Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Music drifted from the camp again: a circle of Sklisstheklathe playing, and Xiara’s voice raised in song, deep and sure. Gray sprawled passed out in a heap of drunken spiders and garish schlumpy statues; Hong sat, conversing, with the hill-sized elder far from the fire.

  People liked to talk about decisions as simple matters of pro and con, column A and column B, but Viv had never seen it that way. You learned everything you could about a problem; you held it all in your mind at once as pressure built, and built, until at last you broke, and acted. When the moment came, no matter how long you’d pondered or what pains you’d taken, the right words slipped from you as easy as a splinter working its way free.

  “Let’s find the Fallen Star.”

  The band played on; the strange sky shifted as the body turned beneath them. Zanj closed her eyes, and a shudder ran over her skin, from her nose through her scalp, neck, down her limbs to twitch the tip of her tail. “Thank you,” she said, and nothing else for a time, so Viv wondered if she had fallen asleep. Then, eyes still closed: “You didn’t dance, down there. You watched, you talked, ate and drank, but you didn’t dance. Why not?”

  “Not wanting to get eaten isn’t enough reason?”

  “They wouldn’t eat you.” Zanj grinned. “You don’t have a soul.”

  “Honestly? I don’t know how. Dancing was never my thing back home.” Odd, that confessing she couldn’t dance felt harder than deciding to go for the Star. But then, Viv had never been good at admitting there were things she couldn’t do. It felt too much like weakness.

  Zanj settled back, lost in thought. Viv turned to leave. Someone tapped her shoulder: Zanj, standing, starlit, hand extended. “I’ll teach you.”

  25

  TEN DAYS LATER, they slipped from the Cloud to the battlefield.

  “Don’t worry,” Zanj had told them in the ship the night before, which just seemed perverse to Viv. “Everything we’ll see died hundreds of years ago. Besides, this ship is small fry. Even if any of the fleet’s weapons are still working, we won’t register to them so long as Gray and I don’t start showing off. These ships and their warminds were built to hunt bigger game than the Question.”

  That was the idea.

  Viv had felt quite enough awe in the last few weeks. She’d planned to shrug off the battlefield, whatever it was: “Oh, is this all?” But she could not quite manage it when faced with the reality. Beside her in the cockpit, Hong prayed. Gray whistled, long and low. Xiara flew, but her hands stilled on the controls, the indicator lights flickered, even the cockpit dimmed, as if afraid the dead hulks out there would spot them.

  “See?” Zanj said, self-satisfied. “Like I said. No big deal.”

  Imagine a gray gnat darting over a shining black field: the sky, you might think at first, perhaps, until the horse blinks, and its eyelash flicks the gnat away. Imagine a herd of horses, dying, dead. Imagine rotting elephants. Imagine the oceans of their blood.

  Enormous hulks twisted about them, ancient and dead. Great shapes blocked out stars, and behind every broken ship another turned, unfurled. In the cockpit Viv saw by reflected starlight, by ghostglow from the ships themselves, by the rays of the distant weak sun. The Question’s running lights cast deadly rainbows upon the octopoid monstrosity beneath them—deadly, because where there were rainbows there were drops of water, or ice, and in space, particles could kill.

  “I can hear them,” Xiara said, her voice faraway and strange. “They came from across the galaxy and from the depths between stars, to free themselves, to fight, to kill, to feed, to tell the tale. Old Ones who survived the wreck of long-gone fallen worlds, fleets of rebel machines, pirates and soldiers and fanatics. The Suicide Queens brought them: al-Zayyd in her glory, Heyshir who sees from shadows, Old Tiger who prowled between the galactic arms, the Black Bull framed first in iron, assassins and heroes and poets and thieves, sisters, and among them, cleverest, most fierce: Zanj.”

  Zanj shrugged, and tried to look nonchalant—but Viv hadn’t turned to her just because her name was uttered. As Xiara spoke in that ghostly voice, the wrecks through which they flew began to move. Lights flickered behind shattered windows. A metal squid-arm twitched. The cockpit speakers rendered creaks and groans of tested metal, whalesong deep. Viv caught Xiara’s arm. “Hey.”

  “They webbed their minds to draw Her, and draw Her they did: Herself, full green galactic, mouth wide and devouring, arms spread, She sent Her servants chewing through the fleet to remake it into more of Her.”

  “That’s us,” Gray whispered; Hong, rapt, kicked him.

  “Others hid in ambush, feigning death, only to wake once She joined battle. Great Groundswell met Her, pierced Her, drew Her blood. And She called the Diamond Fleet to break them: screaming from the depths of Her Citadel, battle calculators given razor form, densely brilliant, lances bright as stars—” As she spoke and flew through the fleet, her voice gathered weight, speed, frantic.

  “Xiara.” Viv tried to shake her out of her trance, but Xiara sat rigid at the controls, her eyes wheels within glistening wheels. The dead ships woke, and turned, or tried: shards of metal longer than the Question peeled off and spun blade-black through space.

  “—and the war endured and they were inside each other modeled each other became each other and broke each other and the Bleedcameglisteningfiercethroughskywiththeiropenmouthsandmouthsandmouthsand—”

  Viv caught her by the shoulders, tightened her grip until her nails cut in. Pressed their skulls together. “Come back to us.”

  “Viv?” As if from the bottom of a well. “They’re still here, Viv. They’re dead, but the dead have ghosts, and they died with their minds all tangled up, a single enormous ship in so many bodies, hungry. I can hear them—”

  “Don’t. Xiara, come on. Stay with us.”

  “—beautiful—”

  Her body went slack. Her head lolled forward on her neck, breath shallow, but still the Question danced through the fleet around them, dead no longer, waking, pulsing with sallow ghost light. Viv shook her, and she trembled. Viv didn’t know what to do, this wasn’t her place, she didn’t understand it, she was losing Xiara to the dead—

  Zanj swore, and thrust herself between Xiara and the console, tore her hands from the controls and took over. The ship lurched—Xiara slumped from the seat, she’d gone so slack, but Viv caught her before she hit the floor. Even Zanj’s firm hand on the controls felt rough and jagged after Xiara’s mastery, but she guided them around the spinning metal, in toward the densest wreckage. “Gray, can you disconnect her?”

  “I’ve been trying!”

  Hong pointed. “That tentacle—”

  “I see it, thanks!”

  Xiara moaned, reaching for the controls, no no no, I can hear them, memory and song, and Viv hugged her harder, and tried not to be afraid. “Zanj, get us out of here. She can’t take more of this.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “This is all for nothing if we don’t get to the Fallen Star. And it’s here, I know it is, just—”

  “Zanj, those two ships—”

  “I see them!”

  Xiara elbowed Viv in the gut, clawed for the console, moaning, hungry, and Viv hugged her, felt nails bite in as the ship spun (without Xiara managing their inertia it felt like a spin, and she slipped, hit her head against the seat, ears ringing, stomach knotted, breath sick), as it climbed and sheered and—

  “Watch out for—”

  “—fucking flying this thing so please shut up—”

  “—grand and full and burst with wounds—”

  “Xiara, come back. Come on. Don’t listen to them. We’re here, we’re alive, I’m alive, dammit, I need you, just wake up, and everything will be—”

  And then it stopped.

  “—okay?”

  The ship stilled and so did she. In seconds, heartbeats, breaths, Xiara came back: her eyes focused, silver and full again, then blue, her face her own, its little
muscles once more animated by her mind. “Viv.” Her voice was raw silk but her voice again, not the cosmic oracle’s, not the fleetmind’s, just the small low human voice of a spear-carrier from Orn. “What happened? I dreamed—”

  “Then stop,” Zanj said, and though Viv was turned away, she could hear the frown that accompanied Zanj’s words. “Weird. That shouldn’t be here.”

  How could Viv not look?

  A perfect green planetoid hung beneath them, blurred with clouds, in a globe void of wreckage, circled by dead, listing ships. Small for a planet, it was still bigger than any of the vast broken ships through which they’d flown—and grew larger as they approached.

  “Um,” Gray said. “Guys. I can’t feel anything.”

  Yes, larger. She hadn’t imagined that last part. Visibly larger, second by second. Which said a number of unsettling things about their speed, their vector, and their chances of survival over the next few minutes. Hong was praying again. Viv wished she had the knack.

  Instead, she asked questions. “What do you mean, you can’t feel anything? Gray? What’s going on?”

  “We’re fine,” Zanj said, working the controls in a way that suggested it wasn’t fine at all. “It’s fine.” Her repetition did not reassure.

  Gray sputtered. “It is not fine!”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Something’s cut us off from the Cloud, that’s all.”

  “And we’re going to crash.”

  “That,” Zanj admitted, “is a bit more of a problem.”

  26

  CRASHING TURNED OUT to be easy. Staying alive was the hard part.

  Zanj cursed the controls, tugged and kicked, and in her frustration dented the instrument panel. A number of lights Viv hoped weren’t important turned red. Hong gripped the back of Xiara’s seat, white-knuckled, eyes wide, praying. Gray slumped to the ground, motion-sick. Zanj’s lips peeled back to reveal small, sharp teeth.

  Viv found their panic odd at first; then again, she had always met her own impending death, in car crash or spaceship accident or at the hands of robot monsters, with a sense of detachment, what her various shrinks called disassociation. She saw the planet approaching, taking up more than half the sky beyond the cockpit now, and felt distantly aware that this could be it, that she might, just now, after all this, be about to die. She didn’t believe it. But who did?

  People who grew up in a war zone, maybe—people the law tilted against, people who had more to fear from a traffic stop or an airport line than Viv. Maybe that was the difference. For her friends all this was real, the blaring alerts, the warning lights clicking on and off, all the precursors to death crushed in metal at high speed. (Could Zanj survive this kind of fall? Could Gray, ionized after a crash at orbital velocities, re-form?) For Viv, the gut-wrenching plummet, the short sharp stop, the pain of every bone in her body breaking at once, more than breaking, was a dream. It couldn’t happen to her—until it happened, and once it happened, she wouldn’t be around to worry about it happening again.

  (In the back of her mind, a panicked voice chattered a line from an old physics textbook: an ant, dropped down a mine shaft, walks away. A man breaks. A horse splashes.)

  Xiara faced detachment of a different sort, and so did Zanj, and Hong and Gray: impending death, yes, but disorientation, too, cut off from the Cloud Viv had never known how to feel. Blinded, they reeled.

  But Viv was born blind.

  She looked into Xiara’s wide, staring eyes, and snapped her fingers before them twice until she blinked, refocused. “Xiara. Can you feel the ship?”

  “It’s dark.” She licked her lips. Her chest rose and fell, rabbit fast. “So dark.”

  “But you can feel it.”

  She nodded.

  “Great. Hong! Buddy, snap out of it.” He didn’t shake himself from his prayer-trance, so she shook him until he did. “You said this thing had a conventional drive, one that doesn’t need the Cloud. Can you fire it up?”

  “It’s ancient.”

  “It’s all we have right now.”

  “It’s disconnected,” he said. “The power plant’s routed into the Cloud core, the thruster ports are sealed—”

  “I’m not asking what you have to fix. I’m asking, can you fix it?”

  “I need time. Acolytes. Tools.”

  That was a start. “Zanj!”

  She growled, bent over the controls. “I’m trying to keep us not-dead here!”

  “Hong needs help with the engines. Xiara can fly.”

  “Are we talking about the same girl? The one who was going crazy and talking to ghosts just a couple minutes ago?”

  “I can do it.” Xiara’s shaking voice didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but Viv would take it. “The fleet’s gone. I can’t feel them anymore. I’m fine.”

  “Sure. You say that now. Then you have another fit and smack us right into the ground. Gray can help Hong.”

  Viv grabbed Zanj’s shoulder, and pulled her back from the controls. They stared at one another, breathing hard, for seconds they didn’t have, while the planetoid grew. Zanj’s lips curled into a snarl, and the circlet on her brow blackened, began to smoke, responding to her killing rage; her claws tensed. Viv didn’t care. Ah, there was the hit of adrenaline, that rush of fury: Zanj was strong, and smart, and ancient, and Zanj knew the secret ways of the world, but goddammit she would listen. Viv had spent most of her adult life learning compromise, trust, how to get along with humans. She had been born knowing how to decide. You curled yourself into a fist, and bent iron with your eyes. Even if all that kept the iron in question from murdering you where you stood was a single piece of posthuman bondage gear with unknown limitations. “We need you to work on the engines. Gray has to reinforce the ship.”

  Gray, still sick, trembling, looked up: “It’s all dark.”

  “This ship wasn’t built to crash.” She spoke to him, but it was Zanj’s gaze she held, fierce, refusing to yield to the rage in the pirate queen’s yellow-red eyes. “We need baffling. Restraints. Shock absorbers. We need this whole structure remade to crumple around the cockpit. If Zanj and Hong get the engines running, we might be able to slow ourselves down enough to survive landing, but it won’t be gentle. Every second we spend arguing is one second less we have to figure out how to survive. Zanj and Hong, fix the engines so we can slow down. Gray, make us crash-ready. Xiara, fly. I’ll coordinate. You all listen to me, and maybe we get through this. Okay?”

  “Okay, boss,” Gray said, and Hong said, “Yes,” and so did Xiara, though she stammered three times before she managed the word. It hadn’t really been a question, and even if it was, she wasn’t asking them.

  Zanj’s nostrils flared. Her tail lashed the console.

  Viv could use the crown—command her to comply. This was a life-or-death situation. Trolley problem time. Do you break one woman’s will, and your own word, to save five lives? Including yours? And maybe the lives of everyone you’ve ever known, depending on what that Rosary bead you’re chasing is, on what it contains? Do you use power when it’s easy, and there, and you need it? No matter what it makes you?

  “We need you,” Viv said. “We need to work together. Or none of us get out of this alive.”

  Zanj’s tail stopped lashing. Her claws uncurled. And then, in a rush of wind, she stood in the cockpit door, grinning at Hong. “Come on, kid. Let me show you how it’s done.”

  Hong ran after her into the hold; Viv granted herself a moment’s sag against the console, a moment’s panic, her heart pounding, her sweat cold, her gut churning, her skin tight. Even with that crown on her head, Zanj’s anger felt more real, more dangerous, than the impending crash. Of course, Viv had never crashed a spaceship before, while she’d certainly seen Zanj kill people. She had not commanded her—and the circlet hadn’t hurt Zanj, much. But still she felt dirty and wrung out and not altogether brave.

  There were too many sirens and emergencies, not to mention entirely too much planet coming up fast beneath them, for her
to worry much about any of that now. They tumbled through the sky. Xiara groped for the controls; her eyes wheeled as she tried to focus. Fiberglass strands slipped from her fingers into the control panel. Viv marched out of the cockpit and Gray scrambled after her, eyes wide. “Boss, just so you know, I, um, I’ve never done anything like this before, I—”

  “Do you know how?”

  “There’s know, right, and then there’s know. I don’t exactly get a second chance at this! And I don’t have materials to work with, and I’m hungry—”

  “Eat the ship.”

  “I can’t eat the ship. We’re inside the ship!”

  “Not for much longer. Don’t touch the engines or the control surfaces. The cabins, the stores, anything else you want, take it. Eat. Get us out of this.” She checked herself before she asked, Can you do it? because a glance at him showed her what he’d answer: wide, scared beneath all that child’s arrogance, every fiber of him screaming a No! she could not let him feel. Gray was a kid, really: raw appetite and power and no control—no, not control. Backbone.

  “You can do this,” she said, level, steady. She set her hands on his shoulders, which felt too slick and wet for skin, like a dolphin’s. “I know you can.”

  Something inside him unlocked—self-confidence? Or the opposite, a sort of collapse, giving up his own sense of what he could do and what he could not. He nodded, yes ma’am, brave young soldier boy, and breathed so deep he inflated, and his not-skin fuzzed around her hands, and burst into flying motes of silver-gold dust.

  “Stay out of my lungs!” she shouted as she ran back to the cockpit.

  They worked, all of them, Zanj and Hong in the engine room, Gray in the hold, Xiara at the controls. Viv ran between them, used the ship intercom, tossed them suit communicators—there was so much to be done in so little time and all at once. Zanj tore open the engines (that blue ring on the engine room floor now burning red), rewired them at Hong’s direction; Viv tossed Hong a skinsuit and donned her own before Zanj ripped open the bulkhead and wedged their improvised thrusters into the vacuum space. Xiara screamed when the ship’s skin tore, but she kept her grip on the controls, milking spin from gyroscopes in the ship’s belly to level out their course. “Are there any people down there?” Viv asked her. “Civilization? Farms? Anything at all?”