by Lina Rather
A dozen armed soldiers, from Earth. What were they even doing in this sector, near this nothing-moon that hadn’t even had a colony on it weeks ago, and close enough to be the first ones to respond to a distress call?
“Oh,” she said, and it came out a gasp because her throat was closing on her. “Oh. Oh.”
Vauca gripped her shoulder. She didn’t know what was wrong but she felt the change of air in the room, like one of their portholes had cracked and that great gnawing cold outside was rushing through the fracture. “What?”
“The mandatory vaccines. Sister Lucia said they looked like injection sites from the mass-dose vaccines of the war. But you don’t need that many vaccinations for an untouched, pre-scouted planet, do you? So what else did Central Governance put in those injections?” She leapt to her feet and knocked her tablet off the table. It clattered across the floor, denting the plastic screen. She didn’t care. Her knees were trembling. This great, awful, horrific idea had rooted in her head and she could not shake it free. It kept unfurling in her mind, like Eden’s serpent, its fangs waiting to sink into flesh. “How long does it take to get here from the first system, anyway? Two jumps plus another couple weeks of traveling through the system? That puts us solidly within the incubation window.”
“Gemma,” Vauca said. She was leaning over Gemma’s now-vacated chair, her fingers digging into the foam padding. She feared Central Governance as much as anyone out here did. “I don’t understand.”
“Say you’re Central Governance. You believe all these people, all these planets with their minerals and water and agricultural space, should belong to you. You ruled the universe once, of course. So you start growing again. You start funding religious missionaries and sending propaganda with colonists. You start rebuilding your communications relays and your supply lines, because people will trust you if you give them infrastructure, right? All roads led to Rome, remember, because the Romans knew that you must be the center of the world to rule it. But that’s too slow. That’s a plan of generations. Centuries, not decades. In the minds of everyone else in the universe, you are the great destroyer. But meanwhile, your oceans are rising, your continents are packed with people, your resources depleted from years of poor management. Swaths of your planet are irradiated still. You have to feed all these people, so you have to buy food at a premium from those colonies who you used to own.”
It was dawning on Vauca. She shivered. “If there was a plague . . .”
“If there was a plague, everyone would need the planet with the universities and the many legions of doctors to save them. They would need coordination. Centralization. Who controls the communications relays? Who controls the largest organized military in the four systems?”
“You think they infected those people with ringeye deliberately, knowing they were going to an isolated sector where the outbreak would be easy to control.”
“More than that. The disease only thrives in a live host. It’s almost impossible to grow it in animals, or in a laboratory. People have tried. It’s part of why it’s so hard to create a treatment. I think they infected these people because no one would hear their distress in time to investigate, and they are using them to grow more doses of it. If you just needed the report to spread, to cause panic, you would not send all your men to the surface. You only go to the surface if you need to bring something back.”
“Because one colony will not be enough.”
No. She could imagine what the next targets would be. Orion’s Daughter, a small, warm planet in the second system, the only world with medical schools to rival Earth’s. The cluster of terraformed moons around Argos in the third system, which had come together into a republic and kept a standing military—a rarity, beyond the first system. Most worlds relied on militias or vague common-defense pacts, if they considered such impossibilities as another system-wide war at all. A disease with no known cure, rampaging through the richest of the independent worlds. Where would everyone else have to turn? How attractive would the promises of Central Governance look then?
* * *
The Reverend Mother felt something disintegrate inside her as Gemma explained. It was horrific. It was disgusting. And it was born of the horrific, disgusting things that she herself had done those decades ago. She had thought the war was over, but it was not and never would be. Its atrocities kept giving birth to more and more and more. Those soldiers carrying out their duties on the surface were her children as much as any she might have borne. Without her, they would not have been born into this world, would not have been set on this path, would not have come here to this moon to allow these innocent people to die.
“We are going to the surface,” she signed. “We are going to rescue Terret and her colony.”
“Mother,” Sister Faustina said, and laid a hand gently on her arm. Gentleness did not become her. It looked awkward on her. “We can’t possibly get past their ships. We want to save the colony too, but I don’t know how.”
She looked at all of them assembled here, Faustina and Lucia and Ewostatewos and Varvara and the others, even Mary Catherine, who had come around in the end. She loved them all so much. She had learned, on this ship, how to love people without wanting anything back from them. Without loving them because of what they could give her. She had not even loved her husband like that, God rest his soul.
“We will transfer everyone to Gemma’s ship,” she signed. “The Cheng I Sao is fast enough for evasive maneuvers, assuming they have a pilot worth his salt. We shall put Father Giovanni into the emergency pod and send him off if he refuses. Someone will be along to pick him up soon enough.”
“They will be watching us,” Sister Lucia said.
“Someone will remain on board to maintain the appearance that the ship is still inhabited.” And then, right as she signed it, she saw the truth of this open up before her. So this was why God had brought her to this ship, and this moon, at this time. She was meant to be here. She could never make amends for all the things she had done in the life before this one, but she could make one small reparation. “I will stay. It will be fine. They are most likely to treat me with deference, anyway.”
“Mother.” Sister Lucia’s eyes crinkled the way they did when she got upset that life provided no easy answers. Poor child—it must be so hard to live with a heart as soft as hers. “What if—what if you feel—” She cut off, struggling to find an appropriate euphemism.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure the Lord will protect me, and all of us.”
Sister Lucia did not seem convinced, but there was no other way. They had only hours. Sister Faustina brought the ship around the barren little half-moon the Cheng I Sao was hiding behind. The Central Governance soldiers seemed happy to let them go, but everyone watched from the portholes in case they changed their minds. So lucky, they were, that Father Giovanni in his hubris had downplayed Sister Lucia and Gemma’s discovery. The Reverend Mother had a dark feeling that they would not have been allowed to depart if he had framed their treatment as more than the fanciful hobby of two uneducated, backwater religious sisters.
They sent a message to the soldiers that they were going to sit on the surface of the barren moon for a little while to rest the ship and plan their flight path. The lieutenant sent back an uninterested Noted. They found the crevice where the Cheng I Sao was sitting on the surface next to a crumbling rock face where it was indistinguishable from the boulders scattering the surface. There was nowhere level enough for their ships to extend pressurized boarding ramps. Everyone got into their vacsuits and skins and stickboots.
Father Giovanni emerged from his room just as the last of the sisters had closed the seam on her vacsuit skin. The Reverend Mother came with them, to bless them on their way, and she drew herself up to her full height. He took in the scene as well as—for the first time apparently, oh what sweet Earther senses he had still to lose—the fact that they were no longer moving.
“I did not agree to this,” he said.
“You d
on’t have to,” said Sister Lucia.
“You have obligations to your convent duties. It is part of your vows. As is obedience. There is no rebellion in this life, Sisters.” His face was mottled red, and his right hand was clenched against the chain that led from his belt to his gilded liturgical, like he could feel his grip on them slipping. “I have already given you direction. Please. I will call those soldiers out there to stop you. I do not want you all to die, believe me, this is for your own good.”
“Let us do what we know to be right,” Sister Lucia said. “If we die, we will know we died doing good works, and that is all any of us have asked of this life.”
He coughed a laugh and turned from them to go to the hatch. The Revered Mother reached for him—to do what, she didn’t know—but Sister Lucia closed the hatch between them. Through the muscle wall she heard his thundering steps headed toward the comms room. Then the footsteps faltered. And went silent. Sister Lucia had closed her eyes and was counting softly under her breath.
“What was that?” Sister Ewostatewos asked. Sister Lucia opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and reopened the hatch. Father Giovanni lay prone in the hall, feet from the comms room, completely still. “Is he—? Goodness, Sister.”
Sister Lucia shook her head. “I vented some of our nitrogen reserves into the hall. It’s the same weight as oxygen—he didn’t feel a thing. But he’ll wake up soon.”
They got the priest into the escape pod and sealed it up, but did not launch it. “Perhaps he will come to his senses,” said Sister Varvara, while trembling inside her climate-controlled suit. Unlikely, the Reverend Mother thought. She made sure to find the launch button on the navigation panel before anything. The hatch squelched closed behind the other sisters, mucus filling the small fissures between the bands of muscle to seal it completely. The Reverend Mother stood on the other side, in the air, watching them one by one step from the warm embrace of the ship to the cold dust of the surface of the asteroid, leaving footprints that would endure far beyond their mortal bodies, until someone else came and swept them away or it all fell into the sun.
* * *
Gemma’s crew were a motley bunch, Sister Lucia thought, as the all crowded together into the Cheng I Sao’s nav room. How appropriate. The engineer who had stolen her away was a handsome woman, with hands that looked like they could do hard work. Gemma was being more circumspect with them around than Sister Lucia thought she normally would be, but when the pilot lifted them off the surface of the rock she reached out and held one of those strong hands in her own.
They skimmed along the gravity of the asteroid-moon. The pilot sent them wobbling across the circumference like so much debris. The Our Lady of Impossible Constellations grew smaller and smaller and disappeared from view.
“She’ll be all right,” Sister Faustina said, for Lucia’s ears alone, but it sounded like a platitude.
“There they are,” said Vauca, the engineer. She was leaning over one of the screens. Three red dots showed the ECG ships standing guard over the colony.
The pilot swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving thickly under the skin. “I’m going to put us on the right trajectory and then turn off the thrusters—hopefully we’ll drift close before they notice us.”
The ship shuddered as the engines fired, and then, right as they crested a ridge on the moon and broke gravity, he turned them off. The ship went silent. It was so much quieter than a living ship. No wonder they were called deadships. No gurgle of digestion, no shudders from muscles twitching, no ghost of a heartbeat overhead. Only the thin hum of the life support systems sucking in carbon dioxide and hissing out oxygen, and that was just the faint suggestion of a sound at the very edges of her hearing. Everyone held their breath. From the porthole, Sister Lucia saw one of the military ships as they sailed past. Far enough away to look insignificant, close enough to fire on and destroy them. The pilot bit into his thumbnail again and again until she saw a thin crescent of blood well under the broken nail. She had the absurd urge to open her case and count the vials there, as if that would help anything.
The colony came into view—the green continent and the regular brown squares where the earth had been tilled. They were not close enough yet to see the houses, but there was the patch of green where they sat.
“Almost,” said the pilot. They sailed past the second ship, which was just a dark glimmer in space, its cannons like two silver needles.
The radio crackled. They all stared at it.
“Approaching vessel, this is Lieutenant Richardson of the Fifth Naval Division, Earth Central Governance. We have established a quarantine zone around this moon. Turn back.”
“I thought you turned off our communications?” the captain said.
“They overrode it,” the pilot replied. This was, Sister Lucia remembered, an Earth-made vessel. The pilot’s hand hovered uselessly over the button to respond. “What should I do?” Already, the first ship was turning on them.
The captain hit the button on the array. “Greetings, Lieutenant. I am the captain of this vessel. We have been contracted to deliver seeds to this moon. Will you be paying the balance on our contract? We are owed quite a bit of chit from these colonists. Please respond.” He gestured at the pilot, who fired the thrusters.
“Turn back, or we will fire on you,” the lieutenant replied. Over the terrible radio he sounded alien, mechanical. “You can submit a request for reimbursement to the Central Governance outpost in this system after the end of the quarantine. Also, we are not receiving your identification signature. Please identify yourselves.”
The pilot increased their speed. The ship rumbled. The military vessel outside had come to face them.
“Vessel, you are increasing your speed. We will fire upon you. This is a final warning.”
“Shit,” the pilot said. “The one in front of us is coming around too. We’re not that fast, Captain.”
The captain hesitated, and Sister Lucia saw him weighing whether to break off or not. But they were too far into it for that.
Then, just as Sister Lucia was wondering how it would feel to be sucked out into space, the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations rose from behind the moon.
Their radio crackled again. They heard a woman clearing her throat. Sister Faustina frowned.
“Hello, out there, to anyone listening in on this fine evening. Specifically you, Lieutenant Richardson.” Yes, that was a woman. And it sounded so familiar. That greeting was ingrained somewhere deep in the recesses of Sister Lucia’s mind. A sound half-remembered from childhood, like the cadence of a favorite lullaby. What was it? “This is Mrs. August, of Radio Terra, and I outrank you.”
Sister Lucia did not understand. The voice of Radio Terra? That woman was—that woman should be—long dead. No one had seen her for decades. How could she have possibly hidden for all these years, when her voice was the most well-known in all the four systems? How could she have said a word without being discovered and turned over to any one of the dozens of polities that would have liked her head? Even Earth, which still worshipped her like a goddess, would not have been safe. And then it dawned on her, and she felt the solid ground of years shift and crack under her feet.
Sister Faustina barked a laugh. “I guess she really did have something to confess.”
* * *
The Reverend Mother had known there was a reason she had lived. Lived through the war, and the rebellion on Earth, and the crushing of it. Lived through plagues and wars and traveling in a small, squishy body for years through unforgiving space. This was why. She knew it as soon as she opened her mouth and found that her tongue still worked as it should even after this long disuse.
Silence reigned on the radio. She watched the Cheng I Sao inch closer to the moon, forgotten for the moment. That wouldn’t last long. She had bought only minutes.
The lieutenant opened the channel again, and she heard a shiver in his voice. She wondered what they taught about her in Earth schools now. Was she a hero, or a monste
r? Either way, he must feel he was standing in the presence of a legend.
“Please explain,” he said, simply. What a question.
She settled for: “Let this ship pass. My authorization code is being transmitted now.” She sent it through the radio waves. Back before the war, she could ask anything of any ECG entity at all, be it soldier or diplomat or low-level lackey, with this code. She heard the soldiers muttering.
“This—” The lieutenant broke off. “Mrs. August. This is your code, but this is not from our current standards.”
She could feel the gears in his mind turning, but the Cheng I Sao was not close enough yet. She had to buy them enough time to break the atmosphere. After that, they would be on their own.
“Are you questioning my identity?” she asked sweetly. She had a voice, soft and kind, that she had used for reading children’s bedtime stories into the transmitter. She gambled that this man had been raised on those stories. On her reading tales of great valor for the defense of Earth. “Surely your ship is equipped with the audio equipment necessary to confirm that I am who I claim to be, and not an impostor or a reconstruction. I don’t understand why you are being so resistant. This is a very simple matter.”
She heard him swallow, a great gulp of air. Soon enough he would dig into the restricted files every military ship carried and confirm that she had not been hidden in some bunker on the moon for these forty years, that she was not a great secret agent of Central Governance, and that everyone with any power on Earth assumed her dead. He would be angry, she was sure. You always were when you learned something ugly about the world.
The Cheng I Sao broke the clouds on the moon. The Reverend Mother let herself relax, just for a moment. The ghosts in the edges of her eyes swam forward, laying over this ship the image of another. She saw not the green fuzz of a living ship’s symbiotic moss, but the cold steel of a prewar strategy room. The viewscreen showing the ECG military cruisers outside became a pane of treated glass, looking out over gray rock and habitat bubbles and, far away, the innocent blue of the Earth and her oceans. This was where she had last seen the war. She looked to her right. There he was, just where she knew he would be, in his white lab coat. He hadn’t been wearing a lab coat that day, she knew that in the logical part of herself, but she had so rarely seen him without it that it seemed correct for him to be wearing it now, as a phantom.