He nodded mutely.
“So. Maybe that’s me, and maybe not, but I don’t see anything else around here, and either way I’d really like to not die. I have to get home. And I owe your Empress a punch in the neck.” Hong’s eyes widened. But then, he’d been talking about his Empress with a kind of religious awe, highly structured language. Maybe from his perspective she’d just proposed decking Jesus. Whatever. Later was a good time for worrying about that stuff. “She hurt my friend. She stole me from my home. I have to get back. So, just for now—no more Lady stuff, all right? No kneeling. Just Viv and Hong. Getting out of here, together. How does that sound?”
Hong closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid she’d broken him. Then he reached out his hand, and she took it. His palm was callused and his fingers thick, and despite his wound he stood as if no one had ever had trouble rising. “Good,” he said, and she believed it. “Can you run?” They’d just jumped out of an airplane hand in hand, and here he was asking if she’d brought the parachutes.
“Yes.” She glanced down at his wound, his patch. “Can you?”
He smiled then, the unforced smile of a boy, or a man who sees his duty clear. “I can manage the pain, for now. We will take a left out the hall, then our second left and straight ahead to my ship. And if I fall behind, do not look back.”
4
THEY RAN SIDE by side down the hall through a war.
Hong of the Mirrorfaith turned out to be infuriatingly fit, with a distance runner’s level stride. The patch worked scarily well: if his injury slowed him, Viv couldn’t see how. He matched her pace so easily she had no doubt he could have lapped her on a quarter-mile track without noticing they were in a race. Viv, buzzed on adrenaline, had recovered enough from the almost drowning and the robot fight to feel pissed at him for that, but she was breathing too hard to joke about it, or to ask any of the questions gathered in starling flurries in her mind.
So she made lists.
The hall outside was made from the same milky translucent material as the egg chamber, its floor hard and cool and regular underfoot, except for the bodies. Most of the bodies belonged to Pride drones, but for every five of those she saw another fallen monk in red-and-gold robes like Hong’s. Mirrorfaith. The monks held broken crystal weapons, or none at all; one dead woman had both hands buried in the torso of a large, jumbled robot-form that did not look even remotely human. Had she just been imagining it, or did that monk have four legs? Were those wings sprouting from the woman’s back?
Viv built systems in her head. She’d made her fortunes that way. But every time she tried to assemble a pattern from the facts she’d gathered since waking in that bubble, some new sight gave her yet another piece that didn’t fit, suggesting a larger puzzle than she’d thought. She wandered in mist, and what she thought were houses were only the boots of giants.
Hong hadn’t recognized Earth. The Pride drones, Hong’s patch—hell, even Hong’s robe suggested whole disciplines of science and engineering toward which she’d seen only the faintest gestures. She’d traveled the world, built subsidiaries in 150 countries, and never heard a language like the one he spoke. But she somehow understood that language without ever having learned it. And Hong seemed to think all this was commonplace.
He had said, We followed its oracles from star to star.
False certainty had almost killed her back in the eggshell room, blinding her to possibilities. So don’t be certain. Steer into the skid. Wherever you are, it’s bigger and more complicated than you know.
She’d never been good at admitting things like that back home, either.
Thinking home hurt. In the server room she’d been so close to getting out, to saving Magda at least if not herself. When she woke in that green bubble, drowning, she’d thought she must be in some federal facility, maybe even close to Boston, not much ground lost. But with each new puzzle piece she found, home, safety, and Magda drew farther away. She grasped in the mist for the faces of friends, and found only more giants—their footprints, their scattered tools, the wreckage they had left behind. She was far from home. Far from the people she had sworn to help, the people she had risked everything to save.
At least she had an ally in the mist beside her. Even if he was in indecently good shape.
“Don’t look back,” Hong said again. His voice held a hint of concern, as if they were discussing bad weather on a hike rather than sprinting past corpses.
By the time she found enough breath to ask why, she heard the scraping and skittering that followed them, needles on glass growing louder. She saved her breath and ran faster.
The second left, he’d told her. When they made that turn, she stopped. The room was littered with more Pride drones and more monks’ bodies, but she had those puzzle pieces already. But the floor here was made of transparent crystal rather than alabaster, and beneath her, well …
Is that a star?
Dumb question, Viv. Don’t waste list space on something you can answer yourself.
It was obviously a star. Directly underfoot, in fact, and taking up most of the sky, which meant that the sky was underfoot, which meant that they were in space—over a bright red orb mottled with sunspots and continental drifts of chromosphere. Impossibly huge, impossibly close. A star so nearby should have vaporized her, should have boiled metal. But not only was she, not to mention the room in which she stood, distinctly un-vaporized, but a stalk, a thick, impossible column, descended from some nearby structure straight down to pierce the stellar surface.
Are those black holes?
That was less obvious. It took Viv’s oxygen-starved nerd brain a few more seconds to confirm her senses’ evidence: they were small compared to the star but still vast, voids in space surrounded by lensed starlight and whirling accretion discs of plasma drawn from the red star. There were many of them, black holes exceptionally plural, twenty to her left, twenty to her right, a chain disappearing beyond the stellar horizon. Viv wasn’t a physicist, but she had some sense of the tidal forces involved, the gravitational effects. A natural system like this would have torn itself apart.
The black holes had been moved here. Or built here.
She didn’t know which was worse.
She had guessed. Of course she had. But she hadn’t let herself believe.
She was farther away than she’d thought possible. Magda and Lucy and Shonda and her parents and her brother and Earth and everything she’d known and loved and fought for shrank to a point at the farthest reach of sight, the way whole galaxies looked smaller than fireflies in the sky. She fixed them in her vision, in her heart. She had been brought here, which suggested that there might be a way back.
She’d find it. For the moment, though, here she was.
In space.
Her laugh was wet and her eyes blurry and her knees weak when Hong grabbed her arm and pulled her after him and she began, again, to run.
Out of the crystal chamber into another alabaster hall. She trusted Hong, and her legs. At least those worked like she was used to.
When you’re both safe, she told herself, you can ask him about the Pride. About these shape-changing robes. You can ask how you came to be drowning on a, say the words, space station. You can ask where he’s from, and whether that monk really did have wings. And how to get home.
Then she realized she was running alone.
Don’t stop, he’d said.
Fuck that. He’d saved her life. She would not let some stupid code of honor rob her of her only partner in this mess.
She turned.
Good news first: she could still see Hong.
Bad news: he stood locked in close combat with an immense Pride drone, and now she saw what those giant broken things they’d passed looked like when awake: a red-eyed scorpion six feet tall at the shoulder, with a torso like a silver Ken doll rising from its spiked back. If Hong hadn’t looked so serious she might have mistaken their battle for some kind of sick dance, the man and the scorpion-centaur-do
ll-thing, his clubs clanging off its armor plating, its claws scissoring through space he’d just left. One of the Ken-taur’s forelegs reared back and speared down into Hong’s thigh, but glanced off, and she realized that Hong’s leg wasn’t flesh at all, but a blue-black metal almost the same tone as his skin.
The Kentaur’s mouth opened, and light burned in its throat. Hong raised his clubs, crossed, to block, but Kentaurs seemed to have stronger cannon than the little drones. This blast struck Hong’s guard and tossed him back up the hall toward Viv; he bounced and rolled like a thrown tin can as the Kentaur boiled after him.
He tried to shoulder her away even as she helped him to his feet, but blood leaked through his patch and he winced. “Go. I can slow it down. You must reach the ’fleet.”
“So come with me.”
Then Hong made a great mistake. If he’d shaken her off and sprinted back down the hall to face the Kentaur again, Viv might have had no choice but to run. She had no weapons, no armor, no sense of how to fight that thing, let alone kill it.
But he tried to stare Viv down. And, warrior monk or not, however tough they built them wherever he’d come from, they didn’t build them to win a commanding-glare contest with Viv.
“You saved my life,” she said. “We’re getting out of this. Together.”
And together, they ran.
5
OR, AT LEAST, they tried to run. It didn’t go well.
They made it out of the hallway into another round chamber, this one made of transparent crystal all the way around, with six exits—and in each exit, a Kentaur.
Viv was all ready to fight, she even grabbed a staff off the floor, but her blows didn’t seem to bother the Kentaurs that rushed her. She expected pain, or fire, but the claws that struck her did not pierce, and the weight behind them only bore her down to the ground, wrenched her arms behind her back with the irresistible force of a hydraulic press, and locked cuffs around her wrists.
Her mouth tasted of copper, her head ached, and her hands were stuck behind her back. She searched past the Kentaurs’ legs for Hong and, after a moment’s panic, found him—furious and bleeding from a head wound, his face swollen with a bruise he hadn’t had before, also bound. One Kentaur lay broken by his side. A metal claw prodded Viv to her feet, and though she’d seen blades bounce off Hong’s robes, she did not feel like testing her own clothing’s robot-proofness. She obeyed, though she shot a glare back over her shoulder at the Pride drone’s sculpted face. “Hey. Take it easy.”
No reply. Not that she expected one.
Viv didn’t have to speak Wi-Fi, or whatever protocol they used to communicate, to tell the drones were nervous: scuttling around the room, sensors darting to corners at the slightest shift of a body, as if they thought the ground itself might open its mouth to eat them. She wondered what they were afraid of. Certainly not their prisoners—they’d only left one drone to guard Viv and Hong.
Which was nice, because when she tugged on the cuffs, they felt loose, as if the catch hadn’t engaged all the way. She pulled, gently, and the cuffs slid open. A twist of her wrists would free her. If she chose her moment, she could make a break for it. Yes, the drones might fire after them—but the fact that she and Hong had been captured rather than killed just now suggested that their priorities had changed. She just hoped their new orders had more of a bring back alive at all costs flavor than an alive by mild preference one.
So, run. And go where, was the obvious question. She’d only have one chance to escape the Pride. No hope they’d give her busted restraints twice in a row.
But for her escape attempt to stick, she needed Hong. And after they bound his arms, he’d gone stark still, and stood glaring mournfully at the floor.
Minor morale difficulties in the wake of failure. She knew that feeling. Granted, under different circumstances—pitch meetings and bad dates. She’d have to talk him out of it. The puzzle pieces of her current predicament still lay mounded on the table of her mind in random order, but if she waited for familiar circumstances to make plans, she had a sense that she’d be waiting for a long time.
One Kentaur supervised while the remaining drones canvassed the room, salvaging glittering diamond wafers from the heads, or head-analogues, of the fallen machines. The wafers reminded her of Communion—robot was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Interesting. File that away.
She looked up.
They were in space, of course, so there were stars overhead. And between the stars, lit by the red fire of the sun below, she saw the ships.
To call the scale of space overwhelming is to commit criminal understatement: space is overwhelming in the sense that a human sacrifice splayed on the altar while the moon eclipses the sun and the chanting priest raises the knife is having a bad Tuesday. Without comparison, Viv couldn’t tell just how large the shapes were that sailed between her and the unfamiliar stars.
But they looked big.
The ships fell into two factions, judging from design: one swooping, multicolored glass and beautiful, like fighter jets designed by Gothic architects with an unlimited stained glass budget. Those were tiny, darting gnatlike between the others. The second faction looked like three-dimensional fractals, Mandelbulbs and Mandelboxes and Sierpinski pyramids made out of prisms, black wire, and hate.
There were more hate fractals. They were larger, and they were winning.
What else was new.
Hong kept his eyes on the floor.
As ways to start a conversation with a morose space monk go, “Hey” might be uninspired, but Viv had to start somewhere. “Hong. Buddy. Are you still there?” He didn’t answer, so Viv kicked him, lightly, in the ankle. “We need to think of a way out of this.” She’d almost said minimum viable escape plan instead of a way out of this, but somehow she doubted the Mirrorfaith, whatever that was, knew much about development methodology. Anyway, they were standing up already, so this was basically a stand-up meeting.
“I am praying to my fallen comrades,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She remembered the broken bodies they’d run past, and her memory rewrote them not as scenery but friends, colleagues, comrades. Hong’s people. Well, that made her feel like an asshole. Then again, if she’d stopped whenever people made her feel like she was being an asshole, she’d probably be dead by now, and she’d never have been rich. “Wait. Praying to them?”
He glanced over at her—placid and cool. The pain only showed in the corners of his eyes. Ten years back she’d gone on her own last-chance-to-see vacation and camped for a week on a glacier, an endless smooth ice cap at the roof of the world. But if you kept still and held your breath, you could hear beneath it all the trickle of melt, the strength to grind mountains down. “Their souls will bring my prayers into the Cloud. They followed me. We all understood the risks. But I am sorry to have failed them.”
She wanted to touch him, maybe to reassure him, maybe to shake him. She almost did one or both, almost gave away the game and their whole chance of escape. “Maybe we can make a deal with the Pride. Pay ransom, or something.”
“The Pride do not deal. They will strip my skin, remove my circuits one by one, unpick my neural lace, and torture me in hells unimaginable until I betray the ’faith. The torments that await me have been devised for ’faithful over thousands of cycles. They know just how to hurt us. With you, they will no doubt take their time to learn.”
“Oh,” she said. The Kentaurs finished their survey; the drone they’d left guarding Viv and Hong scuttled forward, crowding them toward a tunnel. The Pride drones had to duck to pass through the threshold, but Viv had plenty of room to stand—though the cuffs made her walk funny.
“My team fought a legion of Pride to reach Rosary Station and the miracle the Empress worked here. And it has come to this.” Even bound, he sounded so damn noble.
This was, admittedly, not the sort of upbeat progress-oriented thinking Viv liked to hear during a scrum, but the honesty counted fo
r something. She’d known too many men who blithely assumed all problems were tractable to their genius. He was the subject matter expert. She could supply the strategy, and the initiative. “Okay, Hong.” The hall down which the Pride drones marched them was made of transparent crystal, so Viv could see the battle raging overhead and underfoot. Through the crystal, she got a sense of the scope and size of the structure—Rosary Station, Hong called it: a spherical lattice so large even its nearest filaments seemed to be more geography than architecture. “The Pride don’t belong here either, do they?”
“No,” he said, startled, as if she’d asked what direction down might be. “This whole system, Rosary Station and High Carcereal alike, are sacred to the Empress. None may trespass here. We have all committed great blasphemies even to approach this star.”
“Well, you and I are two blasphemers who are getting out of this. That’s your ship up ahead?” She saw two, both docked near the enormous stalk that descended into the star. One stained glass, one hate fractal. “All we have to do is get there?”
“That was the plan,” he said. “But it is impossible now. The Pride have captured my ship.”
Now that he mentioned it—and now they’d turned a corner so she had a better angle—the Pride ship was not so much docked beside Hong’s vessel as wrapped around it. Also there was a large hole in the stained glass, and the vessel looked dull and lifeless compared to the gnat-fighters losing their battle against the hate fractals overhead. “Okay,” she said. “So we need another way off this thing.”
“We could take a shuttle from my ship,” he said, “but the Pride have come in great force. Our fighter wing won’t last long against their Pridemothers. They would destroy any shuttle I launched. And we cannot master the Cloud to escape.”
“Fine.” She pretended she couldn’t hear the finality in his voice. “Can we steal their ship? Maybe get back to Earth that way?”
He looked at her like she would have looked at someone who suggested simply asking competition not to enter their target market. “That is no mere ship. It is a creature of the Pride itself.”
Empress of Forever Page 5