Aurora Burning

by Amie Kaufman

  “NOTHING WOULD MAKE ME HAPPIER, BOSS! A CIGARILLO WAS A SMALL CIGARETTE!” It pauses, absorbs the confused silence, and tries again. “A PLANT KNOWN AS TOBACCO WAS ROLLED INSIDE A THIN SHEET OF PAPER, THEN SET ON FIRE, AND TERRANS INHALED THE SMOKE FOR STIMULATION!”

  “This sounds hazardous to one’s health,” Zila opines.

  “CORRECT!” Magellan says. “THE PRACTICE FELL OUT OF VOGUE IN THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY, AFTER TERRANS DISCOVERED IN THE TWENTIETH THAT IT KILLED YOU!”

  “It took them two hundred years to stop doing it?” I ask, bewildered.

  “ISN’T THAT INSANE?” Magellan says. “HONESTLY, DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE A SPECIES THAT WOULD BENEFIT FROM SOME KIND OF BENEVOLENT MACHINE OVERLORD?”

  “Silent mode,” Tyler says.

  “AW.”

  We share a series of blank stares, pondering the box in Kal’s hand. Our Tank studies the little metal case one more time, then tucks it into the breast pocket of his uniform, with a small shift of posture that’s as close to a shrug as our most dignified squad member ever seems to come.

  Now it’s time for my present. I won’t lie: I’m excited to see what it is. But my excitement fades when I unwrap the paper and discover a small, plain metal cylinder. It’s something like a stylus, but there’s nothing electronic about it.

  “What’s it for?” I ask. “Is it some kind of tool?”

  Auri reaches over to take it from me and presses her thumb against one end, producing a clicking sound. A little point springs out from the other.

  “It’s a ballpoint pen,” she says, handing it back to me.

  “It’s a what now?”

  “It’s a writing implement from my time,” she says.

  “I’ve been ripped off,” I inform her. “I do not need an old-fashioned writing implement.”

  “I’ll trade you for my boots?” Tyler offers.

  “Or my smoking box that does not open?” Kal says.

  I press my thumb to the end like Auri did and retract the point. I will admit the click is a little satisfying. Scarlett reaches into the box again and pulls out a package marked with our squad designation, 312, which turns out to contain a whole pile of red and gold Dominion credit chips.

  “Nothing for Auri, I’m afraid,” she says.

  “I already got my gift,” Auri replies simply.

  “…You did?” Tyler asks.

  “Yeah. You guys.”

  She gazes around at Squad 312 and makes a face.

  “Holy cake, that sounded unbearably cheesy, didn’t it?”

  “Unforgivably,” Scar grins, dropping the cred chips onto the console. “But except for the papers directing us to the ship and the passkeys, this is everything.”

  “At least we will not be lacking in funds,” Kal nods.

  “This is not a credit chip,” Zila says, retrieving a chip bearing a turquoise stripe from under the red and gold. She passes it to me, as I’m sitting in front of a data slot.

  I pause for a moment, because I have a policy of never putting a chip a stranger gives me into my equipment, unless, you know, that whole sentence is a metaphor. But if our benefactors wanted to drop us in it, they’ve already had their chance and then some. So, with a wince, I push it home.

  The main screen above us flickers to life, and we’re greeted by Admiral Adams and Battle Leader de Stoy. They’re in full dress uniform, the sigil of the Aurora Legion emblazoned on their shoulders. Adams raises one cybernetic hand in greeting, and de Stoy favors the camera with a small nod, her black eyes unreadable even to another Betraskan.

  “Greetings, legionnaires,” Adams says gravely. “First, well done on deciphering our code. Battle Leader de Stoy and I regret we can’t be there to brief you personally, but if you are watching this message, it’s our hope that you’re aboard the Zero and headed for the Hephaestus convoy.”

  He pauses, which is helpful, as it leaves room for a collective “Whaaaaat?”

  Before the creeped-out disbelief from all around the table gets too out of hand, de Stoy picks up the narrative.

  “This will doubtlessly be strange to all of you, legionnaires. We know you must have many burning questions. Unfortunately, and for reasons that will one day become clear, there is still much about your situation we cannot reveal. We are sorry for the trials you will face as a result, but you must know this much at least.” She looks around the bridge, as if she can actually see us all. “Our every effort is bent toward supporting you. We know you have taken up the cause of the Eshvaren. And we know you are our last hope against the Ra’haam.”

  “We can’t declare our support publicly,” Adams continues. “In fact, Aurora Legion must be seen to be actively working against you. The Ra’haam has agents within the Global Intelligence Agency, and potentially other stellar governments.”

  My gaze flicks over to Auri, whose face is like stone. I know that like me, she’s picturing her father in the white GIA uniform of Princeps, calling out to her, entreating her to join the Ra’haam.

  “Take these gifts,” Adams continues. “Keep them with you at all times. And know that you’re traveling on the correct path.”

  “Know that we believe in you,” de Stoy says. “And you must believe in each other. We the Legion. We the light. Burning bright against the night.”

  Adams stares straight down the camera and repeats the words he spoke to us when we left Aurora Academy, ignorant of everything that lay ahead of us.

  “You must believe,” he says simply.

  And just like that, the message ends.

  We’re all quiet for a long moment. Trying to process what’s just happened. My thoughts are running light-years per second, the full enormity of it all ringing in my brain and threatening to blow it right out of my skull.

  Our commanders know about the Eshvaren. They know about the Ra’haam. They know what we’re up against, and somehow, some way, impossible as it might seem, they knew what was coming—finding Auri, losing Cat, our new careers as interstellar fugitives—before any of it ever happened. This message waited for us in the security vault for years before any of us ever even entered Aurora Academy. Let alone became legionnaires.

  Auri’s the one who finally breaks the silence. “I don’t know your bosses well, but if they knew this was coming, a little heads-up would’ve been good.”

  Scarlett looks at Shamrock, sitting above the empty pilot’s chair. All the color has gone out of her features, and her voice. “You can say that again.”

  Kal reaches across to tentatively take Auri’s hand. “Have faith, be’shmai. Adams and de Stoy have worked for the best thus far. We must believe that in keeping what they know from us, they continue to do so.”

  Of course, this is right up a Syldrathi’s alley—full of mystery and almost prophecy. No wonder Kal’s eating it up. But I see Tyler looking across at me, pinning me down with those big blue eyes of his.

  “We must believe,” he says softly.

  We’re the only two religious people on the ship, Tyler and I, and I know he feels the same way I do—that the Maker’s hand is in this somehow. It’s Tyler’s faith that Adams is appealing to when he says those words. But it’s so achingly hard to keep believing when it’s cost us so much already. When people we care about think we’re traitors. When we’re fighting to save a galaxy and it seems the whole galaxy is fighting against us.

  When that pilot’s chair is empty.

  “Well,” says Scarlett, deliberately cheerful. “Upside: we know we’re definitely heading in the right direction.”

  Zila nods. “The black box from the Hadfield is our next objective.”

  That pronouncement breaks the somber mood that settled over the table, and Tyler nods, transforming into Goldenboy again with a quick toss of his head. He squares his shoulders, speaks with authority.

  “Okay,”
he says. “It’s been a Day. Let’s grab some food and strategize, then once we’re through the FoldGate, we can try and get some downtime.”

  The confidence in his voice seems to galvanize the rest of the squad, and everyone is soon moving again—turning to their displays or rummaging in supply lockers or prepping for the Fold. I look down at my gift on the console in front of me—dull, metallic, about as useful as a spacesuit without an oxygen supply.

  With a sigh, I tuck the pen into my top pocket.

  “I sure hope we know what we’re doing.”

  * * *

  • • • • •

  A few hours later I’m on watch, feet propped up on the center console to ease the twinge in my lower back. It’ll be a longish Fold to get to the gate nearest the convoy—longer Folds can come complete with anything from paranoia to the shakes to psychosis, but we’re all young enough that we should be fine on a jump like this.

  Once you hit twenty-five or so, it becomes a very different equation. After that age, you can’t travel through the Fold for long without being put into stasis. That’s why Aurora Legion squads start so young. We graduate around eighteen, and we get seven years before we mostly move to desk jobs.

  Sometimes I’ve wondered whether the stress on my body will mean I get less time before the Fold starts to wear on me. But hey, as Scarlett would say, upside: I’d need to be alive for it to become a problem. And the odds of that are bad at best.

  If Ty knew what shape my suit was in, he wouldn’t have given me a watch at all. But he still hasn’t completely worked out how bad it is, and Scar has respected my requests to keep it under wraps. It won’t be an issue soon, anyway—I have everything I need in my cabin for repairs, and once my suit’s properly aligned and functioning, it’ll take the strain off my muscles and let them start healing too.

  I check the scanners for the fifth time in as many minutes. We’re still on course, no pursuit, my displays reduced to sharp monochrome like everything else in the Fold. Black and white isn’t a huge stretch for a Betraskan—life underground isn’t very colorful at the best of times. But I sometimes wonder if my squaddies get weirded out by it.

  I hear soft footsteps and look up from my displays to see Auri emerging from the passageway in a sweater and pajama pants. She must have been to visit the super-sleek galley in the stern, because she’s holding two steaming mugs.

  “Hey, Stowaway. Couldn’t sleep?”

  She answers with a little shudder. “Bad dreams.”

  I make a sympathetic face and pull my feet off the console, reaching across to take my mug from her. It’s baris, a favorite drink of my people that nobody else in the galaxy really likes.

  “Wow,” I murmur. “They really stocked the galley with everything.”

  “You’re telling me,” she agrees. “I never thought I’d see chamomile again.”

  I lean across to look at her drink, and she holds out the mug so I can inhale the steam. “Smells like flowers,” I decide.

  “It’s one of my faves. It’s traditionally for before bed. Helps you wind down.”

  “Chamomile.” I repeat the word to commit it to memory, in case I need to make it for her sometime. “You want to talk about the dream? A load shared is a load halved.”

  She smiles. “Is that some ancient Betraskan wisdom or something?”

  I shake my head. “Read it on a coaster at a skin bar. But, you know, sometimes dreams aren’t so bad when you say them out loud.”

  Even as I’m saying that, I’m thinking about the dreams she’s probably having. About the one I had, when I saw Trask covered in blue snow that turned out to be the pollen of the Ra’haam. It’s the fate that awaits my homeworld if we fail to stop the Ra’haam from spreading. The fate that awaits the whole galaxy.

  She closes her eyes and sips her tea.

  “It was what you’d think,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t Octavia this time. Too many moons. And the sky was greener. But the plants were the same. Except they felt bigger and stronger. I was trying to look more closely, but the pollen was too thick to see. I think there were…buds. On the plants.”

  A finger of ice traces a path down my spine.

  Her voice is a whisper. “I think it was getting ready to bloom and burst.”

  I don’t really know what to say to that. I’m wondering how I’d feel if it was me in her position—if the whole galaxy was resting on my narrow shoulders, not hers. I’m trying to figure out a way to tell her how brave I think she is. How most people would have just flown to pieces if they’d lived her life over the past few weeks. But I’ve never been good at Peopling. I never know what to say.

  Fortunately, I’m rescued from my struggle by the arrival of Scar and Kal. They both look sleepy, but Kal’s taken the time to pull on his uniform, his hair as immaculate as ever. Scar’s in a silky wrap thing that invites me to imagine what she’s wearing underneath it. I do my best not to, with mixed results.

  “Hey, you,” Auri says, smiling at Kal.

  “Hey,” I say, sounding like a chirpy idiot. “Bad dreams for you too?”

  “I don’t know what woke me up,” Scarlett admits. “I was just…”

  “…uneasy,” Kal finishes.

  I wonder about that uneasiness. I know Kal’s mother was an empath, and if his sister inherited some of her gift, maybe he did too? Maybe he picked up on Auri’s bad dream. Doesn’t really explain why Scarlett can’t sleep, though…

  The silence stretches, Auri letting talk of her dream recede like it’s in the rearview mirror, Kal and Scarlett reaching for a better reason they drifted out here.

  Well, this is about as cheery as a tri-soul departure ceremony.

  “All right,” I say. “I got another half hour before I go off watch. Since nobody’s sleeping, what say we teach Stowaway here how to play frennet?”

  “I am familiar with the game, but not the rules,” Kal replies.

  I reflect for a moment that no Betraskan at Aurora Academy would ever have considered socializing with Kal, let alone teaching him how to play a game—not with his Warbreed sigil tattooed right there on his forehead.

  “No problem,” I tell him. “Howsabout I give you and Auri a lesson, and we put some of those shiny new credits to use?”

  Scar gives me a wink that says she knows I’m on cheer-up duty, and she approves, and I work hard to make sure I don’t give her a big, dumb smile back.

  I know the three of them would take over my watch if I asked so I could get to work on my suit, but half an hour of this feels more important. After our strategy talk earlier, we all know there’s hard times ahead. I figure there’s no harm in making a little light for ourselves, here in the dark.

  “I’ll go get drinks,” Scar says. “Fin, why don’t you pull up the program?”

  “Okay,” I say, swiping through the ship’s submenus to find a decent frennet program, and pulling up a 3-D screen to project on the console. “So in the first round, there are seventeen dice in play.”

  “Seventeen?” Auri splutters.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you.”

  A small line appears between Kal’s brows, a sign of great concern.

  “No mercy, Finian,” he says. “We learn by losing.”

  “I never said I was gonna go easy on you, Pixieboy,” I grin, assigning the player tokens. “You, my pointy-eared friend, are about to learn a great deal.”

  “Mmm.” His violet eyes sparkle at the joke. “We shall see.”

  “You know, if you don’t wanna risk any of that newfound wealth, there’s another version we can play. Strip frennet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah,” I grin. “Everyone bets a piece of clothing per pot, and the loser has to take it off. Makes things more interesting.”

  I admit I feel a perverse sense of delight as Kal’s eyes slip in
voluntarily to Aurora, and I see a flush of heat spreading across her freckled cheeks.

  “I do not think that is appropriate,” Kal says.

  “Hey, I didn’t know Syldrathi blushed with their ears.”

  “I am not blushing,” Kal glowers.

  Scar returns with the drinks tray balanced on one hand and flicks my ear as she passes. “Stop being a bastard, Finian.”

  “But I’m so good at it!”

  Scarlett grins and shakes her head, and her smile makes me smile harder in return. We get down to it, and in the end, Kal isn’t the only one who ends up learning a great deal. I learn that Auri starts snorting when she giggles too hard. I learn that Kal has a deep, booming laugh you can feel in your chest. I learn that Scarlett cannot be bluffed, no matter how hard you try. And I learn that maybe I don’t suck at Peopling as much as I suspected.

  We stay up past my watch. We play way longer than we should.

  But hey, nobody’s thinking about bad dreams anymore.

  SUBJECT: SPACE EXPLORATION

  ▶ FAMOUS DISASTERS

  ▼ THE HADFIELD

  IN THE DAYS BEFORE THE FORMATION OF TERRAGOV, AND WITH NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS UNWILLING TO INVEST IN SPACE EXPLORATION, EMBARRASSINGLY, IT FELL TO CORPORATIONS TO TAKE HUMANITY’S FIRST STEPS BEYOND ITS OWN SOLAR SYSTEM.

  THE HADFIELD WAS INTENDED TO BE THE PINNACLE OF SUCH EXPLORATION. CONSTRUCTED SHORTLY AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF FOLD TECHNOLOGY, AND BEFORE FIRST CONTACT, THE HADFIELD WAS EARTH’S FIRST ARK-CLASS COLONY SHIP, BUILT BY THE NOW-DEFUNCT AD ASTRA INCORPORATED.

  CONTAINING TEN THOUSAND COLONISTS, AND BOUND FOR EARTH’S FIRST MAJOR INTERSTELLAR COLONY ON LEI GONG, THE HADFIELD DISAPPEARED IN THE FOLD WITH ALL SOULS ABOARD. THE DISASTER LED TO THE FINANCIAL RUIN OF AD ASTRA, THE FORMATION OF TERRA’S FIRST TRULY GLOBAL SPACE PROGRAM, ET1, AND THE END OF THE AGE OF CORPORATE SPACE EXPLORATION.

  AAAAAAAND NOW I’M DEPRESSED.

  I don’t know how well the others slept in the Fold—my dreams were disjointed and weird—but I’m still better rested than I was before. The aches of Saedii’s agonizer are fading, though I’m guessing I won’t be invited to her place for the holidays anytime soon. It was strange to wake up while we travel this way. Everything on the ship was cast in black and white by the Fold, and it felt like I was still dreaming.