Reading the Wind (Silver Ship)

by Brenda Cooper

  Lushia asked, “What happened?”

  “Someone I couldn’t see, maybe two, maybe three.” He gasped for breath, glancing over at the body of his dead shipmate. “The door opened, and Kuipul went down. Just like that. Someone I couldn’t see kicked her. Then I took a punch to the stomach, and another below the belt.” He grimaced, pain still shooting blackness through his blue eyes. “I felt hands on me. No one there. Just movement.” He shook his head. “How can you fight that?”

  “And the babies?” Lushia demanded. “Did one or two people carry them out?”

  “Two.”

  Bless Alicia and Induan and keep them safe.

  Lushia spoke to the ship. “Caro and Jherrel. Find them.”

  The ship replied. “Looking.”

  There was no way they could have gotten from here to the door so fast. Was there?

  Ghita stepped over Kuipul, sprawled on the floor, and stalked down the corridor. Lushia followed.

  My focus split. Part of me watched the babies float quickly down a corridor in invisible arms, Caro screaming and Jherrel giggling, and another part focused on my father’s captivity.

  I found the slender connection between Ghita’s controls and the manacles on my father’s hands and snapped it. Ghita wouldn’t notice immediately, as she chased the floating babies down the ship’s corridors. My connection to my father felt weaker than the one I had with Kayleen or Marcus. I had to put too much energy into it. “Go. Get out while you can.”

  He scrambled up, racing. I directed him. “Go right.”

  He hesitated, confusion on his face. The Dawnforce had a good interior surveillance system, and I could see them all. I threw even more of myself into my connection with him, no longer caring if they pushed me out of the ship. I had to get him out. “Right!” I forced at him. “Go right.”

  He scrambled in the correct direction.

  “Get out,” I told him, flashing a thread of the ship’s interior map at him.

  Every alarm Klaxon on the ship went off at once.

  I was discovered.

  I dumped auditory threads, ditching the awful sound of the alarms. Crewmembers looked up, began checking for commands and information. I told them all to stay put. There was no way I could imitate their real authorities, but I could confuse them.

  The babies, the girls, and my father converged, racing toward the cargo door of the ship. Lushia and Ghita followed, Ghita pressing on her wrist while she ran, an attempt to stop my father with pain. She snarled as she realized it wasn’t working.

  Three more people pelted behind them, weapons in their hands.

  “Stop!” Ghita yelled.

  No one even slowed.

  The doors on Dawnforce closed down, rather than folding out to ramps like ours. The outside ramps would be pulling in while the door lowered. Whichever of the girls had Caro ducked through the closing door, Caro still screaming in her arms.

  Lushia had almost reached the other one, running alongside my father now. I struggled to block the door, but whoever had found me and started the doors closing again had slammed tougher security in place. There wasn’t time to hack it.

  I stayed, watching, riveted to the scene, no longer a player for the moment.

  The door was over half-closed. The girl carrying Jherrel ducked low, and Lushia took the moment to reach toward empty air, hooking a foot. Lushia fell, thumping against the hard metal floor. Her face shone with surprise and satisfaction. Jherrel screamed as his little body hit the floor.

  Just over a foot of light remained between the door and the ship’s deck.

  A bit of Alicia’s hair glowed black for a second as she scooped Jherrel from the floor.

  My father reached down and grabbed Lushia by the shoulder. She screamed. Something hit my father from behind.

  Ghita.

  He fell, face down. I raced down my connection to him. He was there. “Joseph!”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you. I’m …I’m better now.”

  “I love you.”

  Jherrel and his savior had disappeared through the door. Ghita tried to follow, down on her stomach. There wasn’t enough room.

  His presence with me had become space. “Dad?”

  He didn’t answer. He never would, now.

  57

  LOSS

  Joseph’s breathing quickened beside me. I looked down, but could make out very little of what was happening in town. The noises around me were all natural, the night-birds, Kayleen’s soft breath, and Joseph’s faster breath. He shifted under my hands, a subdued struggle to remain fully away, fully connected. I murmured to him, softly, telling him I was here the same way I had when he was ten and just beginning to work in the Fremont nets with Gianna’s guidance.

  Kayleen remained completely still, her eyelids occasionally fluttering as if she dreamed.

  Joseph screamed. His body bucked under my hand. I held him, leaning into him, bracing my feet against the stone, my belly against his back. He moaned.

  Kayleen sat bolt upright, her eyes flying open. “They killed him!”

  “Who,” I asked, reaching for her hand. Joseph bucked again.

  “Your…your father. The people on the ship killed him.” She clutched at her blanket, looking around, her eyes unfocused. She glanced at Joseph. “He’s still out.” And then she fell back, her head hitting the stone so it made a soft thunk.

  I grit my teeth. There was no time to mourn a man I didn’t know. But Joseph. What would this do to him? I gripped him harder, filling myself with soothing energy.

  He twisted under me, so I sat on his thighs. His eyes flew open, his words echoing Kayleen’s. “They killed him.”

  “Shhhhhh,” I whispered, bringing a hand to his cheek. “I know.”

  “I…I have to go back.”

  I nodded. “Caro and Jherrel?” I asked.

  “I have to go back! They …maybe they got away.”

  Hope. Maybe our children were safe. For now, I could only care for Joseph. I handed him a water bottle and he slurped quickly, dropping the empty bottle on the blanket by his feet. He twisted sideways and his body went limp.

  I placed a hand on his side. He breathed. He’d be okay. He had to be. He had become so much stronger since I’d seen him last. I curled up at his back, between he and Kayleen, touching them both, blinking back tears. All he ever really wanted to do was fly a space ship. He used to sit in the park with toy versions of the silver ship, making engine sounds and throwing rough-hewn pointed wooden cylinders into the sky.

  So much rode on him.

  I wanted to race down the High Road, find Jherrel, and hold him. I wanted to find Liam and pull him free of the conflict so Jherrel would always have a father. I wanted to protect him forever from the kind of world that did this to my brother.

  58

  CHALLENGES

  I had nearly come all the way out of the nets to see Chelo. When Steven and Therese died, I’d let that happen, and hadn’t been able to go back for a long time.

  This was different. People needed me.

  I felt Chelo’s body curled around me, spooning, giving me support. I had no way to tell her I may not have ever needed her more. It felt like she knew.

  For a disorienting moment, I lost direction and found myself looking back at the sleeping dog in the park. I raced back up the nets. Dawnforce’s door was open again; the three people who had been chasing Ghita, Lushia, my father, and the babies and girls down the corridor stood uncertainly in the light spilling from the ship.

  I couldn’t see the babies, had to assume Alicia and Induan had gotten them away, down the cliff face. Since I had turned the one camera back in on itself, there was no net close-in there, no way to do more than check from a distance.

  Anger threatened to kick me back out. Ghita killed my father! A river of anger, drowning the data threads I followed, obscuring the myriad messages that flashed through my nerves. I struggled against it, fighting the anger.

  A memory surfaced.
Akashi’s voice. “You cannot reduce anger by fighting it. You must surrender to it, let it flow through you. Only then can you rise above it.”

  I breathed my anger out into the nets, following after it, picking up layers and threads of data, holding them while I blew out more anger, following it, picking up more and more data. I filled myself with the mercenaries’ nets. Less room for anger, more for information.

  They killed my father!

  I let it go, thinning myself until I encompassed all of the webs, held electronic renditions of the continent, the sea, even Islandia inside my being. Even more information than all of the Islans’ nets danced in me, as if the very planet breathed data into my cells.

  I trembled.

  It knit into a whole. More than data, more than the sum of the data I held. The raw beauty of it ripped through me, taking my breath, my anger, all feelings except awe, stripping me invisible.

  A small crowd just over the lip of the cliff path, turning downward. Our people, capable, not in need of me. Following Alicia and Induan, who held the babes tenderly, still mostly invisible, so the children might have been floating in the air.

  Akashi, Jenna, Bryan, and Ming, and a hundred ragged hungry people from the bands, creeping through Artistos, searching for mercenaries to attack. Bryan running into Garmin in the streets, unsheathing his claws, but going on to look for enemy targets.

  The Autocracy web saw everything as I saw it. Not because I saw it, but because the data was what it was, because the initial forms and programs and desires of those who created it infused it. It might have been a god. A God. Something bigger than all of us. Data about the invaders (about us!). Location and direction for each of us and each of the mercenaries, for the sleeping dog, for the skimmers, all of it flowing to some single point in the Dawnforce and back out to the skimmers and both webs. Waves of information.

  Skimmer engines starting.

  I could drop it all, let the winners choose amongst themselves. Or I could take the skimmer, send it into the sea, send the Dawnforce out into the sky.

  Should I try it? Was I strong enough?

  One of the skimmers rose from the ground, and I slid into its controls like I owned it. I threw it up, up, and out, over the Grass Plains, over Creator sitting as silently as New Making used to, a single silver ship on the sea of grass.

  The beings inside the skimmer struggled to turn it back. Or bring it down. Anything.

  It responded to me. Only to me. A toy ship, reaching for the sky.

  The three people inside screamed.

  I threw it into the sea, with the people inside it. Screaming awake, and yet not, sitting up by my sister, clutching her, and full of all of Fremont, full of knowledge about too much, and too little. Screams sounding in a corner of my head.

  Not Reading the Wind. Riding it. Burning in it.

  Where was I? Who burned?

  Pressure.

  A hand on my back.

  My sister, whispering, “Come to me. Come to yourself. Come here.”

  My scream had torn the beauty of the single web from me, and I struggled with the threads. Chelo’s voice. “Little brother. Let go. Let it go. Bring their nets down and stop for a bit. Rest.”

  She knew the plan. Did I still have the strength to bring down all of their webs? I’d never believed I could hold them all. I’d expected to take them out one by one, slowly, like pulling threads loose from a captain’s coat.

  My sister! I had come to save my sister. She was our leader, had always been our leader, the one with a whole heart. I owed it to her to find her.

  My strength ebbed, falling from me, so exhaustion slowed every nerve. I could break out into the webs, be gone, never, ever return to the body of the fatherless boy. But he had a sister. I had a sister.

  I breathed in, a great gaping breath that pulled the threads back into me. I tested, finding the core that held the others together.

  I pulled.

  The web the Islans had built over Artistos fell away, suddenly silenced.

  I had killed it.

  Such beauty, gone.

  Nothing more to do now. Akashi and crowd and the dog could walk over the nano forever. Dawnforce and Creator could still fly, safe enough behind their shields.

  None of their skimmers survived the death of the data webs.

  It would be up to the people, and the smaller, nearly shattered web of Artistes. The people of Fremont and a few of us against around forty or so from Islas.

  The Islans didn’t stand a chance.

  59

  MY BROTHER, MY CHILD

  When he came up this time, all of Joseph sat beside me on the rock. Something had fouled his eyes with a second helping of the damage he’d taken after the earthquake so many years ago. Sweat bathed him, and he shook. He shifted so he sat between me and Kayleen, one hand taking one of hers, the other pulling me close. He whispered in my ear. “You saved me.”

  Maybe. What did I know? I made the only reply possible. “I love you.”

  He stared out, looking over Artistos, past the town and the battle, and perhaps all the way to the sea. One of the moons, Destiny, shone directly on him, painting the very edges of his dark hair with softness and illuminating tears streaking down his cheeks.

  His arm over my shoulder trembled. He took deep, slow breaths, so many that I lost count, and grew cold. I pulled the blanket he had abandoned over my shoulder, settling it so it kept him warm, too.

  A breather. I had seen a skimmer fall into the sea. No, thrown, like a toy into the sea. Did I want to know?

  Kayleen opened her eyes, but remained still. I looked down at her. “What happened?”

  She blinked and reached a hand across Joseph to touch me, as if she needed to know I was real. “The babies are safe. Joseph brought them all down. Their nets. I told our people. They’re in town now. Jenna and Bryan are running through the houses, checking for weapons or surprises.” She wiped at her brow. I struggled to make sense of her babbling as she continued. “I told Sasha to open the door for Liam and Dianne, but she would have anyway. She knows them, and the babies. Ming killed three of the Islans. With her bare hands.”

  Joseph spoke, his voice an eerie whisper. “I killed three of them, too.”

  He’d never left my side.

  Kayleen squeezed his hand. “Good thing, too. That’s three that can’t kill any of us.”

  “I did it. Might as well have shot them myself.” He put his head in his hands. “I threw them into the sea. I heard their death screams. I can still hear them.”

  I remembered my choices the day I led Lushia and Ghita up and started the war. “We all use our strengths, little brother. Yours are just a little more noticeable than mine.”

  He pulled me even closer to him, and we sat that way for a long time.

  Just as the first light began touching the mountains behind us, the Dawnforce left, arcing up into the sky.

  “See,” I told him, “That’s what your strengths are for.”

  He grunted. “Dianne tells me I may have started a bigger war. One that involves all of Silver’s Home.”

  And again, I remembered the day of choice, and the demon dogs. “Sometimes, all you can do is protect those you love.”

  AFTERWORD

  Midday light streamed shadowless onto Commons Park. Liam and I sat beside Akashi under the twintrees closest to the ashes of the old Science Guild Hall. The remains lay crumbled and heaped, touched here and there with new green grass.

  Caro and Jherrel lay on the grass next to us. Caro babbled at her toes and Jherrel clutched a stick between his chubby hands, turning it back and forth like a metronome.

  I looked over at Akashi, who shucked a twintree fruit deftly, easily avoiding the dangerous spines. He held one half out for each of us.

  “Don’t you want some?” I asked.

  He pointed to a small pile of ripe fruit beside him. “I have more.”

  Liam took the fruit, holding it in his hand. “I thought I would lead the band,”
he said, his voice choking up a little bit. “And raise Jherrel to follow after me.”

  Akashi smiled, the first smile I’d seen on his face this morning. In fact, the first smile I’d seen in the three days since the Dawnforce left Fremont. “I thought you would do that, too. But the Town Council is right. That’s why I voted with them. You all saved some of us, but you saved us from something that might not have happened if you weren’t here in the first place.”

  I looked across the park, my eyes stinging. “Joseph told me the Star Mercenaries would have simply killed you all and left if we weren’t here.”

  Akashi started peeling another fruit. “I believe him. But many don’t. All you have ever done here is fight perceptions.” He shrugged. “Most of them have been wrong, but when you two leave tomorrow, when you all leave, you’ll have a fresh start. You’ll be somewhere that has no preconceptions about you.”

  I couldn’t let Joseph go without me anyway. Not ever again.

  That didn’t erase the sharp pain of leaving. I lay down and set my head on Akashi’s lap. He stroked my hair. His voice was gravelly, but strong enough. “I’ll miss you, Chelo. I’ll probably make up all kinds of silly stories to tell the children about you. And in a generation, they won’t believe me anymore.”

  “I’ll miss you terribly. You taught me a lot.”

  “Lessons stay with you,” he said. “You take care of Liam, now. Right?”

  Liam spluttered. “I’ll take care of her, too! Of them both. Of them all.”

  I laughed.

  A light breeze blew the smell of roasting meat and vegetables to us, and Akashi smiled. “Come on. There’s a celebration to attend before you get all maudlin on me.”

  As soon as we got near the amphitheater, I started looking for a white streak in dark hair. I found her behind a serving table, carefully dipping from a pot of soup and filling bowls. Where else?

  As soon as she saw me, she smiled broadly and came to my side. We walked arm in arm up the steps, oblivious to anyone else. “Sasha,” I said. “Do you want to go with us? There’s room for a few. Paloma’s going. Says she can’t bear to leave her grandbabies.”