Present day
Ariadne wasn’t sure what to think about the proclamation. She didn’t know the Archon well enough to discern if he was lying, and her military experience was limited to ship comings and goings and their cargo. The Oracle had sheltered her from most things growing up—except the images of the dead.
See, Ariadne? One would have said. This is what it’s like beyond these walls. Death, destruction, war—humans are a violent species. One had these urges controlled in your synapses when One engineered you. You would never survive out there, child. And that’s why One is keeping you.
Ariadne’s breath caught. “Well,” she said, hoping no one noticed how she forced the brightness into her voice, “that was interesting.” She lifted the rock in her glove-clad hand and stared at it through the visor of her helmet. Focus on what you know. “Maybe this is just a rock, then, if it’s not meant to hurt the Evoli.”
Nyx didn’t look convinced as she approached the glass door of Ariadne’s small nook. Ariadne could see why pilots and copilots liked resting in there between shifts. It was perfect for a blanket pile and some starwatching. Or makeshift rock tests.
Nyx gestured to the gemstone and spoke through the comm. “Just don’t touch it and don’t take off your mask when you’re drilling at it. It might not be a weapon, but until we figure out what it is, consider it dangerous.”
Ariadne smiled. “I’m going to name it Josephine. A pretty name for a dangerous rock.”
Josephine was a good name. She would have added the rock to her collection of Named Things she kept on her desk at the Temple on Tholos, where she resided alone, surrounded by the Oracle’s programming screens. Sometimes the Oracle, as sentient and clever as One was, sensed One’s daughter was lonely and had the palace couriers bring gifts to the doorstep of the Temple: rocks, plants, dolls.
Ariadne named all of them. Stupid names, silly names, human names. Like Josephine.
Eris looked at her with a bemused expression. Ariadne still wasn’t sure how she felt about her. She was a little scary, and not like Nyx. Ariadne could trust Nyx to have her back, to protect her. When Eris looked at people, it was like she was weighing the costs of either killing them or keeping them alive. Not comforting.
“You’re not naming the rock,” Nyx said, exasperated.
“Oh, but I am. I’ve decided,” Ariadne said.
Ariadne placed the rock back inside the protective glove, wrapped it up tight, and put it in her pocket. The door gave a soft hiss as she came out of the glass room. Her helmet came off with an easy click. Rhea gave Ariadne an amused look and reached out to smooth down her hair. It felt so nice.
“Rhea.” Ariadne smiled. “Do you like my rock’s name?”
“Of course I do, sweet,” Rhea said. “You came up with it.”
Nyx rolled her eyes. “Can we get back to the topic at hand? I don’t believe that bastard about this truce. The Empire’s resources might be more strained, but that’s happened before in the Empire’s history. The Archon just conquers another planet, fights another battle. Kills a bunch of people. So, I’m still pretty convinced that the rock—”
“Josephine,” Ariadne insisted.
“—is a weapon. And you want to give it a cute name?”
“It’s a good name. I want to get a better look inside of it,” Ariadne said. “It’s shiny when I hold it to the light.” Shiny, glittery, pretty. Definitely how she’d imagine a thing named Josephine would be.
“Are you cracked?” Clo looked like she wanted to confiscate the rock. “Who cares how shiny it is? It set off my mech cuff and you can’t even identify what it is. If you open that thing up and your face melts off, you’re on your own. We’re locking you in the room with it.”
Nyx looked at Clo sharply. “We? Speak for yourself. I’ll shove you in a fucking room with it if you keep talking to her like that.”
Clo’s mouth snapped shut. Ariadne really loved Nyx. Really, really.
“If my face melts off, then you know it’s a weapon,” Ariadne insisted. Josephine was definitely going to be pretty inside; she’d seen a faint glimmer in it earlier, kind of like opal but with more light. “I can lay a few things out in the med center for a better makeshift lab and run a more thorough analysis once I open her up.”
Clo shook her head. “I still think this is a bad idea.” She gestured at Eris. “What do you think? You’re supposed to be leading.”
“This is important,” Ariadne insisted. “We have to know why they were protecting this shipment.”
The words tangled in her mouth; she wasn’t used to speaking so much to people. Typing messages to Kyla back in the Temple was different. She could ponder her words and how they would be received. She could take her time, puzzle over the correct vocabulary.
Here? In person? Ariadne’s vocal responses seemed insufficient to calm everyone. She didn’t know how to make them happy. These women weren’t Named Things, inanimate dolls or objects to sit on her desk that never had an opinion other than the ones she thought up for them. They were people—human beings—and she didn’t know how to interact with anything but the practical thought process coded into the Oracle’s mainframe that punished her for inefficiency.
Ariadne was just a girl. To a computer program a thousand years old, she was replaceable. Others had coded before her; others would after her. She survived by making herself useful, by being better than the others. She’d hoped that if she coded and improved the Oracle’s sentience, that One would learn to feel things for Ariadne, to understand that she had needs, and wouldn’t punish her if she got tired.
Lately, she was tired too often. Obsolete. Things that started to become obsolete ceased to work as efficiently.
That’s when it was time to replace them.
Eris sighed. “Clo might have a point. We could have Kyla take the sample back to Nova and have someone in one of the labs at headquarters analyze it. They’d have a better idea of what it is.”
No. No, no, no. Ariadne needed to prove her worth. She needed to make them realize she wasn’t replaceable, not just some girl who had come to them begging for help like a lost pet, but intelligent, valued, important, efficient, not obsolete—
You’re not here to make them happy. You don’t have to please them with your responses or your work. They’re not the Oracle. They won’t punish you for failure.
She couldn’t be sure of that.
Ariadne looked around wildly for Kyla. The co-commander had given her hope of escape. Of a different life. One still full of danger, but also with freedom. Away from the Oracle, from her Named Things that only offered company in the absence of anything better. It was all Ariadne could do not to propel herself into Kyla’s arms and hug her around the waist as hard as she could.
But Kyla wasn’t in the room, and she couldn’t stop her breathing and it pushed too hard through her chest a one to three four five in out in out in out that started to hurt—
She felt a gentle hand between her shoulder blades. “Shhh,” Rhea crooned. “You’re fine. Me and Nyx are right here with you. Breathe.”
Rhea smoothed her hand down Ariadne’s spine, and a warm tingling spread across her skin. Her breathing calmed. Her heart slowed to a normal cadence. Ariadne could think again. Even so, she gave herself to that touch for a moment, to the comfort of it.
She’d never been touched before Rhea and Nyx. Not ever. She liked it. She loved it. The texture of skin—the whisper of it across her clothes in a downward stroke—soothed her more than the soft bed sheets back in the Temple.
“Thanks,” she whispered to Rhea. Ariadne flushed when she looked at the others. Nyx had seen her have a panic attack once before, but not these strangers. “I need to look at the rock’s interior,” she said again. “With or without your permission. I’m doing it.”
Eris considered her, those green eyes all too sharp and assessing. Ariadne felt like she came up wanting. “All right. But if anything goes wrong, we’re sealing up the lab and putting you in quarantine. Don’t complain when you’re stuck there.”
Ariadne let out a little squeal, gathering materials and leading the way to the makeshift lab. It was in the little glass partitioned subsection of the med center with a series of metal work tables and instruments, there in case an onboard outbreak required quarantine.
“Nyx, can you come in with me?” The other woman was so strong, so imposing, that Ariadne felt just that little bit braver standing next to her.
Ariadne wriggled her gloved hands and donned her helmet once more. She waited as Nyx got into another jumpsuit and helmet.
Rhea, Eris, and Clo remained on the other side of the glass.
“Don’t melt your face off,” Eris muttered. “Kyla will kill me.”
“We’re taking proper precautions,” Ariadne said.
“Hopefully,” Eris said into the speaker from behind the glass.
“You worry too much,” Ariadne sang. “We’ll be fine. Josephine won’t hurt us.”
Eris rolled her eyes behind the partition before speaking into the microphone. “Josephine is an inanimate object of questionable origin. She can’t make the decision. She can’t make a decision.” A pause, then: “And I can’t believe you have me calling a rock Josephine.”
“Alrighty, here we go,” Ariadne said, putting on an affected accent. Nyx rolled her eyes, but Ariadne just grinned at her.
Ariadne sealed off the room and removed the rock from its protective glove. She turned it this way and that. She couldn’t feel it, of course, but it looked completely unassuming.
“Josephine,” she crooned, and then she picked up a low-heat Mors blade.
She started with the smallest cut, to ensure the interior was stable. There was a faint glow, the barest glimmer of startling topaz. She held it away, but the rock still felt cool and stable. She worked to carve a larger hole, but the Mors blade was having difficulty.
“Avern,” Ariadne murmured. “This is going to take a while. The heat input on this is barely cutting it. The Mors blades back at the Temple are built for higher power consumption.”
Next to her, Nyx shifted to get a better look at the microscope. “What are those?” she asked, pointing to the oblong shapes on the monitor.
“They’re endospores releasing with the impact of the Mors blade,” Ariadne explained.
“Anything we should be concerned about?”
Ariadne shrugged. “Possibly. They don’t release with easy handling, but I wouldn’t suggest doing this without a helmet.”
For a few more minutes, she worked at carving into the rock, pausing only when the interior light increased. Through the glass, Rhea pressed her hands against the partition.
“Everyone all right?” Ariadne asked. Her question was pointed to Rhea, who had gone entirely still.
Rhea gave a small nod.
“So, if that thing is dangerous,” Clo said into the mic, “what would happen to us?”
“Oh, who knows?” Ariadne gave a dismissive wave of a gloved hand. “But some substances can make you really sick from organ and bone marrow damage. Or you might start hemorrhaging. Or you can become incapacitated and eventually die. It’s like a surprise! Only the surprise is your death and how quickly it happens.”
“I shouldn’t have asked.”
After a check of the hazard meter on Clo’s borrowed mech cuff—still stable—Ariadne only had eyes for the rock in front of her.
It was as though she held the warm honey of sunset on a summer’s day in Tholos. She’d seen so many of those, through the little window in her workroom, wishing she could reach out and capture it, keep it close. She was mesmerized. By the gods, she’d never seen anything more beautiful.
Ariadne smiled smugly at Nyx. “See? Josephine is gorgeous.”
“Does the ship’s computer show any hazardous spikes?” Clo’s voice sounded through the speakers. “Please tell me no. I don’t want to hemorrhage and die.”
Ariadne checked. “Nah, but it’s still scanning the endospores that were just released. Stay behind the partition.”
Ariadne shivered. Of course something so pretty would be dangerous. Wasn’t that often the way of things? When Ariadne watched her vids, she remembered seeing explorations of a planet called Colchis. It had a flower called the Night Rose, which only bloomed once a year, when the moon was highest in the sky. It was considered to be the most beautiful in all of the Empire, and for those brief hours of its bloom, the poison on its petals killed any human who touched it within minutes.
Yes, beautiful things were always underestimated.
“So, what’s the purpose of this?” Nyx asked, leaning closer, as if hypnotized by the subtly shifting colors. The inside of the rock was so vibrant it made fire opals look like cheap marbles in comparison.
“Maybe it’s a gift?” Ariadne asked. “I mean, it’s lovely enough. The Tholosians have a clear protective blocker they can use to paint these for jewelry. It costs a lot, but I’ve seen them do it with lustercite, which can kill people in its natural form. It’s so sparkly.” At Nyx’s questioning look, Ariadne pressed her lips together. “On the vid-screens. I used to watch the holiday balls from the Temple.”
Nyx stared at her for so long that Ariadne wondered if the other woman pitied her for such an admission. But in the end, Nyx just shook her head. “No, you’re not turning it into a necklace. Too dangerous. And it looks flammable,” Nyx said.
Ariadne opened her mouth but Nyx cut her off. “No. Absolutely not. We are not setting the hazardous rock on fire. Do you hear me?”
“Gods, you sound like a mother.” Ariadne pretended to be annoyed, but really, she liked it. She’d never had a mother. Not a good one, anyway. “Let me run the analysis.”
The analyzer ran composition through the Oracle’s database, which stored details of every known and identified material in the galaxy. Ariadne herself had helped organize and maintain the database for Tholosian scientists exploring new planets for resources.
The analyzer beeped twice.
Ariadne frowned. “That’s strange.”
“What’s strange?” Clo asked. “Oh, gods, am I going to die?”
Ariadne shushed her. “Nothing like that. Analysis has remnants of a record about something, but it’s been almost completely wiped. The truncated entry shows that there are teeeeny tiny pockets that hold more endospores. But if those were identified and catalogued, that information was removed with the deleted log. The rest shows that this thing is extremely dense and hard. Very, very. You all saw how much the Mors struggled.”
Nyx leaned in and gave a low whistle at the results. “Could they make it into a high-density blast?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“How possible?” Eris asked into the mic.
Ariadne gave it a thought. “Welllll, if—theoretically, of course—we were discussing another battle against the Evoli, I’d say that their armor has become extremely effective against Mors weaponry. And that—theoretically—this could puncture it.” She put a finger up. “But, conversely, this brings me to my second thing: it could make some very, very pretty armor.”
“Hmm,” Eris said into the mic. “All right, put the damn rock into one of those canisters, get cleaned up, and meet us in the rec room down the hall.”
Ariadne slid the glowing rock into the lead-lined canister and sealed it up tight.
She felt the loss of that sunlit glow. It had been that beautiful.