She felt so ready to give. To slake the machine’s hunger. That was how the crown had trapped her, that was the pit Hong gave his life to free her from. She was eager to be shaped.
She stepped off the catwalk and the ship pulled her up. Its arms spread, and she found herself embraced. Received. Welcomed.
With a thousand thousand eyes she stared out through the Cloud, and flexed a thousand thousand limbs. There was pain, yes, she’d forgotten the fullness of the pain—but there was joy, too, far worse. She wanted the pain to stop, and it did—Groundswell just reached inside her, obedient to her will, and turned the pain receptors off. Its systems embraced her, planet-shattering vast, obedient to her will. It needed her to want things. It needed her will to shape its own, to give its weaponized hulk frame and purpose. She was a girl in a palace, empty and immense, and when she shouted, invisible hands answered her every command. But no matter how she ran, she never reached the walls, and if she demanded a door, it only opened into the palace once again.
She gathered herself in silence, shuddering.
And then, with a thousand thousand ears, she heard her clan.
Voices of Orn, in rhythm and formation and harmony—a war chant, a gathering chant, and she heard their ships gather round her in the Cloud, each will shaped to a greater unity like voices shaped to song.
At their heart, she heard her mother’s voice.
This, she knew.
She gave herself to the song, and flew with the hosts of Orn to war.
* * *
VIV WATCHED THE map.
They sped through the churning engine of the Citadel’s Cloud. Zanj, muttering, adjusted the Star’s form, and they surged ahead still faster. The rules were different here, it seemed; the Empress had carved paths for her own use, dedicated transfer and processing circuits, redundant subsystems. Zanj had opened a window so Viv could watch, but gazing into the enormous crash and roll of the machine made her head ache. She preferred charts instead, so Zanj built those: red patterns in the Star’s matte-black cockpit. There was a situation map: the Mirrorfaith’s battle group in position, telemetry dots winking out in the green blizzard of the Empress’s forces, artwork ships torn by slivers, or else obscured, until the Pride descended upon them, hate fractals trailing flame. And, yes, there, the Ornclan struck, deeper into Imperial territory, at a manufactory hub guarded by an Imperial glaiveship and a torch squadron and, of course, thousands more drones of the Diamond Fleet. A logical second-wave target. Just the kind of place they might strike if their first attacks had been mere feints.
They didn’t have to hold out for long. But still, she prayed.
The map marked their destination in blue, nearing fast. Nioh and Yannis had found them as soon as the wall came down, and they traced telemetry helices around the Star, trading pings and data streams. They had no physical form now, vectors of information only keeping pace. Almost there. She tried not to think about Xiara, she tried even more not to think about Hong, but not thinking made it worse. So she thought, instead. Drew them into her mind, and let them shape her.
She felt it near: her world pierced by Imperial light, the bottled universe in which the Empress built her, and Magda, and everything she knew. A hundred thousand hands of gravity and light pulled Viv, caught her, pried her. She curled over the control panel; Gray came to her side, set his hands on her shoulders, but she waved him off. “I’m fine.”
She was not. But they all had their business now, and hers was to survive.
They drew close. Their destination swelled on the map and became a system, a single star necklaced by planets with eccentric oval orbits, rock and metal near the star, gas giants farther out, one of those marked with an hourglass glyph whose meaning she could not parse. Sensors painted the system Imperial green: installations and ships and lines of force, huge Dyson plates near the star, rings and space junk, a built-up system, an ancient system, full of weapons, full of trash. And there, above the third planet, the blue X of their destination: Viv’s singularity, and the systems the Empress built to pry it open.
Red numbers counted seconds left till their arrival. Thirty. Twenty.
The blue X should have drawn her entire focus, all her worry and her will. That was everything; their success, or failure. Her ticket home.
But instead, she studied the system. The single star, the projected orbits. The planets. Eight, if you counted that weird hourglass-thing.
When she was a kid, there had been nine.
“Gray,” she said. “Does that system have a name?”
Before he could answer, they fell from the Cloud to realspace. Normal geometry reasserted itself with a stomach-twist. But, sickened, Viv still forced herself up, made herself look out the window.
And then she did not need his answer anymore, because below her, bluegreen beautiful, was Earth.
69
EARTH—VIV SAW that first, before all the rest. She’d seen a few planets from orbit by now and none of them got the blue right, or the clouds. But she’d drawn those comparisons to pictures, mostly, videos, the blue marble shots from the Moon, pinholes sent back from Mars. This was Earth seen with her own eyes. She wished Hong were here to see it: home.
But different.
The coastline had changed, for one thing. Someone had reattached Florida, sewn the Pacific Landfall back on, refilled the Ural Sea. Ice caps, big beautiful lazy ice caps, spread their fingers to the north and south; Greenland was coming into view, sparkling white. She found her cheeks were wet.
Yes, the Moon was a hollowed-out shell surging with bent light, where gleaming metal showed through rock; yes, a forest of crystal arms grew from the lunar surface, directing green needles to the L5 point where the stars and Sun went wrong around the singularity she’d come to seek. Yes, huge Dyson plates shifted between Earth and Sun, and somewhere outsystem she didn’t even want to know what was happening with Jupiter, and Venus kept trying to talk to them, and the Earth itself was webbed with veins of crystal, miles across—a transit system maybe, or else the thread the Empress used to knit together a fractured globe. The Earth and Moon alike were surrounded by emerald drone-motes waking to their presence, opening balefire eyes. The system was full of wrongness and wonder.
But the continents looked like they did when she was a girl.
Could there be that much difference in their timelines? No—the Empress would have wanted to control variables in her simulations. A world that was not, in some sense, doomed by change, would not be a world where Vivian Liao was born. The Empress had seized the Earth, and all that it became, and turned it back to how it was. She could not allow even this to change.
She remembered Hong, and transformations.
“Viv?”
“I’m fine,” she told Gray. Wiped away a tear. “We have to finish this.”
“I mean, I came all this way for the view,” Zanj said. “But as long as we’re in the neighborhood, sure, let’s save the galaxy.”
She heard the anger in the joke, and felt grateful for it.
“Now,” Zanj said. “If you were an Empress, where would you be?”
“You can’t scan for her?”
“This whole region scans as her, for light-years in every direction. And I think she knows we’re here.” The emerald motes moved toward them—at this distance they seemed to be drifting, but even drifting at this distance was an unimaginable speed. “Ideas?”
A choice without data, without argument. Except—the Empress had fixed the Earth back how she liked it. Why would you do a thing like that, if you didn’t want to look?
“She’s on the Moon,” Viv said.
Zanj spoke into the comm: “How about it, ladies? Can you clear a path?”
Yannis and Nioh burned before them in the darkness, weapons drawn, shimmering, Yannis’s fangs sharp and long, her eyes fixed, her forked spear in hand, Nioh’s shoulders broad and her horns gleaming. “We’ll give them hell,” Yannis said. “Just like the old days.”
“Try to win th
is time,” Zanj said.
“How about you try to keep up?” And, before Zanj could answer, the Suicide Queens burned, twin comets, toward the Moon.
* * *
XIARA FOLLOWED THE music through the war.
The battle strategies of ships like Groundswell don’t fit in most gravity-bound tellurian languages; ships have one of their own to describe it, but good luck speaking that if you don’t have a distributed neural network the size of a city. It’s not so much an issue of complexity, as one of fronts. Three physical dimensions, not counting the tiny ones, and one arrow of time—sure, for starters. Then there’s the Cloud, in its fullness and depth, its interface with three-space computational systems, which have their own contact surfaces and weaknesses and strengths. All of that creates the battle space.
When fighting a ship, one may attack its soul; waste its time; demand or direct its attention, sneak a memetic virus through any one of its hundred senses, all of them cycling activity to prevent just this sort of assault—though they don’t dare stay closed for long, because if, for example, one’s opponent isn’t monitoring a stretch of q-band, that presents an opening all its own. Does the enemy scour its surface with drones to prevent intrusion? Then drones are an attack vector. Do they shut down their drones to stop your hacking? Then push a nanocloud boarding party across the void.
And that’s setting aside the challenge of coordinating a fleet. Here, the Ornclan had an advantage—their war songs invoked ancient Cloud-based subroutines to coordinate trickier micro-tasks like shield reinforcement, attack timing, and RNG band-hopping. And, of course, their war songs kept the beat.
Imagine playing twenty games of chess at once, with the clocks running down, only you can’t touch the board yourself, but have to make each move through one of those joke cascade devices where a flipped switch rolls a ball down an inclined plane to knock open a door, which releases a mouse, and a cat to chase the mouse, but when the mouse runs into its hole it trips a wire that causes a broom to sweep down, and so on until finally a dart pops a balloon that lets a weight fall that that pushes the piece into place. Only at any time your opponent may change the game to checkers. Or Go. Or backgammon. Or Candy Land.
Also, the whole thing hurts like hell.
So Xiara trusted the music. She’d learned to fight this way—learned to wrestle to the beat of drums, first held a spear and marched as her mother sang. And she was winning. She wrestled the glaiveship with gravwells and drone claws; Groundswell split to pieces, spoofed its own identity, turned the glaiveship’s missiles back. The glaiveship roared, metaphorically. One wild strike shattered a planet; another veered into space, and struck some distant star to nova. But she was winning.
Behind her, below her, on another plane of existence, the Ornclan engaged the Imperial torches, while pickets dismantled the manufactory to keep the Chalcedon from forming.
They were winning, until the melody slipped.
Xiara was so consumed with battle, so given to the rhythm, that she didn’t notice until the harmony landed wrong.
Panic swelled. She missed a beat; the glaiveship’s main cannon tore her belly, drawing plasma.
Her eyes swept the stars through the confusion of colors and noise, through the explosions and the interference and the naked singularities blaring chaos into the black. Ornclan ships drifted. A crystal storm carved one to molecular ribbons.
She did not see the Ornchief. She could not hear her mother’s voice.
She would know, wouldn’t she? She would know if her mother were gone. She would have heard something—would have felt it. That was how the stories made it out: the teller lingered on the fall of heroes. The Ornchief would not die unmarked.
But the Cloud was full of noise and serpents, overwhelming the Ornsong without the Ornchief’s voice to bind it. Xiara scrambled in the dark but heard no melody to which she could give herself.
Around her, the clan faltered, and began to burn.
This was not Xiara’s time, not her place. There should be mourning, if the Ornchief were gone. There should be rites and tears. There should have been time. She followed, gave, supported—but now there was no one to tell her what to do, no one to whom she could lend her strength.
But Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter was not only the woman who gave, who offered, who upheld. She could stand, too. Viv would, in her place—and so would Zanj, in a different way, flying by sheer stubborn refusal to fall. She wanted, as Gray wanted—wanted all things to be a part of him, wanted to pull the world into a single will. And she had learned, as Hong learned, the contours of the world, of her ship, of her voice.
Learn so you can work. Practice so you can play. Follow so you can lead.
No one stays who she is forever.
In Groundswell’s inhuman depths, the woman who was the Ornchief’s daughter hummed a note and, trembling, shaped a melody.
And the Ornclan joined her.
* * *
THE FALLEN STAR burned toward the Moon, and the Empress came to stop them in her millions.
What Viv thought motes were statues on nearer view: angular Empresses all, robed and clawed and bright-eyed. Zanj danced the Star through them, grinning a skull-grin, features set. Outside, Nioh and Yannis were vectors once more, light, motion, trails of fire—scattering the Empress statues, shattering them, piercing three at a time and throwing their shards as missiles against the oncoming wave. But as the Moon ate space to fill the screen, the Suicide Queens began to slow. Viv saw them first arrested in moments of destruction, pausing for broken instants that left ghost images on the eye; the trail of fire their movements left shrank as they slowed, and the waves of Empress continued, more statues sweeping toward them from Earth, or rising from the lunar surface.
Zanj growled a curse too garbled for Viv’s gimmick to translate. “Any idea where on the Moon, exactly?”
Through the chaos of the battle, through the percussion of emerald claws on the Star’s hull, Viv felt something—not words, just a tug in her gut. “Let me fly!”
“How?”
“Make me a joystick?”
Zanj cursed, but she did—stuck her hand into the console and shaped it into a stick. “Here!”
The instant Viv took the stick, they began to crash. From inside the Star, she hadn’t quite appreciated how fast the ship was moving, how many collisions Zanj avoided. But, hell. They were supposed to be more or less invulnerable, right?
She closed her eyes, ignored the increased patter, then the louder thunks, of Empress statues bouncing off their prow, and followed that tug in her gut down, down, toward the pain—
“Are you flying with your goddamn eyes closed?”
They snapped open, and, oh, the Moon was beautiful, and, oh, the Moon was so very awfully close, its surface no longer a map but a very real, very hard ground toward which they were not so much flying as falling fast …
Zanj shoved her away from the controls, and did something, and suddenly Viv could not breathe, could not see, everything was black and deep and sharp and cold and still.
There came a very loud noise.
* * *
SHE WOKE WITH a mouthful of dust, and a jaw that did not feel quite right. Given the alternatives, she’d take it.
She rose to her knees, somewhat easier than she expected. Blinked. Rubbed more dust out of her eyes. No, not dust.
Regolith.
Oh, Christ. She was on the Moon.
She didn’t even have time to savor it, or process more than that first shock. Zanj pulled her to her feet by her good hand. “Come on,” she said. “They’re losing.” She was right. In the sky, Yannis and Nioh’s lines of fire grew shorter, and green motes of Empress closed in. “Which way?”
She searched the jagged regolith, spiked with crystal spires, then realized she had no idea what she was looking for. She closed her eyes. “There!” She pointed, turned—and saw Gray lying facedown, with a spear of rock through his gut.
She ran to him, kneeling, felt his wrist—no pu
lse—of course there wouldn’t be—not another one—but the sorrow and rage hadn’t yet wormed through her shock when he twisted his head full around on his neck, blinked confusion from his eyes, looked up at her. He tried to speak, couldn’t, then shrugged and stood, dragging the rock spar out of his stomach, which sealed behind it. “Ow. Good thing I don’t have organs, or that would have really hurt.”
Zanj didn’t need to take the time to roll her eyes. Viv could read her frustration from her shoulders, and the twitch of her tail. “This way?” Across the lunar plain, a silver staircase, leading up to a silver platform without apparent support.
She nodded, and they ran.
She was out of breath; her chest ached, and her face, and her hand, and the rest of her besides. The sky confused itself with light, and their shadows wriggled and rippled on the ground. She spared no time to think. There were too many questions to ask: what was the vibration beneath her feet, what had the Empress done with the Moon, why could she breathe here, this gravity didn’t feel one-sixth Earth standard—but then again, she didn’t feel like she was a mere few hundred thousand miles from a black hole, either. She looked over her shoulder. The twin fires of Yannis and Nioh had dwindled to dots, choked by waves of green. She ran. If none of this worked, if she’d fucked it up and led them wrong, at least she stood beside her friends, here at the end of everything.
But she would not lose. She could not. Not after Hong.
A wind rose as they neared the stair. It howled across the regolith, shaking pebbles loose, blowing dust down dunes, gathering speed and weight and heat, such heat, sweating, blinding, flame-quick, a heat full of colors and sound that rose cobra-hooded and skyscraper-tall in a column of fury and raging eyes between them and the silver stair.
They slowed, stopped. Stared up at it: a Gray of Grayframe, come to fight.
She waited for Gray to talk to it, to call it cousin and embrace, or even argue. But his eyes were wide, and his face was written in a script whose meaning she feared to guess.
Empress of Forever Page 53
