“Great.”
The path forked ahead: two smooth passages ran left and right, while a narrower hall continued straight. At the end of the center hall, Viv saw a massive pit. Looking down, she confirmed her suspicion: that pit ran down the stalk toward the sun. The most direct route toward the hate fractal ship would be to take the center hall, around the lip of that chasm, and out the other side, but the Kentaurs led them left as if they couldn’t see the passage.
Hong, she realized, was looking at her funny.
“What?”
“You mentioned that word before,” he said. “What is Earth?”
She almost lost her patience then. They had until they reached the Pride ship to escape, and she couldn’t afford to waste time feeling small, feeling far from home, feeling the utter impossibility of her situation. She needed Hong’s help.
So, as she had many times before, in negotiations and breakups and staff meetings and when she quickened her step to catch Susan Cho between the dinosaurs, she took the part of herself that wanted to scream, gave it a big hug like her therapist recommended, drew it a nice hot metaphorical bath, and drowned it in the bathwater. From the outside, this looked like taking a deep, slow breath. “I don’t know where we are, Hong. Or what we can do.” Maybe she was going about this all wrong. He was a straightforward guy. Martial arts and religion and deep emotions that changed slowly. So, why not be straightforward? “I’m a long, long way from home. And I have to get back. I don’t know where I am, and it’s all big and sharp-edged and”—fuck, why can’t you just say it—“scary. And I need your help. Can you give me the simple overview, please? Like you would to someone who had never been off-planet?”
He looked at her then, not at the floor, and tried. “We stand above High Carcereal, the sacred stellar prison the Empress Herself built to hold the Tyrant Zanj, who strode between the stars and could be caught no other way. This new-sprung blessed artifact in which we walk, we have named Rosary Station, from its obvious entanglement with the Grand Rosary.”
“The black holes,” she guessed. Strung like beads around a throat—massive, hyperdense, absurd beads around a throat that was a star. “The … Empress … She built them?” She slowed, and the Pride prodded her from behind.
“Ages ago. Our scholars have studied them from a distance—my master the Archivist risked her soul consulting oracles, and claims the Rosary beads hold worlds by the millions. There is no higher miracle in normal space, save the Empress’s own Citadel. She built the Rosary after She imprisoned Zanj Queen of Pirates beneath us, with the wrecks of her armada. But for centuries She has not returned.” Centuries? No—stay cool, Viv. “Until now. The sacred engines of the Rosary called to Her through the Cloud, and She came, in person. She spun this station from starstuff in a day around a Rosary bead. And then, quick as She came, She left, with the bead in her care.”
“She took a black hole?”
“Truly,” Hong said, “She is mighty beyond compare. Fleets quake at Her footfall.” As if quoting Scripture. At least he was out of his funk. “We study Her castoffs, Her leavings, before the Pride can pervert them. We rushed here to see what miracle She had wrought. We fought toward the locus of all Her mighty pondering, and there we found—”
“What?” Viv asked, and then remembered.
“You,” he said. “And whatever Her purpose in drawing you here, I have lost you to the Pride.”
Not this again. “We’ll get out of this, Hong. You and me.” Poor guy. She wasn’t giving him time to think, to feel, because if she took any time to think or feel herself, she’d snap. “I have a plan, but I need your help.” They turned again, left. Viv remembered the path back to that big hole, back to the stalk. She’d been keeping track, in case she was right. “Okay?”
He nodded. She could work with that.
“The prison. The tyrant-pirate-thing, who strides the stars. You said we’re above the prison. Do you mean the sun? Is the tyrant down that stalk that goes into the sun?”
“You can see the stalk?”
“Of course.”
“It is forbidden.”
“How can you forbid seeing?”
“The Empress’s decree forbids it, and Her word binds the souls of all. I can no more conceive of approaching that place than of removing the binders around my wrists. They, too, speak directly to my soul.”
Interesting. “Do the Pride have souls? Could they go near that stalk?”
“They are bound even more than I. They are the Empress’s own castoffs—Her remnants, Her tools and toys, maddened by abandonment. Her will lies heavy upon them.”
The Pride vanguard had drawn ahead, scouting down split passages. Viv tested her binders again, waiting for them to talk to her soul or whatever, but they still felt like poorly applied handcuffs. And she hadn’t had any problem looking at the stalk.
This just might work.
“Hong,” she asked, as if from idle curiosity, “how’s your stomach?”
“The patch is holding, though it cannot knit my flesh until I rest.”
“Great.” She added turns up in her mind. A right, and another right, a straight sprint, and a sharp left. They might make it. Especially if the Pride really did feel some kind of hard-coded aversion to the stalk, the well, the prison in the star.
The Pride ship loomed before them. Now or never. “And,” innocent again, idle, forbidding herself all thought of outcomes because failure meant death and so probably did success, and thinking about either twisted her blood with excitement, fear, frustration, and all that unhelpful human stuff, “you’re a pretty martial guy, right? Fit?”
“I seek the perfection of form, that I may be equal to all the tasks of scholarship.”
“Can you run with your eyes closed and your hands behind your back?”
“Yes,” he said automatically. Then: “Wait. What do you mean?”
Words were too slow, so she twisted free of her cuffs and showed him.
6
HONG SQUAWKED IN protest as she tugged him toward the pit, with Pride drones clattering close behind. “No! Absolutely not. This is blasphemy. We risk our souls.”
“Come on. It’ll be fine.” Weak-sauce encouragement, but then, she wasn’t trusting rhetoric to get Hong down the hall. Better to rely on arms and legs for that. Good thing the Empress’s compulsion had the guy half out of his mind with panic—Viv kept in decent shape, but there was too much of Hong for her to manhandle if he’d been able to concentrate his power. He’d have been easier to drag if he were still in cuffs—she’d planned to leave him tied up for this part, but the cuffs had popped open back in the hall when she grabbed his wrist. Just her luck. “You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“I have a good idea.” He yanked against her grip, but lost his balance—he’d never have done that if he were in control of his own reactions, and the pratfall would have been almost funny if there weren’t killer robots after them—and she yanked back, hard, and they stumbled to the edge of the pit. Almost over the edge, even, as he jerked against her. She wheeled back at the last minute, dropped to the floor and took him down with her, and lay panting and sick from that half-second’s glimpse down and down into that long smooth uncaring depth, that endless fall.
The Pride drones turned the corner and stopped. Clawfeet clicked on crystal. Their faces were silver smooth but their bodies radiated tension, feet shifting, mandibles chattering. Abdominal gears ground. Viv laughed on the inside, wild with triumph that eclipsed her fear. Serves you right. Try to trap me, chase me through a space station, see if I don’t pull one over on you. They probably couldn’t even shoot down that hall. She was safe. From here, she could find a way out. Even Hong stilled beside her, though he didn’t stop murmuring prayers, too fast and soft for the translator gimmick to catch.
Then the first drone took a shuddering step down the hall. A second followed moments later, and a third. The steps came slow, several breaths to each. The drone bodies shivered with effort. Wires a
nd gems inside them burned like lightbulb filaments. Needle teeth chattered. They advanced in pain, in mechanical terror, but they did advance. “Hong. They’re coming down the hall, Hong. You said they couldn’t do that.”
His prayers ebbed. “Logic.” He licked his lips. Still his eyes did not open. His body beneath her was warm, and so tense he was shivering. “They are convincing their own souls that they approach us, rather than the prison. That they wish to apprehend us, not the tyrant. I wonder that their minds can bear the strain.” As if in answer, the lead drone shuddered and collapsed, smoking. But the two, no, wait, three now, behind it pressed on. They could not fight three of these things. They’d barely survived one with Hong in fighting shape, much less flat on his back in mid-seizure. Not to mention the hole in his stomach.
Okay. All they had to do was edge around the pit, to where—oh, never mind. There were drones at the other entrance now, and a Kentaur, also advancing, slowly. Dammit. Maybe she could slip past them on her own, but that was a big maybe.
And if she tried, she’d have to abandon Hong.
Which left plan B.
Viv had been kind of looking forward to plan B. She’d thrilled at the prospect as she thrilled at poker table showdowns, at going all in on a bluff after a late, long night.
Admittedly, the thrill had faded when she’d glanced down into the pit.
Hong was praying again. Viv didn’t blame him.
She glanced around for controls or a ladder, and found nothing. In vain hope something had changed in the last few seconds she looked over the edge once more, and once more that old monkey fear reared inside her, rampant and cackling. Just don’t listen to your blood, she told herself, or your gut, don’t listen to all the self-preservation instincts dumb generations hammered into you—none of your primate ancestors would have made it this far.
Focus on the facts. There were no stairs down that she could see. No fireman’s pole. No visible controls, though if this Empress could move black holes like billiard balls and build a space station from stardust in a day, she’d probably mastered the art of space-Bluetooth. Still, no railings even—the Empress better hope OSHA doesn’t have a posthuman enforcement division. (Assuming that the Empress was human. She’d certainly looked human, but then, so did Superman. Or Nyarlathotep.)
This was such a dumb idea. They were so about to die.
But Viv figured you didn’t become some kind of goddess or whatever without a decent grasp on design. What would she have meant a user to do, if she built a room like this?
The drones were five feet away. Needle teeth champed, and tails tensed to strike. Viv almost missed the faceless suited men whom she’d imagined torturing her to death.
Hell. If she was wrong about this, at least she was going out on her own terms.
She hugged Hong. “It is well,” he said, mistaking her. “We have fought valiantly. Perhaps we will find liberation in our future lives.” The front-most drone tensed to leap.
She said, “I’m sorry,” and rolled them off the ledge.
For the first twenty or so seconds of free fall, Viv experienced the profound sinking suspicion that she had made one of her rare mistakes.
Thrill mixed with terror as they tumbled, as Hong’s scream mixed with her own ecstatic whoop—though, if pressed, she would have been forced to admit her whoop had distinctly screamlike characteristics. The silver walls blurred past, so smooth and featureless Viv might have been hovering in place but for the wind of the fall that whipped her clothes against her body and tossed her close-cropped hair. Those monkey brain circuits railed: it’s too far to the next branch, and, if you don’t stop soon you will die when you hit the ground, and, you should have listened to me a hundred thousand generations back and never left the damn trees.
They fell faster, faster—Hong shouted at her, but his words were lost on the wind. She tried to turn toward him, maybe read his lips—realizing then that she didn’t actually know his language, certainly not enough to lip-read. But the movement spun her round anyway to face the pit’s distant mouth, and the Kentaur plummeting toward them.
As it fell its body realigned—its tail locked back, half its legs twisted to merge with the tail while the others pointed down to cut the air, gathering speed. Naturally. It would catch them soon. Viv spun back to Hong, pointed, shouted, “Pride!” and though she couldn’t hear his answer, his facial expression was very close to a twenty-first-century American That’s what I was trying to tell you!
He pulled her toward him as the Kentaur drew alongside. It flattened, limbs splayed and trembling, breaking to match their speed, and that silver face, so human in its form and inhuman in its stillness, spun toward Viv.
The walls behind the Pride drone changed color, flushing from silver to red. That could not be a good sign, though Viv wasn’t sure for whom.
The Kentaur’s mouth opened, and Viv rolled to the side as Hong yanked her down. They spun; the Kentaur’s fire struck the wall. Two of its legs lashed out; Viv kicked off Hong to dodge; Hong flicked his wrist and his bracelet flashed and he held his short crystal clubs again, up and blocking. The leg, segmented and whiplike, curled around his club, cut in. Hong grimaced, and slammed his other club down on the leg, and with a scream of taxed metal and shattering glass, it snapped—but the drone had brought two more claws into position, and thrust them out like spears. One blow glanced off Hong’s metal leg. He dodged the second, but spun off his axis, out of control.
The walls were bright red now, and red dots swarmed Hong and the Pride drone both. Viv checked herself, but saw no dots. Which made a certain kind of sense—the station’s security system didn’t seem to mind her the way it minded everyone else.
She glanced down. They were nearing, fast, a mesh of translucent red wire so fine that when Viv first looked it had seemed not a mesh at all but a solid wall. There wasn’t time to explain. She swam through the air to Hong, ducked past spear strikes, pulled him down and away, wrapped her arms and legs around him, and twisted so she lay between him and that red mesh. She willed her robes to spread broad and felt them obey, billowing around Hong. Maybe that would confuse the system, so it couldn’t kill him without killing her, too. She focused on him in case this didn’t work, trying to memorize his shoulder and his hip, the heat off his skin, the smell of him. “Hey,” she said. “If we’re about to die—I’m sorry.”
They passed through the mesh as if through cobwebs, with that same gentle pressure against the skin like a breath that clung. Viv would have felt embarrassed by her panic, if not for the Kentaur’s screech, the brief hell of shearing metal, and the wind-whispered silence after. When she opened her eyes, she found that the Pride drone had been torn into too fine a dust to see. And Hong was still alive.
Score one Viv.
The walls turned blue, and they began to slow. No—they didn’t slow at all, but the wind stilled, so they felt less resistance even though they were falling faster. A shining teardrop took shape around them; its walls rippled at her touch. Hong looked up, and down, shaky, uncertain. His robes settled around his body. “You saved me.”
They fell faster still.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” She didn’t like being subjected to such earnest gratitude. It made her feel she’d messed up somehow when he saved her before, by not thanking him as fully.
He shook his head, which she chose to interpret as a no. She recognized the look on his face when he faced her, though—wonder and confusion more distinctly personal. He was still soaking in adrenaline, overcome with their survival, and here she was curious about the landscape. Viv was used to friends thinking her inhuman, but it still stung.
“I guess the station’s cutting air resistance, so we can fall faster.” Her normal speaking voice sounded loud and soft at once—loud in the silence of the light, soft after the roaring wind. “I bet it will slow us down before we hit the bottom. If the station wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.” How far had they fallen? The answer depended o
n local gravity, though gravity in Rosary Station seemed to depend more on the station’s whim than on trivia like nearby solar masses.
She heard a chime, soft and rich as cymbals rung in prayer, and turned, half expecting some new trap. Instead, she saw Hong staring at his bracelet with a fear she wouldn’t have judged him capable of before. She’d looked like that in the mirror on the morning she left Saint Kitts, when she stood in her bathroom alone and let the mask drop: a prisoner who’d seen the ax. There were glyphs on his bracelet, but she could not read them. Functional illiteracy would be another challenge in the long run, though if she stayed alive long enough for it to matter, she would count that a miracle in its own right. “What is it?”
“The fleet of my faith has jumped in, under the Grand Rector’s command.”
“Isn’t that good?”
She recognized his next expression, too, though not from the mirror. It was the one employees wore when she called them on the carpet. “I’m not supposed to be here. This is a forbidden star. We are not to touch the Empress—only seek to understand Her in our quest to mirror the world. But to let Her works fall to the Pride seemed an even greater sin than my trespass. So I came to High Carcereal with those few of the ’fleet who thought as I.”
“And your Rector does not approve.”
“No. She demands my submission and surrender. Or else she will open fire.”
“Wait. Even your friends are after us now?”
“I would not call Her Rectitude my friend.”
“If you had to sum it up, on a scale of one to doomed, we’re currently…”
“In trouble.”
“We weren’t before?” His lack of a ready answer left Viv with a number of questions about what constituted Hong’s day-to-day routine, but she could ask those later. If there was a later. “Okay. Great. I’d hate to think this would be easy.”
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