A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “That didn’t look fun,” Schaz commiserated as I tried to pick myself up, and failed. Maybe just another moment, lying on the floor, gasping for breath.

  “Oh, no, it was grand,” I wheezed back. “You should try it sometime.”

  “I do it all the time, remember? Remember all the space battles we’ve been in?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I’m just saying—the next time you prioritize some distant target rather than an incoming missile, arguing that ‘Schaz’s shields can take it,’ I want you to remember this moment. Remember how much it rattled you, and how hard it was to think, after. Fair deal?”

  I exhaled something that most definitely weren’t actual words, just a kind of wheeze.

  “Fair deal,” Schaz agreed, mostly to herself. In the process of making obscene gestures in the general direction of her docking bay, I at least managed to get to my knees.

  My comm crackled to life. “Esa, was that blast what I think it was?” Jane asked. Thank god—she was alive.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I coughed, using the wall behind me to lean against as I tried to stand. “And also, yes.”

  “I didn’t want to give away my position by using the comms; he’s been chasing me all across this asteroid. Schaz, double check, but the route from her position to you along the main thoroughfare should be clear; as soon as he heard that blast, the asshole booked it toward the tunnels, so he’s coming at her from the interior.”

  “Clear,” Schaz agreed tersely—she must have been scanning her feeds, looking for the glowing bastard, but the cameras were patchier in the maintenance tunnels, as I well knew.

  “What . . . what does all that mean?” I asked, still a little fuzzy from the “mostly being blown up” that had just happened.

  “It means run,” Jane growled; I could tell from the way she clipped her sentences that she was already doing the same.

  Starting a full-out run from a dead stop is hard enough—starting a full-out run from a dead stop after you’ve just suffered a mild being blown up is not one of my favorite things in the world, as I was just learning. I did it anyway.

  The lights in the tunnels were shutting off behind me, one by one, leaving a sea of darkness in my wake. I didn’t know if Charon was doing that, or if it was something else; I just kept running. Every step I took, another shadow fell across the floor before me. And somewhere in the deep center of the asteroid—maybe passing through the catacombs even now—our enemy was coming.

  If he knew that I’d just blown up his ship, he was probably going to be pissed. If he’d figured out we’d fried all the other ships on board the station, trapping him here once we escaped, he was going to be even more so. That thought gave me a savage kind of joy—a petty vengeance in the face of all he’d done, but fulfilling, even so—and it helped to push my speed up just a little bit higher. How much farther was it, anyway? How much farther—

  I saw Jane, pelting down the corridor toward me; she’d passed the entrance to Scheherazade’s docking bay, trying to reach me before our pursuer did. I grinned when I saw her—put on just a little more speed.

  That may have saved my life.

  Jane slowed to a stop, drawing her pistol and firing in a single fluid motion; I saw her do it and just reacted, threw myself into a slide just as a sizzling bolt of energy sang over my head, right through the place where I had been, close enough that the passage of ionized atmosphere made the fine hairs on my arm stand on end.

  I couldn’t help myself: as I came to a stop, I turned.

  Our enemy had shed his armor somewhere along the way—or Jane had torn it off him, piece by piece. Now, he was just a shining, glowing figure, a being made purely from azure fire. Four limbs, a chest, a head, but beyond that, nothing: a terrifying spectre of energy and flame, his face like a void.

  And he was closing the distance.

  Jane was still firing, but her rounds weren’t doing any more good than they had when he’d been wearing armor—I actually saw one of the bullets get close and vanish in a burst of sparks and metal shards; he was melting the rounds before they hit—and he was still stalking forward, his hands out at his sides, light spilling between his fingers, glowing brighter.

  “You cannot silence the coming scream,” he growled, the words seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere—because they were still coming from my comm, despite the fact that he was close enough that I should have been able to just hear him. He wasn’t speaking at all, just . . . transmitting. “You cannot escape the fire, nor the fall. Purification is your destiny. Purification is the destiny of—”

  “Go!” Jane shouted at me, emptying the chambers of her revolver of dead casings and slipping a new cartridge in even as the cylinder spun. It was a fancy trick, and it wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference—her bullets weren’t even fazing him.

  Except when she aimed next—pulling the hammer on a still-spinning cylinder, five-to-one odds it had stopped on an empty chamber, but this was Jane, there was a bullet under that hammer as sure as I was breathing—she wasn’t aiming at the stalking figure of blue flame: she fired instead at a transformer clinging to the rock wall between him and us, a transformer that gave off a shower of bright sparks into the darkness when her single bullet smashed it open.

  And once she’d damaged it, Charon seized control.

  A torrent of blazing energy filled the hallway, making a shield of crackling lightning between us and our enemy, but he’d seen what we were trying to do, and he threw one last attack before the wave of electricity cut off the tunnel—an orb of glowing blue flame that just made it past Charon’s impromptu electric fence.

  It was aimed straight at Jane.

  She was flat-footed; even if she’d wanted to dodge, she wouldn’t have time. Intention shield raised or not, that much energy would cook her where she stood. I don’t know how I reacted, but I know why—I’d thought I was going to lose her once, and I’d vowed then and there that I’d never risk that again.

  So I reached out with my teke, and I grabbed at the ball of lightning with my mind.

  It was a bad idea.

  It was a horrible idea.

  It wasn’t really an idea at all, just a thing I did, somewhere in between seeing the projectile of burning energy and tracing its route to its target in an instant. If I’d had time to think about it, I never would have done it—my teke functioned as an extension of my brain, just like my hands were an extension of my brain. I couldn’t manipulate pure energy with telekinesis any more than I could reach into a fire and grab the flame. I did it anyway.

  It felt like burning. Inside my skull.

  I held on. It was aimed at Jane.

  I tried to scream; no sound came out, replaced by a whisper of smoke from my nostrils and my throat. I really was burning, no different than if I had reached out and grabbed the fire—the energy leaping from the projectile to me, tracing the path of my teke back along the same quantum channel I used to control it, trying to fry my mind from the inside out.

  With more effort than I’d ever put into anything, ever, I pulled at the ball of fire, I yanked at it, I used every ounce of energy I had to jerk the thing out of position.

  I felt it shift, just a little, and then I was collapsing; I was done. I started to pass out.

  But just before I did, I saw the ball of circular lightning pass Jane by, just an inch or so to her left. I’d fucking done it. It had been monumentally stupid, but I’d done it anyway.

  Then the world went to black, and I don’t think that was just Charon cutting off the lights.

  ACT

  THREE

  CHAPTER 1

  When I finally clawed my way back to consciousness I found Sho staring down at me, his big unblinking eyes amber wells of concern. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  I made a kind of whimpering groan as response. I didn’t feel quite up to speech just yet. God, everything . . . everything hurt. What had happened to make me feel this way again? What had I d
one to myself?

  Oh. Right. I’d reached out and grabbed an energy blast carrying enough megajoules to fry something ten times my size. That had been stupid of me. Still—I’d saved Jane. I think.

  I tried to sit up; when I failed at that, I settled for looking around instead. I was on board Scheherazade; by the thrum making its way up through the medbay’s table, we were in hyperspace. “How long . . .” Hey, I could actually manage speech. Good for me. Granted, I sounded like someone ten times my age—someone ten times my age who had managed to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day—but still. Speech. That was progress.

  “Not long.” Sho shook his head. “Jane carried you off of the asteroid, strapped you down, then got us out of there. Half an hour or so, no more. When I asked what happened to you, she said you had been very brave. And also monumentally stupid.”

  “Yeah, that . . . that seems fair.”

  “Esa—there was smoke coming out of . . . you were leaking smoke. Out of your mouth, your nose, your tear ducts. I helped Jane lift you up onto the table; you were hot to the touch. Not just warm—scalding.”

  The use of my gifts was still more “magic” than “science,” at least to me, but apparently whatever bond let me reach out and manipulate objects with telekinesis, it was also a conductor for energy. Great. I’d mostly known that—a few similar experiments back on Sanctum had taught me not to try and shield myself from laser fire with my teke, if nothing else—but I’d say I’d just definitely confirmed those suspicions.

  “And the asshole?” I rasped.

  “As far as we know, still stuck back on Valkyrie Rock,” Sho said, before smiling grimly. “I find a certain poetry in that.”

  “That was the plan.” I tried to sit up again, succeeded this time. Yet more progress.

  Unfortunately, it also brought me to Jane’s attention: as Scheherazade’s interior swung into view, I found her glaring at me from the kitchen table. I had not been aware she was sitting nearby, listening in—I’d thought she was in the cockpit. “What the hell?” she asked, with no preamble.

  “Good to see you survived, Jane,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. Just . . . everything hurt. Every motion, every action, every breath. “You’re welcome, by the way—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” Jane growled. “You reached out and grabbed an energy projectile with your telekinesis. Couldn’t you have guessed that wouldn’t have ended well for you?”

  “It would have ended worse for you if I hadn’t,” I glared back, or tried to, anyway. It was harder when she adamantly refused to stay in focus. “I’m sorry you had to drag me back here slightly overcooked, but I figure that’s better than me trying to drag your charred corpse back on board.” I ran a hand over my scalp, and coughed. Honestly, I was a little surprised there wasn’t a small puff of smoke when I did.

  I didn’t think it was possible, but Jane’s eyes had narrowed even more. “Esa?” she asked.

  “Yes?”

  “You know, you never told me why you shaved your head.” She’d noticed my guilty gesture. Crap.

  “That’s true—I didn’t, did I?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath, her hands wrapping around the table’s edge. I was fairly sure she was counting to ten in her head. If she was, it didn’t appear to help. “Esa?” she asked again.

  “Yes?” Okay, admittedly, I was just being a pain in the ass at this point, but would it have killed her to say “thanks”?

  “Did you shave your head because you tried something back at Sanctum? Something that caught your hair on fire?”

  “Put that together all by yourself, did you?”

  “God . . . god damn it, Esa.”

  “What, Jane, what? It worked. It worked, and now we know that it can work, and that means—” I paused, looked her up and down for a moment, and then it was my turn to narrow my eyes as I reached certain conclusions of my own. “Jane?”

  “Yes, Esa?” Her voice had mostly come back to level.

  “Your boot seems to be . . . somewhat charred. I couldn’t help but notice, because half your pants leg is gone. Jane—did you try and kick the glowing being made of energy? Is that a thing you tried to do?”

  She shrugged. “It seemed better than the alternative, which was letting him grab me.”

  “Yeah? And did it work?”

  She pulled her shirt down from her shoulder; an almost-perfect handprint—six fingered—had been seared into her skin. “Not as such, no,” she admitted.

  I couldn’t help it; I had to laugh at that. I mean, I didn’t do it well—it turned into more of a cough—but still. Meanwhile, Schaz was making noises of concern: apparently Jane had been too busy getting me strapped in and getting us off the asteroid, and she hadn’t so much dealt with any of her injuries. With a groan, I slid off the table, and patted it so that Jane would take my place. I had to balance on Sho’s wheelchair to make it over to the kitchen counter.

  Jane stripped; she’d been downplaying the cost of her own little adventure. She had a dozen small burns, at least, plus a handful of lacerations, most deep enough to still be bleeding freely. It was kind of a wonder she was still standing. Then again, I’d fought the bastard for forty seconds and nearly cooked my brain inside my own skull; she’d fought him—or at least kept him off of me—for nearly forty minutes. Surviving that at all was damned impressive.

  “Is the course locked in?” I asked Jane.

  She nodded as Schaz lowered one of the medical arms toward her, complete with a dripping sedative needle. “Yep,” was all she said.

  “Great. Grand. Where the hell are we going?” As I recalled, the next step in our little ad hoc plan had been to get somewhere with a broadcast antenna, where we could signal Sanctum for help—but I had no idea where that was.

  “Jalia Preserve V.”

  Well, that told me fuck-all. “And where’s that?”

  “Where we’re going. Hopefully I’ll be awake before we get there.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  She waved in my general direction. “Make something up,” she told me.

  Then Schaz plunged the needle into her arm, and she was out.

  I looked at Sho; he looked back at me. “I don’t suppose she told you anything about this place?” I asked him. Mutely, he shook his head. “Oh,” I replied, a little disappointed. I mean, no, I hadn’t really expected Jane to fill Sho in after she hadn’t done the same for me, but still. Would have been nice. I sighed, and stumbled my way to the cold box. I could really use something nearly freezing to drink right about now.

  I dug something out, then turned to find Sho still staring at me with wide eyes.

  “Yes, Sho?” I asked, pressing my cool drink to my head. I think it was some form of juice, but I cared less about the contents than the simple fact that it was cold.

  “You just nearly died using your gifts to fight off a being made of energy. You were still smoking when she hauled you in here.”

  “You mentioned this already.”

  “And she—she went through all of that,” he gestured vaguely in Jane’s direction, still zonked out on the table as the arms began to administer their treatments, “and she still made sure to get you back here. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you and Jane may be two of the scariest people I’ve ever met.”

  “Only to our enemies, Sho.”

  “I know; I get that. It’s not that I’m scared of you, it’s that—”

  “I get what you’re saying.” Watching Jane and the Preacher defend us against the Pax for the first time, I’d felt the same way: I hadn’t known combat could even be fought on that level. My prior experience was all watching the natives of the settlement where I grew up take potshots at bandits with barely functional rifles.

  “My point is—you two are badasses, absolutely.”

  “I would say ‘thank you,’ but I’m pretty sure you’re going to qualify that statement with another one in just a bit.”

  “This . . . thing that’s
after us—”

  “Hopefully not after us anymore; hopefully stuck on that rock until we can show up to pry him out of there with a goddamned army.”

  “Even so . . .” He looked . . . worried. I couldn’t blame him. The two “protectors” his mother had handed him to, the only two people he knew in the wide galaxy, were exactly 0–2 against the threat we’d just contained. Oh, we’d locked him up, but we’d nearly died doing it. Jane and I were dangerous. That thing was . . . worse.

  “Even so, nothing,” I said firmly, faking a confidence I didn’t feel. “We trapped him; we won this round.”

  “You were almost on fire.”

  I shrugged. “A win’s a win.”

  “It doesn’t feel like we’ve won anything. The people on my homeworld—the people on that asteroid . . . it doesn’t feel like we’ve won anything at all.”

  Great. Way to poke a hole in my incredibly delicate ego booster, Sho. “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. Behind Sho, Schaz’s medical arms whirred in quiet motion as she stitched and patched and coated Jane. It was hard to call anything a win when both Jane and I had come out . . . significantly the worse for wear.

  Sho looked around Schaz’s interior. “So . . . what now?” he asked.

  I shrugged, cracking open my juice and taking a drink. “Wanna play cards to pass the time? We can play Vyrene High-Pass.”

  “I don’t know how to play that.”

  “We can play Vyrene High-Pass for money.”

  CHAPTER 2

  We didn’t wind up playing cards. What we did wind up doing was studying Schaz’s data banks for information on Jalia Preserve V; if we were going to reach our mysterious bolthole before Jane woke up, I wanted to know significantly more than I currently did, which could be summed up as “Jane thought maybe it had a high-powered broadcast tower.” As reconnaissance went, that was . . . not exactly a full report.

  Unfortunately, Schaz didn’t have much to give us either. Justified operatives had never been to Jalia Preserve V, which meant all Schaz had was second- and third-hand information bought from various map-data packets Jane had picked up from various data-brokers, most of it decades old, all of it completely unreliable, and sometimes even conflicting.