I do not even know how to begin explaining this to my elders.
Of course it is Jaqi who complicates my honor!
“Tell me what you hypothesize,” the Engineer says. “We allowed you to land because of the data. We will not speak any longer unless you share data.”
I tell him my newly conceived theory. “I believe that the nano-Suits came through a node. A node inside . . .” I touch the center of my chest, where there was once a puckered scar from the stinger that killed me. “Inside of me.”
The Engineer waits, perhaps absorbing this data. “A micro-node. Fragments of the oldest data speak of them. As instruments of healing, of building, and as weapons.”
“That would be a fearsome weapon, and one that could not be used without some dishonor.”
“Our smallest gatherers of data are now fused with you. They are a part of your data.”
I grit my teeth. Had I my way, I would kill the Engineer for his part in this, but that would not be honorable either. “I want you to remove them. This is not who I am!”
“It cannot be done.” The Engineer rears up a bit, metal legs creaking. I think I see flesh, ancient, pockmarked flesh, inside that metal body. “They have merged with you. It is the way of the galaxy. Flesh and steel merge. One being merges with another. One being crosses with another. It has been done a thousand times, a thousand different ways. All data tells us this. All memory.”
“Does data tell you that it is wrong? That it is dishonorable? My people are made by our land, by our traditions, by our ancestors!”
“Your people.” The Engineer again flashes numbers and letters across his screen. “Your people, data tells me, suffer greatly. A virus reported on Zarra-kr-Zar.”
I am forced to turn my face, not to show my sorrow to my enemy.
I am too late. Zarra-kr-Zar was to be my next stop, to warn my people about the Faceless Butcher’s plan to unleash the digger virus again. He will have already sent agents there, to make up for what was done on Shadow Sun Seven.
“In exchange for your data, we will give you more of our smallest parts. The ones you call nano-Suits.” The Engineer makes this sound so pale, so casual. As if it were not a violation of all honor. “They can heal your people. They can become one. Flesh and steel.”
“This is dishonorable. We would rather die honorably.”
“Data suggests that codes of honor are often reinterpreted based on new developments. Data also suggests that few cultures who prize honor consider death by disease to be a preferred mode of death.”
“Data is not honor.” If it were, data would have fallen on its sword.
“You had data relating to the Dark Zone. We have a piece of data we have not shared. We can offer it in good faith.”
“What is this?” I ask. “What do you mean? You know something about Abaddon you have not told us?” This, perhaps, I could use to redeem my honor. Jaqi is destined to defeat the children of giants, the Great Spiders, but the method of her destiny was not known to her.
“The Shir use a web of dark nodes, their own unique faster-than-light network, which cannot be understood, or navigated,” the Engineer says. “Unlike our system of nodes, they create new points of faster-than-light travel when they consume a sun. But in person, they use radio waves to communicate.”
A strange, mottled sound, like a choked scream, comes from the Engineer. It raises hackles on every inch of my skin. It is surely one of the most hideous sounds ever heard. “What is that?”
“That is Shir song,” the Engineer says.
“They sing,” I say.
“They communicate via node-relay and radio wave, but it cannot be interpreted with any data available. This we can interpret: some is speech, some, we think, is song.”
The Great Spider sings. Abaddon itself, Hell itself, sings. I wonder whether that will matter to Jaqi. “What do you ask in return for a file of their song?”
The Engineer does not answer. He waits so long, in fact, that I worry he is about to have me killed, or otherwise removed from the planet.
“New data,” he finally says, in a garbled voice.
“What is this?” I say. “Are you done speaking to me?”
“New data.” I almost think I hear emotion in that voice. A hint of fear? It cannot be, for the Engineer has quenched his feeling.
“There is a black spot on our sun.”
* * *
Kalia
Scurv doesn’t hear me. Vi doesn’t even look for me. Vi staggers, lurching from side to side, clutching vir head as vi goes out the door.
My breathing sounds as loud as thunder. Gel-packs can make you ignore your injuries while they’re still knitting, so I try to move carefully, and quietly, and sneak out of the corner. But even if I were lying on the ground moaning, I’m not sure Scurv would notice me. Vi staggers across the bridge and back out the entrance of the temple—all the time not seeing me as I sneak after vim.
The sun has come up outside, just enough to illuminate the causeway in dawn gray. The waves still crash against the causeway, with less force. It all looks really pretty, actually.
Scurv makes vir way across the causeway and I feel awful and exposed, but I keep sneaking after vim and vi just never looks back to see me, just staggers forward, clutching vir head.
Vi nearly collapses, leaving the causeway to walk along the beach. Clutching at a tree branch, vi forces vimself up, gasps for air. Vi staggers along the beach, to a hut. Unlike the weatherbeaten structure of the temple, this one looks kind of recent. It must have been vir shelter when vi was stuck on the planet before. It looks like the sticks and mud have been layered over a prefabbed hut, the kind of thing that can be folded up into a box.
I creep closer.
I can almost hear Toq saying We should go back. And I think of Father, and Mother, both of them saying, You don’t change the Empire by being safe.
I creep along the beach to the door of the hut, drop to my knees, and peer inside the crack in the door.
A low, flickering light illuminates a weird lab. In the center there is a long tube, clear. The contents of the tube look like the inside of the disposal on Shadow Sun Seven, all folds of flesh and things that look like organs, pulsating.
Gross, gross, that disposal tube is still the grossest thing in space.
Scurv, hands shaking, whispers, “There, my lovelies. There we are. Change now, we can.”
And vi actually sets vir guns down on a table that abuts the tube of weird fleshy bits—and opens the guns. Huh. Never thought I’d see that.
With shaking hands, swathed in thick gloves, vi lifts out the Skithr symbionts from inside vir guns.
They look like bits cut from the mines in Shadow Sun Seven as well. Just little flaps of flesh, but they’re glowing faintly green. That’ll be the synthetic unthunium they excrete.
Scurv, hands shaking worse than ever, keys a sequence into the weird, pulsating tube, and reaches in and pulls out two little lumps of flesh.
Oh my gosh.
I know what vi’s doing—vi’s gotten vir symbionts to reproduce. Those little bits of fresh flesh in vir hands, taken from the vat in the center of the hut, are the children. The ones vi took out of the gun are the previous generation.
Of course! This has to be the most secure planet in the galaxy. Skithr symbionts are impossibly valuable.
And I know I have to get them. This will be my only chance to disarm Scurv.
Maybe it’s from hanging out with Jaqi and Z, but I don’t hesitate. I leap into the room, and Scurv sees me, and looks at vir guns, which are currently useless, and frantically tries to stick the babies back in that incubation chamber with shaking hands and—
I kick vim in the back of the knees. It’s not very nice, but neither is trying to shoot me.
“The lovelies!” The baby Skithrs drop to the ground. I reach, and the sleep has done me good, because my hands don’t shake when I grab them.
I come up to find that I’m facing Scurv, who is holding
a regular old everyday shard-blaster in one hand, shaking so badly that the red glow makes a blur in the air.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” I say, holding up the small, pulsating baby symbionts. They’re already glowing green, and I hope they don’t produce their synthetic shards when scared. It would be dumb to blow my hands off.
“Put our lovelies down, girl!” Scurv’s voice is hoarse and weak. “We will shoot you.”
“Well, the comic books would say you never miss,” I say, looking at vir shaking hands, and holding the baby Skithr symbionts to my chest, and trying not to show how I’m shaking too. “So you should be able to shoot my head off without harming your lovelies.”
Scurv makes a weak little sound and collapses back, against the incubation chamber vi got the babies from.
“But them comic books lie.”
Scurv gasps out, like they’re vir last words, “Them comic books lie.”
“Who were you talking to back there?”
“We was hired to do a job.” Vi gasps in pain. “No more Chosen Ones.”
“Who hired you?”
“Starfire’s wife. Wants them both dead, aiya.” Scurv blinks. “They’ll attach to you, girl. They must, or die in the next few minutes.”
I look down and vi’s right—the symbionts are trying to crawl up my arms now, and putting out little suckers to attach to me.
“Take care of my lovelies, girl. Knew this was a risk too big to take…”
I drop the baby symbionts onto the table next to their dying forebears, and Scurv winces, tries to get up. “I want more information than what I could get just listening to you. I want to know what you’re not telling us. About this planet. About the Shir. Anything!”
“We don’t know that.” Scurv’s voice is now just a whisper. “Found this place by luck. Was a good place to grow new lovelies. Lost the coordinates when we jumped out of Dark Zone, when we ran straight into Imperial patrol, thrown in jail. Didn’t lie about that.”
“Where does John Starfire come into this?”
“Starfire’s wife hired us after we left Shadow Sun Seven. We made contact with her.” Vi tries to get up and fails. “Please, girl!”
I’ve never had to make a decision like this before.
Vi defended us. Vi saved us from the Vanguard. “Why did you betray us?”
Scurv blinks. “Good money in betrayal,” vi says, before vir eyes start to fade.
“I thought you had a code of honor. You always do, in the . . .” Never mind.
“It is who I am.”
That settles it.
I put the symbionts inside the guns, and small suckers emerge from the bottom of the gun hilts. Without really thinking, I press the hilts of the guns against my waist, and feel a weird sucking sensation as the symbionts bond to me. “No need to go unarmed anymore.”
The withered tubes that lead to Scurv’s body kink and tear, first one and the other as I hold the guns in my shaking hands.
I raise the gun and Scurv nods. “We thank you for doing it quick.”
“Thank you, for teaching me something important.”
I shoot Scurv dead.
This is the first person I’ve killed in this war. A helpless, quivering person I thought was a friend.
I don’t feel any regret. I feel like I’ve finally fought back.
-11-
Araskar
MY EYELIDS CRAWL OPEN, and I see only a blur. A white haze, spread between goo filling the crevices of my eyelids.
I start to breathe by reflex, and can’t do it. Something is holding me back from breathing. Oh. Maybe it’s this big machine in my mouth, the tubes running down my throat. It vibrates, sucking goo out of my lungs. And I realize, weirdly, that I don’t need to breathe yet. My body has all the nutrients that breathing would provide already.
The machine pulls away, and I become aware of my ears, which hear the hum of the automation through more layers of goo. Little automated limbs clean the goo from my skin.
My last thoughts drift across my mind, like the memory of a dream. So this is death.
So this is . . . birth?
I’m in a vat? I’ve been reborn?
A warm drug rolls through my veins, making me sleepy again, but just as I begin to drift, an actual person leans over me and cleans the goo from my eyes. Through the goo, I see a halo of red hair. Rashiya. My memory tugs at me. Tells me no. That can’t be right.
The face is different.
Mom.
It’s what my memories say when I see the face. The same angles and the same small green eyes that Rashiya had. But a leaner face, without the round, attractive apple cheeks of John Starfire, the crow’s feet more visible around the eyes. No smile lines.
“You,” she says, as the goo is cleaned from my face. “You bastard. Wake up. You’ve been saved, for whatever you’re worth.”
Feeling returns to my arms and legs, returning as pain, little needles pricking me in every pore all the way up my legs and arms. I remember this pain. From the first time I came out of a vat.
And then a warm flush, and I drift in and out as I’m cleaned off. I can’t tell much of what is happening, save that I’m being moved to a bed. A clean bed in a bright room.
When I wake up, fog clouds the window, turning the room gray.
I sit up, and the gravity lacks any of the itch of the artificial stuff, and feels slightly off the Imperial standard. We’re planetside. That’s real weather out there. An ocean breeze, cold and moist and refreshingly salty, cuts through the house. It’s not the cold, rainy shore where the Thuzerian city was. Grav feels nice and comfortable, if a bit light.
I look down at my body, naked under the cleanest sheets I’ve ever slept on. The synthskin job on my leg has been replaced by a much better one, the mesh under the skin so fine that there’s no trace of it. I flex the leg and it feels as real as it used to, before I lost it. This is the kind of repair job only sentients can get.
I stand. The new leg feels good. Better than the last one. And my tongue . . . my tongue feels like it’s all flesh as well.
I try speaking. “Salutes. Salutes.”
No slur.
I look up and see Aranella.
She’s sitting in a reclining chair, reading a book. She puts it down when she realizes I’m awake. And looks at me. Just looks, and calm as ever, says, “I’m Aranella.”
I just avoid saying I know. She doesn’t need to know I stole her daughter’s memories in death. “You fixed my tongue.” I don’t slur it. “I thought it was unfixable.”
“The vats have gotten better since we took over,” she says. “Who knows more about crosses, a bunch of engineers, or crosses who have managed to outlive their projected lifespan?”
“Did you get rid of the . . .” I touch my face. The scars are still there.
“No, those I told the vat to leave. They suit you.” She carefully folds a bookmark into the book and says, “Now, let’s talk about why you attacked back there, and made yourself that much harder to find.”
“Wait . . .” I say, and the last few hours return, if hazily. “You fired on us.”
“I didn’t fire. Someone in the Resistance did, yes.” She lifts a soulsword—mine, I realize. Same soulsword I shoved through her daughter’s heart. It catches what little light comes through the fog outside.
“I’d really like to shove this sword right through, suck up all your memories, the way you did to my daughter. And then it’ll be over.”
For half a second, I debate honesty or vulnerability. Honesty has always been overrated in war. “I didn’t take Rashiya’s memories,” I lie. “I killed her. But it was a clean death.”
She cocks her head, looks at me as if she can tell whether I’m lying. I hope I look convincing. I’ve never much needed to lie in my life. I’ve spent a lot more time delivering hard truth.
Her expression softens, just a hair.
“How long did you have me in a vat?”
“Two days. It took a littl
e while to find you in that wreckage, but we followed the signature of the resonator in your sword.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Long enough,” she says. “Long enough for everything to change.”
“What does that mean?”
No answer.
A non-sentient construct appears in the door. I’ve only seen them in holos, about rich bluebloods who have enough money to use such things. This one is featureless save for a few breathing holes at the neck. And creepy in person. You can hear it breathing. It has a particular smell too, a thick, sweet gel smell that I associate with the vats. A smell that, until a moment ago, I would have associated entirely with my friends.
“This is what a non-sentient being looks like,” Aranella says. “Too bad they don’t make good soldiers. We’d all be happier.”
“You’re using constructs? The Resistance is using constructs?”
“This planet has always used constructs. Where do you think you are?”
“Back on Irithessa?” I don’t say that, if it weren’t for her, I would figure I was in the afterlife.
“No. We realized quickly that Irithessa had to remain much the same way that it was. All that bureaucracy keeps things from falling apart, even in the midst of consolidation. They keep collecting taxes, they keep up maintenance on terraforming and make sure all the proper bribes are paid at unsavory nodes.”
“No Directive Zero for the bureaucrats?”
“The bureaucrats know how lucky they are. The only humans in the galaxy who don’t have to look over their shoulders.”
The construct reaches out with a padded hand, helps me walk to a closet where a nice arrangement of normal street clothes waits for me. Trousers and shirts, hats and kilts. The kind of thing humans wear. I’ve never worn such innocuous clothes. Even on Shadow Sun Seven I dressed as a fighter. It dresses me up and I can’t help thinking I look like the kid I never was.
Why is Aranella treating her daughter’s murderer like this?
After I’m dressed, carefully moving the new leg, the construct turns me to face Aranella.
“You owe me now, Araskar. I wanted to leave you in space. More than that, I wanted to make a skewer of you, same as you did to my daughter. But I need you. So you’re going to tell me everything you can about the girl. This new Son of Stars you’ve picked to replace my husband.”
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