Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Viv didn’t begrudge Zanj some fun at her expense—after all, she’d unintentionally tortured this woman to the edge of passing out. And—more worrying—Viv had enjoyed it, that rush of power in this place where all else slipped from her control, enjoyed it even as it horrified her. Focus on running. The Vivian Liao who hated running felt more familiar than the Vivian Liao that enjoyed the prospect of having her orders enforced by a futuristic torture crown. “And a ship will work, even if I don’t have a,” might as well embrace the local terminology, “a soul?”

  Zanj held up one hand for silence, and dropped into a crouch beside a door that had not existed seconds ago.

  This whole escape had been like that: Zanj had whispered to the walls of the prison chamber and its gravity reversed, drawing them up, up through the stalk with terrifying speed, until the bright death grid appeared above, at which point she’d stopped them, and opened the seamless wall to reveal a space where they could crawl, climb. Zanj flowed from hold to hold, wall to wall, her long arms and broad shoulders spanning drops Viv had to jump, her body squeezing through claustrophobic cracks. Hong chugged along beside her, behind her, groaning at the jumps, grunting as he muscled himself up the wall, his hand pressed against the patch in his gut, and Viv felt grateful for his presence, for his humanity. If she’d been alone with Zanj, she would have cursed herself for a weakling, for thinking this was difficult. Because obviously Viv, who kept herself in reasonable shape, thank you very much, should be able to keep pace with a woman of mythological infamy.

  If Viv ever had a chance to explain all this to her therapist, she would laugh and laugh.

  She’d figured Zanj’s pace for a not-so-subtle revenge, and maybe it was, but one time when Viv couldn’t make a jump, Zanj flowed back down the wall, stretched out her long arm, grasped Viv over her scar, and pulled her up in a single smooth tug, as if Viv weighed no more than a doll.

  And yet, for all that strength and speed, when Viv tried to imagine Zanj fighting the Empress, her mind reeled. Zanj might be strong, swift, and clever as clever, but the Empress who built High Carcereal, who had torn out Viv’s heart and brought her here for unknowable ends with unknown means—she was a fact of nature, a vastness. You couldn’t punch something like that.

  Viv, of course, still planned to try.

  She was conscious of the irony.

  So, at last, they’d reached this door. Zanj crouched, and Viv behind Zanj, and Hong behind her; Zanj leaned around the corner, drew back, waved for Viv and Hong to do the same.

  Beyond the door lay a hangar. And in the hangar there was a ship.

  Viv loved the ship at first sight. She was a matte-black bird of metal and glass with a falcon’s beak, and massive drums that might be engines or turbines beneath her stubby wings. There were panels and seams on her skin, hatches for personnel and connectors for hoses, a ramp, raised, for ingress, sized right for human beings. People had made this ship, or something like people—with their hands, with machines their hands made. It was not leftover godstuff, not some stained-glass glory or hate fractal curse. People built this ship to go places.

  That, Viv understood. Walk forward a few thousand years from the twenty-footer she’d scuttled off North Carolina, or for that matter from the ungainly space dicks Elon thrust toward Mars, and you’d find this: a big goofy gourd of metal to mount and float wherever the stars would take you.

  “How old is that thing?” Hong asked with the same tone of voice Viv would have used to ask a hipster about the typewriter he’d hauled from a shoulder bag at a coffee shop.

  “The same age as me,” Zanj said. “I rode it from Pasquarai to the stars, before I was anyone. And I kept it with me even after I didn’t need it anymore. I thought she would have burned it, but she does like her trophies.” The kind of anger Viv heard in Zanj’s voice took a serious run-up. Several thousand years of prison’s worth of run-up, say. “The Question’s a slow, simple jump drive—raw physical transit through Cloudspace, without compression. My people didn’t know how the world worked back then. We had colliders, we had some eggheads whose math said causality propagated through a higher-dimensional space. All the rest, I had to go out and learn. But she’ll get us where we need to go.”

  “If we don’t fall into a singularity on the way. Or split ourselves on a string.”

  Zanj rolled her eyes at Hong, slow and exaggerated, so even he couldn’t miss it. “I’m no true pilot, but flying is among my many skills.” The station trembled again, and this time the tremor did not fade; a subtle shiver lingered, reminding Viv of the earthquakes of her childhood, and not in a good way. She glanced around out of reflex, drew close to the wall. There were no books to fall on her here, no china to slip out of cabinets. She would have hugged something as normal as a book, or a china cabinet.

  Instead she asked: “What are we going to do about the Pride drones?” She’d counted nine Kentaurs on the ground between them and the ship, a handful on the catwalks to the left, two in what looked like a sniper’s nest on the right. How they’d come here, she had no idea—well, that wasn’t quite true. This place wasn’t unknowable, just different. Think, Viv. The hangar opened onto empty space above the star—and if the drones were still trying to chase her, this might have been as close as they could come to the stalk.

  “We will fight our way through.” Hong stood, and drew his clubs. He composed his face for battle or for death. “We cannot let the Bleed catch us here. We will triumph, or die.”

  He marched toward the door, but without looking Zanj reached out her hand and set it on Hong’s chest. He tried to march past her, but could not move her arm. “Slow down, soldier boy. I’ll handle the Pride. You just get my illustrious jailer here to the ship.”

  “Thanks,” Viv said in a tone that, she had to admit, lacked a certain thankfulness.

  Zanj shrugged, and tapped the crown on her forehead. “I don’t know what this does to me if you die. You’re the only one I know who can control it—so you’re my best shot at taking it off. You stay safe.”

  “Can you really fight off all those drones yourself?”

  “In the old days,” Zanj said, “I could have fought all the drones, anywhere. And any friends they cared to bring. Now? I have no weapons, I’ve spent the last three thousand years or so in a box. I only have two batteries left with charge, and they’ll drive me at full speed for maybe ten seconds each. The question is, how fast can you run?” But she was smiling at the prospect. Viv was building an index of what the pirate queen’s smiles meant—threat, enticement, innocence, fury, pain—but this one suggested real joy. “When the ramp starts to open, go for it. And don’t you worry about me.”

  Zanj raised one hand, fingers poised to snap, and closed her eyes. Viv gathered herself in a sprinter’s crouch beside Hong, and waited. Hong looked uncertain, grim, but ready, for all the terror he’d held of Zanj an hour ago. Viv understood. Zanj was not a friend, but for now she might be an ally.

  Viv remembered the rage in those eyes, the fierce promise, I will kill you, spoken with the weight Viv only gave words she meant to make real.

  Zanj snapped her fingers, gunshot loud in the empty hall. The Pride drones’ heads spun toward the door, as if noticing it for the first time. Then they spun back to the ship as, with a whir of comforting, basically normal hydraulics, its ramp began to descend.

  Viv heard a second pop, deeper, this one from inside Zanj’s skull, a snap like a broken bone, like Viv had heard in the prison chamber, and when the pirate queen opened her eyes they burned the same solid white they’d been when she reached for Viv’s throat. “Go!” Her shout deafened. Hong froze, but Viv needed no second cue. She ran into the hangar, and Hong, with a squawk of unreadiness, scrambled after her.

  The Pride noticed. Kentaur heads revolved to them at once, scorpion tails charged, mouths opened. Viv ran as if the hangar were empty and her life depended on setting a personal best over the distance between the door and the ramp, which, well, it more or less did. And as s
he ran, she realized that, in spite of everything, she trusted Zanj to cover them.

  Behind her, the first Kentaur broke. By reflex she turned to look, but Zanj was already gone, leaving the wreck behind, torn in half at the middle. Viv tried to find her but the hangar became a blur of fire and fléchettes, screams of tortured metal, sparks, teeth-jarring booms as something—many somethings, but one in particular—broke the speed of sound. Zanj was in the catwalk and the sniper nest at once, punching through one drone’s sternum, ripping another’s torso from its abdomen. She moved faster than sight, visible only when physical matter had the temerity to resist, for however few seconds, her will to break it. Zanj was sharp, and fast, and burning. She left dented, melted footprints in the solid metal deck.

  Viv stumbled as she tried to track it all; a Kentaur reared above her like a horse, spiked hooves plunging; Hong grabbed the hooves and thrust it aside with a surge of his legs and back, and Viv rolled away. She staggered to her feet, then went down hard as a line of coherent fire stitched through the air where her head had been; pain was a solid bar across her shin, and she saw Zanj-prints in the deck metal around her, spinning where Zanj had tripped her and moved on. Somewhere the shooter screamed static. Viv did not look, rose again, yes, alive but limping, and there was Hong caught between two drones, his wounded arm bleeding, clubs awhirl, human, beautiful.

  Zanj had told them, don’t fight, just get to the ship.

  “Hong!” He heard her, understood, pulled free, and they ran through a hangar of acrid smoke, ozone, burning plastic, burning air, hot metal, oil, blood, and then the ramp by some miracle was underfoot, and they climbed it into a space empty of threat, a space whose silence rang like a bell, and sought, because this ship had been built by creatures not so inhuman after all, up ramps and past a dinner table (a dinner table!) and a cargo hold, for a space with two chairs and a great deal of buttons, dials, levers, and unsettling hoses that Viv, to her own surprise, recognized as a cockpit. Outside the viewscreen the hangar was a mess of fire—the oil Pride drones had for blood seemed to be flammable, under some circumstances.

  She started pushing buttons at once, giddy with adrenaline and fear, turning dials to the farthest right. Lights came on, green, red, purple, yellow, shades of pink. Chimes played behind a panel. The ship jerked. Hong fell into a switch that started something whirring, jerked away, and tried to pat the whirring something back to sleep. “You know how to fly this thing?”

  “No!” Viv shouted back, flushed and ecstatic with the nearness of death, with the need to move. A voice in the back of her skull kept screaming, I’m on a spaceship! very loud, over and over. “But it’s moving anyway!” She reached for something that looked like a set of brass knuckles suspended above the control panel by no visible force. Hong tried to stop her.

  Zanj got there first. She appeared in the cockpit with a thunderclap, fur smoldering, body slick with oil and hydraulic fluid, jumpsuit torn, bleeding from a deep gouge above her eye through which Viv could see a white substance too shiny for bone. The gouge healed over as she watched. Zanj trembled. Her fur was still filament bright at the tips and hot enough to burn. Her hands were coated black, her claws were out, and she wore a smile Viv could not read, a smile less human than the rest. “That wasn’t the ship,” she said. “It’s the station.”

  “What?” seemed a reasonable, if imprecise, question to Viv, but rather than answering, Zanj hip-checked her away from the control panel, slid her own fingers through the brass knuckles, and sank into the pilot’s chair. The ship bucked beneath them, then reared; Hong braced himself against the door, and Viv caught the back of Zanj’s chair as the ship lurched gracelessly toward the open wall.

  An immense hate fractal hung in space outside their exit, gunports glowing ruby. “Hold on,” Zanj said, and pulled her hands back, and distance got weird. Viv’s stomach took up residence in her feet and her feet lost their close partnership with the floor; her shoulders jerked in their sockets as she clutched the back of Zanj’s chair. Hong let out a sound he probably would not have called a scream. They roared toward the hate fractal, between its arcs of fire, then zipped up between the fractal and the stalk, climbing away from the star. Viv lost her grip there, slammed against the ceiling first and then the floor as ship’s gravity compensated. Her head rang. Her jaw hurt. She tasted copper. But they were free, and rising, rising, toward the stars.

  Above them, the battle raged.

  What Viv had seen from the hall while she and Hong were prisoners of the Pride drones was barely a skirmish compared to this. The sky was full of triple constellations—the stars, the sharp red Pride ships flitting, dancing, spitting fire against the stained-glass artwork vessels of the ’faith. Structures of still larger scale had arrived, whirling furious Mandelcontinents of Pride set against a regimented vast and glistening phalanx at whose heart burned a cathedral planet.

  Gnats, Zanj had called these ships. Peashooters, their guns.

  Viv felt electric all over, seeing all this as the doorstep of some greater glory.

  Hong’s wrist chimed. Fire chewed through space around them and Zanj hauled them out of its way. The ship’s own gravity softened the maneuvers now, translated them to gentle pitch and yaw and roll, and Viv heard the fire pass, heard the engines of the fighters they darted around. There was no sound in space, her inner science officer objected, but then, she wasn’t hearing sound in space—only sound in the cockpit. Now that she wasn’t being bounced across the instrument panel, she could see the speaker grilles. Of course. Humans, and things like them, evolved to respond to sound, not to dots on an instrument panel.

  Speaking of sounds—again, Hong’s wrist chimed.

  “Can you turn that off?” Zanj shouted.

  Hong pressed a button instead, and his bracelet flashed like when he drew his clubs—but instead of the clubs, a woman’s head whirled into being before him, bald, severe, ageless and ancient and angry. “Grand Rector,” Hong said, “I can explain.”

  “I said, turn it off, not answer it!”

  “Brother Heretic.” The Rector’s rage came through despite the tinny speakers. “You have cost us much—in ships and souls—”

  “Grand Rector, I have found a miracle.”

  “You have found what was not yours to find, and you lost yourself in its finding. Submit to us. Return. We will cleanse you, and burn you free of—” The voice died mid-sentence, and the head disappeared. Hong tapped his bracelet, tapped it again, then glared at Zanj.

  “Did you just hang up on the leader of my order?”

  “She’s firing on us, and I need to focus for this jump. The Bleed are almost here.”

  “How can you tell?” Viv asked, but in answer Zanj only waved out the window. There, in the dark, against the stars, no, beneath the stars and warping their light, she saw a massive shape like an eyeless face, and a mouth vast enough to eat stars, opening, opening—Pride and ’faith fleets alike scattered, wheeling away from that monstrosity, but a rope of purple lightning passed through the fleets and their lights died, their motion slowed, they dripped frost and darkened, and the mouth in space gaped wider into madness, and all the speakers now were screaming, and Hong began to pray and Viv realized she was praying, too, and there were tears in her eyes—

  Zanj said, “This will be bad.” And: “Hold on.”

  Before Viv could ask, to what, they tore, and were somewhere else, and it was bad indeed.

  9

  THE CLOUD HURT less once they closed the shades and walled out the bubbling geometries of twisting blue that Viv’s mind insisted was not blue at all. The shades, though, did nothing to relieve the teeth-on-teeth feeling in her chest, the nagging sense she had almost remembered … something.

  What she had almost remembered, they told her, was everything.

  At least, with the shades closed, she could not see the faces.

  The Cloud: she wondered who’d thought that one up, or if her translation gimmick was adding connotations foreign to the origi
nal. A good name, whether it rose from some long-dead brand manager or from Viv’s own mind. The Cloud sat above everything, accessible from everywhere if you knew how to look. You could travel through it if you had the knack. You could fly. And, like another sort of cloud altogether, it remembered things. Places. People.

  A hyperspace data system, she’d called it—well, almost. The Empress built it, people thought, or found it first, or found what had been there before and built the Cloud on top of it so long ago no one remembered. At any rate, the Empress could bend the Cloud to her will better than anyone in known space.

  Viv pondered the implications. What could you do with a massive distributed faster-than-light network? Enormous computations at nonsense speeds, at least. You could index matter, mirror it, particle by particle. You could give the whole universe a shadow, add an informational component to each atom, seed base matter with nanomachines until code could rewrite reality. You could do this, and someone, at some point, had. Every soul in the galaxy was wedded to a single Cloud.

  Except for Viv.

  She’d have an existential crisis about that later.

  Thanks to blood-borne interfaces and implants, minds existed at least as much in the Cloud as in flesh—which made some hard problems easy. Want to move about the cosmos? Why bother accelerating matter? A quick shift of variables could dart you across space and put you back together on the other side—if you had the right passwords, permissions, and tools. Do you fear death? Archive and index souls, store them by the trillion compressed deep deep down so nothing need pass away. Between quantum engines and the power of the Cloud, rewriting reality, building stations out of starstuff, became a simple matter of software. Anyone could do it—at least until the Empress shut them down, or the Bleed came.

  And the Bleed—what were they? Shivering at the table far from any window, gripping a cup of warm water—all the tea on the ship had crumbled to ash eons back, but water did not decay—she asked the question. Neither Hong nor Zanj answered at first. “You know almost as much as we do,” Hong said.