Shadow Sun Seven

by Spencer Ellsworth

  Swez’s shock stick hums, but the nest queen gurgles at him, and, surprising everyone, he puts it down.

  “You think I am too proud to take a letter of credit, wingless?”

  “A Hukas letter of credit?”

  Wings rattle all over the chamber and the queen hisses. “What’s this about Hukas?” Hukas are the Kurgul nest all the other nests love to hate. The richest, most decadent nest, funding most illegal activity in the galaxy, squeezing out minor, angry nests like the Matakas.

  “The Hukas are the only reliable investors in the brave new galaxy, egg-layer. The Resistance is ears-deep in debt to them.”

  A whole chorus of angry vestigial wings rattles around the room.

  “Egg-layer, you can lick the Hukas’ bellies for the next ten years, if you want.” Half the drones reach for their guns, and the nest queen doesn’t stop them. She hisses, a really horrible rattling hiss that I’m sure means I am about to die. But then she speaks.

  “Offer me something better, wingless, or I rip out the rest of your tongue.”

  I close my eyes and let words filter out of Rashiya’s memories. “Shadow Sun Seven. You know it?”

  “No, wingless.”

  Swez speaks up. “Seen the inside of two Shadow Suns. Corporate prisons.”

  “Seven was a prison. Since the fall of the Empire, it’s been a center for pit fights. Lots of money changing hands. Lots of important prisoners.”

  “Why so much money in a prison?”

  “Because this Shadow Sun is located in the cleared-out guts of a Ruuzan Threg.” I have the queen’s attention now. “You know what those are, don’t you?”

  The queen nods to Swez and Swez says, “Air-sucking space ticks. Used in the Andelaxan War.”

  “Andelaxan pirates used them to get all the oxygen and moisture out of a ship in minutes,” I say. “Fly up to the side of an Imperial cruiser, have the Threg pierce its hull, and the oxygen is gone in minutes, stored and conveniently reusable. Once the Empire beat the pirates, they turned the oxygen mines into prisons. That means Shadow Sun Seven has enough hyperdense cells to make the Matakas the most wealthy nest in the galaxy.”

  Swez snorts, a fake laugh if I’ve ever heard one.

  But the nest queen gives me an appreciative gurgle, and every drone in the room stops rattling their wings.

  I keep going. “Real matter. Value in hand. No letters of credit, no bowing to the Hukas.”

  The nest queen speaks. “And you cased this station?”

  “I didn’t. But I just stabbed someone who did.” I nod toward the soulsword, in the hand of two drones at the back of the room. “You give me a complement of drones, we’ll bring a load of hyperdense cells back. Imagine the bartering power that gives you.”

  The drones start rattling wings, and Swez looks ready to speak, but the nest queen cuts him off by speaking to me. “Well-spoken, wide-thorax.”

  Well. She’s now referring to me with the pronouns one would use for an attractive drone.

  “This will be our deal. Matter in hand. You will provide the way in, we will provide ships and drones for your use.”

  “A fine decision,” I say, over the discontented rattling of Swez’s wings.

  The nest queen notices her drones’ discontent, and lets out another rattling hiss. “I will not lick a Hukas belly! Silence, or become wingless yourself. I need material to build larval chambers.”

  When Swez does speak, my data dump lets me know that the particular thrum in his vestigial wings means humble. “Egg-layer, what will you do with . . . the cross?”

  “Wide-thorax here will become part of our lineage.”

  “Uh.” Searching through my memory of the Kurgul language, I’m not finding any words to respectfully decline mating with her. They just . . . don’t exist. A drone doesn’t refuse the queen.

  “Come here, wide-thorax,” she says. “Partake.”

  Two drones force me up the dais. Dead drone bodies crunch under my feet. They bend me down, as if I couldn’t figure it out, to lick the glistening jelly off the nest queen’s belly.

  Royal jelly oozes out of holes like pores across the wide yellow spread of soft flesh, the only soft flesh I’ve seen on a Kurgul.

  Memories of Rashiya intrude, and I shut my eyes, as if that’ll help. Memories of kissing, of undressing her. Memories of her skin, touching mine. Memories of her skin, drained of memories and dead.

  Memories of her speaking to her father.

  In the memory, John Starfire looks back across the node-relay screen. Hair going white, smile lines at the edge of his eyes.

  “Let’s talk your next mission, Rash,” her father says. “You get that memory-crypt from the kids, and then a pickup. Should be straightforward, unless the prison warden gives you trouble.”

  “What’s this about prison, pater?” Rashiya asks. She’s trying not to show how tired she is. Or show that she doesn’t agree with her father’s assessment of Araskar. She doesn’t think I’ll be loyal.

  “Keep this one to yourself. There’s someone imprisoned on Shadow Sun Seven, Rash. I need you to get them out, after you’ve finished with the children.”

  Rashiya is not happy. “The prison? That place has gone wild. I had enough trouble with the scabs on the last place you sent me.”

  He ignores “Memorize these schematics. You should be able to do a requisition—the warden owes me—but if he gives you trouble, it’s not too hard to shoot your way in if needed.”

  “Why is this prisoner so important?”

  And then, as usual the memory of my own sword slamming through her chest, and that sudden tight pain, that inability to breathe, that surprise. I didn’t think you had it in you, Araskar. That was her last thought. What kind of last thought is that?

  A worker tilts my head to look up. The nest queen is clicking her mandibles together.

  “You do not want my jelly, wide-thorax?”

  “Not at all, just, uh, savoring the odor.”

  I go ahead and lick up some royal jelly. (Don’t judge. I was putting worse than this in my body, up until a week ago. It’s not bad, in a tangy, bodily-secretion sort of way. Sweet, with a hint of vinegar. Nobody tell Jaqi, or she’ll want some.)

  The drones step away at another particular hiss from the nest-queen. I stand up. She unfurls one of those antennae from her head and strokes my cheek.

  “Will you add the best of your blood to our line?”

  The way she says it, it isn’t a question.

  “Take the kid out,” I say under my breath to Swez.

  When X and Toq have been taken into the hallway, her workers swarm me and pull my clothes off.

  I resort to speaking Imperial. “I’m sorry, I barely know you—”

  “I am not going to take you in passion, wide-thorax,” she says in Imperial standard. This whole time, we could have been speaking a language I actually know? A language with phrases that would let me turn her down. “I would, if you begged, but a girl must be forgiven for rending some flesh in the heat of passion. If you want to keep your arms, I suggest we do a simple extraction.”

  “Hold on now, you didn’t tell me it would kill me. I could go for death that way.”

  “No. I think you are meant for something special, my mumbling, scarred, wide-thorax. And I need you to work this prison job. It is a good risk, one that bodes well for your seed. Hold still, and I will take what is needed.”

  I don’t get a choice in that, as her workers pin me.

  A sharp mandible emerges from between her legs, like a scorpion’s tail, ending in a glistening point like a needle. “This will hurt a good bit. But it is for your cause, no?”

  Of course.

  She jabs it right into my left testicle.

  Every muscle in my body seizes up and I vomit a little and fall down to the ground and I’m nose-to-nose with an eyeless drone’s head, sweating a river from every pore, and cold as a comet, and my left nut might be going supernova.

  John Starfire’s voice fil
ls my memory. “This prisoner? Inside Shadow Sun Seven? Survived a year in the heart of the Dark Zone.”

  “Well, wide-thorax,” she says as the workers pull me up to my feet. I vomit and they lick it off the steps. “I think we have all found wisdom today.”

  “Or something like that,” I mutter. Memory’s blade just gave me a roundabout stab in the nuts.

  -3-

  Jaqi

  THE SMOKE FROM THE boy’s burning flies up into the sky, against the glowing Suits’ planet. Taltus’s reptilian voice booms out over the camp.

  It’s the Thuzerian way to give a body to fire, even planetside where you can’t put too much smoke in the atmos without ruining it. The boy weren’t much of a believer, but Taltus, he says the boy would sit and talk on faith with him, and was going to embrace the faith. No one has counteracted that, as none of us are preachers.

  I’m staring out at the dark desert, because I can’t stand to be over there.

  Watching a boy’s body burn, a body I should have brought back.

  Taltus has been speaking in some language I don’t recognize, but then he stops to translate some of what he’s already said. “Oh God, highest of arbiters, foe of all darkness, Great Sun. Erdo thy servant has fallen in they service, to defend against corruption and darkness and entropy.”

  That en’t why he died. Damn me, damn me to the Dark Zone.

  “Jaqi?”

  It’s Kalia.

  Couldn’t be anyone else, huh?

  She comes closer—and hugs me. She presses her face to my chest, wets my shirt with tears.

  I should put an arm around her, comfort her, but can’t move. I stand stiff as a corpse frozen in a vacuum, while she hugs me.

  “Can we read a few verses?” She presses her well-worn Bible against my chest. Of all the things to bring in space, she brings this book, and don’t no one agree about what it actually says.

  “Aiya, you—you want to read some of them verses what comfort people?”

  “No,” Kalia says. “I want to read the verses about you. Maybe we can figure out why you couldn’t, you know, do a—”

  “No.” I don’t mean to snap at her. But damn. Now? “No, girl, I don’t want to hear it.” I try to make my tone softer. “En’t no point.”

  “Jaqi, you need to learn to read the Bible, or you’ll never know what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Them prophecies are the same ones folk think might be about John Starfire? I need to read something most folk don’t agree on?”

  “They’re obviously about you, Jaqi. Remember when we were on the Engineer’s planet—”

  “Stop crazing!” I let go of her and step away. “En’t me in them prophecies! I don’t want to lead no religious movement. I’ll get myself drunk and forget to save the galaxy!”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want, Jaqi. You have a duty to the galaxy, and that is something to take seriously. You need to stop the Red Peace, you need to stop John Starfire, you need to make real peace with the Dark Zone—”

  “I know what I need, aiya! Need some time to think! Your books teach you how to leave someone alone?”

  She tries a stern tone. “You have to learn to read.”

  “Will you quit ordering me around? This is why folk don’t like you bluebloods!”

  Soon as the words leave my mouth, I realize they are the worst things I ever said. I want to grab them out of the air before they hit her ears, and make their way to her heart and break it.

  Why folk don’t like bluebloods. She don’t need a reminder of that. It’s true folk don’t like bluebloods. Folk didn’t like her pater and her brother enough that they killed them.

  “Kalia, I . . .”

  “Don’t,” she snaps, real commanding, but there’s a little hint of a sob about her words.

  “Kalia, I . . .” Hell, what do you say when you’ve been that big of an ass? Burning hell, Jaqi, you went and improved on your foolishness today. “Kalia, I shouldn’t have—”

  “Don’t talk to me!” She throws the Bible down at my feet, and runs back to the fire.

  I almost go after her. I should.

  But I don’t. I pick up that Bible off the ground, sand clinging to its leather-worked cover. Turn the pages. Too dark to see what they say.

  And if I could see it, I wouldn’t understand them little markings.

  And if I could understand them, they wouldn’t make no sense. Folk think they make sense, but I been all over the spaceways, and religion’s no different than every other drug you can get from a slimy Kurgul drone.

  I en’t no miracle worker. No Saint. I’m just a scab. Those words proved it. No one but the worst of spaceways scabs would say such a thing.

  I leave that Bible lying there, turn around and walk out into the big black desert.

  * * *

  Araskar

  The hoverbug zooms through the desert. Cold night air blows my hair around, cools the burn on my cheek, although it does nothing for the pain between my legs. Kurguls aren’t big on painkillers.

  Swez sits next to me, his hat pulled low, his wings constantly vibrating, a sign of annoyance, I think. Toq clings to X, next to me, all of us unshackled and armed on the nest queen’s orders. Suddenly compatriots with these drones who were shooting at us yesterday.

  Over the rumbling of the hoverbug, the rumbling of the annoyed drones all around us, and the pain still exploding out of my left testicle, I hear the faint strains of music ahead.

  Jaqi’s there. Good. She’s safe. If . . . different.

  The music’s faint, and slow, like the players are drunk.

  “We should announce ourselves,” X says. “Drone! Give me access to the announcer on this hoverbug.”

  “I want to scare em,” Swez answers.

  “You little filthy insect, you have cost our friends enough this day, you—” I only get X to shut up when I hand her the voice-key for the speaker, that I pull from the hoverbug’s dashboard.

  “Don’t let him rile you up,” I say. “He’s just mad I got some time with the nest queen.”

  Those wings rattle, a sign that he’s challenging me.

  “You wouldn’t dare, asshole,” I say.

  “You think I am scared to go against the nest queen?” He snorts. “She will not begrudge us if we see an opportunity for more profit.”

  That is probably true.

  X takes the voice-key and speaks, her voice booming. “This is Xeleuki - an - Thrrrrr - Xr - Zxas. We are coming home. We are safe. Do not shoot.” The fire gets closer and closer on the horizon. A big fire. I suspect I know what it’s for, and I wonder who the poor desert folk lost because of us.

  The hoverbug roars to a stop and sets down, along with the three following us. I clamber out and hold my hands up, showing myself, X, and Toq, along with the three dozen drones behind us.

  The whole camp smells of burnt meat, the smell both sweet and sour and rank, which means they’re burning not just muscle, but bones and entrails. A burning body. So our newfound allies definitely killed someone today.

  Taltus steps out in front of the crowd. The floodlights turn his bone mask bright white, and play off his black soulsword. “You dare return, you—” He sees me and the others, unshackled and armed.

  And then Kalia bursts out of the crowd, runs for Toq and sweeps the kid up in her arms. “Toq! I was sure you were dead! Oh, thank you, God!”

  “Araskar saved us!” Toq exclaims. “He made a deal and he did the slack with the nest queen!”

  Everyone looks at me, halfway through my limp to Taltus.

  I just smile, and try to look like I’m not limping. “You’re welcome.”

  “You made a deal. With the nest queen.” Mutters and whispers sound around the group. They all know why I came to this planet. Taltus’s yellow eyes narrow behind the bone mask. He lets out a low, guttural lizard hiss, the sound muffled by the mask—

  “I made a trade. No one’s going back to the Resistance.”

  Taltus keeps his sword u
p, but nods slowly. “God be praised for your safety. And for the child’s, and our sister of the Zarra.” He comes forward, puts a long, scaly arm around both of the children. “You made an agreement with . . . Matakas.”

  “And he did the—” Toq shuts up when I glare at him.

  Swez comes around from behind me. He rattles his wings, tips his hat, and offers one segmented arm, topped by two clawed fingers, to Taltus. “Coin and prosperity to us, ai, preacher? Good to be working with you.”

  Taltus’s hand tightens on his soulsword, and, unprompted, the black blade bursts into blue flame.

  “Easy now, preacher,” Swez says. “Thought those swords worked on faith, not anger.”

  “I do have great faith,” Taltus says. “It requires great faith to walk these sands, when you drones use our people as target practice, when you spread abomination across the galaxy, with your guns and your drugs, with your dirty money and your whoredoms and—”

  Swez laughs. So do the other drones. “I love me a preacher.”

  Taltus raises his flaming sword like he’s about to strike—and Kalia speaks up, thank God. “Thank you,” Kalia says. “I don’t care who you had to deal with, or what you had to do to keep us out of John Starfire’s hands. Thank you for saving my brother.”

  Well, that almost brings down the pain in the left side of my boys. “You’re welcome.”

  “Where’s Jaqi?” Toq says.

  “She’s—” I hardly realize I’m speaking. I feel her, not far, though not in camp. Just outside camp.

  The music has changed. It was, before now, a soaring, sweeping wall of song. Like all the stars’ fire poured down through her, turned into music.

  Worse. Not even like the players are drunk now. Slower, like something chokes off the music. Like the instruments’ strings are slowly detuning.

  “What’s happening to her?”

  * * *

  Jaqi

  I walk into the desert night.

  Trace glows overhead. The Suit cities are bright enough that, even from the distance of this moon, yellow light flickers and glows, and the reflected light of the sun makes the planet a wide glowing crescent, dimming the stars.