“Ask you what? I already know that you voted for it. As if an act of tyranny by a democracy of few could—”
“Do you want to ask me if I still owe something. For my part in it. For my piece. Do you want to ask what I still owe.”
The Preacher swallowed, nodded once, the motion hard, a single sharp jerk.
“Everything,” Marus said simply, spreading his hands, the webbing between his fingers almost glowing in the light.
She looked away from him, but I could still see her face, all that rage and the pain and the fear, her steel mask probably less impassive than she would have liked it to be. She was working through all the new information, changing truths that had been at the fundamental core of her being for over a hundred years, and she didn’t like any of it.
Better blind and unafraid than to know you can see and only find darkness anyway.
“And how do you plan on paying that debt?” she asked Marus finally. “All the lives, all the pain—how could you possibly pay that off?”
“A little bit every day,” he replied, matching her anger with his own calm. “I may never touch all of it—I may never come close. But a little’s better than nothing. And nothing’s how much I’ll be able to repay—how much any of us will be able to pay—if the Pax reach Sanctum.”
And there it was. Regardless of what we’d done, Marus and I—regardless of what we’d continued to do. Right or wrong, what was in the past was in the past. We had to deal with what was ahead of us.
“So now you know,” I told the Preacher, my arms folded across my chest.
“And if I say I’m going to expose the whole thing: tell the whole universe what you did, who they should blame?” The way she was looking at me, it was clear she didn’t actually have to ask.
“You know I won’t let you do that,” I said evenly.
“Maybe the Pax should wipe you out, then.” Her voice was bitter as she said it. “Maybe it’s what you deserve.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. If you can stand back and let millions die—plenty of whom weren’t even born back then—for a mistake we made a hundred years ago, maybe that’s who you are. But maybe you haven’t considered what it would mean for the Pax to take Sanctum.”
“The loss of a dead-end bolt-hole in a nothing system? Would it really mean all that much at all? Despite the bill for your actions finally coming due.”
I nodded. “Ignore the fact that we’ve been studying the pulse for a hundred years—that, with what we know, we could re-create it, if we wanted to. Ignore the fact that, even if we tried to wipe all that data out, the Pax would get at least some of it, that they’d then likely be able to use the pulse against their enemies, otherwise known as everyone. Ignore the fact that, no matter how much you may want to blame us for what happened, the Justified are still a force of good in this galaxy. There’s also the fact that we’ve built a school, a place for gifted children, changed children. Like Esa.”
I looked at the girl when I said it; she closed her eyes. She’d been quiet for a while now—too long. “They came for me on my homeworld,” she said. “Were willing to sacrifice one of their big ships, just to get me. You said it was for my . . . my gifts, before. That they wanted to make a soldier out of me.”
“Well, they don’t care about stopping the pulse from returning,” Marus told her. “I can promise you that.”
“And the other children?” she asked. “The other ones at Sanctum, the other—all the other kids,” she glared at me, “the others that you’ve taken from their homes. If the Pax get to them . . .”
“They want you for your abilities,” Javier nodded. “As far as the Justified are concerned, the gifts you—and those like you—are born with, those are just . . . secondary, useful only in the sense that they let us identify you as those changed by the pulse, and thus those who can guard against its return, eventually. Those who can stop it. To the Pax, though . . .”
“The Pax are a great many things,” Marus continued, picking up the thread. “But you have to give it to them—they are completely blind to species prejudice. They think they’re the answer to everything that ails the galaxy, that if everyone came together under their rule, under their rules, there would be no more war, no more conflict. The strong would rule the weak, and the weak would submit. Because they would have no other choice.”
“Even if they have to kill two-thirds of the galaxy to get there,” I murmured.
“And how is that any different from what the Justified did?” Esa asked me. From the Preacher, I could have shrugged it off. From the girl, it hurt.
I didn’t let that show as I shook my head. “Not important. What is important is—they will make those they capture into Pax. They’re very good at it; they’ve had enough practice. Whatever you want to call what the Pax do to their ‘recruits’—brainwashing, lobotomization, pick your poison, it’s a little of both: there’s an element of both surgery and powerful chemical rebalancing involved—they’ve honed it to a science.
“Point is, they wouldn’t just do that to the slaves they took from Sanctum. They’d do it to all the other children, the others like you. The gifted. We took you from your homeworlds because we needed you to stop the pulse from coming back, and because we wanted to give you lives where you could . . . know your place in this galaxy. Serve a purpose. The Pax want to make you soldiers, and the only purpose you will serve then will be death. The gifts you were born with, the gifts the pulse radiation left you with—they vary, but almost all of them would be devastating in combat, if properly trained.”
“So those are my options,” she said. “Join the Justified’s cult, and train my gifts to try and stop the pulse when it returns—if it returns. Or be taken by the Pax, and be brainwashed into using . . . what I can do . . . to unite the galaxy under their rule.”
“Oh, they still wouldn’t be able to unite the galaxy, not even with an army of kids like you,” Javier told her. “They’d still fail, eventually.”
“And leave a trail of dead behind them that would stretch between the stars,” Marus added. “The legacy of the Justified may be a heavy weight to bear, Esa—it is for me. But it’s a feather compared to what the Pax will make you do. If they catch you.”
She looked at me, tears drying on her cheeks, utterly betrayed. This was why my superiors told us not to form bonds with the children we rescued; this was why I didn’t tell them my name. It was always the person who’d pulled them out of their old life that they blamed, when the new life they were presented with turned out to involve just as much compromise and difficulty as their old one. “I don’t see that’s much of a choice at all,” she said.
I could see it, behind her eyes—she’d made her decision. Maybe the first true adult choice she’d ever make. I just hoped it wouldn’t be the last.
Ultimately, though, it was beside the point. Esa’s broken heart would heal, eventually; being among kids like her, at Sanctum—that would help. Didn’t matter if she hated me; if that part never healed. That was my own price to pay. For now, we still had the Pax invasion force to deal with. “And you?” I asked, turning to the Preacher.
“You’ll throw me out the airlock if I disagree; what do you expect me to say?” she asked.
“I’ll throw you out the airlock if you threaten us, yes,” I nodded. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to ask you to fight. Not if you don’t want to. You can sit this out. Granted, that sitting’ll be done in a jail cell in Sanctum, and if the Pax break through, they’ll either kill you or fry out your programming trying to turn you into one of them, but still. If you can’t bring yourself to fight on the side of the Justified, I won’t ask you to.”
She almost smiled at that. “You’re not one to soften a blow, are you?”
“You soften a blow, it just means you have to throw more of them,” I replied. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
She nodded, just a tiny fraction. “I’ll help you fight,” she said. “But when this is done, I want access to your resear
ch, access to your records. I want to know everything.”
I shook my head. “I can’t promise you that; it’s not in my authority to grant.”
“But you’ll try.”
“I’ll try.” I would, too. She’d earned that.
She nodded, once, and then was silent. I turned to Javi.
“You don’t have to ask,” he told me, raising a hand. “I’ll help. You know I will. Unless the council decides to shoot me on sight, of course. I won’t be very good to you then.”
“You can still take Bolivar and run,” I reminded him gently. “As soon as we get in-system, we could link up, get you on board; you could be out of here, well clear by the time the Pax show up.” It would tear me up to watch him go—I could admit that to myself, if not to him—but I’d done it before, and I’d survived. I’d survive it again. Though maybe not for long, not with what we were facing.
He shook his head, something sad in his face as he did it. “If you’re asking me to do that, you never knew me at all,” he said.
“I’m not asking. I’m giving you the option.”
“Well, I’m not taking it.”
“Good.” I tried not to put too much meaning into that single word, but at least some of what I felt made its way in there. Javier looked up at me and smiled when he heard it. It was a sad smile, and more than a little bitter—as much hurt there as anything else—but at least he was still capable of hearing the things I didn’t say. At least we still had that.
I looked around the room. Marus, Javier, the Preacher, Esa. Myself. A spy, a smuggler, a cleric, a child, a soldier. Not a single one of us was capable of changing the course of a war. We wouldn’t do much in a fight against the Pax—this was going to be so much bigger than us, so much bigger than Schaz or Bolivar—but if we could get there, if we could warn them, at least we could give Sanctum a fighting chance.
“Get some sleep,” I told the others, uncrossing my arms and leaning off the wall. “When we get to Sanctum, there likely won’t be time to rest. There will be a great deal of work to do before we’re prepared to take on the Pax fleet.”
“You think you can?” the Preacher asked me. “Everything else aside, I’m asking . . . logistically, I suppose. Even with advanced warning, can the Justified hold off a Pax invasion armada?”
I gave her a tired grin. “I guess we’ll find out,” I replied.
CHAPTER 5
We didn’t talk to each other much on the last leg of the journey to Sanctum. That wasn’t an easy thing to do on a ship Scheherazade’s size, but we managed it; we were all wrestling with different demons, and none of us particularly wanted company.
Marus spent most of the trip hooked up to Scheherazade’s medical suite, getting his biochemicals back into balance. We’d healed up the burns he’d taken when Khonnerhonn’s systems had overloaded, but he was still drained from his overlong stay in cort, malnourished and dehydrated.
Javier sat in the cockpit for the most part. He might have slept, but mostly he just talked quietly to Schaz. They’d always liked each other, and Schaz didn’t even have Bolivar for company at the moment; ships couldn’t communicate in hyperspace. I didn’t begrudge her the conversation, though I had an idea that this would only encourage her entreaties for me to somehow heal the rift between Javi and myself. Like all it would take was a kind word or two.
The Preacher meditated in the turret. I don’t know what she thought about. I mean, I could guess, but I would probably be wrong. Barious can be hard to figure out sometimes. They’re almost like other sentient species, until they’re entirely not.
Esa stayed in the living quarters. Her mind I could read a lot better than the Preacher’s, just by the expression on her face: she was wondering what she’d gotten herself into, if maybe she wouldn’t have been better off staying on her homeworld. Sure, it had bandits and food shortages and all sorts of dangers; sure, it lacked fancy tech and resources and answers to questions she never knew she’d had; and sure, it was currently under Pax occupation, but at the moment, it still had to seem maybe the better alternative than what she was flying into.
As for myself, I took my own advice, and slept. Pretty much everyone on board was angry with me, for one reason or another, and there wasn’t a great deal I could do about it. That was fine—to be expected, really. So I just sacked out, rotated one of the bunks built into the walls into position and told Schaz to wake me when we neared Justified space.
She did that.
She did it quietly; she always did, when we had company. I stretched, and yawned. Did that quietly too. Old habits, from back home when I spent most of my time bunked down with a whole platoon and privacy was a kind of myth, something the officers got maybe once a month or so.
Marus was out of the medbay, talking to Esa, quietly, but he actually had her smiling, which must have taken some work. “Eels,” he was saying. I listened, without letting them know I was awake. “Mutated eels, some of them six, maybe seven feet. Teeth as long as your hand.”
“What are ‘eels’?” she asked.
“Big fish. Big, long, mean fish. From human worlds, I think, originally, though you find them in a great many oceans. They eat almost everything.”
“And she was—”
“Had no idea, no.” He chuckled; I glared, though neither of them was paying attention to me. Why did he always have to tell this story? “Remember, she didn’t grow up anywhere near an ocean. Learned to swim in reservoirs, quarries—wasn’t used to the idea that there might be things living under the water. I was just about to call out to her when the first of them—”
I made my presence known, primarily by kicking the back of Esa’s chair. “What?” she asked, more than a bit sullenly. Well, she was due that much. “We were about to get to the good part.”
“You mean where I almost got eaten?”
“Yeah.” The “obviously” was implied.
“I’ll spoil it for you: I didn’t. Now, you can stay mad at me all you like,” I told her, “but you’re still going to want to see this.” Then I turned and headed for the cockpit without waiting to see if she was going to follow.
Javi was still in the gunnery chair; I slid past him. He reached out—not by much, just a slight motion of his hand—and brushed my arm as I did. A tiny moment of human contact, of support. He was still on my side, or, at least, was doing his best not to hate me at the moment. It meant a great deal, not that I’d tell him that.
I sat in the cockpit and took the stick. “You want control for the approach?” Scheherazade asked me.
“Better give it to me, yeah,” I replied. “I know you can do it, but I can do it faster, and every second counts.”
“Plus you want to think about piloting, rather than—”
“Just give me the damn stick, Scheherazade.”
Javier chuckled softly. I turned in my chair and gave him a dirty look. “Don’t glare at me,” he said. “I wasn’t the one telling the eels story.”
“I hate that story. I don’t know why everyone thinks it’s so funny.”
“Mostly because of how Marus tells it. I mean . . . it is pretty great. When he makes the faces and all.” I ignored him, started checking my instruments instead. As I did, I turned slightly, on the pretext of setting some of the toggles above me—saw that Esa had slipped in, to sit quietly in the navigator’s chair. She was still sulking, but she was here. That was good. Regardless of how this turned out, she deserved to see this.
I shifted us out of hyperspace, and the Justified’s home system filled the viewscreens, both the cockpit window itself and the various monitors taking their feeds from the forward cameras.
“Oh, god,” Esa breathed, forgetting, for a moment, how angry she was at all of us.
“Yeah,” Javier agreed. “ ‘Behold, the glory of destruction, and the beauty that it has wrought in its wake.’ ” His voice was caught somewhere between sarcasm and reverence; I don’t know what he was quoting from, but it was apt.
Once upon a t
ime, this solar system had been home to four separate stars—a binary pair at the center, orbited in turn by two smaller suns, themselves orbited by small clusters of planets, nearly a dozen, filling out the spaces between the stars. There were half a hundred moons as well, most surrounding the outer gas giants, though each world had at least a pair. It had been a ridiculous wealth of terraformable worlds, by any galactic standard. That was before the sect wars.
The two outer stars had both been collapsed into black holes, not by natural cosmic forces, but by the exact sort of weapons the pulse had been designed to render inert. The sucking voids spun and whirled at the edges of the system, their presence a constant reminder of the wars that had swept through here long before the Justified arrived.
Like dancers in counterpoint, the black holes bracketed the system on either side, bending and twisting the light of the cosmic firmament as they drew it toward them like ribbons in a gale. Most of the planets had been destroyed as well, in one manner or another, each terrifying in its own way, each leaving behind a painfully gorgeous vista that you could never forget had been created by the havoc that had also caused the deaths of untold civilians.
Some of the rocky planets had been shattered from within, broken into a billion pieces, filling the inner system with metallic shards that reflected the two surviving stars’ light toward us, and toward the two black holes, creating a constant stream of light as the voids ate the illumination. A few of the worlds had been split in half or broken up into their component plates by coring, their orbits still strong enough to hold them mostly together, haunting facades of the complete spheres they had once been. Still others—mostly moons—had been completely pulverized, forming a faint ring that wove throughout the system, as well as smaller halos around the three planets that remained.
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