Jaqi. She knows about Jaqi?
“I don’t . . .”
“I need you. I hate it, but I do. And I need those kneelers and their masks.”
“What?” I cough, and a bit of vat-juice spatters the bed. “Why? Why do you need us?”
She doesn’t answer.
This business of asking questions with no answers is getting tiresome.
The construct leads me through the hallways of a house nicer than any I’ve ever been in. I see a piano, a massive thing that takes up half a room. More constructs working in the kitchen. Their cybernetic implants, delivering occasional data dumps, flicker with green light. The smell of frying onions and eggs drifts from the kitchen. My stomach groans, and I nearly bend double with hunger.
The construct leads myself and Aranella on a balcony, for the kind of view that sentients usually pay good money for.
Wherever we are, it is a paradise. A rocky beach stretches a few hundred feet below the balcony, and wisps of fog cling to the water and the oak-dotted hills around us, just burning off in the morning sunlight. The sun peeks through the fog out on the water.
“This is gorgeous,” I say, and look over at Aranella. “I could think I was dead, if you weren’t here.”
She narrows her eyes. It’s too close to what Rashiya last said to her. They didn’t part well—the memories are clear on that. Again, Rashiya’s words run through my head. Just find the person who killed me and throw them out an airlock.
I could make my lie true. On the moon of Trace, I wanted to get rid of Rashiya’s memories. I still can. Stick my small soulsword in my arm, suck them up, erase them handily, as I was trained to do with any battle trauma.
But those memories, right now, tell me how to deal with Aranella. The intel in them is priceless to the Reckoning. I hate myself for it, but I can’t cleanse Rashiya from my mind, not yet.
For now, I’ll hope Aranella continues to believe the lie.
“This is Keil,” Aranella said. “You’re standing on the same balcony where Formoz used to greet the morning.”
I peer up at the sky, but it’s too foggy to see the moons this morning, the moons where I almost got killed. “You know, I’ve actually met the children you stole this house from. They may be rich, but they didn’t deserve what you did to them.”
“We didn’t steal the house from anyone,” Aranella snaps. “They stole all their wealth, from the dead. From a thousand years of crosses going to be ground into meat in the Dark Zone.”
I don’t answer that.
“I’m going to ask you to come with me today, Araskar. I’m going to show you what the Resistance made, and see how our most high-profile traitor feels about it.”
“I’m not your highest-profile traitor,” I say. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the leak in the Resistance.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Whatever you’ve made here, it can’t last,” I finally say.
“After you see what we’ve made, we’ll talk. My husband’s gone mad, and as much as I hate it, I need you, Araskar. I need to know about this girl.”
“You think—” I stop myself from saying Jaqi’s name. “You think the girl’s the Son of Stars? You doubt your husband?”
“I don’t know if there is a Son of Stars, or if it’s just nonsense. But my husband’s gone mad. He was mad when he ordered Directive Zero, and he’s just gotten worse. He’s also disappeared. And since he disappeared, the Shir have attacked three separate star systems.”
It takes a long time to find the words for that, and when I do, they’re stupid words to boot. “Oh. So that’s what you meant when you said everything’s changed.”
* * *
Z
“Save the data!”
The Suits’ cry goes through the city, the atmos, the entire planet. It goes through me, the nano-Suits in my bloodstream echoing the cry, rattling my nerves and screaming in my tendons.
My ship rears up, reaches for the sky, the thrusters roaring, burning unthunium. I am joined by the entire Suits’ city. Towers and buildings and vast metal landscapes join together, twist and turn and form and re-form into massive ships, larger than any dreadnoughts, larger than some planets, tearing away from the planet’s crust, leaving gaping holes and sending massive earthquakes through the planet—
It does not matter.
The planet is damned.
A black thread takes up the whole of the horizon. The finger of a dark god. The planet roars in pain as Abaddon pierces it. Dust clouds choke the air. Hurricane winds slam into my ship. The Suits bought sentient slaves to keep on this planet, grew bodies in vats, and so it has oceans, weather, air currents—none of them prepared to deal with the piercing, planet-killing touch of the Spider.
The data. I cannot tell, anymore, whether I hear the Engineer inside myself or inside the ship; all my efforts are to keep my ship from being tossed. Circuits and machinery and even what few plants remain on this planet are uprooted and tossed against my ship with the rush of the wind, the surge of the dust as crust and mantle are vaporized, as superdense Shir eggs implant on the inside of the planet.
I must reach the node. My thrusters burn and scream, the unthunium chamber roaring. I push it harder, for a better burn. Thrust, against gravity, shoves me hard against my seat. I fear that my ship, despite its sense-fields and its atmospheric protection, will be torn apart.
“Take the data!”
The voices come from inside me. The voices of a whole world of Suits, seeking to escape their fate.
My ship hurtles toward the upper atmosphere, carried on the storm. The metal screams. The heat shields wail. The sense-field begins to fail. Atmos hisses away from the ship, but I know I can survive for some time without it, so I do not concern myself.
And then, at last, I rise above the atmosphere of Trace. Below me, the world is all red lightning, black clouds, and death.
Suit ships, like whole moving cities, tear themselves out of the wrack one at a time. Massive clumps of circuitry, of towers joined together. They strive for orbit.
Too many fall back to the planet, caught by the roar of lightning, the suck of the black thread.
I can still hear the Engineer, now joined with one of the ships. Take the data!
“Do you speak to me?” Almost as if I hear him through the dishonorable creatures implanted inside me.
You who know the purpose of the data. Take it.
I know not what he means. Take it? How? And does he mean all of his data?
My sensors register hostiles. Suits? Do they dare attack me now? Where are the—
Ah.
Superdense, light-absorbing, only illuminated by a few ultraviolet frequencies that must be translated by the sensors into a shape for my naked eyes. The Suits dishonorably implanted in my body aid in my perception. For I see them.
The Great Spiders.
Three of Abaddon, each larger than a star. Inside their vast bellies, stars still burn, eaten for fuel to power their massive bodies.
It is a mothering triad, the nightmare of every creature alive. Their black carapaces span vast gulfs of space, and their thousand legs twitch and glow with the strange energy that is their weapon—and their faces. By my ancestors, their faces, massive and alien, thousands of eyes. Jaws like broken spars that can swallow planets.
They only allow themselves to be seen on sensors when they are ready to kill—the rest of the time, they move faster than light, in the web of their own dark nodes.
And they are ready to kill.
One looms over the planet. Sickly blue light, like rotting vegetation, gathers at the ends of its thousand legs. It spirals and twists and forms a shape like a web—and it lays like a skein around the planet, to contain the Suits, keep them from escaping.
I increase thrust. The node is not far. Sensors tell me the Matakas have left the moon and are attacking the Shir.
They die in one twist of the blue energy, the web wrapping their ships and tearing through metal.
> They died in something like honor.
I fear I will not.
The Engineer loses a piece of himself, and another. I do not need to pull it up on my sensors. I can see it in my head clearly. His ship was, when it first lifted off, miles and miles long, a moving city transforming itself into a vast dreadnought. Now it is little more than a single blade, stabbing for the freedom of the node. Daggers of sickly blue strike out, and where they touch, metal crumbles, circuits fail, and the Engineer loses data, his ship stripped, dying.
A thousand years he guarded that knowledge, and now he died.
I did not choose to be a vessel for the Suits, but I know this. The knowledge of my ancestors is most sacred above all. And in their own way, this the Suits appreciate.
I think a thing that they will be sure to hear. Give me the data. And let me return to Jaqi.
The Engineer’s knowledge flows into me. The nano-Suits inside me suck up the data, their collective quantum memory taxed to organize that massive stream of information. Over a thousand years of data, since the first Suit attempted to bridge between the failed automatons of the First Empire and flesh sentience.
The Engineer’s ship breaks apart—and three massive shards, glowing red and vile, planet-cracking shards, soar up from what was the Engineer’s ship and tear through the Shir’s web of energy, making a hole for my ship.
I burn through the rest of the fuel as my ship screams for the node.
The shards hit the attacking Spider. A vibration passes through my every molecule, a scream of something so massive it bends spacetime. More blue-white threads reach to weave a skein, trying to trap me—
Just as I pass through, before they close and the Suits die.
I escape the web of death, only because my ship’s thrust is far beyond safe levels for any sentient. I should be torn to pieces, my flesh jelly across my cockpit. But the Suits inside me hold me together.
The Great Spiders spin filaments of sickly blue, flying across the void for me, but I burn hard to the node.
In my head, a thousand years live and die, stories, songs, people long gone and long changed. It is the knowledge that the Suits have managed to put into me, though it is only a fragment of what they gathered. My mind cannot retain it—the entire Second Empire flashes through my poor brain and is forgotten. Dark nodes, the Imperial salvage, the worlds and people and stories that they have gathered, all the Engineer’s knowledge, and then it is all gone.
But one piece of data sticks out, like a scream, like a battle cry, like the last words of the Engineer.
The Shir sing.
-12-
Jaqi
I BACK UP, TRYING not to trip. Those intense blue eyes are like shards burning me. I remember all the folk he’s killed, and know I won’t be but one more piece of meat on a sword.
“Whirr, you got any information on swordfighting?”
“Please state the style of swordfighting you prefer.”
“The kind where you kill the other fella.”
“The Earth-Mars Alliance forbids death in the process of a duel.”
“Shame, that,” John Starfire says as he walks toward me. “I’m going to take my memories back now.”
“Whirr, I need you to shoot him. This man is dangerous,” I say.
“That is not a proper command for my model,” Whirr replies.
Worth a try.
I back up, between the pillars, and he comes for me. I hold Taltus’s sword out like an idiot, like it’s going to stop anything, and he holds his own sword up, in that way that tells me he really knows how to use it.
Being some Oogie of Stars won’t help you, Jaqi. Got to use your head for one time in your life.
I’ve got this fella’s memories, but none of the ones running through my head seem to relate to swordfighting.
“I know the secrets,” I say. “I heard it here. It was humans done it to themselves. There weren’t no Jorians. They was just humans what had special powers of the mind, and the devil was the creatures in pure space.” I say it. “Shir—that just means Starfire. You can’t kill all humans. We are all humans.”
When I say it, the music flares up inside me, a distant song of the stars, moving through my blood. It feels true. We look at what the Jorians made—nodes and relay-towers and we figure it had to be some kind of miracle by a super-race, but it en’t, it’s just folk getting clever.
His face twists, and he laughs. “You believe that old lie?”
“That automaton done told me,” I say. I’m trying to move faster, and my body reminds me of how much pain it’s in as I do so. “Read it right from the records.”
“A lot of old lies here,” he says. “I’d like to go through them all, but I think we’re better off without those ideas.” He waves his sword. “It was a blessing in disguise when the Shir destroyed the library worlds. Think of how we’ll start afresh.”
This is a big room, but I’m still going to come up on a wall eventually, as I keep backing up. And there’s no way out of here. Nothing. Unless I can pull yet another miracle.
The last miracle weren’t nothing but a node. Nodes. What did I do back at Shadow Sun Seven? I was thinking about how I didn’t want no one else to die—well, en’t no one here but me, and I suspect I might be too foolish to live.
I was thinking about when I shot gray girl, Araskar’s old lover, when this all started on Swiney Niney. Reached out for a node. Can I reach out for this one?
I try, but that’s when John Starfire moves in and thrusts with his sword, and I try to bang it away, and he’s strong and presses the attack and I stumble backward, and fetch up against one of the pillars, and he’s slashed my leg open now—
Help me! I think of that thing I saw earlier. What appeared as my parents, then as a devil, but made of music.
I try to think of music. Try to think of my folks. But John Starfire’s memories crowd it, full of fighting and blood—no, I need my mother’s music, come on, where’s the song—
I barely knock his sword aside, and he twists and punches me in the face, knocking me against the pillar.
But with that pain comes the hint of a song.
Bend, pull, bend, pull . . . till the wheelbarrow’s full.
My mother’s voice.
And then an answering voice, from the Starfire itself. Bend, pull, bend, pull . . . till the wheelbarrow’s full.
A torrent of music pours into me from the universe around, drenches me, drowns me—
John Starfire leaps suddenly, his blade coming for me.
But I en’t there no more.
With a scream and a yank, I go flying across untold pure space. A rush like I never felt, a feeling like my body’s spread across the eternities.
And I’m back, standing on the bridge on the temple of the planet in the center of the Dark Zone.
I fall on my knees, clutch the railing. I feel like my insides all been wrung out. Aw hell. Aw hell. I just went between galaxies like it weren’t no thing.
This business of doing miracles is wearing me out.
The temple walls stretch high around me. Now that I’ve seen it, I reckon this place was supposed to be a mate to that Archives Tower back in orbit around Earth. If they was going to fill it with archived information filling up the pillars, they never built no pillars.
Far as I can tell, down below this bridge there’s only seawater.
All that information’s still back there, in orbit around Earth. With John Starfire wanting to smash it. I don’t read none, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned today, it’s that we could all use more stories about what happened when the First Empire went out the airlock.
“You there?” I ask the empty space. Looking for that thing—that creature made of music.
It hits me like some planet-sized echo of my mother’s song. I can feel her so close in the music I can almost taste it. Tapping her hips against the counter, and singing while she cuts a tomato.
And I see that thing. Well, see en’t the right wor
d for it, but I know it’s there.
“So you’s what the devil was originally.”
Again, I’m translating from the thoughts that come into my head with a rush of music, so forgive me, cuz this en’t quite it, just the closest it can be in words. We are not like you. We are not part of time, part of fixed space. Those who came before . . . they were in pain and they sought to exist in fixed space, to aid those they loved. It . . . changed them. They tried to go into the corrupted space, and they were themselves corrupted. There is a sadness to the music, a kind of bad feeling running through it. They saw the ones they loved being hurt, changed. They themselves were hurt, changed. They feel only hunger now.
“So your . . . ancestors? They were in pain?”
The music strikes a couple of quirky notes. It don’t know the word ancestors. Okay, worth a try.
“Them . . .” I make myself say it. “Them . . . Shir that lived in pure space, back before they was—monster-ized.” Okay, that en’t a word, but for someone who en’t a book bug, I’m doing the best I can. “Why was they in pain?”
It comes to me, like it’s a story being told through song.
A virus, John Starfire was right. Only, he was half right. He thinks it was a virus humans made to kill Jorians, but I know that en’t right now. It was a nasty thing, a microbe that got turned fearsome during terraforming. I’ve seen plenty of that, out in the spaceways—you hear tell of planets that should support sentient life just fine, but something is wrong in the soil, in the air, some bug kills everything that comes down there.
I almost see it.
An empire that spread across galaxies died. All them folk, their skin turning red from broken blood vessels, hacking blood into their hands. It was a long, painful death, and the music, representing it, turns chaotic, mad, like an orchestra sawing away at their instruments fit to smash them. I see the First Empire falling. Whole star systems just stopped talking on the node-relays. Whole galaxies. With trade so connected by the nodes, the virus could get anywhere. Planets only survived by cutting off their nodes, when they could.
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