Heaven's Queen

by Rachel Bach

  “Do we?”

  Caldswell gave me a funny look, but I kept going, because if we were going to have it out today, then I meant to have it all out. “Dr. Starchild told me that you were the one who gave Maat to the lelgis to be the wall that stopped new phantoms from coming into our universe. Is that true?”

  Caldswell sighed. “Ben has been airing old laundry, I see.”

  I scowled. That wasn’t an answer. “Is that true?” I repeated.

  Now it was Caldswell’s turn to scowl. “Yes,” he said. “And before you ask, no I’m not proud of it, and yes I’d do it again. I did what needed to be done to save us all.”

  “I believe you,” I said, making Caldswell blink in surprise. He clearly had not been expecting me to agree, but I wasn’t finished. “I believe that it had to be done in the beginning, but that was decades ago. Maat and her daughters have been suffering for all of us ever since, and that’s not fair.”

  “You sound like Brenton,” Caldswell muttered.

  “Well, maybe he’s right about this,” I said, my voice heating. “You know what I think? I think you’re afraid. You’re afraid to do the right thing because Maat works and you don’t want to mess with it. You’d rather let her be a slave forever than even consider a new solution.”

  “Afraid?” Caldswell said, staring at me like I was nuts. “Of course I’m afraid. Have you not been paying attention? We’re talking about the end of human life as we know it. Maat is one person. You can’t possibly argue that one crazy girl is more important than the security of all mankind.”

  “Just because she’s crazy doesn’t mean you can do this to her,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I was raised to fight my own fights. This kind of thinking, that the greater good justifies all evils, is exactly why I tried so hard to find some other way to do this that didn’t require working with the Eyes. Because I don’t buy the company motto. I don’t believe saving trillions of lives excuses all other sins wholesale forever.”

  I lifted my chin, uncaring that I was on my back for this. For once, that didn’t change a thing. “I am prideful,” I said. “And stubborn, but this isn’t about being proud or stubborn. It’s not even about getting everything I want. It’s about having a moral standard.”

  I didn’t often get to take the moral high ground. I was a mercenary, a killer for hire, and I made no apologies or excuses for how I lived my life. But while my hands would never be clean, I had honor. I knew where my line was, and I knew the Eyes were firmly on the other side. And even though I no longer had a choice, what with being lashed to a bed and drugged, I knew what was right. That had to count for something.

  Caldswell stared at me for a long time after that, and then, slowly, he spread his hands in defeat. “You’re not wrong, Morris,” he said. “But you’re not right, either. Morals are for people who can afford them, and that’s not us. Not with so much on the line. I thought I’d made that clear to you, but I see now that we’ll never agree. I’m sorry, I wish things had turned out differently, but this is the end.”

  I’d thought it was the end when he’d tranq’ed me back at Dr. Starchild’s, but apparently things could keep going downhill, because Caldswell was still talking. “Thanks to your stunt on Kessel and that show you put on back at the church, Martin considers you too volatile for any kind of trust. The only reason you’re even awake right now is because you’re tied down and that IV you’re sporting has enough anti-plasmex drugs in it to knock Maat over.”

  My eyes flicked to the IV needle in my hand. Anti-plasmex drugs? I didn’t even know something like that existed, though it would explain my weird anger-related headaches since I apparently reached for plasmex when I got mad. “I guess this means our deal is off, then?”

  “Not at all,” Caldswell said. “I’m a man of my word. If your virus can be turned into a weapon, and if the lelgis don’t kill us all for trying to use it, I’m going to do my best to free the daughters as promised.” He shot me a bitter smile. “That was always the plan in the end, you know. I’ll try to get the Eyes, too, though targeted phantom killing will be nigh impossible now. Commander Martin was always a political man, but he’s been under a lot more pressure to deliver since we lost Unity.”

  It took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that Unity was the name of the Aeon Sevalis planet destroyed by the emperor phantom, the one I’d seen floating in the rubble and freaked out about, tipping off Rupert that my hallucinations weren’t hallucinatory at all. That realization was followed by a flood of guilt that I’d just forgotten about the deaths of billions of aeons, but in my defense, a lot had happened since then. Also, I’d never actually seen the planet in question, just the rubble and the giant space monster, which was a pretty big distraction. Still, the slipup made me feel just awful, and I had to focus to get my mind back on Caldswell.

  “…Paradox, even the free colonies are in his ear about it, demanding results,” he was saying. “Martin needed a miracle, and then you came back from the dead. The moment he had confirmation that you were alive, he started selling you as the magic bullet solution to his superiors, and they ate it up. The Scientific Council is outfitting a ship right now for long-term hyperspace travel to serve as a safe quarantine where you, or your remains, can be studied until something comes of it.”

  That made a lot of sense, I thought morbidly. The lelgis couldn’t get me in hyperspace, and if my virus went haywire, the plague couldn’t spread to the rest of the universe. But that did remind me of a question I’d wanted to ask earlier. “Where are we now?”

  “By the Dark Star Station,” Caldswell said. “Don’t worry, we’re well outside of Maat’s range, but still closer than the lelgis will ever come.”

  Because they feared Maat’s contagion, I realized. But that wasn’t the part of Caldswell’s announcement that bothered me. The longer this went on, the more I saw that he was right. This was the end.

  I bit my lip. After facing my death so many times, I’d never thought the truth would be so quiet. So anticlimactic, and yet so terrifying. Could the king’s death guides even find you in hyperspace? I wanted to ask Caldswell if he could pull some strings to make sure they didn’t kill me for good until we were back in the universe, just in case, but copping to such a fear felt cowardly, and I’d been cowardly enough for one day. I’d ask when they moved me to the other ship, I compromised, staring up at the phantoms on the ceiling. Anything to prevent admitting more weakness in front of Caldswell.

  I didn’t even know why he was still here, actually. I wished like hell he’d just leave me alone so I could have my breakdown in peace. But as I glared at the phantoms on the ceiling so I wouldn’t have to look at him any longer, I noticed they were changing.

  When I’d first come to, the phantoms had been packed in like a locust swarm above me. Now that swarm seemed to be merging, the smaller phantoms pulling together like drops of water on a slick surface. At first I thought it was just a trick of the light, or maybe I was having a real hallucination at last, but the longer I watched, the more sure I became that it was real. The crowd of tiny phantoms was merging into a single creature before my eyes, a long, flat glowing mass that took up the whole ceiling, complete with tiny, hairlike appendages that were still waving at me.

  Just when I was getting good and freaked out by this, the mass changed again, growing longer and thicker until one end passed through the wall at my feet. My first thought was that the swarm of phantoms was changing shape again, but when I saw their surface shimmer, I realized they were actually merging into something I couldn’t see on the other side of the wall. A second later, the phantom mass changed again, and I saw I was right. The phantoms that had swarmed together on my ceiling had hooked into another group, forming what now looked like a glowing pipe so long only a tiny fraction could fit into my room. It wasn’t even doing anything, but the sight alone was enough to make my blood run cold. Just how many phantoms were on this ship?

  A hand closed on my shoulder, making me jump, and
I tore my eyes off the phantoms to see Caldswell standing over me. “What’s wrong?” he asked sharply.

  I didn’t know how to begin to answer that. The mass of phantoms above my head was now a single phantom far larger than the one I’d killed on the asteroid. I couldn’t even see how big it was thanks to the walls, but the bit I could see was undulating, almost like it was part of something even larger than I’d envisioned. Much larger. I was wondering just how big it could actually be when the ship’s power cut out, leaving only the glow of the phantom as the scream punched into my mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  The scream went off like a siren, a sharp spike piercing right through the center of my skull. It would have sent me curling into a ball with my hands over my ears if I hadn’t been strapped down, not that that would have helped. Just like back in the clearing on Mycant and the emperor at Unity and the poor dead phantom on the asteroid and every single one of these bastards I’d ever encountered, this phantom’s scream wasn’t a sound. It was a force, as huge and immutable as gravity, and all I could do was grit my teeth and wait for it to end.

  But as I lay there trying to keep myself together, a distant part of my mind noted that this scream sounded different from the others. Maybe I was grasping at straws, or maybe I was finally cracking for real, but where most phantom cries sounded angry or pained, this one struck me as excited, like the shout you give when you find something you’ve been looking for. That didn’t stop it from hurting like hell, of course, but there’s only so long a body can be shocked into stillness, and a few seconds later, mine had recovered enough to open my eyes …

  Just in time to see the glowing tentacle slam down right by my head.

  I rolled sideways on instinct, straining as far as the straps would allow, but that didn’t save me when the equipment bank beside me exploded into shrapnel. The phantom’s aura had killed the ship’s power, which meant I didn’t get showered in sparks when the breaker came off the wall, but I still ended up with a latticework of thin cuts down my right arm and toxic-smelling plastic dust everywhere.

  I was still coughing to clear my lungs when I saw the glowing mass rise up again for another blow. Tied down as I was, though, I couldn’t do anything to get away. Fortunately, Caldswell was already on it.

  Whatever our differences, the captain and I had always been on the same wavelength when it came to trouble. He couldn’t see the phantom like I could, but he’d been at my side when it had crashed down. By the time it lifted up again, he had his claws out and was slicing through my restraints. The second he was done, he shoved his arms under me, yanking me off the bed a split second before the phantom flattened it.

  The crash of breaking metal was deafening in the tiny room, but the phantom didn’t lift up for another blow. Instead, the glowing appendage that had been hundreds of tiny phantoms less than a minute ago froze, almost like it was taking stock of the situation. But then, just as I leaned against Caldswell’s hold for a better look, the glowing flesh dimmed and sank through the floor like a ghost, plunging the room into darkness. I was blinking to adjust my eyes when I realized Caldswell was calling my name.

  “Morris!”

  “What?” I asked, looking up.

  “You tell me,” he said, his voice growling with annoyance as he tugged the now useless IV tube out of my hand. “What the hell was that?”

  “A phantom,” I said, reaching up to dig the sensors out of my hair.

  “I guessed that much,” Caldswell snapped. “How big? How many?”

  I bit my lip. How to answer that? “One,” I decided finally. “And really big.”

  It was too dark to see the captain’s face, but I could feel his scowl. “Define ‘really.’”

  The room was about eight feet long, but the thing the little phantoms had formed had been much bigger. I’d taken to thinking of it as a tentacle because that’s what it looked like. Now, though, I was starting to wonder if that wasn’t more accurate than I realized. Phantoms came in all different shapes, but the ones with tentacles tended to have long ones. A piece of this one was big enough to fill an eight-foot-long room, which meant the creature it belonged to would have to be ship sized, if not bigger.

  “I think it’s an emperor,” I said honestly. “Or whatever the next step down is. Big enough to take on the ship.”

  Caldswell cursed loudly, shifting me in his arms to reach for his com, but it was dark just like everything else. He cursed again and shoved it back in his pocket. “Come on.”

  Before I could ask where, he’d tossed me over his shoulder and turned to the door, which, with the power out, was locked tight. Not that that stopped Caldswell. I’d barely gotten my balance on his shoulder before he kicked it down, his foot going through the metal like it was paper.

  The hall outside was just as dark as the room we’d left. Whatever the phantom did, it worked on the self-powered emergency lights as well as it did on the other systems. By some miracle, the gravity was still working, but everything else was dead, leaving only darkness and chaos. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could hear the soldiers shouting. That didn’t stop Caldswell, though. Even though I knew he was as blind as I was, he cleared the busted door and started running into the dark without missing a beat.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I asked, clinging to him for dear life as I tried in vain to find the patch of darkness behind us that was the door to my room. “My suit’s back there!”

  “Forget it. It wouldn’t work anyway,” Caldswell said, hopping over something I couldn’t see. “Our only hope is to get to the bridge.” I felt his chest tense as he bellowed, “Officer coming through!”

  I couldn’t see the soldiers, but I heard them clear the hall, giving Caldswell a wide berth as he raced forward. “Mabel has a daughter on board,” he went on, like nothing had happened. “Her aura can restore enough power for us to get to a fighter and jump. The drugs should keep the virus down long enough to—”

  He broke off with a gasp as a huge clang reverberated through the ship, and everything pitched sideways. For one terrifying second, the enormous battleship rocked like a skiff on a stormy sea, and then the gravity sputtered out at last, flinging us into the ceiling.

  Thanks to Caldswell’s bellow, the soldiers had moved out of our way, so we didn’t crash into anyone. Caldswell let me go when we hit, and even my rubbery limbs were enough to catch myself without gravity to weigh me down. The ship stopped spinning after a few seconds, and for a crazy moment, I thought they’d actually gotten the thrusters back online. But then I heard it, the same horrible creaking noise I’d heard on the Fool, and even though there was no gravity, my whole body started to sink.

  “It’s wrapped around the ship,” I said, my blind eyes darting in the dark.

  “I’m well aware,” Caldswell muttered beside me, and then I felt his hand on my arm before he yanked me forward. “Stick to the plan,” he said, dragging me around until I was pointed the right direction. “We go up this hall until we hit the central elevator shaft. From there, we…”

  He was still talking, giving directions in that clipped captain’s voice of his, but I’d stopped listening, because I’d just realized I could see. Some part of the ship must still have power, because there was a light up ahead, and it was getting brighter. I grinned and turned to Caldswell to make sure he saw it, too, but the captain wasn’t even looking at the light.

  And that was when my sinking feeling doubled, because that was when I realized the captain didn’t see the light at all. Neither did the soldiers I could now clearly see clinging to the walls around us. No one did but me, because it wasn’t a light. It was the phantom.

  I’d been unconscious when they’d loaded me onto the battleship, so I’d never actually seen the dark hall we were climbing through. Now I didn’t know if I’d ever forget the sight of that plain, straight, efficient, military ship’s hall lit up with the bluish moonlight glow of the enormous phantom tentacle sliding through the closed off elevator shaft at the far end like a
ghost. I couldn’t say if this was the same tentacle that had nearly smashed me earlier, but I didn’t think it was. First, this one was reaching in from the opposite direction, and second, it looked even bigger. That one had been as wide as my bed once it had finished forming. This one was big enough to nearly fill the five-foot-wide hall.

  It looked more transparent than the one before, too, but when it had reached in far enough to cross the first of the doors that lined the hall, its rounded tip grew suddenly brighter, and the door exploded inward like it had been hit with mortar shell. Considering it could go through walls, knocking down a door seemed pretty pointless, but when the tentacle turned to slide into the room it had blown open, passing through the screaming soldiers who floated out to root around inside, I suddenly realized what was going on. The phantom was looking for something, something it couldn’t drag through a wall, and I had a pretty good idea what.

  “Caldswell,” I said, cutting off his instructions. “The phantom’s inside. We have to go another way.”

  He stopped at once. “Where?”

  I pointed before I remembered he couldn’t see. “Did you hear the bang up ahead?” I said instead. “That was it blowing out a door. It’s about to hit another one.”

  As though my words were the signal, the tip of the phantom’s tentacle brightened again, and the second door flew off its track, slamming into the wall on the far side of the room. Caldswell hissed as the sound echoed down the hall. “What the hell is it doing?”

  “Looking for something,” I said. Looking for me, I added to myself as I tugged on Caldswell’s sleeve. “We need to get out of here.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do,” the captain snapped.

  “No, I mean we have to get out of this hall,” I said, letting him go and pushing off the ceiling with my feet. “Right now.”

  Caldswell grabbed blindly, catching my foot by pure luck. “You’re not going anywhere.”