John Starfire
YOU WOULD HAVE TO be an idiot not to be afraid. To stare at a wide expanse of starless space, the darkness full of the nightmares of a few trillion sentients?
He’s afraid.
The fear sharpens the hope.
Not two hours ago, he stood in the Imperial Navy’s central hub, examining supply lines. Dreadnoughts blinking in and out of the Dark Zone. Casualty numbers from a never-ending war against the Shir.
John Starfire pushed a few buttons, activated the clearance he’d taken from the Emperor’s mind with his soulsword, and changed the node-codes. The pure-space relay pinged. Military node-codes were changed on a fairly regular basis anyway. This would have been routine, as long as the new codes had been communicated.
But they hadn’t.
No one knew these new codes but him.
That quickly, and the lines of supply stopped. Not a single dreadnought in the Dark Zone would ever leave. As soon as they ran out of ammunition, they’d be Shir food.
The only way they might escape would be if there was one of the very rare cases among them, one of the crosses born with an instinctive ability to manipulate nodes. But John Starfire looked all over the galaxy for one like that, and found no one.
Now, he stands before the Dark Zone.
Within those nightmarish light-years, that massive section of starless space, whole Imperial dreadnoughts are being torn apart. Billions of soldiers are dying, firing off their last planet-crackers and missiles. They will each be fighting the fear, trying to die with what little honor they thought they owed their masters. They will be swimming in vacuum. Looking for hope, like he once did.
He hates to think of it. They don’t deserve to die. But he has done what he must.
He breathes in the stale, recycled air of his small ship.
He breathes in his own fear.
You don’t need to be afraid, he tells himself. You’re it. You’re the prophesied one, the Son of Stars. It feels real, feels right, coming from his mouth. The children are the key. All he has to do is let the Shir bear one generation of young.
What if you’re wrong?
He curses that voice. It’s normally quiet, but two days ago Aranella doubted him, and it’s been all the stronger since.
“Our daughter is in one of those units that’ll make planetfall,” Aranella says. “On Irithessa. John, I can’t think of her doing—”
“She made her choice, Nella.”
“No,” she says. “Formoz is right. If there is a chance to wind down the war slowly, with negotiation, we should take it. Think of how many troops will die when we attack Irithessa.” Aranella stands up. “Be patient this time.”
“I am speaking as the Son of Stars, Aranella.”
She fixes him with her gaze, the words unsaid trembling on her lips. “It cannot be that easy. You’re speaking the words of God, just because you want to be right?”
“I know when it’s destiny. I can taste it. I can see it all, laid out in front of me.” The words taste right. He can feel the truth on his lips.
“I don’t believe you.” She puts a tender hand on his arm. “For one thing, you haven’t slept in a week.”
He yanks his arm away from her. “You doubt me? Now? Just because our daughter is in danger?”
“I’ve always doubted you,” she says. “Someone has to.”
“Not anymore,” he snaps.
“If our daughter dies, Jaceren, I won’t forget this.”
“She won’t die,” he replies. “Trust me.”
The big moments unroll before him. The Empire, falling. The Shir, bearing more children.
Now, he enters the node. Punches in the code, vanishes into the darkness.
It’s cold.
It’s dark.
The cockpit is lit only by a sickly blue half-light, like rotting vegetation. Voices whisper, and he’s chilled, and his fear all the stronger.
The fear speaks with his voice. The humans know. They know what you’re doing. They’ll regroup, and then you’ll never be rid of them. They’ll get into everything. They’ll make you serve. The humans. The humans.
A fear even louder than the voices. You are one of them. You are just a human, and Jorians are just a myth.
And the voice he recognizes. You aren’t the Son of Stars. You’re a cross who got lucky. The words feel right because you want them to be right.
He grits his teeth against that one, against the way it tears into him.
And then a different voice, one as cold as vacuum. You have no name.
He doesn’t know how they do that. “I have many names. You can call me Jaceren.” He doesn’t hesitate to use the Jorian name anymore, even if it’s not the one that made him famous.
You have no name.
On the display, a million planet-sized threads shift, like a great web.
One of them is near.
He speaks, and the air in his ship tastes like an open grave.
He tries to keep the memories clear, everything that came through the memory-crypt. The children are key. The Shir’s children.
“I came to offer you something.”
Offer. Us.
There are others now. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he can sense them as well. They move through the dark webs, faster than light, yet restricted to the Dark Zone. Why? Because they have fallen from pure space?
“You’ve enjoyed this, yes? A Navy that you can beat for once. A battle that doesn’t end with retreat.”
Retreat? Pain floods him. They’re angry now. Good, he tries to remind himself, it’s good to make them angry. He can use their anger against them.
“I offer you time. World where you can implant your children.” He doesn’t pause, despite the importance of the phrase. “A cease-fire.” Only for a few months, God, let it be so. The Empire must be consolidated, the bluebloods removed, crosses installed in power, and then, most crucially of all, the Shir, who have not produced a new generation in a thousand years, must be allowed to produce one new generation of juveniles. And then all his Resistance will be restored to the full glory of the Jorians.
If it works.
It will work. He is the Son of Stars, and so it will work.
You taste like fear. You taste like fury.
You taste like all things good.
Their whispers sound like the fear. The sort of thing that lives at the back of his mind, trying to drag him into the darkness. Trying to keep him from what he knows to be true, that humans are a scourge, that he was chosen to eliminate the scourge. He is the Chosen One.
You are the one, yes?
And after a moment, the voices whisper, No. No, you are not the one.
He stops. “What?” They sound so much like the voice, the doubt that clamors at the back of his mind, that it takes a moment to recognize that they spoke again.
You are not the one. The tenderest of flesh. That one is yet to come.
“What are you . . .” Stop, he thinks, it makes no difference what the Shir babble about.
But fear seizes the back of his mind, a clutching, grasping, terrible fear. He must be the Son of Stars. If he is not chosen, if he is not going to find the legendary uncorrupted ones and make more nodes, if he cannot head a Third Empire—then all of it is in vain. All of it. He clutches his sword’s hilt, shaking, half drawing it before he remembers a sword won’t do any good.
Your fear is sweet.
He forces the words, against the fear. “A cease-fire. Will you take my offer?”
What will you give us?
“I am broadcasting, on a universal Imperial channel, the locations of solar systems you can attack without fearing reprisal.” Death sentences to those solar systems. He hates himself for it. Trillions of innocents will die and it will be his fault. But there must be another generation of Shir.
We can make our larvae there.
“Are you speaking as the Son of Stars?” Aranella’s words twist and pivot in his mind. They spin like webs.
He opens his mouth, to answer Aranella, and answers instead the devils. “Yes.”
And a prayer, a desperate prayer escapes his lips. A weak, momentary prayer, to a God he thought he forgot.
“Let me be right.”
* * *
Jaqi
I yank the sword from the bastard’s back. Them devils’ voices spin in my mind, crawl down my spine. The force of the yank sends me reeling backward, and the vast distance below us yawns—and I reach for the music again, and think, Good solid floor!
Both of us—skewered John Starfire and I—appear about three feet off the ground near Whirr.
And crash into that floor.
Ow.
Had to be Imperial standard grav, aiya.
Also, why didn’t I think good solid floor when he was trying to kill me?
John Starfire screams in pain, and coughs blood.
“So you en’t dead. Well, what kind of asshole are you?” I say, as if that’s somehow a good question to ask this bastard when he’s lying here bleeding out. “You flew into the Dark Zone and offered the devil whole planets full of people!”
He twists around and looks at me, tries to say something. Just blood comes out, runs down his handsome chin.
He en’t going to answer me. By the look of things, he’s on his way out—I stuck that big old sword right through his chest, and must have gotten a lung or an artery or something important. He’s got minutes.
He hacks up blood, adding to the puddle he lies in, but then he tries to rise on his hands.
I ought to just stand here and watch him die. That’d be mighty satisfying.
But no, he owes folk too much. I gotta do this aboveboard.
“I en’t the right one to ask about justice,” I say. “In the spaceways, folk give you trouble, they find themselves out the airlock. But I figure you ought not to die. Ought to stand before the galaxy and admit the Chosen One business was never true.”
He tries getting up on his hands, tries speaking, but just coughs up more blood.
I’d better get this scab into a vat, soonwise, if I want him to live. You there?
The music comes rushing back.
Can you get us to a vat? I picture what I’m thinking. Somewhere I can find again, quick. A nice one, though, that’ll work quick enough to fill the holes in this fella.
The music goes into a loop, almost like it’s thinking.
Whirr is still standing there. “I noticed you both have severe lacerations.”
“Oh, you think?” I say.
“Medical automatons have been summoned to deal with your injuries.”
“I like you, Whirr,” I say.
We hit the node before Whirr can do a thing. Time itself seems to wrap around me, and I almost think I can see all of this moon, and all of Earth below. This moon was what all humans, which was, it seems, my ancestors, looked up and saw when they crawled from the muck. The Earth that was lost, and now is waiting for folk to discover it again.
I look around the next minute, and I’m in a real fancy private shuttle. And there in front of me, a real fancy private vat. Real high-headed fancy stuff. Shining with the best nutrients and skin-builders in the goop. Not just going to patch you up with metal and plastic, but will really put the meat and guts back together.
I grab John Starfire under his bloody shoulders, and drag the big lug over. “Got to do this all aboveboard,” I mutter. “Would love to just toss you out an airlock, but that’d just be too easy.”
He’s a big fella. Hard to get into the vat, even when I get it to open, and the smell of that weird jelly wafts through the shuttle. I get under his shoulder and more of his blood and guts spills all over me, and I toss him in.
He falls into the jelly, and looks at me, and manages to crank out one word. “St—ssss—starfire.”
“That’s your name, yep.”
Only after I get him in there do I realize that the thing made of music has brought me right back to the monster’s den; this has got to be John Starfire’s own private shuttle. One look outside confirms it. Night is falling, a completely starless night.
I’m back in the temple on the planet in the Dark Zone. In my own galaxy.
John Starfire’s shuttle is parked on the beach just a short walk from the temple.
First I find the aid-packs left in his shuttle and slap some synthskin gel on the leg and breast he cut. That one has bled good, so I find a water-pack and drink the whole thing and I show great personal strength because I resist the urge to look for food.
I go duck into the ocean water real quick, gasping at the cold, to wash his blood and guts off of me. It stings like hell in my breast, but it’s nice to be clean.
And then, my sword blazing with blue fire, like a hero in a story, ’cept for being soaking wet and starving, I walk back into the temple. The sense-field is open for me and everything. Scurv is naught to be found—I reckon vi just went back to our shuttle and took a nap.
Just like a hero in a story, I walk on into the temple, and back onto the bridge spanning the abyss, and raise my sword.
And then I ruin the fancy bits of it and say, “Uh, salutes.”
The uncorrupted Shir finds me in a rush of music, pours that music over me, swirling notes and riffs and so much music that I feel like it’ll lift me up and turn me into a piece of music myself.
It’s a bit much, really. “One of these days, slab, I’m going to play you some slick-down. All you need is a beat and a bass. None of this fancy stuff. Get your extradimensional ass moving.”
Music wells up. We can join now. We can— I don’t know how to represent this joining thing it talks about, except to explain the music. The thing sings to me in two different parts, that complement each other and also seem to bounce off each other, and then to represent the joining, they merge. Not joining. Becoming.
“Easy now. We joining together—well, I en’t picky anyway. But en’t you got a name at least?”
It “laughs” at the idea of a name.
“I’ll call you Kid. You’re a young’un still, as your folk reckon time?”
The music is confused. It has no idea what time is. “Never you mind.”
I feel this thing more than ever. I reckon I can almost see, and taste, and touch, them musical notes, as strange as that sounds. I could almost reckon I have more senses, feelings I en’t got words for, and it’s touching all them feelings too.
“This joining,” I say to Kid. “It going to change me?”
All is change, says the music, or something along them lines.
“John Starfire thinks—he thinks he can make more of you. More uncorrupted Shir. Long as he lets the spiders have their babies.”
The music swoops around me, swirls, waiting.
“He reckons them devils leave this planet alone because they sense you, think of you as one of their own young. And he reckons that if they have more young, and he reaches to them young ones through you, he’ll be able to . . .” I don’t know the right way to say this. “To pull them in pure space? He’ll have a whole bunch of uncorrupted Shir, making a billion new nodes to anywhere in the galaxy, joining with his soldiers, and they’ll all be like the Jorians in the stories.” This is what he got from studying lots of them memory-crypts, all them piecemeal bits of information from the end of the First Empire. “Is it true? If the Shir reproduce, can we make more like you?”
The corrupted ones cannot be . . . uncorrupted, Kid says through music. Children or parents. They know only hunger now. You can only destroy them.
Aw hell, I was afraid of that. Not that I usually want John Starfire to have the right idea, but this time I really hoped his mad plan had something to it.
They remember just enough to leave me alone, but they do not understand. Their hunger consumes them.
“How’m I supposed to destroy them?”
I do not know.
Kid doesn’t know. Hell. I figured that at least with this thing, opening new nodes, we could at least surprise the Shir. But I know the Resistance en’t got all the Imperial factories running full-tilt yet. And even if I ran around opening lots of new nodes under every Shir’s nose, and tossed a planet-cracker at every single one, they wouldn’t be stopped.
“Well, how we going to make more of you?”
I will bear young, because you will bear young.
“Uh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that one, I reckon . . .”
You will bear young.
The way the music comes across, there en’t nothing iffy about that will. “Hang on, Kid. You telling me I’m laden?”
You will bear your child. In time, more and more young will come through your line, and new nodes will open for each of them.
“I’m laden? I just fought a battle at the end of space and I just took out the Chosen Oogie and we gonna fight the devil and I’m laden?” I didn’t realize I fell to my knees till I realize I’m staring down the abyss under this bridge. “I’m going to have a child?”
I shall also mature and bear a child, to match with yours.
“How’m I laden?” I say stupidly, and immediately wonder why the music doesn’t smack me up the head. Out the airlock with you, Jaqi. I know how. I remember every nice little minute of it. I just . . . do I feel like I been smacked.
“Didn’t remember to take that old pill,” I say, and it sounds so funny I break out laughing. “That pill! Bill told me, and weren’t his face red when he said it, if you get the slack from someone has the right bits, you take the pill or we’ll need that much more water and air.” And of course Araskar had the right bits, being another cross.
Well, that makes me chuckle. En’t two sentients in the whole galaxy less qualified to bear young than myself and Araskar.
You do not want the child?
I manage to get up. “I’m a mess of feelings right now, and I’m talking to a thing what’s made of music about whether the devil’s gonna eat us all, so now don’t seem like an ideal time to go bringing a child into the galaxy.”
Kid’s music swells around me, and I almost lose track of where I am. I don’t know how to say what the music’s telling me.
It just feels like hope.
“Hope,” I say, and laugh. “I weren’t made to hope. I was made to run.”
And there’s the music, reaching through me, touching all my senses plus a good hundred other feelings. Nothing I can put name to. I see the nodes, all of them, everything the Empire made, stretching through this galaxy and beyond, see a whole universe that can be in our hands.
To exist is to hope.
I remember Bill’s, just about ten years ago. The place stinks, but I don’t notice, because I’m sniffling, snorting my nose into some tissues. I’m curled up in bed, Bill’s arm around me, and the pillow under my head is wet and stinks of my tears.
I’m crying because we’ve messaged every scab everywhere, and my parents is just gone, just went to do a salvage job and didn’t come back, and I en’t got a clue where they may be, but all odds on dead. Even Bill’s said so. He holds me, and strokes my cornrowed hair and whispers, “Shouldn’t be true, bug. Shouldn’t ever be true. But ’tis.”
I hate him for it, but I know he’s right. The galaxy’s got a lot of scabs. No one’ll miss my parents ’cept me.
I en’t let myself think on it in years, but I think I saw that girl in Kalia and Toq. I think I saw them alone and crying and missing their own mater and pater.
Right now, I got the whole universe at my fingers. Which means I can bear a little girl whose mama will always come when she calls.
I stand up and I reckon I feel a little different. “Did we—we join together? Like you said?”
We have become one, Kid says. I reach out, and yep, I can see the nodes in a way I en’t never been able to before—like gleams of light in a web that stretches over the whole universe. I can go wherever I want, just by figuring on it. Unlike before, when I had to be close to a node to ken it, now I can just find the node in my head.
I could go anywhere in the universe.
I’ll go find Scurv, and we’ll get off this planet, and figure out what we’re going to do about the devils.
And hell, en’t no one like a laden woman for getting spoiled on food. I’m going to invoke the Chosen One’s privileges and eat like a black hole.