Araskar
I FLOAT AWAY FROM the asteroid, away from the heat of the shard-fire. The music is gone. It’s been replaced by the eyes. There’s a few hundred of them now, but only fifteen faces; they all share the same fifteen faces. They’re all staring at me out of the darkness. Every last dead one of them. Are you mad at me for living, or are you telling me I’m just about dead? No answer. Impolite bastards.
The Moth around me is growing cold. It’s been hours since this one left its cocoon chamber, and they degenerate if they don’t go back in.
Through the Moth’s circle of vision I can see the asteroid, floating up above me, still glowing with shard-fire. I can see the white of the rings, broken, pieces spinning in space. There are bodies up there, or pieces of bodies.
They were all just kids. Hell, I’ve been five years out of the vat. Were I someone’s true-born cub, I’d barely be reading.
What did they think they were doing? When the Empire built the first crosses, built us out of the Jorian DNA in their labs and the DNA of humans, trying to make the right combination for the perfect soldier—why did they think that they could construct us only to kill, and yet they made us able to feel?
We fought this war, this Resistance, because we did not just want to be killing machines. And here we are. We failed. We overthrew the Empire, but we are nasty bastards, and have to find something else to kill.
It’s colder.
And something stirs. Far, far out, light-years away, something springs into my head. It’s her. The girl with the music. Not gone after all. Something was keeping her from my senses, but now she’s there, stronger, drawing me. I could find her, if I wanted to.
I push the thought through my soulsword. Back. Return to the ship. If there’s any strength left, go. Back.
My hands move, thank Starfire. The Moth trembles. And then two of its thrusters fire, propel me up. Didn’t even know they were working.
I need to find her. I need to end this.
* * *
“He wants to see you.”
My Moth is lying frozen and useless across the hangar floor, a brown wreck, its ragged edges rapidly shedding skin, turning to papery shreds that scatter across the hangar with each blast of new atmos. I can’t walk. Two of the survivors—there’s only about ten of us—have hoisted me up, put my arms around their necks, and slid me along the floor. Rashiya’s eyes are deep-set, in hollow pits. That gray protective suit she wears has been torn, revealing lines of fine wire and circuitry.
“Who?” Half frozen, my tongue’s even more useless. I stand in the middle of our ship’s hangar, conspicuously empty now without the burrowing pod and most of the Moths. “Terracor?”
“Terracor’s dead.” She’s barely standing. Shard-fire has burned away her left ear, turned the circuits and running lights that were part of her face into melted slag. “That little cross bitch got him.”
“I felt . . .” I felt the girl, full of music.
Rashiya waits. I don’t know what to say. “You felt what?” she asks.
“I felt nothing,” I say finally. “Thought I was dead.”
She looks at my leg. I can tell what she’s thinking. It’s not the kind of wound that should have taken a Moth out. I stand up and stare at her. Perhaps she can tell, from the way I am, from my weariness, that something else is wrong.
I think about the way my whole body went numb, in the face of the music. Numb, just like I knew it was going to one day, with all those pinks.
I’m just about ready to tell Rashiya to throw me back out the airlock when she says, “Dad. Dad wants to see you.”
And that’s how, a few hours after I choke when it counts the most, I am sitting before a grainy viewscreen consulting with our fearless leader.
John Starfire looks older. He’s still got the salt-and-pepper hair and beard. His eyes still have a kindness that he didn’t pass on to his daughter. His jaw quivers and he tries for a smile, and fails. “Araskar.” The pure-space relay blurs his words a bit.
I don’t say a word.
“You failed,” he says.
Strange to say, but that’s almost comforting. I wait for what he’s going to say. Whatever it is, it’ll be soothing, in its way. You’re relieved of command. You can get high and die. If it weren’t for the girl with the music, it would sound good.
“Araskar, if you were anyone else, I’d throw you into a prison.”
I nod.
“You’re different, and I need you, even if you failed. You have something that other crosses don’t.” He stretches out his hand, from where it’s been clasping his sword. “Araskar, I can feel the Starfire. I don’t often tell people this, but I can. I can feel the power driving the universe, and when I need it, it aids me. Do you feel it?”
I don’t answer. I just sit there. This is of a piece with everything—our leader’s crazing.
“Like a flood, Araskar. Like currents twisting together in a torrent.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Like music, whole symphonies rising in the distance.”
I perk up, blink. “Music?”
“Have you felt it?”
“I . . .” I was blazed as a supernova at the time. That, and then it came from a girl who shot me.
“I believe, Araskar, that we are not crosses, but are the first generation of the new Jorians. Do you believe that?”
I just nod.
The Chosen One keeps talking. “We will grow stronger and stronger, until we can make our own nodes, until we can return to the old galaxy and find Earth that was lost. Do you know what a memory crypt is?” His hand is out of the frame. I’d be willing to bet all of lost Earth that it’s twitching on that sword handle. “The old Jorians used to seal up their greatest knowledge in memory crypts. They would remove the knowledge they had sealed up, remove it from the minds of the entire galaxy. It was knowledge that they wanted to make available only to Jorians, and once the old Jorians died, the bluebloods couldn’t access the information. Only a true Jorian can access a memory crypt. Listen.” His face is cold now, cold and hard and serious. “When we took Irithessa, the first thing I looked for, in those ancient vaults, miles deep in the crust of the planet, was the vault of memory crypts. I’ve been reading about them since I was a child. I found them. I was able to read them, Araskar. Do you know what that means?” He moves closer to the screen, and his voice takes on that odd, robotic quality. “That means that we aren’t just crosses. Like I’ve always said, we are Jorians, as much as the ancients.”
I nod.
There’s an edge, a hint of something—a fear?—in his voice. “One of the memory crypts was gone. It could only have been a human who took it. If it had been one of the Resistance—one of our own—we all would have known.” He leans in. “Do you understand now? I sent you because I know you are like me. I knew it as soon as I saw you—you will sense things. Your thoughts will go farther. Your heart will go farther. Rashiya told me about your problems with drugs, Araskar, told me about how you’ve been trying to kill what’s inside you. Stop.”
I force myself to meet his eyes. “Sir, I’m no different than any other cross.”
John Starfire lapses into that grin, but it just seems fake now. “You’re a hero.” And then the grin falls. “Crosses are mostly blind to the power of their ancestors—made simply to breed tough. You are not. You are like me, and, as I’ve told you before, that means you have to act like a hero whether or not you know you are one.”
I think of the girl. The girl in that gunner ship, with the music. I’m no new kind of Jorian. I’m no different than any other cross. But if there was one of the ancient Jorians reborn, I’d bet on her.
When I leave, I go straight to the bridge. I look at the star map for the systems around the Dark Zone, in the wildest of the wild worlds, and after a long time, after a long time asking myself whether I can truly do this, I point toward a system where I know that girl is.
I give the coordinates to our navigator.