Memory's Blade

by Spencer Ellsworth

  We’re halfway down the hall, and I dodge a wrench flying through the air so fast it could take my head off. I realize Vanaliel is talking. “Araskar,” she mutters. “I wanted to—I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to play—”

  “Plenty of time for what you want to be,” I say.

  “I wanted to live,” she says.

  “You’ll live!”

  There’s emergency vats on every level, the kind of place you can stick a wounded soldier for containment if there’s a hull breach. I pull the wires that open the wall and put Vanaliel inside. She stares up at me as the green goo of the vat closes over her legs.

  Kid was fresh out of the vat. Three weeks ago everything she knew was contained in one data dump. Today she’s another near-dead cross, in a ship full of the same.

  “Just hang on, all right?” I say. “Automatic recall will take over without the bridge. The ship will fire on automatic until it runs out of shards, and then it’ll go back to the node. You’ll live.”

  As long as the automatic recall isn’t damaged. Considering that the gravity’s gone, I’m guessing the recall is.

  She looks so scared.

  I have to leave her there.

  I reach a node-relay station and turn it on. It screeches like it’s an animal in pain.

  “Rixinius, tell me you hear me!”

  It takes a long time before a much-battered voice comes on. “Araskar? You live?”

  “I live. Tell me the situation.”

  “Two full mothering triads. Six Shir. They’ve destroyed two of our ships already, and one of the planet-crackers—the second one, the one that was still on course for the planet.”

  “Where’s the first one? Still in orbit around Rocina?”

  “Still in orbit. It’s too close for them to risk triggering it. The juveniles are hatching, Araskar. If you can reach the planet-cracker, disrupt its orbit so it falls to the planet, you can at least kill the eggs.”

  “My ship is in no shape to do that.”

  “Araskar, in the name of God and all Saints, you must drop that planet-cracker. We will stand against the darkness now—but you must. By any means.”

  The entire ship rocks, and the comm goes dead.

  Shit in space.

  Well, there will still be Moths in the hangar bay. And a Moth will get me to that planet-cracker faster than any shuttle. It’ll be nice and comfortable in there, my body cushioned by the Moth’s inner goo against the g-forces of spaceflight.

  Just one other thing to do.

  I run back down the hallway, dodging more debris, bouncing off the bulkheads. At one point the gravity generator flickers, and I am unexpectedly slammed to the ground, but the adrenaline is still working, because I get up, and a second later we’re back to zero. I’m leaving my own globules of blood from where Vanaliel cut my leg, and it hurts like hell and I probably shouldn’t be running on it, but at least the zero makes it a little easier to swim along.

  I reach Aranella’s room.

  Thankfully, the doors don’t protest when I force them. Even secure locks will be disabled under emergency power.

  Aranella springs out of the darkness with a blazing soulsword—and stops.

  She stares at me. Both of us lock eyes, stare across the darkness.

  “You going to kill me?” I ask.

  A long moment between us, between her eyes, blazing with rage, between her sword and my hand on my own hilt.

  She sheathes the sword. “No.”

  We make it to the lift, but it’s not where I left it—but in zero, we just spring down the shaft. About halfway down the whole ship shakes, and we’re thrown against the side of the shaft. Gravity, but the wrong way.

  “We’re under thrust,” Aranella says, from where she’s pressed against the side of the lift. “Emergency retrieval, heavy burn under unthunium thrusters. Moving back toward the node.”

  “It was your husband that did this. You were right. He wants the Shir to reproduce.”

  “I heard him,” she says. “I patched into the main channels.”

  “Why they hell does he want this?” I say.

  “He spent a lot of time with the scriptures,” Aranella says. “You tend to see what you want in the Bible after a while. He wanted peace with the Shir, so he found a section that said so.”

  Under thrust, pressed against the side of the lift, we climb down, hand over hand, the side of the lift becoming the floor—until the ship shifts again, and we start to fall. I cling to the handholds, try to ignore the pain in a leg I’m suddenly putting weight on.

  “The hangar,” she says, and drops down to the next level. “Come on!”

  I drop down next to her, and crumple. “Ah, shit, my leg!”

  She pulls me to my feet. “You can whine about your leg later.”

  We enter the hangar bay.

  There are still plenty of Moths, curled up in their pods along the walls. The ship shakes again, and we’re fighting all sorts of g-forces as it goes under emergency thrust. Luckily there are handholds here for emergency zero. I limp along the ground, pulling myself via the railing holds as gravity shifts on me. Come on, leg. One step, one more step, and then the Moth.

  “It would be so easy not to remember,” Aranella says, from where she’s similarly crawling along next to me.

  “What?” I say, through a haze of pain.

  “All the pain would be gone if the memory was. Sometimes I feel like all I have are memories of hope.”

  “Memory’s blade cuts deepest of all,” I say.

  “Didn’t take you for a philosopher,” she says.

  “I’m well read. Had the entire collection of Scurv Silvershot comic books.”

  I reach the Moth.

  It only takes a few seconds to open the pod with the override code, and the Moth tumbles from the pod and expands. Its wings, meant for light atmos, won’t do anything out there in the vacuum, but here they seem necessary, weirdly beautiful, the microfilaments gleaming in the emergency lights.

  “Not dead yet,” I mutter as I climb into the Moth. I drive my soulsword into its fin-brain, and I “see” through the Moth’s segmented eyes, giving me a much broader field of perception and a stranger sense of depth all around me.

  The Moths rise, each ridge along the wing humming together, each a tiny blade, like part of a helicopter. They help us to hover in the hangar bay’s atmos, and launch us despite the ship’s thrust through the small hole in the wall, right through the sense-field.

  We soar out of the hangar bay, into the darkness.

  Vacuum brings a weirdly peaceful silence. Oh, sure, debris is everywhere, and the Moth corrects course a good sixty times in the first minute of the flight to avoid debris flying at high speed. Most of the debris is made up of pieces of the ship I was just on. Some of the debris is made up of cross bodies, flying so fast they could smash through anything without a decent sense-field.

  In the distance, dark shapes of Shir move back and forth through the system, spinning those sickly colored blue webs at the tiny lights darting for them. They’ve attempted to spin the web around the planet, to protect their juveniles, but the planet-cracker is in a stationary orbit, my sensors tell me, and they can’t risk triggering it, changing its orbit.

  That shouldn’t be too tough. As long as I can hit the planet-cracker hard enough, I can just send it on a descent toward Rocina, and it’ll break open the planet before the juveniles all have a chance to hatch.

  “Araskar,” Aranella says.

  “What is it?”

  “The refugee rescue.”

  Ah shit, she’s right. There in front of us is a damaged drop ship, trying to limp back to the dreadnought. Carrying all those people I was so careful to rescue.

  “Raise the dreadnought Thalator.”

  The Moth’s comm array buzzes, and I say, “This is Acting Firstblade Araskar to anyone who’s listening. Do not retreat. Do not allow automatic recall. Rescue ship is still attempting to rendezvous with the node. Cover for them
before you make a retreat. Understood?”

  No answer.

  “I think you burned your bridges there,” Aranella says.

  That’s when the Shir notice us.

  Half-blue, half-white lines spin through space toward us, striking for our Moths and the drop ship carrying the refugees. I fire, shards spinning bright red through space, and I manage to cut the Shir’s threads, red shards breaking the eerie blue apart.

  “You escort them back,” I tell Aranella.

  “You’re going to need help,” she says.

  “Then come back and help me,” I say. “Let me get to the planet-cracker.”

  I know the easiest way about this mission, as my Moth spins through space, dodging the filaments of Shir energy that reach with their sickly blue fingers for me. The easiest thing to do is get my ship under the planet-cracker, fire on the shard, and let the resultant explosion take out me—and the planet.

  But I’m going to try to drop it on the planet. Because . . . “I don’t want to die,” I mutter as my Moth gets closer. “I want to live. Not what I should want, I know.” It’s funny, how loud my voice sounds, when it’s the only noise inside the Moth, when all of silent space closes around me. “I like the idea of living. Crazing, I know.”

  It’s closer now. The planet-cracker is a single white wedge hanging above the black storm of Rocina. I run over every potential scenario. I need the orbit to degrade quick. As in, I need it just to fall.

  The Moths have auxiliary arms, two long things hanging beneath the main pod. They’re not going to be that easy to manipulate, but if I can land on the planet-cracker without attracting attention, I can reprogram it just by patching in. If worse comes to worst, I can go under the planet-cracker’s shell with the Moth and tear out the guidance system.

  I’m afraid both of those options will take too much time.

  I set the course, and come closer to the white wedge.

  Thank God the Thuzerians are keeping the Shir busy. Blue-white filaments spin through space toward me, but none of them are precise—the Shir spinning them are distracted by the Thuzerians’ attack. Through the Moth’s vision, I just see the Thuzerians’ attack, a barrage of red shards in the darkness near one of the Shir.

  Still, there was supposed to be an escort with this, and going by the amount of shattered Moth debris I’m scanning, the Shir got everyone. Killed all my troops.

  Don’t get overconfident, Araskar. Just do the job.

  Closer now. The white wedge of the planet-cracker fills my sensors.

  And then my Moth touches down on the planet-cracker. The insectile body settles onto the wide swath of white metal, clinging to the surface through hooks in the auxiliary arms.

  “Back here again,” I say. Hasn’t been long since the last planet-cracker. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  Through my soulsword, I tell the ship to manipulate the Moth’s auxiliary arms. The guidance system has been remote-controlled this entire time. A quick access to the control panel tells me it is code-locked.

  I can only do basic manipulation here—I have to patch into the planet-cracker’s brain to adjust this.

  Best option is to climb just far enough underneath to tear out the guidance system, like I did before. Or grip the entire thing with the Moth’s arms and fly it into orbit myself.

  Just as my Moth crawls toward the nose of the ship, something red flashes by me. And then the Moth’s alarms scream, and my ship spins, and nearly goes flying off the planet-cracker.

  “Don’t do it.” John Starfire’s voice, on a universal channel.

  Do I ignore him, or do I talk back, and make this worse?

  He lands his own Moth on the planet-cracker behind me. I spin mine around, dragging my ship’s damaged end, and both of us face each other, in our insectile carapaces, across the distance of the ship.

  “Come out and face me, Araskar,” he snarls. “Traitor.”

  “You remember what you told me,” I say. “That you didn’t know if you were the Chosen One, but you had to act like it? Turns out you aren’t! I’m sure that’s a load off.”

  “This is all because I trusted you.”

  “I can hear you pawing your sword, you paranoid old bastard.”

  He skitters toward me, and rears up, and his Moth’s wings, whirring with their hundred tiny blades, buzz toward my own Moth’s face. I back off. As strategies go, this isn’t a bad one. As long as we’re in vacuum we won’t need these wings, but because I’m damaged, I can’t move like he can.

  He backs my Moth up, against the rim of the planet-cracker. “You want to live, Araskar. You took my daughter from me. You took my people from me. And you still want to live.”

  He’s right. I still want to live. It’s my weakness now. The universe needs an Araskar who is willing to die here.

  I close my eyes. I’m sorry, Jaqi. I wanted you more than anything. More than drugs. More than freedom. More than Rashiya.

  And I fire.

  My shard hits his Moth and knocks it nearly off the planet-cracker, breaking up its wing into a thousand pieces of space debris. I fire again, and blow off the back of his carapace, and then his Moth goes spinning into space, vanishes against the darkness of Rocina.

  “Traitor,” he shouts through the comm—and then goes silent.

  The planet-cracker roars and lurches as shard-fragments pinhole it, breaking through the metal shield. The shard underneath it is destabilized now, red and roaring. It’s going to blow up under me.

  I grip the planet-cracker with the auxiliary arms and pilot my Moth down, down, down into the gravity well. Alarms scream in my ears, scream that the ship is damaged, that the shard has destabilized and the planet-cracker is losing integrity—

  Upper atmos buffets my ship. The Moth compensates by using the wings, but the controls aren’t working right—the auxiliary arms are burning now, tearing away—the hundred small fragments of the wings rip away under the pressure of the gravity well and the atmos and burn as the shard destabilizes—lightning streaks across the clouds below me, and the gravity well sucks at me—

  I break away, leaving bits of my Moth still clinging to the planet-cracker. I climb, climb, climb toward space.

  Gravity and upper-atmos wind tears at my ship, sends it careening, but I lean on the thrusters. Just a little space. Just a little thrust—

  The Shir scream in my ears.

  Below me, the planet-cracker vanishes into the black clouds of Rocina.

  My Moth makes hard vacuum again.

  It’s instantly cold, the containment breached. Space is full of sickly blue-white filaments, the Shir’s webs cast across this entire system. My damaged ship limps along, but John Starfire has damaged the main thrusters. We won’t make it beyond orbit.

  Below me, Rocina erupts in a massive plume of red.

  The darkness rises before me. A thousand eyes like black holes, a planet-sized mouth with jagged spars of teeth. The Shir’s roar tears through me, stabs icepicks into every inch of my body, shreds my mind.

  You little thing.

  But over the roar, I hear music.

  -20-

  Jaqi

  “ROCINA SYSTEM.” Kalia gets off the comm that connected us up to the Thuzerians. “To fight the Great Belial.”

  “I’ve been to Rocina,” I say, trying to ignore the sick feeling in my gut as I reach out for the node. The devils already made their move, and some Chosen One I am, three steps behind, lost the Usurper, still without a plan.

  “I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “Nice place, they say. Well, I didn’t go no further than the orbital platform, but the planet’s supposed to be nice.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Well, since you’re becoming a woman and all, what with the killing people, I can tell you that I got high as five suns. Don’t really recall what happened after that. Woke up next to a fluid sentient.”

  Kalia makes a little noise of disgust. Nice to see we en’t changed, aiya? I
say spaceways things, she disapproves. It’s the same whether I’ve bonded with a pure-space thing made of music, and whether she’s got Scurv’s guns coming out of her sides.

  “What do you think we’ll see on the other side?” Kalia asks me.

  “The devil himself,” I say, and I reach out for the node. I try not to show Kalia how scared I am, but my hand shakes on the lever. I been into a lot of scrapes, a lot of dodgy bits, but this en’t the fighting pit, this en’t the guts of Shadow Sun Seven, this en’t even a swordfight against John Starfire. This is the darkness. The spiders. This is them things who haunt my nightmares and the Chosen Oogie en’t got a plan.

  You grow up in the spaceways, you learn a few things. Always, always, always check the seals, the air, and the water. Salvage can save you. Never turn down parts or water. Use the grav generator even if it itches you, otherwise it’ll hurt too bad when you go planetside.

  And stay the hell away from the Dark Zone.

  I’m about to do the dumbest thing any spaceways girl has ever done.

  “Wait, Jaqi. Hang on.” Kalia looks up at me. “The Thuzerians just raised us again. They say they have a message for you. They want me to put it on audio.” Kalia hits the button to put audio on the whole ship, despite the fact that we’re running evil low on the batteries.

  And it en’t no stuffy monk’s voice I hear. It’s Z. His voice is raspy, and he don’t mention honor, which makes me wonder if it’s really him for a moment, but I make out what he’s saying.

  “Jaqi,” he gasps, as if he’s just run a mighty race. “Jaqi. The Shir sing. They sing.”

  And then the node-relay cuts off.

  “Interference,” Kalia says. “Do you think it’s John Starfire—”

  “No,” I say. The devils sing? Them what is monsters, who don’t remember nothing but hunger, they sing? I feel like I been given the last bit of a puzzle, only I need time to turn the puzzle to make it fit.

  “Z? Why Z?” Kalia asks.

  I don’t answer. They sing. So I was right about a thing—they don’t just feel hunger, it’s just that hunger makes it hard to feel anything else.

  Hey. I send out a feeling toward that sense of Kid. You there?