Surprisingly, the only debate the Voice’s offer engendered in the Others was whether everyone should go in the Silhouette, or if only a few volunteers should accompany the Slipstream, currently sitting in the larger vessel’s landing bay. But with typical decisiveness, Osgood heard the arguments, reined in the enthusiasm of both naysayers and adventurers, and made her decision: the Silhouette would deliver them to the drop-off point and await the Slipstream’s return. Given the seven-person crew, Osgood decreed a maximum of three people could go, a number Qora could tell she’d chosen knowing that when Laniis volunteered, the Liaison and Na’er would as well. This time, Osgood declined to separate the two males. Perhaps she was hoping they’d resolve their differences on a mission dangerous enough to require close cooperation.
Daqan seemed neither pleased nor troubled by the Others’ choices; perhaps, having done what he felt to be his part, he had put their fates in the hands of the God. Qora only wished he could do the same, but a possibly fatal trip to the birthworld was not a prospect guaranteed to allow him to rest easy. With every hour the ship logged toward their destination, Qora became less sanguine about what he’d become involved in. He was glad Daqan showed no desire to mingle with the crew; his withdrawal left Qora free to seek the Others’ less challenging conversation in the mess hall, and more importantly, their comfort. Especially their comfort. He should have been euphoric at his involvement in the fulfillment of the final prophecies of the Faulfenza. Instead he was as nervous a mess as Sediryl had been, leading pirates. And he’d been so patronizing! God on the Shoulders, forgive him.
Reaching their destination would need less than a week’s travel. Qora wasn’t sure whether he wanted to put their new errand behind them, or never reach the system from which they would launch it. Fortunately, the Others were willing to distract him, though it took several days for the first to broach the topic of the Voice.
“He’s nothing like what I expected,” Laniis was saying over her coffee. “But… ah… he’s definitely got… I don’t know. Presence. Something inexplicable about him. Humans would say a je ne sais quoi, but I always thought that was an unmitigated positive thing. At very least, a more trivial thing. I could be wrong.”
Qora couldn’t help it… he wrinkled his nose at her, and by now she knew she’d amused him. “Aren’t your kind famed for their ability with words?”
“I know! And yet here I am, at a loss for them. What do you think, huntbrother?”
The dragon was stirring sugar into his coffee. A great deal of it. “I think you should have expected someone portentous. Why would the leader of an alien species trouble themselves to seek a single member unless he was worth the effort?” The dragon tapped his spoon free of droplets on the edge of the mug. “He is obviously an important individual.”
“Yes,” Qora said. What to say? He would have demurred before, but how could he keep Faulfenzair secrets from aliens when aliens were involved in Faulfenzair affairs? Intimately, for surely an Emperor Dancing counted. And with these two in particular, who would soon see the birthworld…
Qora had seen the Pelted birthworld. Or their source world, anyway. And Daize was right. They were friends. “Daqan is one of only three prophets to have ever walked our worlds since the beginning of time.”
Had he expected them to understand? He didn’t think they did. But Laniis’s eyes had widened, and the Liaison became grave. What they would have said he never knew, however, because Patrick erupted into the mess, waving a data tablet. “I have a lead!”
“We have already located the missing Faulfenzair,” the Liaison said.
“No, not about that. About this whole ‘visiting the Faulfenzair birthworld’ thing.”
Laniis’s ears twitched back. “And you’re telling us, but not the captain?”
“I wanted to run it past you first, Qora-alet.” Patrick dropped into the chair at the end of the table and set his tablet to project. “Your dignitary said something about your homeworld being destroyed, right? And that travel to it from the drop-off point would take ‘no time.’ That was quite a claim, but it kept pinging my brain until I remembered there were some mentions in the Fleet eye-on databases about slides.”
“Ion databases?” the Liaison said, frowning. “This is a collection of information about astrophysical phenomena?”
“No, no, not ‘ion’. ‘Eye-on,’ as in ‘we keep an eye on them.’” At the dragon’s baffled look, Patrick glanced at Laniis in obvious appeal.
“A hunting metaphor,” Laniis said, inspiring a hiss of comprehension.
“Understood. Continue.”
“Right, so a while back, we, as in Fleet, started making entries about what appear to be artificial wormholes that connect some worlds, but it was mostly theoretical. Twenty years ago, it went from ‘theoretical’ to ‘evidentiary’ when a battlecruiser ran into a situation in the Sargasso with a bunch of killed planets, and then they found a world with bizarre alien tech that got classified.” Patrick shuffled through his files and picked a map, projecting a part of space that was outside both Alliance and Empire. “This is what caught my eye, though.” He scrolled the map coreward. “Here… is the Faulfenzair homeworld. And apparently the mission that took that ship into the Sargasso was undertaken at the behest of…” He looked at Qora. “Your government. So. The Alliance knows about artificial wormholes. They’re associated with dead planets. The information isn’t available to me, even though I should have clearance. And apparently the Faulfenza tipped us off about the phenomenon at least two decades ago. Oh, and finally, the Faulfenzair birthworld is also a dead world.” He cocked his head. “Am I crazy for thinking these things are related?”
“No,” Laniis said. “And I think you should go to the captain with this.”
Patrick nodded. “She might have to pull you off the mission.”
“We’re going,” Laniis said. “If Fleet’s already got a secret team working on it, this isn’t about the Faulfenza alone anymore. It’s about all of us.”
It always had been, Qora thought.
* * *
The solar system the Voice directed them to was empty of everything but its dead world… the dead world, and the anomaly the Silhouette had coasted to a halt before. There was no scientific reason that hole in space should project menace so powerfully it pierced the bulkheads and filled the bridge to choking, and yet, it did. Staring at it, Osgood said with admirable calm, “How did you find this?”
“Our scripture reveals it,” Daqan said. “I spent some time traveling, validating its claims. And this bridge, in particular, was discovered by our last messiah. She left instructions for me.”
“You’re not seriously going through that thing,” Shanelle said, dismayed. “Look at it. It’s like something out of a horror movie.”
Na’er’s jaw muscles were so tight Qora was surprised the Other could squeeze words past them. “It’s just a wormhole.”
The human made a dismissive noise. “That’s just a wormhole like an atom bomb’s just a fission reaction. It wants to hurt people.”
“That’s enough,” Osgood said mildly. “If our allies say it’s been used in the past, then it can be used.”
“Our allies also said it was dangerous,” Patrick murmured.
“We’re going,” Na’er repeated stubbornly. To Qora, he added, “Right?”
“I go where the Voice goes,” Qora said.
“And I go to Quzen,” Daqan said. “But I will say again that it is not needful for you to accompany us. I will do all in my power to protect you from the makers of the bridge, but they will attack us in transit.”
“It’s a wormhole,” Na’er said. “Transit should be instantaneous.”
“It won’t feel that way.”
Osgood’s ears had twitched back. “You didn’t say anything about an attack.”
“I said using the bridge might result in your deaths, or insanity,” Daqan said. “There is nothing you can do to stave off their assault, captain. There is no preparing for it.”
“Then there’s no point discussing it,” Na’er said. “Let’s get it over with.”
There was no sign of Na’er’s bravado in either of the other volunteers. From her silence, Laniis was nervous; and the Liaison was staring at the phenomenon on the display with wings held taut to his back, as if to hide them from view. Only Daqan was serene… but what else? He was the Voice and he was walking the path the God had set before him, the path his messiah had walked first. Qora wondered what it was like: to have dedicated his life to Zafiil’s mission, only to survive her, and be left with the work incomplete.
Did he miss her? What had she been like? Really? Qora’s parents had told him stories of the messiah, whom they’d seen perform, but even for them, she’d been a symbol of the God’s grace, not a person. Qora couldn’t imagine a messiah as a normal Faulfenzair, one born from a mother and father, one who grew up and suffered the normal vicissitudes of life. Maybe he would meet the fourth and learn for himself whether they were paragon or person. Or both, knowing the God and the nature of flesh.
“We’re going,” Na’er said, but this time it was a question, and—
“Yes,” Osgood confirmed. “You are. Come back in one piece.”
* * *
Daqan played the consoles of the Slipstream with the confidence of a trained spacer; watching him should have eased Qora’s mind, but instead it kept seizing on random thoughts. When had the Voice learned to fly ships? Had he been attached to the Hearth as a student? No, that couldn’t be right… the Scroll that made sense of Daqan’s ease in the mountains had mentioned him being born to them. A Scroll that, now that Qora thought about it, had been written by this Voice, who was sitting in front of him, so he could ask. But going through the Hearth’s training wouldn’t have made Daqan an expert in Alliance systems. Would it? Faulfenza born after the technology transfer might have some facility with Other hardware, but Daqan would have had to learn before the Faulfenza made contact with the Pelted.
Except that now he knew they’d made contact long before the official date….
“Is there anything we can do?” Laniis asked, interrupting his frenzied thoughts. “To prepare, or… I guess, to fight back?”
Daqan was silent as the Slipstream forged toward the wormhole. He finished laying in the course, then said, at last, “To call them the builders of the bridge is wrong. Even naming it a ‘bridge’ is false. These names reflect our natures: we see something and assume it was made because our nature is to build, to make, to grow. But it would be more accurate to say that this phenomenon is not the result of a making, but an unmaking. They destroy, and the destruction makes holes—destroys space—and then they use those holes for their purpose. To unmake more things.” He watched the wormhole, not as a wary prey animal might a predator, but like someone who did not fear death. “They will try to unmake you. Be, then, whatever you are, most powerfully.”
Qora expected this cryptic comment to provoke responses, especially from Na’er, who hated them, and the Liaison, for whom Universal was a second language. But for once, everyone received the words in the spirit they were intended: as a warning, and as a task.
What was he, Qora? An Eye without sight?
“To you and I fall the greater task,” Daqan said, as if sensing his anxiety. “The unmakers despise our fire.”
“Fire destroys…?” Laniis said tentatively.
“The MindFire is to fire as spirit is to flesh,” Daqan said. “It is the spark of life manifested in Faulfenzair hands.”
“Our fire can hurt our enemies,” Qora said.
Daqan’s smile was wry, a partial nose wrinkle that didn’t reach his eye. “You have been among Others too long, Qora. We do not hurt. We cleanse.”
“And yet, that can kill.”
“Yes,” Daqan said. “If that is the God’s will. Not ours.”
“Speaker-Singer,” Laniis whispered. “Shanelle was right. It does feel malevolent.”
Na’er reached for her hand and squeezed it.
The Liaison said, “We will fly this storm, huntsister, as we have so many others.”
“What do we do?” Qora asked.
“You and I? We burn,” Daqan said, and the Slipstream plunged into the bridge.