“IT COULD BE worse” was, in Viv’s experience, a phrase people tended to use when they didn’t see exactly how. So when Zanj used it, as they peered down onto the Ornclan camp from the shelter of a crumbling crystal tower, she didn’t bite the lure—only watched, and stewed, and tried to think of a solution.
Xiara did not have Viv’s experience. “How?”
“Well,” Zanj said, “they didn’t expect me, so they only sent one Pridemother. It’s not even very large as these things go. Plus, your Chief brought our ship here. Otherwise we would have had to dodge Pride halfway across Orn.”
“But there must be a hundred drones between us and your ship. Not to mention the fighters.”
“Those are not fighters,” Hong corrected gently. “Our holy books call them close air support.”
Viv laughed, then realized Hong was looking at her funny, and rolled back her sound-memory tapes a few seconds: he had slipped into a different language just then, sonorous and ancient as a priest’s Latin, and the translation gimmick followed him. “Sorry,” she said, to Xiara more than Hong. “Don’t worry about me. Keep going.”
“I can’t see the Ornclan at all.”
Hong’s face, his voice, his body compressed to a grim line. “The Pride have no reason to suspect your Chief has betrayed them, but they will keep the Ornclan under guard until Viv is theirs. Your people will be corralled, safe. However, if the Pride cannot find us, they may seek compensation for their failure by harvesting your clan’s blood.”
Xiara looked sick. “What do you mean, harvest?”
“Your germline piloting adaptations and your nanobiome are valuable. As long as they’re in system…”
Viv grabbed Xiara’s shoulder in time to stop her from sprinting out of their hiding place in a futile attempt at rescue. “Don’t worry. We can fix this. We just need to be smart.”
“Why?” Gray sat on top of the wall in what would have been plain sight if he had not made himself transparent for the purpose. He kicked his crossed legs, unconcerned. “We can just eat them.”
“Don’t eat people.”
“The Pride count as people?”
“The Pride,” Viv said, “count. So do the Ornclan. Who might die in the crossfire if we’re not careful.”
“Fine.” He sounded bored.
Xiara glared at him. “I still can’t believe you’re working with this monster.”
“I’m not a monster,” Gray said, haughty. “I am a Gray of Grayframe.”
“You kidnapped people and ate their dreams.”
“Look.” He raised his hands. “I said I was sorry! I didn’t even know what I was doing at first, and I promised Viv I wouldn’t do it again.”
“You forced my mother to break hospitality.”
“I didn’t force anything. I took over the manufactory, sure. What was I supposed to do? Die?”
“Is death so fearsome to you?”
“Yes!”
“Quiet,” Viv said. “Both of you. Before the Pride hear you.” They shut up, at least. “You,” with a finger jabbed at Gray, “apologize to her. Sincerely.”
Gray rolled his transparent eyes, but when he saw the expression on Viv’s face he sobered fast, and turned to Xiara. “I am sorry I kidnapped your people and ate their dreams.”
Xiara glared at him, grim and earnest as a blade. Gray looked back at her, nonchalant at first, but his eyes widened slowly and his shoulders slumped as he appreciated the depth of her anger—either truly contrite or faking it well. “I really am sorry.”
Xiara frowned, and he winced, and Viv wondered if maybe he really was sincere. “Xiara,” she said gently. “He promised to help me. If we sneak past the Pride we’ll get him offworld, far away, and he’ll never bother your clan again.”
“Very well,” Xiara said, and Gray relaxed. “Monster.” His shoulders sank again.
“Great. Glad that’s settled. Now all we have to do is find a way past the Pride.” Viv pushed herself back from the ledge, touched her knuckle to her lower lip, and turned the problem over in her mind. She felt comfortable, familiar, and after a few breaths she realized why. Everyone was looking at her. Waiting for her to tell them what to do.
Everyone except Zanj. Who was lying on a small pile of rubble, juggling three pebbles one-handed, and watching the clouds.
“Do you have anything to add?”
Zanj’s lips revealed teeth in a long, lazy smile. “No. You got us out of his mess.” With a tail flick toward Gray. “Who knows how long I would have kept fighting if you weren’t there? And while I understand the outlines of our, let’s call it a deal, I’m still not clear what sort of violence I can do without offending your sensibilities. I know what I’d do in your shoes. But you want to lead. So, lead.”
Viv was half-tempted to launch into her plan just then—but injured pride would fester. Besides, there was always the chance Viv had missed something. She needed Zanj as a partner, not a passenger. She needed them all. There was too much galaxy for her to beat alone. “What would you do?”
Zanj’s face softened with surprise at being asked. She rolled to her feet, catching the stones she’d been juggling in the process. “As I see it, and as per usual, Viv’s the problem.”
“Thanks.”
“If we could pull you through the Cloud, I’d suggest we hit them fast, then jump away, leaving a big enough trail that the Pridemother and her brood will follow us. Then we could lose them in the Cloud, or at least take the fight somewhere with fewer bystanders. But you need a ship.”
“Can you lead them away, then double back?”
“They won’t all follow me. They know you need a ship, so they’ll keep a guard on the Question.”
“What if we both took off at once—and you made a bigger splash, to draw them off track?”
Zanj seemed less bored by that idea. Her tail twitched. “That could work. If the ship had fuel. And if we had a pilot.”
“Gray can fuel us up.”
His head spun around three hundred degrees on his neck; somewhere in the field of space behind him, a white bird struck a Pride ship’s effector field and vaporized. His skin reproduced the exchange in sordid detail. “What?”
“You’ve been eating straight from the matter siphon for months. You made that whole paradise. I bet you can make fuel for the Question.”
Gray did not exactly radiate confidence. “Boss, it’s really not the same sort of thing. I can build anything, but I need time, and feeding fuel right into an engine—”
“Can you do it?”
He held his hand flat and tilted back and forth: maybe?
“Close enough.”
“Which still leaves us in want of a pilot,” Zanj observed. “Unless Gray can fly and fuel you up at once.”
“Fly? Like, a ship?” He laughed. “What kind of backwater rube do you take me for?”
“I’ll fly.” Xiara stood on the rooftop between them, looking brave and, as their eyes settled on her, more and more unsure. She glanced from Viv, to Hong, to Grayteeth, to Zanj, and back to Viv, her hands clenched, knuckles white. “If you’ll still have me after what the Ornchief did. I want to get him off my world. And I want to go with you.”
Viv wanted to hug her, but didn’t let herself. Xiara had talked about her dreams of flight and of the stars like they were some grand adventure that would happen to someone else: of course I’d go into the world, fight demons and evil empires, risk death, dismemberment, abandon my home and family without any assurance I’ll return, all to reclaim the sky my mothers were denied. It was one thing to want that, and another to live it—to leave the life you’d known, and step onto a road you once thought a dream.
“She’s never flown,” Hong pointed out. “She’s never left the planet.”
Zanj, on the other hand, looked interested. “Viv doesn’t have a soul, and we don’t hold it against her. Much. Xiara has the nanome, the training, she knows the songs of Orn. She’ll do.”
Hong blinked, looked away, raised one hand to his temple, paced.
Zanj raised one eyebrow. “Go ahead.”
“You can’t be suggesting we put someone who’s barely seen a ship, let alone flown one, in the cockpit.”
“I’ve seen the people of Orn fly.”
“You also thought the city would still be here!”
Xiara didn’t seem to have heard either of them. She was watching Viv—to see if the gift she’d offered would be honored, or cast aside.
Hong had a point. Hong had all the points. If this were a board meeting, he’d have the charts and graphs, the carefully formatted and cross-checked statistics on his side, all the transitions right. And if this were a board meeting, Viv would have agreed with him. You couldn’t manage by heroics. You couldn’t manage by the way Xiara looked right now, afraid, desperate to prove herself, and brave. You couldn’t manage by a young woman’s total unflinching faith that she was born to fly.
“We won’t be able to come back here for a long time,” Viv said. “You know that.”
“I know,” she replied. “I’m ready.”
Zanj clapped her on the back. “Kid, we’ll show you all the stars you can handle.”
“I,” Xiara said, “will be the judge of that.”
Viv held out her hand. “Welcome aboard.” Xiara followed her handshake into a hug that hurt Viv’s ribs—then she broke away, blushing, and saluted. Viv didn’t mind the hug or the salute, but there would be time to sort it all out later.
“Thank you.”
“Okay,” Viv said. “Here’s how I see this going down.”
IT STARTED WITH Zanj.
They hadn’t spent much time on this phase of the plan, leaving the particulars of the distraction up to Zanj’s sadistic imagination.
Viv tried to envision it from the Pride’s perspective: Kentaurs scuttling over the gnarled rock-hard ground beneath the Ornclan’s palace grove, guarding their quarry’s ship while close air support buzzed overhead. The Pridemother’s inaudible modem screams bound them in a web of telemetry and bloodthirst. With the Ornclan under guard, no minor annoyances would disturb their mission—no fleet in this sector of space could hinder them. They were supreme, they were fierce, and they would find what they had come to seek.
Zanj walked out of the ruins, juggling three stones in one hand.
A hundred Kentaur heads spun toward her at once, and locked. Her chest danced with laser sights and other forms of targeting Viv lacked the words to name. Close air support warmed up plasma cannon and fléchette launchers and no doubt all sorts of nasty ordnance. The Pridemother lowering overhead turned its thorn-brains upon her.
Zanj looked up at the close air support, at the Pridemother. She shaded her eyes with one hand, and squinted. With her other hand she caught the stones one by one.
“Surrender,” said the Pridemother through all her drones at once. “Lay down all arms, submit to binding, and identify with your true name.”
“I am not armed.” Zanj’s hand tightened around the rocks. Several loud cracks and a disconcerting hiss of escaping heat echoed through the windswept silence. “I have had quite enough of bonds. And as for my true name—” She opened her hand, and revealed a single tiny gem, its sides still smoking. “You don’t deserve it.”
Then she threw the gem overhand, not just at but through one of the close air support hate fractals. The ship veered to the side, spoiling targeting solutions as its mates spun out of formation to avoid a crash. Guns spoke, but not before there was a loud pop inside Zanj’s skull and her eyes burned white. There was too much noise and fire and confusion for anyone to see her smile as she moved fast and broke things.
Viv ran through the firefight. The four of them had spent Zanj’s distraction working around the clearing’s edge until they had a straight shot up the ramp into the ship; the others were slow off the block, stunned, perhaps, even now, by the violence Zanj could unleash when she wanted. Maybe it looked even more impressive if you had some connection to the Cloud.
If you had a soul.
Either way, Viv ran. The battlefield around her, over her, was very bright and loud and hot. She wasn’t worried for Zanj—she was worried for herself. The pirate queen, she was coming to realize, was a lot more likely to survive whatever the Pride could bring to bear than Viv was to survive as a bystander to their engagement.
Zanj was in the sky, tearing off a hate fractal’s wing, only to dive down and use that wing as a scythe to carve through Pride drones by the score. Zanj sprinted so fast she left smoking glass footprints behind her in the dirt. A bolo snagged Zanj’s legs and she went down beneath a pile of drones, only to snap the bolo’s nanotube wire and fight her way back up, cackling mad and dripping oil from her fangs.
All of which made problems for Viv and for the rest. Molten metal sprayed across their path; a panicked fléchette cannon stitched crystal shards through the air before her, then behind her, then swiveled around to—almost—tag Zanj before the woman reached it and tore it free of its mount.
The Pridemother’s bay doors cycled open overhead, fractal leaves revealing passages into the fire of its belly, from which more drones and fighters fell. Zanj climbed into the air to meet them; tossed one fighter down, and it shattered.
By chance, by luck, by sheer style, Viv reached the ramp. Hong, too. And Gray.
Christ—where was Xiara? Searching the field she saw drones drones drones and—there. Not all the drones’ attention had been drawn to Zanj—of course the Pridemother’s battlemind had its own autonomic nervous system, perhaps even subconscious, scratching little tactical itches without realizing, adjusting posture, breathing.
Maintaining area control.
A Kentaur must have snatched Xiara, but she got her rifle around in time, and took shelter behind its corpse while three more closed in: firing wildly while the drones zagged and zigged, pressed themselves flat, scuttled sideways to avoid her. She was a warrior, but she was freaking out. She had seen Zanj fight the Chief, but she had never seen anything like this before.
So Viv ran back for her.
Yes, there were tactical considerations. They needed a pilot. But as she ran into hell again, it occurred to her that she was justifying her choice after the fact. As, perhaps, were Hong, and Gray, who, she realized once she grabbed the first Kentaur by the tail, had followed her onto the battlefield—Hong with his clubs out, Gray bounding on all fours, his skin quicksilver, his teeth large and white.
Idiots, all of them.
Viv’s earlier Pride drone wrestling experience had involved an already-battered individual; this one was, basically, whole, and its tail flipped her over its head as it struck; she landed hard, head ringing, by spearlike feet that would have skewered her if Xiara had not just then shot it in the face.
A cluster of ships exploded in the sky, wreathing Zanj in flame. Zanj, Viv noted dimly, was a great deal larger than she had been, and still growing.
Hong broke two of his drone’s legs; Gray roared, pounced, distended his jaw, and swallowed his Kentaur whole. His mouth was full of silver knives, of whirling dust, and his teeth ground sparks as they chewed. The drone gave a modem scream as it died, and Gray belched fire and collapsed, grinning contentment. The grotesque dimensions of his mouth settled back to the normal three, but his belly waggled, swollen with Pride.
Xiara offered Viv a hand up, which she accepted, breathing hard. She should have been too scared to look this happy. They ran, Gray waddling behind them, dragging a trench with his rapidly shrinking belly. His skin steamed as his body’s disassemblers digested the drone, and with each step he gained speed, though he didn’t lose his stupid, overfull smile.
They made the ramp with all interested parties this time; Viv collapsed against the wall, panting, the only one out of breath. Gray looked around, dreamy: “What a museum piece! How does it even run? Some sort of, what, a primitive description engine? Or do you just throw atomic bombs out the back and hope for the best?”
“This way,” said Hong, and led him down.
The ramp slammed shut, but even the Question’s skin could not close out the roar and blast of battle outside. Xiara stared around in what Viv hoped was wonder, not shock—there would be time for shock after they survived. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled her after her past the dinner table, up the stairs. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d left you, I thought you were with us.”
“You came back.”
And then they found the cockpit.
Flame and fire lit the outside world, and Pride wreckage rained down hot and jagged to tear the earth. Chaos whirled in the sky. Viv saw all that; Xiara had eyes only for the instrument panel.
She sat. She traced switches, lights, displays with her fingertips, her mouth open soft, her eyes watery wide. There was reverence in her touch. Viv had prayed before, but she had never needed to pray, had never been faced with a situation so overwhelmingly out of her control there was no proper response but prayer. Watching Xiara, she learned what that would look like from the outside.
“Can you fly it?”
There followed as much of a silence as could follow, with the war outside, with Hong shouting at Gray from the engine room, and Viv thought, she’s frozen. She can’t do it. We’ll need a new plan. What tools do we have, what options—I could call Zanj—
Xiara set her hand on Viv’s, and her touch was warm. Metal threads moved beneath her skin, and her eyes were whirlpools of shifting silver, and she was smiling. “Yes.”
She slid one hand into the brass-knuckles control; her other, she placed palm down on the instrument panel. Viv was struck by silent thunder—a soundless single pulse through the chest. The panel woke. There was no other word for it. Bright lines of circuitry threaded from Xiara’s touch into the ship. The quicksilver spirals in her open eyes formed interlocking, turning rings that ground like gears. The blue lines Viv had taken for tattoos spread silver light across her flesh.
When Xiara breathed, the engines came to life.
This was not how Zanj had flown the ship—but Zanj was a pirate and a fighter. The people of Orn had built themselves to fly.
On the battlefield below, Pride drones retreated from the palace grove, pursued by Ornclan armed and armored, and by the Chief herself clad in the brilliance of her office. Perhaps that armor made the Chief’s senses sharp, perhaps she sensed something through the Cloud. Perhaps intuition, or else mere random chance, guided her gaze to the ship, to the cockpit, to her daughter staring back at her, conscious all at once and at last of what she was about to leave behind.
Far overhead, Zanj blew something up.
Xiara lifted them, and brushed them through the sky, smooth, swift, and sure. They gained speed, height; hate fractals cut after but slow, too slow. The sky gloved them in fire, and they slipped free—into space, first, and silence, and then with a sickening lurch into the Cloud.
Xiara’s eyes blushed blue. She took a slow, shuddering breath.
“Are you okay?” It was a dumb question to ask, but Viv didn’t know a better one.
Her cheeks were wet with joy.
“I’m home.”