by CJ Birch
Vonn hovers a few inches behind me. He reminds me of one of my father’s aides growing up. Kurt was this meek little man who always gave the impression he was wringing his hands. Delivering bad news was cause for a panic attack. Kurt would hover behind my father and tap on his sleeve to get his attention. My father hated Kurt. He hates any sign of weakness.
I turn back to Vonn. “Was there something else?”
He doesn’t wring his hands, but he does wipe them down the front of his environmental suit, even though there couldn’t possibly be anything to wipe off. “It’s just that…well, all this time spent breathing air from your tank. Is that healthy?” He peers around at the disarray on the bridge. Most of the consoles are in shambles, ready for their new power converters. “You’ve been at this for hours.”
I shrug and return to my work. “Nothing’s wrong with the air I’m breathing.” Would they rather we sit on our assess all day? “This work needs to get done. It’s going to take longer than we have.” He still doesn’t leave. “Would you like to help? It would go a lot faster.”
He shakes his head and leaves after wishing me their version of good luck. “May your hopes be easy.” What an odd little man.
It’s three in the morning Persephone time. I’ve tried to keep the crew to our regular schedule, even if it doesn’t line up with the illya’s. And here I am again working by myself on some project that should have a whole team attending to it. A small part of me is keeping an eye on the door. I’m not worried about the air being vented; there isn’t any to vent. Vasa is under guard on the Kudo. So why am I on edge?
The night has always been my best time to think. I like to hole up with a project that doesn’t require my whole brain and sort through what’s going on. The doctor would say it’s unhealthy to isolate myself. It may be, but this is what works for me.
I hear a scrape behind me and almost jump out of my enviro suit. I leap to my feet and turn, clutching my chest. Yakovich is standing near the navigation console with one of the old power modules in her hand.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing up at this hour?” I check the time in case I’ve misplaced a few hours.
“I got off watch and wanted to talk to you about Vasa. He doesn’t look so good. We should let the doctor check him out.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s sweating a lot and complaining of pains in his arms and legs.”
I nod. It never occurred to me that the illya might carry diseases that our immune systems can’t handle. It would make sense. It’s a good idea to have the doctor take a look. I’ll ask him to keep an eye on the rest of the crew as well. “Have the doctor check him out. Stay with him when he does. It could be some stupid escape plan.”
“Where’s he going to go?” She flings her arms out, displaying his lack of options.
“It’s a precaution. Desperate people do stupid things.” My mind immediately goes to Sarka and the look on Jordan’s face as he pulled her out of engineering.
Before Yakovich leaves I call her back. “One more thing. They’ve invited us to a formal dinner this evening.”
Yakovich’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “And you’re telling me because…?”
“It’s for senior staff, and as head of security you’re required to attend.”
Yakovich’s jaw drops. “Please, Lieutenant, don’t make me go.”
“If I have to, so do you. No one gets out of it. I don’t want to risk insulting anyone.” I hate formal affairs as much as the next person. The last one I had to attend was to welcome Hartley and me aboard the Persephone. That was only two months ago, but it seems like forever.
Yakovich huffs but doesn’t protest any further. “What do I wear? Normal uniform?”
I have a flash of what Jordan was wearing that night. It was conservative but still sexy. I, on the other hand, had opted for something a little more revealing. “Dress uniform is probably the safest.” Who knows what might offend the illya?
When I was younger—especially after my mom died—my dad used to cart me to all the formal functions he had to attend. With a seat on the Commons it was a pretty regular occurrence. I hated it. He didn’t force me to dress up or make small talk with stupid people who couldn’t give a shit about what I had to say. Instead, he showed me off, like I was some sort of prize. “This is my daughter, Alison. She’s in A levels at the academy.” I’d get a limp handshake while they continued to look at my father. “Top of her class,” he’d say, and they’d congratulate him as if he were taking my classes. The more revealing my dress, the less they heard. I figured the less I looked like a top student, the less he’d want to take me to these events. But my rebellion just pushed his buttons. The more we fought, the more I hated going. By the time I graduated the academy, I was spending most of the events holed up in the restroom.
I still hate attending these things. No one’s here to show me off, but I still feel like I’m on display, which makes everything awkward.
I arrive first and congratulate myself on my diplomacy.
Hartley enters the giant dining hall and smacks into one of the waiters carrying a tray of food. The commotion is enough to turn everyone’s head, and I un-congratulate myself. I pick Hartley off the ground, direct him to a table with napkins, and help him scrub off whatever is all over the front of his suit. It’s brown and sticky, like syrup, and smells foul. My stomach tries to make a run for it.
Yakovich arrives next. Her dress uniform is like a second skin, taut where her muscles bulge. She spots Hartley and me and makes her way over.
“What happened?”
Hartley balls up his napkin, now covered in sticky residue, and shoves it behind a centerpiece. “One of the waiters attacked me.”
Yakovich raises one thin brow. “Yeah?” She surveys the room. “Which one? I’ll follow him into the kitchen and take him out when everyone’s distracted.”
“I’m kidding. Calm down.” Hartley scrubs his beard with his fingertips. “Did you get my note about your help with power conversion?”
She nods. “I’m not on watch again until eight hundred hours. I can help any time before or after my rotation.”
“Great.” Hartley’s about to give her a playful punch in the arm but shifts and reaches for his beard again.
Out of everyone in the crew, Yakovich and I are the most similar when it comes to work. If it gets results, she’ll go as far as it takes. If that means overworking herself or pushing through an injury, then that’s fine with her. I respect that. But that limp she walked in with has me worried. I’ll ask the doctor when he gets here. I want to make sure it’s healing. I’d ask her, but she’ll tell me it’s okay.
Five of us attend the dinner: me, Yakovich, Hartley, Dr. Prashad, and Julianna Olczyk, our helms officer. There should be seven senior staff, but the captain relieved Vasa of duty, and she of course is missing. Not for the first or last time do I wish she were here. Jordan can make everyone feel at ease in stressful situations, especially me. She has this calming effect.
Our little group is overwhelmed by the number of illya. I count at least twenty-five of them scattered around the table. They’ve interspersed our crew at the table so we’re not all bunched together. I know why they did that, but I wish we weren’t separated. I’m also sure they thought we’d have more senior officers.
Bragga is at the head of the table, no longer in uniform. Instead he’s wearing a long white cloak that resembles wings in some strange way. It reminds me of the avians, and I wonder if it would be polite to ask if they’re related in some way. On his right is Vonn. On the other side is Captain Kalve and then a bunch of nameless faces. They introduced everyone earlier, but the unfamiliar names and the similarity in faces makes it difficult to tell who is who.
Hartley’s curiosity overrides any nervousness because, as soon as we’re seated, he asks, “So how far is your home planet from here?”
Vonn closes his eyes in obvious horro
r, and now I wish I’d had a briefing with everyone first to go over appropriate dinner conversation. Jordan would have.
Bragga smiles indulgently—at least I think that’s what that smile means. “We no longer have a home world.” He spreads his hands, indicating the table and the ship beyond. “This is all that is left of our once-abundant species.”
Chapter Ten
Jordan
“So Sarka’s your father?” Tup wraps his meaty hands around his knife and hacks at something dark green on his plate. It looks like a roll of protein ground up and pressed into a log.
I hesitate. I’m uncomfortable admitting our relationship. I’ve hidden the fact that the leader of the Burrs is my father for so long, it comes as second nature. We’re sitting at an empty table in the mess. Most of the tables are empty at this hour. It’s well past dinner. My training took most of the day, and even though I’m starving, I don’t have the energy to raise food to my mouth.
“Yeah, why?” I ask.
He shrugs giant shoulders. “Curious, I guess. I didn’t know my father. He died before I was born, or when I was young. My mom was kind of vague about that point. It hurt her to talk about it.”
“He die in the war?”
Tup nods. “Almost everyone does.”
Why is conflict universal? What about intelligence also breeds contradiction? Or do our intelligence and individuality give way to friction?
The last wars on Earth were long over before I was born, but my father fought in them. They were brutal. Billions died. They put all that effort into weapons, but imagine what they could’ve done to save our planet instead. Those last wars were pointless. Instead of working against each other, we should have combined our efforts to find a way to save the planet. Or at least keep it habitable. In the end, everything they did was too late. Only after we’d lost our only home did we see the pointlessness of war. I wonder if the umquashi and breens will ever get there. Will they find a way to end this war peacefully or will they destroy each other before that happens? Tup doesn’t look all that sad about it, though.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Nah, don’t be.” He speaks around the food in his mouth. “They’re in the skylife now.”
“Skylife?”
A loud thwap interrupts us. Sarka drops his tray on the table and collapses next to me. He looks as beat as I feel. “That was bullshit.” He doesn’t even bother with utensils. He uses his fingers to shovel the food straight into his mouth. “I’m so fucking hungry I could eat a goddamned cow.”
There’s another scrape, much quieter than Sarka’s, and one more tray joins our table. The man who sits is well built like Tup, although not as stocky. He’s all muscle. His skin is a light green, and he has a shock of bright-red hair that starts from his forehead, swoops over his head, and ends somewhere down his back. He looks kind of like a naked mole rat with a mohawk.
Tup points to the man. “This is Frage.” I recognize him as umquashi, the species in charge of the Avokaado.
We’ve been on board for only a day, but already I’ve seen more strange species than I could ever imagine. While walking back from the training center with Tup, I saw about a dozen different aliens. It’s strange to think of them as aliens, but using our human definition, that’s what they are. Of course, they probably think we’re the aliens.
When we stopped at one deck, the doors opened, and I thought no one had boarded the lift. But when I looked down I realized four worm beings had slithered on. Each of them had one large eye in the middle of their head but arms and hands that protruded from their middle abdomen. One was carrying a tablet of some sort and the other an engine part.
When they left I asked Tup about them, and he said they were ulods. Basically they’re the grunts of the ship because they refuse to fight.
“And you’re okay with that?” I thought everyone had to fight.
Tup laughed a great big belly laugh that echoed beyond the lift. “They have a point. They’re so small they get stomped underfoot before they make it to the front line. They help in their own way because they can reach places most of us can’t.”
I’m sure this ship has even stranger things I haven’t seen yet. Tup says that over a hundred species are on board, all of them working toward stopping the illya. What a pointless existence.
Sarka burps and licks his fingers. He’s very much in his element right now. I’m surprised he’s agreed to try to escape. Where does he expect we’re going to go but back to the Persephone, where I’ll arrest him. I would think he’d want to stay here and war. Of course, maybe after a hundred years of being at war, he’s tired of it, especially since this isn’t his fight. Or he doesn’t like the idea of being forced to do something. He’s been in charge of himself for well over a hundred years now.
I can’t fathom that time span. When I was a kid I asked him one day how old he was. At eight even twenty seems old, but he told me he was a hundred and thirty-three. I thought he was lying, but then he showed me a card with a picture of him on it, and it listed his birthday. It looked official, so that was good enough for my eight-year-old self. He’s had more change in his life than anyone. Does he ever get tired of just living?
I shake off the morose thoughts and return to what we were talking about. “So you were saying about the skylife?” I ask. I still haven’t touched my food. My arms are resting on the table, the same position they’ve been in since we sat down.
“Everyone leads three lives: the waterlife, the walkinglife, and the skylife. Everyone starts out as waterlife. You,” he points to me and Sarka, “me, and him.” He points to Frage. “Waterlife is when you’re Masha, when you’re first introduced to the world. You begin as microbes, bacteria, single-celled organisms. It’s simple. Lets you enter the world in a calming manner. The current of water becomes the current of life. After that comes the walkinglife. This takes many lifetimes as you work your way up to the higher intelligent beings. All of us,” his hand circles the table, the ship, “we’re all in the last stage of our walkinglife. But this life is weak. You are weak. You are learning what it is to be of the body. After this is skylife, which is the ultimate, the reason for life. When we die here, our journey finally begins, and we become nothing and everything all at once. We are bound by nothing—space, dimensions, time. We know all and see all. And this is why you must go through the waterlife and walkinglife before you reach this state. You take the wisdom of everything you know and use it for good.”
Sarka and I exchange a look. I’ve never been religious myself, but this smacks too much of wishful thinking. How many fables and myths have we told over Earth’s history of what happens when you die? It’s always sounded like people unable to face the truth. You die and that’s all. Does Sarka worry about what happens after he dies? He will die eventually. Even with all the work that Ethan Burr did on those soldiers, they could die and did. The biological pieces will run out long before any of the mechanical ones, but what happens when he runs out?
I don’t want to insult Tup, so I nod.
“I’m excited to meet my father for the first time. When I begin my skylife, everyone who has come before will greet me, including my mother.” Tup waves me off before I can offer my sympathies. “She lived a long life for a Varbaja. She didn’t get to die in battle, but that honor isn’t bestowed on everyone.”
“How did she die?” Sarka sucks at his fingers. I kick him under the table, but no one else seems to think the question is rude.
“An accident on one of our incubator ships.”
“Incubator ships?” I ask.
“We have several ships, much smaller than this, that can connect to ours but detach if needed. I was twelve at the time. Breen—my species—can enter battle and become a man at the age of fourteen. My mother was visiting our ship when a hull breach occurred and sucked her out into space.” He puts down the meat he’s eating and wipes his fingers on his pants. “I’m glad it was fast.”
The way he talks, death must be very
common out here. Parts of the Belt are probably like this, such as Eps, where they do most of the mining.
Frage grunts. “If you can’t die in battle, it’s best to die fast.”
The mood at the table dips low as everyone contemplates that last sentence. I’d rather not die at all, but I don’t think that’s a popular opinion here, so I change the subject to something less dour.
“Do you get back to your planets often?” This whole idea of inhabited worlds has me a little giddy, if that’s the right word. We as humans don’t even have one planet to call home anymore, and these people can just flit from one to the next. I can’t understand why they would want to spend all their time up here stuck in space.
Tup shakes his head. “I’ve never been to my home world. I grew up here. The illya drove us from there a long time ago.”
So much for a lighter topic.
Frage puts down his utensils and stares long and hard at me. “This is why we fight.” He thumbs at Tup. “He doesn’t know any different, so he’s happy to fight. Most breen are. None of us has a choice. A planet is a target, a place where the illya know to find us to poach our species. When they come, there are no negotiations. They rip you from your home, the younger the better.” He looks down at his plate, and I think he’s done until he looks back up at me with eyes so sad I lean back. “I was only five when we finally abandoned the umquashi home world. They came in the night, hundreds of ships full of troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
“The city where I lived was on the water, a lake so big you couldn’t see the other side and so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, even at its deepest. The noise their ships make over water is deafening, so we had a little warning.”
Everyone at our end of the mess stops eating to listen to Frage’s story. Some I can see have heard it before, yet for others like me and Sarka, this is all new.
“They’d invaded different cities before, so we were prepared. As kids we grew up learning emergency procedures. But not everyone was lucky enough to see them coming. Their ships could evade our defense systems. The only way to detect them was to see their ships or to hear them.