I’m going to try this recording again. They’re all working in the new restaurant and no one is paying attention to me anyway. They didn’t notice that I didn’t come to eat with them. They’re too busy. I don’t want to talk to them but they could at least notice that I don’t want to.
I wanted to tell you about the day that Mama died. We were on the station, but just a rest period, not defending it. No one told us that the troops were on their way. We were sitting and talking and Mama was telling us a story about our grandmother.
And then the station alarm sounded, and everything was loud, and my ears popped because the pressure was dropping and everyone was grabbing for suits.
Mama got us into ours. Then she turned around and was going to grab hers and someone shot her. I didn’t see where the shot came from.
She was three steps ahead of us, and she took a step and there was a flash and then she was just a shape in the air, and then there was just falling ash.
You and I both ducked away without thinking, just reacting. I would have stayed with her, but you grabbed me, and we did find Niko, the way Mama wanted. That’s what saved us because we didn’t realize what had happened until we were under cover and Niko had sent the team of Nnetis in to disable the lasers.
We didn’t know they had arc-lasers, but we should have. I think Niko has suspicions about how that happened, but she’s never talked to me about them.
We fought. We had to, we didn’t have time to cry, but we fought as though every drop of blood was a tear shed for her, and as though if there were enough of them, it’d bring her back.
Niko came to us afterward to make sure we knew she would take care of us. She was angry with whoever hadn’t given us all the information we needed to take the place safely. We could smell that anger lying on her, thick as a film of sweat, but she didn’t show us any of it in her face or her voice.
She couldn’t bring back our mother, she said, and she apologized for that.
And we still had each other, and we still had her and the others, and that has always been enough, but with you gone, it wasn’t, so I did this and now I’m wondering what will happen because you won’t be my brother, will you? Or maybe?
Please?
Okay, someone’s coming. Stopping again for now.
Gio brought Jezli and Roxana their desserts, confections made of sparks and bits of mint and thin sugar rods, each containing liquid of a different, decidedly non-sweet flavor. He carried the tray carefully from the doorway; Jezli had her back half-turned and didn’t see him.
Niko wasn’t sure exactly what she had hoped for, although something like Jezli leaping from her seat to shout “Discovered!” and immediately releasing whatever it was she was doing that kept the Gate from working would have been fine.
Instead, as Gio set down the dish, she said with what appeared to be genuine pleasure, “Gio! I knew you’d get away from Gnarl someday. So this is where you ended up?”
She cast a glance at Niko. “Sly captain!” she said. “You knew how pleased I’d be to see him and saved that for the last as delightful accompaniment to the closing note. True mastery! I can see why they say your last restaurant was in line to receive a Nikkelin Orb.”
Niko scowled at her. “He says you’re a con woman.”
“I am an explorer,” Jezli said, “and explorations are not cheap. So sometimes I … mmm, fund myself in nontraditional ways. But if you have met Gnarl—ah, I see you have—you can discern why I might have had fewer scruples using him to create that funding than I would in a case like, say, yourself and your noble crew.”
Roxana studied the end of her eating utensil and said nothing.
“I have studied the Forerunners and learned a great deal,” Jezli said, “although only a drop of a vast sea. This necklace…” She touched the crystals around her neck. “It is of Forerunner origin itself and allows me to speak to an ancient ghost of their kind, and when that ghost and I work together, as we will tomorrow, we can activate the Gate by reminding it of its purpose.”
“And then move on through the Gate,” Roxana said.
“True, we have things we must be doing elsewhere,” Jezli said. “I hope I have set your mind at rest, Captain?”
“You have done nothing of the sort,” Niko said. She laid the bill on the table. Another traditional Velcoran touch, the plastic round was imprinted with molecules from the flavors they’d tried and bore the total cost of the meal in its center. “A twenty-percent tip is traditional if you have enjoyed the service.”
She was irritated to find Jezli had left a tip as large as the bill itself.
The next day, everyone clustered around one of the Thing’s view screens to watch Jezli and the Gate. The Thing put up the main sight of the Gate, hanging there, empty in space. It gave Niko chills to look at that. It wasn’t right. Wasn’t how a Gate should look.
There was the pinpoint of light that was Jezli in a space suit, supposedly conferring with the Gate. Niko refrained from making any of the expressions that she wanted to make. She could just see the prophet in her mind’s eye, smile sanctimonious and effulgent, dressed in the flowing robe that surely belonged to no genuine order.
Niko found herself holding her breath as she watched it, nonetheless. You knew these sorts of moments when they came, full of splendor and spectacle. She’d lived through more than one in her time with the Holy Hive Mind. There was grandeur to them, a sense of living history, of being part of a story that would get told over and over again that made her feel small and humble in a way she was unaccustomed to at any other time.
Dabry stood beside her, watching.
She said, “What if Farren fails to open the Gate?”
“Then we may end up the nucleus of a station here, in which case we will be its finest restaurant, and perhaps might try a rotating menu,” he said. “But there is no reason to doubt that Farren can do what she has been seen to do before.”
“I still believe there is some trickery at the heart of it.”
“Given what we have seen so far of her, I am forced to concur. Gio’s story has shown that she thinks quick and is glib. That’s not a pair of qualities he’s known for falling prey to.”
“Maybe she’s why he learned not to,” she pointed out. “This is how one learns, burning fingers when you touch.” A thought occurred to her. “And how has Atlanta been doing? Has she found her course yet?”
“She has not,” he admitted. “Sometimes I think she won’t. That she deliberately misunderstands herself.”
“In all our time together, have you ever failed with a soldier?”
He tapped his lips with an upper hand’s finger, thinking. “There are some that I have done better with than others,” he said. “Have I given those others short shrift? Was it that I was not patient or diligent or smart enough with them? Surely it must be. And surely that must be at the heart of Atlanta’s failure as well. She is—or believed herself to be—an Imperial heir. She is smart and well taught, and secure enough in herself not to doubt herself while remaining cautious. So surely it is that I have failed her, somehow.”
His voice was unexpectedly desolate. Niko reached out and touched his upper elbow. “You have not failed her,” she said. “She will find her feet, given enough time. They always do, you know that as well as I do. You are feeling low.”
“I am,” he admitted. “I have been thinking sometimes that perhaps I should have died with my family. As it is, I have never said goodbye to them, never seen their bodies. Never set foot on the planet where they died.”
“Then we will do that, once this thing with Last is over,” Niko said. “And it will be over, I swear it. We are quite a cunning mob, and he cannot outthink all of us. Particularly Skidoo. She thinks sideways sometimes.”
As she’d meant it to, the thought made him smile. She released his elbow, feeling reassured. Dabry’s imperturbable nature was one of the constants of her universe, but she knew that he had dark moments, ones that he usually hid from her so she did not know they had happened until a chance remark long after would let her know of their passing. She did not know how to stave them off, other than keeping him busy.
At least there would be plenty to do once they were on the other side of the Gate. Plenty to do for all of them.
The Gate shimmered into life.
Funds were transferred into the bank account of one Jezli Farren.
And the spot of light that had marked the position of said Jezli Farren beside the Gate vanished.