She tried not to think about the nightmare that had awakened her either, but that was a far more difficult task.
She had been having variations on it for the past ten years, although it always began and ended the same way. Elsa and her father stood outside their home in Gahmuret, watching a ship burn through the sky. The sight was almost too bright to look at. Chunks of the vessel had broken apart, but the core looked intact. It wasn’t until then that Elsa heard the roar, as the sound waves finally reached them. The ship screamed as the atmosphere tore it apart, and it smashed into the snowfields. A gout of ice and snow flew into the air as the ship disintegrated. Moments later, the shockwave rumbled through the ice: Elsa felt it in her boots, then in her bones and teeth. She looked up at her father, holding onto him for support as the ground shook. He was crying for the second time that day. She had never seen him cry before. The cloud of snow and ice thrown up by the ship raced towards them, and Helias picked up his daughter to run for the house—
Elsa always startled awake with a jolt at this point in the dream. Sometimes her nine-year-old self in the dream didn’t know that it was the Wilhelm plummeting to Anser, and sometimes she did. Elsa wasn’t sure which version was worse.
She kicked off the twisted blankets, wondering if she should just get up. She eyed her commlink, checking the time. Might as well. She could grab some breakfast. The one bright spot in this whole situation was the food. The ore barge had filled up on fresh fruits and vegetables when it docked, and for someone Anser-born, the mess hall was a veritable feast of delicacies. Fresh tomato juice and orange juice every day? Luxury indeed!
She eased herself off of the bunk, not wanting to wake Anastasia. Both of them had been surprised—and unpleasantly so—to find that they were bunkmates, both being sent to Rhodophis. In Elsa’s opinion, two ill-humored and uncommunicative girls in such a small space was a recipe for disaster. She was in no mood for pleasantries, and she preferred to escape the cramped sleeping quarters before Anastasia stirred.
Unfortunately, in the darkness her foot knocked against her cinder helmet, clanking against the bedpost. She froze.
She was too short to see Anastasia where she slept in the top bunk, but she heard the rustle of blankets. “Make a little more noise, short stuff,” Anastasia’s grouchy voice came through the darkness.
“Sorry,” Elsa whispered.
Anastasia’s sigh seemed to come from the depths of soul. “I’m awake now, you don’t need to whisper.” She sat up. “Might as well get up. We can go to breakfast.”
Elsa bit back her own sigh as she pulled the covers smooth over her bunk. So much for avoiding Anastasia this morning. She picked up the traitorous cinder helmet and set it on the bed out of the way.
Jerry the giant had given it to her at the jump-off before she left the training center for Rhodophis, the small helmet almost out of sight in his hand. “You’ll be needing this,” he said, holding it out to her. “Wrote your initials in the back.” He pointed to the letters E.V. written on the lining in the back of the helmet.
“You think someone will mistake it for theirs?” Elsa asked dryly.
Jerry shook his head. “Doubt it. But I thought it might feel more like yours. Everything is company-issued on the mining worlds. It’s nice to have something you can call your own.” He looked at her, eyes filled with a kindness she didn’t expect. “Doesn’t seem like you have much.”
Elsa had been surprised to find she had a lump in her throat. Care, consideration: these were things she thought she had left behind on Anser. Encountering kindness among the cinders almost made everyone else’s treatment of her worse, somehow.
“Thank you, Jerry,” she told him, her voice thick. She had to crane her neck to meet his eyes.
He smiled. “Good luck to you. Careful of the fire worms.”
He had left before she could ask what he meant.
That was the last noticeable thoughtfulness she had received from anyone, she thought dryly as she moved out of Anastasia’s path to the sink. Admittedly, Elsa was keeping to herself. Anastasia was the only person with whom she had really conversed. If one could call it that.
She took another stab at conversation as the two girls walked to the mess hall for breakfast. She wasn’t sure why she bothered. Anastasia had made her desire to be left alone very plain.
And yet, she still wanted to go with Elsa to meals. Elsa recognized another lonely person when she saw one. Even though she would’ve preferred to walk in silence, she broke the quiet.
“What made you decide to be a cinder?” she asked, curious.
Anastasia didn’t look at her. “I come from a family of cinders,” she said. “Both of my parents were miners.”
They moved to one side of the claustrophobic corridor to allow several ore barge employees to walk past. The faint reek of cendrillon ore lingered everywhere, and the stark grey walls did little to brighten an already cramped ship design. The barges were meant to haul ore, not haul passengers in fine state.
“I’m very good,” Anastasia said without a trace of humility as she lengthened her stride, forcing Elsa to trot a couple steps to keep up. “It’s in my blood, you could say. That’s why they’re sending me to Rhodophis. I’m used to working in tough spots.”
“It’s good that you can do what you love,” Elsa said, feeling that some sort of response was required.
“Oh, I hate it,” Anastasia said bluntly. “But I don’t know how to do much else.” She shrugged. “The money’s good.”
Elsa didn’t understand how that mattered if Anastasia never had a chance to enjoy her earnings in places other than the hellish mining worlds, but she kept her thoughts to herself. Anastasia was difficult to get along with, but she really did know her mining: Elsa figured she would be a useful ally once they reached Rhodophis.
The girls rounded the corner to the mess hall. Elsa was forced to walk behind Anastasia as the other cinder crowded her, and she restrained another sigh of impatience.
And found herself face to face with Bruno Lorengel as he walked out of the mess hall.
“You!” she blurted, then realized how silly that sounded. “What are you doing here?”
His eyes widened. “What are you doing here? How did you get assigned to Rhodophis your first time out? A midget like you won’t last half a shift on a planet like that!”
Was the man incapable of saying anything that didn’t raise her ire? “I wasn’t aware there was a height requirement,” she said with some acerbity. “If I can survive on Anser, I can survive on Rhodophis. And what do you even know of that world?” she asked, switching to attack rather than defense. “If you’re being transported to the planet, I assume you’re a miner who is coming from elsewhere too.”
An ore barge employee tried to squeeze through the doorway past the altercation. Bruno grabbed Elsa’s arm and pulled her into the mess hall and off to one side near some empty tables. Elsa yanked her arm away, incensed. Anastasia had completely ignored the fracas and was getting her breakfast, unconcerned.
“Girl, I was mining cendrillon on worse worlds than Rhodophis before you hit puberty,” Bruno snapped. He paused, his gaze flickering away. “And I requested the assignment.”
Elsa arched an eyebrow. “You know it’s a dangerous world. Why would you request—” She broke off. “Wait a minute. You said it yourself, people become cinders for one of two reasons: for the thrill or for the money.” She folded her arms. “You don’t strike me as an adrenaline junkie either. All your fine talk back at the training center,” she said, voice rising with indignation, “criticizing me for my apparent greed, when you requested the highest-paying world yourself!”
Outrage flashed across his face, but it was quickly replaced by an emotion she couldn’t identify. He just stood there, looking at her.
Suddenly uncomfortable, she tried to recapture her indignation but couldn’t quite manage it. The silence lasted too long. “What?” she finally asked.
“You told me you had lost
everything,” he said, so quietly that she had to resist the urge to take a step closer to hear him. “Did you ever feel that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there were an accident? If one day you just…didn’t make it.”
She remembered her wild ride across the snowfields, half-hoping for a crevasse to swallow her up, as it had her father. She swallowed hard and didn’t answer.
She didn’t have to; he read it in her face. “Now you know why I request the most dangerous assignments,” he said simply.
“What happened to you?” she asked, just as quietly. Her anger had drained away as rapidly as it had come.
Bruno cleared his throat. He swung a leg over a bench at one of the tables and gestured for Elsa to take a seat. Once she was sitting, he took a deep breath. “I lost my wife in the attack on Atthis.”
Elsa looked at him, stricken. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. My mother was killed in the battle as well.” She looked at the battered surface of the table, struggling with her guilt. “That was a hard day for us both, sounds like.”
Bruno nodded. “After that, I lost my job. I had nothing left, just like you; folks with nothing left have a way of ending up on the Periphery. Benizara was the toughest place to mine, those days. Half of the ore barges leaving there were being hit by Demesne forces. It was so bad, the company was having trouble keeping barge crews around. They hired me without asking too many questions.” He quirked his lips.
He couldn’t be more than forty years old, she realized with a start. When he did that almost-smile, he looked downright young.
“You worked on an ore barge?” She didn’t know why it surprised her, but it did. He didn’t seem like he belonged in cargo transport, though she couldn’t have said exactly where he did seem to belong.
He nodded. “It seemed a shame to waste a war—so many opportunities to get rid of myself without actually having to do it. Worked the barges for a year or so. Never got hit by the Demesne, wouldn’t you know it. Then I trained to be a cinder.”
Anastasia returned at last, carrying two trays of food. “Got you breakfast,” she said carelessly, dropping one tray on the table near Elsa and sitting down next to her. The gesture was a little too elaborately careless, in fact: Elsa was beginning to wonder if her calloused exterior was just an act to cover up her loneliness. She could relate.
“What about you?” Bruno asked, toying with the fork on Anastasia’s tray. “What’s your story?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but the blare of alarms split the quiet conversation of the mess hall. Elsa glanced up, startled. “What is it? What does that mean?”
Anastasia shook her head in bafflement.
Bruno, however, threw down the fork and hurried to the single window in the mess hall. “We’re under attack,” he said, craning his neck to see. “Pirates have been hitting ore barges lately to plunder the ore, but what kind of idiots attack an empty barge?” He strode to the wall comm, signaling the bridge.
“Little busy right now,” the ore captain’s voice said, sounding strained. The barge had limited armaments, and they wouldn’t do much against the pirate brigantine’s cannons. Since the peace accords had been signed a year and a half ago dividing access to chthonian planets between the two main mining companies, piracy was becoming a huge issue. The cendrillon black market flourished. The Fleet issued escorts for the largest ore barge flotillas—when they were loaded. But empty barges had never been attacked before, so far as Elsa knew.
“Yes sir, I can see that,” Bruno said with just a hint of testiness. “Have you hailed the pirate ship? Tell them the barge is empty. We’re not even worth their time.”
“Oh yeah,” the captain scoffed, “because they’re going to believe that.”
Bruno swore. “Send them your flight records,” he spat out. “We’re obviously coming from an inhabited system, why would we be carrying ore back to Rhodophis?”
The ore barge shuddered as the pirate ship fired on them. Elsa’s eyes widened, and she clutched the edge of the table as a tray slid off of it, spattering breakfast on the floor. She was accustomed to certain dangers, but she had never been under fire before. The deck beneath her feet rumbled. Was that normal? She didn’t know which sounds meant serious trouble.
“I don’t think they’re in the mood to swap flight plans,” the captain snapped. He terminated the connection, and Bruno swore again, smacking the wall in frustration.
Elsa hesitated. She might not know much about ore barges, but she was used to thinking on her feet. She had an idea…but if there was one thing she had learned from this experience so far, it was that she knew far less than she thought. Maybe this was stupid.
“Bureaucracy getting in the way of saving lives again,” Bruno gritted out. “There’s an easy solution! Nobody needs to get hurt today.”
The ship lurched again, and a crewman yelped and dodged out of the way as a stack of pans slid across one of the counters to smash against the wall.
Elsa made her decision. She released her death grip on the table and rose on shaky legs. “You said only an idiot would attack an empty barge,” she said slowly.
Bruno looked at her over his shoulder. “Yeah. So?”
“So we should show them that the barge is empty.” She smiled suddenly, vibrantly; even if it didn’t work, contributing a possible solution made her feel much less helpless. “Do you know where the cargo bay is?”
Bruno stared at her as he realized what she was suggesting. “Girl, I like the way you think. I’m on it.” Without further discussion, he took off at a run for the corridor.
Elsa hesitated a moment before following him into the corridor as the alarms continued to blare. She had to hustle to catch up, sliding a bit as she rounded the corner. She had no idea where she was going; her explorations of the ore barge had been limited by her desire not to converse with the crewmembers.
Bruno glanced down at her. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, not unkindly. “It’s a long run to the cargo bays.”
“Felt like a jog,” she said. And, truth be told, she felt more alive in this moment than she had in months. “And anyway,” she continued, dodging around a crewman who was moving along the corridor far too slowly, “it was my idea. If it saves us all from being boarded by pirates, I at least want to be there.” The crewman glared at them as they passed, but both runners ignored him.
“If we’re very, very lucky, it may save us all from being boarded by pirates,” Bruno corrected. The ship yawed, tilting them into the wall. It righted itself just as suddenly.
They ran faster, Elsa taking two steps to Bruno’s one as they clattered across a long section of deck with grating for a floor. Some kind of engine systems throbbed below their feet, and wisps of steam drifted up through the grate. Elsa hoped that was normal and not a sign of damage. She wiped the first droplets of sweat from her forehead with one hand.
“Where’s a Fleet ship when you need one?” Elsa muttered.
Bruno glanced at her sharply. “Indeed,” he said after a noticeable pause. “You, ah…you said you were from Anser. Were you on the planet during the battle?”
Surprised by the conversation’s turn, Elsa nodded. “My father and I saw the Wilhelm fall, with my mother aboard.” She stared straight ahead in consternation as she ran. Why had she said that?
“Do you—” Bruno began, then stopped, seemingly torn. “I…I always imagined maybe the inhabitants of Anser felt some resentment towards the Fleet. You know, because their ships didn’t arrive in time to save Cygnus. Is that the case?” He glanced at her tentatively from under his eyebrows, looking almost boyish.
Elsa considered that and shook her head, incredulous that they were having this conversation while the ship rocked around them. She had to admit the distraction was welcome, though. “No, I don’t think so. Most people knew that there was no way for the ships to get there in time. We saw it as a tragedy they could do nothing to prevent. I definitely didn’t blame the Fleet. Heck, I almost joined it, and m
y mother worked for it.”
Bruno nodded thoughtfully. “Good to know.”
“Don’t know what the folks on Atthis thought,” Elsa said. She was starting to get winded; how far were they running? “But from what I heard, they fared much better than we did. Most of Anser never was rebuilt, in spite of our best efforts.” She swallowed, pumping her arms and legs harder as the conversation grew more difficult. “After my mother died, my father made it his life’s dream to put our world back together. That’s why I’m here, actually.”
Elsa was flung sideways as the deck beneath her feet bucked, but Bruno caught her arm and propelled her onward. He didn’t even look out of breath, Elsa noticed in exasperation. “How does that connect?” he asked.
“When our community needed food transports, my father purchased them with his own funds, expecting a grant from the Tremaine Mining Company.” She grimaced. “Oh, how he hated to go crawling to them for help!” she said, remembering Helias’ rants on the subject. “But he said that they caused the mess, and by the stars, they should help to clean it up.”
“But they wouldn’t,” Bruno said, not making it a question. A new alarm rang out, and she saw fear in his eyes for the first time. If he had felt it before, he’d masked it well. Elsa wondered if that was for her benefit.
She shook her head, running out of breath to speak. “When my father died several months ago, we were deeply in debt. The sum I owed far, far exceeded anything I could possibly earn on Anser in my lifetime. So I decided to become a cinder.”
A stitch in her side made its presence known. Good grief, how long was this barge? “I’m not sure how he would feel about me working for a mining company,” she gasped out. “He called cendrillon the galaxy’s bane.”
The Battle of Castle Nebula (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 1) Page 13
