Page 3 of Fog of War (Over the Moon)

Gabbie

As soon as I'd come to terms with the fact that Leopha's plan was unstoppable, I'd gone out and spent an entire Saturday staring at pants.

What even constitutes as adventure pants?

It was a silly thing to fixate on, but it was something I could control.

Did I get trekking pants? Leggings? Maybe khakis like people used to wear on safari.

.. Was safari even a real thing? That sent me into a spiral, because I worked in an international studies office.

I should know if safari was real or made up!

I descended the trans-atmo ship's ramp on wobbly knees.

I'd chosen a pair of comfy grey linen culottes with a wide cut and an elastic waist. They were wrinkled to hell, but that was part of their charm, right?

They looked good with my balloon sleeve sweater and flat-soled leather high-tops.

Too expensive to be casual, but not formal.

Durable if we needed to walk, kind of waterproof.

.. I'd gone through so many calculations to land on this outfit that my mind still spun, wondering if I'd made the right choice.

Leopha loped after me with a sigh of thick, humid air, completely unconcerned about her clothes or mine.

"Mmm, smells like home."

Her wistful happiness soothed me. She wasn't nervous at all, her gold eyes gleaming up at the dark sapphire blue sky.

It was apparently midday, though the sky looked a lot like high-altitude photographs of a sky so blue and dark it was more like the ocean.

The sun shone through the thick atmosphere like a reflective disc, no aura or glow, though it still stung to look at.

The quality of light was similar to a total eclipse on earth, with perfectly crisp, faint shadows and a blue filter like that magic hour right before dusk.

I took a deep breath. Wet, rich soil and black cherry soda.

.. Was that Aescipolian petrichor? The weather was like a spring thunderstorm with chilly air that clung to your skin and clothing in a mist. It wasn't autumn, per se, but it wasn't not autumn either.

I could already tell that the summers were oppressive and full of heat lightning, and for once, I wished I could see it.

"Give me a hug, you brat!"

A venandi man boomed with his arms held open from the edge of the tarmac. Leopha charged at him, truly attempting to knock him down. But he was taller and sturdier, clapping her shoulders with a bear hug so tight, it made me breathless.

Then she cuffed him across the spires, their plates connecting like two slabs of flint, causing a spark. The man flailed, clutching at his bronze and copper plates that caught the blue sheen of sunlight.

"Ow!"

She pointed in his face. "Serves you right, giving me only two weeks to figure out how to get here. Two weeks?! They chose the clan champions like three satbits ago!"

I hauled my stuff over–just my cross bag and a single piece of levi-luggage that floated like an air hockey puck–as the man spared me a grimace that was meant to be a welcoming smile.

He looked so much like Leopha, it was almost difficult to tell them apart.

Venandi weren't sexually dimorphic like humans.

The differences were slight by comparison.

Slightly narrower shoulders, slightly smaller mandibles, a milky quality to feminine voices, maybe.

.. But his spires were taller and more coppery, and that helped.

"You must be Gabbie Rubens," he said.

"And you must be Leopha's brother."

He cocked a grin. "Leonide. Welcome to Aescipoli."

"Thanks." I laced my hands together with a deep inhale and pressed them to my chest, staring out at the alien everything. Alien trees, alien clouds, alien smells, alien sounds... And couldn't stow my smile. "I'm really happy to be here."

Leonide grabbed my things and pointedly left Leopha's behind.

She sprinted off to haul her luggage–mostly human souvenirs and foods to share with her clan–and caught up with us at an open-air transport hovering on idle just above the ground.

Leonide jumped in the driver's seat and patted the passenger side, indicating I should take the front.

Leopha didn't argue, sprawling sideways in the back, sliding a pair of oversized human sunglasses on as she stretched with a happy groan.

Was it just me or did her plates look... thicker? Maybe more vibrant. Whatever it was, her body had missed the weather on her homeworld, and she planned on soaking it up.

"Trip go well?" Leonide asked. He raised the vehicle several meters off the ground and the engine hummed to life beneath our butts.

My glasses vibrated on my face until he spun out of the port in a wide, gentle arc and hovered directly over a trail of markers made from neon yellow fence posts.

It was a road, I realized, for hovering vehicles to follow.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Very smooth. I didn't expect for chain-skippers to be like cruise ships!"

"Even for us, they never get less impressive," he chuckled.

He veered off the yellow markers and into a horizon of rolling hills.

The wind raced across the vast highlands, whipping the tall, silky grass like waves on a beach.

Golden blades with magenta roots waved violently in the wake of our transport as Leonide took us off the beaten path with the sun at our backs and a sky like the ocean ahead of us.

"So!" I yelled over the roar of wind and engine. "You're competing?"

Leonide rolled a shoulder, his mandibles rattling with pride. "Yeah! I like a challenge. I think it'll be a good fit for me to find someone there."

Leopha snorted from the back and tapped the top of my head. "What he means is, Aescia is the Ferulis contender, so he begged for a spot."

My brow creased. "I see..." I didn't see. At all. But I nodded my head slowly as if I did. Leonide glanced at me as he eased off the accelerator and let the transport coast over the next hill.

"My sister didn't tell you much about the battle, did she?" he asked with hesitation. I blinked at him. That little edge of worry was enough to put me in a full-blown panic. I sat up straight, clutching my bag.

"Wait, did you say battle?"

"Hey, I said it was like a football game, and I stand by my description."

For the first time in my life, I heard a venandi growl, and not on television.

My bones vibrated as Leonide swiped at his sister with his talons at full-length, displaying his fangs with a wide, angry snarl.

He snapped his teeth at her and she scrambled away while I pressed myself against the side of the transport, the hair standing up on my neck.

"Ouch, okay!" Leopha yelped in surrender. She sighed and leaned her elbows on my seat so that our faces were close to each other. "First off, I didn't lie, and you're safe. I promise."

I blew out a shaky exhale but was still wound as tight as a bowstring. Leopha set her big palm on my shoulder and rubbed her thumb over my sweater to soothe me.

"It's a mock battle," she snapped, obviously directing that at her brother. "Venandi have a, uh, pretty violent history. Clan wars, fights for territory, kidnapping mates. You knew this though, right?"

"I took ISU history in high school." The course had been about the formation of the union, so it didn't go into detail, but I got the gist.

"Did you take xenobiology?"

I nodded.

"Okay, so you know about convergence then, right? Venandi get horny and our bodies shiver out a bunch of infectious genetic code. It changes our partner's visual markers, and that newly changed partner joins the other one's clan."

Right, familiar territory. I nodded again, and this time, my shoulders softened under the weight of Leopha's arm. I smoothed down the wrinkled front of my culottes. "Which used to happen on battlefields during clan wars, right?"

"Right! See? You get it," Leopha said affectionately.

"To honor our history, we have a mock clan war every autumn.

Four clans chosen at random send three champions each.

No one dies..." She chuckled. "But hopefully they leave the battle with a new vir or vira.

Not gonna lie, it's pretty hot. Only the four clans and their guests are allowed to attend, because the location is sacred.

And Satoris hasn't been in the mix for like. .."

"Fifty-seven orbits," Leonide supplied.

I looked up at them both feeling a lot better, even if my face was turning pink. I didn't want to see people die. If that meant I had to watch people having sex instead, so be it. I could squirm in my adventure pants for a weekend. "So the battle i-is an orgy?"

Leopha hauled back and guffawed while Leonide rubbed his spires with embarrassment.

"No, we go in with goals and targets." He huffed. "It's more political than random. Every clan has someone on the battlefield they want to headhunt."

So I wouldn't be watching an orgy or people die. Maybe just some light exhibitionism.

I could handle that, right?

"Oh! You know the Atarian clan, right?" Leopha asked.

I rolled my eyes at her, finally able to breathe normally. "Every human knows the Atarian clan." They were the first clan to have a human member, Ambassador Olivia Atarian, way back before integration had even begun. She brokered the deal that brought Earth into the union.

"Well, Baella Atarian, the magistrata of the clan when the ambassador converged with her son, met her vir at the Festival of Souls. It's one of the reasons she became magistrata."

"Woah." Okay, that was pretty exciting.

"Yeah," Leopha said, sitting back now that she knew I was at ease again.

"Baella nabbed herself a Ferulis. Atarians are high up there, don't get me wrong.

But the Ferulis clan has been top tier for centuries.

Which means that everyone is gonna have their sights set on Aescia.

When my brother loses, he's gonna be heartbroken. "

Leonide leaned over to me with a cocksure grin. "I'm not going to lose."

"Yeah, right! Look at those puny guns!" Leopha jumped forward and the bickering picked up fresh. I let them go at it, my mind racing over the same thought repeatedly.

This festival was definitely not study away material.