Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection

by Stephen Gaskell

  She was the one who looked as though she should be sleeping, but she didn't--her face as white and as translucent as the sheets of composite they'd used to make the partition between cabins on the ships, her eyes deeply bruised in the wrinkled oval of her face; her nose crooked, as if it had been broken and not properly set--which was nonsense, surely even Karist worlds had basic medical bots?

  After a while, Miri looked up, to find Derra at her elbow, her hands smelling of disinfectant and machine oil. "How is it?" she asked. "Outside?"

  There were no sounds from outside, in the mortuary: just the soft noise of recycled air piped through exhaust vents, the click of bots walking on the tiled floor; nothing that would hint at the turmoil and destruction happening outside, as the Karists took hangar after hangar, burning ship-parts and bots; arresting the scientists, technicians and anyone who might have knowledge of how to escape the destruction the oncoming Maelstrom would bring to Colibri.

  Derra's face was set. "Parliament has fallen. It went on the common network, a global broadcast to all levels of accreditation." She didn't even ask if Miri had watched: they both knew she wouldn't. "They have a Hierarch coming in, to replace the Speaker." She jerked a finger towards the unconscious Shadow Walker. "Do you think we can use her as a bargaining chip? We could use their goodwill."

  Never. "No," Miri snapped, more angrily than she'd meant to. "It's too late for their goodwill. It won't--"

  "Won't resurrect the dead?" Derra's voice was soft. She didn't apologise; but then Derra seldom apologised for anything. "Miri--"

  "Don't touch me!" Miri's gaze, roving, found the other corpses in the mortuary--the two at the back, Arthos and Zamakad, each on their slab, staring at the ceiling with empty eyes--if she looked away now, she'd see them as they had been--see Arthos running to her with a skinned knee, Zamakad at age ten, bending over the bot she was building from scratch... She would...

  Anger died, replaced by the deep-seated weariness she'd felt, when Derra had first come to her. No mother should outlive her children; and no mother should have to bury them in the midst of a war--but of course wars seldom followed propriety or the laws of nature.

  "Did she kill them?" she asked, finally.

  Derra spread her hands. "I don't think so," she said, but ventured nothing more.

  Miri knew prevarication when she heard it. "Tell me." She hadn't asked; hadn't spoken about it since learning of their death; but now the layer of ignorance she'd deliberately maintained wasn't enough to smother her grief. She had to know.

  A silence, and then: "A ship's wall collapsed on Arthos; and a laser cut Zamakad in two. Your Shadow Walker... only had a Nox pistol on her."

  But she'd still been there. She'd been fighting other units; helping them out. She-- Miri's hands clenched, of their own volition. She was just as guilty as the other Karists, wasn't she?

  "Look, if you want to, just kill her and be done." Derra's voice was tinged with anger. "Or go home and let me tend to her."

  "Would you?"

  That silenced her. She watched Miri, her eyes bright. "I don't know," she said, at last. "I swore an oath, but... She's killed dozens of ours, and will kill again. Again and again, as they prevent people from leaving doomed worlds. Think of all the suffering we could spare, if we--"

  "Adaptable morality," Miri said, fighting to drop the sarcasm from her voice. They'd had that conversation before; when it had still been academic; when the Maelstrom had just been a distant purple tinge in the night sky, and ships had leapt easily from world to world--before the planet became doomed--before the evacuation fleet, before the Karists.

  Before her children died.

  "Ascension." Derra's voice was low, angry. "They'll keep us here, waiting for the Maelstrom. Waiting to be pulled apart by gravity, or swallowed by our expanding sun, or scoured away by the fragments of our cracked moons falling down upon us. Waiting to die; and they'll call it rapture."

  Miri said nothing--she'd already decided to die long before, but it had been with the knowledge that Arthos and Zamakad would survive. Now...

  "Let me take her home," she said, finally. "If that's how you feel about her."

  Derra looked at her for a while. "I'd ask you why, but you won't answer me, will you?"

  Miri shook her head. It wasn't because she was angry at Derra; though she was, a little--at the temptation that Derra voiced aloud, at the bald admission she wasn't strong enough to resist?

  Was Miri any better than her?

  Probably not.

  "Fine," Derra said. "There are too many wounded and dying and dead among our own people as it is. Take her, with my blessing."

  Miri nodded. She rose--not towards the Shadow Walker, but towards the other slabs, the ones she'd been avoiding.

  Zamakad looked as though she were sleeping, her body knitted back together by Derra's bots--only the purple bruising beneath her cheekbones hinting at something else. Arthos... didn't look like Arthos anymore, but nevertheless, she forced herself to look at the ruin of the face--at the trail of blood and grit on his hands, which the bots hadn't finished cleaning yet. He would have hated this--always so methodical, always keen to wash away the dirt of the shipyards before he could even embrace her...

  There were no prayers, nothing that could fill the void within her. But she owed them--a last something, a farewell even though it was much too late.

  "Arthos cua Miri cua Semarthi," she whispered, touching the wounds of the face--her hand rubbing against the grit of dried blood. "Zamakad cua Miri cua Semarthi." Her hand trailed on the face, over the closed, lifeless eyes; and on impulse, she laid her lips on Zamakad's stone-hard ones, feeling nothing but emptiness well up inside her. Had she been alive, Zamakad would have teased her about such intimate gestures; would have told her she was no longer a child...

  Now there was nothing but silence.

  Miri blinked back tears, forced herself to speak. "I love you always, but you already know this. Safe journeys. Until we meet again."

  And then they were gone, forever beyond her.

  *

  Once she'd brought the Shadow Walker back to her compartment, Miri busied herself with cleaning--the bots could have done it for her, but she needed to do something; to keep herself from logging on to the network and listening to the Karist broadcast; to remember that they had won, paving their way to Colibri's parliament in blood and deaths.

  The display wall was mostly starscapes above Colibri as they had been before, with only the distant haze of the Maelstrom--no bright purple light that had started to eclipse the nearby stars, and to creep as a tinge into daylight. And a picture, too, of Arthos and Zamakad, awkwardly smiling at the camera for Matrilines Day--not the most recent, or the best one she had, but there was something in their eyes, something in the set of their faces, which brought up better days.

  Better days. Any day was better days than those ones.

  There was a noise from the pallet behind her; and she turned, to see the Shadow Walker staring at her--weighing her, her face carefully blank and expressionless.

  "You recover fast," Miri said.

  The Shadow Walker shrugged. "Drugs in the blood. And altered body chemistry." Her gaze moved, took in the small compartment--the holos, the bots, Miri herself. "You're Epirian."

  "Of course," Miri said. "My name is Miri."

  The Shadow Walker raised an eyebrow. "Of course?" She closed her eyes--listening to voices only she could hear--her own communal network, the one that would slowly be replacing the Colibri one. "I'm Tamestir. And I'm surprised."

  "That I didn't kill you?" Miri didn't bother to keep the loathing from her voice.

  "That, among many things." Tamestir's face was still distant, disturbingly serene; as if she hadn't been left for dead on the battlefield, as if she hadn't just brushed off the gravity of her wounds. As if nothing mattered.

  "I'm not like you," Miri said, because it seemed to be the only thing that needed to be said.

  Again, a raised eyebrow. "B
ut you're not happy. Very well. I won't be bothering you for much longer, in any case."

  Back to her command; to Parliament, which they now utterly occupied; waiting for the Maelstrom; or for the next mission that would bring them to other worlds, other places they could drag headlong into destruction. Miri found her fists had clenched again; and wondered why she should care.

  "I guess not," she said. "Seeing that you're fully healed."

  Tamestir's face was remote; she nodded, a queen to a supplicant. "Thank you. For the healing." Something... was off, some unease that Miri couldn't pinpoint. Was she going to pull out a pistol or some other weapon, and kill her--but what would be the point?

  "Of course," she said, and turned back to her wall, and the images of Arthos and Zamakad, and the darkness and the taste of ashes that seemed to have swallowed everything.

  *

  Later, Miri wasn't sure what woke her up--a distant sound in a dream, that resolved itself in soft, indistinct sounds she knew all too well--someone trying to muffle tears.

  By the time she'd pulled herself fully awake, the sound was gone, replaced by a silence that was more worrying still. Miri pulled up a near-infrared vision from the bot closest to Tamestir's pallet, and saw her, sitting with her armour on, and staring at the gun in her hands--lifting it, toying with it as if re-familiarising herself with its contours. At last, Tamestir lifted it--and her face, her whole body language, was all too awfully familiar.

  What had she said--cool and composed, as if it hadn't mattered to her, except that it had been a sham, a mask put on for the benefit of the enemy? I won't be bothering you for much longer, in any case.

  Oh no you don't.

  Miri's hands were moving before she knew it, dispatching one bot to hit Tamestir squarely in the chest; and then she was up and running, screaming something she couldn't remember, her full weight bearing the Shadow Walker down onto the pallet--bots rising around her, locking Tamestir into place, pinning the gun to the pallet and digging claws into the armour until it cracked apart.

  For a while there was nothing but the laboured sound of their breath; and Tamestir's gaze, no longer expressionless or arrogant, but open on depths of pure fury. "You--" she said. "You--" she took in a deep, shuddering breath. "You hate me. You don't want me here. What's it to you, whether I live or die?"

  "Because..." Because Miri had no answer, other than that deep-seated conviction--the rage that had propelled her through the room, running on sheer and unexplainable instincts.

  Tamestir shifted, effortlessly. The bots scattered as if stung, and with a gesture she'd sent Miri sprawling to the floor--for a moment Miri thought she was going to follow through, to pull out some other, hidden gun, or simply snap her neck--but then Tamestir sat back down on the pallet, and merely waited for Miri to stand up again.

  "I was here before the invasion," she said, slowly, softly--not looking at Miri, or at the bots, or at the room. "Working in Hangar 16. It was my first mission."

  The hangar next door to the one they'd found her in.

  Of course. Shadow Walkers were infiltration units. They reconnoitred ahead of the Karist invasion force, made sure that the troops knew where to go, who to kill.

  "There was..." Tamestir closed her eyes. "A woman. Jena va Ilum via Lems. She..." she took a deep breath, and said, "She was my friend--more than my friend. And yet..."

  "And yet she was Colibrian?" Miri said, equally softly. "The enemy."

  "No! You don't understand--" Tamestir took a deep, trembling breath, and then went on, "When we invaded Hangar 15--Jena was there, and... and I hesitated, for a split second. I--" she took in another breath. Her eyes were dry, her voice remote again. "Her bots shot my unit. Four dead in an instant. And--and I had to--I" She closed her eyes. "I shot her. I had to. I--"

  Miri made the sharp, cutting, cruel answer. "What does it change? She was doomed to die, anyway, wasn't she?"

  "The Maelstrom isn't death."

  "You know I don't believe that," Miri said. A conversation between fools--neither of them would budge or give way, and what point was there, in having it at all?

  Tamestir reached down, and pulled the pieces of her armour back into position again. "But I do. And..." She closed her eyes again. "And it's here, all the time. It's so easy..." she smiled. "Just one step in the wrong direction--just letting go. What would be the harm, in departing early?"

  She looked... young, and vulnerable--and it was wrong to feel that way, about someone who might not have murdered her children, but wouldn't have blinked if she'd been ordered to--about someone who served her new masters, who thought the death coming for them all was something devoutly to be wished for...

  But then, was she wrong about the Maelstrom--wrong to see it as deliverance, when nothing else in Miri's life would make sense again?

  Miri said, eventually, "We all need something to live for."

  "As you do?" Tamestir's voice had the sharpness of a drawn knife.

  Miri said nothing. Tamestir just watched her--there were tales, of what Shadow Walkers could do, the way they could get under your skin, the damage that they could do if you let them see your thoughts. But what harm could she do, that her kind hadn't already done?

  "I don't matter," Miri said, slowly, carefully.

  "And I do?" Tamestir's laugh was bitter. "Think on what you're saying. I destroyed your world."

  The only thing that came, welling out of Miri's lips, was the truth, as dark and as irrepressible as heart's blood. "You didn't. I've known. I've known for a while that I would die here, with the Maelstrom. But you're not the one who killed them."

  There was silence, for a while. Then Tamestir said, slowly, carefully, "Your children?" And, when Miri didn't answer, "I have ears. Even while lying unconscious. And I saw the holo."

  "They--" Miri swallowed back what she was going to say. "I bought them tickets. Begged and pleaded until they had their place on the evacuation fleet. I--"

  "Gave them the best chance you could." Tamestir's face was unreadable. "What mothers do for their children."

  "No," Miri said. "What I did. Because I loved them." Because Zamakad had been withdrawn and serious, asking her at eight what the Maelstrom meant, and then proudly bringing her designs for ships they could use to escape; because Arthos, who easily lost his temper, had shouted at her she needed to come with them until she'd talked him down--because there was no reason, never needed to be one. Because... "Because there was no other way. There never was."

  "So you resigned yourself to death." Tamestir's voice was grimly amused. "And you're the one talking to me about suicide."

  Miri shivered. "I don't know why I saved you."

  "Because you had to." Tamestir smiled, but there was no joy in it. She rose, the armour slowly coalescing around her again. Miri didn't move--merely stood poised, ready for what would come next. "We both need something to drink, I should think. Let me make you tea."

  Tamestir could, Miri assumed, have hacked the bots, but instead she rummaged through the storage units until she found the pressed leaves, and set some water to boil on the stove--until the song of it filled the kitchen, a comforting memory tinged with bitterness--if Miri closed her eyes she would see Arthos, arguing over which strain of tea tasted best with the water of Colibri, would hear Zamakad teasing him about water temperature and calcium content.

  "Here," Tamestir said. The tea in the cup was a perfect shade of green, its taste that of freshly cut grass, with no hint of bitterness. Tamestir sat on her pallet again, and sipped it carefully--her manners chillingly Colibrian, a jarring alienness when combined with the harsh reality of her armour, and the bulletins that Miri had cut off, the ones detailing the takeover of Colibri by the Karists.

  Miri tried to compose herself--wondering what she could say that wouldn't set them off at each other's throats. "Tell me about Jena."

  "Only if you tell me about your children."

  "A bargain, is it?" Miri said. "I had two. Arthos... was the headstrong and impuls
ive one, the youngest. Zamakad... always made things. Bots and drones and ships." She'd have risen so high in Epirian society, given a chance--instead she'd died in the ruins of the ship she was building, the one that would have carried her and Arthos to safety. "She was the eldest by five years."

  Tamestir raised her tea cup, like a salute to absent friends. "I see," she said, and her face was utterly devoid of pity, or anything that would have made Miri break down in front of her--no matter that she was the enemy and Miri couldn't afford to show any signs of weakness. "Jena was bossy, always badgering people into what she thought was best for them. She..." Tamestir took a deep breath, and shook her head. "When I left to rejoin my unit, she didn't want me to leave. She... she thought there was someone else, and I couldn't make her understand. I... I tried to tell her to take a day off. To be away from the docks when...."

  "When you attacked," Miri said.

  "Yes. When we attacked." She said it slowly, hesitantly, like a child caught in fault--as if it didn't make Miri want to take her in her arms and hug her.

  Instead, Miri stared at her cup; breathed in the warm, comforting scent of tea. "You did what you could," she said, finally. "We're all adults. We all pick our sides, and do what we must. I realise--"

  "It's not much help?"

  "No," Miri said, bluntly. "But I don't have easy answers. Divided loyalties--"

  Tamestir's face was harsh. "No," she said after a while. "You're right. It wasn't divided loyalties. I would never have put her above my unit. I--" she shook her head. "There was never any time to explain--" she paused, staring off into the distance, while a bot crept closer to her hand--"but explanations probably wouldn't have made any difference."

  "So you will just set her aside?" Miri asked--with less sarcasm than she initially intended, seeing the minute tremor on the surface of the liquid left in Tamestir's cup. "Bury her with your other dead?"