Heaven's Queen

by Rachel Bach

  A stab of annoyance hit me, followed by a flash of pain as the remainders of the anti-plasmex drug did their job. Now that I was off the IV, my system was clearing out and the pain wasn’t nearly so bad, but it was still sharp enough to make me gasp, and the light at the end of the hall brightened as the phantom’s tentacle froze. And then, like a hunting snake, it yanked out of the room it had been rummaging through and snapped back into the hall, coming up with its tip pointed directly at me.

  The blood drained from my face. “I need to go now,” I said, yanking against Caldswell’s hold, but his fingers only tightened on my foot.

  “I am not—”

  I kicked. Hard. Slamming his hand into the ceiling. If he’d been human, I would have broken his fingers, but since Caldswell was a tried and true monster, I was just aiming to weaken his grip. And for a second, it worked. His hand opened enough for me to snatch my foot away, but before I could pull more than an inch, he grabbed me again, his fingers locking around the arch of my bare foot in a vise.

  “Morris!” he snarled, but I barely heard him, because that was when the phantom’s tentacle lunged at me.

  “No!” I screamed, writhing out of the way. “Let go!”

  The tentacle was fast but not agile. It must have been hard for such a huge creature to move such a tiny part of itself, because even though Caldswell had ruined my dodge, it missed me by a mile, landing with a flat thump on the ceiling beside us. Part of it actually phased through the metal before it brightened again, ripping a fair-sized chunk out of a support beam when it pulled back for another try.

  It was such an odd sight I actually paused for a moment. The phantom must have to concentrate to interact with the physical world, I realized. That was what the brighter glow meant. Maybe if I aimed for the dimmer parts, I could pass through the phantom just like it passed through everything else and get away?

  It was a crap plan to be sure, but I ran with it. There was nothing else to do. The phantom’s tentacle was already racing toward me again, knocking floating debris out of the way as it flew at my stomach like a spear.

  Funny enough, it was the lack of gravity that saved me. In a move I never could have pulled off otherwise, I braced my leg against Caldswell’s grip and swung sideways, using his hand on my foot as a pivot for my entire body. The tentacle missed me again, but this time, instead of slamming into the ceiling, it slammed into a soldier I hadn’t noticed coming up behind us. It was glowing at the time, and it hit the poor woman like a missile, throwing her all the way back down the hall to slam against the far wall so hard I heard her bones crack.

  “What the hell is going on?” Caldswell shouted at me.

  “The phantom!” I shouted back, reaching out to grab the wall so I’d have something to push off. “It’s after me. You have to let me go!”

  Caldswell’s grip tightened on my foot, and I bit down against the stream of swear words I wanted to lay into him. Satisfying as chewing him out would be, I didn’t have the time. He had ample reason to think I’d run. I’d run from him every time before. What I needed was to make him understand, so with a will I’d never known I possessed until this moment, I forced my voice to be calm and reached up to grab his shoulder.

  “Listen,” I said, squeezing hard. “I swear to the king this isn’t an escape ploy. But there’s a phantom tentacle in the hall with us right now that’s already grabbed for me twice, and unless you let me go, I don’t think I can dodge it again. So would you please release my foot and help me get out of here?”

  Though I knew he couldn’t see me, Caldswell turned toward my voice in the dark, his face set in such a scowl I didn’t think he was going to listen. But then he nodded, unlocking his death grip on my foot. “Which way?”

  Since he couldn’t see, I grinned in triumph. “Back,” I said, scrambling over him.

  At this point, my fight-or-flight instinct was pinned firmly on flight, and the corresponding adrenaline rush was rapidly cleaning the remaining drugs from my system. Instead of hurting, my body felt wired and ready as I wedged my hand against a support beam and shoved myself backward, flying down the hall away from the phantom like a shot.

  Other than my short jaunt in the Church of the Cosmos, I hadn’t been weightless outside my suit in years, but the need to get away filled the void left by experience. Caldswell followed right behind me, kicking off the walls with practiced ease. We’d nearly made it back to my busted door and the rest of what I could now see was the medical area when the tentacle attacked again.

  This time, I was ready. I flattened myself against the wall to let it pass, already plotting my next push to get around the corner into the next long, drab hall. I didn’t even know where I was going, other than away, but as I prepared to jump, the tentacle snapped back and up unexpectedly, brushing against my leg in the process.

  The first thing I felt was cold. Even through the fabric of my scrubs and the tape beneath, the phantom’s slick surface seemed to leach the heat right out of me, making me gasp. The touch must have surprised the phantom as well, because the tentacle froze against me.

  Looking back, that should have been my chance. I should have kicked off, dropped down, anything. But I was too shocked by the chill to move, and that was my undoing.

  Quick as a whip, the tentacle wrapped around my leg and plucked me off the wall. I saw Caldswell’s hand shoot out for me when I yelped, but he was miles too late. The tentacle was already dragging me up the hall toward the elevator, its slimy, freezing coils sliding up my body until they’d wrapped me to the neck.

  I fought them the whole way, but it was like trying to wrestle an icy current. The phantom’s flesh was slick as oiled gelatin under my fingers and even colder than the one I’d touched in the xith’cal’s asteroid. My whole body was numb in seconds, but even though I couldn’t feel my hands, I kept punching anyway. There was nothing else I could do.

  “Let me go!” I screamed, my voice shrill with fear and frustration. “Goddamn you, idiot monster! I’m going to kill you if you don’t let go!”

  And I was, too, because the drugs were gone now. Numbed by the phantom’s cold, I couldn’t feel the pins and needles, but I didn’t need to. I could see the black stain spreading up my arms in the monster’s light, and my heart began to hammer so hard I thought I’d pass out.

  “No!” I screamed, writhing against its grip harder than ever. I absolutely refused to die this way, but I didn’t see how else this was going to end. Already the phantom had yanked me around the corner and away from the elevator Caldswell had been going for, dragging me through a pair of blown out doors into a huge open space, but it wasn’t until we passed the first row of neatly arranged single-pilot ships that I realized it had taken me into the battleship’s fighter bay.

  My heart began to pound even harder. The lights were out here, too, but I could see the bay’s enormous doors clearly in the phantom’s glow, the stars glittering like pinpricks in the dark through the huge exterior windows, and I knew what it was doing at last. The phantom was going to drag me outside, kill me with the vacuum before the virus could touch it.

  That thought made me go absolutely insane. I hadn’t gone through all this shit, hadn’t lost Rupert, hadn’t swallowed my pride and gone back to the Eyes, to die like this. It insulted every sense I had, and I fought wildly, snarling like a trapped animal. I was getting ready to bite the damn thing when the phantom stopped moving.

  I stopped as well, blinking as I looked around. We were at the very edge of the battleship’s fighter bay, right beneath the huge doors that opened when they scrambled the fleet, the ones I’d expected the phantom to smash open. But though the tentacle passed through the jointed metal in front of me, it remained semitransparent, incorporeal as a projection. In fact, the only part of the phantom that was still shining bright enough to be physical was the bit wrapped around me. Apparently, we weren’t going outside, at least not yet. I was wondering why it had brought me here, then, when the phantom jerked me up.

  Th
e move came without warning, snapping my neck painfully. By the time I recovered, I was twenty feet in the air, flying up past the doors toward the huge observation windows above them. As the phantom lifted me past the window’s bottom edge, harsh white light broke like a sunrise, and my panting breath vanished completely.

  Through the huge window I could see the full sweep of the ship’s port side, as well as a second battleship floating in formation with ours. The other ship was unexpected, but they could have had the entire Republic Starfleet out there and I wouldn’t have given them more than a passing glance. My eyes were only for the phantom.

  As I’d told Caldswell, it was indeed wrapped around the ship, though not like I’d expected. I’d imagined a giant squid clutching the battleship in its tendrils, but the emperor looked more like a nest of beautiful, glowing snakes that had simply cozied up to us. There were so many overlapping parts, I couldn’t actually tell where the phantom began until the shimmering mass in front of me shifted, and its head came into view.

  Normally, I had a hard time determining which part of a phantom was which. They seemed to follow no rules, at least none I was familiar with. But while I’d seen phantoms with thousands of jointed legs and phantoms that were little more than blobs, I’d never seen one with eyes until right now.

  Its head was clearly delineated, a huge and majestic sweep of glowing flesh leading up to four perfectly round spheres. They were bulging and beady, like the eyes of a shrimp, but they glowed the most beautiful, deep blue I’d ever seen. And though, since they had no pupils, there was no way I should have been able to know they were looking at me, I felt that fathomless gaze locked on my face, all four eyes glittering with intelligence as they looked me over.

  As we stared at each other, a bolt of pure cold slid into my chest, making my heart stutter. Even with that, I had to struggle to tear my eyes away from the phantom’s in order to see what had stabbed me. But when I looked down, my chest was uninjured. What I’d felt was the tip of the phantom’s now transparent tentacle passing through my ribs into my body.

  It was astonishingly cold, but it didn’t actually hurt. At least, it didn’t hurt me. The phantom, on the other hand, gave a deep moan that set my teeth on edge, but it didn’t let go. Instead, it slid the tentacle in farther until I could feel the icy edge of it inside my lungs. And then, right before my eyes, the tentacle in my chest began to turn black.

  For a second, all I could do was stare as the black ink swirl of the virus began to seep up the beautiful glow of the phantom’s body. I was still staring at it when the world fell away, plunging me into the dark.

  Just like all the times before, my journey into the oneness happened in an instant. This time around, though, I at least knew what to expect. The second the universe vanished, I braced, ready to face the others, the crowd of lelgis I knew were waiting in the dark. And that’s where things took a turn for the unusual, because when I opened my eyes—something, by the way, I’d never realized I could do here—it was no longer dark.

  I was floating weightless in the nothing, and hanging in front of me like a silver moon was the emperor phantom. It looked just as it had when I’d seen it from the window with its clear blue eyes and beautiful snaking tendrils, only there was no window anymore. There was no battleship either, no stars, nothing. Just the phantom and myself floating in the infinite dark.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. As my mind adjusted to the beautiful monster filling my vision, I realized I could still feel the unseen watchers out in the dark beyond. I looked around, craning my neck, but the phantom’s glow ruined my vision, or what passed for vision in this place. All I could see beyond the glimmer of its moon-white light was blackness as thick as tar, and so I gave up, turning back to face the monster I could see.

  “Okay,” I said, folding my arms over my chest, which I could now see was covered in the same medical scrubs I’d been wearing back in reality. “You brought me here. Now, what do you want?”

  I can’t tell you how stupid I felt shouting across what had to be miles of emptiness. Now that I’d lost all points of reference, it was hard to actually tell how big the phantom was, or how far away, other than very. But the lelgis had been able to talk to me here no problem, and I figured the phantom, being plasmex as well, would be the same. So I waited, clearing my mind for an encore of the strange mix of impressions and words the lelgis queens had put me through when Reaper died.

  What I got was a roar.

  The phantom shifted, lifting its mass of snakelike tentacles as it made a deep, musical sound. “Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm.”

  The call was so loud I could feel it to my core, churning my guts until I thought I was going to be sick, but what really got me was the fact that it was a sound. Not a psychic message or a scream-that-wasn’t-a-scream, but a real, make-your-ears-ache noise that went on for almost a minute before finally trailing off. Then, after a few seconds of blessed silence, the phantom roared again, even louder this time.

  “HURRRRRRRRRRRM,” it roared. “HURRRRRRRRRRRM!”

  I clapped my hands over my ears, but my palms were a poor guard against the vibrations rolling through me like an earthquake. I had no idea what this was about or why I was here or what the hell this phantom thought it was going to gain by yelling at me, but the whole mess was giving me a splitting headache. Worse, the phantom seemed just as frustrated as I was. The whole time it sat there hurrming, it was staring at me with those huge eyes, waving its huge tentacles in increasingly sharp motions, like it was trying to tell me something and it was angry that I wasn’t getting it.

  “What?” I shouted in the gaps. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want me to do?”

  The phantom waved its tentacles more frantically than ever, and then it stopped, tapping the ends of its appendages together in a way that gave me the distinct impression it was thinking. After almost a minute of this, it reached its two longest tentacles out toward me, tightening the coils in its snake nest body to get enough slack. I worried it was going to make a grab for me, but the phantom’s tentacles stopped a few dozen feet away. For a second, I was stuck again by how huge it was, and how beautiful. Its body glowed like water lit from within, sparkling in the dark as the longer of the two tentacles bent to form a rectangle.

  It was a nice rectangle, too. The phantom’s squishy flesh squeezed itself neatly into four perfect corners. Of course, I still didn’t know what the hell “rectangle” was supposed to mean, but it was nice to see something recognizable. Just when I was starting to feel like maybe we could work with this, though, the phantom took its second tentacle and placed it in front of the rectangle, blocking it from view. Then, slow and deliberately, it pulled the covering tentacle away.

  “Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm,” it sang when the rectangle was fully revealed again. “Hurrrrrrm.”

  I folded my arms over my chest, wracking my brain as I tried to guess what that could mean. I sucked at puzzles in general, and this was way out of my league. I bit my lip, wishing with all my might that Rupert were here. He was clever at this sort of thing, and he knew a ton about languages. He could probably figure this out. But he wasn’t here, and I didn’t have the first clue what the phantom wanted, or how to tell it I was stumped.

  “Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm,” the phantom called again, moving its tentacle back and forth in front of the rectangle like it was playing peekaboo. “HURRRRRRRRRRRM!”

  “I hear you!” I shouted. “I’m trying, okay?”

  “Horrrrrrrrrum,” it said, varying the intonation until it sounded like whale song from the largest, angriest whale imaginable. “Hoooooorum. Hooooooooooorum.”

  I felt like ripping my hair out. God and king, why of all the people in the universe did this stupid alien pick me to play charades with? What the hell was a horum? I couldn’t even think with the phantom roaring like that, so I tuned it out as best I could, combing my brain as I tried to remember if I’d heard that word before in any context. I even tried to search Rupert’s memories, which was incredibly h
ard with nothing to help trigger them, but he didn’t have anything either so far as I could tell. I was pretty sure “horum” wasn’t even a word, but when I looked up to tell the phantom I had nothing and this was a waste of time, I realized its roar had changed again.

  “Hooooooome,” it sang, looking at me as its tentacle went back and forth, the motion no longer just revealing and hiding the rectangle, but pivoting against it, like a door opening and shutting. “Hooooooome.”

  And just like that, the puzzle fell into place. “Home,” I repeated, my face breaking into a grin. “You want to go home.”

  The phantom dropped its tentacles, and though I might well have been imagining things, I would have sworn its blue eyes looked happy. “Hoooooome,” it roared, making my ears ring. “Hooooooome!”

  “You want to go back,” I said, getting excited as well. I could almost hear Dr. Starchild’s voice in my head telling me that Maat was the wall that held back the flood of phantoms. But walls worked both ways. In cutting off the place where their universe broke through into ours, we’d kept new phantoms from entering, but we’d also prevented the ones who were already here from leaving. By plugging the hole, we’d cut off their way home. But even as the thrill of solving the riddle raced through me, I realized it didn’t make sense. “Wait,” I said. “Why are you telling me about this?”

  The phantom dropped the rectangle and reached out its tentacle again, stretching until the tip was barely touching me. I paused, waiting, but the creature didn’t move. It just hung there, motionless, pointing at me with a glowing tentacle that seemed to be getting shorter.

  I took a hissing breath. The tentacle wasn’t getting shorter; it was getting dimmer. Its light was going out, eaten from the tip by a creeping black stain.

  I jerked away with a curse. My virus was crawling up the emperor phantom’s tentacle like ink seeping up paper. At my horrified sound, the phantom pushed its dying tentacle at me in a motion that seemed to say See what you’ve done? But I didn’t see. I didn’t know—