by Rachel Bach
“I am.”
Any worries that the aliens wouldn’t be able to hear him vanished when he felt the presence in his mind focus, the impressions growing louder and clearer, as though the speaker had turned to face him. Enemy of our enemy, it said again, only now the words implied kinship and cooperation. We offer you aid.
“And we appreciate it,” Caldswell replied. “Thank you. We never could have killed that thing on our own.”
We know this, the alien said dismissively. And now you know it as well. You are dead without us.
Caldswell fought the urge to scowl. “What kind of aid are you offering?”
Protection, the voice said, the word itself a wall. The universe has been torn open, and the corruption is seeping through. This attack was only the beginning. More are coming.
“More” was the word Caldswell’s brain supplied, but the alien’s impression was infinitely larger, an endless flood. “How many more?”
Countless, the voice answered. More than either of us can fight.
Caldswell nodded. “So you want to work together.”
Amusement trilled through his mind like a swirling feather. We do not fight unless forced, it answered. Violence is a risk we cannot take. We are vital; therefore, we cannot be allowed to end.
“Is that so?” Caldswell said, folding his arms over his chest. “Then what exactly would we be getting out of this aid if you won’t fight?”
Survival, the alien replied, filling the words with the feeling of an open hand. We are lelgis, those without end, and we offer you our knowledge and the opportunity to save your race. We will show you how to forge the weapon that can kill the ones you know as phantoms, and in return, you will hunt them until we are all safe. The voice paused, letting this sink in. And then, almost like an afterthought, it added, We also require an offering.
“What kind of offering?” Brenton said, making Caldswell jump. He hadn’t realized the others could hear this as well until Brenton spoke, but when he looked back, his partner was glaring murder at the black alien above them. “You seem to be getting the sweet end of this deal while we do all the work.”
Without us, you will die, the lelgis said lightly. You need us, and to aid you, we require the one called Maat.
“What?” Brenton shouted, but Caldswell put out his hand.
“Explain,” he said.
She has the potential to be like us, the lelgis said solemnly, the words heavy with power. Give her to us, and we will forge her to be the tool that saves this universe.
Caldswell could feel Brenton’s rage building from across the room, so he made sure to speak first. “What would that entail, exactly?”
The enormous black alien moved a little closer. She will stop the flood in our stead, it said, offering up the picture of a door closing. Without a barricade, the corruption will overwhelm us all, and this sad, dead planet will be but the first in an infinite line of tragedies. But with her, we can stop them. A single sacrifice so that all may live.
Caldswell bit his lip, trying to think this through, to tease out what was really going on. Before he could, though, the alien spoke again. This offer will be tendered only once, enemy of our enemy. Accept and save your species, refuse and perish.
“Don’t do it, Brian,” Brenton said, suddenly beside him. “Don’t even think about it. We can’t trust them. We don’t even know what they are.”
“You saw what they killed,” Caldswell said. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but without them we’d be dead right now.”
“Maat is our only weapon against the phantoms,” Brenton said, his voice rising. “You can’t just give—”
“Maat is breaking!” Caldswell yelled. “You know that damn well. Even if she wasn’t, do you really think we can keep going like we have been over the last few months? Some of us need to sleep, Brenton, and we can’t guard the entire universe with one girl. Not at the rate the phantoms are multiplying. We need a better solution, and if they’re offering one, we’d be idiots not to hear it out.”
“So you’d just give her over?” Brenton shouted. “Sacrifice her to some alien—”
“Yes!” Caldswell shouted back, jabbing his finger at the floating rocks that had been Svenya. “If it means something like this will never happen again, I’d give them my own daughter!”
Caldswell regretted his words the moment they were out of his mouth, but it was too late. The alien voice was already crooning in his head.
Good, it whispered, petting him with their approval as the aliens turned their fleet around. Follow.
“Do it,” Caldswell ordered, ignoring Brenton’s horrified look. Moments later, the battleship took off after them, following the aliens into the dark.
Once the ship was moving, Caldswell stomped over to Brenton to take Maat from him, but the symbiont wouldn’t let go. Maat was trembling in his arms, staring at Caldswell with terrified eyes. “I can see what they want,” she whispered, her voice breaking like old glass. “Don’t let them take me.” Tears appeared in her eyes. “Please, Brian, don’t do this.”
When he didn’t answer, she flew into a rage. As Brenton and Dr. Strauss wrestled her back into the chair for sedation, Caldswell slumped into his own seat to watch the lelgis fly. He knew Brenton wouldn’t stop fighting him on this. Brenton always took Maat’s side, but it didn’t matter. Caldswell had made up his mind. If the lelgis could give him the weapon that had burned that monster out of the sky, or any weapon that could reliably kill phantoms on the scale they needed to be killed on, then he would pay any price. He would climb up on the altar with Maat himself if they wanted, so long as they gave him the power to stop the goddamn tragedies.
After all, he thought, slumping down, what were a few more deaths compared to the billions of lives already lost? What was anything, so long as no more planets died? Nothing, he decided. Nothing at all.
Five days later, Maat was given to the lelgis as promised, and at the far corner of the newly restricted zone that had been the Svenya System, construction began on the prison that would later be known as Dark Star Station.
CHAPTER 1
I’ve woken up in a lot of weird places in my life, but coming to in a xith’cal escape pod was pushing it even for me.
I woke with a start, jumping so sharply I would have put a fist through something if I hadn’t had the foresight to lock my suit. Fortunately I had, so all I did was bang around a little.
“Welcome back.”
I glanced at my cameras to see Rupert smiling over his shoulder at me. In the normal run of things, I would have counted waking up to an attractive man’s smile as a plus, but my relationship with Rupert Charkov was a thorny, complicated mess at the moment, so I mumbled a hello and looked away, though not before I noticed that Rupert had shifted out of his symbiont scales and put on clothes while I was asleep.
I’ll admit I was a little disappointed I’d missed that. I might have been infected with a crazy plasmex plague and generally confused about my situation, but I wasn’t dead. At least, not yet, which was in itself nothing short of a miracle considering the events on Reaper’s tribe ship and our subsequent crazy escape from the lelgis. But though I’d had one of my best nights ever celebrating not being dead with Rupert back on Caldswell’s Glorious Fool, a lot had changed since then, so I forced my eyes off Rupert’s admittedly lovely back and settled them firmly on my surroundings.
Surprisingly, it turned out to be worth the look.
“Wow,” I breathed, craning my neck back. The sky outside the ship’s tiny canopy was absolutely full of stars all crowded together against a rainbow of color that ranged from deep blue to brilliant pink. The combined light was so bright my cameras darkened to compensate, but even my suit couldn’t dim the glare of the giant, golden gas planet we were currently orbiting, its swirling cloud cover shining like a second sun in the reflected light of the twin star system behind us.
“Where are we?” I asked, covering my eyes with my hand.
“The Atlas Emissi
on Nebula,” Rupert replied. “Birthplace of stars and, as you might have guessed from the name, a licensed territory of Atlas Industrial.”
I whistled. “I know you Terrans give your corporations a lot of freedom, but this is ridiculous.” Why would anyone give up a place this beautiful?
Rupert shrugged. “There are plenty who would agree with you, but at the moment the Terran Republic’s policy of licensing unused space works in our favor. Every possible terraformable satellite in this sector has been turned into an Atlas cash development, which means we have our choice of places to set down, so long as we do it in the next thirty minutes.”
“What happens in the next thirty minutes?”
Rupert turned back to the screen at the front of the ship. “If I’m reading this right, that’s when we run out of fuel.”
He said this so blithely I almost missed the doom inherent in that statement. “Hold up. You’re saying we’ve got thirty minutes to safely land a xith’cal ship on a Terran colony?” He nodded, and I threw up my hands. “Why don’t we just shoot ourselves down and save them the trouble?”
Rupert must have been breathing the xith’cal’s poison air for far too long, because he actually laughed at that. “Everything will be fine,” he said, pointing at the gas giant below us. “That’s Atlas Fifty-Nine. It’s got a regular trade route and ten moons we can pick from, any one of which is bound to have communications equipment and a hyperdrive-capable ship we can requisition. We’ll be down and back up again before you know it.”
I was about to ask where the hell he thought we’d be going since Caldswell—my only guarantee that I wouldn’t be immediately tossed in a lab and ground into patties by scientists looking to extract my phantom-killing plasmex virus—was still lost in hyperspace, possibly forever. But I wasn’t ready to start up that hill just yet, so I stuck to the more immediate problems.
“Have you been here before?” I asked. “Like, do you have any contacts you could radio not to shoot us?”
“I haven’t been here personally, no,” Rupert said. “But we’ve got a Republic military all-access code that will guarantee us safe passage. I just need you to radio it out from your suit, because I can’t figure out how to send anything from this.” He pointed at the xith’cal ship controls.
I couldn’t help smirking at that. “Powered armor comes through again,” I said. “But why didn’t you wake me before we entered orbit? They could have shot us already.”
Rupert flashed me a smile. “You looked like you needed the sleep, and no one puts long-range missiles on a cash colony.”
It was a fair point. I pulled up my suit’s com with a thought and flipped to an open channel. Since I don’t make a habit of getting stranded in ships that don’t have communications equipment, I didn’t actually have a lot of experience with open-space frequencies. Subsequently, it took quite a bit of fiddling before I figured out how to send a message.
But while my Lady has many strengths, she’s not much of a broadcaster, and even after I put all her power into it, my signal was still pretty weak. Fortunately, the com chatter in this sector of space was almost dead silent, which meant even a weak message could get through. I just had to figure out where to send it.
“You were right about having our pick of landings,” I said, looking over the half dozen different colony identifiers my suit was picking up. “I’ve got a fix on all six Atlas Fifty-Nine moons. Any preference?”
Rupert glanced at something on the complicated screen in front of him. “Whatever’s closest would be best, I think.”
That didn’t sound good. I picked out the strongest of the signals, but as I tried to compose a Mayday that wouldn’t be taken for a xith’cal trick, something made me pause. The list of planetary identifiers on my message screen was giving me the strangest sense of déjà vu. This, in turn, was enough to seriously piss me off, because I’d thought I was done with this missing-memory bullshit. But a quick search of my contacts list proved I was overcomplicating things. The call sign looked familiar because it was, and my anger vanished as my face broke into a huge smile.
“Oh man,” I said, putting in the familiar code. “You are so lucky you have me.”
I expected Rupert to laugh at that, but all he said was, “I know.”
The quick response threw me off balance, and I turned back to my screens before he caught me blushing like an idiot. I wrote my message and sent it off, then crossed my fingers. When we didn’t get anything back for several minutes, I started to worry my signal was too weak even in the silence. Before I could work myself into a panic, though, a man’s gruff voice sounded in my ear.
“Unidentified xith’cal ship,” he said in heavily accented Universal. “I don’t usually give warnings, but since you were either kind enough or stupid enough to call in on a Paradoxian ID, I’m giving you ten seconds to explain why I shouldn’t shoot you out of the sky.”
I’d turned on my external speakers the moment the hail came in so Rupert could hear as well, and the look on his face was priceless when, instead of answering, I pursed my lips and whistled a piercing shriek into the com. It was so loud Rupert actually jumped, but by the time I finished, the man on the other end had changed his tone completely.
“Well met, Blackbird,” he said in his native King’s Tongue. “How can I help? Are you a xith’cal prisoner?”
“Not hardly,” I answered in kind. “Nice to hear your voice, Hicks.”
There was a pause, and then the man on the other end burst out laughing. “Deviana Morris, I don’t believe it. What the hell are you doing on a xith’cal ship?”
“Trying to get off it,” I said, grinning. “Can you get us a safe landing spot? Preferably somewhere that doesn’t involve missiles?”
“For you, baby, anything,” Hicks cooed. “I’m messaging the tower right now. Give me five minutes and I’ll have a beacon for you.”
“Copy that,” I said. “Thanks, Hicks, see you in a few.”
The connection cut off with a click, and I looked up to see Rupert glowering at me. “Baby?” he repeated, arching an eyebrow.
I did not like the implication in his voice that I needed to explain myself, but since Rupert was the one who was going to be landing us, I did it anyway. “Hicks and I go way back,” I said, switching to Universal again. “He was my first squad leader in the Blackbirds before he landed a cushy corp job as head of security on some nowhere colony.” I’d thought he was crazy for doing it, too, but Hicks had always liked money more than glory. “Never thought I’d be visiting, though.”
Rupert’s scowl didn’t fade. “And the whistle?”
“Well, we were Blackbirds,” I reminded him.
“I never heard a bird make that awful sound.”
“You’ve never heard about Paradoxian blackbirds?” I asked, looking at him sideways. “Black feathers, ten-foot wingspans, teeth like saw blades, hunts in packs?”
Rupert made a face as he turned back to the controls. “From that description, I’m glad I never encountered one.”
“What, you didn’t think we were named after those sissy Terran birds, did you?” I scoffed. “Please. Blackbirds were the reason no one lived above the snow line until the first Sacred King appeared and gave us back technology. Good-sized flock can pick a grown man down to his skeleton in fifteen seconds, and their scream…” I shuddered. “Turn your bones to water. My whistle ain’t nothing to the real thing.”
“The joys of Paradox,” Rupert muttered. “Though I still don’t see why we have to go through this man. I could have used my security clearance to get us landing permission.”
“Well, now we get the personal touch,” I said, though that was only part of it. Honestly, I felt a lot better having an inside man. Hicks was a flirt and a flake of the worst order, but he was still a Blackbird and a Paradoxian, both of which I trusted way more than Rupert’s clearances. Especially on a little dirt ball corp planet where it was easy to cover things up. But as I was setting up my com to receive Hicks’s lan
ding beacon, I noticed the time stamp on his transmissions.
“Rupert?” I said weakly. “Remember when we first came out of the jump? When you said we lost some time?”
He nodded. “How much did we lose?”
“Eight months, twelve days, five hours,” I read off, heart sinking. Eight months galactic was almost a year on Paradox. A whole year gone, just like that. Rupert didn’t seem to share my concern, though.
“That’s not so bad,” he said. “I was braced for far worse, though it does make me worry about Caldswell and the others.”
That snapped me out of my self-pity. “Why?”
“The jump from Reaper’s tribe ship to here was barely five minutes, and we had the tribe ship’s gate to help,” he said. “The second jump they made to escape the pursuing lelgis was far more reckless, and much, much longer.” He looked up at the star strewn sky. “Dark Star Station is nine hours from here by hyperspace, but on a jump so wild, the time dilation is almost random. They might end up coming out seconds after they went in.”
“Or they might come out a thousand years from now,” I finished for him. “That would suit Caldswell’s terrible luck.”
Rupert glanced back at me. “You know, among the Eyes, Caldswell’s actually known for his unusually good luck. Though the captain always says that only fools count on being lucky.”
I chuckled. “Guess that explains the name of his ship.”
Rupert’s voice went suddenly serious. “Actually, I believe Caldswell named the Glorious Fool after himself. A long time ago, he told me only fools gamble what they can’t afford to lose.”
“What does that have to do with Caldswell?” I asked. “He’s not exactly a reckless gambler.”
“I believe the name is meant as a reminder of what not to be,” Rupert said quietly.
Not for the first time, I wondered what a man like Caldswell could have gambled and lost that hurt him so badly he’d name his ship after it as a warning. I was still puzzling it over when Hicks called me back with our landing.