by Neil Clarke
An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between.
THE CHARGE AND THE STORM
An Owomoyela
Petra was already in a bad mood, not that that said much. Her good moods had become increasingly apocryphal over recent years. But today there was a lightning storm outside her Faraday cage of an office, and she could feel it like a second psyche, inhuman and insentient and laid over her thoughts.
And today, when she walked into her office, there was a familiar man sitting on the chair before her desk. Amad.
She stopped, a step in from the doorway. Amad turned, looking back at her over his shoulder. He had a small device in one hand, and while Petra could sense the stream of information flowing from it, the mental interference from the lightning storm drowned it out.
“I’ve jammed your communication lines,” Amad said.
Petra gave him a withering look and headed toward her desk. “You think that’ll keep me from contacting security?”
“For a couple minutes, yes,” Amad said. “We need to talk, Sulai Tabov.”
“No,” Petra said. “You need to be arrested.”
She settled into her desk chair, bringing her interface up with a sweep of her hand. He had jammed her communications lines, the bastard. Clever bastard—she had a very nice system, full of redundancies and adaptive compensators—but he’d always been clever. Probably always been a bastard, too, though she’d looked past that, once.
“It’s about Nash,” Amad said.
“He needs to be arrested, too.”
Amad made a frustrated noise. “Look,” he said. “Knowing there’s no love lost between the two of you, and knowing that I would rather hang myself by my thumbs from the lightning towers than come ask you for help, I expect you to know what it means that I’m here and I’m asking. This is about Nash’s life.”
A cold anger sparked into being at the bottom of Petra’s stomach, ringing against the lightning she could feel outside. There was no sound of thunder in here, no electrical interference except the noise inside her head, but her fingers twitched, as though urging her to become a conduit. A lightning tower herself. She could string Amad up by his thumbs right here on her own.
“I have,” she said, “on multiple occasions, attempted to help Nash fix his life. On the last occasion, he sold Su secrets to violent revolutionaries and got my wife kidnapped. I’m not interested in trying again.”
“Yeah, great,” Amad said. He stood up from the chair, almost started pacing, then caught himself. Petra watched with a knife-sharp interest, taking in the tension in his shoulders, the tremor concealed in his hands. Amad liked to think he was better at being unreadable than he was. “Leaving aside your ignorant and well-intentioned efforts to turn him into a good little colonizee, this isn’t about fixing his life. It’s about saving it. Are you going to help, or do you honestly think he should die for screwing up and screwing you over?”
Yes, Petra thought, but it was a knee-jerk thought, more spite than sense. And it was a pretty damn big screw-over, her brain retorted, and it took a moment for her to blink and realize what Amad had said.
“What,” she managed, the anger still smoldering but neatly derailed.
Amad glared at her, then took a deep breath. “The Su,” he said, voice bitter and brittle, “have decided that he’s a detriment to the colony and should be excised. However, they will accept his abject submission to a citizen in good standing, to whom reparations are owed, in lieu of his death.”
The anger in Petra’s gut gave a long, uneasy turn. “No one else is willing to speak for him?”
“No one the Su are inclined to listen to.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.” She watched Amad. As an afterthought, she gestured away her interface. Right or wrong—and she felt that it was wrong, for all that knowing that didn’t stop her—she wasn’t going to fix the lines, call in the authorities, turn Amad in. “You came to me because you had nowhere else to go.”
Amad didn’t bother confirming her comment.
“And what makes you think I’d agree to this?”
Amad’s fingers curled around his jammer. “You used to be friends.”
“Used to be.”
“You’re not that heartless,” Amad said.
He was right. The Su had a casual disregard for life. If the life in question didn’t serve their ambitions, they had no compunctions about casting it aside.
Petra, human, balked at that.
Yes, she resented Nash. Hated him, it felt like. She would have liked to see him suffer for screwing her over, years ago.
Seeing him die was a little much.
“Well.” The word left a taste like ozone in the back of her throat. It very nearly made her sick to her stomach, until she shoved it away, hunted out the control she’d developed to turn down her own feelings. “Then. What jurisdictor has him?”
Some of the tension leached out of Amad’s shoulders. Not all. “The information is here,” he said, and gestured a data sigil to her interface. Petra could feel it blink into availability; text, no more than a few lines. Amad said All the information; Petra heard everything you need to know, and her fingers itched for the comm line again. One call and she could very easily ruin Amad’s life, if not end it.
Him and Nash. Always so eager to use her. Sudamn opportunists, both.
She accepted the transfer. Amad backed toward the door, the jammer in his hand coming up like a talisman.
“I’m sorry about your wife,” he offered. “I—you know, I liked her. We never intended for anything to happen to her.”
“Ex-wife, now,” Petra said. “And what you intended doesn’t matter much, does it?”
Amad made a noise like he was the one who should resent all of this. In his mind, maybe so. “Can’t say it’s been a pleasure seeing you, Sulai Tabov,” he said. “Shouldn’t happen again.”
Then he vanished into the halls.
After a moment, the comm lines cleared.
The jurisdictor module was in a part of the colony Petra never visited. Other, more skilled, biologically Su Makers maintained the physical mechanisms of that part of the colony, and there was nothing in that area that Petra needed to concern herself with personally: the organs that recycled air and water and processed waste back around into nourishment; raw material intake from the ruined outside world; corpse handling. And the jurisdictors, where aberrants against the colony peace were held and, if necessary, excised.
The Su had a particular sense of utility.
One Su was waiting outside the cluster, her antennules moving in the still air. “Sulai Tabov,” she said, each word humming out of the speech synthesizer embedded on the underside of her head.
How, exactly, all the Su managed to recognize her and her exact place in society was an open question, and one Petra didn’t bother asking. She had her suspicions, but it didn’t matter much, so long as their system worked.
Unfortunately, she had no such skill when it came to the Su. Fortunately, the Su hierarchy was stiff enough that she knew what rank would be standing here, acting as custodian to the condemned.
“Sudaeg,” she said. “You have Sudaeg Nash Carder?”
The Su gestured assent. “You would like to take ownership of the aberrant?”
Saying No, I’d like nothing of the sort, but I seem to be obligated to would mean that the Su would only hear the no. “I would,” Petra said.
The Su didn’t question the statement or ask for any justification. Petra had standing among the Su; Petra was owed reparations from Nash; Petra, therefore, had the right to claim his life. The Su never questioned the exercise of rights. The Su did not
believe that if one had the right to do something that thing could be morally questionable.
Sometimes Petra wished she could see it the same way.
“This way, Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and unfolded her legs beneath her. At her full height, she stood nearly half a meter taller than Petra: an armored mass, through whom hummed a faint bioelectricity that Petra could feel at the corner of her mind. Stronger than a human’s but too faint and too subtle to control.
The Su led her back into the module. Only one of the cells was occupied, though another had been sealed off—and through its translucence, Petra could see a dark shape, rounded toward the extremities and just about the size of her own torso. Someone, human or Su, who had been excised already, their body being digested by the biomat cell walls.
She turned away from it.
“The aberrant is here,” the Su announced, pressing claws and her tarsal pad into a receptor. It sensed her energy, or her pheromones, or simply pressure— though Petra doubted it was simply pressure—and a membrane dilated open, revealing the figure inside.
Nash was looking worse for wear, Petra thought. The years hadn’t treated him well, or maybe it was just sitting in a cell that might devour him that had him looking grey of mien, thin, and uneasy. His head snapped up when the membrane retracted, and a flood of emotion passed through his expression— mortification, horror, desperate relief. “Petra—”
“Amad found me,” Petra said. She could hear her voice resonating in her head, oddly cold, almost alien. There was a cold pressure constricting her lungs, too. She didn’t let herself think about it. “Come on.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked out again. It took Nash a moment to scramble to his feet and follow, the Su coming along after him.
“How did you end up with a death sentence?” Petra asked. The Su didn’t give a damn about life, but out of respect for their human constituents, they usually didn’t jump straight to excision from the colony. Not these days. The fact that they had with Nash—a man who, despite his many faults, was neither violent nor destructive—suggested that he’d annoyed them more than he’d ever annoyed her, and that was a feat.
Nash hurried to keep up with her, trying to put a few paces’ distance between himself and the Su custodian. “I wasn’t expecting you to come save me,” he said.
“Neither was I.” Petra increased her own pace, focusing on the crisp clip of every footfall. The rhythm gave her something to focus on that wasn’t the lightning storm and wasn’t Nash. “What did you do, Nash?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. And then they were at the gate, and the Su moved in front of them and took a collar from a cache on the wall. She regarded Petra with characteristic nonchalance.
“I will put this on the aberrant,” she said. “For you.”
Petra nodded acquiescence.
Nash stiffened, but he didn’t resist as the band fastened around his neck, the inner lining adhering to his skin with a soft schup. “In typical situations I would format the collar myself,” the Su said. “However, you possess the skills to format it yourself, Sulai. You are free to request that I format it for you.”
“Thank you, no,” Petra said. “I understand the technology.”
“You are free to return him for excision at any time. You are to format the collar before removing him from the jurisdictor. May I serve you otherwise?”
Petra gestured her to leave, and the Su made an answering movement of assent and acknowledgement. Then she turned and walked away, folding herself down into repose at the door again.
Petra turned to Nash, who looked back at her with as much mistrust as he’d shown the Su. Unsurprising. To listen to Amad, Petra was half-Su anyway, and she knew who Nash had thrown his lot in with.
After a moment, though, he forced himself to relax. Put on a smile that was as fake as anything Petra had seen. “Try not to electrocute me?”
“It will be an effort,” Petra said, and took the collar in her hands.
She could feel it resonating against the colony around them; feel it asking the colony walls for information, catching the signals the walls sent out. The colony was never quiet, to Petra—it was always murmuring to itself, bright paths of directed energy and a haze of signals. But the loudest things to her senses were the flashes of lightning, carving brilliant but transient pathways through the atmosphere. The electricity running through the channels in the colony was dull by comparison. Hard to focus on. And the collar was fainter still.
And Nash’s closeness made it hard to concentrate, too. They’d enjoyed an easy physicality when they’d been on good terms: a clap on the back, a nudge with the elbow, a warm presence against the flank or in repose against the chest. Now, Petra couldn’t help but feel that she shouldn’t be standing so near, that Nash might try to seize her by the arm or pick her pocket or loop an arm over her shoulders. Try to trick her into believing that they were still friends.
She closed her eyes and wrote permissions into the collar.
Every circuit in the collar, live or dead, mapped onto one of the halls in the colony; all she needed to do was energize the ones she needed. Like trying to draw a line of sand in a statue of glass capillaries while wind howled through cracks in the habitat. But she got the basics done with the same determination she applied to all of her work. The lightning storms were nothing new, nor were the headaches or the brain-fog that accompanied them, and while it might slow her down, it wouldn’t incapacitate her.
She let her hands drop and stepped back, away from the sound of Nash’s breath, the heat of his body. “Dare I ask where I’m allowed to go?” Nash asked, with a kind of wary wryness.
“For now,” Petra said, “the halls from here to my quarters. I requisitioned a room across from mine. You can go from there to the baths, the libraries, and the commissary, using the most direct routes between all four. I’ll figure out more later.”
“Thanks,” Nash said. By his tone, he wasn’t sure that was the correct response.
She’d saved him from death, and put him under house arrest. Petra wasn’t sure there was a correct response. “I have work to do,” she said. “The room will open for you. We’ll talk later.”
She turned, and Nash said “Wait,” and she turned back, already seething. She hadn’t expected to get away that easily, no. But it would have been nice. At least Nash caught that and made an appeasing gesture. “Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you. But there’s stuff in my lodgings, out by the ship corridor. If I could—”
“I’ll ask a sudaeg to get it,” Petra said. “Forgive me if I don’t feel like letting you go back there.”
“Right,” Nash said.
Petra watched him. “The collar will kill you if you stray too far from the path.”
“Right,” Nash said again and made a stiff, Su gesture of apology. It had an overtone of self-parody to it. “I won’t delay you any longer.”
Petra could have said something to that.
She didn’t.
She met Kaah at the juncture between the human First Cluster and the Su Brooding Cluster 9. Kaah gave no indication of how long she’d been waiting; she only crouched with an unconcerned stillness and with the smug self-assurance all Su seemed to carry with them.
Petra drew her fingers down from her forehead to her chin to indicate respect. “Hello, Sulai Kaah. How are we operating?”
Kaah echoed the gesture. “We have erected seven additional towers along the polar perimeter,” she said. She flicked her claws toward the wall, which beaded out a display and lit up with graphs. “We have an excess of energy, Sulai Petra. Now we must craft it. It interests me to create a new habitat in the Third Cluster. Do you agree?”
“It would behoove the colony,” Petra said. Third Cluster wasn’t yet over-crowded—the Su would never let it get to that point—but it was coming close, and Kaah at least saw creating more space as the natural answer. Being a human cluster, it would do more for colony harmony than the other answer, which was to curtail po
pulation growth outright.
In a race like the Su, where all reproduction was hierarchically decided, such an edict was non-notable. Among the human population, it was a call for rioting. Or for just the kind of separatism that Amad and his ilk espoused.
“I’ll follow,” Petra said, and Kaah uncurled her legs and paced off in Third Cluster’s direction—slowly, for a Su, in consideration of Petra’s shorter and fewer legs.
The Su had no real use for small talk, and so they walked mostly in silence. They passed one of the human commissaries and a number of dwellings— nearly all empty, as First Cluster housed those who worked directly with the Su, and the Su valued productive work more than they valued much else.
A hall or two into Third Cluster they passed a human woman with two boys who looked at Petra walking stride-along-stride with Kaah and seemed to come to her own unvoiced conclusions about that. Humans and Su lived together, but the pace and activities of their lives were so different as to make living together academic. There were only so many positions where a human would work alongside the Su.
Kaah turned her head, and made a superior greeting. “Hurem Omotoso,” she said. “Your children grow well?”
The woman’s eyes softened a bit, and she made a gesture of subordinate greeting—though the quirk of her lips, an expression interpretable by Petra but not Kaah, suggested she was playing along with propriety rather than moved by any genuine submission. “They do, thank you for asking, Sulai,” she said, then looked to Petra. “Sulai . . . ?”
“Petra Tabov,” Petra said, and extended a hand. Omotoso took it.
“First time in Third Cluster?” Omotoso asked. “We don’t often rate two Makers.”
“We’re building an expansion,” Petra said.
“Long time coming,” Omotoso said, and made an offhand gesture of appropriate respect toward Kaah. Petra gestured recognition and accep-tance—the Su didn’t understand speaking like this across hierarchy. But that Petra accepted it satisfied them. So long as Petra gestured acceptance, Omotoso would not face any penalties for hierarchical transgression.