And yet I knew for a fact Shadow had been talking to me. That Shadow, in a word, was sentient.
Alive.
And that didn’t sound very sane.
None of that would matter, however, if drones tore us to scraps first. I had to figure out what was happening with them before I could make sense of what I’d experienced with Shadow.
“Arjan,” I wheezed. It came out as barely a whisper, and good thing, because I realized I shouldn’t distract him. I also realized I still had my ear-comm in. The last time I had used it, I’d been talking directly to…“Telu?” I said, after mashing my ear against my shoulder with the hope I would hit the activation button. My voice wasn’t much louder, but it reached its intended target.
“Qole?” Telu nearly shrieked in my ear.
“Telu, I’m awake, and I’m fine, but—”
“Oh, thank the ancestors! Let me comm Nev.”
Nev. My stomach twisted with something between happy anticipation and dread. He must have been thinking I’d gone completely insane. I wanted him to know I wasn’t, but that wouldn’t exactly help our situation, either with the drones or with his being a king. “Wait, doesn’t he need to focus on—?”
She interrupted me again. “Trust me, this will help him focus.”
And then his voice cut in over the comm. “Qole?” Breathless. Desperate. Filled with such a potent mix of hope and anguish that tears flooded my eyes. It was the same feeling that roiled through me.
He loved me, like I loved him, and there wasn’t really anything we could do about it.
“Nev…Nev, I’m okay. Right now I just need…” It was sort of embarrassing to say.
“What? What do you need?” He asked as if he would drop everything, never mind the drones outside or that he was commanding a fleet, to give it to me, whatever it was.
“Well, I sort of just need to get off this bench that I’m strapped to. And then I would prefer it if my ship didn’t get shredded by drones,” I added.
“Oh, sorry!” Telu said, for my strapped-down state, probably not the ship. “But I’m a little busy. Basra?” And then there were more voices on the line, each one shouting my name in relief. Their responses were real things, heavy, squeezing my chest just like Nev’s had. Arjan even turned around in his seat to glance at me with a wild, triumphant look, but he went right back to piloting.
A second later, he managed to level us out long enough for Basra to slip up onto the bridge, place a cool, comforting hand on my cheek, undo my buckles, and then hurry back down to his station below. I shakily hauled myself over to the copilot’s chair and strapped myself in.
And none too soon. The next second, Arjan executed a jarring maneuver that threw me sideways in my seat.
“We can switch, if you want,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth.
I felt short of breath just from moving that far. “Give me a second. Looks like you’re doing fine, anyway.” His smile was brief, pleased. I hit the comm. “Now does anyone want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
Nev spoke first. “I never imagined even she could try to use the drones for warfare. They can’t tell friend from foe.”
Solara. This was her work, then? But if I was seeing clearly—and I was pretty sure I was, in spite of the unrealness of it all—the drones were attacking both sides. “They can’t. They’re going after her ships, too.”
Eton’s voice growled from the weapons turret. “Did she do this just to cause mass confusion, with the hope of coming out ahead? Because I think it’s working.”
“It’s not,” Arjan said. And he was right. By the looks of it, Solara’s forces were getting hammered at least as bad as Nev’s. A burst of pride warmed me for a moment when I saw that the Alaxan fleet was way better than anyone at maneuvering. And instead of bothering to fight back against the drones—which was futile at best, deadly at worst, as more and more drones responded to the distress signals—the little fleet of fishermen were picking off Solara’s forces in the chaos. They were tipping the scales.
“And…um…” Telu’s voice, uncertain. “I don’t think she’s doing this, either.”
“What?” Nev’s response was incredulous.
“I’m hacking their programming to try to redirect their orders, and…” She hesitated again. “This is really damn creepy, but I’m not seeing any orders. It seems like they’re just doing this on their own.”
“Malfunctioning,” Nev said, putting such a practical label on something that made the hair stand up on my arms. “There have been increasing reports of the drones acting up.”
“Sure,” Telu said. “Call it what you want. I’m going to call it really, really wrong.”
Wrong. The word echoed in my head—I’d just heard a different voice, an inhuman one, saying it so many times, after all. Wrong. It echoed, and then clicked into place, like a gear that sent other thoughts whirling.
The Wrong.
Telu likely didn’t mean it in the same way, but that was what made me think of it. My focus suddenly shifted. I stared out at the drones, trying to see something else. My eyes blurred. I used that sixth sense, my Shadow sense, to reach out. All the while being very, very careful not to have a hateful or angry thought in my head.
It was still surprising that nothing shivered or cracked or broke apart. No dizziness or disorientation struck me as blackness coated my vision. No disorientation other than that caused by seeing, feeling in a way that almost no one else could.
There was only the suggestion of a whisper in my ear. “Yes.”
Maybe it was giving me the hint that, for once, I was doing this Shadow-thing right.
What I saw made me gasp. Against the darkness in my eyes and the blackness of space, I didn’t spot any normal Shadow beyond the residue that remained in the holds of a few Alaxan vessels. I’d used up most of our stores.
No, what I saw glimmered silvery-dull, not bright purple-black, in a web that streaked and morphed in my vision, clearer than the swarm of ships outside. It stretched between all the drones, connecting them.
Rather, it ran through the drones, like veins in a circulatory system. It was their blood.
Tentatively, I stretched my senses toward it. Touching the gray web sent a wave of nausea rippling through me, and I pulled away immediately. I still felt sticky, stained.
This was what the Shadow, my Shadow, had been trying to warn me about. This new substance was almost like Shadow, except it was just…wrong.
Images flashed in my mind—razor teeth, hungry maws, sickly fire, dissolving flesh, collapsing portals, and destruction, destruction above all. I didn’t know if it was the Shadow inside me, reminding me, or my own memories.
I gasped, recoiling and shuddering in my seat. “It’s in the drones.”
“What is?” Arjan glanced at me. “Are you all right, Qole?”
Nev’s voice came over the comm. “What’s wrong? She’s not…she’s okay, right?”
“It’s not me,” I said quickly. “I’m fine. It’s the drones. They’re wrong. Something is controlling them, something really bad, and I can sense it.”
“Something?” Basra spoke up, sounding dubious. “Not someone?”
“I told you, no one is controlling these things,” Telu cut in, and then she murmured almost too low for me to hear her over the comm. “No one human, at any rate.”
“Um, okay,” Nev said. He must have heard Telu, too. “So you’re saying…”
When he didn’t finish, Eton chimed in. “What the hell are you saying? I’m getting the creeps up here.”
But I wasn’t listening, because there was another voice speaking in my head, sounding clearer, rather than muted, through the veil of Shadow. It sounded a lot like the other voice on the comm, the real Nev. But it wasn’t.
“Find the Wrong. Reveal it. Stop it.”
&nb
sp; Stop it. With those words, I suddenly knew what to do. This Wrong…whatever it was…was close enough to Shadow that it probably had similar qualities. Shadow was volatile, and I could set it off, like touching fire to an explosive substance.
“Everyone just be quiet for a second,” I said. “I’m going to try something.”
Chatter died. “Let me know if I can do anything to help you,” Nev said. “And, uh, I don’t mean to rush you, but the faster the better. We’re taking heavy losses.”
“Wait,” I said, as it occurred to me. “You can help. Solara is taking heavy losses, too, right?”
“Correct. She’s being decimated.”
“Stop the Wrong. Now,” the voice repeated with more urgency.
I took a deep breath, ignoring it and hoping I wouldn’t pay for it in a second. My intentions still had to do with stopping wrongness, after all—just two-for-one. And I wouldn’t even be killing anyone. I would be saving lives.
“Tell your sister I’ll call off the drones if she surrenders and retreats immediately. If she doesn’t, we’ll let them finish her.”
“But won’t we be letting them finish us too? And can you even call them off ? That would be—”
I didn’t have time to explain. “Nev, just trust me!”
Without hesitating, he said, “Affirmative. I’m comming Solara.”
I couldn’t help holding my breath, my heart in my throat, my guts threatening to sink out of me. Please, let this work. Through the viewport, in the time that it took Nev to get back on our comm line, I saw three more ships go down by drones. Two were Solara’s. Please, please.
“She agrees.” Nev’s words were like air, making me light-headed. “She’ll surrender. In fact, she’s trying to retreat now. We…we might consider trying to do the same.”
“After this,” I breathed, “we might not have to.”
Blackness flooded my vision, making the dark-gray web spring into sharp relief through the viewport again. It was like a net, connecting all the drones.
Good thing I was a fisherwoman. A net could also be used as a trap.
This time, when I touched the substance with my senses, I didn’t recoil. I let the repulsiveness slide over my consciousness like dipping my arm in a vat of rancid oil. I drew strength from the Shadow inside me until I burned with it. My touch was like a spark to a fuse. Rather, the entire web, the whole pulsating system, diseased veins that led to sickly mechanical hearts, was one giant, interwoven fuse. And it reached straight into every drone in the vicinity. I reached into them. Dozens upon dozens.
With a spark of Shadow—good Shadow—I set it all alight.
And so it was dozens upon dozens of drones that suddenly froze, or jackknifed, or spiraled in flight. Cleansing fire was in their systems now, and I forced it to their cores, clenching my fists against the pressure, the resistance I felt. Nothing could hold me back for long. Every drone I could see through the viewport glowed like molten steel, from the inside out. And then they exploded spectacularly, raining flame and chunks of metal across space with glowing tails like comets. For a moment, we were all in the middle of an intense meteor shower.
I guessed I should have thought of that. Arjan managed to dodge and weave, though others weren’t so lucky, becoming small meteor showers of their own.
But at least, when it was all over, there was quiet. No drones. There were no distress signals for them to broadcast, once they were taken down from the inside out. For a second, silence reigned. And then crying and cheers and shouting erupted over the comms. It was chaos nearly to match what had come before. Except this was a good kind of chaos.
Arjan pounded me on the back, seized my head in his hands, and planted a massive kiss in my hair.
Nev was shouting at me. “You did it! Unifier’s sake, you did it, Qole!”
“I…I guess I did.” My voice was stunned, shaky. But not from anything other than shock and exhaustion. For only the second time in what had felt like ages, I’d used Shadow and hadn’t felt the side effects.
Or maybe Shadow had used me, and that was the difference.
I still had no idea what the Wrong was, the substance that seemed to run the drones. The one that the Shadow inside me was almost afraid of. The one that I apparently had to stop. But at least I understood a few more things than I had before.
Not that it would be easy to explain to anyone else.
“How, Qole?” Nev gasped. He sounded on the verge of tears, and I remembered what he’d had at stake today. “How did you do that? How did you even know to do that?”
The words came out, almost numb, before I could stop them. “Shadow told me.”
Silence fell again over the Kaitan’s comms, if not everywhere else. Arjan stared at me as he practically fell back into the captain’s chair.
“Uh, it told you?” Eton said. “Is this a figure of speech or a metaphor or something?”
I grimaced, wishing I could take back the words. “I don’t know how else to say this, but you should be the first to know. You’re my family. All of you.”
“Yes, yes, we love you too,” Telu said, impatient, “but back to Eton’s question…”
I took a deep breath, looking out at space through the viewport instead of meeting Arjan’s incredulous gaze. Solara’s forces, what was left of them, were indeed retreating. Nearly gone. Ours were ragged and battered, but still here, in holding patterns among the shattered remains of drones and the Treznor-Nirmana construction docks. So much damage. So much to rebuild.
But at the very least, my crew, my family…Nev…they were all alive. The Kaitan was whole. I was whole.
And I only had Shadow to thank for that. And I already knew what it wanted in return.
A voice. My voice.
“Open. Embrace,” it said.
There was nothing else for it. In for a reentry, in for a freefall, I thought dryly.
“Yes,” it responded.
Maybe Shadow liked idioms.
Before I could stall any longer, I said, loud and clear, “Shadow has been talking to me. I know that sounds crazy, but I promise you all that this is the sanest I’ve ever been.”
“What?” At least four people said it at once, voices rising in unison over the comms. Arjan, at least, only continued to stare at me, his mouth open.
“Yeah, so, I thought you should know…,” I said as conversationally as I could manage. “Shadow is alive.”
“So that’s settled.”
I studied her face in the holofeed. I knew it so well, but the new details I now saw unnerved me. On Alaxak, I had seen ice glint in the sunlight: beautiful, friendly, inviting exploration. But sometimes the twinkling of an ice crystal hid a dangerous crevasse. An experienced eye would learn to discern those glimmers of darkness, know that they gave way to awful depths.
I had learned how to pick out those treacherous signs with Qole’s help, and without intending to, she had taught me to see honesty in the eyes of someone else. So I saw the depths in Solara’s, and I saw the lie.
It turned my stomach to treat with her, and I doubted she was any happier about it. But having fought ourselves to a bloody standstill, we both needed something from the other: peace.
I nodded, working hard to keep my expression neutral. “It is. In exchange for the listed subsystems and all their respective holdings, we declare a truce to all hostilities, effective immediately.” It was a higher number of planets than the ones who had immediately declared their support for me. With their associated defense fleets, we would be a respectable power.
“In return,” I continued, the word turning bitter in my mouth, “you retain the rights to all other subsystems belonging to the Dracorte system.”
Solara’s eyes bored into mine. “Including Luvos.”
She was making me say it, relishing it, and I hated her for it. “Including Lu
vos.”
That meant she kept the primary source of family revenue: the raw materials from the drones. Of course, it also meant she had to deal with whatever was making them run rogue, and I didn’t envy her that.
But she didn’t get Alaxak. Or the Shadow grounds.
“Then that is indeed it,” I said. “Our advisors will finish the formalities.” All in all, we had both gambled everything in our showdown outside Valtai, and ultimately, I had come out ahead. I quelled a rebellious smile at the thought and prepared to end the transmission. Be an adult, I reminded myself. “Solara, I’m sorry for whatever part I played in bringing you here. Take good care of Luvos.”
“Nev, what brought me here is people like you assuming they can direct my life. Just ask Devrak.” Solara’s cheeks dimpled in a smile. “And I will use Luvos as it should be. I always did want to host an engagement party where Mother had hers.”
I blinked, surprised. “You’re getting married.”
“She is.” Heathran Belarius stepped into the holo, dressed in the dark suit that fit his imposing frame well. Solara held her hand out to him, which he took almost reverently. “The long friendship between the Dracorte and Belarius families has now reached its pinnacle,” he continued. “We have become one.” He opened his mouth to say more, but Solara spoke first.
“Heathran and I have a great many plans to make. Needless to say, you won’t be invited.”
Heathran was always something of an inscrutable brick, but he and I had been on friendlier terms than most. Now I could find nothing on his face but distaste. Somehow, Solara had convinced him of my regicide, and merged her fortunes with his. This meant her position was nearly unassailable, and if it hadn’t been for my alliance with Makar, who had already regained control of the Treznor-Nirmana family, my forces would be crushed by Belarius might.
But now that I saw she had Heathran on her side, I didn’t understand why she had surrendered so much, when she could have pressed for more—for Alaxak. It made me nervous, rather than grateful.
“Congratulations are in order, then.” Qole stepped in by my side. “But I’m sorry you won’t be able to attend the ceremonies.”
Shadow Call Page 35