Fires always spread.
This, too, was the Ornchief’s fault. She had failed the peace when she fell to the Graytooth—so duty fell upon her to set the balance right: a quick, decisive victory against Bloodarm and Carver to prove the clan’s strength, followed by mercy shown and penance paid.
Her daughter should be here to lead them. All the clan knew and loved Xiara, but the clan, too, overlooked her in their love. They saw a woman of beauty and eagerness and compassion, a young warrior who could chase her dreams past the galaxy’s edge, but they did not see what the Ornchief saw: a woman of strength and talent, a woman warriors would follow. This would have been such a stage for her, a war fierce as any the Ornclan had known in many seasons, the clan outnumbered and fighting for its life against enemies so hungry for victory they had opened ancient idols, called upon forgotten powers, raised daggerwasps and artifacts to fight for them. Xiara would have sprinted in the vanguard, spear raised, rifle hot, trailing glory.
No use to sigh now. The Ornchief hunkered low, as did her warriors, and the daggerwasp slipped by.
By dawn they reached the enemy’s position: a high amphitheater used for unknown purpose in ancient Orn, with a commanding view of the valley, the winding river and the fallen towers and the Ornclan’s grove and the spaceport. An impregnable post, or so the Carvers and the Bloodarms thought, its left flank and direct approach exposed to fire, its right overgrown with crooktooth—impregnable unless one’s grandmother had discovered an unguent expressed by spider rabbit glands that hid one’s scent from the crooktooth vines. This unguent, naturally, attracted spider rabbits, but they were not particularly poisonous—just unnerving. Some of the younger warriors grew fearful quiet as spider rabbits climbed them and tested their armor with their teeth, and the Ornchief allowed herself a smile. What did discomfort signify, when one might pass unharmed beneath the gaping mouths of crooktooth vines?
Their enemies had barricaded their flank and the slope, but trusted the vines to guard their right. So, when dawn came, and Djenn’s team began their shield rush up-mountain, their enemy clans would be distracted, their fiercest warriors mounting their walls to meet him with a rain of arrows and sling bullets, and even a rifleshot barrage in case the Ornclan’s battle chant weakened enough to let their fire strike home.
The Ornchief waited as the assault pressed uphill. Her warriors twitched, nervous and eager for battle. Djenn’s warriors gained step by careful step, chant high, shields raised, their song twisting daggerwasps back mid-strike. The volleys slowed them, but they did not stop. The Ornchief waited until the Bloodarm and Carver warriors raised spears and called upon the small gods with whom their ancestors had made bad deals, and, clad in spectral armor, jumped the barricade and charged down to scatter Djenn’s shield wall, tossing warriors aside as a bear might scatter coyote monkeys prowling after its meal.
Good.
The Ornchief whistled then, and her warriors slid from the vines into the enemy camp, trailing a wake of spider rabbits.
The defenders fell, rank by rank, taken by surprise. The Ornchief’s spear pierced shield walls; her blade forced her enemies to their knees, to pledge and beg surrender. Without fire and with little noise they moved through the camp, birdwhistling for aid or to announce triumph: pickets taken, food supplies secured. Young Agol suffered heavy wounds as he fought to the camp’s high altar, but with the last of his strength he seized the altar and bled upon its surface so the Ornclan’s blood could work its possessive magic on the daggerwasps and enemy gods. A young man in black silks, with knives for fingers and red wheels for eyes, stood against the Ornchief, and she stove in his ribs with a mighty kick, though his claws lay open her forearm.
In an hour that felt like a day and a heartbeat at once, she claimed the camp and pushed south to the barricade, cresting a wave of triumph. Only to meet, at the barricade, a line of troops and drones, with Kronn and Alyra in the vanguard—and Djenn, and his force, held at bladespoint.
The Ornchief calmed her rage, slowed the war spirits in her breast. Djenn looked ashamed, defiant, injured, but alive. The others of his force, likewise. The Ornchief raised her bloody hand to stop her warriors’ charge, and stop they did. For the first time, as she strode forward, she felt grateful for Xiara’s absence. If Xiara had stood in Djenn’s place, with a blade to her throat, the Ornchief would have found the calm she needed now more painful to sustain. And if the Ornchief had stood where Djenn stood now, while Xiara led the ambush team, there would have been much blood spilled. “We hold your camp and your altar,” she said as if there had never been such a thing as a hostage. “You have lost, Ornchiefs.”
Alyra tested her machete’s weight against her palm. “Not while we hold your people, Ornchief.”
“Release them. Turn back to your homes. And we will carry on as before.”
Great Kronn, graybearded and knotted as a vine-choked tree, shook his shaggy head. “You have held the manufactory too long, Ornchief, and failed us in its keeping.”
“I could not stop a demon from beyond the stars,” she said. “But I have stopped you. And I will stop any who dares trespass on our valley. We keep the peace. You are old, Kronn, and wise. You know better than I what wars you will face if you take the valley. Or do you think Alyra will settle for half measures of mastery?”
Alyra, by his side, half smiled. “Always you war with words, Ornchief. But mere words did not serve you against demons—and where one demon comes, others may follow. We must unite against the world beyond.”
“Your fear would start an avalanche to break the mountains of Orn.”
“War makes strength.”
“War,” the Ornchief said, “makes scars.” She raised her hand and blood fell between them. “If you will not surrender though I hold your altars in my hand, will you stand against me, arm to arm, blade to blade? We will see whose strength prevails.”
Alyra laughed, half-mad. “If you stand against one of us, you stand against both.”
Kronn hesitated first, but at last dipped his head in assent.
Two against one. The Ornchief felt the wound in her arm, and tested the strength of her spirits. She stood a chance of victory. Her warriors would prevail in open battle even without Djenn’s force—with their altar fallen, Kronn’s and Alyra’s drones were losing power, and the spirits that gave their warriors strength began to fail.
But they would kill Djenn first.
Djenn was strong. Look at him, defiant even now, prepared for his ascension to the Cloud, for his next life’s journey. Big dumb lug. The right choice, surely, for the Ornclan, for all Orn, was to press their advantage, rather than submit to a duel with two Ornchiefs bent against her.
But making the right choices, those brutal leader’s decisions for which her own mother had readied her when she was younger than Xiara, had led her to betray hospitality, to cast her daughter out into the stars, from which she never would return. The right choices led her, step by staggering step, to this field.
Why not try a different way?
“I will fight you,” the Ornchief said. “Free my warriors. Let the drums beat.”
Beat they did.
Alyra raised her machete, and the blade left Djenn’s neck, and the spearpoints shifted away from his followers. Alyra stepped forth in drum-time. So, too, did Kronn, raising his heavy iron club, in truth an arm wrenched in single combat from the shoulder of a metal-mad mountain hermit, spattered with the blood of five decades of his enemies since.
The drums beat faster.
The Ornchief raised her eyes to the stars beyond the sky, not seeking the advice or succor of any desperate lost god, but thinking about her daughter, out beyond the edge of time where their grandmothers once flew. Then she returned her gaze to Orn, stepped forward onto the dust, and lifted her spear, pondering the transformations of fate.
Before she could reach any grand conclusions, the sky split open.
New moons bloomed overhead, great curving ships’ hull swells and cons
tellations of smaller stars burning bright beside the dawn. The largest of the ships cast the whole valley in shadow, save bright spots where its running lights shone. The Ornchief knew no scale to make sense of such a thing save monstrosity—but beneath her awe, beneath the rodent-rapid drumming of her heart, she heard the ship, all the ships above, speak to her blood as the Pride spoke, in womb-tongue.
Groundswell was that huge ship’s name, and her pilot …
The Ornchief dropped her spear. This might have caused her some embarrassment, were not the other Ornchiefs also frozen, staring up. The other Ornchiefs did not, however, begin to laugh.
No crystal chariot, perhaps. But once again she had underestimated her daughter.
Groundswell’s hull flickered, and displayed a mountainous image. There, flanked by Zanj the thief of stars, and Vivian Liao, and the gray demon who had caused all this trouble, stood her own girl, grown and sure and beaming, her eyes full of sacred wheels.
“Ornclans,” she said. “Brothers and sisters. I am Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter. I have traveled beyond the stars, and I come home to seek your help. We have sheltered in our ruins singing star songs and making small wars since the Empress cast us down. Now she plans to strike the stars themselves. I want to fight her, but my friends and I cannot fight alone. I have brought you ships, and you have the blood to fly them. The galaxy needs the people of Orn. Will you ride to their aid?”
The Ornchief looked down at Kronn, at Alyra, at the gathered squadrons, at Djenn, all rapt, unready. She could not blame them. Prophecies do not come true every day. But though none yet could speak, in their eyes, in their shoulders, in their hands upon the hafts of spears and clubs and the grips of swords, she saw so many echoes of her own ecstatic yes.
And so the Ornclans went to war.
58
VIV WALKED ZANJ to the planetoid.
Xiara had created it, she’d confessed, half embarrassed and half proud, after they parted ways. Groundswell could not work to full capacity with people living on its back—and besides, she had to stash the Suicide Queens somewhere, since she didn’t trust herself to beat them in a wrestling match for control of their own ship. The ship acted on her idea as soon as she had formed it: it peeled Refuge’s rock and soil from its hull and reassembled it into a hollow globe buttressed with scaffolding, its surface gravity fixed with notional mass generators, the whole construct surrounded by a shell of dead matter sealed with Groundswell’s will. Tamper with the shield, and the sky would quite literally fall.
She’d built a prison world, and she hadn’t thought to mention it, because the ship made it feel so easy.
“Why fear your own strength?” Zanj asked when she explained. “I could do that. Gray could do that. Viv wouldn’t even need a ship. She could probably just ask the planet nicely.”
“I’m just … still getting used to it.”
“I see. That’s why you gave a planet of hunter-gatherers a space fleet.”
“We are all of Orn,” she said as if that were an explanation.
“That,” Zanj replied, “is what worries me.”
By the time they reached the prison planet even Zanj had to admit that the Ornclan took well to their ships, if none so well as Xiara. Hunger for the stars, hidden beneath ritual, flowered with practice; prayers and chants repurposed down generations to guide them through war revealed their original purpose now. Ornmusic woke deep systems in the ships, synchronized their shields, inspired computation. Rhythm tied the fleet together. An army might march on its stomach, but a starfleet flew on its songs. They lost only two ships en route to Refuge, and those not to mismanagement, but to a duel. Xiara, speaking with Groundswell’s god voice, put an end to that. Duels were fought between human bodies; ships were treasures. Ships were lineage. Ships were rings for chiefs to give and for children to inherit, melt, reforge.
So they reached Refuge, a net of jewels and song in the black above the manufactured world.
Zanj had told them she’d go down alone, so Viv was waiting for her by the airlock.
“Don’t be stupid,” Zanj said. “Yannis almost killed you the last time you met. The only reason you’re still alive is that she didn’t realize what you were.”
“I’m not going. I just thought you might like company on the way.”
Zanj’s eyes stayed the same, but her whole body narrowed. “Fine. Walk with me.” She cycled the airlock open.
“I need a suit.”
“Don’t be a baby. Come on.”
“Unmodified human, remember? Made of meat? Needs air?”
Zanj tapped the airlock wall. “Do you really think I’d let you die?”
Viv didn’t know what to say. You’ve threatened to kill me how many times? But she stepped across the airlock threshold anyway. For all her faith in Zanj, Viv’s skin tightened as the airlock cycled. She thought of all the various explosive decompressions she’d seen in movies, and how none of them had prepared her for the feeling of air torn from her lungs, of falling in that cold cold black as the Empress burned murderous above.
When the airlock cycled open, she grabbed Zanj’s hand by reflex, took a deep breath.
The air did not blow out. Zanj chuckled. “You are such a rube sometimes.”
And she walked into space.
Viv followed. Questions surged inside her. She might as well ask a couple. “I can breathe?”
“The ship knows you, and it knows Xiara likes you. It doesn’t have a life-support system the way you’re thinking, like the Question did, or like one of your old puny capsule ships; it has enormous molecular restructuring powers, a field projector, Cloud interface, all held together with a sort of, what would you call it, a homeostatic directive, to keep the bits and bobs functioning like they should. When it sees you take a dive out an airlock, it makes sure you can breathe.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“What bothers you?”
“The part where my survival depends on the ship’s goodwill?”
“Just don’t piss off your girlfriend, and you’ll be fine.” Said with a shrug and an aggrieved what do you expect from me sort of tone.
“Is that why I can walk out here, too? Even though there’s nothing to stand on?”
“Nah. I’m doing that.”
They kept walking for a while, much faster than Viv’s actual foot speed, to judge by how quickly Groundswell shrank behind. After a while Viv stopped worrying about the precise extent of the ship’s protection. She reviewed all the things she’d told herself she would say to Zanj, all the support and advice she could offer a being a few thousand years older than herself without sounding insulting. She hadn’t come up with much, and hadn’t worked up the will to say any of that, before Zanj spoke.
“I’m not looking forward to this,” Zanj said.
Viv decided against saying something like that was obvious, or pointing out that Zanj had spent the entire voyage from Orn glaring, and challenging various hothead young Ornclan pilots to asteroid belt races. She got drunk once, in a welcome-to-space party Xiara threw for the Ornclan; Viv hadn’t even known Zanj could get drunk, and it had taken Gray, Viv, and three-quarters of Groundswell’s power output to settle her down.
“I had to stop Yannis to save you, to get a shot at the Empress. That’s simple math. And she was being … cruel. Mean. To you. I wonder if I was ever that bad, that comfortable hurting people I didn’t think mattered. Probably. I stole from a lot of people, broke a lot of things. But I never stayed in one place long enough to sour like she did. I kept moving. It was better that way. If you cared, the Empress could use that against you—find what you loved, and take it. I never went back to Pasquarai after I started fighting her, though that doesn’t seem to have helped. I assumed I was dead when I took up arms. Every Suicide Queen could tell the same story. That was why we chose the name.”
“You were friends.”
“We used to be. Before she and Nioh spent too long as masters of a dust heap. Bending people’s mind
s, keeping them small. They turned into something we told ourselves we’d never be. I’m sure they think I changed in the star. I probably did. I’m sure they’ve been sitting down there ever since Xiara dropped them off, griping about how I went soft. Maybe they’re right.”
“I like you the way you are now,” Viv said. “And you don’t have to go down there. We don’t need their help.”
“It would make things easier.”
“Yes? I mean. They could open a whole new front by themselves. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Bullshit. I have to do things I don’t want to do all the time.” Zanj’s brow furrowed. She sat cross-legged in midair, scrunched her face down into her hands, and thought. “Okay,” she said before Viv could ask if she was all right. “Fine. I’m going in.”
She fell through the shield, to Refuge, to the prison. Viv tried to follow her with her eyes, but she flew too fast, and soon was too small to see. Still, Viv watched.
“It’s about to start,” Xiara said beside her; Viv jumped, yelped. “Sorry.”
“Can you make a noise when you do that, next time?”
“I’m only a hologram.”
“A sound effect would still cut down on heart attacks.”
“I’ll think of something,” Xiara said, and sat beside Viv in the black, and set one hand on her leg. The hologram was weightless, but it tickled.
“You can see her?”
Nod. “Nioh and Yannis are farming outside of town. Seems like there’s been a rift there between them and the villagers. Zanj is closing in. Just walking up the road, the Star over her shoulders. A lot of dust. Yannis looking up from her crops. I think—yes, okay, she’s recognized—”
On the planetoid, a flash of light; a breath, and an answering flare in the field that enclosed its atmosphere. Cracks of lightning spread from the point of Zanj’s impact.
“That is not a good start,” Xiara said.
“What was your first clue?” Viv narrowed her eyes. “Wait, is that a mushroom cloud?”
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