by Loren Rhoads
A grinding sound set her teeth on edge. Raena couldn’t figure out what it was, why it wouldn’t stop. Any avalanche would be quicker than this slow, steady scrape.
Then she noticed the blackness around her had lightened subtly. Someone was opening her tomb.
Of all the people who knew she was inside, only one would come after her.
If she could drop dead in an instant rather than face Thallian again, she would have counted herself the luckiest girl in the galaxy. Instead, she swiped her clammy hands against the legs of her jumpsuit, then crept as quietly as she could to the far side of the tomb’s entrance. That was as much of a hiding place as any.
Not a moment too soon, either. A beam of light flashed around the inside of the cave. It did not find her.
“Raena?” a man called. “It’s okay. I’ve come to rescue you. You’re safe. I’ve come alone.”
She recognized the voice, but couldn’t picture its owner. It wasn’t Thallian. Of course, he wouldn’t come himself. She should have expected that. He’d sent a minion: someone from the Arbiter, she thought. The voice made her think of the ship.
She held her breath until the man slipped past the slab that had sealed the tomb’s entrance.
Then she leapt on him, yanking the helmet from his head. She flung it out of arm’s reach into the darkness. She followed up with her other hand before he had a chance to react. She hit him with the Imperial torch, beating it down into his skull over and over and over until the bone gave way with a satisfying crunch and hot blood slicked her fingers.
When at last she’d expended her fury, the man’s face was unrecognizable.
Raena stood back and wiped her long hair from her face. She tasted blood on her lips and shivered. How long had it been since she’d eaten anything?
She stared down at her bloody hands. They were stripped of their color in the twilight. She opened them, turned them over, sensitive to the faint stickiness that held her fingers together. That was a sensation she hadn’t felt since the tomb slab closed …
She shook herself away from the reverie and bent to drag the jacket from the corpse. As it came loose, a little piece of metal clattered on the stone floor. Thinking it might be some kind of traveling money, Raena snatched it up.
Instead, it was a small silvery disk. She held it close to her face to examine it, smudging its surface with bloody fingerprints. They didn’t obscure the pair of crossed sword blades embossed on it.
Recognition came over her in a hot rush. This was her mother’s final gift. Fiana had given the hologram medallion to Raena for her eleventh birthday, the day she sent the girl away into the universe.
The last time Raena had seen the medallion was when she gave it to Gavin Sloane aboard the Arbiter. He had been attempting to rescue her from Thallian then, but instead she covered his escape and went to meet her fate.
She stared down at the corpse at her feet. There was no longer any way to tell if this was—or had been—Gavin Sloane.
It didn’t matter. She slung the medallion over her head and shouldered into his coat. It hung practically to her knees. She rolled back its sleeves, then stripped his body of its weapons. Finally, she retrieved the helmet from the tomb’s floor. Once she had it strapped on, she walked out into the gritty wind.
Raena opened her eyes blearily and found herself sprawled across her bunk, still naked from her shower. She sat up and rubbed her damp hair, trying to force her thoughts to clear.
This sleep thing, she thought raggedly, is just not working out. No more trying to exhaust herself. From now on, she was going to stay awake as long as possible.
She squinted at the clock and realized she could probably make it to lunch if she hurried.
Mykah had outdone himself with the cooking this time. The central part of the meal was some sort of cardboard-brown noodles, over which he ladled a complex orange sauce full of bite-sized pieces of a rainbow of vegetables.
Raena watched the others, studying their techniques for eating. Mykah twirled the long pasta on his fork, shoving in huge mouthfuls at a time. Haoun merely scooped up a forkful and sucked the noodles in like long skinny worms. Coni and Vezali chopped their food so that they could manage it much more delicately.
“I don’t get it,” Raena said as she tried to wind up some of her own pasta. “I know I’ve been away for a long time and a lot has changed, but why is the media still so obsessed with Thallian? I thought there would be rejoicing that the murderer had been punished, you all would be heroes for breaking the news, then interest would wane. Everyone would move on to the next scandal.”
Haoun and Coni exchanged a glance. Mykah looked uncomfortably down at his plate. Raena sensed she had said something truly stupid, but she was honestly puzzled. She didn’t apologize.
Coni spoke first. “You noticed that it’s not human newsfolk who are calling now?”
She hadn’t paid that much attention, but Raena nodded for Coni to continue.
“Humanity’s attention has moved on. Maybe there’s an element of embarrassment or they’re disavowing him, distancing themselves from the past, but they’re done with the story. Other people in the galaxy, though, it’s more than morbid curiosity on their part. They want to understand Thallian, all the Thallians, and the Empire, too. They want to understand what drove humans to think it was acceptable to wipe out an entire people, to imagine they could do such a thing and no one would protest.”
“Thallian was a madman,” Raena said. “I thought everyone understood that.”
“But he didn’t act alone,” Haoun reminded. “The galaxy wants to know if humans are likely to do something similar again, if another madman leads them or when someone else gets in their way. They want to know if Thallian and the Empire were an anomaly or if another of you is going to take a genocidal hatred to some other species, someone even less able to protect themselves than the Templars were, and fashion a plan for wiping them all out. If humanity is going to keep killing until they’re the only species left.”
“The galaxy is still afraid of us, all these years later?”
“They haven’t had closure for very long,” Coni explained. “Thallian’s show trial was a long time ago, but people would have been more comfortable to see him tried again, in person. They wish they’d been able to hear his justifications from his own mouth, so they could judge him themselves. It would help if they could have heard how crazy he was.”
“And they sense that someone went in and wiped out the Thallians,” Raena guessed. “More indication that humans—if the assassin was human—are inherently violent and dangerous.”
There was a strained silence at the table as everyone shared the understanding that Raena had just described herself.
“They think,” Haoun said at last, “that Thallian’s death was just one more cover-up.”
“That’s why I keep doing the interviews,” Mykah said quietly. “Because I want the galaxy to understand that Thallian was an aberration. Those of us humans who survive in the galaxy today reject the kind of xenophobia that conceived of the Templar plague. I am not like the Thallians, and by extension, other humans are not like them.”
Raena remembered Sloane’s casual sale of the Templar artifacts his men had looted from the tombworld. Humans First! bigotry wasn’t as dead as Mykah might have hoped, even if the terminology had fallen out of fashion. At least she’d been able to ensure that Gavin couldn’t go back for any more treasures.
“I didn’t know this was going to be so complicated,” Raena said. “It honestly never occurred to me to try to bring Thallian to justice. I was so frightened of him that all I could think of was ending him, erasing his power over me, and his threats … As it was, you know I barely escaped. If Eilif hadn’t turned on him at the last moment, I might still be his prisoner. Maybe, with an army, we could have swept in there and pulled the Thallians out. Or we could have all died as the ocean crashed through the domes on top of us. Surrender was never anything Thallian contemplated, at least not a
s long as I knew him. Suicide, though, if he could take all his enemies with him: he would have seen that as another path to glorious victory.”
She looked around the table, met each of their eyes. “I’m sorry I dragged you all into this.”
“I’m glad that you did,” Vezali said quickly. “I’m honored to have helped you bring justice to the Thallians. Even if it’s not the justice that the rest of the galaxy thinks they want. I have always felt that public executions are unnecessary, bloodthirsty spectacles. We should be better than that.”
“I’m honored, too,” Mykah said. “You did your part, Raena, the part only you could do. Now I’m doing mine. I’ve studied the galactic media my whole life. And I get to stand up for us scattered humans, show we’re not all bad. I’m happy.”
“I’m just along for the ride,” Haoun said.
Raena laughed along with the others, glad to have gotten the joke for a change.
She wasn’t ready to let the conversation slip away just yet, though. She caught Coni’s eyes. “You’ve studied humans,” she said. “Do you think we should be more closely controlled?”
“I’m continuing to monitor the situation,” Coni answered. Her tone was so serious that Raena was unsure if she was joking or not. She wished she could glance away to check Mykah’s reaction, but she met Coni’s eyes instead and nodded.
After lunch, at loose ends, Raena threaded her way through the Veracity’s engine, stepping over cables and ducking under conduits. It amazed her how well the old ship ran with Vezali continually pulling it apart and putting it back together.
Imperial ships like the Veracity had clunky FTL drives that generated a hyperspace bubble around the ship. It made them tricky to pilot; you had to calculate the course very carefully and broadcast your location constantly to warn other ships to get out of your way. Raena didn’t know exactly how all the moving parts worked, only the right sequence of buttons to push. She’d only ever learned to pilot well enough to run, not for the joy of flying like Ariel had.
Raena must have made enough noise coming through the engine room to alert Vezali. From somewhere overhead, the tentacled girl asked, “Can you bring me the mag spanner?”
Raena glanced around for the tool, located it hung neatly on the wall amidst the other spanners, and pulled it free.
Vezali leaned down from a crawlspace overhead and reached out a delicately pointed pink tentacle. Raena held the tool up and let Vezali find her own grip.
The girl hung suspended upside down, some tentacles wrapped around handholds inside the engine, others bracing her in place. Now that Raena counted them, she found that Vezali had an odd number of tentacles. The largest central one she referred to as her root. She used it mostly for balance, when she was upright, and something to sit on when she wasn’t moving. Raena thought it was probably a continuation of Vezali’s spine, although she couldn’t say for sure if Vezali had bones or cartilage or if she was simply held upright by muscle strength—or force of will.
Raena envied the girl her flexibility of body and the ability to have more hands or legs as a situation required. She would’ve liked the chance to spar with Vezali, just to learn more about how the girl could move, but she wasn’t sure how fragile Vezali’s species might be. Raena didn’t want to bully the crew into working out with her, so she respected the girl’s reluctance. That didn’t make her stop wishing things were different.
Vezali tinkered silently, then flipped a switch plate back into place. The Veracity seemed to take a breath. Then it began humming along happily.
Vezali flushed a little greener, clearly pleased.
“What will you do for fun once you understand how the engine works?” Raena wondered.
“Take apart the weapons systems. Then take apart the hand weapons. Then? I don’t know. There’s always the galley systems, if Mykah will let me in there, or waste disposal, or life support.”
“We’re gonna have to be grounded before you fiddle with that,” Raena teased.
“Maybe,” Vezali teased back. “Don’t you trust me?” She reached down half a dozen tools, each in a separate tentacle. Raena gathered them all awkwardly into the crook of her arm. She took them back to the wall and began to put them away. Everything in its place, Thallian used to tell her. Raena supposed that had been meant to include her.
Vezali shifted her balance and flipped over so her tentacles could flow to the deck. “Is there something I can help you with, Raena?”
Her voice, like Haoun’s, came over a translator she wore. Haoun’s was a necklace, but Vezali—having no neck, per se—wore hers as a belt around her midriff. Her species didn’t use their mouths for audible communication, but generated sound inside their bodies. The new translator gave her a high-pitched girlish voice, which Raena guessed must be pleasing to Vezali’s auditory system, wherever it was. Otherwise, Vezali was clearly clever enough to adjust it to any pitch she wanted, even though it was based on Templar technology.
Now, though, Vezali sounded eager.
Raena knew the other girl enjoyed Raena’s little technical puzzles. She was sorry to disappoint her now. “All I need today is a needle.”
“I don’t understand the word.”
“It’s a sharp sliver of metal for mending fabric.”
“Let me see.”
Raena retrieved her catsuit from where she’d left it by the hatchway.
Vezali examined it closely. “It can be mended,” she said, “but it’s going to have a scar. The fibers have broken off so jaggedly that there’s no way to reweave it.” She handed it back to Raena.
“I’ll just have to make the scar a feature,” Raena said, thinking of her own scars.
Vezali’s eyestalk bobbed in an imitation of a nod. She drifted over to her tools and rummaged through them, lifting things and leaning forward to peer underneath. Finally she came up with a miniaturized awl. “Will this do?”
“Perfect,” Raena said, plucking it delicately from Vezali’s tentacle.
Raena found that she didn’t want to return to the solitude of her cabin. Her hands still felt slightly sticky, as if from the memory of her dream.
It didn’t really happen, she reminded herself. She’d had blood on her hands many times, all sorts of shades and colors of blood, but no one had come into her tomb until Kavanaugh did—and she’d let those men escape. Why, then, wouldn’t this nightmare leave her alone?
She went to the lounge and settled in on one of the carpeted benches with her back against the wall. The room was quiet now, with all her shipmates amusing themselves elsewhere. She recognized that things were peaceful and wondered why that didn’t make her happy.
She spread the catsuit across her lap and studied the tear. Fairly quickly she discovered that mending it was beyond her meager sewing skills. She could get holes drilled through the fabric and the floss threaded through the holes, but there was no way to make it look like an adornment rather than a sloppy patch job. In the end, she chucked the magenta catsuit into the incinerator.
It was a shame. The stretchy fabric was supremely comfortable and she loved its hideous color. She supposed, at some point soon, she was going to have break down and do some shopping. One more reason to get in touch with Ariel: she had always been so much better at that kind of thing.
In the cabin she shared with Mykah, Coni sat back from her screen. It showed Raena sitting quietly in the lounge, bent over a piece of eye-piercing red fabric.
When Coni started to monitor Raena, it had been with hazy notions of continuing her research on humans. She’d thought Raena might serve as an example of the last of the Imperials, but now that Coni had pried so deeply into Raena’s Imperial record, it was clear that the little woman never actually bought into the Empire’s rhetoric. Raena didn’t even seem to have held an official rank. She was enlisted as Thallian’s aide, but the role seemed fluid and ill-defined.
While Raena had done as Thallian ordered her, he had clearly been a loose cannon, under surveillance by his superiors
even before Raena’s defection showed how precariously he held his command together.
Beyond the way Thallian isolated Raena from his crew, she had been an object of ridicule—and worse, aware of it. Everyone aboard the Arbiter seemed to know how much she meant to their commander—and exactly what she did for him behind closed doors. It meant that, on the rare occasions that she stepped out of her commander’s shadow, the crew shunned her.
Coni tried to imagine Raena’s life onboard the Arbiter. No doubt she held herself aloof from her shipmates, as she had initially done from the crew of the Veracity. At first Coni had thought that Raena interacted chiefly with Mykah because she still harbored Imperial prejudice, however unspoken, against anyone nonhuman. Now, looking over Raena’s life, Coni wondered that Raena was brave enough to speak to any of them at all. She had always been surrounded by humans—and for the most part, humanity had treated her shamefully.
Little wonder she preferred her own company to anyone else’s.
CHAPTER 5
The crew of the Veracity gathered every afternoon—Galactic Standard Time—to watch the news. Everything was available online eventually, but the crew found comfort in watching the “best news team in the galaxy” run down the biggest news stories of the day.
Raena never joined them. Rarely did the news concern itself with humanity. Most news stories referenced peoples and planets and political systems she’d never heard of. Instead of troubling her crewmates with the breadth of her ignorance, Raena took her shift in the cockpit, monitoring their flight, while the others debated the new scandals of the day.
So she hadn’t really been paying attention until the good-natured banter between the others fell into uneasy silence. The lack of voices caught her notice.
She hit the comm button. “Everything okay?”
“Come back,” Mykah said. “Everything just changed.”
A cold shiver paced up Raena’s spine. She locked everything in the cockpit down so it could be left unattended, before she strode back to the lounge.