by Webb, Nick
They could never get Earth back.
Earth was lost. Earth was a dream. A siren. A mirage.
“How do you tie a race to slavery?” she asked him. “You put them in the very shadow of the thing they want most and you make it impossible to reclaim. How many years have we lost? We could be gone by now, out there, amongst the stars. We could have the life we one day dreamed of having, but there are those who will keep looking backwards as long as they are able. I would free us from those shackles.”
“By destroying Earth.” He spoke the words wonderingly, as if he still could not believe it.
“It cannot be reclaimed!” The words burst out of her. “The Telestines won’t just be defeated and leave Earth unscathed for us to claim. They’ll never, ever do that. They must be defeated permanently, or they will always be a danger to us. What is the greatest danger in this world? Someone else with the same needs. There are few enough planets, and now there are two races who want the same ones. If we cannot have Earth back—and we cannot—then I will destroy it if I must, to take our enemy and our shackles in one blow. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.” His face was a mask. “But how do you think we will survive that?”
“The way we survive everything,” she said wearily. “By willpower and ingenuity. The reason we are not surviving it now is that we see no need. We tell ourselves fairy tales of reclaiming Earth. There is no hope of that.” She waved a hand towards the wall and the stars beyond. “There’s a whole galaxy out there, Nhean. Limitless potential. And we chain ourselves to the false hope of getting our home back.”
She was trying to persuade him, she realized now. All she had ever wanted was to have someone else understand this. Pike … could never understand. Could he? She wanted him to, so badly. For a long time, she had hoped that he of all people might come to see Earth for the trap it was, but the truth was that he never would. He had been born under those skies. He still remembered fresh air in his lungs. She had faced that, now.
“So what do you want?” she asked him again.
“My fleet back,” Nhean said promptly.
“We need that.” She did not flicker.
“You want to destroy a planet with it. That was not its purpose.”
“You wanted to save humanity with it, and that, I will do.”
There was a silence, and then he reached forward and cut the call, and in the silence of her room, Laura Walker clenched her hands and tried to remember how to breathe.
***
In the Koh Rong, in a ship hidden by the cluster of asteroids and debris caught up in the exact cancellation of Jupiter’s and the Sun’s gravity, Pike doubled over and threw up on the floor.
“She wants to destroy Earth,” he whispered. He had to say it, or he wouldn’t believe it. “She wants to destroy Earth.” He looked up at them, Nhean and the girl, two pairs of black eyes watching him calmly, and anger came in a rush. “Why the hell did you make me watch that?”
Nhean’s face was implacable. “You would never have believed it unless you saw it with your own eyes, and you had to believe it.”
“I could have mourned her if she was dead,” Pike said thickly. “I could have … if she’d died in battle, I could have mourned her. But now….” Now she was just as gone as if she’d been dead, and he could not even mourn. How could you mourn a person like that?
“I don’t need you to mourn her,” Nhean said simply. “I need you to change her mind. We need her as an ally when Tel’rabim realizes we are still at odds, and you are the only one she will let close enough. You are also the only one who can get close enough to do what must be done if her mind cannot be changed.”
Pike looked up at him in horror.
“Laura Walker,” Nhean explained, “is one of the greatest tacticians we have, perhaps the greatest, and certainly the best positioned to act. If she sets her mind to destroying Earth, do you think for a moment that she will fail?”
Slowly, Pike shook his head.
“Then make your peace with that fact,” Nhean told him flatly. “And decide what you will do if you cannot persuade her.”
Pike shuddered, rolled over, and began to heave again. The girl walked towards him, carefully, with delicate steps. She placed the back of her small hand lightly against his spasming shoulder, and cupped her fingers.
It was an odd gesture, Nhean thought. Not human. But then, she wasn’t truly human, was she? She was something else. An other.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t show compassion. It didn’t mean she wasn’t, in some fundamental way, true. And it didn’t mean that he didn’t trust her.
Nhean’s thoughts flickered back to the conversation he’d been in a rush to leave back in the Constantine Gardens. “To trust the other, to trust an enemy, especially when our interests align … now that takes real faith,” Worthlin had said.
So. It did not matter then. The Telestines could be the end of humanity, or underground demons, or simply unimaginably distant. Whatever they were, they were other. And the girl, too, was other. And he, Nhean—the human who had built his life by seeing through webs of information built to hide deceit and deception—he was going to need faith.
He was going to trust this other.
Thank you for reading Jupiter’s Sword, book 2 of the Earth Dawning Series. If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review?
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