Araskar
MY EYELIDS CRAWL OPEN, and I see only a blur. A white haze, spread between goo filling the crevices of my eyelids.
I start to breathe by reflex, and can’t do it. Something is holding me back from breathing. Oh. Maybe it’s this big machine in my mouth, the tubes running down my throat. It vibrates, sucking goo out of my lungs. And I realize, weirdly, that I don’t need to breathe yet. My body has all the nutrients that breathing would provide already.
The machine pulls away, and I become aware of my ears, which hear the hum of the automation through more layers of goo. Little automated limbs clean the goo from my skin.
My last thoughts drift across my mind, like the memory of a dream. So this is death.
So this is . . . birth?
I’m in a vat? I’ve been reborn?
A warm drug rolls through my veins, making me sleepy again, but just as I begin to drift, an actual person leans over me and cleans the goo from my eyes. Through the goo, I see a halo of red hair. Rashiya. My memory tugs at me. Tells me no. That can’t be right.
The face is different.
Mom.
It’s what my memories say when I see the face. The same angles and the same small green eyes that Rashiya had. But a leaner face, without the round, attractive apple cheeks of John Starfire, the crow’s feet more visible around the eyes. No smile lines.
“You,” she says, as the goo is cleaned from my face. “You bastard. Wake up. You’ve been saved, for whatever you’re worth.”
Feeling returns to my arms and legs, returning as pain, little needles pricking me in every pore all the way up my legs and arms. I remember this pain. From the first time I came out of a vat.
And then a warm flush, and I drift in and out as I’m cleaned off. I can’t tell much of what is happening, save that I’m being moved to a bed. A clean bed in a bright room.
When I wake up, fog clouds the window, turning the room gray.
I sit up, and the gravity lacks any of the itch of the artificial stuff, and feels slightly off the Imperial standard. We’re planetside. That’s real weather out there. An ocean breeze, cold and moist and refreshingly salty, cuts through the house. It’s not the cold, rainy shore where the Thuzerian city was. Grav feels nice and comfortable, if a bit light.
I look down at my body, naked under the cleanest sheets I’ve ever slept on. The synthskin job on my leg has been replaced by a much better one, the mesh under the skin so fine that there’s no trace of it. I flex the leg and it feels as real as it used to, before I lost it. This is the kind of repair job only sentients can get.
I stand. The new leg feels good. Better than the last one. And my tongue . . . my tongue feels like it’s all flesh as well.
I try speaking. “Salutes. Salutes.”
No slur.
I look up and see Aranella.
She’s sitting in a reclining chair, reading a book. She puts it down when she realizes I’m awake. And looks at me. Just looks, and calm as ever, says, “I’m Aranella.”
I just avoid saying I know. She doesn’t need to know I stole her daughter’s memories in death. “You fixed my tongue.” I don’t slur it. “I thought it was unfixable.”
“The vats have gotten better since we took over,” she says. “Who knows more about crosses, a bunch of engineers, or crosses who have managed to outlive their projected lifespan?”
“Did you get rid of the . . .” I touch my face. The scars are still there.
“No, those I told the vat to leave. They suit you.” She carefully folds a bookmark into the book and says, “Now, let’s talk about why you attacked back there, and made yourself that much harder to find.”
“Wait . . .” I say, and the last few hours return, if hazily. “You fired on us.”
“I didn’t fire. Someone in the Resistance did, yes.” She lifts a soulsword—mine, I realize. Same soulsword I shoved through her daughter’s heart. It catches what little light comes through the fog outside.
“I’d really like to shove this sword right through, suck up all your memories, the way you did to my daughter. And then it’ll be over.”
For half a second, I debate honesty or vulnerability. Honesty has always been overrated in war. “I didn’t take Rashiya’s memories,” I lie. “I killed her. But it was a clean death.”
She cocks her head, looks at me as if she can tell whether I’m lying. I hope I look convincing. I’ve never much needed to lie in my life. I’ve spent a lot more time delivering hard truth.
Her expression softens, just a hair.
“How long did you have me in a vat?”
“Two days. It took a little while to find you in that wreckage, but we followed the signature of the resonator in your sword.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Long enough,” she says. “Long enough for everything to change.”
“What does that mean?”
No answer.
A non-sentient construct appears in the door. I’ve only seen them in holos, about rich bluebloods who have enough money to use such things. This one is featureless save for a few breathing holes at the neck. And creepy in person. You can hear it breathing. It has a particular smell too, a thick, sweet gel smell that I associate with the vats. A smell that, until a moment ago, I would have associated entirely with my friends.
“This is what a non-sentient being looks like,” Aranella says. “Too bad they don’t make good soldiers. We’d all be happier.”
“You’re using constructs? The Resistance is using constructs?”
“This planet has always used constructs. Where do you think you are?”
“Back on Irithessa?” I don’t say that, if it weren’t for her, I would figure I was in the afterlife.
“No. We realized quickly that Irithessa had to remain much the same way that it was. All that bureaucracy keeps things from falling apart, even in the midst of consolidation. They keep collecting taxes, they keep up maintenance on terraforming and make sure all the proper bribes are paid at unsavory nodes.”
“No Directive Zero for the bureaucrats?”
“The bureaucrats know how lucky they are. The only humans in the galaxy who don’t have to look over their shoulders.”
The construct reaches out with a padded hand, helps me walk to a closet where a nice arrangement of normal street clothes waits for me. Trousers and shirts, hats and kilts. The kind of thing humans wear. I’ve never worn such innocuous clothes. Even on Shadow Sun Seven I dressed as a fighter. It dresses me up and I can’t help thinking I look like the kid I never was.
Why is Aranella treating her daughter’s murderer like this?
After I’m dressed, carefully moving the new leg, the construct turns me to face Aranella.
“You owe me now, Araskar. I wanted to leave you in space. More than that, I wanted to make a skewer of you, same as you did to my daughter. But I need you. So you’re going to tell me everything you can about the girl. This new Son of Stars you’ve picked to replace my husband.”
Jaqi. She knows about Jaqi?
“I don’t . . .”
“I need you. I hate it, but I do. And I need those kneelers and their masks.”
“What?” I cough, and a bit of vat-juice spatters the bed. “Why? Why do you need us?”
She doesn’t answer.
This business of asking questions with no answers is getting tiresome.
The construct leads me through the hallways of a house nicer than any I’ve ever been in. I see a piano, a massive thing that takes up half a room. More constructs working in the kitchen. Their cybernetic implants, delivering occasional data dumps, flicker with green light. The smell of frying onions and eggs drifts from the kitchen. My stomach groans, and I nearly bend double with hunger.
The construct leads myself and Aranella on a balcony, for the kind of view that sentients usually pay good money for.
Wherever we are, it is a paradise. A rocky beach stretches a few hundred feet below the balcony, and wisps of fog cling to the water and the oak-dotted hills around us, just burning off in the morning sunlight. The sun peeks through the fog out on the water.
“This is gorgeous,” I say, and look over at Aranella. “I could think I was dead, if you weren’t here.”
She narrows her eyes. It’s too close to what Rashiya last said to her. They didn’t part well—the memories are clear on that. Again, Rashiya’s words run through my head. Just find the person who killed me and throw them out an airlock.
I could make my lie true. On the moon of Trace, I wanted to get rid of Rashiya’s memories. I still can. Stick my small soulsword in my arm, suck them up, erase them handily, as I was trained to do with any battle trauma.
But those memories, right now, tell me how to deal with Aranella. The intel in them is priceless to the Reckoning. I hate myself for it, but I can’t cleanse Rashiya from my mind, not yet.
For now, I’ll hope Aranella continues to believe the lie.
“This is Keil,” Aranella said. “You’re standing on the same balcony where Formoz used to greet the morning.”
I peer up at the sky, but it’s too foggy to see the moons this morning, the moons where I almost got killed. “You know, I’ve actually met the children you stole this house from. They may be rich, but they didn’t deserve what you did to them.”
“We didn’t steal the house from anyone,” Aranella snaps. “They stole all their wealth, from the dead. From a thousand years of crosses going to be ground into meat in the Dark Zone.”
I don’t answer that.
“I’m going to ask you to come with me today, Araskar. I’m going to show you what the Resistance made, and see how our most high-profile traitor feels about it.”
“I’m not your highest-profile traitor,” I say. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the leak in the Resistance.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Whatever you’ve made here, it can’t last,” I finally say.
“After you see what we’ve made, we’ll talk. My husband’s gone mad, and as much as I hate it, I need you, Araskar. I need to know about this girl.”
“You think—” I stop myself from saying Jaqi’s name. “You think the girl’s the Son of Stars? You doubt your husband?”
“I don’t know if there is a Son of Stars, or if it’s just nonsense. But my husband’s gone mad. He was mad when he ordered Directive Zero, and he’s just gotten worse. He’s also disappeared. And since he disappeared, the Shir have attacked three separate star systems.”
It takes a long time to find the words for that, and when I do, they’re stupid words to boot. “Oh. So that’s what you meant when you said everything’s changed.”
* * *
Z
“Save the data!”
The Suits’ cry goes through the city, the atmos, the entire planet. It goes through me, the nano-Suits in my bloodstream echoing the cry, rattling my nerves and screaming in my tendons.
My ship rears up, reaches for the sky, the thrusters roaring, burning unthunium. I am joined by the entire Suits’ city. Towers and buildings and vast metal landscapes join together, twist and turn and form and re-form into massive ships, larger than any dreadnoughts, larger than some planets, tearing away from the planet’s crust, leaving gaping holes and sending massive earthquakes through the planet—
It does not matter.
The planet is damned.
A black thread takes up the whole of the horizon. The finger of a dark god. The planet roars in pain as Abaddon pierces it. Dust clouds choke the air. Hurricane winds slam into my ship. The Suits bought sentient slaves to keep on this planet, grew bodies in vats, and so it has oceans, weather, air currents—none of them prepared to deal with the piercing, planet-killing touch of the Spider.
The data. I cannot tell, anymore, whether I hear the Engineer inside myself or inside the ship; all my efforts are to keep my ship from being tossed. Circuits and machinery and even what few plants remain on this planet are uprooted and tossed against my ship with the rush of the wind, the surge of the dust as crust and mantle are vaporized, as superdense Shir eggs implant on the inside of the planet.
I must reach the node. My thrusters burn and scream, the unthunium chamber roaring. I push it harder, for a better burn. Thrust, against gravity, shoves me hard against my seat. I fear that my ship, despite its sense-fields and its atmospheric protection, will be torn apart.
“Take the data!”
The voices come from inside me. The voices of a whole world of Suits, seeking to escape their fate.
My ship hurtles toward the upper atmosphere, carried on the storm. The metal screams. The heat shields wail. The sense-field begins to fail. Atmos hisses away from the ship, but I know I can survive for some time without it, so I do not concern myself.
And then, at last, I rise above the atmosphere of Trace. Below me, the world is all red lightning, black clouds, and death.
Suit ships, like whole moving cities, tear themselves out of the wrack one at a time. Massive clumps of circuitry, of towers joined together. They strive for orbit.
Too many fall back to the planet, caught by the roar of lightning, the suck of the black thread.
I can still hear the Engineer, now joined with one of the ships. Take the data!
“Do you speak to me?” Almost as if I hear him through the dishonorable creatures implanted inside me.
You who know the purpose of the data. Take it.
I know not what he means. Take it? How? And does he mean all of his data?
My sensors register hostiles. Suits? Do they dare attack me now? Where are the—
Ah.
Superdense, light-absorbing, only illuminated by a few ultraviolet frequencies that must be translated by the sensors into a shape for my naked eyes. The Suits dishonorably implanted in my body aid in my perception. For I see them.
The Great Spiders.
Three of Abaddon, each larger than a star. Inside their vast bellies, stars still burn, eaten for fuel to power their massive bodies.
It is a mothering triad, the nightmare of every creature alive. Their black carapaces span vast gulfs of space, and their thousand legs twitch and glow with the strange energy that is their weapon—and their faces. By my ancestors, their faces, massive and alien, thousands of eyes. Jaws like broken spars that can swallow planets.
They only allow themselves to be seen on sensors when they are ready to kill—the rest of the time, they move faster than light, in the web of their own dark nodes.
And they are ready to kill.
One looms over the planet. Sickly blue light, like rotting vegetation, gathers at the ends of its thousand legs. It spirals and twists and forms a shape like a web—and it lays like a skein around the planet, to contain the Suits, keep them from escaping.
I increase thrust. The node is not far. Sensors tell me the Matakas have left the moon and are attacking the Shir.
They die in one twist of the blue energy, the web wrapping their ships and tearing through metal.
They died in something like honor.
I fear I will not.
The Engineer loses a piece of himself, and another. I do not need to pull it up on my sensors. I can see it in my head clearly. His ship was, when it first lifted off, miles and miles long, a moving city transforming itself into a vast dreadnought. Now it is little more than a single blade, stabbing for the freedom of the node. Daggers of sickly blue strike out, and where they touch, metal crumbles, circuits fail, and the Engineer loses data, his ship stripped, dying.
A thousand years he guarded that knowledge, and now he died.
I did not choose to be a vessel for the Suits, but I know this. The knowledge of my ancestors is most sacred above all. And in their own way, this the Suits appreciate.
I think a thing that they will be sure to hear. Give me the data. And let me return to Jaqi.
The Engineer’s knowledge flows into me. The nano-Suits inside me suck up the data, their collective quantum memory taxed to organize that massive stream of information. Over a thousand years of data, since the first Suit attempted to bridge between the failed automatons of the First Empire and flesh sentience.
The Engineer’s ship breaks apart—and three massive shards, glowing red and vile, planet-cracking shards, soar up from what was the Engineer’s ship and tear through the Shir’s web of energy, making a hole for my ship.
I burn through the rest of the fuel as my ship screams for the node.
The shards hit the attacking Spider. A vibration passes through my every molecule, a scream of something so massive it bends spacetime. More blue-white threads reach to weave a skein, trying to trap me—
Just as I pass through, before they close and the Suits die.
I escape the web of death, only because my ship’s thrust is far beyond safe levels for any sentient. I should be torn to pieces, my flesh jelly across my cockpit. But the Suits inside me hold me together.
The Great Spiders spin filaments of sickly blue, flying across the void for me, but I burn hard to the node.
In my head, a thousand years live and die, stories, songs, people long gone and long changed. It is the knowledge that the Suits have managed to put into me, though it is only a fragment of what they gathered. My mind cannot retain it—the entire Second Empire flashes through my poor brain and is forgotten. Dark nodes, the Imperial salvage, the worlds and people and stories that they have gathered, all the Engineer’s knowledge, and then it is all gone.
But one piece of data sticks out, like a scream, like a battle cry, like the last words of the Engineer.
The Shir sing.