Coral smiled thinly. Her eyes shone with wisdom beyond her years. "I do not deal with magic, Leona, daughter of lions. Only with the holy light of the cosmos. That light shines inside you, and it burns bright."
One by one, the others spoke. Many chose to return to their homes, too fearful of the battles ahead. Most had never been to space, had spent their lives hiding in their hovels, cruel aliens living around them. They had become like mice, too timid to leave their hole.
But some joined Leona. Some would become warriors, dreamers, and maybe Earthlings again.
She looked at them. Eighteen recruits, that was all. Eighteen new mouths to feed. Eighteen soldiers for humanity, most already old and bent but still ready to fight. Eighteen lights in the shadow.
"The Heirs of Earth have only a handful of starships," Leona said. "And not much money. It will be crowded. It will be a hard life. Sometimes you'll be hungry and go for days with barely any food. You'll all have to work—cleaning, fixing what you can, tending to the young and old. Every man, woman, and child does their part. Yes, a hard life, but a noble one. And someday, we'll walk under Earth's blue skies."
And someday you'll be with us again, Bay, she thought. Someday you'll return to me, my lost little brother.
A buzzing sounded above, tearing her away from her thoughts. She looked up to see a Peacekeeper drone.
A machine gun unfurled from its underbelly, aiming at her.
Leona opened fire, peppering the drone with bullets. It crashed down and burned, but already she heard more buzzing in the distance.
"They found us," Leona said. "Again—run!"
They raced down alleyways, through an archway, and out into the open desert. Rocky mountains soared ahead, rising toward the stars. The rings that surrounded Til Shiran arched across the sky, silver in the night. The humans ran, sand swirling around them.
More drones appeared above. The machines opened fire, and bullets slammed into the sand. One bullet hit a human, and the man fell, dead before he hit the ground. Leona raised Arondight and fired the railgun. She took out one drone, but more kept flying in. Peacekeeper tanks rumbled out from the city, remarkably fast for their size, raising clouds of sand.
"Faster!" Leona shouted. "We're almost there!"
They raced across the sand, dodging bullets. A tank fired, and a shell exploded overhead, raining shrapnel. In the firelight Leona saw it: The ISS Nantucket, her starship.
She was a small starship, about the size of a yacht from old Earth's seas. She was old, rusty, barely more than scrap metal. But Leona loved the Nantucket with all her heart. She reached the small ship, knelt, and fired Arondight at the Peacekeepers.
"Into the ship!" she shouted. "Get in, fast!"
The other humans leaped inside, even the elders. Leona and Coral entered last.
A shell slammed into the hull.
The ship tilted. The hull's shields dented.
"Muck!" Leona cried.
She raced through the cluttered starship, leaped onto the bridge, and took her seat at the helm.
With roaring fire, rumbling engines, and clouds of sand, the Nantucket rose from the desert. Drones buzzed around the starship, peppering the shields with bullets.
"Is it like this at every world you Inheritors visit?" Coral said.
"This one was easy!" Leona said. "Want to be helpful? Man the cannon! Fire on anything that moves!"
The weaver took position at the gunnery station. Her white tattoos began to glow again, and her eyes shone.
Leona kept tugging the yoke, raising the ship through the sky. In a previous lifetime, the Nantucket had been a starwhaler, used for hunting the giant beasts who flew in space. The Inheritors had bought her third-hand, cheap and rundown, and refitted her, installing shields, battle-class engines, and heavy artillery. Tonight the rusty ship rumbled, lighting the sky with fire. The city of Turmaresh sprawled below, a hive of sandstone and flesh and misery.
One of the tanks below aimed its cannon skyward.
Leona released a bomb. An instant later, the tank below exploded.
"Incoming ships!" Coral cried.
Leona saw them. Several Peacekeeper vessels were flying from each side, lights flashing.
"Terrorist vessel, surrender!" boomed a voice on a megaphone. "Land now, or we will blast you from the—"
"Fire on them, damn it!" Leona cried.
Coral opened fire. On both sides of the Nantucket, cannons shot out spinning shells. The inferno roared across the Peacekeeper vessels. One of the enemy ships managed to fire two missiles before crashing. Leona spun the Nantucket around, grimacing. She fired a hailstorm of bullets from the Gatling gun on the prow, destroying one missile in midair.
The second missile hit the Nantucket. The hull dented. The ship rocked. The people in the hold screamed.
Leona raised her prow, kicked the engines into full afterburner, and soared toward the stars. Coral kept firing the side cannons. It only took a minute to breach the atmosphere, but it felt like a lifetime.
The Nantucket soared into space, rattling, wounded. Several Peacekeeper ships followed. Leona groaned. The Inheritor fleet was still a light-year away. She was alone here.
"Strap in, boys and girls!" she said. "This'll get bumpy."
As missiles flew toward them, Leona hit the warp drive.
She winced.
Like any starship worth its salt, the Nantucket was installed with an azoth crystal deep in its engine. Azoth was among the rarest, costliest material in the galaxy. Unless you limited yourself to wormholes, azoth made interstellar travel possible. Wormholes were like a subway system back on old Earth. A starship with an azoth engine was like having your own car. The way diamonds could refract light, azoth crystals could bend spacetime itself, the fabric of reality. Azoth crystals weren't just rare, found on only a handful of worlds; they also had to be cut by experts, calibrated down to the exact atom. When their angles were perfect, they could warp spacetime into a bubble around a starship, allowing it to fly faster than light.
There was only one downside.
Bending spacetime didn't work very well near planets.
A planet like Til Shiran, a massive world of rock and sand, itself bent spacetime by sheer force of gravity. Using an azoth engine nearby was like lighting a match at a gas station. Sometimes you were lucky. Sometimes you ended up as a pile of ashes.
At least the Peacekeepers won't be this crazy, Leona thought as her azoth drive kicked in.
Spacetime twisted around them like a wet towel.
Leona screamed.
All dimensions of reality swirled around her.
We're too close. Too close to bend reality. We—
She was suddenly ten feet tall, then flat in a two-dimensional world. Reality ballooned and she was everywhere at once. Her consciousness floated outside the starship, and then she felt herself inside the dashboard, inside the machinery. She tried to close her eyes, could not. Outside, the starlight curved. The planet unfolded into four dimensions, a curved cylinder tracing its orbit around the star.
She floated through time.
She was there again. Ten years ago. A seventeen-year-old girl with a swelling belly.
She approached the wedding arch with her groom. It was a sunny, green world, but she was scared and cold. Jake Hawkins was only a year older, a somber boy, the son of an Inheritor captain. Jake had not planned to plant life inside her, but every human life was precious. They would keep the baby. They would keep their honor. Both a priest and rabbi married them, remnants of their lost Earth faiths. The bride and groom sealed their love with a kiss, and Leona could practically imagine their parents with shotguns in the audience.
Yes, a shotgun wedding, she thought, gazing into Jake's blue eyes. But I love this boy. I love him so mucking much.
She drank. She danced. She had been married for only an hour when the strikers swooped from the sky.
Leona screamed.
Her father fought them. So many died. She grabbed a gun, and
she fired, tried to stop them, but they ripped off Jake's legs, and he reached out to her, screaming, and Leona wept, wanting to save him, and she kissed his forehead as he died in her arms. A scorpion tore open her leg, but Leona barely felt the pain.
The Inheritors fought them hard. Their guns shook the sunlit world. The starships rumbled, and explosions lit the sky like fireworks. Leona knelt in the devastation, in the ruin of her wedding, clutching her belly as the blood flowed down her thighs, as the life inside her extinguished.
Weeping, she lay on the grass. She looked up. And she saw her there.
A girl.
A human girl with blue hair, with white skin, with madness in her eyes.
"Jade," Leona whispered, reaching out to her. "My friend. What did they do to you?"
The girl smiled and scorpions danced around her.
The stars burst into straight lines.
The Nantucket stormed forward through space, moving at millions of kilometers per second.
The desert planet vanished behind them.
Leona took deep, shaky breaths, finding herself back in the present. Once more, she was twenty-seven years old, an officer in the Heirs of Earth. Once more, the wound on her leg was just an old scar, a groove along her outer thigh.
The spacetime bubble had formed. She shivered. We're alive. We escaped.
Yet tears still filled Leona's eyes, and she placed a hand on her flat belly.
She had never used an azoth engine so close to a planet. She had not been ready for this. Not to gaze back through time. Not to see that day again.
"Leona!" Coral approached her. "Are you all right? You're trembling."
Leona looked into the weaver's purple eyes. She looked nothing like Leona. While Leona had olive-toned skin, Coral had skin like rich mahogany. While Leona had curly brown hair, Coral had silvery hair like flowing moonlight. But Coral was young, still full of life and light, a new warrior for Earth. Eager and hopeful.
So much like I was.
Leona looked down at a wound on Coral's leg, perhaps one that would leave a scar.
Like the scar I carry.
Leona rose to her feet. "The autopilot will keep the ship on its course. The Peacekeepers are too far behind to catch us now. Get some rest."
Before Coral could say more, Leona left the bridge.
She hurried through the hold, ignoring the passengers. A few spoke to her, offering to tend to her wounds. Leona barely heard them. She walked through the ship's cluttered hold, through a doorway, and into her cabin. She closed the door behind her, leaned against it, and took several long, shuddering breaths. Her eyes stung. For a long moment, Leona could merely stand still, eyes closed.
"I miss you, Jake," Leona whispered. A tear rolled down her cheek.
Through the porthole, she saw the starlight streaming, stretched into lines as the Nantucket flew through warped space. Leona stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. She let the water flow over her, washing off the blood, the sand, the shame. She let the water run so hot it nearly burned her. Pain was good. Pain helped her forget.
Finally she stepped out from the shower. She bandaged her wounds with numb fingers. She stood naked in the steam, gazing into the mirror. The scar ran down her thigh, a deep groove, a memory of that day. A scorpion claw had given her that scar.
She looked at her tattoos. On her left arm, she had tattooed a line from Moby Dick. She owned a single page from that old novel. She had read and reread it countless times, had inked words from that page onto her skin.
I love to sail forbidden seas.
Years ago, Leona had found that single page in an antique shop. A page from a real Earth book, printed on actual paper from an Earth tree. It was two thousand years old, had been preserved through the generations. The line from that page symbolized Leona's dream to someday return. To see Earth, to sail upon the seas, the captain of a sailing ship rather than a starship.
On her right arm, she had tattooed three hearts. One heart for each life the scorpions had taken from her. One heart for her mother, slain when Leona had been only a child. A second heart for her husband, slain on their wedding day ten years ago. A third heart for that child who had grown inside her, the child she had lost.
An albino scorpion had devoured her husband; she had never buried Jacob's bones. Her child was buried at sea. Her mother had burned. She had no mementos, no places of mourning. Only these tattoos.
"I'm an Inheritor, a warrior for Earth," she whispered at her reflection. "But I'm also a widow. Childless. Motherless. And so scared."
She dressed, her fingers stiff. She stepped back into her bedchamber, approached her safe, and opened it. Inside, she kept her treasures. A model sailing ship in a bottle. A seashell on a chain, an actual seashell from Earth. And that single page from Moby Dick. Treasures of the sea. Finally a smile broke through Leona's tears.
"Someday I'll see them," she whispered. "The blue seas of Earth. I'll sail the forbidden seas, the sunlight on my back, the water all around me, the wind in my sails. Still you sing to me, Earth. Still you call me home."
She closed the safe, sealing the bottle and page inside. But she placed the seashell amulet around her neck. She and this seashell shared a common ancestor. Both had evolved in the waters of Earth. This cold shell against her skin was a connection to home. No human had seen Earth in millennia, but Leona wore a piece of that world against her chest, comforting and smooth. She lay on her bed, gazed out the porthole, and tried to imagine seeing the blue marble in the distance, its wind singing for her sails.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Another human.
Rowan trembled. She could barely breathe.
There was another human in Paradise Lost.
She huddled in the darkness. The duct rattled as she shook. She had not met another human since she was two years old. Sometimes she wondered whether any others even lived at all.
But he was here.
She had seen him.
It was real.
"You sure you didn't just see a hologram?" Fillister asked. The robotic dragonfly buzzed beside her, wings fluttering.
"I'm sure!" Rowan nodded. "I mean, yes. I saw a hologram of a human too. A woman. After all, I was peeping into the virtual reality brothel. But I also saw a real human, and—"
"Blimey, you were peeping into the VR brothel?" Fillister frowned—as much as a robot could frown, at least.
Rowan groaned and rolled her eyes. "Oh, shush. I wasn't peeping to look at . . . that." Her cheeks flushed. "You know patrons drop scryls there all the time. How do you think I buy your gear oil?"
Fillister shuddered. "Bloody hell." The dragonfly buzzed around her, grazing the walls of the duct. "Row, another human? Really? The bloody scorpions killed them all. We were both there. We saw it. Only we escaped."
Rowan grabbed him, nearly crushing the tiny robot. "Don't you say that!" She glared at Fillister. "Don't you ever say that. My sister lived. And other humans have been surviving too. The Heirs of Earth are out there, and—"
"The Heirs of Earth are a myth," said Fillister. "A group of human warriors knocking about space? With guns? With starships?" He laughed. "Look, squire, I love me some humans. A human built me. And you're human, and you're me best mate. You're family, you are. You know I'm in your corner. But Earth was destroyed so long ago. The Earthstone is all that's left. And if any other humans did survive, they must be in hiding. Not visiting bloody space stations."
Rowan bristled. "I'm in a space station!"
"That's only because that smuggler caught us and sold us to a pet shop. And we've been hiding in the ducts since. We're not knocking about the bars and brothels here. Well, at least not when they're open." He shuddered again. "I cannot believe you bought me oil with scryls collected off a brothel floor. That's bloody disgusting, it is."
"It's either that, or I grease your gears with snail slime."
"Brothel scryls will do."
Rowan took a few moments to collect herself. She breath
ed deeply until her trembling eased. Every instinct screamed to flee. She wanted to crawl toward the top of the space station, to curl up by the porthole that gazed upon the stars. Or she wanted to crawl to the bottom of Paradise Lost, where the ducts met great rumbling engines, and gears churned, their teeth larger than her. She wanted to move as far as possible from this new human.
"For years, I wanted to meet somebody else," Rowan said. "For years, I watched movies about humans, read books about humans, listened to human singers. I even wrote my own movie scripts about humans—well, humans and dinosaurs. But now a real human is here, and I'm terrified."
Fillister nodded. "Humans in movies and books can't see you. Can't talk to you. Can't disappoint you. For years, you thought humans are brilliant. You're worried this one won't be."
Rowan bit her lip, then remembered her crooked teeth and covered her mouth.
No. She would not run. She would perhaps never see a human again.
Maybe he can take me away, she thought. Maybe he has a starship. Maybe he'll take me to another world. Maybe I can finally feel grass beneath my feet, sunlight on my skin. Just like the movies. I can even film my own movies, become a director like my heroes.
Yes, for years Rowan had dreamed of leaving Paradise Lost, of meeting other humans, of making movies. But for fourteen years now, she had remained inside these steel ducts. The thought of flying away, of seeing real grass and mountains—not just on a tiny screen but huge before her—spun her head.
She ignored her fear.
She crawled through the ducts.
She returned to the brothel and peeked through the vent, hoping to see the human again. She cringed. The human was gone. A scaled, aquatic alien had rolled his aquarium into the brothel. He was busy fertilizing holographic eggs.
Rowan crawled above another brothel room, only to see an alien insect—it was larger than her—fluttering between two holographic flowers, groaning as he pollinated them.
She approached another brothel room, peeked inside, then shuddered. She scampered away before she could see too much. The giant snail from the toilet was there. Seeing his Seductive Slugs magazine in the washroom stall had been bad enough.
The Heirs of Earth (Children of Earthrise Book 1) Page 11