Starfire, A Red Peace

by Spencer Ellsworth

  The short soulsword shimmers faintly in the running lights; the currents of black steel, hardened into a short, curved blade, subtly variegated like a jewel.

  “In token of my lost honor,” I say.

  I let the blade linger when I cut my arm, let it groan and burn. From the blade, grasping fingers move through my nerves, bursts of climbing pain that reach into my brain.

  * * *

  Barathuin breaks the bottle against the edge of the table. Beer sprays everywhere, along with broken glass, flying off into the darkness of the makeshift tavern in this tent.

  Real glass. Fancy beer, that. He shouts and raises his soulsword in the air. “Starfire!”

  “Oh, for burning Dark’s sake, you’re going to get us shot,” I say.

  “Nothing can kill me,” Barathuin says. He can’t help his voice from slurring and slipping. His face is threaded with bruises, and his arms, and he stinks, not just of beer, but of blood and sweat from the fighting pit. “Nobody can kill me today, Araskar. I have won the . . .” He squints at his trophy. It might have been a Kurgul’s tentacle, if the tentacle were made of shredded and repurposed aluminum foil. “I won the soulsword trophy.”

  “That’s supposed to be a soulsword?”

  “What’s it look like to you?”

  “I’d tell you, but you’re too young.” He roars with laughter at that one. I stand up. There’s plenty of girls, and fellas—Barathuin likes both—waiting for a chance to talk to the winner, and who knows, one of them might turn out to be good for him.

  I go and sit at a table. I’ve drunk just enough to feel warm. Tonight, it doesn’t matter that we held an illegal tournament, which even the Resistance would frown on, or that we’re holed up in a compound under a biosphere on an empty rock that’s a mile too wide to be a comet, that we have defied a very strong order to bring the booze to the line untouched. Tonight, my friends and I are together, and getting the drunkest we will ever get, before we hit the campaign next week. Next week we will jump into burrowing pods and hit the Imperial Navy ships broadside, and take on the trained crosses of the Empire with nothing but our guts and our wits.

  Hell. Those thoughts require several more drinks.

  “You.” She grabs my arm. I come around to snap my hand on her wrist—reflexes—but she stops that too. Red-haired girl. The one who creamed me in the pit a few hours earlier, the one who gave Barathuin the fight of his life.

  “Hey,” I say. “We were looking for you. Hope you’re not sore.” I grin in a way that Barathuin has mastered, that half-accusation, half-playing grin. “I still am.”

  “Shut up and drink.” She sits down, across from me, and grabs a half-empty bottle from another table, clinks it against mine. “For the Resistance, and your stupid friend.”

  “For the Resistance, amen.”

  She drinks hard. After a couple of beers, she orders shots. After a couple of shots, she pulls me close to her, gags me with her pickled breath, and heaves, “I’m still sober.” I could almost believe it, except that I can hardly believe my own senses, so who knows if that’s what she’s really saying? “I hate this. I can never get drunk.”

  It usually takes quite a bit of booze to get us drunk; she might be an espionage model, meant to never get there. “What’s your story? You must be top of the line. I haven’t seen your like before.”

  “I’m home grown. Real parents.”

  “No shit? I never met one of you real ones before. So that’s a face no one else’s got?”

  “This is just mine,” she says, spinning a hand around her cheeks. I laugh and she waves her hand. “En’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she says. “It’s not like coming from a vat; my sisters are scared I’m putting all of them in danger, and my dad, well . . . don’t ask me about that bastard.”

  “Seems like you bred true,” I say. “You beat me like you were gold-grade Marine stock.”

  “Yeah, you weren’t quite the challenge I thought you’d be back there, slab.”

  “What?” I sputter into my beer.

  “I can tell when a cross is holding back.” She takes another shot. “You’re one of those who needs to see the devil in front of you before you can swing a sword.”

  “Walk out! I know I hammered you good.”

  “You know what, slab? I reckon I am tingling a little bit.” She looks up at me. “Feel like hammering me some more?”

  What’s she mean? Another fight? A rematch or . . . oh. Oh.

  When I don’t answer, she adds, “You’re a fully working model, right, slab? Do I need to conduct an investigation?”

  “Uh, fully working.” Vat-grown eunuchs just don’t make good soldiers. Thank the Starfire for little things.

  “Ever used it?”

  I don’t respond to that. I haven’t seen her at officers’ mess anywhere. She’s just rank and file. “I’m sure I outrank you.”

  “Some comfort that’ll be when you die a virgin.”

  Well. She’s got me right, much as I hate to admit it. “Then you’re under orders to keep your mouth shut.”

  “That’s what makes a good night, in my experience,” she says.

  “Why me?” I say as we get up. “Why no other slabs in this room?”

  “You walking me off?” Her face turns to a pout.

  “Not at all. Let’s go. Just wondering why me.”

  “You’re special. Shut and follow me, special boy.”

  “I’m special? How’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Fine, you’re not special. I just need a warm body.”

  You’re like the war that way, I almost say. But it seems I have finally learned to shut up, and that is indeed the key to a very good night.

  -17-

  Araskar

  I CUT THE MEMORY. The memory of that night when I first met Rashiya, when the tournament we had played was over, when Barathuin was victorious and my batch was still alive. We sat at the table and drank and laughed and she straight up asked me back to her bunk.

  The small blade lights up with white fire, with the energy of the memory. I hold it out, so the light of the soulsword’s fire shimmers across the dunes of ash.

  “I have given up a piece of my soul for my honor,” I say softly. “I will take it back only when I’ve truly honored you.”

  That old story still gets me. I first read it among those legends of the original Jorians in that book where Barathuin and I found our names. Some fellow, whose name I don’t care to remember, had a soulsword that could actually take a soul. Not just a psychic resonator, made in a factory, matched to a cross made in the same factory, poured in a mixture of true metal and synthsteel.

  No, this one had a magic sword, and when he went into battle, he tore the souls of his enemies and pulled them into his blade. Unlike putting meat back in the vats, it was real life, it was the glory of the Starfire and the currents of the universe that folk talk about.

  And when his friends fell, he used the souls of his enemies like fuel, to bring his friends back alive. Not a joke. In the story, he sticks his dead friends with the sword, and up they pop, using the souls of his enemies as fuel to bring his friends back, same as putting meat back into the vats.

  They fought an army of demons, granted, and then flew on a dragon to a moon, so it was a shit story.

  A soulsword good for something besides tearing through guts and ripping out memories. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  But that’s not what a weapon, be it a piece of metal or a piece of vat-made flesh, is for.

  The blade blurs in my eyes, the gleaming white fire on black steel. I could put it in my chest, right now. I could make the ultimate move of the dishonored, and let myself fall forward into their bodies, finally join them.

  I sheathe the small soulsword.

  Then I withdraw the pinks from my shirt. I show them to the pile of ash. “These were more important to me than you,” I say. “No more.”

  When I try to put the pinks out the airlock, my hand spasms on them
, worse than John Starfire’s hand twitched on his sword hilt. I clutch at them and I think of the music and I think of forgetting the war and I think about Rashiya and what lies in store and I think of the girl in that gunner ship and my slugs, and my friends, their faces over and over, and damn it, damn it, I want to forget. I want it to all be gone.

  My hand twitches and twists, going numb. The synthskin in my fingers feels the most alive of the uncontrollable hand. I let go, my fake fingers first, and somehow, after an eternity, my real fingers let go.

  I watch as the airlock opens and the pinks are sucked out. The bag rips and they scatter in the vacuum, bright for a second in the ship’s running lights, like tiny stars.

  * * *

  Jaqi

  I speak the message, and it flashes across the screen, not that I can read it. “Here to see the Engineer. From Bill’s.” I figure this Engineer’s got to be some fella works with the Suits.

  The Suits’ reaction is instantaneous. One of those dead, flat voices rings out. “You bring the data.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I mutter. A string of Suits drifts across our viewscreen, a half-dozen bundles of metal arms and tubing and bulbous heads.

  “Come. We shall program your coordinates.” The numbers flash across the screen, bright green, lighting up Z’s face as they go.

  Down we go, toward the mainframe.

  I forget to switch off the itchy artificial gravity before we hit atmos, which means there’s that moment of strange brain squishing when gravity clashes before I throw the switch. “Sorry!” Good old regular gravity, tossing us around like fish in a tank, little heavier than I’m used to. I never learned the percentages, but I know good gravity when I feel it. I figure the Suits might have modified planetary mass just for their humanoid visitors. At least, the ones they en’t going to slice up.

  They en’t going to slice us up. I don’t think.

  Something else hits me, a realization. “Whoa,” I say, as the thought hits me. “Z . . . this is my first time planetside since . . .” I look over and his eyes are closed. I punch his arm. “Z! A planet! I en’t never been to one since I was five!”

  His eyes open, glazed over. I punch him again. “My first real planet, Z!”

  “You have . . .” He finds his voice. “Never breathed real air?”

  “All ecospheres and stations,” I say. “We were on farms, when I was real little, but most of my memory, it’s been these places.” A real planet, not an ecosphere. Hell, even a Suit planet is a real rock circling the sun. First time. It en’t no Irithessa, but still . . . I’m flying in real atmos. As the bluebloods would say, the way God intended it.

  “What is wrong with the air?” Toq says.

  A yellow haze spins below us, too fast to be a regular storm. Fingers of lightning run through the yellow cloud. Beyond it, the morning sun is hitting a vast black landscape of triangles and squares and lights glowing with lights, red and green and white and blue. More yellow haze looms on the horizon, clouds of it mixing with the smoggy purple-white of regular clouds.

  “That, my friend, is a nano-Suit swarm.” Creepy, I have to say. I’ve heard of them. They roam the galaxy, spun off from their “parents,” who tap into quantum storage and create microscopic cells capable of flying up to whole ships and dissembling them. “I hope they were warned about us.”

  “What would happen otherwise?”

  “Otherwise . . . they swarm this ship, pick it to pieces. Or worse, turn it into a Suit, just waiting for organic bits. Welcome to Suit Central. Try not to puke.”

  “I saw a Shir,” Kalia says. “I don’t think that Suits scare me anymore.”

  “It does my calloused self good to hear that, it does,” I say. I guess I can’t trouble her for naming the devil, given that we looked it in the eye. “Toq, you scared?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t do much good to get scared out here, I think. Everything is scary. You have to get used to it.”

  En’t that one of the wiser things I’ve heard in a time?

  We descend. Around us towers, black and spiny, stretch up toward the sky. Biggest towers you’ll ever see; I don’t think even them famous pyramids of Irithessa could dwarf these. Their tops are lost in that yellow haze of nano-things. Flyers zip everywhere, carrying things from one tower to the other. Below the towers stretches a tangle of city; all steel and wires and lights, a living machine that covers the continent.

  “They’re moving!” Toq says. “The towers!”

  Sure enough, two of the big towers have a set of little legs coming out of the bottom, walking them around. Their thousands of lights glimmer on and off as they slowly trudge through the metal and Suits thick as flies.

  If you look closer at them towers (and I evil hope the kids don’t), you could see the sacs. The Suits have their own kinds of vats, growing organics that are best suited to splicing into their parts. You could see full-grown men and women, blank eyes staring from the gel they’re kept in while they feed from a tube and shit in another tube.

  “All the junk of the galaxy. Bill traded them whatever he could find,” I say, “even if it was just old pieces of plate. They go through everything for information. Probably could bring down the galaxy if they wanted to.”

  “Why don’t they?” Kalia asks.

  “They don’t think like that. They’re hungry for scrap and data. New material to process. New components to break down into fuel. New organics to splice. If they replaced the Empire, no one would want to sell them information.”

  The voice that booms over the link is another almost-human thing, save it’s too flat, without tone. “You have data.”

  “Most precious data in the wild worlds,” I say. “If you can crack it.”

  “We will send you coordinates for our data center.” Sure enough, the green screen lights up with the numbers. Easy enough. Just punch the numbers, and we go into the guts of the Suit mainframe.

  We sweep lower. A yellow cloud spits from a round smokestack, and I can’t avoid the damn thing. I swoop right through it. I swear, for all that they’re microscopic, I can hear the little nano-Suits pinging off the hull.

  “Ah!” This time the cry comes from Z, of all people. “Watch out!”

  “Can’t help it, Z,” I say. “They won’t hurt us as long as we’re holding the data over their heads.”

  “It . . . it seems . . .” He doesn’t finish that sentence.

  I look over and see Z is licking his lips. “You okay, there?”

  Z don’t answer.

  We zoom in closer, between buildings. They’re all moving. Even the buildings that aren’t alive, Suits themselves, are crawling with other Suits. Some of them even move on two legs and two arms, though most of them have decked themselves out with a couple of hundred legs. It’s like a nest of ants. Like when you turn a log over, and all sorts of crawlies run everywhere, like . . .

  “Ew! Ah!” I jump in my seat.

  “What was that?” Z asks.

  “Nothing. Just . . .” The Suit we just passed looked about as much like a centipede as anything can.

  “Are you frightened of something?” Z says. “Think of what you’ve seen.”

  “It don’t make no sense,” I say, “but a girl gets to be afraid of a bug now and then. En’t you got something you’re afraid of?”

  “Dying of old age,” Z says, his voice a dry whisper.

  “Oh hell, Z. Don’t joke about that.”

  Kalia whispers something. “What’s that?” I say. “You talking to me?”

  “I was praying,” she says. Sounds about right, in this mess of metal moving around us like a bunch of bugs. And though I don’t ask, since it’s none of mine, she says her prayer. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, manifested Starfire be Thy hand, Thy breath, Thy will, Thy eyes the thousand suns. Give us this day our needs, and let our wants be Thy domain, and forgive us our unbelief.”

  We’re all silent. I hold my hand up, because I reckon Z’s going to say something about blood a
nd honor and probably that it’s weak to call upon the blueblood God. “That’s a real nice prayer.”

  “I pray all the time now,” Kalia says. “I pray for you guys. I pray for Quinn’s soul . . .” And she manages to say his name without her voice cracking. “I’m sorry, Jaqi. This wasn’t all your fault.”

  “You still going to teach me to read?”

  “If we survive.”

  Suits update the coordinates for me, fast as I can follow. We’re zipping between the streets with them now, and I got to say, when those metal eyes turn and blaze at us, I can’t help feeling like these fellas are hungry. This little ship must look one hell of a snack.

  We glide into a hangar in one of them towers. The entrance looms above, about twice as high as the rings of Bill’s asteroid. The ribs of the walls are the biggest, blackest pylons you ever seen; little Suit drones scramble over them, like a billion bugs.

  The biggest Suits you ever seen pop out of the walls. They were part of them pylons, I see now. Black and segmented and long, and they scurry across the metal.

  There en’t a one of them don’t look the image of a centipede.

  “Oh, no,” I say. I shudder. It had to be worse. It just had to get worse. Maybe this is God’s way of talking to me. En’t going to win this one, Jaqi. Just check out the evidence.

  Our ship comes to a stop, and they crowd around us. The biggest, longest of them seems to be dragging himself across the floor. He’s got more gear sticking out of them segments than I ever seen—arms with crackling fingers of electricity, pincer hands mounted on crane arms, human hands with too many fingers.

  “Time to face them,” Z says. He tries to stand and sinks into the seat, and he don’t even complain when I grab his arm and help him haul himself to his feet.

  “Do we have to?” I say. “Maybe we could just keep going. Jump again. Beyond this.”

  “There is nothing beyond this,” Z says. “Nothing but more Kurguls, more Suits.”

  “That’s my life from now on, en’t it?” I say. I mean only Z to hear it, but I guess Kalia does.

  She says, “I’m sorry, Jaqi. You’ll be able to leave soon. Z can take care of us.”