“Wow,” I say. “A two-node system. Living in luxury.”
It’s a stupid thing to say, and it gets me more glares from around the room. But if these folk don’t glare at you, you must not be screwing up enough. Everyone in the Thuzerian Ruling Council has been a monk, abstaining from all fun for at least fifty years by Imperial reckoning, sometimes seventy, one hundred—in the case of a few long-lived sentients, one hundred fifty. Everyone in this smelly, old, cold rock chamber that predates the Second Empire.
Military monks, I should clarify. A handful of them even fought in the Dark Zone, and many of them fought against the Empire at some point. Abstaining from everything except violence.
And while I don’t know much about religion, I know veterans. Once you’ve been in battle, you get terribly pragmatic.
They’re adding up all the lives they have on the ground, the lives on their ships, versus one life.
Mine.
I look at the readings. “That’s five Imperial dreadnoughts. Or Resistance dreadnoughts, maybe we should call them. Slightly smaller than what you have. They’ll carry thirty gunships and three hundred Moths each, if it comes down to that.”
“So they are keeping the Imperial munitions works running,” says another of the Thuzerian council, a woman who sounds almost human, though you can’t tell through those masks. “They must be, to mount this attack.”
“They’ve got it all running,” I say, from my position on the floor, next to their table. “Full complement. There’s no way to crew five whole dreadnoughts without bringing the vats online.”
I hear several sharp intakes of breath, from those monks who breathe through a mouth. John Starfire pledged to shut down the vats. If he hasn’t, he has an infinite number of new soldiers.
“We must sue for some kind of parley,” says Father Rixinius. He’s an elderly Grevan, tall and too thin, and to most sentients he looks like a thing out of a nightmare, with those deep-set red-framed eyes, and those incisors that hang over his bottom lip, sticking out from underneath his ceremonial bone mask, carved deep with various curling designs.
“You knew you would have to pick a side.”
I turn around to tell Paxin to be quiet, but she’s on the other side of the table, somehow managing to look more commanding than me despite her condition.
Paxin is the default leader of the refugees we picked up on our mission to Shadow Sun Seven, a writer whose work helped inspire the Resistance, but had the unfortunate DNA of pure Earth stock, and fell in line with John Starfire’s purge of the blueblood humans. Right now she’s looking a little better than she was in the mines, but she’s still hollow-cheeked and sickly. She coughs into the stump of her right hand, still tries to cover her mouth with fingers the Resistance cut off.
Father Rixinius waits until Paxin’s coughing subsides, then says, slowly, “The Masked Faith cannot begin a war with the Resistance, for the same reasons we could not ever truly declare war against the Empire.”
“Which reasons are—” Paxin breaks into more coughing.
“Our dreadnoughts are spread out, doing the work of God throughout the galaxy,” says Rixinius. “We have called muster, but it will take time for them to return, to gather. It will take time to arm them fully. None of our ships have a full complement of shards, or short-range fighters. The Resistance knows this.”
“You have a moral duty. You never took a stand when it mattered,” Paxin says. “You never sided with the Empire or the Resistance.”
“We also don’t own a thousand factory moons!” he growls through that mask.
I wish Jaqi were here. She’s good at talking people into crazing things. “It’s all right,” I say. “There will be no grand military stand. Let me speak.”
“I won’t let you offer yourself as some sacrifice, Araskar,” Paxin says.
“That’s nice of you,” I say. “Didn’t know you know my name.”
“Of course I know who you are,” Paxin says. “We know all of you who set us free. The seven: you, the Zarra Z and the fallen X, and Kalia and Toq of Formoz, and Jaqi, and—”
“Ai, enough,” I say. She was about to name Scurv, which is a bad idea around here.
“Don’t give your life away,” she says.
I almost say For once, I don’t want to.
I walk around the ancient table to the message relay controls.
I should feel more at peace. I’ve wanted to die for a few good years now, and here I am about to get my wish.
But I’ve just learned to live. It wasn’t three days ago that Jaqi surprised me with . . . something. I don’t know what else to call it.
I thought she hated me; apparently she felt tenderly enough toward me to make love. And then sleep. I slept in peace, next to someone I cared for. If that’s life, I want it.
Father Rixinius leaves his seat and moves to stand by me, at the control center for their war table, which doubles, of course, as a message center. He doesn’t look at me. Of course not.
And we send the hail.
The screen crackles. Here we go. I’m ready to face the big bastard, John Starfire, and get this over with.
And the screen crackles again and I see—
The woman I killed.
Thin face, green eyes narrowed in that calculating way, and lips pursed as she’s thinking, and for a few full seconds I swear to God I’m seeing Rashiya, that I didn’t actually put my sword through her and take her memories, that somehow the Resistance found a way to bring her back, or to build a template out of her, and . . .
No. Recognition snaps into place with the memories I took from my former lover. Not Rashiya at all. I see these lips moving, begging Please, I don’t want my daughter’s body to show up dead on the screens. I remember—as Rashiya—ignoring the pleas. You really don’t understand what this feels like? I can’t stop your father, but we’ve done all this so you could have a normal life, Rash!
Stop overreacting, Mom. I can keep my wits.
Rashiya’s mother.
She’s almost as famous as her husband in her own right; Aranella, the legends went among my crew, was a territorial boss who risked everything to take her division of mixed agricultural and security crosses against their bosses, and steal shipments of food and munitions to create the Resistance. She and her husband John Starfire had a good life, or so the propaganda went, but they had to act to stop injustice.
But that’s not how I know Aranella. I know her as a woman divided; she stole and fought and sold her life to the Resistance, but all on the condition that her children would stay out of it. And I know her through the one daughter who defied that. The Resistance is in my blood, Mom. I’m not going to go the rest of my life knowing that I didn’t fight.
“Aranella?”
She looks long on me, checking every one of my features, following the jigsaw scars across my face.
I wonder if I slurred again, so I open my mouth to ask one more time.
She interrupts. “You’re Araskar.”
“Yes.” I motion toward the tall masked figure behind me. “With Father Rixinius, acting head of the Thuzerian Ruling Council.”
Her eyes flicker to Rixinius. “The Order of the Thuzerians is protecting war criminals.”
“Those you refer to as war criminals have, for the most part,” Father Rixinius says, and I feel his red eye on me, “sought refuge among the Masked Faith, by our code to protect the innocent. They were unjustly forced to work in the dangerous conditions of a hyperdense oxygen mine.”
“What gives you the right?”
“The Sanctuary Acts.”
Aranella could say a few things here. She could come on strong and say that the Resistance doesn’t observe the Sanctuary Acts. They were ratified by the Empire she’s just destroyed, after all. Or she could question whether the Thuzerians, a military organization, can claim refugee-right under the Sanctuary Acts.
She won’t say any of that.
I know her too well.
“Including him?
” She motions to me.
Rixinius looks long on me, red eyes gleaming through the mask. “No,” he finally says, “not him.” He hastens to add, “Though he distinguished himself greatly by bringing the refugees to the Masked Faith.”
Aranella waits a moment longer, never taking her eyes off me. “I know what you are trying to do, Thuzerian. I know who you’ve taken in here, and I should blast your world to pieces. You are only preserving, lengthening the life of the Empire’s injustices.”
“Says the people who’ve brought all the vats back online, and kept the Navy running,” I say. The response comes fast. Too fast. Easy, Araskar. Despite the memories, you’re not a teenage girl sparring with her mother.
“Who are you protecting, besides this one?” Aranella asks.
Rixinius’s eyes flicker toward Paxin, who is standing out of range of the message, coughing into the stump of her hand. He says, again, “All of them, save this one warrior, qualify under the Sanctuary Acts.”
The unspoken offer hangs.
“Very well,” Aranella says. “As our first condition of negotiation, I insist on the transfer of this cross, who names himself Araskar, to our custody.”
“And your other conditions?” Rixinius asks.
Aranella purses her lips, thinking. The same way she would think when working out a fight between Rashiya and her sisters. “Fifty million in cash, or in a suitable hard-matter equivalent. Water, ore—we can work out the details later. And a pledge of nonaggression against the Resistance.”
“In exchange,” Rixinius says, “you agree to abide by the Sanctuary Acts in all dealings with the Faith. You will not attempt to reclaim refugees. Other than him.”
“It’s a good thing you have something I want, monk,” Aranella says, looking at me.
“You will abide.”
“I will abide. Your little pack of war criminals are safe.”
They dither just a bit more. The prisoner and fund exchange will take place at a neutral point beyond the orbit of this planet’s moon, in what is technically not native Thuzerian territory. The dreadnoughts will all retreat except one.
This time tomorrow, I’ll be in Aranella’s hands.
Another of Rashiya’s memories surfaces. One of their endless fights about her joining the Resistance. I would never forgive myself if you fell in battle. I would never forgive you, never forgive your father.
Mom, Rashiya said, angry to be having this discussion yet again, we would be the wrong people to hate. Just find the person who killed me and throw them out an airlock.
I go to the window, stare out at the planet. It’s raining. Sheeting cold gray drops. It’s winter here. The curtains of rain sweep off the sea, batter the huts of the refugee camp.
Living sounded so good.
-3-
Jaqi
IN THE DARKNESS, all I hear is our breathing.
Quiet. Sometimes I like the quiet, but too often it reminds me of space—of the feeling that if it’s too quiet, and too cold, you might have lost atmos. I think of that one moment I was out in the killing vacuum, the moisture in my body instantly freezing. So I twist around in the sheets, next to Araskar, press up against him, just to make a little noise.
Araskar shifts a bit against the pillow too. The running lights of the ship flicker outside, shine through the window onto his face. Plenty of ridges over the face, the imperfect scars where he’s been pieced back together.
I touch the scars that jigsaw across what was the bridge of his nose. “This why you chose your name?” I ask. “Araskar?”
“Ha, no,” he says. Under the covers, his hand rests on my belly. A rough hand, with all them calluses from swordfighting, but still feels nice on my soft belly. “Not at all. I was with my friend Barathuin, and we were supposed to pick names, because vat-cooked crosses didn’t get real names, you know. So we’d go through these old record books with Jorian names, the real ones. Barathuin’s name was some warrior-king, something glorious, and mine . . . I think it was on a list of minor officials. I just liked the way it sounded.”
“That fella still with the Resistance?” I ask him. “Barathuin?”
“No,” Araskar says. “No, he’s dead. They’re all dead. My entire vat-batch, my entire first battalion.”
“Right. I remember now. You said that, on Trace.”
“They all died the moment we hit our first Imperial ship. Rashiya, the girl I killed on Trace, was the last of my battalion. The only survivor, besides me.”
“That’s why it was so hard to face up?”
He doesn’t speak, just grunts a little assent.
“What do you suppose we’ll do when this is over?” I ask him. I said something like this before, back before we fell into bed.
“Told you, I don’t place too much stock in the future.”
“I heard you, slab, but I en’t talking philosophically. Just want to know what you might do if old John Starfire kicked it tomorrow. Come on now, you got any plans?”
He exhales. “Play guitar. Learn how to play it right. I only know two chords so far.”
“That’s a good start, slab. Where is your guitar?”
“The guitar you gave me is still back on the moon of Trace. Thought it would be safer in the desert than on Shadow Sun Seven. I guess I’ll go back there and see the sights again. Then I’ll come back—here, I suppose? Here, and I’ll see if there’s a Thuzerian who’s sworn to fight evil and stay celibate and teach guitar.” He breathes into my hair. “You?”
“Oh, I thought about it plenty. I’m going to go see some plays, visit some museums, do the stuff real folk talk about.”
“Real folk. We’re real folk now, aren’t we?”
“Depends who you ask, I suppose. Crosses have got to be as real as any other sentient, now.”
“We’re real,” he says. “And we’re—”
And that’s where the memory slips away. Araskar’s face blurs. The only part left of his face is the scars, now, an empty field of brown skin with scars dotting it, but no eyes, no nose, no mouth.
He speaks, but I don’t recognize the words.
I think I been dragged somewhere. I reckon I been hurt. Everything else is fragments. My memories break into shards and bounce around my head. Faces blur and names and I don’t reckon I remember a thing and this fella who done stabbed me—who is he?—still talking.
“You don’t get it.”
Am I back with Araskar? This fella got scars. Hard to tell. Araskar had a lot of scars, though I remember him lying next to me, saying things about them after we had slack. But I can’t see his face. Only the scars.
“You killing me?” Why would Araskar kill me? Thought we was getting along real well. We did—a thing.
Can’t recall what it was.
“Ha.” He actually puts something cool on my leg, where he cut me, and another on my arm, where the other cut was. Synthskin gel-packs. Kind of thing crosses use in a battle. Kind of thing heals you, helps you keep fighting till you can get properly stitched. What’s this? “I need to know why it speaks to you.”
“It . . .”
“You felt it, when you came in. The pure-space being.” He, whoever he is, presses another gel-pack to my shoulder. My shoulder, I’m fairly sure. Not anyone else’s. “When did you first hear its voice? When you ran to that Suit mainframe? Before that?”
“It.”
“You know, I wanted to believe you too.” His voice softens. “I thought perhaps I wasn’t chosen, wasn’t fated, and for just a moment, it was a relief. A relief to stop doubting, to stop being afraid.” And then his voice rises again, like some kind of preacher. “Then I remembered how it felt. How the words burned inside me. Do you know what it’s like to speak, and know that the will of the Starfire itself is speaking through you?”
“I . . .” My mouth is dry. No, this en’t Araskar. Maybe this is Z, his dour face locked in anger, muttering to himself. Something about blood and honor, I’d guess.
“I’ve been hunting this
place for years. All that trouble to get one memory crypt from Formoz, and you find it first.” He leans closer. “You know why the Shir don’t come here?”
“Don’t name the devil,” I say.
“Devil is more apt than you know. They are fallen, like the devils of old Earth myth. They almost remember what they were.”
He sounds like Z, being all cryptic. “Blood and honor,” I say to him, hoping he’ll respond and turn out to be Z.
“What’s that?”
“Blood and honor. You . . .” No wait, this en’t Z. I en’t even sure I remember Z. My memory done broke. He’s . . .
He’s my enemy. And he’s gonna kill me like this, rip me to bits.
I gotta get out of here.
He’s sheathed his sword in order to slap the gel-packs on me. He turns around. Touches something at the controls. “Why won’t you talk to me?” he mutters. “What did she do to bring you close?”
Okay. I got enough sense in my woozy head to see a way out of here. Just gotta kill this fella. My enemy. I know he’s my enemy. I can remember that.
It’s simple, self. Grab that sword. Pull it out of the sheath and stick him with it.
Simple. Except it’s so hard to move.
I start to move, and blood runs down my arms and legs. Them synthskin packs haven’t had time to meld with my flesh. My wounds are raw and ragged.
“Bend, pull . . .” He mutters a thing. A thing I recognize. A song my mother used to sing. He sings it, only half in tune. “Bend, pull, break your back . . .”
The cadences, the rhythm of the song is all mine. My mother’s.
What did she look like? I should be able to remember her face—that thing had her face, a minute ago.
And I realize I can’t recall my mother’s face.
He took that from me.
Now that pisses me off, and strength rushes through me, the strength born of anger, and I get to my feet, ignoring the pain and the blood.
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