A growing crowd surrounded them, pressing close. The fire grew, became taller than the buildings, burning an angry red-gold.
Some of the smaller women climbed on the bigger men’s shoulders, looking back toward their homes. Even from so far away, firelight danced in their eyes, a brightness illuminating tears.
Everything had changed. How many times would he need to think that thought? How many times would change wrack him and force him to find some new strength, some new reserve?
When would he run out?
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
SATYANA
Satyana surveyed the entirely full habitat bubble. Beside her, Gunnar waited for her to assess his work as self-appointed chief of hospitality for her election night party. He must have spent a fortune on gardeners alone. Colorful flowers filled pots in tall containers, sending cascades of blooms hanging down above the heads of the well-dressed. Although people wore a wide variety of styles, the most common current fashions were diaphanous, flowing dresses and coats in pastel patterns with contrasting dark hair. It made the audience look like butterflies. Tables full of food and drink filled the open spaces, with fountains of wine and water in the corners. She turned to him. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Both she and Gunnar were dressed in neon blues that matched her eyes. She had added bright pinks and yellows, so that she would stand out beside Gunnar’s great bulk. He reached down and took her arm. “Are you ready?”
“Only if I lose.”
He laughed. “You won’t lose.”
She wasn’t nearly as sure but took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd beside him, watching people both part to leave them room and swing toward them, gathering close, wanting to be seen. She did her best to touch almost everyone with a hand or even a look, to acknowledge them.
A number of her performers were here, some as guests and others with planned half-hour gigs on a high stage that Ruby had once used at one of Gunnar’s parties.
It was hard to believe that there was only fifteen minutes until the election returns, which came in all at once. She hadn’t been sure she wanted to win, but in this moment she knew she did. Maybe she wouldn’t want it again tomorrow, no matter who won. But right now? She could hardly wait for news.
Gunnar split away from her, working the crowd his own way, looking for ship captains. Through this whole process, he had backed off in favor of showcasing her, and generally he even looked graceful about it. They hadn’t argued about anything for a week. She reached one of the fountains and held a glass under the cool water.
A news alert klaxon stopped her. Here? It had to be a station-wide message.
Surely it was still too early for election results. She’d never heard those delivered this way anyway.
She stopped; trying to remember the last time she had heard a station-wide alarm. Surely it had been a test. Years ago?
Everyone else around her stopped as well, glasses lifted part way or food held waiting on plates.
A voice used all the speakers in the station, so it spoke at them from many angles, echoing. “The Next have destroyed almost every ship orbiting Lym.”
She grew cold. She was too short to see over the crowd from here and find Gunnar.
He was apparently doing something. The screens in the room came up one by one, the same news story on all of them. Ships died from the inside, some form of explosion going off one by one by one. Each ship turned to a ball of light, and then trails of light, and then nothing.
At first, the crowd made noises as each death happened. As Satyana made her way through, still clutching her water glass, they grew steadily quieter.
She only glanced at the screen from time to time. Finding Gunnar was more important.
It took her nearly ten minutes to make her way to his side. “Your ships. Are they okay?”
He nodded. “So far. They’re traumatized from watching that, and the debris field must be something. But they were warned away from the docking lines and from other ships.”
“You knew?”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Of course not. Not . . . not that anything like this even could happen. Who would have imagined? But they did tell us to stay away from other ships and drift into higher orbits.”
Her mind raced. “Those can’t all be revolution ships. They don’t own that many.”
“No.”
Her jewelry buzzed, a warning that the election results would be in soon.
Had the attack started before the last moment to change votes? Would anyone care anyway, or would they just be watching the news? How could she be thinking such a thing while ship after ship was blown out of the sky?
People died above Lym in droves.
Gunnar tapped her shoulder. At first she didn’t know what he meant. He had to turn his hand a certain way for her to remember. They had practiced a move for the election results, at least if she won.
Did he know?
She took his hand and let him spin her up and onto his shoulders. From so high, she could see twenty screens showing the fireworks of ship deaths, each of them making her shudder. The crowd, which had been a chaos of movement swirling to the song of conversation had stopped and quieted. The hanging vases full of cascading multicolored flowers looked like a lie.
The announcer stopped talking about Lym and said, “In current news, Satyana Adams has won the position of Headmistress of the Diamond Deep.”
Eyes turned toward her.
She swallowed, the reality of it washing over her, both the victory and the disaster mingling, fighting each other. She tapped Gunnar’s shoulder. “Take me to the stage.”
He walked her to a spot just below it, and she grabbed a rope ladder designed for repair access, kicked her heeled shoes off, and climbed up.
From the edge of the stage, the people below her looked foreshortened, their faces thinner. She recognized the fluttering stomach of serious stage fright she hadn’t felt for decades. A deep breath banished it. Someone recognized she wasn’t wearing a microphone and dropped one from the ceiling. She grabbed it and spoke into it. “Thank you. Thank you for your votes and for supporting me. I know I don’t take office officially for two days, but the position is vacant. So I am calling the High Council together to meet tomorrow, and calling for a vote to anoint both me and the newly appointed Historian,” she glanced down at her wrist to make sure she got the name right, “Julianna Duncan, to join the leadership of the Diamond Deep two days early.”
She watched the crowd, looking for reactions. Most were positive. Gunnar set his glass down and clapped, and then two of the people next to him did the same, and then more. She watched closely, the stage a great vantage point to determine how many people supported her. Most of them. She was careful not to force those who weren’t clapping by staring down at them, but she noted their faces and when she knew them, their names.
After the applause died down, she started again. “In the meantime, we will closely monitor the situation on Lym, and we will increase our defenses as much as we can. I ask that the military command of the Diamond Deep come meet with me in an hour, and we will talk together about what this means.”
Hopefully they would come. When the military kidnapped her before Deep’s decision to help the Next, they had been angling for martial law. As far as she knew, they still were, and they’d see this situation as military. She would need to deny them that idea immediately, to show her own strength. She took in a deep breath, feeling it. This was a little like flying a ship through a problem; you stayed at the helm, and you rode it out.
“For now, let’s bow our heads and have a moment of silence for those who we just witnessed pass from this world. Whether they were rebels or innocents, they deserve our respect.”
Someone was clever enough to start appropriate music. She bowed her head and let her heart fill with empathy for the lost while she calculated her next move and the next one after that, and worked out the various things thi
s new development might mean for the Deep.
She could do this. She looked down and found Gunnar, the two of them sharing a look that drove heat through her very core. They could do this together, the two of them. He was a wily bastard and mercenary as hell, but he eventually came to the right decisions. She could live with that.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
NONA
Jason handed Nona into the elevator, essentially a dark-gray metal box that didn’t register their weight at all. It felt like stepping onto another part of the floor. He stood in the doorway for a moment, head cocked, and then said, “We haven’t taken a human down this yet. We are going two hundred meters down, which should not put undue strain on your bodies. Please tell me if you feel ill for any reason at all, and we will slow down or stop.”
“Of course,” she said.
Neil’s hand found hers. She allowed it, remembering the night they had spent in custody, curled up close to each other in a large group of other political detainees on the Deep. That had been right after the last time she had seen Chrystal before her death.
And now, Chrystal waited for her. She had been both glad and disconcerted that they took Chrystal with them. Seeing her friend—part two—unsettled her, but it was also something she needed to face and get past.
Jason touched a spot in the featureless elevator wall, and they began the descent. Her stomach floated up toward her throat. The only light now came from above, a whitish light shining down on them, turning their faces pale and brightening the deep purples of Jason’s hair. She began her mantra of the moment. “I will be safe in here. I will be curious in here. I will be helpful in here.” Over and over she repeated it, feeling the thick rock walls above and all around them, sensing the darkness in spite of the spears of light they held in their free hands.
She contemplated turning on her flashlight but decided that saving it made far more sense. Still, her hand roamed the casing and the on-off switch.
It took a long time.
The elevator stopped gently.
The door slid open, and all three of the soulbots turned toward them. As much as Chrystal drew her, the Colorima fascinated her. She was more beautiful than any human, ethereal, and her eyes were windows to something vaster than all of the Glittering, something ineffable and frightening and comforting all at once. She nodded at Nona and gestured both her and Neil to follow them through a series of doors into a wide vestibule, and then over to a windowed wall.
She realized she was still holding Neil’s hand. She let go, her cheeks warm. Neil beat her to the glass, staring inside. “It’s medical,” he whispered. “Something medical.” He paused. “Repeatable. A place for something they can do to a lot of people at once.”
“Or soulbots,” Chrystal added.
Rows of beds lined wide aisles, each paired with unrecognizable machinery that hunched over them. Belts and hoses attached to each machine. Others hung from the high ceiling. The low light used the same color frequency that farmers used in the garden bubbles on the Deep, as if whoever designed this was trying to bring sunshine far inside the mountain. A few large boxes in the back had been shrouded with draped material, which had since disintegrated and fallen to the floor, revealing a sort of large dresser and a box with no obvious features.
“There are human-sized chairs,” she said. “And tables.”
Chrystal pointed. “I see a sink.”
“It’s so . . . sterile looking.” Neil turned toward Yi, who had come up just behind them. “How old is this? What makes you think it’s from after the age of exploration?”
The Colorima answered. “We’re not sure.”
Yi frowned. “But would they—would we—have had so much technology before that?”
“I don’t think so,” Neil said. “But history is never truth. Don’t confuse anything you’ve heard about the past with what might have actually happened.”
Chrystal laughed, her laugh infecting Nona, lightening the serious mood in the cave.
The Colorima said, “Please gather around. I have a few questions to ask you.”
Yi looked puzzled, but he turned toward the Colorima. Nona found herself between Neil and Chrystal, all of them facing the strange and beautiful robot in a half circle. “Go ahead,” the Colorima said. “Sit down. This will take a few moments.”
Everyone sat, clearly for the sake of the humans. Next could stand forever or run forever or sit forever. “Thank you,” Nona said.
The Colorima flicked her fingers and a see-through display sprang to life between her and the others, its edges shimmering in the air. Inside, three symbols hovered. One was a circle with a ring around it, a circle with no ring, and a crescent combined together. Another was a set of interlocking circles with a bar through them, and the third was a three-dimensional rendering of a box with what looked like a cloud trapped inside it. After she gave them a few moments to look at the symbols, the Colorima asked, “Do you have any idea what those might be?”
Nona had certainly never seen anything like them.
“Language?” Neil asked.
“We don’t know,” the Colorima said. “Have you seen them before?”
Neil leaned forward, his face so near the symbols that it looked like he might blow them away. “I might have,” he said. His hand went to his slate.
The Colorima shook her head. “We have been very careful they do not end up on human networks. I will tell you what we know so far.”
Neil settled back, a look of pure happiness on his face. Nona realized she didn’t feel much different. The mysteries of the caves had the tang of adventure that showed up in vids, so real it felt surreal, special.
The Colorima bent her beautiful head toward the images. “We have found these symbols in a variety of unexpected places. Not always together. Sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, sometimes all three together. The things we have found them stamped or painted or etched upon have all been old.”
She pointed toward the rendering of the box with cloud in it. “The first time we saw this symbol, it was here on Lym, but not here in this cave, which we have no previous record of whatsoever. We found all three hand carved on rocks near Neville. Small rocks. Nothing that has been noticed, even though the rocks are still there. They are fist-sized and a little bigger, and they occur from time to time, as if they were buried and are working themselves up from some archaeological midden.
“We suspect the symbols are in other places here, as well.
“We’ve found them on Mammot, deep in caverns as they have been mined.”
Neil interrupted. “Meaning that the miners put them there?”
“No. The humans found them in deep places while mining.”
Neil said it first. “You don’t think humans put them on Mammot.”
The Colorima looked pleased. “Not historically current humans, anyway. We are trying to discover who put them there.”
“Aliens?” Yi leaned in as he asked it, his eyes wide. “Aliens?”
The Colorima shrugged. “We have also found the symbols on asteroids far beyond the habitable belt, out in the wild places where only we can live.”
For a long moment the only sound Nona heard was her breath and Neil’s breath. She shivered.
“We’re looking for more instances of these symbols. I’m hoping we find them in these caves.” The Colorima glanced at Yi. “We may have glimpsed one in the video stream that you sent us. I’m not sure. But we decided it was worth looking here. We plan to leave sometime soon.” She glanced at Neil. “On our terms, and not necessarily in weeks or months. But we are not staying on Lym for long. We want to understand these symbols before we go. They have become a defining mystery for us.”
“Did you come here because of the symbols?” Yi asked.
So Yi didn’t know why the Next came either? They were that secretive?
The Colorima closed down the display window with a slight, audible snap of two fingers. “We came here to learn more about our past,” she said.
“Funny,” Neil said. “I came here to learn about our future.”
“They might be the same,” the Colorima said. She stood up, fluid, so that one moment she sat and the next moment she stood. Neil and Nona also stood, although with far more difficulty and less grace. The Colorima added, “Let’s explore.” She looked at Yi again. “Have you gone further than this?”
“I thought we should wait for you.”
“Excellent. I’ll lead.”
Yi didn’t react, even though Nona got the impression he had expected to lead the group.
Out here in this room there was only the elevator, the long windowed wall, and a corridor that stretched away, the thinnest lacework of virgin dust proving Yi’s claim that they hadn’t ventured any farther.
The Colorima’s feet left thin, clear tracks as they started down the hallway. She led, Nona and Neil following her, Jason and Chrystal behind them, and Yi in the far back.
Nona coughed a few times as the dust tickled her throat. Neil slapped her gently on the back. “Breathe through your nose.”
“Oh. Of course.” The dust coated her nostrils, but she stopped coughing. It smelled metallic and sharp, like rock and crystal and science.
The Colorima came to a door on the left, opened it, and walked on. As they passed it, Nona looked in the open door and identified a privy. Another sign this was a place built for humans.
The next room held what had to be computing infrastructure—squares and rectangles of various sizes grouped together, some soft and flexible and others hard-surfaced. This room had been closed up clean; almost no dust rested on the soft surfaces, and the air smelled empty.
The Colorima walked over to the boxes and bent down to peer at them. Nona had the impression she was using her eyes to take pictures. She didn’t touch anything, and no one else actually went into the room.
Next, they found a room similar to the one behind the viewing wall, only instead of beds, row on row of variously sized clear boxes sat beside the machinery. The room was as big, maybe bigger, than most labs from the university where Nona had taught. Twenty people could work in here and hardly ever come across one another. There must be thirty or forty boxes, with wide aisles between them all. The floor was hard stone. Here and there, small cracks had appeared in the sealed boxes, spilling streams and droplets of liquid across the floor. She nearly slipped on one.
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