by Webb, Nick
“You don’t have to kill me,” Essa told Parees. In a room with Walker, he was all malice; now, he was calm and gentle. “You can put the gun down if you want, Parees. Would you feel better if you did that?”
Parees hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“You said you don’t want to kill me.”
“I don’t. I—don’t! I don’t. Don’t want to do this.”
“Parees.” Essa’s voice was calm. “Who ordered you to kill me?”
That was his fatal mistake, because that was something Parees had apparently been forbidden from answering. Nhean watched as he fought the pain, face contorting, bending toward the gun, putting both hands on it as if a feat of strength would be necessary to drag it out of place. He opened his mouth to speak, his body went rigid, and the blast of the shot reverberated through the videocast. Blood splattered onto the screen and there was screaming, shouting. Nhean just had time to see Parees face the center console.
“You have to destroy all of them! Destroy the heart of it or it will consume you!”
Parees reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, grey cylinder. The gun clattered to the deck as he held the cylinder out in front and then raised it up, above the frantic fray of officers and military police that swarmed around him and Essa.
“No!” Nhean was up out of his chair and yelling, and the girl was staring at the screen in horror.
She threw out her bleeding hands, her mouth opening in a silent scream, but it was too late.
With a calm, fluid movement, Parees looked up even as he began to be pulled down to the ground. Arm still raised, he pressed the button as he disappeared into the struggle surrounding him. The video cut off abruptly as a flash of light burst across the monitors.
And the settlement at Vesta was entirely gone. Vesta itself almost entirely gone, as not one, but a handful of explosions erupted from the surface, blasting rock and molten metal out into space.
“No,” Nhean whispered again.
His helmsman had jammed her hand into her mouth to stop the sound that was coming from her, a high sort of animal wailing, and she curled her legs up to her chest as the picture cleared on debris: rocks tumbling, chunks of the ships that had been docked, the mining operations belching out flame and going abruptly quiet.
Nhean sank back into his chair, shuddering.
Parees. Parees had been a drone, Parees had gotten orders from Tel’rabim.
He stopped.
And then his world seemed to turn upside down.
Because he knew.
She’s telling you everything. There had been a pleading note in Parees’s voice that day. And then, in a panic: You have to destroy all of them! Destroy the heart of it or it will consume you!
In horror, Nhean felt his fingers move to bring up the pictures he had spent days staring at. There’s a saint, and she clearly doesn’t like what’s going on in that city. A cult. Someone blew something up.
“They blew up the sun.” The words fell out of his mouth and they were wrong, they had to be wrong because they were ridiculous—but he had never been so sure of anything in his life. “They blew up their own sun,” he repeated, numb.
She had told them everything. Ka'sagra had told them everything, right down to why she liked Walker and Tel’rabim so damned much.
After all, two opposing and highly capable strategists could help quite a lot of people ascend to heaven. They could help everyone ascend, human and Telestine, both. And heaven wasn’t a future abstraction. It was here. It was now.
He suddenly remembered Worthlin’s mention of the word cult, and why it had struck him at the time.
“Son of a bitch,” Nhean said, with feeling. “It’s goddamned death cult.”
With Ka'sagra at the helm.
Suddenly, Tel’rabim’s warning to stay away from Vesta made sense. Suddenly, the silence from Earth didn’t seem so strange. Tel’rabim hadn’t reacted to the attack because he hadn’t known it was coming—and, then, because he’d had the good sense to be suspicious about who might have done it.
And Parees … Parees had tried desperately to keep from carrying out his orders.
There was no way he could have known, Nhean told himself. There was no way he could have known any of it.
But that still left one million dead.
“What?” Pike looked at him like he was crazy.
Behind him, the girl was rocking back and forth. To Nhean’s shock, he heard a whisper break loose from her lips: “No.”
“What did you say?” Pike repeated.
“Sir, the fleet is turning to disperse.”
“No time,” Nhean said to Pike. He turned to the helmsman. “Get us to one of the dark points. Any of them. Lagrange Two at Jupiter. Go there. And don’t tell anyone where we’re going, except … send one message.” Nhean opened his mouth and hesitated. “To Tel’rabim. Tell him that I believe him. Tell him that I want to help him find Ka'sagra and kill her.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Vesta
VFS Santa Maria
Bridge
They stared at the rubble, open-mouthed. At the blank screens. There was a vivid memory of blood and gore, and Parees screaming as he was dragged away from the desk far too late.
Vesta was gone. One million lives, snuffed out. And how many ships—
Too many.
Walker shuddered, and felt herself split in two: the first part open-mouthed, blank with horror; the second part cold and calculating. She listened to the second part, as she always did, and it told her now that this was no time for grief. It told her that what they had wanted to protect was gone. It told her to run before their ships were snuffed out one by one by the cannons that were starting to glow.
“Larsen, message to the helmsmen. Get us out. Fighters dock within one minute or hide in the asteroid belt and we’ll be back in a few days. Split the fleet according to….” Her finger traced down a list she kept always at hand. “Plan Mu.” The fleet would split, each traveling to seven assigned points, one group rejoining the flagship at each point. “Broadcast. Now.”
“But—” Delaney looked sick. “The survivors—”
“Wounded is worse than dead,” she told him brutally. “If we stop to help them, we all die and there will be no fleet.”
The image of the child juggling the small pile of rocks in a hallway on Vesta reared into her mind. And the other child, the girl with the old, worn ball. Could they be alive? Was there a chance anyone was alive?
“We can’t just—”
She wanted to slap him. Instead, she grabbed the front of his uniform and pulled him close. “How many ships do you think Mercury can produce?” She spat the question at him. “We have nothing in the pipeline. We have lost the mines at Vesta. We … cannot … rebuild. These ships are all we have left, and I am getting them to safety. There will be time for grieving later.”
That, and time to find out who the hell had planned this assassination attempt.
Which reminded her of one more thing. She gestured to Larsen, who hurried close. She pulled him down so his ear was a hairsbreadth from her mouth.
“Tell the new engineers to lock Nhean out of the server rooms, and begin changing the authorization codes. Do it now. And do what you can to get into his systems. He’ll have bombs that were left on Mars. We need them.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Jupiter’s L2 Lagrange Point
Koh Rong
The bridge was quiet. The helmsman had been dismissed, although the proximity map had been stretched to cover three walls, so that Nhean would not miss any approaching ships.
He could not be too careful until the fleet was back under his control.
Nearby, the girl sat quietly. She still had no name that she would divulge, but she spoke of other things in hoarse words that sometimes did not quite fit together. She spoke of the feel of Tel’rabim’s computer systems, life in the laboratories, escaping the Intrepid in search of Ka'sagra. That Parees was a drone
, and that even she had not realized until she saw the way he was moving onscreen.
She spoke.
“There were no … thoughts,” she said simply. Quietly, she added: “Fear of Ka'sagra. He and I. Should know—have known.” She shook her head and took a moment to try to put the thought into a sentence. “He was the only other one … who feared Ka'sagra. He did not want to meet her. I should have known.” She spoke carefully, as if English were a foreign language to her.
They said no more, and Nhean could not bear to think of Parees now.
The buzz of the comms recalled him. The girl sat up, out of sight but alert.
Tel’rabim’s face swam into focus on the viewscreen, and he allowed Nhean no time to speak. “I sent you a message!”
So this was how it was going to be. Nhean bit back a sigh. “In the future, if you want a group of your enemies to stand back while you destroy their allies and their own settlements, I would suggest telling them why.”
Tel’rabim stopped in the middle of a retort, his mouth open. “I told you it was for your own good.”
“Yes,” Nhean said patiently. “And what evidence have you provided that we can trust you?”
There was a long silence. Tel’rabim looked away.
At the table out of sight, the girl scribbled a note and passed it to Nhean. His eyebrows rose as he read it.
“You didn’t think when you sent that message, did you?” he asked quietly. “You sent it the way it would have been sent to another Telestine. The words were only part of it. It didn’t occur to you that we would think it was a lie.”
Tel’rabim had dropped his forehead into one hand. Now his head came up. “I sent you a message,” he said again, quietly. “I tried to get you out of the way. It was the only way to get rid of her, and now I can’t even be sure we’ve done that. She destroyed the moon herself—I doubt she did so while she was still there.”
“Yes,” Nhean said softly. “That is true. Out of curiosity … when did you realize? Have the Telestines always known what the Daughters of Ascension were?”
“We knew what they had been in our home system.” Tel’rabim shook his head. “That they believed the ascension could only be achieved by violence … no. We did not know that. Our journey from our system must have changed them more than we knew.”
Nhean stopped. “You don’t know.”
“I do not know what?”
Nhean exchanged a quick look with the girl.
You have to tell him, her eyes insisted.
“I do not know what?” Tel’rabim’s inflections were innately Other, and he was struggling with the human language.
“The Daughters of Ascension destroyed your star,” Nhean told him.
Tel’rabim’s face went entirely blank. “That is a lie. A human lie. You lie like you breathe.”
“It is not a lie!” Nhean’s hand clenched.
“You are saying that our disaster was not … natural?”
“Yes. I am saying that.”
“You are saying that a group that preaches about the ascension, that brings food and medicine to all, somehow destroyed a star and took billions of lives.” Tel’rabim was clearly struggling between his innate desire to believe, and his disbelief that any part of this could be true.
“Yes, I will find proof for you.”
“You are telling me that my family was murdered.” Tel’rabim was beginning to rock back and forth. His tone was not so angry as before, but lost. Could he, too, see the tiny hints slotting into place in a larger pattern? “That the bad luck of the Telestines, the justice on which I based the seizure of your planet, all of it was a lie? That our planet was destroyed by a willful act and our own people were murdered?”
“Yes,” Nhean said quietly.
Tel’rabim stared him down. The strange pupils were dilating and shrinking by turns. A flutter in the gills by his throat seemed to indicate distress, though Nhean did not know enough to know if he was interpreting that correctly.
“They came with us,” Tel’rabim said simply. “As we journeyed across the stars. They gained followers, they spoke of the trials of the living and the heaven that awaited us. I knew that they planned to make us kill one another, I learned that … recently.” His face twisted. “But now you tell me that they had done it before. This was just planning to do it again, another way.”
“Yes.” There was nothing else to say. What could you say to someone who learned that the suffering of their species had been entirely unnecessary? This was not a small terrorist attack. It was genocide.
“I will … speak to you again.” Tel’rabim cut the connection.
Nhean tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair for a moment. He exchanged one look with the girl. “What do you think?” he asked her.
“You think—” She broke off. “I think,” she corrected herself. “Ka'sagra is not problem.”
Nhean blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”
She held up two fingers. “Humans and Telestines.” One finger came down. “One planet.” She lifted her shoulders. “He kills Ka'sagra. What then?”
It took him a moment to parse it. “You mean, the enemy of my enemy is not always a friend,” he said quietly.
“Yes.” She spoke even that small word with care. “And….” She looked around, eyes traveling over the room as if to see who might be listening. “Walker.”
Nhean looked down at his lap, eyes drifting closed. “I….”
“You know,” she said softly.
“How do you know?” He picked his head up to look at her. He wanted to be wrong about this, but if she had seen the same thing he did….
He was not wrong.
“People who can talk do not listen. I listen.” Her eyes were calm. “Maybe wrong.”
“Maybe. You know we’re not wrong, but maybe.” Nhean reached for a button on the comm unit and paused, finger hovering just above it. “So do you think you’ll be going back to being a mute, if it helps you see things so clearly?”
Anything to distract himself.
“No.” One shoulder lifted. Her eyes were far away. “A little. I want to learn to talk.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Humans talk. I was not … human.” She did not flinch from it. There was a sudden clarity in her eyes as she raised her head. “I am not human.”
Nhean said nothing. He would have reassured her, but there was no pain in her words.
“I failed.” She said the words in a strange staccato rhythm. “Parees. The orders. I failed. I … tried … to change them. To reach him. Maybe if I finished—if Tel’rabim finished … me. Maybe I could succeed.”
Nhean looked away. “Finish you? I think you know we can’t let Tel’rabim get his hands on you again.”
She nodded once, but the next moment, a data disk appeared in her hand. “You could do it.”
Nhean stared at the disk, and then back at her face. “I…”
She walked to him, feet placed carefully on the metal floors. Her fingers pressed the disk into his palm. “You need me.” It was a fact. “All of me. The completed me.”
He took the disk. He did not know what to say to that.
He would find something to say later. He reached out to press the button for a call to Walker. “First things first. Shall we learn the truth about Walker?”
She settled down next to his chair on the floor. “Maybe wrong,” she said simply. She looked up at him. “Not wrong. But maybe.”
He managed half a smile. “Maybe,” he agreed. He paused, and dropped his hand away from the button. “Wait. Pike should see this.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Mars
Carina Station
VFS Santa Maria
Bridge
“Hello.” Walker kept her eyes locked on the screen as the techs began a trace on the message. Scattered on the desk were the blueprints from the bombs. Nhean’s ship had left so quickly from Mars that the bomb itself had been left behind. Now aboard the Anchor, it w
as being deconstructed very, very carefully. She moved the papers out of sight and smiled at Nhean. “Are you planning to rendezvous with the fleet again? We’re nearing the final meet-up.”
“Perhaps.” Nhean looked calm. Far too calm. “I think it depends on how this conversation goes. After all, you’ve made it quite clear that I am not welcome there.”
“It was only proper to have our own techs overseeing the control of the fleet,” Walker told him. She had been ready for this. “Control by civilians is not acceptable. I assume you had always intended us to control the ships at some point. We can hardly have two fleets on two different administration and command systems.”
“Indeed. And what of your plans for Earth?” The question was swift and unexpected.
Walker went cold. For four weeks now she had seen Nhean watching her. The little turns of phrase she used with the rest of the fleet, the tiny evasions, had never been noticed. Until now.
She reacted on autopilot. A jab of her finger cut Nhean’s audio and her eyes went around the room. “Dismissed, all of you.”
She was silent until they were gone. Her heart was pounding.
There was no point in evasion. He knew the truth. That much was clear.
“What do you want?” she asked him when they were alone. “A post in the fleet? My head on a platter?” She had to find out what he wanted, and give it to him. “Why have you said nothing until now?”
“Because I could not believe it,” he said simply. “Even when I heard you speak to Ka'sagra, I could not understand your choice. Have you ever been to Earth, Laura?”
“No.” She said the world coldly. “I have seen it, and that is enough.”
“Do you not find it beautiful?”
“Of course I find it beautiful. Death traps are always beautiful. Otherwise they would not be traps.” She should not say this out loud, but she was so tired of lying. All of the years of not screaming her fury at them, shaking every last one of the fools who claimed they could get Earth back.