Memory's Blade

by Spencer Ellsworth

  In those days each ship had a navigator, a person who could follow the nodes, connected to a creature of pure space. These things that existed in a different dimension, but they was as connected, surely as Scurv is connected to vir guns. They was—what’s that word—symbionts.

  And so the Shir in pure space felt every single death from that disease, and it drove them into some kind of madness. I sense it, as much as anyone can. A whole host of them as became the devil, mad from the pain, the music turned into splintering, jigsawing roars. So they threw themselves against the nodes they had made, and they shifted dimensions, came into our space, where they was never meant to be.

  And they changed.

  Went from being creatures of pure space to being the devils.

  And, I reckon, the only piece of alien life in the universe that en’t crossed with humans.

  I need to get to my feet. Need to get out there, outside this temple, find Scurv, bring vim back and send vim through the node to shoot John Starfire for good.

  The music presses on me of a sudden. I’m not sure what it’s saying, but this thing don’t want me to leave. I must bond, it “says.” It en’t quite bond, either—it’s almost a combination of bond and become and a bunch of other feelings what relate to changing.

  “What you talking about?”

  Someone with a better brain could say this in a way that makes sense, but this is mostly what it tells me: I am adult. I must bond. I reached for you, but the other was here first, and I cannot bond if he is strong. He bent me to his will, to make him travel. He can again.

  “So . . . you want to bond with me, the way you done with the ancients . . .” Whatever you call them. “But John Starfire is in the way?”

  His reach is strong. His call is strong. I do not feel the bond—becoming, growing, it’s more than bond, but that’s the best my puny brain can do when it’s told something through music—with he as I do with you, but he seeks it. You must stop him from reaching out, or we will not unify.

  Even this thing reckons I’m some Chosen Oogie. “How am I supposed to beat a fella took down the entire galaxy?”

  The music swells, rises up around me, as if it’s telling me I am with you.

  Well, I reckon that’s almost a vote of confidence. Course, as much as it’s great to have the real living Starfire itself on my side, this is a fella who took down a galactic empire.

  But a plan starts to form in my head. Guess my evil small brain has grown a few sizes lately.

  “Send me back to Earth’s moon. Let’s kill John Starfire.”

  -13-

  Araskar

  WE TAKE A HOVERBUG from Formoz’s seaside manor along a line of cliffs to a place where the coast opens up. Below, the long spread of sand is dotted with people. Young people. Lots of young adults, in their prime. I see only a couple of children.

  “You’re about to live the dream, Araskar,” Aranella says.

  I don’t answer. Three star systems.

  There’s no words.

  The hoverbug comes in for a landing at a public platform. The guy waving us to our parking spot has my face. The market is bright with colors, bright with fabrics and signs written both in Imperial standard and a language I don’t recognize. People move along laughing, chatting with each other. And when I say people, I mean crosses.

  A sea of the same eighteen faces, those used again and again for the military models. My own face repeats about a dozen times, as do the faces of my slugs—Helthizor and Joskiya—and my friends, Barathuin and Karalla, everyone I’ve lost. Over and over again, the same faces, with different arrangements of scars. A few unique faces—probably from agricultural crosses, or those outliers, like Jaqi, whose parents managed to reproduce—break up the monotony.

  But I’ve never seen these faces without a uniform. I’ve seen them over and over again in cramped ships, between Moths, over training swords and under emergency lights. I’ve never seen these faces smiling under a bright open sky, wearing loose, casual clothes, looking like they’ve taken a long lunch to enjoy the sunshine. That’s the kind of thing humans do. Humans get weathered skin from real sunlight. Humans laugh and sit out on cafes drinking coffee with a touch of thurkuk. Humans talk about politics like those politics don’t get us killed.

  And humans have children. It seems like every third woman I see is pregnant. A whole new batch of crosses, being cooked up at home just like John Starfire promised.

  Over and over. Not wearing military uniforms. Scars on plenty of them. Synthskin shining through the netting that merges it with regular skin. Most of these are veterans, I’m sure.

  “Welcome to the dream,” Aranella says, co-opting my thoughts. “Can you quote it?”

  “If you mean the actual book itself, no,” I say. John Starfire’s book, Toward a New Sentience, was supposed to be required reading in the Resistance. Few of us actually read it, because he quoted it so much in the required-viewing holos. “I read My Private Vat.”

  “That one was written by a human,” Aranella says, shaking her head. “An incrementalist, to make it worse. Ten years ago, when all we had was a handful of ships. Why is it that all of you read that one, and not John’s book?”

  “Sometimes you want to know what happened before.”

  “But he was a moderate.” She’s referring to the author of My Private Vat, the book credited with starting the cross-rights movement. “He thought that crosses should be allowed to retire from the army into society, but that the army must be maintained.”

  “Tell me, then,” I say, turning to her face, her unique face in a crowd filled with my face and the faces of all my dead friends. “Do we need the army? Have you shut down the vats, as promised? Who is maintaining what’s left of the Navy?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “What happens now? You can’t fight the Shir with a bundle of happy citizens. You need all the vats, and all the forges, to be running at top speed.” The words tumble out of me. “Three star systems.”

  In one of the strangest things that’s ever happened, in any galaxy, Aranella doesn’t answer. Instead, she walks five steps to a booth and buys me ice cream.

  She hands me the flake-and-cream without a word.

  Rashiya’s memories bubble up. She’s a child, taking ice cream from her mother’s hand. Crosses aren’t allowed to have this, child-Rashiya says, confused, and her mother laughs. Your father pulled some strings.

  She meets my gaze and I look away.

  The ice cream is amazing.

  It’s cold and sweet and perfect, with a hint of mango and strawberry under vanilla. I suspect there is actual real fruit and vanilla in it, not just a clever flavoring. I had plenty of ice cream during those training days in the Navy, but it was cheap, mass-produced stuff.

  We end up on the beach, watching the waves. Crosses, many bearing the signs of synthskin and battle, run into the water. A couple are surfing. The few children, mostly infants and very young toddlers, sit on blankets and poke at the sand. Their parents try to stop the children from eating said sand.

  It’s all so normal, and I just want to scream Three star systems!

  The signs are all new, with a second language underneath Imperial Standard. Even the ones that say Mind the Lifeguards and Stay Inside the Buoys. I don’t understand the second language, which is odd, considering how many languages came with my data dump. I keep waiting for recognition to hit, like it did with the Matakas and their nest queen, and it never does—the signs remain a mystery. “What is that?”

  “The only language every cross has to learn the old-fashioned way. Our own language.”

  I can’t help laughing. “You worry about that? Now? You know as well as I do that all this is a lie.” I spread out my arms, and nearly drop my ice cream, which would be a terrible mistake, as it’s cold and sweet and wonderful. “The Shir are free.”

  She exhales. “It’s you who don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand? The vats are still operating, aren’t
they? They would have to be.” It’s so strange to have this discussion on a pleasant beach, surrounded by gorgeous, happy couples, eating the ice cream. It feels so far away. “For the Empire to exist, it must exist in a state of eternal war. There must be a soldier class. John was a fool to think otherwise.”

  “It’s you who don’t understand.” Aranella takes a lick of her own ice cream. “John wants peace because he wants the Shir to reproduce.”

  That takes a minute. I stare at her, openmouthed, until the ice cream melts and runs out the side of my mouth.

  “He—what?”

  “He wants them to have children, and they need inhabited planets to do that. I confronted him, and he said they have to reproduce. Those were his words. Have to.”

  “Did he . . . explain why?” I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. Are the Shir controlling John Starfire somehow?

  “He tried. It was nonsense.” I think she’s going to say more about this nonsense, but she doesn’t. She turns and looks out at the ocean again. “I’ve seen the Imperial estimation of how many Shir are in the Dark Zone. They haven’t produced a new generation in a millenium, the Navy has logged at least a thousand kills in just the last few years, and there are still billions of adult Shir in there. Imagine billions of mothering triads. Each one willing to crack a planet open for a full harvest of eggs.”

  It’s actually making my head hurt more. I thought John Starfire was a misguided demagogue; he wanted to rule the galaxy and get rid of the humans. No, he’s a devil-worshipper?

  “So John told me something insane and vanished.”

  “When was this?”

  “He vanished a week ago. Right after that, I told the fleet he was dead.”

  “The Resistance thinks John Starfire is dead?”

  She nods. “Lots of crying. You wouldn’t think hardened veterans could cry so hard.”

  “We have our sensitive moments.”

  “I told them we would accept the Thuzerians’ offer to trade you for peace. I thought all was well, right up until someone fired back there. I didn’t give the order to fire, Araskar. And now I can’t trust any of my officers. I don’t know which of them—maybe all of them—John’s controlling.”

  “How many of them know about the Shir attack?”

  “Rumors are flying. I can’t order them to attack the Shir if they don’t recognize my authority.”

  I can’t think of what to say to that.

  “I got rid of that memory crypt, sent it to Formoz, because I knew why John wanted it.” You wouldn’t think you’d ever hear someone incriminate herself as a traitor over ice cream on a beautiful day. “He thought it was the last piece of information he needed about the Dark Zone. He used to be so focused on the cause. And then . . .” She takes a long time for the next few words. “And then he became something else. Angry. Obsessed. Sleepless. Religious to boot. I shed no tears for the bluebloods, but killing every human in the galaxy? Do you know what it’s like to hear those words come out of your husband’s mouth? Do you know what it’s like to see your daughter believe that idea?” She looks at me again, and laughs, without humor. “Of course you don’t.”

  Aranella Starfire. Perhaps the least likely ally in all the worlds, but she knows everything we need to use against her husband.

  Aranella Starfire. My best ally in this war. Except I killed her daughter.

  She takes a bite of the flaky crust wrapped around the ice cream. “He promised me we would be safe. All of us safe. I didn’t know that meant that he was giving the Shir the wild worlds to eat.”

  We are both silent, eating ice cream that has lost a bit of its sweetness, watching a scene we never thought to see.

  A good couple platoons’ worth of people are playing in the water of a beach they took from bluebloods. And I’m thinking about billions more Shir. A Dark Zone that’ll stretch three times the size of its current length. And crosses. We’ll need trillions of crosses to fight them off. We’ll need all the vats plus more. And if John Starfire comes back from wherever he went, he’ll have these troops. I knew this was coming, but like a fool, I thought I had time.

  “I’m not convinced we need a Chosen One,” Aranella says. “Any Chosen One. But I need the kneelers’ ships. I’ll take your messiah over mine if it gets me Thuzerian dreadnoughts.”

  “You don’t need Jaqi. You need me.”

  “I know.” She pulls a terminal comm from her pocket. “I don’t have access to the node-relay right now. My Firstblade says it’s a technical problem. Says to visit the central node-relay here in the city. My ship is in orbit, but all my subordinates seem to think it’s a great idea for me to relax on the planet’s surface.”

  “You’re cut off.”

  “I don’t think I would last an Imperial minute on that bridge.” She walks back toward where we parked. “I need you to speak to the Thuzerians, which means hijacking a node-relay to send a message that will broadcast my treachery loud and clear.”

  “S’funny.” I finish my ice cream, and seriously wonder if I have any money in my account to go back for more, before I remember my account is probably frozen.

  “What’s funny about this situation?”

  “Everything.” I try to fix her with her gaze, not let her see what she’s done to me. “Everything you and your husband said. We were made for more than to just die in the Dark Zone. Now, here we are, making plans to die in the Dark Zone.”

  I think she’s going to snap again. No. Just more words. “I believed him. You couldn’t help believing him, before . . .” I hear the unspoken words. Directive Zero. “It’s why I started a family. John went into the Dark Zone and came out alive, with word that the Shir were going to hold to a cease-fire. It was an unbelievable claim, but everything he did was unbelievable. I believed him.”

  Right then, we pass someone plunking away at a guitar, sitting in the sand. And I’m reminded of the first night on the moon of Trace, when I looked at the guitar Jaqi went to a lot of trouble to save.

  And I feel a strange urge, a need to make peace. Not a familiar feeling. But one I felt when I held that guitar, and when I thought of whole soaring songs and unembodied suites I needed to play.

  “This is going to sound strange.”

  “Because today’s been a normal day?”

  “I want to ask your forgiveness.”

  “What?”

  “Call me bizarre, or broken, or gone in the head.” I think I’m probably all three. “I would like to ask your forgiveness for what I did to Rashiya.”

  “You’re saying you’re sorry?” She spits out the words. “You’re sorry that you murdered my daughter?”

  “Of course I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t regret why I did it, but I sorrow. If I’m going to die fighting the Shir, I would welcome your forgiveness.”

  I can’t help thinking of Jaqi. Of the way it felt to wake up next to her and truly want to keep living.

  Here I am, Barathuin, Helthizor, even Rashiya, all my dead friends. Here I am without you, and I still want to go on. More than that, I want to go on into a life of peace. I don’t want to chew on my anger, my loneliness, any more than I want to chew on pills.

  “Forgiveness.” She shakes her head. “You ask for my forgiveness.”

  And then she kicks me right between the legs, and I fall to the ground, in blinding pain.

  I must be getting used to blinding pain, though, because I still make out what she says, half muttered as it is. “I thought you couldn’t hurt me anymore.”

  -14-

  Araskar

  I SAID I WOULD never wear the uniform of the Vanguard again, and here I am in a fresh pair of fatigues, walking down the well-lit hall of an Imperial communications complex, past various Imperial symbols scratched and scrubbed out and occasionally covered up with Resistance decals. I half expect Rashiya to materialize at my side—in real life—again. It feels like I’m back on drugs.

  It’s what it takes to get Aranella through the halls. She needs a norma
l-looking cross soldier with her, since she’s managed to ditch her assigned bodyguards.

  “Come on,” she says, irritated at my slowness.

  “I’m trying.” My body needs more rest, having been pulled from that vat as soon as the work was done. “Still healing up here. That kick didn’t help.”

  We pass through another hallway, past a batch of joking crosses who stop and salute Aranella. I would think they would recognize my face, but they must assume I’m just another cross, maybe wounded.

  “Didn’t you stick my face up everywhere?” I say, when yet another cross walks by with barely a look. “The Kurguls had an image of me.”

  “We had to take it down,” she said. “There are lots of crosses with your face and a few scars. Half the Resistance turned themselves in.”

  Well, that’s one good thing about sharing a face with a billion other people.

  We reach the main node-relay room. Unlike the one I hacked back on the moon of Trace, this is a properly maintained node-relay, sending and receiving tens of thousands of faster-than-light messages each hour. Banks of knobs and lights and wires rise high above our heads in each direction.

  “Regent!” A cross, with the same face as Joskiya, jumps up from her seat. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I need to get a message through,” Aranella says.

  “Of course, Regent. I can patch you in through the fleet—”

  “Not the fleet.” Aranella steps forward. “What’s your name?”

  “I . . . I haven’t decided.” The communications tech seems flustered. “It didn’t seem right to focus on a name when there was, ah, so much going on. But I’m leaning toward Dinetrifi.”

  “Dinetrifi. A warrior queen, from just before Joria even expanded into space. John took his own Jorian name from that era, you know. Jaceren, the king who launched the first ships into the nodes.”

  “Yes,” she says, looking everywhere but at Aranella. “The Regent’s name. I don’t say it, of course.”