VIV FOUGHT WHILE she had strength. Sirens wailed; the hallway lights burned red. Hong must be at large, uncaught. She dug her heels in; she planted her feet against Yannis’s body and strained with every fiber of her muscle, and still could not break the woman’s hold on her wrist. She punched her, and hurt her hand; she gouged for her eyes, but Yannis swatted her thumbs away, annoyed. Yannis never slowed. She had seemed bent by years, but then, three thousand years weighed more than Viv.
Viv could have made Yannis drag her all the way to whatever doom she had in mind, but she could not choose to be dragged. While she had strength, she fought. When strength gave out, if she was going to her death, she preferred to go under her own power.
“I’m glad you’ve seen reason, dear,” Yannis said when she tired and began to walk. “No sense making this less pleasant than it has to be.”
She wasn’t wrong, though Viv’s plan ran more toward saving her strength for when it might help. If Yannis and Zanj were even close to the same sort of being, she would never win an arm wrestling match. “Where are you taking me?”
Yannis stopped at a patch of wall that seemed identical to the rest and made another sign in air. The wall bloomed open, and they fell out into the abyss within the world.
Viv turned and spun in space—the rush of free fall coupled with knowledge that she was about to die, inside this monstrosity of chitin or metal or monomolecule hull, or, fuck, sub-ether nonsense for all she understood, surrounded by lights and battle damage and the impossible mass of that black spear through the ship’s heart—and found, when the panic passed, that she could breathe. Then she noticed the inch-thick skinsuit field that covered her, and the slight burnt tang of the air. Just a bit of nothing between her and vacuum. She hadn’t minded that on her earlier spacewalks, but then, her earlier spacewalks had been under her own power, in a suit she controlled.
Yannis spun them in space, pointed her pitchfork, and they flew, with a speed that almost dislocated Viv’s shoulder; at her scream Yannis eased off the accelerator, but still their speed built, and built. Viv gained a new sense of Groundswell’s scope by the long minutes it took them to reach the point where the spear transfixed the ship.
Spear was too small a word. It might be wrong on even the most basic topological level: Viv could see no tip or blade or barb, only an immense column so black it burned her eyes, facets growing and melding as she watched, its darkness broken by darting blue weblike lines that branched, cascaded, then vanished without trace.
“Like a brain,” she said without thinking. The tea still at work inside her, maybe.
“Yes,” Yannis replied. “In most ways that matter. The Fallen Star is Zanj’s weapon, her ship, the greatest part of her soul. We don’t even have words for what it’s made from. Computationally dense acausal neutronium was Old Tiger’s guess, but that doesn’t explain all of its properties. Zanj took it from beings you would not understand, and it fit her as if they had crafted it for her grip. And still, it is chained.”
Yes—chained. At first, the Fallen Star’s sheer mass had drawn Viv’s eye, but now she saw the bonds that held it fast. Jade vines climbed the Star, and sank thin, burning roots into its blackness. Where the blue cascades met green, they stopped. The chains seemed too flimsy to hold something like this—an engine Zanj would have mocked her for describing with so worthless a word as god. But Viv recognized that green. She saw it in nightmares. “The Empress.”
“She chained it,” Yannis said. “Now you will break those chains, and I will use it to keep Refuge safe, forever.” Her form slipped as they drew close, returning to that fearsome burning predatory shape she’d shown Viv over tea. She stood without a stoop now, her scales glistened and feathered. Two more arms swelled beneath her cloak. She opened like a flower bud to some radiation from the Star. Or perhaps that was only memory bridging the eons between Yannis, village elder, and the woman who once fought an Empress.
“No,” Viv said.
“You will do it,” Yannis replied. “For me. For Refuge.”
Viv backed away from her slowly, hands out. “I get it. You’re afraid. But you don’t have to do this.”
“Afraid?” Yannis’s tongue flicked out; her eyes were dangerous slits. “Child, you are speaking nonsense.”
“I know fear when I see it. You lost a big fight, and to cover for yourself you let your people slide back to the Bronze Age, and kept them there, and made as if hiding would keep you safe.”
“You don’t understand,” Yannis said. “You’ve never met Her.” And there was no doubt which her she meant.
“I have. She pulled me into this fucked-up world. She gave me this scar.”
“A scar?” The laugh was fierce and torn. “I have seen Her scatter ships like a thresher scatters husks of rice. She broke my friends and laughed at the ease with which She slew them. She called the Bleed upon us. She shouldered off our might, and carved Zanj down to that ruin you rescued from the star. But we survived here, free. We built ourselves this place. If this is what it takes to live, then we will live. Break the chain.”
“No.”
“You do not understand.”
“I do. The answer’s still no.”
Yannis hissed, and drew in breath, and let it out. She looked almost sorry before she moved.
She grabbed Viv’s wrist again and dragged her toward the Star. Viv kicked her, and bit her; she caught Groundswell’s ribs and antennae, the many protrusions from its hull, and still Yannis pulled her forward. Viv’s nails bent back; her fingers slipped, scraped. Their pads tore. She wedged her foot in a crack in the ship, and Yannis stopped, growled, then knelt, picked her up by her ankle and tossed her toward the Star, which, when she struck it, felt like any other wall.
Her head rang; she tasted blood, and hoped that wasn’t her tongue. Fallen but free, she scrambled to her feet, and tried to get away, but Yannis was already over her, four-armed now—one hand caught each of Viv’s wrists as she rose, and the fingertips of her third hand squeezed into Viv’s clenched left fist and peeled it open, forced her fingers back, back—her thumb dislocated with a pop, and she screamed, and in that instant of pain, Yannis hooked Viv’s fingers over the Empress’s vines and pulled.
The vines made a sound like violin strings when they snapped.
Yannis let her fall.
Viv lay, teeth gritted, curled around her thumb, heartbeat fast, cursing, weeping. She did not let herself breathe, because if she breathed she would scream, and she would not let herself scream before this woman.
This woman—
—who stood before the Fallen Star, its immensity wreathed now by cascades of unrestrained blue light, vibrating with its full power.
—who reached for it, this phantom of her dark dreams.
Pulled.
Strained.
And yet the Star did not move.
Viv breathed through the tears. She had to, because she could not stop laughing.
Yannis clawed at the Star, cursed it, kicked it, and it did not budge. Yannis grew to mountainous size and wrapped her arms around the Star, and strained, her feet dimpling the hull. She roared curses in radio bands—and Groundswell trembled.
But that tremor had nothing to do with her.
Viv was still laughing when the ship’s skin burst open and Zanj flared out into the hollow night, trailed by the fires of her wrath.