by M. R. Forbes
It left her tense and frustrated, even though they were lucky to be alive in the first place, and twice as lucky to have grabbed one of the Harvesters before he had destroyed it. It had taken some time and a lot of her power, but they had managed to get the rest of their new fleet linked to the vessel well enough that when it moved into the traversable wormhole, they went with it.
Now they were in the middle of what amounted to a fold in time and space, crossing a great chasm of nothingness back toward Shardspace. She still didn’t completely understand why one wormhole took longer to cross than another, but Gant had tried to explain, using plenty of big words and even going as far as breaking out a board to write the math down on.
If he was losing his intellect, she didn't see any signs of it. Of course, every time she mentioned it he would bring up some random bit of useless information he could no longer remember like he once could.
“Cherub, what are the reports from the fleet?” Abbey asked. “How are the crews handling the integration?”
“There have been a few incidents, Queenie,” Jequn replied. “But the former Unders have remained surprisingly calm and accepting, as have the Apostants.”
“It doesn’t hurt that the Apostants are outnumbered ten to one,” Uriel said.
“Not at all,” Jequn agreed. “But the Unders have every opportunity to revolt against them, and so far they’re staying in line.”
“For Queenie’s sake,” Helk said, breaking into the channel. “You set them free. You also went toe to toe with the Father and didn’t die. They respect you, and they’re also terrified of you.”
Abbey felt the tail at her back swish to the side, a reminder of what her use of the Gift was costing. She had been forced to leave a hole for the growing member, and while she had a sense of it as a new, controllable appendage, she didn’t have it completely within her mental grasp just yet. It felt so alien to her, and at the same time not as uncomfortable as she had thought it would be.
Part of that was because the Rejects we so supportive, but she also knew it was because her body wasn’t the only thing changing. Her mind was different too. She had a better grasp of the naniates than ever. She could hear their whispers in her head, near silent communications they passed to one another that she believed they didn’t know she knew about. She was also more focused, more angry, and she was certain much more capable of intense violence. The only thing that was keeping her steady was her need to remain sane long enough to ensure her daughter’s safety.
If she went mad after, that was okay.
If the Rejects had to destroy her in the end, that was okay, too. Not ideal, but acceptable.
“I’m terrified of me,” she said.
Her skin was constantly warm despite her suit. She remembered how the flames of energy skipped from Lucifer’s body unbidden. She felt a tingle at the thought of him, and of the power. The naniates wanted her to go to him, to merge her power with his.
Why? Was that what Lucifer wanted, or what they wanted? She wasn’t sure. What she did know was that if she went near him, he would own her. She wasn’t strong enough to challenge him. She wasn’t even close.
“I’ve got it,” Erlan said. “Four days, Queenie. We’ll be in Shardspace in four days.”
“That’s a long time,” Benhil said. “Especially since we think Lucifer will be there tomorrow.”
“It doesn’t make sense that he would go after Republic assets himself,” Gant said. “His interest is in the Gate, and in getting to Elysium. Thraven can continue to handle the dirty work.”
“Only until we stop his ass,” Pik said.
“Can we stop him?” Uriel asked. “Queenie, are you strong enough?”
“Look at me,” Abbey said, turning to make her tail more obvious.
Not that she needed to. The ridges on her forehead had grown. The bones of her arms were jutting out into her skin. Pik kept telling her she looked awesome, but she knew she didn’t look human anymore.
Was she still human?
“I had better be strong enough,” she said. “I don’t want to live like this for nothing.”
“I like it,” Pik said again.
“Nerd, do you know where in Shardspace we’re going to come out?” Abbey asked.
“Standby,” Erlan replied.
“That’s assuming we can even get to the bastard,” Bastion said. “Thraven could be on the opposite side of the galaxy.”
“We’ll reach out to Captain Mann and General Kett when we arrive,” Abbey said. “One of them has to know something.”
“Again, assuming at least one of them is still alive.”
“If they aren’t, we’ll be in deep enough shit that it might not matter,” Benhil said. “We could get to Shardspace and find out Armageddon is already over.”
“Tell me again how letting Lucifer get what he wants is a bad thing?” Bastion said. “He takes his assholes and gets out of our galaxy and becomes the One’s concern. What’s the problem there?”
“He lied to the Nephilim to get them to follow him,” Abbey said. “The One left them the means to get home, and he hid them from the Seraphim to support his claim that they were slaves. He’s interested in conquest, not freedom, no matter what he says. Name one asshole ever that conquered a land and then abandoned it.”
“He’ll come back,” Jequn said. “Or maybe he’ll leave Thraven here to rule over what’s left of us. Either way, once he has our galaxy in his grip, he isn’t going to let it go again.”
Bastion nodded. “Right. But how the hell are we going to stop him? We’ve got a few ships, but most of them wouldn’t pass inspection in the Republic. Kett’s got some ships, but compared to what Thraven is throwing at us it’s like David versus Goliath.”
“Do I have to remind you that David won that one?” Gant asked.
“With the help of God. We don’t have God on our side.”
“No, we have Queenie,” Pik said. “That’s better.”
“No offense, but Queenie can’t handle Lucifer. Not now. Maybe not ever. I know it’s not the answer we’re looking for, and I don’t want to sound like a coward, but we might have to settle for saving Hayley and getting the frag out of town.”
“Saving Hayley means killing Thraven,” Abbey said.
“Yeah, and you might be able to do that. But Lucifer?” He shook his head. “We don’t have to stay here. We have the Harvester. Maybe we can find another part of the universe to put down roots. Someplace away from Shardspace and the Extant? What if that’s the best we can do?”
“I’m glad to hear I’m not being the negative one for a change,” Benhil said.
“No one is saying this is going to be easy,” Abbey said. “No one is saying we’re guaranteed to survive. We can’t abandon the Republic. We can’t abandon the Outworlds. There are too many innocent people, and I don’t know about you, but I remember taking an oath to protect them when I joined the RAS.”
“The same RAS that sent us to Hell,” Bastion said. “We don’t owe them anything.”
“Yes, we do. We made a promise. All of us. And even if we didn’t, I did, and you all made a promise to me. We’re a family. We’re going to stick together; we’re going to hit the Nephilim with everything we’ve got. We’re going to free the fragging galaxy, or we’re going to die trying.”
Abbey hissed the last part of the statement, the anger overwhelming. She clenched her jaw tight, realizing her entire body had tensed. It was getting so easy to become furious. So easy to start losing control.
She fled the bridge, hurrying away from the others as the rage fought to consume her, the naniates’ whispers growing in pitch. She was barely away when her body started to smolder, and her eyes started to tear.
She leaned against the bulkhead.
“You do as I say,” she whispered to the naniates. “You do as I command.”
She swallowed the anger, slowly coming back under control. The effort left her emotionally exhausted. She wiped at her eyes before heading deep
er into the Harvester. She needed some time alone to clear her head.
Besides, it was as good of a time as any to take a look around.
35
Abbey walked the corridors of the Harvester in silence and solitude. In many ways, it felt good to get away from everything and be alone. To have time to think and feel and be without anyone asking her for anything and without having to be a leader. She had never asked to be so much to so many. She didn’t particularly like being Queen. But she was going to do what she had to do, now and forever.
Of course, she was always only a comm link away. She was tempted to shut it down, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Even when she needed time alone, she needed to be available, too. She hoped she could maintain the peace. For her sake and for the Rejects’ too. She wasn’t sure how far she could be pushed before the naniates would seize control. She wasn’t sure what they would do once they had.
The Harvester was a large ship, but not the biggest she had been on. Its components were an amalgamation of generations, with parts replaced piecemeal over the years as older, similar pieces broke down either because of use or time. The corridors were mostly small and narrow, poorly lit and more reminiscent of a slave ship than one of the most valuable vessels in the Extant. Then again, the Harvesters were used by the Nephilim to return to Shardspace and capture a fresh supply of humans, snatching them up and bringing them back to be used for their blood or sold as Unders. It wasn’t a cruise vessel.
The smaller passages made the interior feel like more of a maze, with crisscrossing corridors that were indistinguishable from one another, save for the occasional localized smell or stain. It was obvious humans had been beaten and murdered on the ship. It was a truth the Nephilim took no pains to hide. How many slaves had been shuttled this way over the millennia? Was this the ship that Thraven had been brought to the Extant on?
The thought stuck with her as she continued walking, even while her mind continued to other things. She could hardly believe Bastion was the one to suggest they cut and run. Sure, he had done the right thing and mentioned rescuing Hayley first, but still. She had come to depend on him as an ally, and there was a part of her that was coming to see him as something much more. It seemed every time she started to let those feelings in he did something to disappoint her. Now he wanted to give up and give in, and to abandon the people who were depending on them. He hadn’t put the idea forward in a cowardly way, but she was still surprised he had put the idea forward at all. A part of her felt like he was the kind of man she could be with. Another part of her was repulsed by him. Even she didn’t know which one would win out in the end, and she hated that he wasn’t more solid.
And Hayley. Where was Hayley? Was she healthy? Was she alive? Every thought of her under Thraven’s thumb caused her to start losing the control she was fighting to maintain. She had to break herself away from it.
She thought about Thraven again. How many humans had been trafficked on this ship? How many thousands had lost their lives on the trip, or suffered a worse fate at the other end of the line? The ship had to have records somewhere. She knew a little bit about the Gloritant from Uriel. That he was from Egypt. That he was a eunuch. That he hadn’t aged much thanks to the Gift. Was there more she could learn? Was there something she could use? It was a long shot, but she needed the distraction.
“Gant,” she said, contacting him through the comm.
“Aye, Queenie?” he said. “What do you need?”
“Do you know if this ship has a datastore on it?”
“I’m certain it does, why?”
“I’m curious, and I need a distraction.”
“Bastion?”
“In part. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m here if you decide you do. You know that, right?”
Abbey smiled. Gant was as dependable as they came. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Of course. Give me a second to scan the systems. Where are you, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I was wandering. Somewhere in the middle, if I had to guess.”
“Do you want some company?”
“Not at the moment. Just a terminal location for the datastore.”
“Roger. If you’re in the middle, be on the lookout for the holding cells. There should be a guard station with terminal access there.”
“Holding cells?”
“From the schematic, it looks a lot like the layout in Hell. It makes me wonder if one inspired the other.”
“Like the Nephilim helped design Hell?”
“It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Thraven was pulling resources from there, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first.”
“An easy place to make individuals disappear.”
“Exactly.”
“Thanks, Gant. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”
“Roger. I’ll do my best to keep the others from bothering you for a while. Pik already gave Bastion shit for pissing you off.”
Abbey laughed. “Good.”
She disconnected the link, continuing through the ship. It took her a little while to come across the holding cells. When she did, part of her wished she had never asked about a terminal in the first place.
She had sensed the blood and violence in the other parts of the Harvester. It was present ten times over here, where rhodrinium bars split an open space into three hundred separate pens, each large enough for ten to twenty humans. The bars were stained, as were the walls and floor, stains that could have only been made by blood and piss and shit, acidic stains that told all who ever entered the ship as a prisoner that things were only going to get worse from there. A smell permeated the deck, even as it had stood empty for who knew how long.
She raised her eyebrows in amusement when one of the few remaining Reapers on the ship emerged from the base of the guard tower. It approached her on mechanical legs, keeping its weapons at its sides and coming to stand in front of her. The machines had become docile once they had entered the wormhole, she supposed because their programming told them whoever was on the ship at that point was legal crew.
“Wait here,” she said to it, knowing all it wanted was direction. It turned slightly to get out of her way but otherwise didn’t react.
She walked past it to the guard tower, ascending the steps to the top. A handful of seats greeted her, arranged in a pattern so that a few eyes could watch the whole area. There were no weapons; the Apostants didn’t need them. She imagined they rarely if ever had a problem with their fresh meat.
The terminal was in the back of the room, more of a convenient admin station than a necessity. She went to it and tapped the controls, turning the projector on. It didn’t ask her for a password; they had already cracked the weak security.
She moved her hand over the controls, navigating through the system, the activity finally helping to take her mind off their current predicament. It took some time, but she found her way to the source console, where she was able to search the system. Since the different Prophets had shared access to the Harvesters, she assumed the personnel files would be secured and organized based on the Prophet who recorded them. She knew Thraven had been taken by the Prophet Malize, and so she did her best to locate references to him in the datastore.
The search turned up a raft of data related to prisoners - more than she had been expecting. It was protected and encrypted, but the Nephilim were far behind the Republic in those technologies, and she broke into the data with little resistance. She had thought maybe the Nephilim didn’t pay that much attention to their victims, but she was wrong. Every prisoner was identified and cataloged with images and full histories, a process that must have taken the collectors weeks. She searched the name Selvig Thraven but didn’t turn anything up. Because he had been on another Harvester? Or because that wasn’t his original name?
She set about trying to narrow down the lists. Not because she thought any information she found would be all that useful, but because it gave her something else to do, somethi
ng that kept her brain working but didn’t have to do with the war beyond the wormhole. It was a way to stay focused without getting too angry, without the risk of losing her mind.
She sorted the list by gender, by record age, and then by location. There were no records that old from anywhere other than Earth, and they stretched back to way before humankind had invented air travel, never mind space travel. She found four hundred males that could have fit Thraven’s description.
She started going through them one at a time. The Nephilim had saved images of every single prisoner, stripped naked and placed in front of a light background. The process was exhaustive, and in her opinion nearly pornographic, including close-ups of the genitals for purposes she didn’t, and didn’t want to, understand.
Even so, it helped her narrow the list of hundreds down to four eunuchs, all of whom could have potentially been Thraven if any of them were. She looked at the data for each of them. Two were marked as potentials for the Gift due to their overall health and strong personalities. She put them aside for further investigation, reading through the data the Nephilim had maintained and deciding that neither of them was Thraven.
She was going to give up then. Thraven had to have come on one of the other Harvesters. The problem was that quitting was going to return her to reality, and she had too much time to burn. She pulled the other two records, reading through them. She was halfway through the first when she began to wonder if she was onto something.
An Egyptian eunuch named Ahtintep who exhibited nearly narcissistic confidence and strength, who showed little fear at his situation, and who was intrigued by the Nephilim language and their Gift. It turned out this particular slave had a brother who had been captured as well, a younger boy named Ketmose who had died on the journey back to the Extant.
Interesting.
She searched for Ketmose, the name helping her to locate him quickly.
She froze when she saw him.
What the hell?