by Webb, Nick
Pike crossed his arms over his chest.
“If he’s breaking orders….” Rychenkov looked unaccountably sad all of a sudden. “He’s going to die alone. He’ll detonate the bomb and go out with it, somewhere he thinks no one will be hurt.”
“How do you know?”
“Call it a hunch. I’ve heard stories of this. When you’re ordered to do something you can’t, and there’s no way to run, you end it yourself. That’s the only choice you have, the only you can control. He might have broken free of the orders and he wants to do the right thing. Who knows? But it’s dangerous to follow him, if so.”
“And if he has some other orders, the best thing to do would be not change course, establish that we aren’t a threat, and arrive at Earth first to head him off. We were barely going to catch him as it was.”
Pike chewed his lip. “So what I’m hearing is, ‘don’t follow.’”
“That’s about the way of it. What d’you think, Lapushka?” Rychenkov caught Pike’s look. “What?”
“That’s the first time I’ve seen you invite a referendum after giving your opinion, is all.” Pike found a smile from somewhere. “I’d say our girl has you wrapped around her little finger.”
Rychenkov snorted. “Bah. My people have hearts of ice.”
“That is the biggest lie I have ever heard.” But Pike turned to look up at the girl. “What do you think? Do we follow?”
She considered, her face lit by the glow of the screens, eyes focused on the trajectory but her mind clearly far away. At last, she nodded.
“Go after him?” Rychenkov’s surprise was evident. “A cornered animal?”
She nodded.
“But … why?”
She tapped at her chest, then pressed her fingertips to her temples, before pointing out the port window towards Earth.
“You want to give him new orders?” Pike frowned.
She nodded.
“You can—why did you not mention you could do that?”
She gave him a look.
Rychenkov wasn’t diverted, however. He sat back in his chair with the air of someone who would be stroking his beard if he had one. “It’s a dangerous game, Lapushka.” He looked up at her. “What’s your range? A handshake? A kilometer?”
She shifted uncomfortably, but she was honest, at least: she held up her thumb and forefinger, close together.
“So, smaller than the range of that bomb.”
Pike and the girl looked at one another.
“Put yourself in Tel Robbie’s shoes for a moment.” Rychenkov leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Y’make yourself a nice little toy, right? A human girl with all sorts of powers, able to play with your enemies’ technology. And then she runs off and helps someone else destroy your flagship. You might want to kill her in revenge, or you might realize something else: she’s just dangerous, revenge or not. Is it so unlikely that you’d have found ways to track her? On a station like Vesta, might someone have sent back word? How do we know all of Ka’sagra’s people are loyal to her, after all?”
Pike looked away. He didn’t want to hear this.
But Rychenkov’s voice went on, softly. “And so you send a decoy ship. A ship with a bomb. Lapushka’s going to know it’s dangerous, but she’s outsmarted him before. She thinks she can do it again. She can’t just let innocent people die, after all—even Telestines. And of course she’s not going to lose the opportunity to help another former slave, is she? And then she’s gone, and you don’t have anyone standing in your way.”
Pike looked to the girl, where she was sitting still and scared on the cabinet. She wasn’t kicking her feet now; she seemed to have curled in on herself.
“So do you still want to go?” Rychenkov was gentle. “Because men like that—even if they’re aliens—they don’t forget someone who slips out from under their thumb. He’s coming for you. Do you still want to risk it?”
She looked at him, eyes dark and horrified.
And then her shoulders went down, her chin came up, and she nodded.
Rychenkov, improbably, began to laugh. “Ah, Lapushka, you are a wonder. I hope to God I get to watch you take that son of a bitch down.” He looked at Pike. “So, if you have no objections?”
“Just one.” Pike frowned at him. “Where the hell did my captain go? What have you done with Pyotr Rychenkov?”
“You killed him, remember?” Rychenkov clapped him on the shoulder and swiveled to start making the course corrections. “Now you have a revolutionary, my friend.”
“And … you’re not afraid of dying?”
“We’re all dying. Some more quickly than others.”
“You’re impossible when you get like this, you know that?” But Pike left the cockpit whistling.
***
Two days. It took two days to catch up with their target, swinging wide away from Earth and into the empty black, the sun out the starboard window as they drew ever closer on the maps. Two days to get to the point where they could look through the viewscreens to see it, out in the black.
But there was nothing there.
Rychenkov, for his part, understood first. His hand came down on his leg with an oath.
“What?” Pike looked over at him.
“Transponder.” Rychenkov gave a grim smile. “He removed the transponder. It’s just drifting all by itself.” He looked at Pike and the girl. “Guess we forgot there could be a third option, huh? That they were trying to keep us from catching up. They were expecting to be followed. Pulled out the shuttle’s transponder, shot it out into the black and led us on a wild goose chase, and now they’re sitting pretty, aren’t they? Because we won’t make it to Earth in time now.”
The girl swayed. She was looking out into the black with eyes that had a sheen of tears.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Pike told her, but she shrugged away from his touch on her shoulder.
“At least you know one thing,” Rychenkov said thoughtfully.
“What?” Though he hardly cared.
Rychenkov jerked his head at the girl. “Way I see it, whoever did this either doesn’t know she’s involved, or they don’t want her dead. Just out of the way. I’d guess the former. She’s one of the single biggest assets anyone could have in this war—bigger to them than to us, I’d think. What’s-his-face can do a fake terrorist attack any day of the week, he’s not going to prioritize that over grabbing her when he has the chance. I’d think most other people would do the same. So they didn’t realize who was following them—and that’s interesting, don’t you think?”
Neither Pike nor the girl spoke. They weren’t going to make it. They knew it.
“What’s the point?” Pike asked, as Rychenkov plugged in the coordinates for Earth.
“The point?” Rychenkov gave him a look. “Same as it always was. Stop it if we can.”
“We can’t,” Pike said flatly. “Nothing goes right for us there. You know that. They’ve won this race.”
Rychenkov stared at him for a long moment, and then pressed the START button on the coordinates. He lifted his shoulders. “All we can do is try.”
And die, uselessly. Pike closed his mouth on the bitter words and left the cockpit, hating Rychenkov for taking them back, hating the girl for not taking his side, and, most of all, hating himself for not doing more to stop this.
Earth was a trap. Open skies and the sharp cut of mountains against the horizon were pretty nothings, and still he could not break their hold.
Earth would only break their hearts again. He knew it more surely than he had ever known anything.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Asteroid Belt
Vesta Station
“This way.” Parees walked slantways through shift-end crush in the corridors, hugging the right wall with one shoulder leading, the way the miners did. Where Walker and Nhean tried to count the branches of the passageways to remember their path, Parees clearly knew it by heart now. He lowered his voice. “The priestess is waiting fo
r you. She was informed when your ship landed, and sent me.”
Walker shot a quick look at Nhean, and found him studying Parees closely.
“You’re looking better,” he said.
“I feel better.” Parees gave him a quick glance and a small smile. “It was difficult at first, to see how humanity lives, after having lived so long on Venus. I have hope now, though.”
Nhean frowned. “After speaking to Ka’sagra?”
“She’s….” Parees had a small smile on his face as he chose his words. “She’s not like Tel’rabim at all,” he said finally. “She sees something greater than all of us. The pain you see here, the suffering—she sees a world where all of that is gone.”
She had never considered that possibility. Walker sank into silence as they made their way through the crush of people. She had been fighting for humanity’s bare survival for so long that she could not begin to imagine a world like the one Parees was describing, the one Ka’sagra envisioned. Perhaps it was different if one had lived in the Telestine cities—if there was the chance to go back to that. If one had ever even seen that.
She had never even had the chance to imagine what Ka’sagra hoped for.
Her brow was still furrowed as they came into a series of caves. Humans, streaked in dust and all wearing coveralls, turned to watch as their small party passed. When Walker met their eyes, she wished she had not. Her uniform was too distinctive, and her failure to protect them was too evident when she looked at their thin bodies. The sound of coughing reverberated against the stone walls.
A small child dropped an old ball, and it rolled towards Walkers feet. She stooped to pick it up, and crouched to hand it back to the girl. The child, thin and wiry, eyed her warily before snatching it back and scurrying away to her waiting mother.
Walker remembered agreeing as Nhean argued that humanity would not win the war without losing human colonies. It was simple in the hallways of the UN, and on the bridge of a carrier. It was simple when the battlefield was a holographic readout. It was simple to say.
It was infinitely harder to see. She eyed another small, dirty child playing with a pile of tiny rocks in the corner. This one a boy, small enough to be four or five but likely a little older—malnourishment tended to stunt growth. He expertly juggled a handful of rocks into the air. Rocks for toys.
If Ka’sagra had given Parees hope, however … was it worth hearing her out? She watched him as he led them unerringly through smaller corridors and past storerooms full of crates and infirmaries with pallets laid on the floor. There was no security to speak of. The Daughters of Ascension did not bother to guard their crates of supplies, nor did they seem to fear that the humans on the station would turn on them. It was a level of trust that was almost ostentatious. Telestines moved to and fro, wearing simple robes so like nuns’ habits that Walker blinked in surprise. Their skin looked unnatural in the dim light and a few of them smiled at Parees and raised their hands in greeting. Was smiling a Telestine expression, or was it learned?
Ka’sagra waited for them in a converted storeroom at the end of the corridor. The rough walls had been draped in hangings, and thin carpets covered the floors and hung on the ceilings to reduce the noise of voices echoing off the stone.
The Telestine was composed, long-fingered hands clasped in front of her, strange eyes watchful. She smiled at Parees as well, and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Thank you, child.”
She had clearly studied human mannerisms and was attempting to use them now, but the hiss in her voice, the inhuman pallor of her skin, the set of her face, all lent a horrifying tinge to the performance.
Unnatural, Walker’s instincts screamed. She had never liked the aid workers and missionaries in the stations—aliens passing out scraps of home to humans too poor to refuse. They seemed to expect politeness for their generosity, when what they were giving should never have been theirs to start with. Even as a child, she had thought that. She had done anything to avoid standing in the food lines with her mother and sisters, always running off to hide with Pike—who had also been hiding, of course.
Now she told herself to behave, like every adult had told her child-self to do. Allies were allies. Food was food.
Revenge would come later, when they saw everything they loved burned to the ground and knew what it was to be without a home. She knew their greatest weakness, because she had watched what they did to humanity. She knew what to take to destroy them.
And they would never see it coming.
“You are Nhean Tang.” Ka’sagra took a moment to look Nhean over. Her gaze flicked sideways to Walker. “And you are the admiral.” She was smiling, incongruously. “You are both very welcome here.”
“Really.” For all her planning, Walker could not keep the skepticism from her voice.
“You are my ally,” Ka'sagra explained. “I believe your people have a saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You stand against Tel’rabim, so you are my friend—and as I stand against him, I am yours.”
Are you? Walker kept her mouth closed on the question.
“Why do you oppose Tel’rabim?” Nhean linked his hands behind his back. His tone was carefully neutral. He shot Walker a look. I talk, it said. You listen.
Ka'sagra looked between the two of them for a moment. “He opposes the ascension,” she said finally.
“The, ah … and what is that, exactly?”
“It is, I think, your … ‘heaven’? It is total peace. Quiet. Nirvana. Ascension.” Ka'sagra was smiling. “Many speak of it, but too few think to achieve it. They would rather concern themselves with wealth and power. They do not understand that it is to gain infinitely more than any luxury, and it is not achieved when we crush humanity, but when we lift them up with us.”
Walker refrained from pointing out that it was the Telestines that had cast humanity down in the first place.
“And so you oppose him because he interferes with the spiritual health of the Telestines?” Nhean asked carefully. “Forgive me, I know very little of your religion.”
“Religion.” Ka'sagra smiled. “Such a human notion. You adopt ideas and cast them aside again as if they were clothes, as if there can be disagreement over the truth. For a Telestine, what you call ‘religion’ has a very different place. I would say that your religion, Mr. Tang, is to know. And yours, Admiral Walker—it is to fight. It is not a job. It is not a thought experiment. It is a way of being that is the deepest expression of what you are.”
Walker and Nhean looked at one another.
“And the ascension is a … heaven for all,” Ka'sagra corrected Nhean. “Humans as well. Your souls shall also rise. I believe this, for you are essential to it. Only by harmony can it be achieved.”
Walker was unable to suppress her snort, and Nhean’s lips tightened as Ka'sagra looked over at her.
“I do not doubt your sincerity,” Walker said carefully. “Nor do I oppose your goal. I see that you live your religion as you tell us we live ours. But the rest of your kind have not moved to help humanity. The Daughters of Ascension are very few compared to the others.”
“I do not deny it.” Ka'sagra did not seem offended. “My priestesses and I are slowly changing the minds of the people to bring about the ascension. It is possible for us to do so, even when others have a different … religion … than we do. To our own, we say that this is greater than human or Telestine. It is beyond us all.”
Walker forced herself to focus on the Telestine’s alien eyes.
“Our people had been a long time in the bellies of their ships, Admiral Walker, wandering from star system to empty star system.” Ka’sagra’s eyes were clear. “Their desperation for a home had grown greater than they could bear, so great that they would justify any cruelty to escape their hell. That is why they would tell you that it is only natural to put your own kind before others—it is one of the half-truths they tell themselves to justify an act that would otherwise seem monstrous. Judge my kind for what we have done, that
is your right.”
Ka’sagra paused.
“But I ask you … what would you sacrifice not to live on these stations any longer?”
Chapter Thirty
Asteroid Belt
Vesta Station
Daughters of Ascension headquarters
Walker’s lips pressed together, and her nose flared. There was a sudden tension in the set of her head, and guilt behind her eyes as she broke eye contact with Ka’sagra. It was only a moment before her face cleared, however. Someone would have had to be watching very carefully to see it.
Nhean had been watching very carefully. He marked the way Walker marshaled her thoughts, and he reminded himself that emotion was very different from motivation. So she felt guilty and tense when asked that question. It might only mean that she wanted Ka'sagra and all of her kind dead, and did not want to say as much out loud. It might still mean nothing.
His fears might be entirely unfounded.
“I only want humanity to be free,” she said finally. She would meet no one’s eyes, focusing instead on a point above Ka'sagra's head.
Ka'sagra waited for a long moment, clearly expecting more, but Walker said nothing else.
“And what does ‘free’ mean?” Ka'sagra asked finally. She did not prompt the admiral. She offered nothing but the question.
“It means we will no longer be caged by despair and poverty.”
Nhean looked over in new interest. There was hope in these words. It was almost a match for Ka'sagra's language.
“The Daughters of Ascension strive for the same,” Ka'sagra remarked.
Walker’s eyes flared with anger at that. “We will never be free while we rely on you.”
Parees cast a worried glance at Nhean. She’s ruining everything, his gaze said.