ll have my sweet revenge!”

Rudim knocked the astrazoan out with a single punch and stood up. Without looking away from the cabinet he was searching, Tynea said, “I swear, if you say something about ‘just desserts’ right now, I will find another skillet to brain you with.”

“Why are you taking the fun out of this?”

“Fun?!” Tynea yelled as an arc of energy transformed a portion of the ceiling into dripping jelly. “You think this is fun?! Aha!” He pulled a roll of shiny foil from the cabinet. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I have an idea.” Tynea cautiously approached the sputtering cube, and moments later had it wrapped in the material. The device shook one last time and then was quiet. Tynea carefully peeled away a portion of the covering to reveal an elaborately decorated layer cake.

Rudim chortled. “Reflective foil! Genius!” He warmly embraced Tynea, who finally relaxed.

“I suppose… that was a little thrilling.” Tynea looked up into Rudim’s eyes. “Perhaps you could teach me that leg sweep?”

Rudim reached behind Tynea, swiped a finger of icing from the cake, and smeared it onto Tynea’s forehead. “Does that mean you want to do this again?”

“Maybe,” Tynea said coyly. Wiping the icing from his face, he licked it from his hand and then gagged. “But first let’s get a drink. That might be a cake but it still tastes like metal.”

About the Author

Jason Keeley is a Developer at Paizo, working primarily on the Starfinder Adventure Path line. His work has appeared in all sorts of products, from adventures to supplements to short stories written for Paizo and many other RPG companies. You can find him (and pictures of his dog) on Twitter at @herzwesten, and also watch him as Professor Nikodemus Thorne on the Oblivion Oath stream every Thursday!

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The Tempering: a time of travel for any kasatha reaching maturity, when the young adult seeks out new experiences, and in doing so, discovers himself. Some accept exciting internships, and others join crews to travel beyond the stars—proud, noble, traditional stuff. It was lost within this wistful self-reflection that Tahja gradually regained consciousness following his accidental dive off a skybridge, his fall unceremoniously broken by a dumpster. In his dawning lucidity, he gazed about and wondered.

“How did you end up here?”

Tahja reflexively jumped, or tried to, instead slipping on a lumpy trash bag below. The question mirrored his own thoughts, yet it wasn’t his own. In his scramble for stability, he looked up and locked eyes with a shocked shirren, her compound eyes bulging slightly in alarm at his sudden movements.

“Whoa, hey, hang on, calm down! Too much telepathy? Fine, hey—unarmed, see?” She raised her two main arms, splaying her three fingers and rattling her neck barbules in alarm. After a few tense seconds, she continued with her reedy voice. “That was quite a fall. You okay? Need an ambulance?”

“No. No authorities,” Tahja gasped, using his lower arms to sit up while his uppers straightened his mouth scarf. “I need somewhere to hide.” With a glance upward toward the twisting, towering skyscraper cast in late afternoon light, he added, “Just for a few hours, until sundown.”

The shirren’s antennae bobbed with amusement. “Oh wow, you really hit your head. Sundown? You know you’re on Verces, right? Tidally locked? Always the same time of day?” She cocked a claw toward the nearby skyscraper as Tahja’s eyes widened in confusion. “Hell, this is Building 5 for the Nabokon Broadcasting Network.” She punctuated the announcement by tapping the sewn patch on her coveralls. “It’s been late afternoon here since the Gap—perfect hour for filming drama.”

Verces. Nabokon. Tahja tried to remember his cultural training. That put him somewhere in the nation Kashak, known for its cybernetics research and heavily augmented populace. That also put him a long way from Absalom Station. The last he remembered, he’d been early in his Tempering on the station, short on credits, and several pages deep into the contracts for a short pharmaceutical testing gig. He figured he would get a few shots, earn some money, and then depart for new adventures. Instead he’d woken up from surgery less than an hour ago, his body no longer entirely his own. He dimly remembered doctors trying to calm and sedate him before he panicked, broke free, and started to run. His fall had just been his latest gamble in escaping his pursuers.

Verces — illustration by Mark Molnar

The shirren eyed him sadly. “C’mon, you’re clearly not doing well. I’m just coming off duty and can put you up for a bit. Name’s Estrik.” She reached up and clasped his hand, pulling him up and out.

“Tahja Maur of Clan Estu, House Truyark, Essence of Ipu—and thank you,” he responded while twisting his leg free from where it had punched through the dumpster lid. “But I’m being chased by dangerous people.” With that, he extracted his left leg, a cybernetic limb of hex-plated skin covering powerful joints and pistons.

Estrik’s barbules quivered with admiration as she inspected the limb with interest. “No kidding! Dermasteel weave?” She flicked the knee. “Is that adamantine? I bet it’s the debt collectors after you, with this thing’s price tag. Weird that it doesn’t even have a maker’s mark, though.” The shirren’s antennae suddenly twitched and she straightened with fear before pushing Tahja behind cover and pathing a silent warning into his mind. “We have company!”

“That’s because it’s stolen,” remarked the alley wall as a hidden figure’s skin dropped its camouflaged pattern. Eight feet tall with bulging all-black eyes and pale, chameleon-like skin, he was a verthani, the planet’s native humanoid species. His mostly nude frame had allowed his chromatophores to hide his approach, but it did little to hide the artificial muscle fibers and untold other augmentations that bulged under his skin. “This is NextStep business. Move away from the subject, bug. This doesn’t concern you.”

“Rude!” Estrik wailed before telepathically gushing to Tahja “You’re a criminal? Wanted by a real bounty hunter?” Her eyes developed an admiring sheen. “It’s just like in the stories—like Astral Eternities or Galaxy in your Eye? I’m such a fan! So. Cool.” She paused in hearing his wordless response before adding “Oh yeah, I know another way out of here, why?” His response came in the form of a swift kick that sent the dumpster careening across the alley, powered by his leg’s mechanical strength. It slammed into the verthani and threw him against the nearby wall, stunning him.

“The escape?” Tahja insisted. Estrik goggled at the dumpster for a second before whipping out a keycard, running to the far end of the alley, and swiping open a service door. The two slipped inside before slamming it closed. “Where to from here?”

“Zakol, one of the camera operators,” Estrik wheezed through her flaring facial spiracles. “He has a bunch of family near Darkside. It’s a trek, but maybe they could get you out of here?” The shirren mentally conveyed a vague map interspersed with halfhearted assurances and excited squealing. The chatter ceased as the door shuddered from a gunshot outside and the blaze of a plasma torch punched through the lock. “New plan: we run.”

By the time the outside door clattered open, Tahja had already bounded down the service hall, up two flights of stairs, through a cluster of interns, and into a studio—all while Estrik apologetically struggled to keep up with the kasatha’s cybernetically enhanced strides. They caught their breath for a moment before Estrik telepathically buzzed, “No, no, we can’t stay here.” Tahja stared back blankly, prompting the shirren to continue. “Hear that? They’re filming Galaxy in Your Eye, only the premier verthani serial romantic drama. You know, the star-crossed lovers forbidden to marry by caste, all set during the Gap? Thing’s practically a religion for some folks. Like, I’m not even allowed to clean within a floor of this place!”

“No other choice I see,” Tahja muttered, looking for a concealed means of crossing the occupied set being watched by a live studio audience. He tiptoed toward the ongoing scene featuring fantastically beautiful actors.

“Zfezar,” demanded the Augmented verthani woman, her steely arm and reinforced spine belying the melodramatic intensity in her voice as she wilted in her partners arms. “Were our families to find us so, what would they say?”

“To hell with families, traditions, and castes, Apsoria!” responded her masculine counterpart, his chest emblazoned with Ibra’s divine constellation, marking him as a God-Chosen. “Too long have we danced to their wishes yet denied the duet sung by our hearts alone! Here, just the two of us, nothing can stand in our way.”

The stage door shuddered, signaling the bounty hunter’s arrival. As Estrik worriedly looked back, Tahja pushed forward onto the set, wasting no more time. The actors, interrupted on the cusp of embrace looked up with shock, the director off-screen seemed ready to shout, and the hundred-strong audience gazed hungrily at this new development with an audible gasp. Tahja took to one knee, showing his cybernetics openly. “My lady, I come with dire news. Your family has learned of your actions.”

“Ha, they dare not intervene!” laughed Apsoria, improvising, though her narrowing eyes conveyed how suspicious she was of the kasatha’s sudden appearance.

“More dramatic!” Estrik mentally insisted from her hiding spot.

“And...they have sent assassins, my lady!” Tahja added quickly. “By slaying your love, ah—“

“His Occult Eminence Zfezar”

“—his Occult Eminence Zfezar,” Tahja continued, silently thanking Estrik for the prompt, “you will be bound to honor your arranged marriage!”

The audience’s gratifying gasps mollified the director, who sat back to observe this strange turn, and the actors adapted flawlessly to the changing script. “Villains!” growled Zfezar with a flourish of his cape.

Just then, the stage door fell open, and the bounty hunter stepped into the lights, at first with menace but then with quizzical uncertainty. As Apsoria and Zfefar berated the supposed assassin, the bounty hunter struggled to push past them, shouting. “Brightside blind you all, stand aside!” His throat swelled as his head tilted back before he spewed a bolt of electricity from his biotech dragon gland. Tahja’s cybernetic leg kicked into action—literally—flinging him out of danger’s path.

The audience shrieked with delight as Zfezar attempted a stage punch that the bounty hunter easily dodged before hurling the actor aside. He was just beginning spit another attack when Apsoria struck in earnest, hitting him in the throat as his dragon gland built up charge. The hostile verthani’s eyes went wide as the gland fired prematurely, shocking him and sending coruscating lightning ringlets dancing over his body. Smoking slightly, he dropped to the ground.

Without hesitation, the two actors took each other in their arms. “My family has spoken its peace, and I have delivered my answer, Zfezar. No matter what lies ahead, we will face it...”

“...together,” he finished.

“And scene!” cried the director, punctuated by the audience’s applause. She hopped off her chair and snagged Tahja by an arm. “You know that there weren’t kasathas in this system during the Gap, right? And that makes what just happened more than a little anachronistic?”

“Um, yes? About that?” stuttered the young kasatha.

“Ha! Soesn’t matter! The show’s set in the Gap for a reason: can’t historically disprove anything we film! And now this is just what we need to shake up the story: aliens! I’ll get those damn writers to revise whatever sorry script they had in store. Let’s talk numbers—got an agent?”

Tahja desperately looked around for any help in salvaging this awkward moment, but he saw only Estrik. Her arms were quivering with excitement as she pathed emphatically to him one more time: “So! Cool!”

About the Author

John Compton is the Starfinder Senior Developer at Paizo, Inc., having recently joined the team from years creating organized play adventure content. He has written extensively for Pathfinder and Starfinder, including adventures, setting content, and rule books, and before working for Paizo, he was a teacher, practicing archaeologist, and archaeometallurgist. You can find John on Twitter and Paizo-facing Discord servers @Archaeotagh.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

It was a cold, still night in Arl, and from the thasteron-stained alleys of the Old Quarter to the shimmering stadiums of the Vitaritech Coliseum, the people cried out for blood.

Except for Vaereji.

The damaya lashunta stood among the screaming throng of the Crimson Forum, oldest arena on the desert planet of Akiton, and for a professional lounge singer, he was strangely silent. With his pale skin and long antennae slicked down against his dark blue hair, he ought to have stood out among the towering, four-armed shobhads and furtive, rat-like ysoki natives, a handsome figure in his tailored black tuxedo. But tonight, all eyes were fixed on the blood sport.

It might as well have been an execution.

The rabble watched, enraptured, as a reptilian vesk lifted his opponent—a grizzled, white-furred ysoki with a mechanical arm—into the air, ripped off the prosthetic appendage, and, with a mighty hiss, tossed the dying mammal onto the reddened ground.

Yells of violent delight erupted at the totality of the kill, but Vaereji’s gasp was one of horror…not merely because the ysoki was his friend—a friend he’d bet most of his credits on—but because the fight was supposed to be a sure thing.

The barrel of the arc pistol pressed against his back certainly didn’t help.

“Better come with me, snazzy,” growled a voice at his ear. “You’ve got singing to do.”

Akiton — illustration by Leon Tukker

They’d called him an adept back on Castrovel, and it was true, but Vaereji had only used his phrenic abilities to help with his music. To push his telepathic abilities beyond those of other lashuntas. To feel the emotional swell of the audience between songs, hear the anticipatory desires in their thoughts—even send them telepathic messages, if they lined up with his lyrics. His abilities helped him put on a better show, and that was all Vaereji really wanted to use them for.

It had been the ysoki’s idea to use them to cheat.

The grizzled little fighter—who went by “Rusty” in the arenas—was a regular at the Forum district clubs where Vaereji liked to perform. One night the two had wound up sharing a drink, and then another, and just like that, a friendship was born. Nothing more to it, until…

“Why do they stick up sometimes?” Rusty had asked, pointing a worn metal finger at the lashunta’s antennae.

Vaereji, then drunk, had embarrassedly slicked them back down and mumbled, “They do that sometimes, when I use my abilities.”

“Abilities?”

The lounge singer didn’t get halfway through his explanation before noticing a conspiratorial glint in Rusty’s eye, but he’d been too drunk to care. He even bragged a little, about how sometimes he could manage clairvoyance, or a true mind probe—not that he bothered with that stuff most of the time. He just wanted to put on a good show!

With a grin, Rusty assured him that he could indeed put on a good show and make a few credits on the side, if he wanted. With the right moves, he could even make enough to open up his own club! Maybe even get out of Arl—or off Akiton altogether—and set up shop somewhere classy.

“What do you have in mind?” Vaereji asked cautiously.

“Nothing dangerous…”

All he had to do was perform at clubs where Rusty’s opponents (or their managers) were drinking. Sing the right leading songs—combat anthems, usually—mixed with the right leading set banter—“who in here’s got a fight this week?”—and even the fighters’ surface thoughts and feelings were full of intel. Occasionally, the ysoki convinced him to probe someone deeper, or use a mix of song and telepathic messages to demoralize them. With the right tips and drunken secret thoughts from his opponents, veteran fighter Rusty was able to take on all comers. He started to climb the ranks, and Vaereji started to bet on him a little more freely. They picked a mark, planned the fight, and, without fail, Rusty emerged from the bout victorious.

Until tonight.

Their intel on the vesk hadn’t been enough, it seemed, and now Rusty was dead, leaving Vaereji friendless, in debt, with a pistol at his back. Did they expect him to pay out everything tonight?

His assailant—a hulking android in dark estex—urged him on. They moved past the clinking credit tables of the bookies, beyond the red-tiled smoking rooms filled with celebrating shobhad gamblers, their eyes wide from transdimensional pesh and the thrill of the fight.

After another few minutes, the hall ended in a reinforced security door; the door slid open, and the android shoved Vaereji inside.

It was a luxury box, with vidfeeds on every wall showing looped scenes from past and current bouts. Plush chairs and low tables sat around the chamber, while recessed yellow lights made a pleasant diversion from the rusty red of the rest of the Forum. There were several androids in the room, dressed in cheap suits or hoods like the one behind him, and all of them were armed with arc pistols and nasty blades.

Except, that is, for the woman behind the large wooden desk at the back of the room.

“Hello, Mr. Vaereji,” she said. Her tone was polite, but it made the singer’s breath catch nonetheless. She had more mechanics visible than most androids, the joints of her synthetic skin lined with soft red light. Her eyes glowed the same red, and when she smiled, they shimmered. “Sorry for your loss this evening.”

“Who…who are you?” Vaereji asked. He’d been expecting to be threatened by debt collectors, not a gang of well-armed androids. He was starting to think this wasn’t just about the credits he now owed the Forum. But if not that…

“I’m the person who decides who fights who,” she said. “And until very recently, I was very good at predicting the winners.”

Who fights who? Vaereji stepped backward, eyes widening with realization.

“Stars above,” he cursed quietly. “You’re Kell-3.”

The android’s silence was confirmation enough.

“Kell-3. A crimelord working the Forum…I thought you were an urban legend.”

Kell-3 smiled, flashing more of that red glimmer.

“So did your friend, Rusty,” she said, and the lounge singer gulped.

“He thought the syndicates didn’t care about this arena. He thought that Kell-3, the most feared android on Akiton, didn’t bother with Arl anymore. He thought he knew this city better than one of its own legends.”

The secret gangster of the Crimson Forum was real, Vaereji had been ripping her off, and she knew.

“He thought wrong,” Kell-3 said.

She let the words hang in the air, until the lashunta choked out the inevitable question.

“Are you going to kill me?”

Even shaky with fear, the singer’s voice was melodious, soothing. His words hung in the air, and the room grew quiet for a moment, only the dim sounds of the final spectators above leaving the Crimson Forum in satisfaction.

Then, Kell-3’s smile returned.

“Of course not,” she said. “You misunderstand. I’m a fan.”

Vaereji was at loss for words as she stepped toward him.

“People have used their psychic abilities to fix arena matches before, of course,” the android said. “But they’re usually thinking too big—mindbreakers trying to sow doubt, powerful technomancers shorting out the implants of combatants they bet against, that sort of thing. They always got caught. But you…”

His antennae popped up again, their position beyond his ability to control, especially when under pressure. Only just now, as he resisted the nervous compulsion to smooth them back against his hair lest movement be mistaken as a threat by the room full of armed toughs, did he realize that Kell-3 was wearing a glittering green evening gown. Tight-fitting and studded with gems, it looked almost as absurd and out of place here as his tuxedo did.

“You have a very subtle approach, and I’d like to see more of it.”

Kell-3 stood, inches from him, eyes like the bright red sands of Akiton itself. He understood now why he wasn’t getting his legs broken by goons, why he wasn’t dead like Rusty. She wanted him to work for her. He had never wanted anything like this.

“I just wanted to put on a good show,” he choked out.

But it was clear enough that she’d get her way. The singer was hers now. Defeated, Vaereji met the android’s gaze, and she laughed, a high static titter.

“You heard that crowd—could you ask for a better audience? Poor Rusty was sure he’d win, thanks to you, and that confidence led to the best bout I’ve seen in months. If every match was that brutal—that dramatic—this would be the busiest arena on the planet. With your help, it will be.”

She ran her hand up Vaereji’s face, and he flinched, but her fingers only rose to press up against his antennae. He blinked as Kell-3 slicked them back with surprising gentleness.

“I just wanted to sing.” His voice was low, almost a whisper.

When she spoke, her voice, too, was soft—but full of the same violence as the screaming crowd. “And as long as you can learn to take requests, you still will. With all of Arl as your audience. This city sings for blood, Vaereji...”

Now, the arenas were empty and silent. From the thasteron-stained alleys of the Old Quarter to the shimmering stadiums of the Vitaritech Coliseum, the city was sated, but in a dark room beneath the bloodied sands of the Crimson Forum, Vaereji’s latest performance was just beginning.

“Isn’t it time you sang along?”

About the Author

Ryan Cady writes comics and horror fiction - with credits from Marvel and DC and everywhere in between. His critically acclaimed space horror series, Infinite Dark, recently concluded a two-volume run at Image Comics, and you can read his latest webcomic, Wolfsbane, for free on LINE Webtoon. Find him on twitter @rycady, where he rants about Star Wars, food, and TTRPGs.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

The bite of the usqui, a blood-loving fly native to the rainforests of Naleobaseq, delivers a parasite that renders victims psychically mute and deaf. Its effects on telepathic races are quite profound. The resulting silence, a cold psionic exile from kith and kin, so shocks the infected that they’ve been found in fetal curls, talking to themselves to keep from feeling so utterly alone.
—Entomological Survey of the Vast, Vol. 131.7

To kill time during the stakeout, Shaeon composed psychic poetry for her beloved, Kiress. Not far away, vermilliath flowers whorled in scarlet murmurations above the city’s defensive walls, and sometimes, when the wind shifted, she heard the rush-water sound of fluttering blossoms. Enthralled by the shivers it gave her, Shaeon grafted it synesthetically to the sibilant where Kiress’s name appeared in the poem, along with petrichor scent of the promenade

By the time Mataras kissed the horizon, the sky blushing in reply, most of the basement shops fronting the curved street below had closed. Some laborers trudging home past the fortune teller’s place bore the telltale circular welts of animute infection, unaware a black-market cure beyond their finances waited behind the door with the great eye sigil. Shaeon felt a fleeting temptation to let them know, to watch them batter down that door. But, since they weren’t receiving anymore, she’d have to yell the news down to them with lungs and lips, with a tongue that always found speaking uncomfortable. Such things, made for air and food and water, felt clumsy and inadequate for real communion.

Whatever Oryniri did with his stakeout time, tucked into the shadows on the other side of the pedestrian bridge, he wasn't sharing. Taking this to mean he might be bored, Shaeon telepathically sent him the newest line of her poem.

He pathed back with a terse nice, and they spent the next few minutes in psionic silence.

Illustration by Mark Molnar

With twilight there arrived two yaruks, which reared into the sky to feast on the flying blossoms like whale through krill.

The first telepathic alarms were rippling across the populace when one of the mighty beasts came down hard with its forelegs to crack the surge wall, then clambered onto the crumbling fortification, horned head darting from new heights to chase a river of petals.

Guards raced from streets and minor walls to defend the surge line. The steeple-high creatures weren’t carnivorous and feasted on neither bone nor blood. But they got such a narcotic buzz from vermilliath petals that most adults of the species were thoroughly addicted. Enough that they’d cheerfully endure bullets and lasers to gorge on gardens of the stuff, careless of what they trampled under their massive hooves.

Think our thief will capitalize on this distraction? Shaeon pathed.

Probably, Ory answered.

They stayed put, stayed quiet.

As the yaruk on the wall charged bellowing through a phalanx of defenders, a young lashunta urchin scurried past the fortune teller's storefront. Though the Face wasn’t a telepath, she employed a few. Two days earlier, they’d marked this girl as one of her messengers.

Any second

Inside, the Face crouched to peer through the window of her shop, adjusted her mask (which today resembled an impressionistic insect), and then passed through her door, hunching so her head wouldn’t scrape the doorframe. From the middle of the street, she watched the wall battle for several seconds before a passing man bumped into her.

The bumper—a korasha lashunta, stocky and scarred—paid the scene on the wall little heed and instead hurried into a narrow cut-through that zagged up to Expatriate Highway.

Handoff, Ory pathed. I've got the tail.

On relay, Shaeon answered, and darted across the crushed-shell blocks of the Gyre.

She was rounding the Gyre’s south bend when Oryniri’s mind blurted in alarm, then went silent.

Gods be still. No, dammit, no.

Feet a blur, Shaeon took the broad slabs of the Thirty-Four Steps two at a time. She brushed past a stubbled, thimble-hat tourist gaping at the yaruk brawl and reached the spot where the cut-through, the Steps, and highway met at odd angles.

Oryniri’s crumpled form lay in the cut-through, blood seeping into porous stone. A touch from her mind told her it was just fluids now, soul already departed.

On the other side of Expatriate Highway, a stocky shadow slipped into an opposing alley. Shaeon sprinted after him, arc pistol drawn. The shrouded alley bent among buildings like a branch seeking sunlight before opening into a cloistered courtyard.

There, a man waited, backdropped by—

—the glittering tower of a lashunta corporation, reflections of the fight on the wall playing out across its silvered surface. Each flash of laser and cannon flare limned the tower's angles and protrusions, giving an impression of—

Shaeon shook her head.

A gun pressed to her neck.

“On my wrist is a telepathic scanner,” said a voice by her ear. “If you so much as bleat telepathically, it’ll show, and I’ll remove your head at the neck."

Shaeon’s mind cleared. Someone had diverted her with that tower imagery. Nice job, too. She guessed whoever did it was lashunta, like herself. Lashuntas practiced diverting as children, squaring off like gunslingers. Fastest mind wins. Slowest comes to in the middle of the quad, pants around his ankles. She wasn’t used to being the slow one.

Across the courtyard, the korasha raised one hand, pacifying, the other hovering near a gun on his belt. “Come on, man. We don’t do this.”

“I do,” said the man behind her, voice human, accent from off-world—Akiton, maybe. The tourist from the Steps, she realized. “Already did her partner. Now drop the weapon.”

Shaeon dropped her pistol before realizing the human might have been talking to his partner.

“She was diverted,” the korasha said, his hand unmoving. “I could have escaped.”

“Yeah? And what was she gonna do when she recovered?”

“I’m fast.”

“You ain’t faster than thought. You’d be surrounded in no time. Come on, Romalo, you’re the telepath.” Romalo winced at the disclosure of his name. Shaeon realized her chances of survival just dropped. “What the hell were you thinking, going back to the fortune-teller?”

“One of the flies bit my cousin,” Romalo said, peacemaking hand extended, two fingers and thumb loosely curled. “I had to do something.”

“No you didn’t. You put all of us at risk, you monumental fool.”

Fair critique. An alien disease, animute was hard to diagnose. After the first symptom, a victim had maybe six hours to take labat before the affliction became permanent. All of which meant anyone responding quickly to an animute infection was probably in-the-know. After learning the Face obtained labat days before the heist, and guessing she must have supplied the team, Ory and Shaeon had monitored the Face in case the outbreak forced her customer back. Clearly the human was the sensible one—but also the one immune to the disease’s worst symptom, telepathic isolation.

“Someone’s gonna see us,” the human continued. “We need to kill her. Now.”

All of us, the human had said. Implying more than two operatives on the heist. How many in this alley?

Romalo’s hand caught her eye. Two fingers fully extended.

Shaeon had always been fast at diverting, but she’d never tried to beat a mechanical sensor before. She counted down with her left hand against her leg, one two—Romalo’s eyes twitched—three.

She hit the human with her psychic poem.

Romalo drew, fired, and the human slumped against her, tumbled to the ground, pushing Shaeon down with his dead weight.

Then Romalo tried to flee. But, as he reached the mouth of an alley, Shaeon pathed an image of her sighting his back with her recovered arc pistol.

He stopped.

My cousin needs me, he begged.

Your fault, she thought, getting to her feet. You brought the usqui flies. Released them.

He slumped. They were never supposed to spread, just disable the guards’ telepathic alarms.

But they did spread. In the smugglers’ defense, they’d sterilized the queen that they used to whip up the usqui swarm. But it died, and they apparently had no idea that some warrior usqui mutate in the absence of queen pheromones. Into queens. Now Qabarat had an invasive species and Shaeon had a case to close.

I know. But my cousin—

She shot him.

It was an arc. He’d recover. In a cell.

---

Quiet reigned in the villa, all its bustling servants gone.

Shaeon frowned at the unwonted stillness.

In the reading room, Kiress's parents faced each other, tear-streaked, locked in silent argument. Kiress was outside, staring at the courtyard wall, back to the door.

Everything o—? Shaeon started, and then recoiled.

Where Kiress’s mind should have been, she’d found nothing.

As she drew close, Kiress looked up and the cause was revealed. Shaeon traced the telltale bumps on her neck.

“How long?” she asked.

“Five hours.”

“Five?”

“It’s okay,” Kiress answered. “He’ll be back soon.”

A shiver settled into Shaeon’s spine.

“Pardon?”

“You haven’t met him, but my cousin’s back on Castrovel now, and he’s gone to fetch a cure,” Kiress said, waving a hand at the wall. “Sit with me and wait.”

Mind numb, unable to speak, Shaeon sat.

“Any minute now,” Kiress continued. “You’ll see. He’s never let me down.”

About the Author

A product of California, Graham Robert Scott now resides in north Texas; a born scofflaw, he owns neither surfboard nor cowboy hat. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Nature, Barrelhouse Online, X-R-A-Y, and Pulp Literature. He tweets semi-regularly at @graythebruce and maintains a blog at hemicyon.wordpress.com.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

An electric glow bathes the artificial landscape around me, assaulting my senses with a kaleidoscope of neon blues, greens and pinks. The sound of moving mechanical lifeforms and low-altitude vehicles creates a cacophony that somehow manages to generate an odd harmony with one another. Hundreds of beings, both organic and mechanical alike, maneuver the wide open streets of the megaplex city with guided purpose.

Aballon, the so-called Forge of this system and where I now stand, is something I’d never experienced in my long-life: a world inhabited by self-upgrading machines. Not confined to one form, these machines—anacites as they collectively refer to themselves—have spread across the small world closest to the Pact Worlds’ sun, gradually converting the world into something wondrous. Yet, even for a species who could so easily disconnect themselves from organic concerns, they’ve built their great cities to accommodate those around them.

Illustration by Leon Tukker

I came here to study the Pact Worlds, to walk its many worlds and meet its many people in hopes of learning their cultures. One of my siblings had spent much of their time in this place and had come to respect the Pact Worlds’ people. Another sibling, now deceased, had sought to one day venture to this star system, although their intentions were far less academic than my own. As for my final sibling, I couldn’t be sure if they even know this place exists.

An elevated vidcast monitor several hundred feet wide displays a white-furred rat woman snacking on an apple while partaking in an interview. Vendors of all backgrounds shout out to passersby about the quality of their wares, each making shop in alcoves at the base of massive structures, their presence something clearly intended by this place’s inscrutable designers. Even the walkways that I find myself on are designed to facilitate both organic and robotic beings alike. Hidden lines, invisible to those without augmented sight, direct the settlement’s robotic inhabitants in their maneuvering. Meanwhile, the unaugmented organic lifeforms disrupt the transit with chaotic movements that routinely cause minor fluctuations in the otherwise perfect transit lanes. A controlled chaos of sorts.

Taking this all in over the course of a few seconds, I compile my first impressions on this world.

Something pushes against me; the slightest force against my leg.

“Greetings visitor,” a synthetic voice speaks in the Pact Worlds’ common tongue, emitted from a blocky, rectangular robotic lifeform less than half my height. Its vocal tone is clearly intended to mask any type of association with other species, yet it is fashioned to be appealing to all listeners. “Apologies for this unit’s unintended interaction. This unit had not properly processed your presence in this area, possibly due to a scanning malfunction.”

I smile because that’s what others would expect of me. “No apology is necessary. It was my mistake not to properly respect this world’s traffic laws. Though, if I may make another imposition, may I ask you a question?”

The small anacite rolls back on its tiny automated wheels before adjusting the position of a small telescopic appendage to view my full body, scanning me to resolve its prior error. “This unit does not serve a critical function. This unit will respond as best it is able.”

“You’re a mechanical being, as are most on this world. Why are most the vast settlements of this planet designed with the lives of organics in mind?” I ask the question as I’ve yet to truly discern the answer—a rare occurrence for me.

“This unit understands your query. Answer: Aballon and its many megaplex settlements, such as this megaplex of Endeavor, were designed in respect for Those Who Wait.”

“Those who wait?”

A mechanical whirr of sound comes from the blocky anacite’s telescope as it adjusts a viewing setting. The other robotic beings around us change their ordered line to curve around the conversation. Far above, I see the ysoki woman on the vidscreen take another contented bite from her apple. The small anacite in front of me makes a final calibration before recalling its telescope into its interior, having completed its scan.

“Some anacite units designate themselves as Those Who Wait. Such anacite units conclude that our creators, the First Ones, will one day return to Aballon and as a result our world must be made amenable to them.” The small unit continues its response as a new line of anacites forms a second queue around us, curving in the opposite direction of the existing stream. “Other anacite units designate themselves as Those Who Become. Such anacite units conclude that they must take on the role of the First Ones and seed the galaxy with new anacite lifeforms.”

I maintain my smile and nod my head in appreciation of the explanation. The vidcast screen in the background has shifted to an advertisement led by a skeletal figure that is more of an assault on visual senses than anything near as succinct as my recent exchange.

“What of you, do you belong to Those Who Wait or Those Who Become?”

“This unit does not possess sufficient importance to hold such a belief. This unit exists to assist in the stability of Endeavor’s traffic flow, a task in which this unit is currently failing.”

I look down at the small anacite, taking in all of its simple boxy form and the elegance in its design save for the aesthetic displeasure most other beings would see in it. As the small anacite’s vocal emitters finish its statement, I can’t help but feel my siblings mocking me from the past. I stifle my annoyance by suppressing my smile.

“That seems a shame. Perhaps I can offer a more important existence? Would you be willing to act as my guide on this planet? I have credits.” I offer my hand down to the anacite.

“Acceptable. Assisting newcomers is of higher importance than my current designation.” An aperture opens on the anacite’s frame, releasing a metallic rod that ends near my hand. I clasp the appendage.

Together with my new guide, I step through the break in the curving line of anacites. The remaining robots adjust their movements to form two perfect lines of traffic. Perfection without words.

About the Author

Thurston Hillman is the Starfinder Society Organized Play Campaign Developer. He lives in the frigid ice deserts of Canada, where he's written and developed several products for both Starfinder and Pathfinder. Prior to working at Paizo, Thurston worked in the aviation and technology fields where he travelled the world for several years. You can find Thurston on Twitter at @OnCallGM.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

I was two-thirds of the way through a hybrid power converter and already feeling the buzz when a knock on the door caught me off guard. In itself, that shouldn’t have been strange; I’m a private detective, after all. But I’d turned the sign off a week ago. Sentient Robotic Investigations—the only SRO detective agency in the Burning Archipelago—was closed. Figuring someone’d gotten lost, I opened the door to send them away. Instead I found a korasha lashunta waiting, her features as symmetrical as anyone could ask for, wearing an annoyed scowl that brought with it a surge of memories of the old days.

“Chief Maneon,” I said, waving her in and tipping the power converter in her direction. “I’d buy you a charge, but I think I already spent it.” She didn’t laugh. I’m not very funny.

She’d come to tell me about a stiff—a ysoki, washed up in the canal in Bulwarks Plaza. Eventually I realized she was offering me a job. “Last time I checked,” I said dryly, “you were in charge of a bunch of cops.”

“We’re slammed,” she said. “Too many cases, not enough hands. You remember things at Laubu Station.” I did, but I was also thinking of how I was going to refill my drained power converter.

“Rate’s two hundred a day, plus expenses.”

She accepted without hesitation. That’s when I should have known better. “A person’s dead,” she said on her way out the door. “All I want to know is, what are you going to do about it?”

I tossed the spent battery on the table. “As little as possible.”

I tried the canal, but it was a bust. Holo-tape marked off the scene where they’d dragged the poor rat—a guy named Bey—out of the water, but there was nothing to see. The locals along the green promenade didn’t seem to notice in any case. Not far off, a small crowd gathered around local doomsayer Jenaelyn, whose ravings about a pending armageddon were far more interesting than anything I had going on.

Illustration by Mark Molnar

Bey managed an apartment building in Clearlight and I headed in that direction. It was a hike, and by the time I got there my circuits were throbbing. I was not in a good mood. Of course, the door was locked, so I jimmied it. I couldn’t exactly ask the landlord to let me in.

Inside was a warren. Typical ysoki. I wove a path between boxes of cheap electronics and used drone parts. There was a whole rack filled with nothing but obsolete datapads, and a handful of credsticks by the bed. His union certification was framed on the wall. I liked him. But there was a weird signal coming from behind the desk; it was wired. Crawling under there, I saw a security panel. I tried his union member number, and a panel in the wall slid open. I went in.

It was a small little space, cozy even for a ysoki. He’d hung monitors all over the walls, and half of them were still running. On the screens, people—mostly lashuntas in black—sat huddled together in molded plastic seats, checking their comms or talking quietly to each other. A few people stood nearby, holding onto brass poles that led from floor to ceiling. It was the inside of a linecrawler. Bey had bugged the linecrawlers. What the hell for?

All the camera feeds were recorded. There were hundreds of hours. My headache was telling me I didn’t want to watch them all, but it turned out I didn’t have to. Fifteen minutes were missing from a recording three days old. Bey had erased it. I locked up as I left. But I took the credsticks.

Half of the credsticks bore the logo of the Last Laugh—a local comedy club—so that’s where I went. Tonight, the batteries were on Bey. Chaz Bilgart, the club’s most celebrated act, was on stage, making a finger pistol with one hand. “‘Didn’t you hear me,’” he snarled, imitating a mugger in a cheap holonovel. “‘Hand over the credits or I blow your damn brains out!’ And I told him, ‘Gimme a second, okay? I’m thinking!’” I didn’t get the joke, but everyone else laughed.

I saw a lot of off-duty cops in the room, but I rolled in anyway and ordered a battery from a waiter dressed like a mourner. Bey’s sticks had plenty of credits. I didn’t know if I could drink my way through all of them, but I was ready to try. I was halfway through my second when Chaz dropped onto the chair next to me. “J4K3, you look like crap.” I couldn’t disagree, so I showed him a picture on my comm without a word. “That’s Bey,” he said. “Nice guy. Tips good. Is he in trouble?”

“Not anymore.” I told him about the canal.

Chaz told me Bey had been in three nights ago, pretty upset. Had too many. A local took him home. When I asked who, he pointed across the room to a table where a bunch of big palookas sat around a less boorish, far more handsome local. “Zeylan,” he said.

“Bey talk to anyone else?”

“One of the waiters, Lin,” he said. “But Lin didn’t show for his shift today.”

I didn’t like my odds against the palookas, so I waited for Zeylan to leave and I followed him. Chaz insisted on tagging along. We ended up at a storage facility which Zeylan entered. I got Maneon on the comm and told her everything. She was there in ten minutes.

“Killer is in there?” she said.

“And probably another dead guy,” I told her.

I was ready to bust the door down but she just knocked. “Sir,” she said through the door. “It’s Chief Maneon.”

After a short pause, the door opened a crack. Zeylan had a pistol pointed at the floor. “Shavri,” he said. nonchalantly. “Who are your friends?”

Maneon didn’t acknowledge Zeylan’s familiar address and ignored the question. “You need to go, sir. Is there a body in there?”

Zeylan shrugged. “I’m afraid so.”

“Leave it. I’ll take it to the crematorium. With all due respect sir, if you’d let me take care of the first one, none of this would have happened.”

A numb feeling had been spreading through my circuits, but I finally lost it when I realized the chief wasn’t calling Zeylan “sir” as a formality, but rather as a sign of deference. I lifted my arc pistol, but Chaz held me back, giving Zeylan the chance to slip out the door and bolt. And just like that I was watching his back as he ran for the linecrawler station.

Maneon looked at me like she’d just swallowed a bug. “Holy hell, J4K3, put that thing away before you hurt someone!”

“You knew the whole damn time!”

“I didn’t know how the ysoki overheard what he did. But now we’ll destroy the rest of those recordings. This is your fault. You should have done what you promised you’d do.”

As little as possible, I’d told her.

She turned away to see to the corpse waiting in the storage unit. As the door closed, I made a last lunge to hold it open, but Chaz was stronger than he looked.

“Forget it, J4K3,” he hissed in my ear. “It’s Asanatown.”

About the Author

Jason Tondro develops Starfinder Adventure Paths. A former college professor, he taught literature, writing, film, and comics & graphic novels before joining Paizo as an editor in March 2018. He is the author of the Arthur Lives! RPG; look for him on Twitter @doctorcomics. He lives in Seattle with his two dogs and blames Joe Pasini for this story.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.

Today is going to be a good day.

That’s what Major Ramalakesh remembered telling himself this morning while he was putting on his uniform. Now he wasn’t so sure. He looked up at the starry sky above Absalom Station’s Eye, squinting in the harsh light of the yellow sun, and thought of the relentless hard vacuum beyond the thin layer of polycarbon plate. The transparent dome looked so fragile. One crack, one tiny hole in that flimsy bubble, and everyone and everything in the Eye would die horribly and without honor in a matter of seconds. And the Pact Worlders placed their government here, without even a hint of defensive fortifications. Ramalakesh couldn’t comprehend it. It made him uneasy.

He lowered his gaze and tried to not to think about the dome overhead. He had been so excited this morning! This was his first day of leave since arriving from the Veskarium a week ago, and his first opportunity to really explore Absalom Station. It was what he had always dreamed of. This is why he had joined the Imperial Diplomatic Corps. This is why he had fought so hard to be assigned to the Veskarium’s diplomatic mission to the Pact Worlds. What better place to experience the galaxy’s wealth of alien cultures than the very hub of the Pact Worlds?

Illustration by Leon Tukker

So why did he feel so anxious? Why was he on edge? It wasn’t just the bubble, or the days that were four hours shorter than on Vesk Prime. It was something more, something unexpected. As Ramalakesh walked among the government buildings and gardens of Parkside, he studied the people passing by and marveled again at the sheer diversity of alien life all around him. Humans, kasathas, lashuntas, barathus, ryphorians, and countless others. There were so many of them, speaking so many different languages, it was almost overwhelming.

But why would that unsettle him? Ramalakesh was only a junior attaché on his first assignment outside the Veskarium, but this wasn’t his first encounter with alien species. The Veskarium was a multicultural society, especially on Vesk Prime. He had interacted with ijtikris, pahtras, skittermanders, and even a few Pact Worlders—humans and lashuntas, mostly—before, with no problems whatsoever. They were always accommodating, almost even subservient at times. They knew their role and position in society, just as they recognized his.

Slowly, it dawned on him what was so different here. Why he felt so uneasy, so out place. He was vesk, and back home in the Veskarium he enjoyed an entitlement he had never lived without.

In the corridors and streets of Absalom Station, people still gave him a wide berth, but that was only because of his imposing physical presence. Not because he was vesk. There wasn’t the automatic, deferential respect he was used to from non-vesk. Instead, there was indifference. The Pact Worlders didn’t care that he was vesk. He was surrounded by a multitude of people, different species from worlds scattered across the galaxy, and he was just one more alien, a single drop of water in a vast galactic ocean. He looked around and couldn’t find any other vesk in sight. At home on Vesk Prime, they thronged the streets, but here on Absalom Station, vesk were a distinct minority. Ramalakesh suddenly felt very alone, as if he was on the front line of a battle and his all comrades had suddenly deserted him, abandoning him to face the enemy alone. And a hot anger began to stir in his belly.

Lost in his thoughts and not paying attention to his surroundings, Ramalakesh bumped hard into an android passing by. The android spun around and gave him a rough shove.

“Watch where you’re going next time, lizard,” the android said, the circuitry tattoos on their expressionless face glowing brightly.

Did they just call me lizard? Ramalakesh thought incredulously. In an instant, a predatory rage dropped over him at the affront. Instinctively, Ramalakesh bared his teeth and growled in the back of his throat. His heart sung in exhilaration, and he could hear the war-songs of his ancestors ringing in his ears. His clawed hand flashed to the dueling sword at his waist. This android would learn to respect their betters.

The android’s face was unchanged as they flipped aside their cloak, revealing a disintegrator pistol pointed right at the vesk’s midsection.

“Back off, repto. I’d hate to have to melt a hole right through those pretty little scales of yours.” Somehow, the android’s monotone voice made them sound even more threatening.

Ramalakesh knew that if he got into a fight here in public, he risked creating a diplomatic incident. His career would be ruined. He would be cashiered and sent back to the Veskarium in dishonor. His heart was pounding in his chest, but whether from bloodlust or fear, he didn’t know. There was only one thing to do. Breathing heavily, Ramalakesh held up his hands and lowered his head. When he wasn’t immediately shot, he turned and fled into the crowd.

Everything around him was a blur, a clashing cacophony of lights, colors, and noises. But it was all wrong. The light was wrong, the smells were wrong, the people were wrong, and the babble of their languages was incomprehensible. Ramalakesh understood now why so many of his compatriots preferred to stay in the Vesk Quarter, where the blue lighting felt more natural, where the smell of spiced talakka meat filled the air, where they could hear and speak their native tongue, comfortably surrounded by their own people. A place where everything was in order, everyone followed a regimented routine, just the way things were supposed to be. It wasn’t home, but it was the only place on this station that felt even close. Ramalakesh hurried through Parkside, head down, retreating to the safety of the Vesk Quarter.

Just as Ramalakesh was nearing the exit from the Eye that led to the arm of the station that held the Vesk Quarter, a jumpsuited ysoki walked into his legs, halting them both in their tracks. The small ratfolk had been talking animatedly to his companion and hadn’t noticed the vesk coming toward him.

“Whoa! You’re a big one, aren’t you?” the ysoki said, looking up. Without thinking, Ramalakesh showed his teeth and growled, glaring down at the ysoki. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold back this time. The ysoki’s eyes widened and he scrambled backward, hand scrabbling toward the flame pistol on his belt.

“You walked right into him, Quig,” said the ysoki’s companion, a human female. “Now apologize to the nice vesk.”

“Hey, hey, all right,” the ysoki said, raising both hands. “Sorry, my friend. Wasn’t watching where I was going. My mistake.”

Ramalakesh took a deep breath and gritted his teeth, trying to will away his anger, his frustration, his doubt. The human woman gazed at him with thoughtful, appraising eyes.

“New here?” she asked. Her smile was friendly and genuine. “Welcome to Absalom Station. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. And if you haven’t checked out Golotra’s in the Freemarkets yet, you should! She has the best grilled talakka steaks on the station. Trust me.” She winked at him.

“Have a nice evening.” The human woman gave a wave that was half salute, put her hand on the ysoki’s shoulder, and the two of them walked past, disappearing into the crowd.

As he turned to watch them go, Ramalakesh suddenly realized he felt more at ease. Maybe Absalom Station and the Pact Worlders weren’t so bad, after all. He would retreat—briefly—to the Vesk Quarter and regroup in the comfort of his bunk in the diplomatic barracks. And in the morning, after a good night’s rest, he would again be ready for battle, of a sort. Ramalakesh would do his duty to the empire and conquer Absalom Station. He would make it a part of him, and himself a part of it, and maybe his efforts would help bring the peoples of the Veskarium and the Pact Worlds just a tiny bit closer together in true friendship.

Major Ramalakesh looked up at the stars overhead, the same stars that shone above Vesk Prime. He could almost smell spiced talakka in the air. He straightened his spine and smiled.

Tomorrow was going to be a good day.

About the Author

Robert G. McCreary is the Creative Director of Starfinder. He was a design lead for the Starfinder Core Rulebook, as well as the author of Incident at Absalom Station, the first volume of Starfinder’s inaugural Dead Suns Adventure Path. He has written and developed dozens of adventures and other material for both Starfinder and Pathfinder, but the science fantasy setting of Starfinder is where he feels most at home. Rob has had a lifelong interest in science fiction and history, the latter no doubt influenced by years spent living abroad.

About Tales from the Drift

The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.