Araskar
IT’S A CRAPPY DAY to go for a hike, but it’s my last day planetside, so I’ll be damned if I’m spending it indoors. Rain lashes us. My clothes are wet through despite the slicker. Rain patters off the metal roofs of the hastily constructed shelters all around us. Mud runs in thick rivers along the streets of the refugee camp. The refugees of Shadow Sun Seven, formerly the elite of the galaxy, huddle inside their shelters and thank God for a roof. Paxin walks next to me, clad in an equally soaked slicker. We hike slowly, up the hill, toward the air hangar that is the only part of the refugee camp that predates the refugees.
The painting’s back on side of the hangar.
I step slowly and carefully up a rapidly eroding hill of mud. Close enough to the picture to stop and stare.
In the picture, Saint Jaqi stares out at the universe, her dark skin reflecting the light of a surrounding circle of stars.
“Rixinius has had this painted over twice already,” Paxin says. “Actually, this one’s kind of a rush job. Last one was better. That’s not what her nose looks like at all. And they need to learn to draw hands.” She’s wearing her temporary prosthetic hands today. She points with her prosthetic finger, a thing of spindly metal.
The fresh paint is not quite dry; bits of Jaqi run in the rain. But not her eyes. Her painted dark eyes. I can’t help it—it hits me. Just the same way it’s hit these refugees.
It really is like looking on God.
Or the Starfire.
It’s not what her face looks like. She never has that beatific, wise look the painter’s given her—most of the time she just looks hungry and curious.
But I look at this, and I realize I’ve seen it. I’ve seen her do genuine miracles. Me, who was supposed to die in the Dark Zone, who should have died a thousand times since, in our first assault or on Irithessa or when I was chasing Jaqi. Instead, I’ve lived long enough to see miracles.
Realizing that—you also realize how amazing this day is. Sheeting rain and mud and all. Gray skies over stormy sea. People, human and otherwise, running around the refugee camp to stay out of the rain.
Everything I’ve been through, all of it, was all for a day like today.
I can’t help laughing.
“You okay?” Paxin asks.
I might be. “If you write about this at all . . . don’t fake it. Tell the truth about who we were.” I don’t even mean Jaqi, I realize. I turn and fix her with my gaze. “Tell the truth about me.”
“I’d be happy to.” Paxin’s face softens. “But I still believe you’ll get through this.”
Hope. It’s a worse temptation than any drug.
* * *
“This is wrong,” says Adept Alsethus.
I’ve only met this woman once before. She captains the dreadnought that took on the refugees, and when I met her before I’d been up for hours, and was half burnt and near frozen from splitting Shadow Sun Seven in half.
She was angry then and is angry now.
Consistent.
I’ve been on a lot of shitty little shuttles lately. The Thuzerian shuttle, christened Sword of Faith 529, is rather luxurious. It’s meant to hold an elite team of Adepts, and that’s who accompanies me—all of them are big burly sentients who look like they’ve spent the week in the gym.
“This is not what the servants of God should do.”
I don’t bother with that. Instead, I motion to the huge people around us. “I sure could have used this group when we were breaking into Shadow Sun Seven last week.”
“You came protecting a group of refugees, and we give you up to save them.” She interlocks her four arms in a way I’ve never seen before, but I’m guessing it’s a bit like a human shaking their head in disgust. “What have we become? I heard what happened in the Council chamber. I heard how the leader of the refugees came to defend you, and Father Rixinius instead offered you to the Resistance. Where is our faith? The Council will find an uprising of their own if they’re not careful.”
“Easy,” I say. “Infighting only helps the Resistance. I offered myself.”
“Yourself?” Her eyes narrow, and two of her arms cross over the enormous sword emblazoned on her tabard. “This was your idea? Do you want to die?”
“I used to.” I hardly realize I’ve said it. It’s weird to be so honest about something. Especially with one of these religious types who place such stock in honesty. “I think life might be worth living now.”
“Of course it is. Life is a gift. Each moment is given us by God, in His mercy.”
Religious types seem to forget that not everyone comes to life the way they do. “In my case, life was given by the Empire.”
“All sentient life is given by God. And do not say a word about crosses and sentience. I have always believed crosses to be sentient. None of us believed the Empire’s propaganda. This galaxy was built on the blood of crosses. It is a thousand-year-sin.”
“Thanks,” I say. Her words could have come straight out of one of John Starfire’s speeches, but I don’t mention that. The ironies are piled high around here. Almost like every revolutionary is destined to be a despot, and every addict who finds hope is destined to die.
Shit, I’m maudlin.
She hits the bulkhead. “You know, if this broke, all the time I’ve had—all the beauty I’ve seen, all I’ve loved, all the worlds I’ve stood on—they would mean nothing against the cold.”
“Are you trying to convert me still?”
“With so much darkness, you must choose light. Faith is a choice, Araskar. You choose to believe because the alternative is despair.”
“Oh, there is something greater than all sentience out there,” I say. “The problem is, it lives in the Dark Zone.”
“Don’t mock.”
“I don’t.”
I can tell she wants to say more. Her sort wants to save my sort. That’s the way the universe is made.
“Don’t worry about me,” I tell Alsethus. “I know death well by now.”
“Any fool can see you want to live. I don’t need God to tell me that.”
I can’t respond. Something stuck in my gullet.
And then she yells. “Shields!”
“Shield are up—” says one of the pilots—and then our shuttle rocks with the impact of shards against our sense-fields.
Bright red shards spin in a thousand patterns through space around us. From the dreadnoughts and the gunships—Resistance fighters blazing away, every weapon they have—
The ship topples, and this time spins—we must have been hit by a heavy-load shot—we’re free-floating now, gravity gone—and it doesn’t matter for a moment, because for a moment I think this is it, we’re dead—
The ship rights itself. “Return fire!” Alsethus orders. “And strap in!”
“What the hell?” No one hears me say it, but I can’t fathom this. I know Aranella. Know her through Rashiya’s memories. She isn’t the type to shoot the messenger. I grab a chair and pull myself down, strap in as the jerks of battle replace artificial gravity.
We send a barrage back. Gunships close with us now, a swarm of them having erupted from the Resistance dreadnoughts. From three of the five dreadnoughts. Two are still holding fire. Behind the gunships, smaller brown shapes—Moths, the individual insectoid fighters.
The shuttle takes another hit, and Adept Alsethus bellows more orders, and we go into a dive, circle, spin, dodging the clouds of shards that keep coming our way.
Heavier shards fill space around us as the Thuzerian dreadnoughts fire back. Gleaming points of red streak across space, tear through the gunships and scatter against the heavy shields of the Resistance dreadnoughts. By the buzz on our intercom, more battle shuttles are entering the fray.
Our ship rights itself—and another shard lands, rocking us back and forth. “Go to battle mode,” Alsethus commands. It gets colder as environmental controls minimize.
Alsethus and her gunners yell orders back and forth. We spin around and fire at two gunships, taking them by surprise. A half-dozen Moths swarm us, spitting shards. Our ship rocks and spins and the thrusters blow all over the ship, pinging warning signs as they try to arrest our velocity to keep us from being crushed.
Thrust five times Imperial gravity replaces the art-grav, and then the thrusters catch us, make a stomach-twisting return to zero. Then another spin and more G-forces. Several Thuzerians hitch up their masks and puke. My cross engineering holds and so does my stomach.
“The sense-fields can’t take any more of this pummeling,” the lead pilot says. “We need to return to the dreadnought.”
“As long as we can dodge their shards long enough,” Alsethus says through gritted teeth.
That’s when I see it. “No!” I say. “Turn!”
“What are you talking about, Araskar?”
“Turn and attack. That’s a planet-cracker.”
Right there on the sensors, although you’d have to know what you’re looking at. Right off our bow, a swarm of Moths is guarding a large white shape.
Alsethus magnifies it on the viewscreen. It looks like a fat missile. In truth, from a better angle, we would see that the “missile” shell is only a half circle, over a shard big enough to survive entry into a planet’s atmosphere, big enough to withstand hits from orbital defense. Once there, the giant shard will tear through the planet’s crust, sending up a billowing cloud of dust that blacks out the sky and triggers a supervolcanic eruption, to make the planet completely uninhabitable.
You can kill any planet with any decent-sized asteroid, but orbital defense platforms blow those up; firing shards at a planet-cracker will just increase its volatility.
“We won’t be able to stop it from just here,” Alsethus says. She gets on the private intercom to her bosses; after a moment her face turns sour. “Head for the planet-cracker and suit up.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Our instructions are to fly as close as we can, then suit up and stop it manually. Firing at it will, at best, make it blow early. Hopefully the planet will only catch a few fragments.”
“The only way to stop it manually is to ride it out,” I say. “Those things don’t have much in the way of navigation—you have to reprogram and to stay with it until it’s hit the new target.” For a moment, in the shaking, rattling ship, Alsethus and I both stare at each other, thinking the same thing. “The Resistance fleet.”
“We’ve got to land on the planet-cracker and reprogram it to hit the Resistance,” Alsethus shouts.
When she says it, it sounds even crazier than when I do.
“Last chance, Araskar,” she asks me. “Would you like to pledge yourself to God and the Saints before death? We do not have time for a full rite, but God will understand.”
“Ask me later,” I say, unbuckling to float toward the spacesuits, then clutching a handhold to keep from being thrown into the wall as the ship rattles again.
“By then it will be too late,” she says.