Outlaw Planet

by M.R. Carey

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

From one of genre fiction’s most original and revolutionary voices comes a space opera adventure like no other. Sometimes the fate of entire worlds can be decided by a woman with nothing to lose, and the smartest gun in the multiverse in her hand . . .

This is the story of Bess - or Dog-Bitch Bess as she came to be known. It's the story of the gun she carried, whose name was Wakeful Slim. It's the story of the dead man who carried that gun before her and left a piece of himself inside it. And it's the tale of how she turned from teacher, to renegade, and ultimately to hero.

This is also the tale of the last violent engagements in an inter-dimensional war - one of the most brutal the multiverse had ever seen.

This is how Bess learned the truth about her world. Came to it the hard way, through pain and loss and the reckless spilling of blood, and carried it with her like a brand on her soul. And once she knew it - knew for sure how badly she'd been used - she had no option but to do something about it.

Discover this thrilling standalone science fiction adventure from the million-copy bestselling M. R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts and the Philip K. Dick Award-shortlisted Infinity Gate (a New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Year).

Release date: November 18, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 496

Sample

Dog-Bitch Bess is what they came to call her. You might say that’s a strange name to lay on someone, and I would not be inclined to disagree. A mite over-precise, at the very least. All dog-selves are either bulls or bitches so that ought to be a given. It’s as if you were to say that a plank was made out of tree-wood, or that someone coming in out of a rainstorm was water-wet.

People explain that strangeness each in their own way. Some say they only called Bess dog-bitch because there was an otter bitch that lived in the same town as her, in the same house even, and that the two of them were pledged to each other as betrothed.

Others would have it that when folks gave her that name they wanted both “dog” and “bitch” to have their weight of contempt and spitefulness. Certainly Bess herself always assumed this was the case, and she didn’t mind it at all. She was only too happy to have those same folks hate her and curse her. She would have been mightily disappointed if they ever called her anything civil.

Dog-Bitch Bess then, both in the war and after, though what she had been before was a different thing altogether. She was mostly Labrador, her fur the near-transparent yellow of white gold, except for her face where it was paler and more than a little uneven. She had been badly burned once and the fur had not grown back exactly as it had been before. Even the contours of her cheeks and chin were subtly or maybe not-so-subtly off the true. She was not overly tall but there was something about her, a quiet or a coldness or an intensity, that left an impression. Sometimes she was wont to wear a battered old greatcoat that she had acquired from a Parity cavalry officer, with dark patches around the shoulders where she’d torn away his rank and regimentals. The coat created a doubt, which was most likely its purpose. Had she served in the army of the Equalisers or was she, as you might say, wearing the pelt of a dead enemy? Bess sat more or less comfortably inside that doubt, staring back at you and waiting for you to make your call.

It’s funny how many you’ll meet who claim they knew her. That they lived a stone’s throw away from her all unknowing, passed her on a street in some border town a hundred miles from anywhere, sold her a gun or a hat or a chafer, took a kindness or an insult from her or else gave one. There’s a whole slew of folk who will tell you they were in this or that posse that chased her and nearly brought her down, or that they swapped bullets with her and would have killed her for sure if not for this thing or that thing, the dust or the daylight or the Devil’s luck.

Most of this is lies, as you’d expect. Not so much lies, even, as the desperate need some people feel to make their life mean something by pushing it up close to other lives that are bigger or at least louder. There’s no more truth in most of these accounts than there is fresh air in a shithouse. But stories accrete around someone like Bess.

Like this one. An old couple hear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. It’s a stranger with a big iron on her hip and three bullet wounds in her. They dress the wounds as best they can and then they retreat to their own room and lock the door out of pure fright. In the morning the stranger is gone and there’s a purse on the table with a hundred silver dollars in it.

Or this. A man in a saloon is bad-mouthing the Echelon, calling them motherfucking sons of whores and cold-hearted slave-owning bastards and more of the same. There’s a woman drinking her drink right next to him with a wide-brimmed hat drawn down over her face. She tells him to shut his mouth and he takes it hard. Calls her out. Only the woman says she don’t shoot no drunkards. “You’re a damned coward if you don’t stand up and answer me,” says he. “Well, if you’re dead set on it,” says the lady, “then let’s dance. But I’ll do this with my right hand, me being southerly in all things including my grip. And I’ll give you three shots before I loose a single one.” They go out into the street and the loudmouth is feeling mighty cocky. But he’s too quick and too drunk and his first shot goes wide. “Fuck it,” says he and shoots again. Hits nothing but sunshine. Fuck, fuck, fuck! But he’s got one shot left and he didn’t hear any rule about how close he could get. So he walks up to the woman and he puts his Lumiss against the side of her head. And she stares him right in the face as he pulls the trigger. Just a click. He’s out of bullets. “What was that you said about the Echelon, then?” the woman asks him. “That they’re motherfuckers,” says the man, knowing he’s good and dead. “Motherfuckers and slave-drivers and sons of whores.” “Well, I respect a man who sticks to his principles,” says the woman, “but I incline to disagree.” Whereby she shoots him in the right knee, cripples him, but leaves him alive.

Or again. There’s a tower at the end of the world where God lives, and one way or another Dog-Bitch Bess found her way in there and she’s standing right in front of God with her hand on her gun and murder in her heart. “Okay,” she says, “I guess you know I lost every damn thing I loved to get this far, but here I fucking am at last and I mean to shoot you down.” And God says, “No, Bess, you didn’t lose everything. Not yet. You got one friend left that you love, and the bullet you shoot me with has got to be wet with his heart’s blood or it won’t do me no harm. And although I’m meant to know all things, for the life of me I don’t know if you’re strong enough in your wilfulness and your hate to do what’s needful to be done.” “Well then,” says Bess, and she takes out a dime piece and balances it on her bent-back thumb, “I guess we’re both of us in for a surprise.”

Lies and tall tales, all of it. Almost. Almost all. There’s a whisper of truth in that last one, but the tower wasn’t at the end of the world. It wasn’t even anywhere special, just out in the open desert near to the western ocean. And Bess wasn’t the one that got to talk to it. And you don’t kill God with a bullet, although in one very narrow sense you can kill Him with a gun. Anyway, and despite all that, Bess was there in that place and she did have to make that terrible choice. For the rest, you’re better off listening to every tenth word you hear about the Dog-Bitch, throwing half of what you heard away and believing half of what’s left.

There are some things that are known, though. To start with, Bess wasn’t Echelon in her origins but pure Parity. She hailed from away up north in a city named Paxen – a safe and civilised and law-abiding place where the pavements were free of ordure and the citizen-selves were sleek of fur. You wouldn’t have guessed from such a silver-spooned beginning that Bess would end up writing her name in the history books using other folks’ blood.

There were many who got their hands bloodied in the civil war, of course. Bess wasn’t special in that regard. Still and all, she was one of those who didn’t put her gun down when the politicians shook hands but fought a second war that was all her own. And then she was among the much smaller number who found out the truth of how the civil war had come to pass. How it had never really belonged either to Parity or to Echelon but was only a poison that had been fed to both sides and that they couldn’t purge except through that one awful thing.

There are many who’ll tell you that the pith and point of stories is to instruct us in our failings. That if you don’t learn the lessons of the past you’ll go on making the same mistakes again and again until at last you make the big mistake that you can’t walk away from. What they won’t tell you is that you sucked in those errors with your mother’s milk, took them in along with your first breath, soaked and stewed in them every day of your short, precious life. Which was never your life in the first place but only a kind of straw doll or poppet put in your hands to comfort you after your real life had been torn away.

Bess learned that truth. Came to it the hard way, through pain and loss and the reckless spilling of blood, and carried it with her like a brand on her soul to match the burns that had scarred her face. And once she knew it – knew for sure how badly she’d been used – she had no option but to do something about it. And that was when she went to war for the third time, to murder God and his tall white angels and get the world out from under their shadow.

This is her story. It’s the story of the gun she carried, whose name was Wakeful Slim. It’s the story of the dead man who carried that gun before her and left a piece of himself inside it.

And it’s a story of the Pandominion, though it takes place after the Pandominion fell. After the rabbit and the robot and the Registry came and killed that endless empire by driving a stake through its heart.

What can I say? Some things don’t always notice straight away that they’re dead. And they take a good long time to hit the ground.

The country was growing, and it was growing apart. The name States’ Union suggests a whole that came together out of many different pieces, and so it was; but some of the pieces came easy while others needed a great deal of cutting and splicing and sanding down before they could be made to fit at all. And looking at the results it was hard to tell exactly what kind of thing they made when they were all bolted together.

In the north there was industry. Manufacturies, workshops, steel mills, foundries, warehouses. Industry eats raw materials and shits out profit. The south was where the raw materials came from, and it was where some of the money went back to. But it was an extraordinary thing to see how sticky that flow could get, syphoning up so much and giving so little back. The north was captivated by its own project, an alchemical transformation of sweat and hard effort into gold. The south did the same thing but on different terms, taking the labour of the so-called ignoble races – mouse and rat, squirrel and chipmunk – as a natural resource that could be exploited at no cost. And if those supposed inferiors protested or (good God forbid) tried to walk away from their work, then it was no crime to school them on their place in the scheme of things with the aid of a lash or a hanging tree.

It was a filthy mess, is what it was. An evil framework built on an evil model, silted up with cruelties that could never be acknowledged because if you once admit you’re sick you might be obliged to take your medicine. The north called itself the Parity, affecting to honour the selfhood of all races and to value them all equally (except for the Pugface nations, of course – the Pugfaces stood outside any system of value). The southern assemblies were collectively known as the Echelon, signifying their adherence to the ladder of being in which the lesser bowed to the greater for the good of all.

There was no Dog-Bitch Bess back then. Instead there was Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper of Paxen City, a name that carried a considerable weight of meaning. Sandpiper was an overt badge of status: all the well-to-do families in the Parity had that fetish for naming themselves after birds and winged insects. The Indigo dropped in the middle there indicated that she was her parents’ ninth child, i being the ninth letter of the alphabet (dog selves tend towards large litters). As for Elizabeth, it was only in northern climes that you’d find the appellation in such a pristine state. Further south it broke apart into Eliza, Liz, Beth, Bessie and all those other part-works.

You might think from all this here foofaraw that the Sandpipers held a lofty place in Paxen’s uppermost crust, but in fact they always had more of the trappings of status than the thing itself. They lived in a twenty-room mansion in a fashionable neighbourhood, mortgaged to the hilt, and paid the wages of their serving staff three or sometimes four weeks in arrears. Miss Elizabeth enjoyed a fair few luxuries as she grew up, including the luxury of a good education, but her father William Alabaster Sandpiper was living like a great many society men and society ladies in the Parity’s eastern strongholds, which is to say out on the uttermost edge of credit.

William came from a big litter himself and had inherited only two things from his own father – the family name and an optimism so fervent it amounted to a religious creed. The name was sufficient collateral for a number of sizeable loans, and the optimism shielded William from any contaminating shred of caution or foresight. He put all the money he only nominally had into the Penny Express, the relay system of intrepid riders and armed wagons that ferried messages and goods between the prosperous east and the ever-expanding west. He assured everyone who was willing to listen that the Express was a gilt-edged investment, solid as any rock. What was the one thing any society could not possibly do without? Why, communication of course! Communication was the keystone. It was a bet you could never lose. And when each year brought William only a modest dividend on his investments, well he just borrowed against the next year and went on smiling.

His wife Caroline wore that same smile slightly more askew. She was from old money, as the saying goes, but like her husband had little to none that was current and actually usable. In her earlier years she had briefly been reduced to working for a living, though this was not a thing the family advertised. She had been what was called a nursing companion, looking after the well-to-do elderly in their own homes. This was no sinecure. Many people, especially the old, were at that time tormented by terrifyingly vivid dreams of blood and carnage. Some woke with delusions that the nation was actually at war, that their houses were burning and their neighbours being dragged out and slaughtered in the streets. Doctors were at a loss to explain the cause of this delirium or why it had struck so many all at once. It was a response, some said, to the growing tension between the northern and southern states. There was a widespread feeling that war was inevitable, and for some fragile minds the constant pressure of that fear was enough to cause psychotic breaks.

Caroline Earnest Crane, who herself was not the most robust or stable of personalities, did not enjoy being regularly immersed in the terrors of others. She was a tolerably good nurse, but she was not at all reluctant to abandon her calling and become Caroline Sandpiper. The marriage was brokered by her parents, who were operating under the assumption that William was a man of actual means and were bitterly disappointed when they learned the truth. For her own part Caroline resolutely refused to be cast down. She had given gainful employment a fair trial and much preferred her present station, in which nothing was expected of her beyond a surface gloss and an absolute passivity. Her fate would be determined by others while she organised charity drives and presided over luncheons.

So she adopted the smile, and conspired with William in imprinting it on their children. In the absence of anything more substantial it was what they had by way of an entry ticket into the bastions of east coast society, and both parents encouraged their offspring to trade on it for all they were worth. To do otherwise would be to doubt the divine providence that was watching over their family, and doubt was a vice that could not be indulged.

Smiling never came easy to Miss Elizabeth though. She watched her siblings scrambling up the scree slopes of elite society and decided those heights were not for her. So she went a different way. She read. She thought. She became so quiet you could have forgotten she was there at all, but it was the kind of quiet you get between the flash of the lightning and the boom of the thunder. It was always going to end at some point, and what happened after that was always going to be loud.

Then the steam trains came along, turning everything downside up, and the Penny Express sank like a stone in a well. The Sandpipers were staring ruin in the face: all their chickens were on their way home at once with IOUs and mortgage deeds clutched in their beaks.

The effect on William Sandpiper was nothing short of cataclysmic. It seemed to him that the universe had lured him on like a harlot and then betrayed him with a harlot’s callousness. Caroline felt equally short-changed, but she had never had many illusions about the universe’s good intentions and she retreated into existential despair with a minimum of fuss. Most of Miss Elizabeth’s siblings, when William broke the news, seemed aggrieved not that ruin had arrived but that their father had decided to tell them about it. It wasn’t any of their damn place to worry about where the next meal or the next chauffeured carriage was coming from. Those things just arrived, like rain from heaven when the ground was parched.

If Miss Elizabeth responded to the calamity more pragmatically than the rest of the family it was because she’d never thought of the life they were living as anything more than a soap bubble, and she knew that soap bubbles weren’t built for the long haul. It wasn’t that she failed to realise the seriousness of the situation. On the contrary, she could see all too clearly the direction the family was travelling in.

Her mother was melting down into one big puddle of grief and her father, despite the presence of this puddle, had taken fire and become a furnace stoked with rage and recrimination. These elemental transformations were alarming, and the situation wasn’t helped at all by the younger Sandpipers continuing to live in a haze of denial and profligate spending that made any stabilisation of the family’s circumstances all but impossible.

William had seldom taken a direct part in his children’s education, but he hadn’t been above delivering the occasional object lesson. Miss Elizabeth was minded now of a time when her father had had the children run races across the garden of their house. The prize for each race was a dime piece – not an inconsiderable sum by any means. The children tore back and forth across the lawn, but the oldest took all the coin that was going while the younger ones trudged increasingly breathless in their wake. After the first few races Miss Elizabeth – ninth in the pecking order, after all – realised the futility of expending any effort on this nonsense. She was obliged to participate but gave nothing to the cause, strolling at a leisurely pace behind her siblings and rolling in last every time.

Then, after more than an hour of non-stop sprinting, William announced a final grand tourney: a hundred laps of the garden with a purse of ten dollars for the winner. Miss Elizabeth decided this was a prize worth fighting for and gave it her all. At first she was bringing up the rear as she had in all the previous races, but her older brothers and sisters, tired out from their earlier efforts, fell back one by one. By the time Miss Elizabeth had made seventy or so circuits she had such a clear lead that she was able to complete the course at a comfortable jog. “There now,” William said, all smiles, as he handed the huge banknote to his tiny daughter. “You see how it is, kids. You need to decide up front if you’re going to run the fastest or the furthest. Can’t do both, do you follow me? Nobody ever did both.”

Now, amid the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, Miss Elizabeth saw a notice tacked up on the wall of a telegram office that said Ottomankie in distant Orselian needed a schoolmistress. She decided on this occasion that the best strategy was to run the furthest. So at the tender age of nineteen, more or less fresh out of her own schooling, she packed her bags and headed south. She didn’t bother to tell the rest of the family where she was going or why. There would have been recriminations, or else there would have been indifference. Either one would have been painful and of no real use to her.

Miss Elizabeth took a stagecoach from Paxen to Shoshimish, a train to Blue Peak and a katy-wagon to Ottomankie. This was in some ways a journey backwards through time, the appurtenances of civilisation disappearing one by one as she journeyed south. The seats in the coach had no cushions to them. The train had no water closet and offered no refreshments. The katy-wagon was a few bare boards with wheels attached, drenched in the pungent smell of the colossal arthropod that pulled it.

The speech and appearance of Miss Elizabeth’s fellow travellers moved in lockstep with these changes. Fine linen suits and crinoline dresses were gradually replaced by blue cotton overalls and homespun calico. Urbane conversation gave way to curse words and obscenities, some of them utterly astonishing to Miss Elizabeth’s refined ear. She sat next to bison with unbated horns, bobcats with gun belts at their waists, a striped skunk with a bandolier of gleaming blades.

And she saw her first Pugfaces – not riding, of course, but walking on the road or standing close by it to watch the wagon go by. The men with their gap teeth and fierce grins, the women with their earrings and tattoos, the children so stoical and impassive they seemed older than their parents. All had the same squashed, truncated faces with no real muzzles to speak of, and all were shockingly furless except for a ridiculous tuft on the tops of their heads, yellow or brown or black, or in the case of the women and young girls a long skein or braid hanging down. Some of the men had fur on their bare arms too, but it was thin and sparse so you could see the flesh beneath. It was hard not to be fascinated. It was hard not to be repulsed. Miss Elizabeth could see why some referred to these beings as scrapes or scrapings, meaning the unavailing bits and pieces that God swept from his workbench after he was all done with making the Wise Peoples. That was blasphemy though. The Pugface were a separate creation, with their own gods and their own providence. There was a serious debate in religious circles as to whether or not they had souls, but Miss Elizabeth was not devout and hadn’t felt the need to adopt a stance on that issue.

Back in Paxen the Sandpipers had had their own chapel, and attendance at Lord’s-day prayers was mandatory. The readings were chosen by William as the head of the household and they leaned very heavily on the first three gospels – the ones that contained Holy John’s strictures against earthly authorities and his exhortations to his followers to seek a reward beyond the mundane world. William would lead the service and read aloud, in a hectoring bellow, the seven screeds and the fifteen admonitions.

But sometimes, when the mood came on him, he would dip into the apocrypha. There were treasures to be found there, especially in Exiles, Book II. This was where John’s more extreme and astonishing parables had been collected, carefully sequestered from his approved teachings. Among them was Elizabeth’s favourite, the parable of the Pandominion. In my father’s house, John told his disciples, there are as many rooms as there are motes of dust in the summer air. Every one of those rooms is a world, and the entirely of the assembled worlds, the face of God’s creation in its manifest glory, is called the Pandominion. God sends His angels between the worlds to carry His word and punish those who trespass against it. All will know them by their red robes and by the flaming swords they bear. All who see them will fear them. And so on. Miss Elizabeth looked forward to these eccentric passages, preferring them to the unending dullness of the screeds and admonitions, but even as a child she could see how absurd they were. Only fools and fantasists believed in angels who came down from heaven to smite the wicked. If there were any such, the wicked would have been bred out of the world in a generation.

The memory of these Sunday services, the dreary ones as much as the sensational ones, made homesickness rise up in Miss Elizabeth’s breast suddenly enough that a small sob escaped her. But she was not cast down for very long. In spite of everything there was a beauty around her here on the frontier of civilisation that mitigated any weariness of body or spirit. The landscapes she passed through were majestic in the extreme. From plains that seemed to roll out to the horizon in all directions she ascended into a world of mountains and mesas – a horizontal immensity becoming all of a sudden a vertical one. Rising over everything were the gleaming white dream-towers, relics of a time before recorded history, every one humming its own complex and repetitious tune that carried for mile after mile.

Miss Elizabeth, along with almost everyone else she knew, had been through a phase as a child when she was deeply fascinated by the dream-towers, which were already old beyond the reach of memory when the Wise Peoples first made landfall in this country. She had pestered her father to take the family on picnics to the nearer ones. She had read books in which lurid speculation about the towers’ origins was dressed up as earnest scholarship. She had fantasised about one day being the first person ever to enter one of the towers, though she knew they were impenetrable. Only one tower, the great Telos on the shore of Lake Azul near the western ocean, even had a door, which was 150 feet above the ground and responded even to the slightest touch with a discharge of percussive force greater than an exploding cannonball.

What were the dream-towers? What was the meaning of their endless song? How and why had the great Precursors, the lost race of the dawn age, built them? There were voices in the towers’ humming if you listened hard enough. At times it seemed to Miss Elizabeth that she heard her own name in there, and the names of her parents. The dream-towers looked down on everything and knew everything, but they kept their own counsel.

Watching a herd of lumbering clutch-beetles go by under an orange and purple sunset, their pearlescent bodies swarming over and under each other until they became a single wave of motion, Miss Elizabeth thought that her father’s bankruptcy might after all prove to have been providential. It had forced her out into the world, and the world was strong wine. She was drunk on it.

An event that happened on the road sobered her again. As the wagon passed through a narrow canyon, an imposing figure stepped out onto the track ahead of it and raised a rifle up above his head. He fired a single shot into the air, drawing gasps and cries of alarm from the wagon’s passengers and its driver. The self in question was a bear man, as broad across the shoulders as Miss Elizabeth’s outstretched arms. Miss Elizabeth had heard of bandits felling trees to make a roadblock. This man was practically a roadblock all by himself. But it wasn’t just his bulk and sinew that had occasioned the passengers’ terror. The gunshot hadn’t been a bullet but an immense jagged crown of violet lightning forking up into the sky. The rifle was a relic, a Precursor weapon, and a great deal more powerful than any ordinary firearm.

The driver gave a hitch on the katy’s reins and the wagon slowed and trundled to a halt. There was a great wave of flinching and ducking as the bear man levelled his rifle at them all. “What you carrying?” he growled.

“P-passengers. Mail. Nothing valuable.” The driver had to try three times before he could get the words out. He was gopher stock and skinny with it, and he was torn between wanting to throw his hands up in the air and needing to keep control of the katy. The rifle shot’s report had left the huge insect skittish and fretful, her head ducked down and her great bulbous body swaying to and fro on its seven pairs of legs.

“Toss the mailbags down,” the bear man said.

The driver got to it. There were only a handful of bags and you could tell how light they were by how little dust they stirred up when they hit the ground. The bear man uttered a small grunt of dissatisfaction. It wasn’t likely there was much more than paper in there.

“Your cash money now,” he said. “And anything else you got that’s worth selling on. Watches. Jewellery. Your coat.” The last two words were addressed to a mule-deer self who was almost as tall as the bandit though not nearly so wide. His name, Miss Elizabeth was vaguely aware, was James State. He was a furniture salesman from Yattamaw heading south to make a bulk purchase of cedar wood from a factor in Bell Bank. His coat was jay-waxed cotton, sky blue and very fine.

“Now see here,” the deer man said. “You can take our money, but leave us the clothes on our backs. It’s not like my coat would even fit you.”

The bandit’s eyes went wide with affront and disbelief. “You’re disputing with me?” he snarled. “Fuck it, just… get down here. Get down out of the wagon.”

He gestured with his rifle. State, having no alternative and no weapon, climbed down and stood by the side of the road. The bandit ignored him as he went round the other passengers, collecting the dollars and cents they had had in their pockets and the trinkets they’d removed from their persons. Miss Elizabeth offered up the gold ring from her pinky finger, a Long-Eared John medallion in cheap silver that hung around her neck and about two dollars in change. She had taken the precaution, learned from a travel guide, of stowing most of her money in her shoe.

“You look a mite too fan