“So they’re not liable to be exactly pleased to see him. Or us. Whichever one of us gets there first.”
“Well—that depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“What kind of demon they think we are.”
“We’re demons now?”
“Like I said—nothing else is real to them. Anything from the outside galaxy is just a . . . projection of the afterlife, there to test them, or punish them. If we’re the latter, the kind they’d want to appease into leaving them alone, we’re golden. If we’re the former, tricksters and shapeshifters, there to tempt them into believing this universe is real—”
“That’s when they kill us with fire.”
“About right, yeah.”
“Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“What the fuck is wrong with . . . with . . . with . . . with everyone?”
She sighed, didn’t answer me. Sho, meanwhile, had wheeled up beside us—he was staring at the holoprojection with the same kind of fascination he had for all the new tech he hadn’t been exposed to on Kandriad. “Why would he be going to a place like . . . like that?” he asked, scrutinizing the projection of the nebula Jane had brought up. Apparently, he’d been listening.
I shrugged. “Why would he be on Kandriad?” I asked. “I mean, no offense to your home planet, Sho—”
“You called it a ‘shithole’ about an hour ago. You also said, repeatedly, ‘fuck that place.’ ”
“Well. Yes. Because fuck that place. Point is, whatever this guy is after—we don’t know enough to figure out what he wants, why he might be going . . . anywhere, really.”
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out on Valkyrie Rock,” Jane shrugged.
“Or he’ll be waiting for us when we disembark, and resume trying to murder us.”
“Or that.”
“Or the locals will be trying to murder us, because we’re demons.”
“Also a distinct possibility, yes, though one we can hopefully mitigate down to ‘unlikely.’ ”
Sho was looking back and forth between Jane and me. “And this is . . . what you two do,” he said, sounding caught somewhere between awe and shock.
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“I . . . I was kind of hoping the Justified would be smarter,” he said, sounding more than a little disappointed.
I had to laugh at that.
CHAPTER 7
So: we had our course—chase after the crazy bastard in the weird ship who maybe had a cure for the pulse—and we had our destination, a hollowed-out former mining asteroid in the middle of a nebula in an otherwise uninteresting system, populated by a cult of death-obsessed misanthropes who hated the rest of the galaxy.
Just another day in the service of the Justified; time for bed.
Well before she’d met me, Jane had made the decision to convert her sleeping quarters—the only separate room in Schaz’s interior, apart from the shower and the airlock/armory—into a sort of recovery chamber for the kids she picked up, meaning Sho got his own quarters. Her reasoning was sound: she figured her passengers would need privacy more than anything, after being plucked from their homeworlds and spirited away between the stars, that they’d need someplace where they didn’t have to put on a brave face for her, or to try and figure out how they were supposed to behave now.
That only became more true if they were dealing with the sort of trauma Sho had just survived. He’d been bearing up well, I’d give him that, but still: he could use some time alone, and he could use some sleep. He wasn’t the only one.
“Why don’t we carry hooch, Jane?” I sighed, changing into my sleeping sweats as she rotated our bunks out of the wall. We’d already settled Sho in his own quarters, and now it was our turn—Jane and I slept in the main cabin, converted into a pair of bunks. “We should carry hooch, just for days like today.”
She laughed at that. “Since when do you drink?” she asked me. Then, a heartbeat later: “Seriously, when do you drink? You’ve never done any drinking around me. Who’s been teaching you to drink?”
It was almost cute, the rare occasions she remembered she was supposed to be maternal. “Jane, I’m seventeen, I have a drink once in a while, god. I just don’t drink with you because—how should I put this—you’re an incredibly morose drunk.”
“Who told you that? Marus?”
“Oh, no one told me, Jane. I found out for myself. Don’t you remember? About a year and a half ago, at that . . . we were at Sanctum, and there was—”
“Wait, was this at that . . . the retirement thing, for TivShall?” She stretched clean sheets across her cot, frowning. “I remember that. Vaguely. I did not have too much to drink at that.” She sounded vaguely offended by the entire concept, which was too much to bear.
I looked her dead in the eyes, made sure I had her full attention. “Jane, you did,” I told her. “You really did. You had so much to drink, in point of fact, that you sat me down for a monologue about your experiences during the slow-motion demise of the Ishiguro. A full monologue, Jane. You went on and on about the sounds it made as it sank into the crushing atmosphere of some gas giant, about the way the light died as you went down into the depths with the ship. I don’t know exactly what moral you were trying to get across, outside of ‘your early days with the Justified were shit,’ but whatever it was, you were very intense about it. So, yeah. I’d say you had a bit too much to drink.”
She paused in the act of pulling off one of her boots. “I do not remember that,” she admitted, sounding a bit mystified. “I mean, I remember the actual sinking, yeah; I’ll never forget that if I live for another hundred years.” For a second I was briefly terrified she was going to launch into the entire reminiscence again, but she shook it off and came back to the now. “But I don’t remember telling you that story, not at all. Why would I tell you that story?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, “but tell it you did: to me, and to Javier, and to TivShall, and to everyone else anywhere in earshot at the time. Twenty full minutes of bloodcurdling descriptions of asphyxiation and weirdly sexual metaphors about the infinite embrace of death. It still haunts my dreams, Jane. It haunts my fucking dreams. That’s why we don’t drink together very often.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s Javi, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s Javi what?”
“It’s Javier who’s been teaching you to drink.”
“Oh, quit clucking, mother hen.”
“You’re my partner; he shouldn’t be teaching you his bad habits.”
“It’s not like I’m littering Schaz’s deck with empty beer cans, you know.”
“Still. I’m vaguely offended.”
“By me, or by Javier?”
“By you, obviously. Javi can do what he wants.”
I had to laugh at that. “You’re more jealous that I’ve been drinking with Javier than that he’s been drinking with me?”
“I’m not jealous, Esa. Just . . . put out.”
“Whatever, Jane. I’m just saying, the next time we’re at Sanctum—”
“I will track down a bottle of celebratory hooch, yes. I know where Marus keeps a stash of the good stuff.”
“Of which you will only allow yourself small doses when we do have a drink or two together.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
I climbed into bed; Jane was already in, so Schaz dimmed the lights.
“I really told you about the sinking of the Ishiguro?” Jane asked me after a moment. “You sure you didn’t hear that from Criat or something?”
“Oh, no. I heard it directly from you. Believe me. Not even Criat could give me the kind of detail you were putting into that recollection. That horrible, horrible recollection.”
“Oh. Okay. Fine.”
“Not really, no.”
“Hey, Esa?”
“God, what?” I yawned. I really was ready to get to sleep.
“Good work today.”
“
Oh.” Slightly mollified, I replied: “Thank you, Jane.”
“You’re welcome.”
After a moment, it was my turn: “Hey, Jane?”
“Yes, Esa?”
“You too.”
“Thank you.”
The long day seemed to stretch out behind us forever, and I was so damned tired I could have dropped into unconsciousness then and there, but: I still had questions, questions about some of the things Jane had said, or implied, down on Kandriad, and if I wasn’t going to ask now, I knew I wouldn’t get a better chance—god hates a coward, and all that. “. . . Hey, Jane?”
“Yes, Esa?”
“What was your home planet like?”
I could hear her staring at me, in the dark—through the dark, even though she didn’t have her HUD activated; I would have been able to tell by the glow of her eyes. She didn’t say anything, was just lying there, breathing.
“Was it like Kandriad? Was it like the factory city, under siege?” I pushed my luck.
“In some ways, yes. In other ways, no.”
“That . . . doesn’t tell me much.”
She sighed; I could hear her rolling over, onto her back. “What do you want from me, Esa?” she asked. Just the sound of her voice, when she said it—it made me sad, like maybe I shouldn’t have pressed.
But I was still me, so I kept going anyway. “I want to know what it was like. I figure that would be obvious, given, you know, that’s what I asked.”
For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer, that I’d pushed too far, and she’d just closed up again. Then she just started speaking, like the darkness gave her permission—like if she didn’t have to watch my face while she was talking, she could pretend that she was really only talking to herself.
“You went to school in the little settlement you grew up in, right? They didn’t have a separate school for the orphanage or anything.” I didn’t say anything; she already knew the answer, was just trying to ground herself. “Imagine that—going to school—except every week there was some kid whose parent didn’t come home from the front; imagine if every month there was some kid who just stopped showing up, not because they’d dropped out, but because they’d been caught in an errant airstrike, or crushed by falling debris, or just shot by an enemy sniper who didn’t give a fuck about basic rules of engagement like ‘don’t shoot kids.’ Imagine having to make your way down the front lines just to get a few eggs to eat, or some milk, if there was any to be had. Imagine that being your choice: cross through the trenches and maybe catch a bullet in the head, or starve. Imagine that. Every single day. For years.”
“I can’t,” I said softly. And I couldn’t. Just today had been . . . too much. Beyond too much. The thought of that being life . . . it was beyond the limited powers of my imagination.
For a moment, I thought she was done—that she’d made her point, and I’d gotten all I was going to get. That was what normally would have happened—in fact, she’d already told me more than she usually would have. Instead, though, she took a breath, and she just started . . . talking.
“I never bought into my sect’s reasoning for the war,” she said softly. “Never, not once, even after being raised in it. The elders tried—they started us young, indoctrination sessions in every classroom, all vaguely religious nonsense about infidels and heretics and schisms, but I never . . . I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t buy it, I just didn’t. But I did hate them, all the same. Our enemy, I mean. I hated them with a pure, almost fulfilling level of malice. They’d defined my world for so long—with their bombs and their assaults and their clumsy attempts at propaganda, broadcast over the loudspeakers and hacked into the terminals—I didn’t know what to do other than hate them.
“So of course I joined the war, as soon as I was old enough. We all did. The war was all we knew—it was how the world worked, what the world was. Only difference between me and my surviving classmates was I actually asked to be sent to the front. I asked for training in special ops. I asked for the recon missions into enemy territory, the sniper assassination details, the last stands against overwhelming odds. Whenever they asked for volunteers, my hand was already up, usually before I even knew what the mission was.”
“Why?” I knew the answer—or at least I thought I did—but I had to ask nonetheless.
I could hear her shrug in the darkness. “I didn’t care about living much—what did I have to live for? Just more war, more fear, more suffering. All of which I could blame on the enemy on the other side of the front lines. And I did care about answering them in kind.
“So. Anyway. Yeah. That’s what my home was like, Esa. And if you’ve ever wondered why the sect wars went on as long as they did, with no end in sight—why they’re still raging on worlds like Sho’s, to this very day—that’s why. It was never about faith, about differing philosophies or beliefs. Maybe when they started, but that point came and went a long time ago. They kept on raging because once you start killing each other, it can get goddamned hard to stop.”
She didn’t say anything else; just rolled over in the dark.
That wasn’t what I had asked; she’d never told me that before. I wondered why now. She never talked about her childhood, ever. Was it something we’d seen on Kandriad? Was it something we’d done, something I’d done? Hell, had it been bringing up the sinking of the Ishiguro that had done it, a reminder that she could open up, once in a while?
Or was it the time she’d spent in the shower while Sho and I were eating, the time she’d had to spend going over the faces of the dead?
Maybe Jane and I weren’t as far apart as I sometimes thought.
CHAPTER 8
We spent the next few days in our own particular version of domesticity: training, reading, slowly introducing Sho to the various modern devices and conveniences that were part of day-to-day life on non-pulsed worlds and starships—not that Scheherazade had a great deal of those, given how spartan Jane kept her interior. Jane broke out her wrench set and removed two of the rear jumpseats in the cockpit so that Sho could wheel his chair inside and join us when we were within; she didn’t want him to feel like there was a part of the ship where he wasn’t welcome, or where we could go to discuss things without him hearing.
Oddly enough, I was the one who suggested he also spend some time training on the rear turret—you would have thought Jane would have made the suggestion, but she didn’t seem to think Sho was as inclined as I was toward violence. Which—maybe fair, but I remembered Jane training me on the guns when I’d come aboard, and having just a little bit of control over my fate when we’d inevitably gotten tangled up in a fight: that had helped. Plus, we’d swapped out the old railgun setup for a laser module, and lasers were way easier to learn on.
The turret wasn’t the easiest thing for Sho to get to, given his condition and the fact that you had to climb down a ladder to even reach the thing, but he proved quite adept at it—I guess his mother hadn’t spent all her time carrying him around, and he was pretty capable of making his way down without the use of his legs, as he’d shown when he’d crawled all the way from the shower to the cockpit.
Once inside, Schaz called up simulations for him to “fire” at—he wasn’t actually firing anything, of course: the turret was incapable of operating in hyperspace. I wasn’t even sure what would happen if we tried. Quantum physics was never my strong suit.
In short order he was at least proficient—as far as “massive weapons attached to starships” go, the turret was fairly simple to use, point and shoot, with an overlaid HUD tracking targets and the angles of incoming enemy fire, as well as indicating how much he would have to lead a moving vessel.
You’d think Schaz would just handle firing all the guns herself—and she could, in a pinch—but the truth was, having organic beings do the shooting actually made us more dangerous to an enemy. AI always fired in exactly the same manner, chose exactly the same targeting parameters and threat prioritization; any half-skilled pilot would know
how to game those. Having a sentient being at the gun meant that we were more unpredictable, forcing the enemy to react to something beyond AI pattern recognition.
Jane also tried to get some basic information out of him as to his gifts, but unlike me, who’d come to her with my talents mostly fully developed, Sho engaged his unconsciously; things just . . . powered up around him, if they could do so. Schaz actually had to adjust her drive baffles to compensate for the extra juice he was constantly adding to the core. Of course, that meant that if it did come to a dogfight—and let’s be real; whatever happened on Valkyrie Rock, it almost went without question that somebody would be shooting at us—we’d have a hidden advantage with that extra bit of power; our shields would regenerate just a little faster, our lasers’ heatsinks would drain just a little quicker, our engines could maintain thrust just a little longer.
Jane didn’t talk any more about her past. Sho didn’t speak of his mother. I didn’t mention all the killing I’d done on Kandriad, or the nightmares it was still giving me. On a ship this small, there were some things you just didn’t talk about, otherwise they were all you would talk about.
Soon enough, we were approaching the end of our cruise, ready to drop out of hyperspace and enter the system with the former mining asteroid full of terrifying cultists who would think we were some kind of ship of the dead. Hooray.
When we were about an hour out from our destination, Jane retreated to the airlock for a moment, then returned with her various cans of camouflage from the armory, setting them all out on the kitchen table. “Just . . . hold still,” she told me, leaning in with a can full of glittering gold camo paint—what sort of world had foliage that color, I had no idea, but Jane was always overprepared.
I sat at my chair, trying not to squirm as she set about painting weird designs on my face, meant to make me look more demon-y. Schaz and Sho both chimed in with unhelpful comments as she worked—which was easy for them to do, since we’d already decided Sho wouldn’t be leaving Scheherazade. It was safer that way. Besides, fur was much harder to apply war paint to.
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