SOON, THIS STAR would die.
The fleet clouded near, and kept killing it.
Shardships and great cruisers, worldminds and sunkillers, they drank the star’s light and the heat of fusion from its core, hollowing as they sipped, shaping magnetic fields to funnel plasma columns up through space to waiting mouths. They still bore the carbon scars of ancient battle, but as they drank, breaches filled in their hull, synapses rewove in their minds. Viv could not see the Cloud, but as they approached the fleet Zanj told her of the shadow the fleet cast, filling the hyperdimensional night with three-thousand-year dreams, dragging in information, every meager advance in weapons patterning and science the galaxy had yielded in their silent millennia, and, too, the great art and gripping schlock and cooking shows and tritone mesosymphonies that rose, fell, rose again, surviving the empires that were their cradle. Waking, the ships fed.
Some smaller drones, slipskimmers, asteroid feeders, mistook the Fallen Star, sliding stealthmode from the Cloud, for a morsel, webbed it in their fields, gnawed it with nanocloud teeth.
Those teeth slipped off. Terawatt lasers bounced. Probes and mindweapons turned back on their sources and scattered them. Pickets roused their drowsy murderous minds; cruisers spun up solution modules. Gunports opened. Cloud decryption engines linked, engaged.
At last, rather than start a fight, Zanj told them her ship’s name, and her own.
More gunports opened. Constellations of engines blazed throughout the fleet: those vessels which had been built by things like humans, and as such had a distinct front that could be pointed toward something one might designate as an enemy, did so. Microdrones burned fast to escape the splash zone.
—Good idea, Viv said. She couldn’t speak, exactly, because her lungs were full of spaceship. That really got them to lay out the welcome mat.
—I’m not here to fight, Zanj told the fleet. I have a passenger. She wants to talk.
They received no answer—but neither did the fleet open fire. Ships drifted away, made a path.
At their shifting heart, greater than moons, its skin still the cutting green of fresh rice, dotted with mountains and ribbed with rivers, hung Groundswell.
They slipped around its immensity, in and out of the shadows of its tendrils and antennae. A fresh patch of puckered metal covered the wound the Star made so long ago. Lights guided them along the hull, and as they drew close the ship’s skin flowed and reshaped itself into a hatch just large enough for a human being. The Star matched velocity, twisted, and kissed the hatch.
—You don’t have to do this, Zanj said.
—Of course I do, Viv replied.
—You don’t have to do it alone, I mean. I can’t protect you from out here.
—You mean, you’d lose the fight?
—Don’t be silly. I just wouldn’t win in time.
The door waited.
Viv hung in space, unsure. This had been her idea, but now that she had come to this point, to this hatch, to this ship, the reality of it overwhelmed her, and she wanted to run. The fleet would be useful—necessary, even. And she remembered a kiss, the pressure of strong arms around her shoulders, the sad final giving up.
She stepped from the Star into Groundswell.
There followed her usual collapse, the first harsh heaving breath after the ship left her lungs, the shock as her organs settled into place. Her knees hurt; she’d hit them hard when she fell. With one hand on the wall, she found her feet again. Zanj stood outside the hatch, Star in hand, gold eyes glittering, mouth twisted, unsure.
The door slammed shut, then disappeared.
Viv stood in a long, level hallway, walls curving eggshell white and faintly luminous. She cast no shadow here. She found that funny. She cast no shadow here—but, in a way, this whole thing was her shadow. Her fault.
The hall ran straight before her until it vanished to a point.
She walked, and thought about her exes.
Her breakups, with one heartsick fucked-up hospitalizing freshman year exception, had been, for the most part, amicable. She’d been broken up with far more than she’d done the breaking, which she seldom mentioned to her friends, partly because it wasn’t any of their business, partly because she had no use for the kind of soppy sympathy which inevitably followed sharing that particular piece of information. She did not need any assurances she’d find someone someday, because she either would or wouldn’t, and either way, in the meantime, she wasn’t hurting for sex or companionship. She ate her ice cream and took her seven days plus or minus three of crying jags like a champ; with extensive interval training one year she’d managed to get the turnaround down to a weekend.
There was another reason she didn’t tell people: she didn’t like catering to their disbelief. Someone less secure than Viv would probably have found it flattering; Viv didn’t need anyone’s assurances that she was pretty or smart, and, god, she certainly didn’t need another reminder that she was rich. She understood the story, controlling as well as she could for the distorting effect of one’s narrative of one’s own life. It was remarkably consistent. Whatever words drew the tears, whatever last quarrel snapped the proverbial dromedary’s spine, the underlying logic was the same. And they knew it, too, the ones wise enough to know.
Viv walked her own path. She did not wait. She did not linger, or retrace her steps. Sometimes her path lay alongside another’s for a while. But she would never shape hers to them.
Shanda learned this in the months she’d battered herself against her, trying to make them work. Danika had always known it, but never consciously. Susan Cho understood at last when she marched away from her down Santa Monica Pier, chin high, fists balled, too proud to let Viv see her cry. And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter had known it, before she gave herself to the fleet.
The hall flowered into a vast chamber—no throne room, no space of empty awe or self-regard. An engine room, perhaps, or a heart. Multicolored ferrous fluids pulsed through veins and conduits. Fields of coruscating light whirled, interlocked: nanomachines, lesser versions of the great Grays of Grayframe, mating computations. The cables that were the chamber’s walls surged in pseudomuscular contraction. Thousands of conduits and arcs of light converged to a single node: metal like flesh or flesh like metal, each grown through the other, and, at their center a body she recognized, and burning eyes she’d once seen echo stars.
Viv’s feet left the ground. Fields caught her, bore her up. She thought of Zanj, a mile of ship away. She could have freed herself, maybe—the Groundswell was built on Imperial tech, like the rest of the galaxy. But if she fought free, she would only fall.
Burning eyes swept her, blinded her. A human shape, or something almost human, emerged from that node with a slippery sucking sound; she trailed cables and light like veils and a bridal train. The fire in those eyes focused, tightened, tamped, until Viv could bear to look at them—could bear to look at her.
There were still wheels in Xiara’s eyes, though the heat of their turning burned them white. Slick from Groundswell, adorned with power, she shimmered. Viv had never seen anything quite so beautiful, or anyone quite so not a person. She had left her to this. Xiara had wanted it—no. Chosen it. Because she knew they could not walk together.
“I came back,” Viv said. This was such a bad idea. The woman she’d left might not be in there anymore. Her heart was spread through a fleet, her mind through millions of tons of body. What could Viv herself, one tiny meat-being, mean to someone who was this? “I was wrong. I’m sorry. I was selfish. I didn’t think about you—about anyone but myself. Nothing was real for me but what I wanted. But I’m trying to change.”
The ship churned. Wheels turned in Xiara’s eyes.
“Maybe you hate me for leaving, or for letting you leave. I understand. I’m not here to ask you to take me back. Though, um. I wouldn’t mind.” Still revolutions. No words. “But the Empress—she’s me. She built me as part of an experiment to change her own past, to make herself stronger. If it works, she’ll burn this universe from the heart out. Zanj and I can’t stop her alone. We need allies—all the puzzle pieces the Empress scattered around the galaxy. Gray’s broken, and we need to fix him. Hong’s imprisoned, and we need to free him. And we need you. If you’ll help us.” She swallowed.
It had been thirteen years since she last felt nervous around an ex. Granted, most of her exes couldn’t blow up planets.
Wheels and wheels, a face as perfect and expressionless as an uninspired angel—and behind those eyes, no woman but the fleet. She’d been wrong. Worse than wrong. The smile, the relief, the strength of arm, the slow workings of that painfully sincere mind, had vanished like a river into the sea. And Viv let it happen. She could have stopped, she could have stayed. Even if there was a Xiara in there somewhere, beneath the fleet, why would she greet Viv now with anything but scorn?
“Please,” she said. “Just be there. Even if you can’t help us, even if you don’t want to see me ever again—I had to see you. I had to know I hadn’t broken you. I’ve spent so long breaking everything else. Curse me if you want. Chain me. I left. I let you push me on my way, because I couldn’t let you mean something to me. I don’t let anyone touch me, or change me. I deserve this. But I’m still sorry.”
Only the ship answered, with that same unbroken hum of digesting star.
“Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll go.”
She tried to turn, to leave. But a hand held her shoulder, strong as glaciers though less cold. Those inhuman features flowed into something almost familiar, and vicious enough to seem kind.
And those remembered lips shaped words: “Not yet.”