The Star Mother

by J D Huffman

  Then, she saw a large shadow pass overhead, flying above the ravine. It was loud enough she could hear it over the persistent ringing in her ears. Its shape didn’t match the cargo ship, so it had to be the enemy. Just wait for them to go away. I can find a tunnel down here and swim my way out, or maybe climb up and find some other exit. Just go away. There’s no one down here.

  Her mental protests had no effect on the ship. A snakelike protrusion popped out of the bottom as it stopped to hover over the ravine, slithering down between the now wider edges. It disappeared from moment to moment as it danced through the waterfalls on either side, the flows that fed the pool down here and kept it from becoming stagnant. Before she could react, it came at her from the side and coiled around her, quickly snatching her out of the water and lifting her up into the air. As cold as the water was, being removed from it felt even colder now. She had to close her eyes as she went higher, her stomach lurching and spinning from the notion of being so high up, suspended only by a thin, metallic cable wrapped around her waist. She made angry, futile jerks against the hoist as it gingerly lifted her through an opening.

  Up, up, and up, through a set of bay doors that opened downward, brought her into the much warmer interior of the ship, then shut before setting her down on the floor. She tried to move but her body, still wracked by the cold, refused to comply.

  A man she knew but did not recognize approached, kneeling next to her. He was short and a little chubby, but with sinewy musculature well-defined on his arms. Dark hair encircled the top of his head rather than covering it, and he stared at her, observing so intently she almost felt his gaze as a physical presence. His head darted one way and then the other, taking in her shivering form, and once again she felt naked in an unfamiliar presence.

  His thick lips emitted a voice that was smoother than she would have expected, and a strange curiosity—even kindness—emanated from his blue-green eyes, which were sunken into sockets with fatigue and weariness.

  “Hello, Sasha,” he purred. “Do you understand who I am and where you are?”

  She barely managed to croak out, “Cylence.”

  The smile that crossed his face exposed a set of gleaming white teeth that, for a moment, she imagined as sharp fangs, ready to sink into her flesh and begin whatever tortuous punishment was in store for she who dared to defy the Totality.

  Chapter 30

  The Refuge

  William had a hard time keeping up as he moved alongside the living stream of human bodies that, as a whole, followed Elena’s lead. Angel was somewhere up ahead, William assumed, perhaps with Elena by now. With the line of people stretching out behind him, he imagined Sasha was somewhere at the back, and he would speak with her once they got back to the ship—if there was a ship to get back to.

  He didn’t bother asking how much farther they had to go, doing his best to push through the pain that darted through his back every time he took a step. With this pace, Sasha’s going to catch up to me before long. He watched Arkady’s people move past him, some of them crying. Many of them carried a few possessions: books, cloth sacks, bags strapped over their shoulders, jars of food and water, whatever they were able to grab in the few moments they had to prepare their escape. Trying to get a rough count, calling back to the occasions when he was engaged in riot control on Lexin, he came up with a guess of about eight hundred. Considering the size of the ship, he knew it would be a tight fit, to say the least. Utilizing only the crew quarters, everyone was already packed in. He knew that adding this number to it would require reorganizing the expansive cargo area. What little privacy anyone on the ship enjoyed before was soon to be gone, and no doubt the ship’s facilities would quickly become overwhelmed. These exiles—now refugees—would not be able to stay long. I haven’t even thought about food and water yet. There’s no way we have enough—no way Meren’s team gathered enough, if they even made it back—to sustain these people for more than a few days.

  They’d come to this planet to get help for Angel, and instead became responsible for a mass of people who were something akin to Totality. William still wasn’t sure exactly what they were. Some were likely actual Totality, but he concluded, based on what Arkady had told him, that the vast majority were the naturally-born descendants of Totality-inhabited humans and their former slaves. What that meant, he still didn’t really know, thanks to Arkady’s vague explanations and incoherent extemporizing. There’s also what he said to me when we were alone. I don’t know what his goal was there—to gain my loyalty, somehow, or something else—but it didn’t work. It didn’t save him from Cylence. Then again, we aren’t safe yet, either.

  The screech of engines tearing through the atmosphere passed overhead, and he saw the shadows. There were at least eight. William imagined whatever fleet Cylence had brought to this planet was substantial enough to discourage any serious thought of resistance. But we never know what’s good for us, do we? Surrender wasn’t an option—not for William. If they were lucky, they would remain hidden under the forest canopy, any ship’s scanners confused by all the foliage. So William hoped, anyway. He didn’t know what sorts of surveillance technology the Totality had on their ships. He couldn’t conceive of Cylence traveling in anything but the most exquisite entourage, though—top-tier technology and accommodations all the way around. The leader of the Totality couldn’t have it any other way, could he? William tried to conjure an image of the man that Fred and Sasha had spoken of. He envisioned someone large, fearsome, and martial. A militaristic demeanor. Shaved bald, or hair cropped very close to the scalp. A perpetual scowl, or maybe a detached smirk. The creature responsible for so much brutality could only have a cruel sense of humor, and no regard for the people he kills and enslaves. All William knew was, he wanted to be face-to-face with that monster, make him accountable for his crimes—the destruction of Trepsis and the enslavement of her colonists, and all the other worlds destroyed and enslaved simply for the convenience of the Totality. He didn’t accept Arkady’s explanation that all this was somehow justified as a response to war with the Order. He could accept that he might not approve of the Order’s methods—it wasn’t as if he often approved of how the Militiamen did things on Lexin, nor how the Lexinian Authority conducted its affairs—but he couldn’t see himself siding with Arkady against other humans, much less taking Cylence’s position on anything. We’re human, and they’re not. That’s about as simple as it gets, isn’t it? But then Arkady had to make everything… complicated.

  Those complications walked beside him, still looking confused and afraid. He didn’t know what to tell them. If it wasn’t for the fact that he suspected they’d all be killed if the other Totality got to them, he’d have been content to leave the lot behind. They weren’t supposed to be the uprising’s problem. Besides that, he couldn’t avoid the irony in a group of rebellious humans being tasked with protecting a splinter group of Totality refugees. If anything, the situation should have been the other way around. Damn Fred for suggesting we make the trip here in the first place. We’re going to be so much worse off. I don’t envy Sasha the decisions she’ll have to make. He was willing, of course, to assist her any way he could. She seemed to value his input, and his outside perspective let him see things differently from her and the other former slaves. The big exception was Fred, who always seemed to have his own agenda in mind, and every so often made Sasha out to be some sort of religious figure. William began to realize just how uncomfortable that made Sasha, and it didn’t exactly sit well with him, either. Fred acts like he’s always here to help us, but maybe he isn’t. What if he’s only helping us incidentally, in order to serve some other purpose? And if that purpose comes into conflict with our needs, what will he do? What will he choose? Again, another decision he was glad would ultimately be Sasha’s.

  The woods finally opened up into a clearing and William recognized it as being close to where they’d landed the ship. As they approached, he noticed that
the rear loading ramp was already down. It wasn’t supposed to be.

  Fred appeared next to him, having observed the same peculiarity. “What do you think it means?” William asked.

  “Given what Janus said, it could mean anything. The ship might be empty. Or we could be walking into an ambush.”

  And we’re completely unarmed, William thought. He knew someone was going to have to venture inside and assess the situation aboard the ship. He would have volunteered Fred for that job, since Sasha had told him—and Fred had implied a time or two—that the old troll was effectively immortal. Let him take the shots, rather than the rest of us.

  Fred ended up volunteering, regardless. “I will go on inside and report back. Everyone stay here,” he announced before walking up the ramp. William and the refugees made a semicircle around the outside of the ship, standing far enough back that anyone who wanted to fire from the ramp would have to take careful aim, and presumably everyone would scatter in a hurry. William took slow steps around the perimeter of the group, looking for Sasha. He couldn’t find her, which worried him since she usually took the lead. He just wanted to make certain she was okay. He hadn’t seen her since they entered the tunnels, and the constant rumbling and shaking had made him anxious that the tunnels would collapse on them. There was no collapse that he knew of, and no one had mentioned any of their people being left behind. He just wished he could see her and know beyond any doubt.

  Fred emerged from the long ramp a few minutes later with a grim look on his face. “Everyone can board. Children may wish to cover their eyes, or have a parent cover them.”

  William didn’t need Fred to spell it out. The crisis is over, but it must be a bloodbath in there. Without waiting for everyone else, he went first. Not far inside the ramp, he already saw bodies splayed out on the floor in pools of blood, twisted expressions on their faces. He recognized most of them—it was hard not to, given their dwindling numbers of late—and it pained him to see so many young people who’d just managed to gain their freedom brutally cut down for no real reason.

  He caught up with Fred in order to get other details. “Where’s Janus? Who’s in charge here? What happened, exactly?”

  Fred shook his head. “Janus and a couple of others survived. They took shelter in Sasha’s office and fired through her door. There was a shootout in the main cargo bay. You saw the bodies. Duna is working with Janus to determine the damage.”

  Meren’s unit-mate, he remembered, placing her face from the meeting that had taken place only a few days before. That might as well have been another lifetime ago, now. “What about Meren’s team?”

  “You’ll have to ask Janus,” Fred sighed. “I need to work on settling these people in.”

  William nodded and walked past the troll, leaving him to his work. He moved to stand next to the doorway that led to the command deck access shaft, watching Arkady’s people file into the ship with whatever they’d managed to bring. He stared for a while, hoping to spot Sasha among their number and see her walking toward him, intent on returning to her office, talk to Janus, get Meren on a communications frequency and find out what happened to them, start sorting all this out. He waited a long time: the hundreds of refugees boarded the ship and Fred brought up the ramp. William briefly wondered why Cylence’s ships hadn’t simply obliterated the cargo vessel while it was on the ground. It was possible they hadn’t noticed it—all the main systems were powered down while it was landed—but that explanation didn’t comfort William as much as he wanted it to.

  Giving up on Sasha’s arrival, he ascended to the command deck and went to Sasha’s dual-purpose office-quarters. The door didn’t open by itself like it usually did. William had to jam his fingers through some new holes in it and pull it to the side until the opening was big enough for him to slip through. Inside, he found Janus and Duna sitting on the floor. The former was rocking himself, staring at his knees. Duna rubbed his back and her lips were moving, probably saying something comforting to him.

  William didn’t have time for anyone to be coddled. “I need a status report,” he announced.

  Duna stood up obediently and stepped over some debris—William recognized it as the strategic console they’d gathered around before, now a broken shamble—and stood before him. “Janus comes and goes. You should have seen him when we were being overrun. He kept pulling the trigger and screaming. When they stopped coming, he kept shooting. I had to take his rifle away. He just wasn’t made for combat.”

  William followed up with the obvious. “And you were?”

  She shrugged. “I handle it better, I think? Janus was a bureaucrat, wasn’t he?”

  “Or a governor, depending on what you believe,” William added. “Has anyone started assessing damage?”

  “No, I’ve been trying to bring Janus around.”

  “Do we even know how many people on the ship survived?”

  “Janus and I are the only ones I know about for sure.”

  “Then we need to figure out if anyone else lived, hidden away in a compartment or something. There might even be Totality stowing themselves to attack later. I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

  She nodded. “That’s a good point.”

  “Have you heard from Meren’s team?”

  Duna suddenly looked very concerned. “Not for a while. I thought they were in communication with Sasha’s team. Your group.”

  “Arkady’s people took our equipment away,” William said, not thinking about what was coming out of his mouth.

  “Arkady’s what?“ The voices and milling about that William could hear must have suddenly made sense to Duna, who’d been too focused on speaking with William. Too late, he realized his mistake. Fuck. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone about that.

  He shuffled along to reach Duna, who’d already slid down the access shaft to check out the main cargo bay. William felt like he’d spent this whole day trying to catch up with other people, as if the universe now moved too quickly for him. He eventually made it to Duna, who stood at the edge of the bay looking some combination of aghast and confused.

  “Who are all these people?” she wondered breathlessly, eyes moving over the mass of individuals who now inhabited the large bay.

  “That’s a long story,” William admitted. “I’ll have to explain later. Or Sasha will.”

  “Where is she?” Duna wondered. “I haven’t seen her since you got back. Shouldn’t she have come to her office?”

  “That’s what I would have expected. I haven’t seen her, either.” He wasn’t ready to face the idea that she hadn’t made it, that she was killed or abducted somewhere along the way. Just getting everyone into the tunnels was pure madness, and if anyone had been left behind or slain, he had no way of knowing. Arkady’s settlement was small, relatively speaking, but not so small everyone could be guaranteed to know everyone else. If they were dozens, maybe. Hundreds? They could have lost several people and I’d have to find the right person to ask. Then, he spotted Elena, and realized there was probably no one better suited to help him.

  He started toward her almost in a sprint, which his body immediately punished him for. He winced and doubled over, coming to a sudden halt, then shuffled the rest of the way to Elena. “Hey,” he groaned, kneeling next to her, since she was looking over a little boy who must have been hit by some falling rocks, given the scrapes and scratches on his face and shoulders.

  “I’m busy,” she dismissed, avoiding eye contact, turning the child around so she could fully examine him.

  When that didn’t send him away, she gave in and looked at him. “I’m going to be busy for a while. I have a lot of people to look after. Shouldn’t you be taking us away from here?”

  He nodded. “That’s the plan. But I wanted to know if you’ve seen Sasha.”

  “Not since we left,” she said simply. “It’s likely she didn’t make it. There are a number o
f people unaccounted for. I gathered up as many as I could but some homes had already collapsed by the time we started evacuating. I’ve not seen Arkady, either. I can only assume he stayed.”

  William frowned at the dispassionate way she related all this. At least Arkady had some compassion. “Thanks for your help,” he said in a way she could not have mistaken as genuine, then he stood up and strolled off. His eyes caught Fred rushing into the shaft to the command deck, so he followed. He found the troll taking the ship’s controls and William felt a telltale vibration that told him Fred was powering up the engines.

  “We’re leaving?” William guessed.

  “Is there some reason we should stay?” Fred retorted, stepping over to another console and tapping various controls, his eyes fixed on the instrumentation.

  “Meren’s team? And Elena just told me some people are unaccounted for. No one’s seen Sasha, either. I don’t think we should just leave people behind.”

  Fred stopped what he was doing to pay attention to William. “Either the Totality have not noticed us or they do not consider us worth bothering with. If they realize who we have with us, however, they may quickly change their minds. If we happen to notice Meren’s team, or Sasha, or anyone else still on the surface, we will find a way to get them back. For now, though, we must leave. I can guide us out on a trajectory that should give us minimal exposure to Totality scanners. They may detect our departure, but if they have not come after us yet, they must not want us.”

  “Or they want Arkady more,” William surmised.

  Fred didn’t seem so certain. “Cylence could have come for Arkady any time he wanted. Why now?” He paused, then aborted whatever answer William might have given. “We don’t have time to speculate,” he concluded, going back to the ship’s preflight procedure. “If you want to be helpful, run through the secondary systems check.”