Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Zanj was in the sky, tearing off a hate fractal’s wing, only to dive down and use that wing as a scythe to carve through Pride drones by the score. Zanj sprinted so fast she left smoking glass footprints behind her in the dirt. A bolo snagged Zanj’s legs and she went down beneath a pile of drones, only to snap the bolo’s nanotube wire and fight her way back up, cackling mad and dripping oil from her fangs.

  All of which made problems for Viv and for the rest. Molten metal sprayed across their path; a panicked fléchette cannon stitched crystal shards through the air before her, then behind her, then swiveled around to—almost—tag Zanj before the woman reached it and tore it free of its mount.

  The Pridemother’s bay doors cycled open overhead, fractal leaves revealing passages into the fire of its belly, from which more drones and fighters fell. Zanj climbed into the air to meet them; tossed one fighter down, and it shattered.

  By chance, by luck, by sheer style, Viv reached the ramp. Hong, too. And Gray.

  Christ—where was Xiara? Searching the field she saw drones drones drones and—there. Not all the drones’ attention had been drawn to Zanj—of course the Pridemother’s battlemind had its own autonomic nervous system, perhaps even subconscious, scratching little tactical itches without realizing, adjusting posture, breathing.

  Maintaining area control.

  A Kentaur must have snatched Xiara, but she got her rifle around in time, and took shelter behind its corpse while three more closed in: firing wildly while the drones zagged and zigged, pressed themselves flat, scuttled sideways to avoid her. She was a warrior, but she was freaking out. She had seen Zanj fight the Chief, but she had never seen anything like this before.

  So Viv ran back for her.

  Yes, there were tactical considerations. They needed a pilot. But as she ran into hell again, it occurred to her that she was justifying her choice after the fact. As, perhaps, were Hong, and Gray, who, she realized once she grabbed the first Kentaur by the tail, had followed her onto the battlefield—Hong with his clubs out, Gray bounding on all fours, his skin quicksilver, his teeth large and white.

  Idiots, all of them.

  Viv’s earlier Pride drone wrestling experience had involved an already-battered individual; this one was, basically, whole, and its tail flipped her over its head as it struck; she landed hard, head ringing, by spearlike feet that would have skewered her if Xiara had not just then shot it in the face.

  A cluster of ships exploded in the sky, wreathing Zanj in flame. Zanj, Viv noted dimly, was a great deal larger than she had been, and still growing.

  Hong broke two of his drone’s legs; Gray roared, pounced, distended his jaw, and swallowed his Kentaur whole. His mouth was full of silver knives, of whirling dust, and his teeth ground sparks as they chewed. The drone gave a modem scream as it died, and Gray belched fire and collapsed, grinning contentment. The grotesque dimensions of his mouth settled back to the normal three, but his belly waggled, swollen with Pride.

  Xiara offered Viv a hand up, which she accepted, breathing hard. She should have been too scared to look this happy. They ran, Gray waddling behind them, dragging a trench with his rapidly shrinking belly. His skin steamed as his body’s disassemblers digested the drone, and with each step he gained speed, though he didn’t lose his stupid, overfull smile.

  They made the ramp with all interested parties this time; Viv collapsed against the wall, panting, the only one out of breath. Gray looked around, dreamy: “What a museum piece! How does it even run? Some sort of, what, a primitive description engine? Or do you just throw atomic bombs out the back and hope for the best?”

  “This way,” said Hong, and led him down.

  The ramp slammed shut, but even the Question’s skin could not close out the roar and blast of battle outside. Xiara stared around in what Viv hoped was wonder, not shock—there would be time for shock after they survived. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled her after her past the dinner table, up the stairs. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d left you, I thought you were with us.”

  “You came back.”

  And then they found the cockpit.

  Flame and fire lit the outside world, and Pride wreckage rained down hot and jagged to tear the earth. Chaos whirled in the sky. Viv saw all that; Xiara had eyes only for the instrument panel.

  She sat. She traced switches, lights, displays with her fingertips, her mouth open soft, her eyes watery wide. There was reverence in her touch. Viv had prayed before, but she had never needed to pray, had never been faced with a situation so overwhelmingly out of her control there was no proper response but prayer. Watching Xiara, she learned what that would look like from the outside.

  “Can you fly it?”

  There followed as much of a silence as could follow, with the war outside, with Hong shouting at Gray from the engine room, and Viv thought, she’s frozen. She can’t do it. We’ll need a new plan. What tools do we have, what options—I could call Zanj—

  Xiara set her hand on Viv’s, and her touch was warm. Metal threads moved beneath her skin, and her eyes were whirlpools of shifting silver, and she was smiling. “Yes.”

  She slid one hand into the brass-knuckles control; her other, she placed palm down on the instrument panel. Viv was struck by silent thunder—a soundless single pulse through the chest. The panel woke. There was no other word for it. Bright lines of circuitry threaded from Xiara’s touch into the ship. The quicksilver spirals in her open eyes formed interlocking, turning rings that ground like gears. The blue lines Viv had taken for tattoos spread silver light across her flesh.

  When Xiara breathed, the engines came to life.

  This was not how Zanj had flown the ship—but Zanj was a pirate and a fighter. The people of Orn had built themselves to fly.

  On the battlefield below, Pride drones retreated from the palace grove, pursued by Ornclan armed and armored, and by the Chief herself clad in the brilliance of her office. Perhaps that armor made the Chief’s senses sharp, perhaps she sensed something through the Cloud. Perhaps intuition, or else mere random chance, guided her gaze to the ship, to the cockpit, to her daughter staring back at her, conscious all at once and at last of what she was about to leave behind.

  Far overhead, Zanj blew something up.

  Xiara lifted them, and brushed them through the sky, smooth, swift, and sure. They gained speed, height; hate fractals cut after but slow, too slow. The sky gloved them in fire, and they slipped free—into space, first, and silence, and then with a sickening lurch into the Cloud.

  Xiara’s eyes blushed blue. She took a slow, shuddering breath.

  “Are you okay?” It was a dumb question to ask, but Viv didn’t know a better one.

  Her cheeks were wet with joy.

  “I’m home.”

  22

  THEY ESCAPED.

  Viv whooped, slapped Xiara on the back. “You did it!” In the wash of adrenaline and relief she realized just how much doubt had filled her, sliding like sand through cracks in her confidence. Now that sand streamed away, and all the force she’d mustered to drive her through the fear and the battle thrust her forward and she realized she had her arms around Xiara and she wanted to kiss her.

  But Xiara was driving. Her muscles were rigid. Wheels turned in her dilated eyes and air hissed through those full lips, too regular for normal human breathing. She was in the ship.

  Born pilots, Zanj had said.

  “Are you still there?” Viv asked, and at first Xiara didn’t seem to have heard her. Her tongue tip peeked between her teeth, and disappeared.

  Her voice came like voices came from deep wells in dreams. “Yes,” she said first, the sounds drawn out. “I’ve just … I’ve never felt the Cloud before. Not like this. Through the veins, the harp strings, the depth. I can hear my grandmothers.” She blinked slowly, to clear the water welling in her eyes.

  “You can stop,” she said. “If you want. We’re safe.” She didn’t know that, but it seemed likely. “Zanj will come back s
oon, and she can fly.”

  “No.” Xiara’s certainty shone through the piloting trance. “This is right.” The control panel lights, Viv realized, blinked in time with Xiara’s breath. Others kept the beat of her pulse. The Cloud unfurled before them, and Xiara’s tears had nothing to do with sorrow. “Go,” she said, soft and sure and full of wonder. “Check on the others. I’m fine.”

  Viv drifted, dazed, from the cockpit. Hong, bouncing, triumphant, caught her and hugged her in the hall. At first she looked at him like he had grown a second head, but his smile was open and unforced and bright with their survival. Viv relaxed. They’d made it out under their own power and under her direction. Together. Her crew. “Where’s Gray?”

  Gone, it seemed at first.

  The engine room was not so much a single room as the whole of the ship that wasn’t given over to living space, a jungle of pipes and circuitry not so different from the tech she knew. When she climbed down the ladder, she found engines thrumming and ticking and gurgling and humming, and Gray himself nowhere. A blue ring on the floor pulsed softly a little faster than her heartbeat. She wondered if it served a purpose, other than reassuring passengers the great machines functioned. But she did not see Gray, so she called his name, feeling the first creep of panic, until she noticed the air’s slight bright frostlike sparkle. She grimaced. “You better not be in my lungs.”

  A gust of him tickled back up her throat, out past her teeth. “You didn’t even notice me,” he complained from all around her at once. “I’m subtle, and don’t metabolize. It’s not like I’d stay in there forever.”

  “It’s gross. And I like to look people in the eye when I talk to them.”

  He manifested two eyeballs in the air before her, just the eyeballs without a skull, and rolled them. “Is this better?”

  “I was coming down to thank you.” Though now she was thinking better of it.

  “Don’t, yet. I’ve done what I can, but we’ll need more fuel soon.”

  “You can’t just, you know.” She waved her hand imprecisely. “Make more?”

  The air blushed peevish orange, then turned clear again. “I need matter to eat, and to convert. Unless you’ll give me some of the ship?” She must have frowned, or her heart sped up, because he laughed.

  “Troll,” she said.

  “We’ll find more fuel.” Zanj sidled back into three-space in the hold above the engine room as if she’d been there the whole time, slapping nonexistent dust off her palms while Viv and the floating eyeballs stared up at her in shock. “I ditched the Pridemother in a black hole cluster. Don’t everyone applaud all at once.” She sounded sated, smelled of smoke, and leaned back against the wall, cool as cool. “Anything else you’d like, Your Majesty? Foot massage?”

  Viv didn’t remember climbing that ladder—just the jump of her heart, the excited blur up, arms spread to embrace Zanj before she realized they’d so rarely touched before. She smiled, broad and open and foolishly happy and she didn’t even mind. “You’re back!”

  Zanj buffed her claws on her jumpsuit. “Did you really think one Pridemother could take me out?” She shook her head, tsk tsk, tongue against teeth, poor form, bad play, an aunt critiquing her niece at majiang.

  “Never,” she said, and realized she was being honest. Zanj, eyes on her nails, grinned—sly and small and real. How would it feel, Viv wondered, to be Zanj? To have such power and be so constrained, for so long? You would start to doubt yourself—to worry your comrades would look at you and see a failure. What would such a person need to hear? Viv, startled, found she cared. “I never thought you’d lose. Only that you might not come back.”

  “You would have called me if I didn’t.”

  “No.”

  Zanj looked at her sidelong, with a gaze Viv could not yet understand. “Getting you home will spit in the Empress’s eye. That means more to me than stars. Don’t worry, Viv. I’m not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  VIV HAD EXPECTED Zanj would take the conn again when—if—she came back, but Zanj took one look at Xiara’s grip on the controls and stepped away, hands raised. “I can’t argue with true love. I told you: there’s no pilot like a pilot of Orn.”

  Rapt in union with the ship, Xiara flew without pause for a day and a night. She flipped switches by hand when she wanted; they flipped themselves when she asked. She charted their course, adjusted bearings, whispered of engines and thrust, looked into the Cloud and through swelling chaos to their path.

  No one knew what to do with her.

  The Ornclan had loaded the ship’s larder with food—some salted meats Viv did not recognize, but which tasted vaguely like ham, and vegetables in a wider range of colors and contortions than she remembered from supermarkets back home, but which, when tasted, fit more or less familiar categories: tubers, alliums, herbs, squash. A taste of raw pepper–adjacent purple apple-fleshed thing made her knees weak. Viv hadn’t realized how much she’d dreaded returning to nutrient paste. She cooked. She cooked! Nothing fancy, sautéed vegetables with a dash of meat in a rich nutty oil, served on that pillowy Ornish flatbread. She’d been years out of practice at a stove even before she woke up here, but still, working the pan and knives, she felt almost home.

  But when she took a plate to the cockpit, Xiara shook her head, her eyes still fixed on the Cloud Viv could not watch without feeling sick.

  “Different pilots take it differently,” Zanj said. “Give her time.” And they did, bandaging wounds, cleaning, fixing, with Zanj’s guidance, what systems the ship’s own maintenance bots could not. Viv tried to meditate with Hong, but bored fast; tried to work out with him, and tired faster. They left Xiara merged with the controls, peering through spacelanes as she stitched them into the Cloud and out. Her union with the ship seemed so pure, so deep, Viv felt guilty watching.

  But when Viv woke halfway through the second night to a steady ship, its singing engines quiet, and padded into the hall—she’d grown used to bare feet aboard ship—she found Xiara slumped in her chair, hands off the controls, staring hollowly at the void beyond the cockpit. She trembled. Her eyes were metal wheels still, but red, too, worn by starlight.

  “Hey,” Viv said without result.

  She’d seen this before. She’d been here before—not with ships and cybernetics, but with code first, then with business plans and meetings and all that accumulating damn work, her mind so stuck in ideas she couldn’t work back into her meat. For years she’d been that person, wired in, and she’d bent a world to her will. Who needed bodies, anyway?

  Everyone, it turned out.

  She fetched a blanket from the closet, and a cup from the canteen, and heated some of that not-quite-tea Zanj made from leaves that smelled like chocolate and cedar, and colored the water pink. She draped the blanket over Xiara’s shoulders, set the tea beside her hand. Xiara came back slowly: her pupils dilated, then shrank to pinpricks, settled in a middle, and the parts of her eyes that should have been white were. The bright circuit lines faded from her skin, her black veins ran blue-red once more. She shivered all through her body, and took a deep wet heavy breath. Viv held her close, rubbed her arms—her body was so cold. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “I was far away.” Her voice cracked; she tried to raise the tea, and it slipped. Viv brought it to her mouth instead, soft, settling the cup against Xiara’s lower lip; Xiara did not sip the tea so much as suck it down.

  “You need rest.”

  “I could go forever. I could live there. In the ship.”

  It occurred to Viv, then, that she’d not asked before interrupting—just assumed. She wanted, so badly, to say, I don’t want you to, but what she said instead was: “I can put you back, if you want.”

  Xiara caught Viv’s wrist before she could draw away, her grip cold and mechanical at first as if she’d forgotten how bodies worked, how they could be soft or gentle. Viv gasped, tensed, too, stared into inhuman eyes. But the eyes melted as the grip on her wrist warmed, and Xiara r
emained. She guided Viv’s hand to her neck, her cheek. “No.”

  Viv helped her back to the cabins. Xiara’s legs steadied as they walked, and her hand sought the wall; she leaned on Viv less as she recovered, then leaned against her more. At the door to the room they’d made up for her, Xiara stopped and her shoulders shook. Crying, Viv thought at first, uncomfortable, and debated how to respond, rifling through her experience of mother and girlfriends and finding little that would help—but then Xiara found her voice, and the first peal of laughter rang through the hall.

  Viv was thoroughly confused.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I did it!” She couldn’t stop laughing, doubled over, dragging in huge heaves of breath. “The first Ornclan in centuries offworld. I didn’t expect it to feel so good. We didn’t lose the stars at all. They’ve been up here waiting for us this whole time.” Her face was raw with wonder. “There are muscles singing I didn’t know I had. I never want this to end. I was scared at first, scared my body wouldn’t be here when I found my way back, but here I am, and here you are, and I did it, and I want to kiss you.” She blanched when she realized what she’d said, opened her mouth wide as if she could snatch the words and swallow them back down. Before Viv could speak, she rushed on, torrential: “I’m sorry, I mean, everything feels so full and sharp and hot when I’m not in the ship, and home’s far away and I don’t know when I’m going back or if and I don’t want to be alone tonight, and I scared you, didn’t I, I’m a fool, I don’t know how this goes where you come from—”

  “About like that,” Viv said, and leaned in.

  She needed this, too. Not wanted it, though, god, yes, that as well, but needed: the more or less familiar feeling as Xiara crashed into her hungry and they tumbled through the door into her cabin, as Viv pressed her against the wall, as she spun around and pressed Viv there in turn, Xiara’s cool fingers exploring her waistband, her pants sliding free, Viv’s teeth on the curve of Xiara’s neck, and then they were bodies naked in a sparely furnished room that could have been any sparely furnished room in any age in any galaxy. This she needed most of all, the tension, the curl, the strain and stress and susurrus of breath to build, and build, and ease into calm: a meat feeling, a meet feeling. And she’d thought cooking felt good! She knew so little in this time, but she knew her body; she knew how to play with a lover. Knew how to devour and tease, and let herself be caught, pressed, teased herself, how to rock and hold and breathe. The sudden pressure of a thigh or knee as weight shifted, the slide of breasts over her belly—and, after, as they drowsed, with her arm under Xiara’s neck, her fingers growing numb—it felt like home.