Alysha's Fall

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Her steps brought her just beneath him, and she tilted her chin up to look at him. His eyes were afire, the glow of the lamps painted on the dark green of his irises. She thought that his gaze flicked briefly to her ears, that his mouth twitched once . . . perplexity? Disappointment? But when he dropped his eyes back to hers, there was nothing in them but that implacable pride, the stern pleasure she’d always hoped for.

  Brighthaven leaned down and affixed the tab to her shoulder. “Ensign. Congratulations.”

  She backed away and bowed, as required, stunned at how shaken she was at the sound of the mere word. “Ensign.” At last, at long last.

  Alysha forced herself back on her course and joined the others already anointed. She did not hear the final address after the line of waiting students had expended itself, nor the thunderous applause of the audience. And when the other students—ensigns, now—dispersed, she remained standing beneath the glow of a lamp, her fingers absently caressing her name tag.

  “Alysha!” Laelkii appeared out of the dark, her formal cadet uniform contrasting sharply to Alastar’s Fleet formal dress. “What are you doing here? Let’s go celebrate!”

  “She wants a party, as predicted,” Alastar said, and adroitly dodged the elbow that new toward her side.

  “A party?” Alysha murmured, fighting her way out of her reverie.

  “There are several currently in progress,” Laelkii said, then grinned. “But I know which one you want to go to. Baner’s giving one by the shore, a really classy affair with a boardwalk, champagne, the works. You can go swimming. It’s only ten minutes by rail. Come on!”

  “I’d like to change,” Alysha said. “I don’t have a swimsuit with me.” One party seemed as good as the next, and she was honest enough to admit she had no idea what to do with herself. All her life her driving goal had been to become a captain of a Fleet vessel, to seek and meet the stars. The intermediate goal was won—the Diamondwing was arriving on the morrow for her. But the most amazing sensation gripped her as she realized that between then and now she could do nothing more to accomplish what she’d been striving for.

  So . . . “Yes. I’d like to change.” Alysha glanced at the folds of her cape and frowned minutely. “It’ll only take me ten minutes to get upstairs. There’s a Pad station in the amphitheater.”

  “Well, hurry! We’ll be waiting for you. Maybe while you’re gone I can arrange to Pad to Baner’s . . . Ensign Baner’s!” Laelkii grinned. “No use wasting time. Be gone!”

  Alysha chuckled quietly and trotted toward the small alcove nestled against the eastern base of the amphitheater pit. Two small Pads hid there with their control panels, and it was the work of a few moments to establish a link with orbital control and arrange a transfer to the station. Minutes later, Alysha strode into her temporary room, beginning to unpin the long white cloak. She turned to face herself in the mirror.

  There was a box on the dresser. A small black box, satin, otherwise undecorated. Alysha stared at it, brows furrowing and full lips twisting. Someone had left her a gift? Gray fingers cushioned the lid as she sprang the catch to reveal the glint of metal: ice gold, an alloy of gold and the rarer, more valuable white metal meredium, shaped into hoops of such elegant simplicity that Alysha’s breath caught in her throat. Meredium wasn’t breathnache, but it wasn’t far from the black clathrate in value. Who would give her such an expensive gift?

  She stared at her reflection, her dilated pupils arresting in their contrast against the ice-shard blue of her eyes, and she shuddered violently as the realization struck her.

  The party. The senior staff of the Academe always rotated through the evening’s parties to speak less formally with the outgoing ensigns. Was it too late? She grabbed the box and dashed out the door, her cape whirling behind her.

  “That was fast, whoa! You didn’t change! Alysha . . . are you okay?”

  Alysha stepped off the Pad. “Let’s go, Laelkii. The night’s spending. You did arrange for a Pad transport, didn’t you?”

  The look the older white feline exchanged with Alastar was so patently obvious it amused Alysha. “I . . . well, yes.”

  Alysha grinned and indicated the Pads with a flourish. “After you, arii’sen.”

  The sea’s rhythm was never far from Terracentrus, but on the Baner family estate it was rhythm no more but song, a music that wove a permanent back-drop to the sultry spring evening. Long lines of torches rose ten feet off-shore to cast globes of firelight on the lapping waves, and the promised boardwalk ducked in and out of shadows as it ran to a small wooden structure on stilts just past the torch-light.

  The silhouettes of bodies flashed in and out of view; cavorting in the waves or dancing on the shore to music that seemed incidental compared to the breathing of the ocean. Dark shapes moved up and down the boardwalk, the sound of their merriment floating back on the sea’s constant breeze.

  Alysha stood on the sand, her white cloak frolicking in a ceaseless motion that sometimes sealed the cloth to her body, sometimes billowed out behind it. Her hair repeated the pattern over her sharp shoulders. Alastar and Laelkii had already lost themselves in the throng that clotted the beach near the boardwalk. She had a more specific goal in mind.

  The sound of footsteps made her glance over her shoulder, eyes thinning. A human was running past her, too young to be graduating in her class. She didn’t recognize him, but she called, “Hey, are any of the staff present?”

  “Sure, they’re flying the colors.” He pointed at the smear of gold and white light at the top of the house on the end of the boardwalk.

  “Thanks!” Alysha called after him, and jogged that way. A few minutes later she left the shore for the wooden planks that stretched above the water’s surface, her footsteps thumping as she passed groups of people. Halfway down the boardwalk, a hand wrapped around her arm.

  “Hey, Alysha!” Baner, the Harat-Shar she’d somehow befriended and host of the party, gave her a quick hug. Despite her lingering reticence at such displays, she returned it before disentangling herself. “Alysha! Five hundred fin says I make captain before you do!”

  Alysha grinned. “If I had the money, I’d make you wish you’d never offered. Who are you flying the colors for?”

  Baner’s round ears pricked and he leaned toward her, voice lowering. “Quite a few of the profs are meandering hereabouts . . . but believe it or not, we have the Old Man himself on the balcony.”

  “And how many of your set are mobbing him, ah?”

  The Harat-Shar snorted. “None! He’s got this look on his face! No one here’s interested in sailing during a storm. As far as I’m concerned, he can stay up there as long as he wants. I’m not about to move a man scuttlebutt says is on the fast track for the Admiralty.”

  Both of Alysha’s brows lifted. “Baner!”

  He laughed. “Guess you hadn’t heard that? Where have you been hiding, arii-love?” He cuffed her shoulder. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that he’s seriously disaffected. My guess is they don’t want to lose him.”

  “I see,” Alysha murmured.

  “Or didn’t you hear about the whole hush-hush incident that happened a few years ago? When Sloan got dumped? As rumor has the story, there was a cadet involved with the discovery of the second being in the Anti-Human League.”

  She couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her mouth, and only hoped the faint trace of bitterness didn’t register. “You shouldn’t listen to everything you hear, Baner.”

  “Maybe not, maybe not. Still. Stay around, ah? We’re going to be having a bonfire in a few hours.”

  Alysha nodded. “I’ll catch you later.”

  He grinned and whirled off to greet more of his guests.

  As if drawn, Alysha’s eyes rose to the platform at the roof of the little wooden cabin on the end of the boardwalk. Her hand clenching the box, she walked on.

  Baner had been right: not a breath or a scuffle disturbed the boardwalk this far out. Alysha paused at the edge of the walkway
and rested her hand on the rail, looking out to sea. The lights near the shore did not penetrate this far, leaving only the warm, dim lights from the two-story gazebo beside her to cast a few feeble golden swatches on the nearest waves. Her eyes rose to the horizon, searching in vain for the point where sea and sky separated: it was all darkness and silence, the sounds of the party-goers muted and tinny, like voices in a memory.

  Alysha licked the salt from her lips and looked at the top floor of the structure. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was there.

  The wooden boards of the steps shivered beneath her boots as she ascended past the twin lanterns hung in sconces to advertise the presence of the staff and the commandant. She paused beside them, squinting, then closed her eyes and continued to the top floor with the box held tightly in her hand. The heavy, humid air filled her nose with the sea’s perfume and the tang of the platform’s treated wood —in her ears, the waves splashed against the wooden pylons and the steps creaked beneath her feet. She reached the top and opened her eyes, suppressing the quiver that threatened her spine.

  He was standing, facing the horizon. Both his hands rested on the rail, and the lines of his cape obscured the verticals of his back if not the breadth of his shoulders. The soft breeze sloughed through his hair and the hems of his dress tunic and cape; he didn’t move otherwise. She’d expected his dignity, but not the tension betrayed by his stillness.

  Alysha stepped forward, but couldn’t find a way to enter the space he’d commandeered for himself with his mood. It was no wonder the deck had cleared out so quickly. She debated making some small sound to advertise her presence but decided against it. Instead she bowed her head and forced herself to walk to the rail a few feet away and stand there.

  He did not respond. After a few minutes Alysha stopped stealing surreptitious glances at him. She faced the horizon instead. The breeze was stronger on the roof deck, vibrant, touched with spray and almost wet enough to drink. She lifted her face to it, let it carry her hair off her neck, couldn’t help the sigh from escaping her open lips.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

  Startled by his voice’s intrusion into the silence, Alysha turned toward him but couldn’t speak. The dim light was unkind to the lines on his face, deepened the wells of darkness beneath his eyes. In the face of such haggard exhaustion she could find no words.

  Brighthaven looked out to sea again. One broad hand lightly caressed the rail. “I keep saying I’ll learn to sail one day, but I never seem to have the time.”

  Alysha said, “Sir. It’s graduation night.”

  “And I shouldn’t be here? Repelling everyone with my black mood? Is that it, Ensign?” He chuckled at her shiver, but it was a gentle sound. “There’ll be a day when you won’t even blink at the title.”

  “Never,” Alysha said, torn between a small smile and a smaller frown. “Sir . . . why are you here?”

  “I’d ask you the same, Ensign.”

  She could see that he said it that time for the pleasure of watching her react. Her ears flicked sideways. “It’s a good night for celebration.”

  “You’d have me believe you wanted to come to a party and then sought out the quietest place in it? Oh, no. You were—”

  “Searching,” she finished for him. For some reason she didn’t want to hear him say it. Looking for him.

  “Yes,” Brighthaven said. “Searching.” His eyes rose to her ears and she touched the base of one self-consciously.

  “Naked,” he said, almost a reprimand had it not been for the slight self-mockery.

  Alysha glanced at her feet. “I’ve never been one for jewelry, sir.”

  He turned from her. “Neither have I . . . but it seems Fleet Command wants to pin another pip on my collar. Tell me, Forrest . . . how do you say no to a suitor that no longer enchants you?”

  Alysha folded her hands behind her back, the box still in them. “If I may, sir . . . it’s too late to say no to the suitor years after you’ve wed him.”

  He barked a short laugh, hands tightening on the rail. “Have to stay in the loveless marriage for the children, is that it, Forrest?”

  “That’s precisely it, sir.”

  “But the children have grown and moved away,” Brighthaven said, eyes unfocused. His fingers chafed at the wood.

  “No, sir.” Alysha took another breath and stepped toward him, one hand on the rail near his. “The cadets . . . they’re only the youngest of the children. The real challenge is there, in the stars. The children of the Accord. Humanity’s children.”

  “Humanity’s oh-so-perfect children. Oh yes, Forrest. Tell me more about your noble races, who did so much better than petty humankind.”

  Alysha flinched. “I can’t.” She looked down. “That’s why we need you.”

  He let his head turn, looked down on her with cool, calm eyes. The tendons across the back of his hand were taut. “You think I’d make a good admiral, Ensign?”

  Alysha said, “Yes, sir.”

  “You think I have something to teach your pacifist Pelted Admiralty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You think I’d be an asset to the Alliance?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, damn your Alliance! Because I want no part of it! Not after any of this.”

  Alysha’s ears flattened. “Sir . . . ”

  “No, Ensign Forrest. It’s quite enough for me.”

  She watched him gather his cloak around his body and stalk toward the stairs. A frown marred her brow and she realized her trembling was anger, not grief, and she released it to a strident call. “Commandant!”

  Brighthaven halted as if struck. Alysha strode toward him and stopped a step away. “I refuse. I refuse to be your excuse for leaving the service!”

  Slowly, he turned back to her.

  “ ‘Any of this’ . . . that’s Sloan’s betrayal, isn’t it? The Anti-Human League? The discovery that humanity’s progeny can be as base and evil and stupid as humans can be and are? Did you honestly believe the Accord’s races were any freer of human emotion than the people who made them? Truly, sir, I thought you less naïve.”

  A mask had replaced his face with something calmer. In the silence that followed, Alysha scrutinized it for some sign that she’d reached him, her chest rising and falling sharply with her anger.

  His hand lifted toward her face and then fell. “I deserved that, didn’t I.”

  Her chin rose and her cool eyes narrowed.

  Brighthaven smiled wryly. “You left the most important part out, though.”

  Her nervousness caught her by surprise. “Some things are better left unsaid,” Alysha said, voice lowering.

  “Ensign,” he said. Then, “Alysha . . . ”

  “Sir,” she replied.

  Brighthaven laughed. “Can’t you call me something other than ‘sir’?”

  Alysha canted her head, a smile tugging at the edge of full lips. “Very well, Commandant.”

  The human sighed, but a light had reappeared in his eyes. “So, what have you been hiding from me all this time?”

  “Sir?”

  “Behind your back.”

  She’d almost forgotten the box. She displayed it for him, the light catching across the satin and spilling toward the crack between lid and body. Alysha glanced at him, unwilling to name it; naming it would give it a power that frightened her.

  Some of the same reticence, it seemed, lived in him. His hand touched the top, then gently sprang the catch to reveal the glittering earrings. In silence he plucked them from their beds and took the box from her, setting it on the rail. And then just looked at her.

  Alysha had never been so aware of her body, of the weight of the breeze, of her hair tangled over her throat as she swallowed . . . of the light gilding one edge of him like the sun chasing the terminator in space. She shuddered and bowed her head, unable to keep her eyes open.

  His touch at her right ear was so light she mistook it for the wind until he slid the pa
d of his thumb across the delicate skin on its inside. His fingers lingered, so gentle she trembled. They left behind the right earring, the weight so sudden, so startling that her ear dropped.

  Even prepared for the left, it still shook her to feel his hands on her again. She managed to open her eyes as he attached the second hoop, to see the serenity: real this time, not the mask she’d seen before.

  Brighthaven leaned back and she trained her eyes on his. He nodded in satisfaction. “Very becoming, Ensign.”

  There was so much in her to say, so much she could not name. So instead, she said simply, “Sometimes it’s the piece of jewelry that makes the difference.”

  His lower eyelids creased, and perhaps he smiled. “Don’t take them off,” he said, quiet.

  “Never, sir,” Alysha replied.

  He walked down the stairs.

  Alysha stared after him, drawing her cape around her body. The earrings dragged at the lower lobes of her ears, far heavier than the ones she’d worn long ago. Far more valuable, in more ways than one. She backed away from the stairs and leaned against the rail on the corner of the deck, occasionally touching one of the hoops.

  The soft smacks of the sea against the pylons soothed her. After a while Alysha simply watched the black waves and listened, aware of the sea and the sky, of the tassels depending from her shoulders and hips, of the wonder of her rank braid at last affixed on her shoulder.

  “There you are!” Laelkii scrambled up the last step, Alastar a few steps behind her. “We were worried when we lost you. Baner said he’d seen you heading this way. What are you doing up here?”

  “Just looking,” Alysha said quietly.

  “Well, in case you haven’t noticed the party is down there,” Laelkii said, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder.

  From behind her, Alastar said, “She has a point.”

  A powerful reluctance dragged at Alysha, but she cast it off and felt no regrets. Pushing herself from the rail, she joined Laelkii. “Yes, Mom.”

  Laelkii hmphed and let her go down the stairs first. As she passed, the Asanii said, “By the way . . . nice earrings.”