Nophek Gloss

by Essa Hansen

  He said, “You can’t know that everything will be fine. What was the point of my acceleration if I can’t be ready to fly now?”

  It stung. Even to him it stung and felt stiff, but he refused to relent this time. He wasn’t just something for the crew to fix and coddle.

  “Stay here alone, then. With that attitude, you’re not ready to pilot the Second Wind on our test trip away. If you’re so rushed to get better, you can fly the simulations here all you want.” Taitn levered off the window and paced to the lift. “Pent’s here if you need anything while we’re gone.” Voice cold, firm, and hurt.

  CHAPTER 23

  BELONGING

  Caiden spent every hour in the simulator. He flew through craggy planet cores, conflagration clusters, industrial stations as large as Emporia, and gaseous universes with zero visibility. He dug through vessel specs and obscure records to approximate the class and mods of Threi’s rare Glasliq ship. If he was going to protect the Azura, he needed to be able to defeat or outrun it. In the sims, he chased, combatted, and fled from the Glasliq over and over until he could beat it consistently in any environment.

  He slept only brief stints, always in the Azura’s pilot seat, letting his neurons keep incubating the link with the ship. The nightmares found him every time, but they were briefer with the link active, and he cried a little less, screamed a little quieter.

  After another long rash of sims, Caiden rolled out of the simulation chair, plucked Leta’s chicory flower off the console— his reminder— and shoved it in his morphcoat pocket. Exhausted but pleased with his progress, he took the lift down to Pent’s depository and walked through its darkness to the shielding hollow. The vast space of starship wrecks and junk heaps reverberated back to him the smallest sounds, outlining isolation. The crew would be back in one hundred eighty arcminutes— not that he was counting.

  He pawed a hand through his hair. His steps were brisk but his ribs tight, breath labored. He hadn’t meant to hurt Taitn, and Laythan was still pissed from even earlier, but the crew’s judgment of Caiden’s decisions seemed more about their own history reflected in him than it was about any recklessness on his part.

  Caiden fussed with the Azura, abuzz like a bee around a black flower. He checked the engine multiple times, checked the exterior thrusters, the shielding matrices, and the integrity of his neural bond. He vented frustration into work. Responding to his exertion, the morphcoat’s sleeves dissolved and the material around his chest transformed to breezy scales. Wisps of hair stuck to his sweaty temples.

  There were many more tests to run with the ship’s universe activated, when the tiny stellar engine became a different creature. Caiden didn’t need to physically touch the florescer anymore; he grasped it through his neural link, and triggered it mentally while standing in the bay.

  The candescent opal bubble expanded out of the florescer. The rind boiled past him. Air slithered from his lungs. Threads of him were wrung out and released. The weirdness of it was lessened each time he crossed over, and in the Azura’s universe, his burdens lifted. The air tasted sweet. The rind settled, encapsulating the ship entirely within the lightseep blister of the shielding hollow.

  Thrice nested inside his machine, in the bubble of light, within the obsidian, Caiden fetched tools and happily tinkered on the Azura’s frayed nerve lines within the walls.

  Footfalls and voices reverberated in the depository outside, loud enough to be heard within the hollow. Caiden groaned. Pent had returned. He’d rather be lonely than spend more time hounded by the inquisitive and forgetful saavee. Maybe Pent would forget the ship was even here.

  There were multiple voices and many feet.

  “Crew’s here.” Caiden smiled. He put his tools away and paced the bay a few times, re-memorizing his apology to Taitn. The simulation logs and his dedication had to count for something.

  He shook his hands out, and strode across the bay.

  A shadow swaggered up the ramp toward the rind, drenched in light.

  “En! How’d the test flight go—”

  The light bloom cleared as the figure approached.

  “Hi, Freckles.” A wavy smile. Mismatched armor. Blue faceplate shoved to the top of his head, framing a pale, unmistakable face. Threi. “I’ve crossed over three hundred and sixty-nine different rinds …” He plunged a measurement device into the Azura’s rind. Dark distortions burbled as the device tasted the universe. “And as I hoped, this rind is perfect.”

  Adrenaline kicked Caiden’s guts, electrified his tired limbs, and sent him right back to that moment in the Den where he’d unwittingly let Threi see the ship’s universe. This time, Taitn wasn’t around to fly the Azura to safety.

  Caiden launched forward to close the distance. Threi pulled a glave from his thigh and fired.

  Click. Incompatible with the universe. Threi cocked his head at it then re-holstered. “Pity.”

  Caiden lunged with an uppercut. Threi’s head snapped aside and his fist barreled into Caiden’s ear. Caiden stumbled, head ringing, one side of his brain filling with heat.

  Strong. He shook his head— a mistake. Vertigo smothered him. He pushed off the spinning floor and punched at the Casthen’s blurry face. Threi blocked and slugged Caiden in the cheek, sending him sprawling.

  Blood gushed in his mouth. He choked on it and spit out a fragment of tooth.

  “Let’s just talk,” Threi said, the words honeyed with Graven intensity— but not enough to sway Caiden. Threi’s boots paced into Caiden’s doubled vision.

  Caiden jammed an elbow into the bastard’s knee, dropping him to the floor. He kicked at Threi’s windpipe, but a hand caught his boot. Threi slammed his other fist into the base of Caiden’s skull.

  Darkness brimmed. The Azura’s floor was hot and sticky. Bleeding. Caiden bubbled out swears and clawed at consciousness. Fighting off nightmares had accustomed him to this sea: the seeping black, the nearby threat. He sensed movement and forced one eye open to a skewed view. Threi dragged him by one foot across the bay.

  He tried to choke out a word, but his body was out of reach. There was a spark of him in his skull, swallowed by another black wave. He sensed an impact and his own crumpling limbs as Threi tossed him to the corner by the cockpit.

  The man slithered into the pilot’s seat and slid it forward to the twitch drive pads. The engine growled.

  No … Caiden couldn’t feel his body but maybe he could grasp the Azura’s. His thoughts flailed with the neural link. The darkness surged, topped with sparkles of pain. He was flooded with sensations of thrust and torsion. Caiden razored his focus on the florescer, willing it off, imagining its song ending.

  The rind collapsed and shrank, its edge purling back through the bay. Caiden coiled against the wall, ready to spring. When the rind swept over Threi, the man spasmed in surprise, head jerking out of the cradle. Caiden lunged to grab the back of Threi’s skull and continued the motion with a fistful of hair and mask, slamming Threi’s forehead into the console rim.

  They both tangled on the floor. Threi grappled. Metal smashed into Caiden’s windpipe. The man’s arm squeezed from behind, armor digging in.

  Caiden twisted and pried while his free hand scrabbled for the glave on Threi’s thigh. Static throbbed in his vision. A buzz of pale noise. His fingers wrapped around cold metal. He whipped his forearm up, pointing the glave behind his shoulder at the blur of the Casthen’s face.

  Threi ripped the glave from Caiden’s hand, which loosened the choke hold. Caiden elbowed the man’s stomach, his bone cracking against armor, but the choke loosened more. He wrenched Threi’s wrist and twisted free, spun the arm around to push Threi to the ground. Instinct-fast, the man’s momentum shifted. He rolled, tossing Caiden into the wall.

  Blood spurted into Caiden’s mouth as he bit his cheek. Tones rang in his head. Threi was a blur, still holding the glave, pacing toward Caiden with a hateful stride. Playtime was over.

  He had no chance alone against the Enforcer.

&n
bsp; But Caiden wasn’t alone.

  Azura. He tried to stand, steadying against the wall, while his mind flailed at the neural controls. The ship’s scalar gravity was off. He held the nodal pattern he wanted in his mind and willed her gravity back on.

  Threi, two paces away.

  Snap! The initiation pounded Caiden’s chest, knocked air from his lungs. Threi snagged midstride, his waist caught in a bundle of gravity nodes. Caiden pushed off the wall into a lunge, snatched the glave from Threi’s hand, and rolled past. He sprang to his feet into a slam of vertigo but managed to raise the glave against the back of Threi’s bare neck.

  “You don’t have your shield, I can tell this time,” he said between panting wheezes. Threi would’ve been wearing a collar-type glave to generate a shield.

  The man raised his hands and backed away, turning to face him.

  Caiden added, “I’m stupid enough to fire this inside just to see your brains on the wall.”

  A smile stretched Threi’s too-white, too-perfect face. “Hear me out, pup.”

  Caiden trained the glave at Threi’s chest. Sparkles teemed in his vision, and vertigo threatened if he moved. Shoot him.

  But somewhere in Threi’s head were the coordinates of the Casthen Harvest, Caiden’s best route to Çydanza.

  Threi yanked the skewed blue mask off and mussed a tangle of short dark hair into snarls. A purple welt crowned his forehead. He looked Caiden over. “Accelerated already? A boy after my own heart.”

  Caiden forced a wry, spiteful smile. “You’ve accelerated fighting?”

  There was no way a human was that fast and strong while looking no older than Taitn. Threi had hawkish features, clean-shaven, intelligent, and sculpted. His skin was flawless white except for what looked like a thick dusting of even whiter freckles. Stretched like the reverse of wrinkled age, the tautness of forced youth. Something about his features looked eerily familiar, as the Dynast Prime’s had. Attractive due to a hidden peculiarity. Repulsive because of the same.

  “I’ve accelerated everything.” Threi’s amicable smile sheathed the daggers in his eyes. He lowered his arms, cracked his neck, and reclined against a wall. “Relax. Just listen. You’re not going to shoot me. I’m your key to defeating the Casthen, and you’re my key.”

  Caiden snorted. “And why would you want to defeat your own organization?”

  Threi shrugged. “I’m only going to say this once, so listen up. I’m Dynast Arbiter Threi—” He seemed to cut off, or drew himself up, chest filled with the air for more words he didn’t expel. Muscles twitched in his jaw as he continued, “Infiltrated into the Casthen as the highest-ranked Enforcer, embroiled with Cartographer freethinkers. Without the Casthen Prime’s dictatorship, their operations can be brought back to moral standards— myself in control, aligned with Cartographer aid and values. Then you can leave a hero, better than you ever were before. Everyone wins.”

  Caiden leaned shakily against the pilot seat, glave still trained on the madman. How many of these claims were lies?

  “Seriously, pup. Put that down. I’m stronger and faster than you.”

  “More reason to kill you. I can shoot before you get up.”

  “Your heart’s stopping you.” Threi tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Not that you’re too good-hearted to kill me— you proved you weren’t when you tried to shoot me the last two times. It’s the dark part of you that won’t kill me. The darkness and violence you were bred for. You want the Casthen destroyed as much as I do.”

  Bred for …

  Threi said, “You shot at me twice, now I’m offering to point your glave in the right direction, at Çydanza’s heart. You’ll never find the Casthen Harvest without guidance.”

  “No one’s been able to kill her before.”

  Threi’s eyes sparkled. “They didn’t have the Azura. Or you.”

  Dizziness flamed through Caiden’s injured brain as he tried to think. If the Azura would help him kill Çydanza, that was more reason to defend it fiercely. “That’s what you were trying to learn from the Dynast Prime; where my ship was.”

  “Sneaky, are you?” A simper stretched Threi’s white face. “Encased in lightseep, like insect in amber. Took a lot of old Emporia blueprints to solve that riddle.”

  “Why me? You need an expendable part in your plan?”

  “Oh no. I need a valuable part in my plan. The irony is delicious: we’ll kill Çydanza with a blade of her own design. You see, you’re more Casthen than I, as much as you’ll hate to admit it. You belong with the Casthen, but not because you were Casthen property.”

  “Bred …” Chill sheeted through him.

  “That’s right.” Threi closed his eyes again and wriggled more comfortably against the wall. “You were meant for so much more than your mechanic’s life, or even a passager life. It was an oversight that mixed up shipments and sent Çydanza’s last batch of Paraborn mosaics to CWN82— you included.”

  The Paraborn interbreeding project for private military operations. The Cartographers’ database had been unable to parse most of his genetic makeup.

  “I was engineered.”

  “Çdanza might as well be your mother, having conceived of your design and use. Child and product. You’re Casthen through and through, pup. And I bet you thought you were worthless and discarded?”

  Clutching the pilot’s seat, Caiden lowered onto his knees. His arm burned, glave still pointed at Threi.

  The man continued, his rich voice filling up the bay. “You belong with us. When Çydanza finally tracked the shipment, she deployed me to recover the children, but you’d already been sent to slaughter. I got to RM28 too late, and crafty passagers tailed me into the system, then began to raid the gloss. You see, it was you after all, in a way, who exposed our whole operation to the multiverse.”

  Caiden’s body was numbing, ribs cinching tight. “What was I engineered for? What’s my purpose?” The questions came out mangled, dragged through the thorns of his fear.

  Threi chose a new smile from his arsenal, one that was half snarl. “Be proud. You’re a soldier.”

  Caiden lowered his shaking arm to his lap. If Threi had found him on the nophek planet instead of Laythan, or if the shipment of infants had arrived where it meant to, he would have grown up as a Casthen … through and through, as Threi said.

  He maundered on. “And not just any dumb lug with a glave. You’re the last survivor of our first successful attempt at breeding Graven soldiers.”

  Freckles.

  “We wanted superior aptitude, senses, healing, and the ability to command obedience and inspire love even from an enemy. The best of however many xenids they could cram into one body. It’s almost impossible to propagate Graven genes artificially, for a number of reasons— especially the kind you came from. The Dynast family is horribly inbred because of this problem. Çydanza’s scientists have been toiling to find the right cocktail of bits that would let the Graven essence stick. Meanwhile Abriss— the end of the Dynast line— is experimenting in a different direction, with gene transfection. Çydanza pulled ahead in this arms race when she succeeded with your perfect batch.”

  Caiden’s mind reeled, not helped by the head injury.

  During his Appraisal at ten years old, the overseers had assessed his worth and placement. Fit, no disease, healthy brain, fine inclinations, unusual intelligence and aptitude. Strange to get one this clean.

  He had thought they meant how thoroughly he’d washed. And when they seemed to approve of him, his heart leapt to his throat. “I— I’m good?” he squeaked. The better words wouldn’t form on his tongue: valuable, worthwhile, functional, proven to belong.

  The two had looked at him for a long moment, really looked.

  “Perfect,” one said.

  Perfect.

  That moment of recognition had filled him with vigor and purpose for years. But his very question, the Graven intent of it, had coerced the answer he wanted once they looked at him and the connection was made
.

  Caiden stared at Threi’s face, the dust of white freckles more pronounced when he knew what to look for. “Are you a product of Çydanza’s design too?”

  “Heavens, no. picked me up when I was your age. I survived within the Casthen maw because I learned how to fill in cracks faster than she could break me, and I rose in the ranks by bullying my Graven way around.”

  “But you’re not perfect either, are you? Not like Abriss.” That sent a crack through Threi’s nonchalance for a moment. Caiden continued, “You’re Graven enough to snag attention in a crowd and have your orders obeyed, but I saw you having to work for it. And you can’t influence me much, can you? Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this chat.”

  Threi’s nostrils flared, a nerve struck. “That’s right, Graven Paraborn pup. You’re Graven enough that I can’t kick you about like I can everyone else, and it’s delightfully refreshing. I’m enjoying the challenge of persuading you without using genetic force. So please— wriggle harder.”

  Graven enough …

  Caiden scrubbed at tingling sweat on his freckled cheeks. Memories unspooled. The gloss deal with Laythan, the crew agreeing to take him off the planet … they could easily have taken the gloss and the ship and left the useless kid. Then Taitn letting him fly when he’d asked directly … all the questions they’d answered … protecting him … Panca helping him when he’d screamed … taking him through the acceleration, even though the gloss was sold … the ship repairs …

  Am I just a piece-of-shit Casthen cur, cruising through life, carving reality to my whims as I go?

  Imagery and phrases replayed in his head with new meaning, unraveling the loving care he’d imagined from the crew. Despite all the ups and downs and the burden he was, he’d evoked enough affection and loyalty for them to keep him in their orbit. He recalled moments on his home planet where a shouted outburst had pacified someone too easily, or a glare had made bullies shy. There were instances where his Graven effect might’ve made life a little easier in ways he hadn’t realized were different. And Leta. What if—