VIV WALKED ZANJ to the planetoid.
Xiara had created it, she’d confessed, half embarrassed and half proud, after they parted ways. Groundswell could not work to full capacity with people living on its back—and besides, she had to stash the Suicide Queens somewhere, since she didn’t trust herself to beat them in a wrestling match for control of their own ship. The ship acted on her idea as soon as she had formed it: it peeled Refuge’s rock and soil from its hull and reassembled it into a hollow globe buttressed with scaffolding, its surface gravity fixed with notional mass generators, the whole construct surrounded by a shell of dead matter sealed with Groundswell’s will. Tamper with the shield, and the sky would quite literally fall.
She’d built a prison world, and she hadn’t thought to mention it, because the ship made it feel so easy.
“Why fear your own strength?” Zanj asked when she explained. “I could do that. Gray could do that. Viv wouldn’t even need a ship. She could probably just ask the planet nicely.”
“I’m just … still getting used to it.”
“I see. That’s why you gave a planet of hunter-gatherers a space fleet.”
“We are all of Orn,” she said as if that were an explanation.
“That,” Zanj replied, “is what worries me.”
By the time they reached the prison planet even Zanj had to admit that the Ornclan took well to their ships, if none so well as Xiara. Hunger for the stars, hidden beneath ritual, flowered with practice; prayers and chants repurposed down generations to guide them through war revealed their original purpose now. Ornmusic woke deep systems in the ships, synchronized their shields, inspired computation. Rhythm tied the fleet together. An army might march on its stomach, but a starfleet flew on its songs. They lost only two ships en route to Refuge, and those not to mismanagement, but to a duel. Xiara, speaking with Groundswell’s god voice, put an end to that. Duels were fought between human bodies; ships were treasures. Ships were lineage. Ships were rings for chiefs to give and for children to inherit, melt, reforge.
So they reached Refuge, a net of jewels and song in the black above the manufactured world.
Zanj had told them she’d go down alone, so Viv was waiting for her by the airlock.
“Don’t be stupid,” Zanj said. “Yannis almost killed you the last time you met. The only reason you’re still alive is that she didn’t realize what you were.”
“I’m not going. I just thought you might like company on the way.”
Zanj’s eyes stayed the same, but her whole body narrowed. “Fine. Walk with me.” She cycled the airlock open.
“I need a suit.”
“Don’t be a baby. Come on.”
“Unmodified human, remember? Made of meat? Needs air?”
Zanj tapped the airlock wall. “Do you really think I’d let you die?”
Viv didn’t know what to say. You’ve threatened to kill me how many times? But she stepped across the airlock threshold anyway. For all her faith in Zanj, Viv’s skin tightened as the airlock cycled. She thought of all the various explosive decompressions she’d seen in movies, and how none of them had prepared her for the feeling of air torn from her lungs, of falling in that cold cold black as the Empress burned murderous above.
When the airlock cycled open, she grabbed Zanj’s hand by reflex, took a deep breath.
The air did not blow out. Zanj chuckled. “You are such a rube sometimes.”
And she walked into space.
Viv followed. Questions surged inside her. She might as well ask a couple. “I can breathe?”
“The ship knows you, and it knows Xiara likes you. It doesn’t have a life-support system the way you’re thinking, like the Question did, or like one of your old puny capsule ships; it has enormous molecular restructuring powers, a field projector, Cloud interface, all held together with a sort of, what would you call it, a homeostatic directive, to keep the bits and bobs functioning like they should. When it sees you take a dive out an airlock, it makes sure you can breathe.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“What bothers you?”
“The part where my survival depends on the ship’s goodwill?”
“Just don’t piss off your girlfriend, and you’ll be fine.” Said with a shrug and an aggrieved what do you expect from me sort of tone.
“Is that why I can walk out here, too? Even though there’s nothing to stand on?”
“Nah. I’m doing that.”
They kept walking for a while, much faster than Viv’s actual foot speed, to judge by how quickly Groundswell shrank behind. After a while Viv stopped worrying about the precise extent of the ship’s protection. She reviewed all the things she’d told herself she would say to Zanj, all the support and advice she could offer a being a few thousand years older than herself without sounding insulting. She hadn’t come up with much, and hadn’t worked up the will to say any of that, before Zanj spoke.
“I’m not looking forward to this,” Zanj said.
Viv decided against saying something like that was obvious, or pointing out that Zanj had spent the entire voyage from Orn glaring, and challenging various hothead young Ornclan pilots to asteroid belt races. She got drunk once, in a welcome-to-space party Xiara threw for the Ornclan; Viv hadn’t even known Zanj could get drunk, and it had taken Gray, Viv, and three-quarters of Groundswell’s power output to settle her down.
“I had to stop Yannis to save you, to get a shot at the Empress. That’s simple math. And she was being … cruel. Mean. To you. I wonder if I was ever that bad, that comfortable hurting people I didn’t think mattered. Probably. I stole from a lot of people, broke a lot of things. But I never stayed in one place long enough to sour like she did. I kept moving. It was better that way. If you cared, the Empress could use that against you—find what you loved, and take it. I never went back to Pasquarai after I started fighting her, though that doesn’t seem to have helped. I assumed I was dead when I took up arms. Every Suicide Queen could tell the same story. That was why we chose the name.”
“You were friends.”
“We used to be. Before she and Nioh spent too long as masters of a dust heap. Bending people’s minds, keeping them small. They turned into something we told ourselves we’d never be. I’m sure they think I changed in the star. I probably did. I’m sure they’ve been sitting down there ever since Xiara dropped them off, griping about how I went soft. Maybe they’re right.”
“I like you the way you are now,” Viv said. “And you don’t have to go down there. We don’t need their help.”
“It would make things easier.”
“Yes? I mean. They could open a whole new front by themselves. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Bullshit. I have to do things I don’t want to do all the time.” Zanj’s brow furrowed. She sat cross-legged in midair, scrunched her face down into her hands, and thought. “Okay,” she said before Viv could ask if she was all right. “Fine. I’m going in.”
She fell through the shield, to Refuge, to the prison. Viv tried to follow her with her eyes, but she flew too fast, and soon was too small to see. Still, Viv watched.
“It’s about to start,” Xiara said beside her; Viv jumped, yelped. “Sorry.”
“Can you make a noise when you do that, next time?”
“I’m only a hologram.”
“A sound effect would still cut down on heart attacks.”
“I’ll think of something,” Xiara said, and sat beside Viv in the black, and set one hand on her leg. The hologram was weightless, but it tickled.
“You can see her?”
Nod. “Nioh and Yannis are farming outside of town. Seems like there’s been a rift there between them and the villagers. Zanj is closing in. Just walking up the road, the Star over her shoulders. A lot of dust. Yannis looking up from her crops. I think—yes, okay, she’s recognized—”
On the planetoid, a flash of light; a breath, and an answering flare in the field that enclosed its atmosphere. Cracks of lightning spread from the point of Zanj’s impact.
“That is not a good start,” Xiara said.
“What was your first clue?” Viv narrowed her eyes. “Wait, is that a mushroom cloud?”
“It’s not nuclear,” Xiara said. “If that’s what worries you. You just get that cloud shape whenever there’s a big enough impact.”
“Not great for the farmers, though.”
“They’re a long way from town now. Zanj had a trajectory when she hit the planet’s shield; she bounced back when she landed. And now they’re—” The next flash made even Viv wince, and she wasn’t watching through Groundswell’s optics; Xiara yowled, and covered her eyes. Viv tried to put a hand on her shoulder to offer some comfort, but her hand passed through the hologram.
“I don’t see any more explosions, at least,” she offered when Xiara managed to open her eyes again. “That’s probably a good sign?”
“They’re—oh. That crater goes all the way through the crust. They’re inside the planet.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s … not?” One orange-slice section of the planet’s surface shivered, cracked, and began to cave in. “Excuse me. I think I need to, I mean, someone really should do something about—”
“Go.”
Xiara blinked out. The cave-in opened a broad, smiling gash in Refuge’s green, but the rest of the planet remained more or less intact, all credit, probably, to Xiara. Certainly Zanj and company didn’t seem concerned for planetary welfare. She watched for another flare, for the gash to widen, the planet to collapse.
Xiara reappeared after a long apocalypse-free interval. She looked tired and annoyed, which Viv decided was a good sign. “What’s going on?”
“The planet,” she said, “will be fine.”
“Zanj? Yannis? The Suicide Queens?”
“They’re drinking.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“And singing.”
Another flash from the planetoid below, and the gash widened. Viv glanced left, concerned, but Xiara was wearing sunglasses now.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve taken measures. The locals are safe.”
They watched the fireworks together. Viv tried to explain fireworks to her, but stopped when it got weird.
Hours passed. The lights died down. A hole opened in the shield around Refuge, and a sole figure staggered toward them, bruised, reeling, grinning on the slant. “They’re in,” Zanj slurred before she passed out.