During this harangue, Britt watched me.
I just sat there, drinking my tea.
When the yelling finally wound down, the Head Instructor said, “Well? What do you have to say to us?”
“Nothing,” I replied calmly. “I have nothing to say to you. I do not answer to you.”
“Oh?” said the Head Scholar. “If not to us, then who do you answer to?”
“The Blessed All.”
They stared at me. Britt pressed a hand over her mouth.
I smiled at her. “I have something to show you.”
I keyed in the coordinates and requested a planet-side picture.
A meadow, on the edge of a woodland. Butterflies flitted by. Birds flew from tree to tree. A bumbler went from one flower to another, doing its duty.
A minute passed. Two minutes.
Then, from among the trees came a white unicorn mare. Beside her were two fillies. One of the fillies had a beard under her chin.
Tears filled Britt’s eyes. Then she started to laugh—a joyous, heart-deep laugh. “I knew you were the one. I knew.”
“You took a risk,” I said. “You could have gotten more of them out in time. We saved what we could.”
Britt smiled at me. Zashi’s eyes began to twinkle.
Somewhere—perhaps on the part of the student island that hadn’t been designated for the students—there were more of Britt’s unicorns. If I had failed this last test, there might not have been enough of them to survive. Britt had been willing to take that risk . . . because she needed the certainty of this last test.
“Willow is my successor,” Britt said. She walked out of the room.
Zashi winked at me, smiled at Stev, and followed her.
The Scholars and the Head Instructor turned pale. Without another word, they left, taking Whit and Thanie with them.
It had come to me last night, just before I fell asleep for a few hours. All the other Restorers were referred to as a Restorer. Britt was referred to as the Restorer. She answered to no one but the Blessed All—because Britt was always in Balance.
And because Britt would not do just what was correct, she would do what was right.
Chapter 16
Tomorrow we are going to attempt to land our ship on the planet’s surface.
The engineers have reluctantly admitted that it’s possible, but they aren’t sure we can do it. But if we don’t try it, we won’t survive another month out in space. If we succeed, we’ll gain a few more years to continue our work before the ship dies completely.
The Scholars, of course, argued against it.
It was Britt who decided.
I’ve wondered if her decision would have been different if I hadn’t saved the unicorns. If, without someone to take her place as the Restorer, she would have let her own people die rather than risk the world that is still slowly being restored to Balance.
I think I know the answer. That is why I will never ask her.
We have lived in a world made of metal, wandering the galaxy and restoring worlds to Balance because we have to make Atonement for something we had done long ago.
Now we have a chance to feel the earth beneath our feet, to feel the wind on our skin, to smell the wildflowers, to press our hands against the bark of a tree. We have a chance to live as one strand in the web. And we can never afford to forget that we are only one strand.
I don’t think my people will ever again have the knowledge or the skill to go into space. This world is all we will have. If we fail it, we will be among the species that are listed as extinct.
Tomorrow we will land on the planet.
Britt was right.
This world is our true Atonement.
About The Author
Anne Bishop is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels, including Bridge of Dreams and the award-winning Black Jewels Trilogy. She recently completed Written in Red, the first book in a new urban fantasy series. When she’s not writing, Anne enjoys gardening, reading, and music. You can visit her at www.annebishop.com or keep up with news about her books at the official Facebook fan page, www.facebook.com/DarkRealms.
Stranded
Anthony Francis
Dedication
To Yseult, the First Centaur, who made all of this possible.
Author’s Note
Almost a decade ago, I was working on a space opera starring a genetically engineered centauress from a supercivilization with all the toys. Wondering what her grandchildren would be like, I sketched a young centauress crossing a field of wheat towards impossible mountains, then drew her brother, a pudgier centaur with a straw hat reading a map of the universe … and carrying a staff that could take him anywhere.
Almost a decade later, my editor Debra asked me for a science fiction story about young adults finding their way. I gave that young girl her brother’s staff and her grandmother’s morals, imagined what would happen if she met a bunch of refugee children who were every bit as good as her in their hearts but who didn’t quite have it all together, and made them all collide on that field of wheat before those impossible mountains. The result is “Stranded.”
—Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr.
Stranded
Sirius flinched as sizzling grey bullets tumbled around him in zero-gee. The grey dented veligen pellets rattled through the cramped innards of Independence’s life support plant, stinging his nose with the scent of bitter almonds. His hands strained at the yellow-striped master fuse. The girls shouted. They fired their guns again. More bullets twanged around him, ricocheting off the ancient, battered equipment, striking closer with every shot—but Sirius just gripped the hot, humming tube harder, braced both booted feet, and pulled.
Andromeda and Artemyst screamed for him to stop. Dijo, the engineer, screamed for their shooting to stop. Even the air screamed—out a bullet hole in a vacuum duct near his feet. But with every second, Independence shot a half million clicks farther into the deep, flying away from the Beacon that was their only hope of survival, so Sirius didn’t stop: he just screamed too, pulling with both hands, shoving with both feet, jerking at the master fuse—until it popped out and he shot free into zero-gee, slamming into the hatch and bursting it open.
Sirius flew out of the life support service chamber into Independence’s cavernous cargo hold. His head clanged off a handrail, knocking him into a dizzy spin in midair. He smacked into the tumbling brassfiber grille of the hatch he’d knocked free, halving his spin—and leaving him right in the crosshairs of Dijo, Artemyst and Andromeda, all clipped to orange handrails far out of his reach. All had their guns on him, red laser sights on, green safety lights off.
The girls of the ship called themselves “skybirds”: most were budding teenagers now, bodies grown slender and toned in zero-gee, poured into soft pressure suits that came to their necks, patterned with shimmering scales and glittering feathers and rich animal prints.
Sirius tried to track them, but as he tumbled, the girls somersaulted around him, moving from anchor to anchor with deadly grace, keeping him off balance mentally as well as physically. It didn’t matter—in the Engine Module, the skybirds had all the arms and the armor.
And they were proud to show it. They’d augmented their softsuits with scraps of ballistic weave printed like leathers and whipstitched with hullfiber, and decked out their communication cowls with feathers like tribal headdresses. The skybirds were savage, independent—free.
All very fetching, but the girls and their animal suits did nothing for Sirius, and that made him worse in their eyes than the “hullrats,” the boys that Andromeda had exiled to the Command Module when she’d taken over the Engine Module—and with it, the ship.
Because if you weren’t a skybird, and if you weren’t a hullrat, you were a—
“Halfway Boy!” Andromeda cried, as the shi
p’s lighting flickered and the whine of the air cycler slowly spun down. Her eyes were as wild as the spray of incongruous feathers sticking out of her snakeskin-patterned communications cowl. “What have you done?”
“Saved all our lives,” Sirius said, still dizzy, still spinning. “You can thank me later.”
“That’s the master fuse for the lifeplant,” Dijo said, staring at the yellow and black tube in Sirius’s hands. Her eyes went wide, the patterned lenses that protected them from radiation making her look crazed. She dove inside the life support plant, cursing. “Oh, God damn it—”
“I told you, hullrats in the Engine Module cause nothing but trouble,” Artemyst growled, squaring her shoulders and adjusting the sights on her gun. The veligen whined as its gyros compensated for movement, helping her keep dead aim on him. “Can I just kill him?”
There was a deadly pause. Sirius swallowed, squinting as red laser light sparkled off his forehead, but he was afraid to raise his hand. Not that she needed the gun to be a danger: Sirius could fight, but Artemyst had ten kilos on him and a mean streak. Then Andromeda spoke.
“And what then, Artemyst?” Andromeda said quietly. “Toss his body out the airlock? We can’t afford the waste, and the boys have the recycler in the Command Module. Are you going to take the detail of chopping up his body and feeding it through the cycler in the shuttle?”
Sirius’s eyes bugged, but Artemyst was equally appalled. Sort of.
“God, no,” she said. “I’d make one of the fledglings do it—”
“Oh, shut it, Artemyst,” Andromeda said. She kept her gun trained on Sirius, her voice rang out—but did it crack, just a little bit? “We can’t cycle Sirius. He’s our best pilot—”
“Carina can pilot,” Artemyst said. “And we can throw him to the hullrats—”
“No. You know we can’t do that. It was hard enough to get Leonid to take Toren, even with him getting as big as a bear,” Andromeda said. “You have to think things through—like Sirius usually does. So, benefit of the doubt: why did you pull the fuse, Halfway Boy?”
“You know why. I told you,” Sirius said, risking a dirty look at Andromeda despite her gun. God, why was everyone so stupid? Andromeda had been the one that split the girls from the boys, so she didn’t even have the excuse of being a breeder! “The gliderdrive is about to fail—”
“Don’t tell me my job,” Andromeda said, glaring back at him. “Of course the gliderdrive is about to fail. Independence is seven hundred and fifty years old. Everything is falling apart! Why did you think deliberately taking out our life support would help?”
Dijo pulled out of the life support plant, tools rattling on her belt, feathered cowl in disarray. “The cycler is shutting down,” she said, as breakers began tripping, one by one. “It’ll need a full overhaul—and we’re going to need oxygen. We need to dock. Anywhere. Now.”
Andromeda’s eyes widened, and Sirius smirked.
“Now do you see why?” he said. “I told you, every second we flew further into the deep we flew closer to death, but you didn’t believe me. I told you, we had to dock, to make repairs, but you didn’t listen. So I made the point a little more clear—”
“Dammit!” Andromeda snarled.
“I know how hard this is,” Sirius said.
“No, you don’t,” Andromeda said, face twisting up in unexpected rage.
“Yes, I do,” Sirius said. “I was a kid on a five-person flyer, remember? It’s been hard for all humans since the Dresanians kicked us off the Earth, and worse for Independence, with the adults gone, running from the next attack. But sooner or later, we have to stop and rest—”
“That’s not it,” Andromeda said. “Our reserves are more depleted than you know. I’m not sure we’d even make it back to the Beacon without supplementary life support—and the boys have what’s left of the oxygen farm. That means . . . I’m going to have to talk to Leonid.”
Sirius swallowed. The ex-captain she’d deposed. And her ex-boyfriend.
“Well,” Dijo said, nervously looking back and forth between them. It was hard to read her expression beneath the smooth porcelain gloss of her engineer’s facepaint, but Sirius guessed she saw that this had to be resolved, now. “If you don’t want to . . . I could contact him.”
Andromeda glared at her, then at Sirius.
Her hand tensed on her veligen; Sirius closed his eyes. Then she spoke.
“Contact the Command Module, Dijo. Tell Leonid . . . I agree to his demands.”
—————
Sirius squirmed, half from the narrow line of the zip tie cutting into his wrists and half from the unexpected weight of the cargo bay deck pressing into his rear. He’d expected to get a hero’s welcome when the boys retook the ship—not a black eye while being taken prisoner.
In the zero-gee of the Engine Module, the girls had grown slender, and chose totems of flying birds and lithe snakes. But the Command Module spun to make gravity for the oxygen farm—and exiled to it, the boys had grown muscular—and for their totems, chose predators.
Where the girls had patchworks of prints, the boys had armor like leopards and tigers. Where the girls were acrobats, the boys were weightlifters. Biggest of all of them was Sirius’s fellow Halfway Boy, the boy Andromeda had exiled when he hit his growth spurt—Toren.
Toren had become a bear of a man, with arms as thick as Sirius’s thigh and a neck as wide as a support beam. His armor matched his image, a grizzly totem down to patchwork fur and a comm helm adorned with bear eyes, ears and teeth—over a human face as hard as flint.
Sirius had reached to hug Toren when he stormed through the airlock, but Toren had just punched him in the face. Now Sirius sat with the girls in the cargo bay, all huddled in a half-grav of rotation—with their hands bound behind them and armed boys ringed all around.
Leonid had set the ship to spinning in more ways than one. He hadn’t just taken over from Andromeda: he’d disarmed the girls and bound them, then friction-coupled the Modules, setting the whole ship turning, making the girls groan in gravity they hadn’t felt in years.
Then he set Toren to hunting down the stragglers.
“That’s the last of them,” Toren said, shoving Artemyst through the ring of boy guards. Her hands were bound behind her with a black zip tie, and when she tripped, she fell heavily onto Andromeda and Sirius. “Thought she could elude us by hiding in the sensor pod.”
“Should have known not to use a tunnel to hide from a hullrat,” Artemyst smirked.
Toren raised his hand to strike her, but Leonid clucked.
“Toren,” he said curtly. “Thank you, but that’s enough.”
Sirius couldn’t believe what had happened to Tori, the little Halfway Boy Sirius had befriended, then trained to defend himself against the other boys like Leonid. Tori had been his best friend—practically his boyfriend—but now acted like he never knew him.
Now Toren stood beside Leonid, his former persecutor. The blond boy with the lion’s helm who had tormented the two of them when he’d ruled the ship was now back in charge—and Toren backed him up, folding his arms and glowering like a dark enforcer while Leonid spoke.
The world truly was upside down.
“Artemyst, you stupid girl,” Leonid said, handsome as ever, frost-blue eyes gleaming beneath the lion’s teeth of his helm. He didn’t fold his arms like Toren: he simply spoke with authority. “We won’t tolerate any more sieges, whether one of you or all together—”
“And just what,” Andromeda said, “do you plan to do with all of us girls?”
Leonid glared. “Lock you all in cabins, individually. The boys will double bunk if that’s what it takes,” he said. A murmur began with the boys. They clearly didn’t like it. But Leonid shouted them down. “Enough! We almost got killed by these irresponsible girls. So we do it.”
“You have us,” Andromeda said with a smirk, “but how will you run the Engines?”
“Now that we have the Helm again, we don’t need you right away,” Leonid said, jutting his chin out at her, less like a lion than a defiant little boy. “When we do, we’ll let you mutineers out, one at a time—but three to one. Two boy guards, one boy worker the girl will instruct—”
Now the girls were murmuring, and it was Andromeda who raised her voice.
“None of the girls,” Andromeda said, voice quavering, “will tell you anything—”
“Enough!” Leonid shouted, firing his gun, and in the ricochets everyone went quiet. “None of the girls will touch any machine in the Engine Module ever again. No more than one girl is allowed in the Engine Module at one time, hands tied, instructing us. That’s it.”
“No!” Andromeda said, voice anguished, eyes wide. Sirius knew she’d made the Engines her life after she and Leonid had split—and that Leonid had to know that banishing her from the Engine Module would just kill her. “You . . . you can’t mean that—”
“We still won’t,” Artemyst said defiantly, struggling to her feet. “We’ll—”
Toren slapped her, and she went down again. “Enough,” he repeated, and that casual slap quieted the room far faster than Leonid’s gun. “You’ll help us, or starve in your cells. You will instruct us. And when the boys know the machines—they’ll have other uses for the girls.”
The girls recoiled. Even the boys looked uncomfortable. Sirius scowled. This had been coming since the last adult of Independence died. Sooner or later, they’d all hit puberty. Sooner or later, they’d all be adults. And sooner or later . . . a new generation had to begin.
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