by Rachel Caine
Interlude: Ghostwalk
I mourn my brothers, but they died in honor and glory, as it should be. Long will their stories be told to their descendants, written to the stars and carried to the hearing organs of every sentient being. This is my burden and my joy, that I write of Suncross and my brothers, stout warriors of the Bruqvisz both lost and found in their tale.
For myself, I have bitter pride. Suncross chose me to carry the tale forward, and that is a terrible honor, one that denies me glorious ending but gives me the opportunity to teach others of this war of gods and heroes. We shall never see its like again, and I am humbled by the task before me, to tell of the fallen and the survivors, the great singing ships and the enslaved Phage, the poisonous hunger of one who would eat the stars themselves and live in the dark.
While my voice survives, I shall tell of this. The battle is not yet done, and I may yet join my brothers. So I send this transmission out, wide and strong, to joyously tell of the Bruqvisz and the Elaszi, the Oborub and the Humans, the Leviathan and the Mechs. All must listen. All must honor, even in the midst of war, the sacrifices upon us now.
So let me speak.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Song for the Lost
GHOSTWALK SEEMED . . . BETTER, I guessed. Stronger. I didn’t know how to read the subtle cues, but he wasn’t quite as angry. “I am the last bearer of their story,” he said to me, “but I know we go into further danger. Permission to access your comms?”
“Sure,” I said. “Not real sure what good it will do you, but . . .”
“Leviathan can sing this story to their cousins,” he said. “And perhaps also humans can send messages, as they did before?”
“I don’t know if they’re going to have time, but we can try,” I told him. His priority wasn’t survival here, it was survival of our memory, our deeds. That was a pure enough goal. I talked to Nadim as we walked, and he and Typhon agreed to communicate the story in a kind of carrier wave out to the other Leviathan. Their singing—and I wasn’t sure what it was, not just sound, surely—could travel intact across galaxies. Across the universe, if necessary. And when it hit a Bruqvisz satellite or comm system, it would deliver its information payload, and Suncross and his brothers would have their glorious last stand told, remembered, sent on.
The most immortality there was in the universe, stories.
Ghostwalk seemed satisfied with that and gave us a gesture with all four hands that seemed like it meant thanks; he asked what he could do, and I gave that some thought. For a Bruqvisz, Ghostwalk seemed positively even-tempered, but I didn’t know that I was a good judge of what was going on with him. He’d lost his brothers, and he felt like the last Bruqvisz in the world. Did that make him more cautious, or less?
“Ghostwalk,” I said as we arrived at Ops. “Will you take the watch here for a while? I need to go check on Marko and C-X.”
“Careful,” Beatriz said, and sent me a look. I nodded.
I heard the discordant noise before I reached Medbay. I doubted that was a good sign, and I took a deep breath before heading in.
EMITU was lounging around in his docking bay like it was just another day at work. Chao-Xyll was shrieking. Modular shrieking, sure, but the translator was having none of it. Marko was backed up against the wall, and if his world had been shaken before, it was broken now—I could see that in his face. He’d wanted to believe she was still Chao-Xing in there. But I knew she wasn’t, and now it was clear to him too.
Marko, of all people—the poster boy for the Honors, the one I’d have tapped as the least judgmental of all of us—couldn’t accept what Chao-Xing had become. It was written all over his face.
I left him to his misery, because I had bigger problems. Namely, Chao-Xyll, who was in restraints again, but struggling very hard to get out of them. I went up to her bedside, though every instinct told me to back off, save myself. She looked . . . wild. Out of control. We were, I thought, lucky that EMITU had busted out the heavy restraints and added some of that steel-reinforced netting on top of them; she wasn’t going anywhere, despite all her efforts.
Her eyes were open, and although they weren’t right, exactly, they were still human. And suffering. Over the grating sound of her wails, I yelled at EMITU. “Get your haiku-crazy metal ass over here! Why aren’t you doing anything? She’s in pain!”
“The pain is not physical,” EMITU said without moving from his docking station. “It is, instead, a mental or an emotional breakdown. I’m a doctor, not a—”
“I don’t care what you’re not. Just give her something to calm her down!”
“I have,” he said. “Several times. It’s no longer working.”
“Increase the—”
“Zara,” EMITU interrupted me. “I have done all I can do without removing her vocalizing instruments or killing her. Which would you like me to do?”
I realized that EMITU was just as unnerved and frustrated as I was. Damn. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Never mind.” I remembered Marko putting his hand in Chao-Xyll’s palm, and I wormed mine beneath the netting to try it too. The slick black armor seemed impenetrable. I wasn’t sure she even knew I was touching her. But she was watching me with that sick, hot desperation in her eyes.
And suddenly, the translator said, “____please.”
I nearly yelped, I was so surprised. Was that a glitch? A random sound that hit an accidental meaning? I didn’t interrupt. I waited.
She was trying to communicate.
And it was working. “___fail____hope___” I waited, holding my breath, as she struggled. “____understand___”
“Yes.” I practically yelled it. “Yes, I understand! Marko! Did you hear that?”
Marko nodded, but he seemed so pale, so remote, that I wasn’t sure it mattered to him. I didn’t let that dent my joy. I leaned over C-X and removed my hand from her palm to place it on her forehead. Warm, smooth skin, lightest tan beneath a dusting of gold. Human skin. “I hear you,” I told her. “Keep trying. Please!”
“____dead___fault___”
Two potentially random words but I didn’t like where they were going. Was this what was going on? Her emotional pain, was it because of all the dead Phage? Or because of the loss of our friends aboard Suncross’s ship? Could go either way. If I had to be real, most of her was Phage now, even if this patch of skin my palm rested against felt human. Who was she in mourning for?
“My fault.”
That came through clearly. Very clearly. I let out a breath and shook my head. “Not your fault,” I told her. “You did everything you could do.”
“Fail.”
“Yeah, you notice I failed too, right? It took Suncross blowing the shit out of his own ship to win that fight.” I sounded bitter. Angry. Well, that was accurate, I guessed. I’d liked—loved—him and his crew. I missed them hard. “Not your fault, C-X.”
“I am nothing,” she said, and that was breathtakingly awful. “Belong ____ not.”
She meant she was alone, completely and utterly alone, and . . . she was right. There was no other thing like her, as far as I knew. Xyll had been isolated, but C-X . . . was alone.
“No,” I told her. “You’re with us. You belong.”
“Failed. Failed. Failed!” That last was an uncontrolled screech, both from the translator and from the underlying Phage-like noise, and when C-X flailed again it seemed worse. It was, I guessed; Chao-Xing had been a perfectionist, always excellent at everything she did. She couldn’t accept this ugly, bloody transformation, or her limitations, or that she’d tried to make a difference and nearly died doing it, to no real purpose. I could imagine what was ringing in her head: Why am I still alive?
I was about to tell her, inadequately, that it was okay when the first restraint broke. I instinctively jerked my hand away when the steel snapped, and one of her limbs popped free; a swipe of her hand shredded the steel-reinforced netting and sent it slumping on both sides of the bed.
Then the other three restraints shattered
, one right after another, and I backed off because she was loose, and I didn’t know what I was prepared to do about this, not at all. She looked alien. She looked mad. And she came up to a fluid crouch on the bed, teeth bared, and looked at me with real menace.
“I failed!”
That was the first complete sentence she’d managed. It also seemed like she was blaming me. Maybe she should, for putting her out there, at risk. For letting her take the risk at all.
“C-X,” I said, hoping the nickname would catch her attention. I couldn’t tell if it did. “You tried. It’s okay. It’s okay!”
A powerful spasm hit her. Pure rage, or another wave of uncontrollable remapping of her body, but the effect was that she came off the bed in a stumbling rush straight at me.
EMITU jerked free of his dock and fired darts that hit her in still-vulnerable spots, but the drugs—and I imagine he was dialing it up to eleven—did absolutely nothing to slow her down. I backpedaled, but she kept coming, and I was reaching for my weapon when the worst thing happened.
Marko lunged, trying to restrain C-X, or maybe he was protecting me. He shouted something I couldn’t process, putting his hands on C-X, and she reacted, shoving him away with incredible force. He hit the metal rim of the end of the bed, and his neck snapped back at a brutally unnatural angle, and then he crashed to the floor.
EMITU rushed to Marko’s side, and Nadim was shouting “Zara! Get out of here, I will lock her in!” but I couldn’t go—I couldn’t. Not until I knew if Marko was okay.
He wasn’t. I knew that; I’d seen it from how he’d hit. EMITU worked frantically. C-X had paused, trembling long arms and razor claws dangling limp at her sides. Her attention, like mine, was on Marko.
EMITU’s busy extensors suddenly withdrew, and his dome turned toward me. I didn’t like that. At all.
“I regret to report that Honor Marko has suffered catastrophic damage to his spinal cord.”
I felt a cold, bolting shudder go through me. “Well, fix him!”
“I cannot,” EMITU said. No jokes now. “The damage is very significant. I have placed him into a medical stasis, and must move him to a pod. It is beyond my capabilities to repair his spinal injury.”
I swallowed hard. “Is—is he dead?”
“No,” he said. “But only because of the medical stasis field. The pod will pause all functions until more extensive repairs can be attempted. I recommend immediate relocation of the patient to the Honors medical facility on Earth. Unfortunately, there is a hard limit to the time a stasis treatment is effective in such cases.”
I felt a real wave of rage and despair. Damn it. We might lose Marko. We had lost him, unless we could survive all this and get him to Earth before the stasis field expired. I wanted to ask how long we had, but the awful truth was it didn’t damn well matter. And Marko would have been the first to say that.
EMITU pointed an extensor at C-X, who wasn’t moving, except for slight, nervous trembles. “Preparing to deliver euthanizing cocktail.”
“No!” It burst out of me, raw and bloody. We’d just lost Marko. I couldn’t lose C-X too. “Stop. That’s an order! You will not kill anybody without my express permission. Understand?”
“Understood,” EMITU said crisply. “I would normally say that it’s your funeral. But it is not. It very well could be his. You should consider this carefully, Zara.”
Fuck. He was right. Marko shouldn’t have been here. C-X shouldn’t have been here. I should have killed Xyll when it started to turn violent.
But I hadn’t, and here we were.
I pulled my gun and held it at my side. C-X noticed that move; it pulled her attention away from the immobile body of our friend on the floor. She was breathing hard. Panting, almost. And yes, those were tears running down her cheeks. The armor crept across her face in thin swirls, like Maori tattoos.
She said, “Go ahead.”
I was tempted. I felt gray and thick inside, heavy with responsibility and grief. Killing her would be the easy answer, for both of us. Old Zara would have done it without blinking, but she hadn’t loved these people. And lost them.
“No,” I said. “C-X, you’re alive. You matter. And I know you. Xyll was strong. Chao-Xing was strong. Together, you are unstoppable . . . not just this”—I swept a hand up and down, indicating the changes—“but here.” Hand to my heart. “I know you. I know what you can do.”
“I failed.”
“So did I,” I said. “And will again. Over and over, until I figure out how to succeed. We don’t give up. That’s who we are. That’s how we have to be. And you can’t give up, C-X, because we need you. We’ll get Marko back. But first we’ve got to win.”
She didn’t want to hear that, but she understood, I could tell. She looked at Marko’s still body again, then moved.
She picked him up with an astonishing grace and gentleness. She laid him in the bed, but when she tried to straighten his crooked, limp arms and legs, her razored fingers left shallow cuts. She made a muted sound of distress, and I broke my stillness to go help. EMITU rolled over and pressed command keys, and a hard shell came down from overhead and sealed Marko up inside it.
Like a coffin.
C-X let out a wild, metallic keen of distress and rocked back and forth. Whatever she was now, she could feel this. Could deeply, horribly regret what she’d done.
I suddenly thought about the larger consequences. “Nadim! Does Typhon know—” I’d expected to feel a huge blast of rage and grief from the older Leviathan at the grave injury of his Honor. I felt . . . nothing. Like he didn’t know. But he had to know. Didn’t he?
“Typhon has withdrawn,” Nadim said. “He won’t allow me access. I think . . . Yusuf says he is very deeply wounded, both by Chao-Xing’s struggle and Marko’s injury. He and Starcurrent are struggling to help.”
“Don’t let him do anything reckless,” I said. “And don’t you do anything risky, either. Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said. I could tell he didn’t like it, but I also knew he’d keep his word to me. “Zara, we are fast approaching Earth’s solar system. We will be there very soon. What . . . what are we going to do?”
I didn’t have to answer that, thankfully, because the Medbay doors opened, and Bea burst through them, hurtling toward the bed. She looked distraught. Horrified. And when she took it in—Marko in the bed, silent and still—she added it all up. “She killed him?”
“No.” Maybe. “He’s in stasis. It was an accident—”
Bea wasn’t listening. She didn’t have a gun, but she went for mine, and we struggled for it. I won and hugged her tight. “There’s a chance we can get him back,” I said. “But we’ve got to hold together, okay? We’ve got to.”
She took in a breath and wordlessly screamed it out. I could hear the rage. I understood it. Then she said, “Are we going to kill it?” It meant Chao-Xyll, I guessed.
“We can’t.” Without letting her go, I kissed her forehead. Right now, loving her was the only thing I could do that felt like it wasn’t a complete disaster. “Please believe me: C-X didn’t mean to do that. She’s in pain. And she’s a child with the strength of a monster. Please don’t blame her, baby.”
“We can’t trust her,” Bea said. She pulled back, and I let go, and she swiped trembling hands over her damp cheeks. Glared at C-X, who was now staring at the floor. “Not after what she did to Marko.”
“She is our friend.”
“Is she?”
C-X raised her head then, looked at Bea, and said, “Yes.” And she sounded eerily like Chao-Xing just then. Bea flinched a bit, but she didn’t bite back. “I regret hurting him. More than you know, Beatriz.”
The name was a little clumsy, but clearly, the translator was starting to get confident now with interpreting the sounds that C-X was making. And C-X was making sense, more to the point.
“Marko’s not going to survive unless we win this fight,” I said to her, and all of them. “Lifekiller’s here. And we have to
get ready. Right now.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what we could possibly do, other than die like Suncross and his crew in a futile effort to save our planet. But I did know that whatever we had to do, we would do.
And though it was very little comfort, and no consolation at all, I knew one more thing: Chao-Xyll would do whatever she could to help.
FROM THE ANCIENT SONGS OF THE LOST ONES, PRESERVED IN FRAGMENTS BY THE BRUQVISZ (RECOVERED FROM ELASZI VAULTS BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST IN FORFEIT-OR-PAIN)
So comes the dawn
Of no sun, no stars but Them
They have swallowed the light and become the dark
Nothing survives Their anger
The Singers sing them still
We try
We fail
We perish
Last light of last star
No dawn
Cold
Good-bye
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lost All Doubt
I’D HEARD OF a famous line in a book that said you can’t go home again, but I guessed that was more of a metaphor, because the Sol system flowered before me with all those exquisitely familiar worlds. I clocked the tiny little outcast on the far reaches that was even prettier up close, the purple gas giant, and the angry red planet with its domed colony.
A pang went through me, so sharp that the feeling might have been made of knives. Not all these worlds supported life, but they all had resources that Lifekiller could steal. Liquid, superheated iron at the core of Mercury. Venus was thick with them; even the snow on its sharp mountains was made of heavy metals. Earth was infused with uranium, which Lifekiller craved. Platinum and palladium buried in the rich red dirt of Mars. Jupiter’s giant surface hid a core of heavy metals under its spinning, rocky rings. Even little Pluto had a uranium core.
But he wasn’t here for the resources. Not completely, anyway. If he was, he’d have started at one end of the planetary buffet and worked his way inside, but instead, he skipped the tasty appetizers and came right for my world. That said something about his capacity for holding a grudge.