“How long do you think we can hold out, Captain?” Roca asked, her eyes searching Jaeia’s face for any indication of hope.
Jaeia studied the holosim again, wanting to find something to give them an edge over Victor’s Fleet. As she ran through her cache of grafted strategies and wartime speeches, she couldn’t help but notice the steady flow of little red enemy starships going to and from the surface to a massive cargo ship.
Li’s transporting the dissenters off-world. She pressed her knuckles into the rim of the projector. ...And probably carting them off to Victor’s reprogramming facilities.
Despair touched her thoughts. As much as she wanted to reassure the last remaining troops that they could counterattack, that they still had a chance, she feared the critical state of their situation.
With the Motti’s weapon getting closer to Trigos, we can’t afford to resist. Worse yet, they were no closer to figuring out the Republic Fleet’s weapon against the Deadwalkers, and revealing that Kurt Stein was alive was a bluff, a chance to stall—but for what? Once the veil was lifted, they had no working plan. The only reasonable choice is to relinquish arms.
Jaeia pressed her knuckles even harder into the projector. No. I can’t give up. With all the minds I’ve stolen from, there has to be something.
“For my troops,” she whispered, closing her eyes and reaching farther within.
She slalomed through a thousand years of military experience, but found little that could help. In her time of need, the things that usually upset her became only a pale distraction.
Please, she thought as steel air beasts congested skies pulsing with flash fire. I need this.
“Kill them all!” someone shouted.
To her left, armored tanks crunched over countless bodies scattered across open fields.
“Send in two squadrons,” another voice called.
The landscape shifted. As different memories competed for her attention, she saw masked troops with thermal explosives storm into a civilian outpost.
“Mow them down like weeds,” someone laughed.
Another memory surfaced. Gun turrets took aim at unarmed soldiers. Horrified, she watched the scene play out as a disembodied voice whispered in her ear: “Leave no one alive.”
Keep going, she told herself, pressing forward.
She passed through war after war behind many eyes and many voices. Battlefields, both on the ground and in the dark matter of space, became a strange amalgam of strangulated light and sound, until she was left facing a bloodied horizon and the tortured skies of unimaginable suffering. Even after all that, it wasn’t enough.
“Don’t give up, Jaeia.”
Jaeia snapped her head toward the voice. Jahx hovered beside her, most of his body translucent against the dark tides of stolen memories.
(What? Jahx?! How did you find me here?)
“Trust yourself. Follow your instincts. It is our only chance.”
Before she could ask why, her brother disintegrated into a faint mist that dispersed as she reached out to him.
A new landscape of ash formed around her, with an unforgiving sun peeking out behind dark, swollen clouds. Jaeia shielded her face from the sun’s harsh rays falling onto the cracked ground beneath her. The weight of the dead world sank into her bones, and the scars of a struggle long forgotten cut into her marrow.
Her brother’s voice fell from the rumbling skies. “Follow your instincts.”
Jaeia could barely lift her head as a crippling grief seized her by the throat, but the torment stopped when something caught her eye. At her feet trembled the tiniest green leaf, a seedling growing out of the wounded earth. A miracle, an impossibility in the face of certain death.
Jaeia cupped it gently as tears fell from her cheeks. So beautiful...
A low growl caught her attention. Jaeia whirled around on her heels, coming face-to-face with a gray-masked, colossal lupine animal. Glowing yellow eyes watched as she scrambled backward, narrowly avoiding the budding plant.
Why isn’t he pursuing? She tore herself away from his gleaming teeth for a second to spot the chains binding his feet.
A polluted wind carried the stink of sulfur and her brother’s whispered words: “Follow your instincts.”
Jaeia’s heart boomed in her ears as she stared at the wolf-like animal. The predator’s gaze never left hers, his ears pricked to her every sound and movement. Fear, ripe in her belly and mind, bade her to run, but her brother’s words kept her grounded.
Follow my instincts, she thought. What does he mean?
She looked again at the animal’s bindings, this time spotting the Alliance insignia stamped on the metal plating. But the marking changed in the blink of an eye. In next moment, it formed the same design as her tattoo, and a second later, Victor’s crest.
The shifting marks didn’t make sense to her, but when she saw the shock-wand injuries that lashed the animal’s chest and back, she heard her own voice come up from the depths: Free him.
Carefully, she made her way over to the bound animal, speaking softly to him. (I don’t want to hurt you. If you let me, I will help you.)
He continued to growl, showing her the glistening whites of his teeth, but made no move to harm her as she unpinned the locking device on his chains. Once freed, he snapped his teeth in her face, and she leapt backwards, readying her defense.
Somebody laughed. Jaeia reared around to see a man, terribly burned from head to toe, standing over the tiny seedling. His eyes, two flames in their sockets, betrayed any earthly origins. As he continued to cackle, she fixated on his teeth, black nubs set in a jaw stripped of flesh.
Not real not real not real— she thought as the sun hid behind the protection of the clouds. The land beneath her feet quaked. Her senses deepened her fright, painting an overlapping picture of a thing devoured by hate and misery, carved from the dark matter of nightmares.
He raised his gnarled foot up over the plant and screeched in a voice that set her skin on fire. “With eyes open, they burn!”
She screamed, throwing herself forward to protect the fragile seedling, with the terrible knowing that it wouldn’t be enough to withstand the incoming blow from such a menacing creature. But as death came crashing down, a gray shadow streaked up beside her, claws outstretched, teeth sinking into the charred flesh.
The burned man and the lupine beast disappeared before her eyes, vanishing with the howl of the wind. As her fears lifted, the sun broke through the clouds, and the ground settled beneath her.
Jaeia bent down to inspect the plant. Instead, she found herself and her siblings sleeping in a bed of flowers.
“Follow your instincts. It is our only chance.”
“Captain!” Lieutenant Roca was bracing her against the holosim. “Captain—are you okay?”
Jaeia reflexively wiped her nose, smearing blood on her sleeve. “Gods...”
Jahx. His words still resonated in her mind: “Follow your instincts. It is our only chance.”
It couldn’t have been. From Dr. DeAnders’s last report, the Grand Oblin’s body had severely deteriorated; his cellular decay was at critical levels, and his brain showed minimal activity. And when she had last tried to contact Jahx, she could barely sense his tune, as if it were trapped at the bottom of an infinitely long well.
It couldn’t have been Jahx.
But the blood on her sleeve was real.
“Shall I call a medical team, Captain?”
“No, Lieutenant, I’m fine,” Jaeia said, trying to shake her brother’s words from her head. What did he mean, to follow my instincts?
Jaeia ran her hand through her hair. I can’t stay here. Every part of her screamed to go to the lab and see her brother, even if she had to use her second voice on DeAnders. There’s too much at stake for me not to understand his message—
(if it was him at all.)
She looked at her reflection in the silver rim of the holographic display. Except for the spotty patches and red-rings around her eyes,
the color of her skin matched the blanched white of her uniform sleeve.
It’s not just sleep deprivation and stress...
(I’m dying.)
There isn’t much time. I have to see Jahx. I have to understand—
A voice, distant and fading into oblivion, rose up to her ears. “Trust yourself...”
“Captain!” the lieutenant shouted as she bolted to the lift, “Captain, what should we do?”
Jaeia sped down the corridors, not knowing her destination, but knowing she had to go faster and faster. As she whipped around the deck exchange, a vision hit her like a head-on collision with a starclass freighter.
“Come on, Jaeia, we’re gonna get in trouble!”
Jetta’s voice. Air, hot and unbreathable, filled her lungs. The entire place stank like the inside of a rotted pipe.
As the vision settled, she saw herself back aboard their first mining ship, stuck in the lower decks doing grunt work alongside the other child laborers. Everything felt new and scary.
I remember this time, she thought. Jetta wanted us to stay away from the other kids and avoid the gangs.
“No, Jetta, we can’t just leave him,” her younger self whispered.
A dimwitted, eleven-year-old Reptili-humanoid boy named Vinnie lay near a grinder after being beaten by the other kids. Though as big as some adults, he didn’t know how to conceal his winnings in the daily food scramble, and had foolishly sported his success in front of the other starving children, most of whom were in gangs.
Jetta, impatient to reunite with Jahx to share what they had secretly won, left her sister to worry over Vinnie. To Jetta he was useless anyway: The kid was severely injured and had proved himself to be a liability. Given their lowly reputations as humans from the slums, Jetta didn’t want to affiliate herself with any other hard cases, nor did she want to be reprimanded by the laborminders for taking a break.
But Jaeia couldn’t help herself.
One of the kids had used a driver gun to nail Vinnie’s hands to the floor so his companions could steal his bakken. Vinnie wailed pitifully as he tugged at his hands. Blood oozed from the sites, but the nails remained solidly fixed into the floor.
“I can help you,” Jaeia said, scooting her way closer to him.
Vinnie spat at her, and she shielded her eyes against the spray. “Ay batc!”
His words were hard to understand, impaired by the birth defect that divided his palate and tongue, but his body language made it clear that he didn’t want her anywhere near him.
(He just doesn’t understand,) her instincts told her. (He’s afraid.)
No, she thought, stopping herself. Why am I doing this? Why can’t I just leave him here like Jetta said?
Again and again he lunged at her as she tried to remove the nail with an electro-plyer she had stolen from a tool closet.
Jaeia considered using her second voice, but there were others just around the corner, and she couldn’t risk getting caught.
“Vinnie, there are laborminders coming. They will toss you out if they find you like this. You don’t want to end up as dinner for the rats, do you?”
This seemed to make some kind of sense to him, and he stopped trying to bite at her hands.
“I just want to get these nails out, okay?”
He didn’t make a sound as she pried the nails out of each hand. Instead, he stared at her with mustard-colored eyes, the scales on his forehead pinching together as he tried to understand her actions.
When she released the last nail, she didn’t move fast enough to avoid the back of his hand. It connected with her temple and sent her crashing into the grinder. Her shoulder hit the corner of one of the grinder teeth, splitting her skin and bloodying her clothes.
Jaeia turned just in time to see him gearing up to come after her when the familiar footfalls of the laborminders froze them both in place.
Vinnie growled at her through brown, chipped teeth before hobbling off down a service shaft.
Back at home she got what she expected from her sister: a long, drawn-out lecture about keeping to themselves and staying out of other kids’ fights. Jaeia nodded when she was supposed to and acted beaten-down enough to make Jetta stop after about an hour, but it never truly changed her mind.
After Jetta left to go collect water from the broken pipes outside their apartment, Jahx approached her.
“So... Why did you help him?”
Jaeia couldn’t find a way to rationalize what she had done other than it seemed liked the right thing to do, even though Vinnie had attacked her afterward. Jahx only smiled and said, “You need to trust yourself more, Jaeia. Jetta’s right about a lot of things, but she doesn’t see all that can be.”
The incident didn’t come full-circle until three months later when she was lugging a load of topitrate into the grinder. Exhausted, she had forgotten to keep an eye on who was filtering in and out of the dump room. Before she knew it, she was alone with four kids from one of the most notorious labor gangs.
The one that stepped forward went by the name Hericio. Even at nine, he was one of the most brutal children she had ever met. It was whispered that he had once spooned out another kid’s eyes for cutting in line at the food pantry, and his unpalatable psionic emanations suggested it wasn’t far from the truth. She had seen him order the beatings of small children and organize hits on older children that threatened his reign over their convoluted world.
“Launnie,” Hericio hissed, “give me your bakken. I saw your rat sister steal three!”
He was right. Well, partially. Jetta had actually grabbed five, but gave two away in a failed attempt at an alliance with some other humanoid kids their age. With only one piece of bakken to last her the rest of her fourteen-hour shift, Jaeia couldn’t possibly afford to lose her share.
No way out, she thought, eyes searching the dump room for an unguarded exit. Three kids blocked the door, and dropping through the back end of the grinder seemed like a bad idea, even in a panic. And with Jetta tending to Jahx in the coolant room, nursing their wounds from another one of Yahmen’s drunken fits, she had no one in position to come to her rescue.
Hericio removed a shiv from his tunic and waved it at her face. “Rumors are true, launnie, so give up them breads!”
Terrified, she screamed out to her siblings for help across their psionic connection.
I’m coming! Jetta cried back.
But given the way Hericio advanced with his blade, she would be too late. Jaeia sensed his cold-blooded plan: kill her, take her bakken, and dump her body in the grinder.
The edge of the shiv bit into her cheek. Warm blood trickled down her chin.
I don’t want to die.
Jaeia despaired. She would have to chance using her second voice, even if it meant freezer cases, shock collars, or the labor locks.
“Rotten launnie!” Hericio said, kicking her in the stomach. The blow took the wind right out of her, and she fell flat on her back, her head only centimeters from the crushing teeth of the grinder. Hericio grabbed her neck, and his imaginings manifested in gory detail: her head slowly grinding away, brains and blood mixing with topitrate. “Let’s see what your insides look like.”
Intoxicated with violence, his companions left their post at the door and crowded around her, hungry to see more.
Jaeia bucked against his grip, but he was stronger and had the help of his companions. But as he reared back to drive the shiv into her face, someone caught his hand mid-strike and slammed it into the teeth of the grinder. Hericio shrieked as his hand disappeared into the mouth of the grinder, which continued to gobble him up to the elbow.
“Help me!” he wailed, reaching out to his fellow thugs, but shock had driven them from their skin. His minions looked upon him with ghostly faces as the rock grinder swallowed him past the shoulder. “Help me! HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Jaeia tried to grab onto his hand, but the rock grinder was determined to consume him, crunching bones and mashing intestines along with topit
rate into an unrecognizable pulp.
One of the other kids tried to pick up the shiv that Hericio had dropped, but her rescuer beat them to it.
Jaeia couldn’t believe her eyes. “Vinnie?”
Vinnie yelled something unintelligible as he threatened the other kids with the shiv. They bolted, leaving her to fend for herself.
“Here,” Jaeia said, uncovering the bakken in her pocket and offering it to him. Vinnie looked at it with starving eyes but made no move to pluck it from her outstretched hand. Instead, he grunted, hid the shiv in the lining of his jacket, and hobbled out of the dump room.
It wasn’t more than a few minutes before another round of kids came along to unload their carts of topitrate, oblivious to her struggle or the person that had just been fed through the grinder. Jetta arrived too, congested with fear and aggression, ready to take out the entire ship if necessary.
“Are you okay?” Jetta asked, looking around for evidence of the fight. The smell of blood lingered, but was hardly noticeable against the stench of topitrate.
“Hey! Get back to work!” one of the laborminders shouted to the kids outside the dump room. In their condition they couldn’t risk a beating at work, so they skipped the verbal conversation as they scrambled back to their duties.
Even though Jaeia allowed Jetta an unfiltered, firsthand glimpse into what had transpired, she received only a gruff reminder to be more careful.
Jaeia, you need to stay away from the gangs and watch yourself!
Her brother’s voice returned in her mind, whispering with the same fervency: Trust yourself.
“Captain Kyron?”
Jaeia shook her head. How long had she been standing there?
“Sir, can I help you?” one of the soldiers said, increasingly concerned at her unresponsiveness.
Jaeia found herself in front of the security and interrogation wing, her original destination before she had gotten a call from Lieutenant Roca.
Aesis. The Spinner that donned a costume of fair skin and violet eyes. She knew that deep down inside he was nothing more than a little green worm, but through his eyes she had seen something more than his physical reality.
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