by Neil Clarke
“I’m afraid to ask which.”
Imbra nodded. “Good.”
Biggs didn’t press. They sat and drank quietly as a long-haul rig rumbled into view, kicking up dust coming past Esrin’s Gulch, then slipping into oblivion around the next hill.
“Could always use more men in the shipyards,” said Biggs at last.
“Sure. The first place the Allegiance’ll target when their fleets arrive.”
“You don’t know that.” Biggs sounded almost chipper. “Could go for the lasers first. Then take out the outer moon defenses. Hop skip and a jump to Novun Prime after that. Seed a solar flare and take off running. You never know what the Allegiance has in mind.”
“Or what they want, exactly. The people? The resources?”
“Our guesses get even weirder, up at the courts. There’s one woman in archives who thinks—” Biggs seemed about to start on a longer spiel, but one glance at Imbra’s ring of bruises gave him pause and softened the sudden heat in his face. “Anyway, all I’m saying is, it’d be quicker, if it happened up in orbit. Down here, with the locals, and your past …” “All life’s a risk,” said Imbra. “You know that.”
“Not everyone gets to pick where they make a last stand, though.” Biggs adjusted his hat and stood. “But I guess you’re sure you’ve chosen yours.”
The statement grew into a question after Biggs set off, and after Imbra returned to cleaning up the shop. The next run of settlement boys came at dusk, mostly to try to rattle him a little on their way out to some pile-on party in the valley. Paloma wasn’t among them.
Paloma came in the night, halfway to dawn—and not, after all, alone. Imbra saw the revolver before the whites of the kid’s eyes at the end of the drive.
Imbra watched him awhile, then put the kettle on.
Paloma’s hands shook around the firearm as he stepped into the light of the garage, so Imbra moved nice and slow, setting two mugs on a table between them.
“Would’ve been easier if I’d been in bed, I guess,” said Imbra. “Sorry, kid. I’m not sleeping so well these days.”
“You think this is a joke? This isn’t a joke.”
Imbra nodded twice, the second time at the revolver. “That thing registered?” Paloma hesitated.
“Registered is no good. They’ll track you and declaw you. Then you’ll end up like me. You think I shouldn’t’ve been done in earlier? All the shit I did for valley mobsters, all the things I did while high—but it took a real slip up, the wrong keypass in the wrong place, for the courts to catch me. You wanna do this, kid, you gotta move in shadows.”
Paloma’s eyes darted to the implements on hand—the pry tools, the welding rods—even the impact wrenches, if applied with pure blunt force against their target.
“No, too much mess,” said Imbra. “You had the right idea with the firearm. You just need an unregistered number. But I know a guy.”
“Oh, frigg off,” Paloma raised the revolver tensely. “I told you this wasn’t a joke.”
“And I get that. Only—see it from my end for a sec. You come in, and sure, I’m bigger than you, but if I try to stop you, your adrenaline’s gonna kick in more than it already has, while I’m still poking along like this. And for what? Maybe I get the gun from you, maybe it goes off while I try. But a gun’s still better than some of the stuff I’ve got in here. So, yeah, if you go with the gun, it’s easier for us both.”
“And I already have one. What’s it to you if I get caught.”
Paloma’s brows beaded with perspiration. Imbra held his gaze.
“You’re right, kid. I’ll be dead. But you’re here ’cause I did something rotten. Something I truly regret. You think I wanna go down knowing I’ve ruined your life twice?”
Paloma snorted, but also watched, finger restless on the trigger, while Imbra took up a thick black marker from the table and scrawled a name and number on a bit of packaging.
“Here,” said Imbra. “This is the guy. He’s down in the gulch, little outpost away from the road. We can take Bullet, go together. You go in, say I sent you, get the gun. We’ll already be in good territory for digging, so then I just fix myself a nice spot, and you shoot me into it. You’ll have to do cleanup, but way out there? No one’s gonna come looking.”
“Like I’m supposed to believe you’ll help me kill you.”
Imbra shrugged. “Shoot me, then. Right now. Just saying, it’s not smart.”
“Yeah, you say too much.” Paloma raised the revolver again—the one deliberate act in his repertoire. Imbra reached for his mug. Turned it in his hands. Inhaled. At the end of a long sip, his brains still more or less intact, Imbra nodded to the far wall.
“Keypass is back in the top drawer. Ever driven hover before?”
The stretch of road between Imbra’s garage and the bottom of the valley was wide enough for Paloma to get a feel for Bullet without too much risk of dropping off a cliff. Auto would kick in regardless, but Imbra had seen novices panic and override, then overcorrect while their hovers were already boosting themselves horizontal, which just led to the whole craft flipping back, and sometimes striking the cliff on its tumble to the ground. Up in orbit, bubble ships avoided the problem by restricting humans to gunner and maintenance duty; on the subcontinent, as with the rest of the system, it was the rare colony that let organics behind any wheel—ground, water, or sky. But Nov’s northern continent, with all its geological upheavals and active volcanic sites, remained an uneasy mix of new and old: neural implants and road warriors, space elevators and end-of the-line towns, tall tales of interstellar combat and local bridges that were always falling down. Courts that knew they weren’t up to the task of keeping the peace, but kept swinging dead weight where they could.
Paloma pushed the accelerator hard—too hard for his first time behind the wheel, but Imbra knew this was not the moment to tell the kid to ease up. When they hit the end of the road, at the bottom of the gulch, Imbra pointed to their destination—the only light in the whole stretch of valley
desert—and Paloma gave him a withering look before cranking the engine again. Recent flash flooding had left the ground thick with mud, but Bullet surged through at top speed, veering only slightly as Paloma adjusted for the loss in friction. Not bad. Imbra glanced at the kid again—a word of praise as toxic as a word of caution, under the circumstances, but still tempting. Before long, they came to a stop outside the little shack.
“Want me to come with you?”
Paloma’s eyes narrowed at the quickness of Imbra’s words.
“Stay here,” said the kid, taking the keypass with him; the revolver tucked into his waistband. Paloma had a harder time in the mud than Bullet, so it took him a few slips to get his bearings and reach the front door. Imbra looked up while he waited—trying, and failing, to triangulate the shipyards above. Imagining General Asarus at the head of her new fleet, pulling off another system-saving maneuver like the one that first made her famous, during the Allegiance standoff at Fort Five. A satellite passed overhead, and then the shot rang out.
Imbra stood by the hovercraft when Biggs eventually emerged, a rifle slung over the adjustment counselor’s shoulder.
“Good,” said Biggs. “Figured you wouldn’t be far off. Someone calls using your name, that’s a sign of trouble for sure, but how did you—”
“Eh. He’s just a kid. You didn’t—”
Biggs cut a hand through the air. “Only spooked him. He’s quiet now. Conspiracy to commit murder, though—that’ll be something for the courts.”
“Even with the circumstances?”
“Especially with them. Even at his age. They’ll try him as an adult for targeting a declaw, and do the same to him for sure.”
“Counterproposal.”
Biggs tipped his hat. “Shoot.”
“I go to the shipyards. Kid comes with me.”
Even in the low light, Biggs’s face cast in shadow, Imbra could see both brows rise.
“He’ll come at you a
gain, you know.”
“Maybe,” said Imbra. “But a kid who goes on a planned, solo hit in this neck of the valley probably doesn’t have much of a life worth fighting for.”
Biggs considered, then nodded to the door. “And if he says no?”
“Give him his options. You’ll see.”
Imbra waited while Biggs went back in and talked to the kid. Neither voice got loud enough for Imbra to make out the state of things, but he had plenty to keep himself occupied: The low wind over damp desert underbrush. The suck of mud underfoot. The residual heat of old Bullet, to be left with the garage in Biggs’s care by dawn. If he squinted in the dark of night, Imbra could just make out the far ridge of the gulch, where he’d played with Tripp and Hurley and Biggs in another lifetime—a world where every child had been a runner for someone, and Imbra had simply been the fastest, for better and for worse.
In time, Paloma came out glaring, hands tucked under his armpits, cheeks shining with what Imbra allowed might be condensation, while Biggs laid out details for their trip to the space elevator. Imbra tried to feel nearly as much of a rush, a heat inside him like the kid had, and would continue to have, so long as he kept clear of the courts. But in his triumph, Imbra couldn’t even rely on a rush of oxytocin—too dangerous, the courts had decided, because of its role in defensive aggression between social groups— so Imbra settled for a nod to both and said nothing when Paloma answered with a gob of spit at his feet.
Imbra waited in the hovercraft while the kid visited his mother’s grave, one last time, before the pair was flung up to the stars.
2.
When the lava runs,
You run.
When the water runs,
You swim.
—Novuni Proverb
Imbra had tinnitus within a week in orbit, which helped tune out some of his new supervisor’s wilder conspiracy theories, but which also made keeping track of Paloma all the harder. The shipyards—an intricate, sprawling lattice of production modules dedicated to various stages of robotics and manual assembly, testing, and resource management—differed considerably from the large, open factories on Nov’s surface. As such, it had never occurred to Imbra that the decibel range in specific space modules, while tolerable to anyone with factory or garage experience, might still be wholly unsuited for long-term auditory health. His supervisor, Miha, liked to say that this was proof they were all being phased out in favor of the machines, but Miha also made no secret of his affiliation with the Path of the Vengeful Sun, so Imbra learned to take the burly man’s fatalism as lightly as possible.
“Way I hear General Asarus talking,” said Miha on Imbra’s second day, “Could be we’re all here as decoys, you know? The Allegiance sees that all our manpower’s up in orbit, so it ignores the satellites with almost no human presence. But that’s where the general gets crafty, see? She has the real weapons waiting on Hav or Isla or one of the other big moons, and she blasts Allegiance to smithereens while they’re doing the same to us up here.”
“Asarus wouldn’t use us like that,” another mechanic, Grott, hollered down-corridor. “She’s never left a man behind, and she’s not starting now. Don’t you listen to him, kitten.”
Kitten was a term from Nov’s subcontinent, where declaws had service roles waiting for them right out of the courts. The south was generally the cleaner, more urban hemisphere, where abuse still happened, but in nicer outfits and living quarters. Imbra hadn’t decided if Grott was making some sort of overture, in keeping with one of the major service roles for kittens down south, but the northerner kept his distance just in case. The beatings, at least, had ceased upon arrival, leaving only Paloma to watch for in the night.
Miha exhaled loudly at Grott’s retort.
“You think that’s leaving a man behind? To give everything in service to our people, our solar system—that’s why we’re here, y’damned southie.”
“Hell with that,” said Grott—a man of Her Loving Embrace, Imbra surmised from the tattoo on his arm when he floated a drill up-corridor. “I’m here to build things and to fix things. Don’t care who I’m building and fixing ’em for, so long as we’re all alive at the end of the day. Life’s what’s worth fighting for—mine, and yours, and even kitten’s too.”
“Go on, then,” said Miha. “Run and hide when Allegiance comes.”
“I will,” said Grott. “And you all should, too.”
Imbra saw more than heard Miha’s answering grunt. The ringing in his ears let him turn his thoughts elsewhere as a more heated argument ensued between coworkers: To the long line of bubble ships in need of supercooling assembly before central processors could be installed. To the heady stink of so many bodies in cramped, strangely sterile corridors. To the latest scuttlebutt about how the new kid, Paloma, was already hitting it off with one of the electrical technicians, Ren, a young woman of seventeen. Smart, vivacious, reckless. The kind of girl who’d listen to the kid’s sad story and maybe offer herself up as a partner in crime. A better ally for vengeance than Tripp and Hurley, to be sure.
So Imbra slept lightly, if at all—and always, after the first week, with one hand, then the other, cupped to an ear. Testing his hearing. Waiting for some sign of release. Accepting, in the meantime, the incessant hum of shipyard life. On Imbra’s recommendation to Biggs, Paloma had arrived at the shipyards with a ticket to “flight school,” an anachronism from when pilot training came first in a ship-officer’s education. Mostly, the kid learned how to handle weapons systems on a wide variety of fleet ships, and the ins and outs of basic in-flight maintenance. At first, Paloma was too young for guaranteed field placement and seemed more likely to end up with Ren on ground crew—safer than most for the remainder of the war, with an education and time to reconsider the whole of his young life before heading home.
But then the Allegiance’s next fleet arrived four weeks early, at the outskirts of the heliosphere, and took out General Asarus’s first line like a hot knife through butter.
Overnight, mechanics throughout the shipyards turned into seasoned strategists. Every spare bulkhead was filled with grids of the solar system, sketched and scratched out and sketched in again to show the strengths and weaknesses of possible attacks in 2D and 3D space. Every active flight officer suddenly be came an expert on AI resistance tactics, too, relentlessly debating programming modifications to allow for riskier, more spontaneous inflight maneuvers. And everyone, it seemed, had plenty of counsel to offer General Asarus, already in-transit to prepare for the next assault, although none would utter those same words of military wisdom to fellow grunts in their sleeping modules first.
“Ah, you wouldn’t understand,” went one excuse.
“For her ears only!” went another.
Imbra’s own ears were still ringing for unrelated reasons, and after listening to his bunkmates worry the subject of Asarus’s next moves for well over an hour, he proposed a saying from up north about backseat driving—forgetting, until the words came out, that his audience was mostly from the subcontinent, where nobody drove in the first place, so the analogy fell flat. Next, he tried a Novuni-wide standard about lava and water, which did better—but even then, his fellow mechanics disagreed about where the Allegiance stood on that figurative fight-or-flight scale. Members of Her Loving Embrace clung to the words lava and run in the ancient saying. Those on the Path, though, remained partial to swim, whether the invaders had more in common with cool water or not. Grott asked if Imbra was scared, in trying to get the rest of the men to change the subject, but Imbra shook his head.
“Just tired,” he said, turning in his bunk. But his fatigue was no match for the nervous energy of his coworkers, each buoyed by hormonal rushes almost alien to him now.
“The point is, we need to land one good kick in their teeth,” said one of the men on the Path, while Imbra tried to sleep. “Something nuclear, right in the heart of it all.”
“You volunteering to get close enough for that?” one of the Loving Embracers rep
lied. “You think their AIs would even let you, if you made the attempt?”
“Well, no, but that’s why we …”
And so minutes turned into hours. By the time his bunkmates finally started sawing in their bunks, Imbra had given up on sleep and lay awake churning over the questions even their most relentless chatter had failed to answer. He could almost visualize the gap in all their proposed strategies: A hole that no mere boast of overt aggression could ever hope to fill. The hole was about the size and shape of a cornered gulch rat down on Nov, once the ragged, prickly thing had dropped to its back—claws up, eyes red, and paws out in something like submission. Like, but not quite. That soft grey underbelly always a trap.
By morning shift, footage of the heliosphere disaster from satellites in orbit around Resu played on repeat across mess-hall monitors: a not-so-subtle reminder to get back to work, because the whole damned fleet was counting on them. The first thing Imbra noticed was the speed of the Allegiance ships, tearing into view in diamond formation precisely where they’d do the most damage to Novun Prime defenses, but then slowing quickly enough to do a couple other, brutal sweeps of the region. Within minutes, the only signs of the solar system’s outer shielding and ring guard were a few glinting pieces of debris, quickly lost to the dark. The first time the images cycled through, Miha prayed for the dead in one way, and Grott in another, while Imbra studied the grainy images with an attention like reverence. Taking notes. Hearing certain gears fall into place behind the ringing in his ears.
“Huge energy consumption,” said Grott. “Coming down from a fraction of the speed of light like that. Not to mention the jerk.”
“Possibly no organics on board,” Miha agreed. The formation pattern seemed rigid enough to suggest complete autopilot anyway.
“Even then,” said Imbra. “You gotta protect the processors.”
“Ion shielding,” said Grott. “Mini-magneto spheres keep most of the nastiness out.”
Imbra whistled. “Even more energy consumption for that set-up, though.”
His coworkers nodded, Miha rapping idly at the table as he did. At the far end of the mess, the youngsters showed up in officers’ dress—Paloma and Ren among them.