Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

  “Yes, Captain?” Hiram said, coming to attention.

  “Go brew me some tea, son,” Reno said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  31

  Turned out, being in a high-speed space chase wasn’t nearly as exciting as in the movies.

  “We can make it to Ashfall in twenty days,” Batzian announced to Reno after examining my flight path on the Wayscope. “That’s moving at maximum speed through the systems.”

  Darcy eyed one of the chairs on the bridge, specifically the little slot where a serum injector would spike into a passenger’s neck. “Oof, this is going to suck.”

  “We have enough of the cocktail in storage to get us there,” H’Jossu confirmed when he returned to the bridge. “But we’ll have to take it slow coming back.”

  I remembered my trippy experience on the skiff ride to Jupiter. “Is it safe to be drugged up for that long?”

  “The first Denzans to attempt long-distance space travel would knock themselves out for months,” Aela said. “You will have a really bad hangover, though.”

  Zara smirked at me. “He’s used to that.”

  “I want the last twenty-four hours plotted out at normal burn,” Reno told Batzian. “I don’t want us landing on Ashfall all strung out.”

  “Understood,” Batzian said and began inputting a course.

  While all those preparations were under way, the Eastwood had already broken out of Denza’s atmosphere, traveling at normal speed. I felt a brief pang as we left the liquid blue planet and its five mischievous moons behind. I wasn’t sure when the next time I’d see it would be.

  Captain Reno checked her console. “All right, everyone, strap in. We’re going to put the pedal to the metal.”

  “The what to the what now?” Hiram asked.

  “It’s an Earth thing,” I told him, and he rolled his eyes.

  All of the crew except for Aela took seats in the ring of chairs on the bridge, ultonate harnesses slithering across our chests. Aela didn’t need to be dosed to comfortably survive the journey. They’d spend the trip monitoring our vitals and making sure that no obstructions suddenly got in our ship’s way.

  Reno hit some buttons on her console. “Everyone buckled up? You’d better be.”

  I felt the cool pinch at the back of my neck and the mellow disembodiment that soon followed. It was different from the paralytic the Vulpin had given me—I wasn’t panicking at being locked in my own body; I was chill. It was like slipping into a dream.

  The Eastwood lurched when the rocket went full blast. I felt that, vaguely, and saw the planters along the wood-paneled walls sealing themselves up so that their contents wouldn’t go flying everywhere as our speed wreaked havoc on the artificial gravity. We were off. I found myself staring at the leaves of a vine as they curled back on themselves.

  I blinked and it was thirty-six hours later. We were at the first wormhole.

  The tear in space became clear on my screen, freshly made by the Vulpin ship. It shimmered around the edges, the Vastness slowly healing itself.

  “Is that big enough for us to get through?” I asked, working some moisture into my mouth.

  “No,” Ty responded. “We’re going to make our own.”

  That was how the journey went. We’d come out of our medically induced hibernation for a few hours at a time, either because we’d reached a wormhole and needed to slow down, or because our vitals indicated that someone needed a good stretch or a bit of real food. The dosage we were getting this time was much higher than the one I received on Ty’s skiff, so my rest was mostly the blank and dreamless kind, not the trippy, stoned, half-awake state that I’d last experienced.

  Although sometimes I did dream. And of course, it was the memory of Australia, of donuts with my father.

  There were other times when I came awake in a haze and could look around at the rest of the crew on the bridge. Zara growled in her slumber, her feet and hands twitching, like she was fighting a battle in her sleep. The drugs made the vivid white mold on H’Jossu’s face recede into its preserved host body, exposing bits of bleached skeleton that the Panalax had eaten away. In one fit of dreamy half awareness, I found myself unable to look away from that sight. Oddly, it didn’t seem as horrifying as it once did—it was like seeing one of those time-lapse videos of a tree decomposing in the woods. There was an odd beauty to it.

  “Fucking nightmare fuel,” Hiram said groggily. I hadn’t realized that he was awake, too. I closed my eyes rather than speak to him.

  On a low-speed break as we approached the third wormhole, as we all staggered around the ship working sensation back into our muscles, Tycius pulled me aside. His wounds from the Vulpin abduction had mostly scabbed over during the first week of our space voyage, leaving behind dark gray scars on his face and neck. I leaned against the door of the infirmary, knuckling the small of my back, while he rewrapped his ribs in bio-tape.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your dad,” Tycius said.

  “What about him?” I said stiffly.

  “That message Vanceval showed you . . .” He paused, looking up at me. “I know it wasn’t easy for you to hear.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, wondering what I might have been mumbling during my days of delirious hibernation.

  “Marcius made a decision under circumstances that we don’t yet fully understand,” Ty continued. “I can’t speak to what was going through his head. But I can tell you about the man I knew before. He loved you very much, Syd. Your mom, too. It couldn’t have been an easy choice to sacrifice all of that.”

  My throat felt tight. “He could’ve contacted you, instead of Vanceval.”

  “He knew I would go looking, just like I have been. He knew I’d try to find him, no matter how dire the warning.” Tycius sighed. “After we lost our parents in the war, Vanceval was like a father to your dad. They had the same passions. Marcius must have thought he could rely on the old man to keep his secrets. That if anyone could understand the dangers of Ashfall, it would be a fellow scholar.”

  I snorted. “He misjudged that one. The secret made Vanceval crack.” I massaged the back of my neck, where I was sore from my injection. “It doesn’t matter what he found. He should’ve tried to come back. He gave up on us.”

  “He didn’t, though,” Ty replied. “All these years and he held on. For you, I think. That should mean something. Remember that when we find him. Don’t be too hard on him.”

  “Would you have done what he did?” I asked.

  Ty hesitated. “I can’t know for sure.”

  I wiped my forearm across my eyes. “You wasted ten years on Earth searching for me. You never gave up. I know what you would’ve done, even if you don’t.”

  There was more I wanted to tell my uncle, but at that point Melian came into the infirmary to check on him. Soon after, we were all back on the bridge, hurtling through the Vastness.

  By the time we reached the fourth wormhole, we didn’t need to use the Subspace Piercer. We’d gained enough ground on the Vulpin cruiser that the hole they’d torn in the Vastness was still wide enough for us to safely pass through.

  “We don’t want to catch all the way up to them,” Zara warned. “Unless the Eastwood has secret missiles that I’m not aware of.”

  “It’s a Denzan ship,” Darcy replied. “Of course it doesn’t have weapons.”

  “Let’s keep our distance until Ashfall,” Captain Reno agreed. “Our biggest advantage against them will come on the ground.”

  “Once they know we’ve followed them, maybe they’ll be willing to negotiate,” Mel suggested. “It doesn’t have to devolve into violence.”

  Zara and Hiram both laughed at that, then gave each other dirty looks.

  The chase resumed, days flashing by in the space of a yawn. My head was filled with visions of my dad turning away from me, or else golden streaks of energy swallowing me up, and sometimes a return to that glimpse of the future where an older version of myself watched a planet engulfed by flames. T
hat last vision was the most troubling.

  When we next came out of hibernation, between the fifth and sixth wormhole, Batzian was giving me a strange look.

  “World killer,” he said quietly.

  My spine tingled. “What?”

  “You kept muttering that,” he said, then rubbed his jaw. “At least, I think you did. Maybe I dreamed it.”

  “I’ve been having some pretty screwed-up nightmares this whole time,” I said quickly, and that seemed like explanation enough for Batzian.

  That break was longer than usual because H’Jossu was severely dehydrated and there were blood clots forming in Captain Reno’s legs. H’Jossu left the bridge to go sit in the shower for a few hours. Reno, meanwhile, sat in her chair massaging her calves, waiting for the high-speed Denzan blood thinner to do its thing.

  “Getting too old for this,” I heard her mutter.

  As I wandered off the bridge to stretch my legs, Aela caught up with me. The wisp pitched their mechanical voice low, the exo-suit equivalent of a whisper.

  “Syd, days ago you mentioned something about helping you with ‘brain stuff,’” Aela said. “I do not mean to pressure you, but I have been conscious this entire time, and the anticipation is, to borrow a phrase, busting my balls.”

  I smirked. “Unborrow that phrase immediately,” I replied.

  Aela cocked their head. “Do you no longer want my help . . . ?”

  I’d made the decision to share my memories of the Etherazi’s prophecies with Aela and my uncle when we first got back on the Eastwood. To me, because of the drug haze, it felt like that conversation with Aela had been only a few hours ago. Aela, on the other hand, had apparently been stewing on it for the last ten days. I still wanted to unburden myself. If I’d been muttering about it in my sleep, then clearly the Etherazi’s prophecies were eating away at me.

  “Come on,” I told Aela. “Let’s grab my uncle and go to your room.”

  At that moment, it looked like Aela had to stop themselves from jumping up and down in excitement.

  We found Tycius gulping fluids in the canteen. Soon, the three of us were gathered in Aela’s room. Our voices echoed against the empty walls.

  “I haven’t bonded with a wisp since my own training,” Tycius said, bemused. He bowed formally to Aela. “I consent to have you in my mind, Ossho friend, and may what memories you glean live on forever in the collective.”

  Aela bowed back. “You will be remembered.”

  “Shit,” I said, “was I supposed to be doing all that? Bowing and stuff?”

  “True class can’t be taught, nephew,” Ty said.

  Aela checked a readout on their wall-screen. “We don’t have long before the captain will be ready to get under way again,” they said, turning to me. “Syd, focus on the memory you wish to share, and I will bring us in.”

  The routine was the same as during my training—decontaminants hissed down from the ceiling and Aela flowed out of their suit and into our noses. I focused on the worst of the Etherazi’s prophecies, the one where my older self stood on the bridge of a spaceship, having just detonated a world.

  The three of us stood in the memory, which Aela had on pause so that we could explore. It had been a while since I’d seen the wisp in their tall, quicksilver-like humanoid form, the one they used during these trips through my brain. The bridge of my future ship was cast in shadows, lit mostly by the hellish glow of the burning planet below. Aela flitted from place to place like a ghost.

  “Something is not right here,” Aela said. “This is not a memory.”

  “No,” I replied. “More like a vision. I came unstuck from time when I made contact with the Etherazi. I think he showed me this on purpose.”

  “Fascinating. A memory of a vision. An unreal replication of a simulacrum.” Aela’s head cocked. “This is not an experience; it is a potentiality. The Ossho Collective has no use for this, although I personally find it interesting.” They peered around. “It is not . . . whole . . . somehow . . .”

  Tycius seemed more interested in the older version of me, which I was trying my best not to look at. My future self’s appearance was blurry and faded, like looking into a dirty mirror. That was because I’d been looking through my older self’s eyes in the original vision. The image the others saw was pieced together from dim reflections. Aela could restore details of the memory that lurked in the depths of my psyche, but that only got us so far.

  Tycius started to touch the plating that encased my future self’s arm, but held back.

  “Ah,” he said awkwardly, seeing me watching him. “You grow up.”

  “To be a total piece of shit,” I replied, gesturing at the burning planet. “I did that. I can feel it.”

  Tycius put his hands on his hips. “Where is this?”

  “I was hoping one of you could tell me.”

  “Unclear,” Aela replied. “This memory is incomplete. But look, Syd, at least you do not commit this atrocity alone.” The wisp stood next to the older version of Zara. There were other shapes on the bridge too, but they were all shadowed—my memory hadn’t caught them.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said dryly. “It’s nice to know I have friends.”

  “The Etherazi showed you this . . . why?” Tycius mused. “As a warning? To taunt you?”

  “He told me it was my future,” I said. “He called me a world killer.”

  “You kept this to yourself,” Tycius said. “What a horrible thing to carry.”

  My face felt hot, my eyes wet. Emotions weren’t easy to hide in my own mind.

  “Can you tell if it’s real?” I asked Aela. “Is there any chance it’s just some trick he’s playing on me?”

  “I’m sorry, Syd,” Aela said. “I only know that the Etherazi really showed this to you. I can’t tell you whether or not it’s true.”

  “I can,” Tycius said. “It’s not. Maybe that monster wants this for you, but it doesn’t have to happen. When—if—this day comes, you don’t have to do this.”

  He was right, of course. I’d come to that rationalization myself. The Etherazi had also shown me a future where I was killed on Ashfall, but assured me that wouldn’t take place. There was still hope I could avoid becoming the grim, old, sad bastard on that bridge.

  “I just thought—I thought I should tell someone,” I said to Tycius. “Tell you. I’m leading us all to Ashfall. You should have the facts.”

  Tycius squeezed my shoulder where I hadn’t yet had it cast in metal like his bicep or Vanceval’s poor hands. “Thank you, Sydney,” he said. “I appreciate you showing me this. But it changes nothing.”

  “There is something else here,” Aela said suddenly, magenta sparks flaring from their eyes. “Something you aren’t seeing, Syd. Something you don’t want to see.”

  “Um, I don’t want to see any of it.”

  “A mental block of some kind,” Aela said distractedly, wandering the edges of the memory, peering at the shadowed crew members. “I cannot reproduce it faithfully if you don’t share the full memory with me, Syd.”

  “This is the whole thing,” I said, holding out my arms. “I’m not holding anything back.”

  “Hmm.” Aela’s eyes swept across me. “Perhaps if we had more time, but the captain is calling for us. We are wanted back on the bridge.”

  Tycius took a step toward the wisp. “Aela, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you—”

  “As I told Sydney already, your secrets are safe with me.” A wide grin spread across Aela’s face, their rows of vivid teeth like lightning bolts. So that confirmed my suspicion that they were giddy whenever they talked like this in the real world. “I am thrilled by this experience!”

  Aela gave us our brains back. Tycius and I changed into fresh uniforms, and we all returned to the bridge.

  We streaked forward. Onward to Ashfall and the uncertain future.

  I came awake at some point between the sixth wormhole and the final seventh. There was a voice on the bridge that didn’t belong. At
first, I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.

  “You’re a credit to your people, Marie,” Rafe Butler said. “When you make it back, your first slice is on the house.”

  The captain was awake and apparently on an open comm channel. I could see the light from her vid-screen reflected in her eyes. Veins popped on the sides of her head, like she’d lowered the dose of her transit drugs so she could have this conversation.

  “Don’t care about your damn pizza,” Reno grunted. “You just make sure you guard those coordinates. Send your people looking if I don’t report back in a week.”

  “You know I will,” Rafe said. “Now hang up before you give yourself an aneurysm.”

  My eyes flicked around the bridge. Everyone else was still under, unaware of our captain’s secret conversation.

  Everyone except for Darcy.

  Our eyes met. She knew I’d overheard, but she didn’t say or do anything, just closed her eyes. I felt dizzy from focusing for so long and shut my own.

  Reno had reported back to Rafe. No matter what we found on Ashfall, the secret was out. There would be others coming.

  Aela’s computerized voice rang over the comms. “We’re here.”

  The entire crew came awake together. As Reno had ordered, we’d been weaned off the drugs once the ship began to decelerate. Even so, we struggled to stand and needed to lean against one another, gulping down fluids and shaking out our limbs. The days had passed in what felt like a few hours.

  Ashfall appeared on our screens. A small gray planet choked with clouds of unnatural dust. Something horrible had happened here once—a war that wiped out all life, the remains of the dead still floating through the atmosphere.