I looked straight into the barrel of Ghazi’s weapon and said, “It doesn’t work if I’m dead.”
“You told me that already,” he said.
Ghazi and his squad stormed the cattle car when it landed. It was fully automated – no pilot. It just rallied to us. Still, the squad did a full search before they brought me on board.
Ghazi shoved me toward the nav board. “Unlock it,” he said.
I had seen Birdit do it a hundred times, but I still didn’t think it would work. I pressed my hand to the nav. Nothing happened.
“Take your glove off,” Ghazi said.
I separated the slick at my forearm and put my hand onto the nav.
The cattle car responded immediately. The doors folded back
up and sealed. The pressure alarm went off.
Ghazi pushed me out of the way and took the helm. But it locked up as soon as I stepped away. He swore.
“Put your fucking hand back,” he said. I did like he said. The other Umayma boys were fidgeting, and the tangy stink coming off the slicks increased. They must have been thinking this up for a while. I wondered how long it would take for Ghazi to pilot us into the ground.
But Ghazi didn’t keep us planetside. Instead, we piloted straight back to the warship, right into the green, bulbous hangar where the long-range shuttles were housed.
The whole squad surged behind me as we landed, pushed me forward toward one of the shuttles while proximity alarms went off.
Ghazi shoved me at the shuttle nav. I’d only been in a shuttle once. It was after I thought I was dead, after they rebuilt me.
I was on Babel, one of the moons around New Kinaan. The fighting there had been fierce for days and days. I was in some trench covered in blood maggots and dead, mutant foals that had rained out of the sky and promptly begun morphing into fantastic fighting monsters. They were horrific. We killed them in droves, but they kept coming, these small horses that grew great claws and mandibles and shed mucus and bloody snot and crushed us whole in jaws the size of military lockers. I’d been shoved in enough lockers to know the size, so when one of them grabbed hold of me and bit and shook, it was like being a know-nothing runt again, a caste-born throw off with one purpose, so worthless I was forgotten inside the cavernous darkness of our semi-organic locker space and left for dead when the mutant foal spit me out.
I remembered how quiet it was in the trench. Quiet and blood-red with pain, while the insects came to devour me and the battle raged off elsewhere. Three of my castemates found me there. They peered into the trench a long moment, shrugged, and moved on while I gurgled and screamed at them. I wasn’t any use to them anymore.
Not to anyone but Birdit.
The battle was long past when a shuttle like this came down. And a battered old warrior stepped out.
Now it was Ghazi who shoved me into this shuttle, forced my hand to the nav, and took the controls. The projection screen popped open automatically, but he was navigating purely with the chemical bubble of the nav that gave him the full 360 around the shuttle, and his gaze stayed locked on it.
The shuttle jumped up and forward. I saw the tail end of a squad of MP’s entering the docking bay.
Then there was a juddering lurch and the shuttle… was no longer in the bay. I found myself sprawled back on top of Ghazi’s squad, dizzy and more than a little disoriented. But Ghazi was already up, dragging me back to the nav. “Keep your fucking hand there!” he yelled.
I pushed my hand back onto the nav. There was a subtle hum, then a burst of scent – vanilla and oranges, and then the stars outside were no longer pinpoints of light, but something else, something other. The whole universe, our whole existence, twisted, bent, and came free… somewhere else.
***
The first time I traveled like this, it was with Birdit.
She had dragged me out of the trench and got me stabilized in some steamy vat. There was a med tech on board, and two more castemates from the field. I recognized their type. We were seeded and grown in batches, and there were only so many different faces on a field like the one she pulled us off. I didn’t understand the words she was saying, but the med techs did, and they translated.
“You’ve been chosen to be part of a great cause,” one of them told me. “Birdit so Alhamin has personally selected you for a great purpose.”
Then everything bent for the first time, and an hour later we were in some far corner of some far system I had no name for. I hadn’t even known something like that was possible. The closest system to us took three years to get to, and it was just some dead place, housing our refuse, and the terrible contaminants our people had created and seeded across the stars.
***
“Where are we?” I asked. The projection screen had gone down during the flight, and Ghazi was still frantically loading things into the bubble of the nav.
He glanced over at me, frowned. He flicked the screen back on.
“Home,” Ghazi said.
The screen flickered, then cleared, giving us a bleary view of a violet-blue world blanketed in a warm, dusty haze. There was only one jagged continent that spanned the globe from pole to pole. I could see two enormous satellites, great dusty red moons with black craters and regular lines and angles that looked like roads or some other type of artificial structures. Did they live on the moons here, too?
It looked nothing like the home I knew, the giant, lush world of eighteen continents, eight moons, and azure-blue skies. “That’s Umayma?” I asked.
The Umayma boys behind me were all crowding close to the screen. A couple of them laughed.
Ghazi was already on the com, broadcasting the same message across multiple channels. “Nasheenian nationals. Permission requested to set down in Faleen.”
I moved closer to the projection panel. There were objects circling the world. As we approached, they began to take on definite forms. Twisted communication satellites, hunks of debris, and there, something far-off, too big for a com satellite. It was a while before I realized it was some kind of ship, bigger than our warship, dark and derelict. The closer we got, the more of the debris turned out, on closer look, to be full, intact ships of all sorts. Spherical objects, like tiny worlds; jagged spires; core-oriented ships with double helix orbiters; blocky squares like pieced-together puzzles; and one horizontal plane that looked like an entire city had once thrived on its surface, powered by some globe at the other end that looked like a fish bowl. There must have been a hundred wandering ships there from a hundred types of worlds.
Our proximity warning went off; something careened by, dangerously close, and Ghazi swore and took the controls again, steering us clear of some of the nearest derelicts and settling into orbit around the lavender world.
“Nasheenian nationals on board. I repeat. Nasheenian nationals. Request permission to land in Faleen docking bay.”
I could see a thin sheen of sweat on Ghazi’s face now. I looked around at the other boys, and wondered why none of them had said what was so obvious to me, staring out at this world surrounded in dead ships.
“Can they shoot us down, like these ships?” I asked.
“We’re nationals,” Ghazi snapped. “Full Nasheenian citizens. It’s only outsiders they blow up and leave to rot.”
“We’re Nasheenians,” one of the others repeated, like he was trying to convince himself, too.
Time dragged on. Now that we were settled in orbit, I risked pulling my hand from the panel. Ghazi was too intent on the screen to notice. The ship continued to circle. I sighed and slid down onto the floor to wait. The air was already hot and close in the shuttle.
“Why don’t you just land?”
“Look around,” Ghazi said. “You need permission.”
I considered that. “But how did Birdit get you, then?”
Ghazi grimaced. “How do you think? She had permission. Probably exchanged us for some of that shit you and your fucked up people made to kill all your neighbors with.”
I shrug
ged. “You should know why they don’t respond, then. It’s not like they miss you.”
Ghazi glared down at me. “We’re Nasheenian nationals.”
“You’re war fodder. Same as me. Why don’t you Umayma boys get that? We’re born into it on New Kinaan. It’s my caste. But there’s no caste on Umayma is there? So you can pretend you’re something else. But you’re not.”
“Fuck off,” Ghazi said. “It’s not all like that.”
“Just this Nasheen place?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. That Birdit bitch pulled us away from the Plague Sisters. We were on the mend. Every last one of us. It was her carted us up here to fight some bloody wars on other worlds. I didn’t ask for any of it. None of us did. I just want to go home.”
I shrugged. “It’s all the same. You’ll just go back to fighting.”
“I don’t care,” Ghazi said. “You fucking thumper maggots don’t know the difference. You just point and shoot. I know what we’re fighting for, and it isn’t anything Birdit can point to on her fucking rocks.”
***
When Birdit first told me to point and shoot, I had a working torso again, like nothing had ever happened. She put me in a squad with other New Kinaanites, all the same caste like me, but hardly a similar face among them.
“I collect all the castoffs,” Birdit said. I could understand her now, though I didn’t know why. Somebody said it was a bug they put in you, some virus. “Especially the brave ones.”
But I did not feel brave. I felt broken. I told her so.
“Oh no, my boy,” she said. “These things I find in the seams between the stars, they are not broken… they are just gently used.”
When I first told Efraim this story, he had grimaced and said, “Of course we weren’t broken. She wanted to break us herself.”
***
Time drifted. After a while, the shuttle did, too. Ghazi powered down the belly of the beast, but avoiding the wreckage got precarious. We were losing orbit. The air was going bad.
I slept for a while. Maybe asphyxiation wouldn’t be so terrible, I thought. I’d just drift off, not wake up. I hoped that was what it was like.
***
“What are we fighting for?” I asked one of the New Kinaanites before the first drop.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean… why are we fighting? To what purpose?”
“What are you,” he said, “some Umayman? We fight because Birdit tells us to. Who cares why that is. Or where. Dying is what we were meant to do.” His eyes got bright, then, that faraway look I would come to recognize in all of us as we traveled back to the bloody field Birdit pulled us from. “It’s what we should have done,” he said, “If we knew what was good for us.”
***
It was the rally that woke me.
I raised my head. Everything was dark. Only the blue indicator lights for life stabilization were still on. Ghazi sat at the console still, staring at Umayma. The rest of his boys were sprawled in the hold, sleeping fitfully. Ghazi’s gaze was fixed on the world - that dusty, dull little world and the void beyond it. No visible stars out that way. Just dead wreckage and darkness.
The tug was subtle, still, subtle but consistent. I wondered if Birdit could feel us, too, sense us way out here in the dark as she drew nearer. Perhaps that’s how she found us. Surely Ghazi felt it? He must know she was coming for us.
But his face was unmoved, barely visible in the glow from the screen. He had finally given in and recorded his message, and now it was playing softly, muted. The audio player emitted a lemony smell that told me it was still running, still on repeat.
“She’s coming,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I climbed into one of the spongy seats next to him. It easily conformed to my body, the way the vat had when Birdit first laid me in.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t be here,” I said, and shrugged. “There’s no home for our people to go back to.”
“That’s because you’re a bunch of maggots.”
For some reason, it burned more now when he called me that, burned because he knew nothing about us, so assumed we were just the same.
“It’s because I have no home to go back to. We don’t have families like you do. Just faces. Castemates. And by now, all mine are dead. We don’t last more than a few waves. I lasted longer with Birdit than any of us were expected to on New Kinaan. Why would I go back there?”
“On Umayma,” he said, “we weren’t just… things. Not like you. We weren’t like you at all.”
I watched the breathy lemon mist near the com console. “Then why don’t they answer?”
Ghazi let out a long breath. He nodded toward the nav. “Put your hand back on there.”
I obeyed.
Ghazi poked something into the nav. The shuttle came alive again.
“Are we going home?” I asked.
Ghazi looked at me with his milky eye. “We are,” he said. “We’re programmed for hard descent.”
The whole shuttle was reorienting itself, turning toward the planet, dipping out of orbit.
There was nothing for me down there.
I scrambled to the back of the shuttle before he could grab me and pulled on a space hood. The slick could only make about twenty minutes of oxygen, and the hood would supply four hours more. It would have to be enough. The hood automatically sealed to my slick. I stepped to the pressure door, palmed it open, and stepped inside. We were going down fast, far too fast. I had only a couple more seconds. No time to strap myself in. I slid into the pod, slapped the pressure door closed and yanked on the emergency eject handle at the same time.
Burst of movement. Pain. Blackness.
When I came to, the pod was suffused with a gentle orange glow. The autopilot systems hadn’t come on yet, though. It was going to take me straight down to the planet if I let it. And I knew that if its own boys weren’t welcome there, I’d be just so much trash.
I overrided the hatch. It popped open and sucked me into the open space.
The sudden expanse, the black void, was oddly comforting after the closeness of the ship. I flailed, tried to orient myself, but there was nothing to hold onto, nothing to push, and the suit had no nav source. I turned my head and caught a brief glimpse of the empty pod hurtling planetward.
Hulking wrecks of debris hovered at the edges of my vision, all too far away to close in on without any kind of propulsion. I was at the mercy of gravity. Still, I twisted and turned, tried to see a ship that wasn’t dead. Some shuttle. Some pod. The rally was still strong within me. Birdit was there, coming closer. Ever closer. Wasn’t it closer, now?
My body settled into orbit, moving along with the rest of the wreckage. I floated free, and, after a time, was able to see the bright burst that was Ghazi’s shuttle, the propulsion full on, moving purposefully toward the surface of his world.
For a moment, I wondered what he would do when he landed there, who he would become.
Then there was a blue-green flash of light from the planet’s surface. A blinding flare. The shuttle burst into fiery fragments, a long tail of lovely atmospheric stars.
The darkness, then, was complete. Nothing moved out here on the edge of this world now, nothing alive, nothing but me.
I had four hours and ten minutes of air left.
I wondered if it would be enough. Wondered if it mattered. One more dead boy, circling another dead world that did not want us.
It was that, then, that finally made my throat close and my gut clench. They did not want us. We were just bodies to them, so much star dust. Another bellyful of dead boys on a shuttle. A boy’s corpse, lost in deep space. Just one more.
The rally beat slowly inside of me. It was not fading, no, it wasn’t. It couldn’t. Perhaps it was not as strong, but that was some trick of the atmosphere, of my body in the suit, of the gravity of the world.
&
nbsp; Birdit would come for me. Birdit would want me. She was the one who always came for us – the derelicts, the unwanted, the nameless. She knew we were still useful objects, still lovely things, useful bodies, waiting for her forever out here - in the seams between the stars.
END
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