by Alex Oliver
"Yes, sir," Harcrow agreed, shaking the hand and then keeping hold of it as he looked the other man in the face with a very mild display of challenge. "And my people? They deserve recognition for the parts they've played today."
"The government agrees," Anderson inclined his head graciously. He was the very picture of an Admiral in waiting, with his thick silver hair and his polished rank stripes gleaming on his sleeve. Yas remembered that Harcrow's news feed was probably booming again and wondered if Anderson had been chosen for this job just because he was highly photogenic and played well on camera.
"You are all to have a month's paid leave while another ship is brought here for you. Reservations have been made for you at the Hilton, courtesy of the Nahasdzáán government. Harcrow, you will face court martial there, for losing your ship—which I'm sure you're aware is a formality. One doesn't write off the cost of a state of the art scout ship like the Ragnarok without an inquest of some sort."
Harcrow nodded. He looked almost as beaten as Sasara at the thought. It occurred to Yas that an inquest into the way the Raggy had been run prior to this incident with the Oses would not turn up anything very flattering, and he stood on his own foot rather than burst out with another embarrassing tirade about justice like the one he'd launched at the Kelkalyn.
"Yes sir."
"You are relieved, captain," said Anderson with a smile. Harcourt's smile in return was only the drawing of his mouth into a straight line, but it conveyed resignation and humor both. "I guess I am. Crew, you're under Captain Anderson's orders now. I'll see you after the trial, I hope."
"You hope?!" slipped out of Yas's mouth despite the crushing pressure on his toes. "They ought to be feteing you, not trying you! I'd like to see any of them do as well."
Harcrow gave a bark of laughter and lifted his eyes to Yas's. It still felt impolite to look anyone straight in the eye, but he endured it, and the light in the captain's caramel-brown eyes made him think that perhaps it was all going to be okay after all. "Thank you, Mr. Sundeen," he said. "Your vote of confidence is noted."
"Ah," Anderson's smile grew wider, bright and white as that of any newsreader. He turned to Yas with a look of curiosity. "Yes. Mr. Sundeen? I heard a great deal about you on the shuttle from the planet." He gestured for Yas to step into the airlock first.
Yas obeyed, curious and unsettled. "Sir?"
Anderson chuckled. "Don't look so worried," he said, setting the controls for the airlock capsule to be shunted down the long quay and deposited in the door assembly on the moon-base. "There is someone here very eager to see you."
The door opened onto the concourse of the moon-base. One of the concourses, Yas should have said if he had had mental space to process grammar, but he did not. There, against the backdrop of the soaring glass domes, sun turning the moon's red dust to blaze like a field of poppies, and Nahasdzáán shining blue-green behind them, were his parents.
They were standing side by side, arms tight around each other, not an inch separating them. His father was still wearing his indoor slippers, and his mother had her hair down in public for the first time he had ever seen.
They looked old, and fragile and incredibly precious, their worn faces lighting up as they saw him.
Forgetting his crew and Captain Anderson, Yas rushed to them and threw himself into their embrace—his mother's arms around him, and his father's around them both.
"I'm sorry," he choked, tears coming stinging to his eyes and his nose prickling inside. "I'm sorry. I meant to get her out of there but things... things kept happening, and I—"
"We know," his father said, his own voice ragged. "We know. We don't blame you."
"But you should! Every time I told myself I would do it later. She was safe enough - there was always something more important to do. More important than my own sister," Yas drew in a sobbing breath. "I... I'm so sorry."
"Ssh," his mother smoothed the hair back from his brow. She had to reach up to do this now, and it always threw him to be taller than her. "Dezba is a warrior, and this is as much her victory—perhaps more her victory than yours. My two children. I am so proud of you."
Yas gave a helpless laugh. It was exactly what he wanted to hear, but this was not the place he wanted to be in to hear it. He pulled himself out of his family's embrace and turned to Harcrow. "Sir, may I be relieved?"
"I'm not your captain now," the man said. "We have no ship. You've got to ask Captain Anderson that."
Yas glowered and turned to meet Anderson's polished smile. "Sir?"
"You are relieved," Anderson said with an indulgent tone. "We'll be in contact when you're to attend for the court martial and for any other posting."
"Thank you sir," Yas managed, remembering his politeness under his mother's gaze. He nodded to Harcrow, hoping to convey his respect and his hope that the court martial was indeed only a formality. "Sir."
Harcrow nodded, apparently amused. "Until next time, Mr. Sundeen," and they walked away, leaving Yas alone with his parents.
"Home?" he said and they nodded.
"Home."
Home for today was his mother's apartment close to her office in the city. Now the threat from the Svartalfr had disappeared, they were not the only refugees streaming back from the gate chamber and demanding seats on the shuttles back to the planet, but his mother's position bought some consideration and they only had to wait three hours for a seat. They spent most of that time pressed up together in silence, watching the planet sail majestically across the sky, and the moon buggies scurry from one city to the next.
The journey down-well was miserable for everyone, the shuttles packed to capacity and the pilots tired. But eventually Yas found himself stepping out into Nahasdzáán's fresh air, and filling his lungs with the scents of dust and corn, cypress and juniper and oak from the fields and orchards around the city.
The city itself had been designed to be pedestrianized, and the air was fresh. Its neighborhoods were all reachable by running, and running was still a culturally encouraged thing to do. Running was part of his heritage and he sorely missed it, cooped up in spaceships.
It was only a short jog from the spaceport to the apartment, but the exercise brought him a calm that nothing else had done as they passed through streets lined with community gardens. Normally these were full of street vendors offering food and jewelry, blankets and baskets, clothes and tourist souvenirs and seeds engineered by his mother and her colleagues that would flourish on this beautiful world.
Today, however, everyone was inside, showing each other how glad they were to be alive.
Yas's mother welcomed him into her apartment with a trace of awkwardness, as though she wasn't sure whether he should be treated as a guest or a returning hero or just as her son would have been treated before he went away to the academy.
He came in after her and walked around the small flat. It was welcoming and almost humble, with its adobe walls painted ochre and white, plants everywhere, and a wall of windows through which she could look out and see the city giving way to the trees.
Yas had not visited before. When he was small they had all lived together out on the plain between the extinct volcano known as White Hair and the jagged peaks of Two Tooth. He still expected home to come with horses and corn and a horizon that receded for miles into the blue.
But this was nice. And his mother was doing important work here, so he settled himself on the hummingbird blanket on the couch and let all the accumulated seething mess of worry that he had been carrying since his graduation begin to slide out of him.
"Let me make you a drink," his mum said, watching him with a tired smile. "And then you should have a shower. Put on real clothes, and rest for a while in who you are."
That all sounded perfect.
"Do you think she really is a goddess?" he asked instead. "Freya, I mean. Do you think Dezba is now in the Yei’s world?"
He hadn't been able to ask this of his team-mates. They wouldn't have understood.
&nb
sp; "You were there, more than we," his father said, going into the bedroom to put on clothes not soaked with fear. "You should tell us."
He wondered if they were hoping he would say yes. It would be a great honor for Dezba to have actually left this mundane human world and traveled into the realm of the powers. But he couldn't say it.
"No," he said. "I think she's an alien who impressed the ancient white people so much they said she was a goddess. I don't know whether our people's protectors can reach Dezba out there. I don't know if they will know where she is."
"We thought they wouldn't find us here," his mother said with a faint smile, "So far away from the mountains on Earth. But they did. They recognized us. They'll find her. We may yet see her again. I'm not prepared to give up hope."
"Perhaps we can have a ceremony for her," Yas suggested. "Before I go again. I know I didn't end up enslaved to Freya, but I feel unclean, as if I had. Maybe we could have a ceremony for me too."
His mother returned from the kitchen with greenthread tea and mutton stew and sat down next to him. His tather came to the other side and sandwiched him between them again. The unfamiliarity of the flat didn't matter all of a sudden, because this was home.
"There will be time for both of those things," his father agreed. "There will be time, because you gave us time. But first, eat, drink, sleep. You will find yourself better when today is behind you."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Just deserts
Over the next week, Yas spoke to an investigative officer of the NXA, giving his report about what had occurred on the Raggy—which seemed unnecessary, since the whole thing could have been downloaded from Harcrow's feed. But also his account of what had happened on the chariot, what Freya had intended to do to the Ocuilin, and his recommendation that Desultory and Dr. Wakes should be commended. Without them... without them, Yas would still have been on the chariot with his sister, stranded in the distant past.
He spoke, also, to an NXA approved therapist, and to a traditional healer, trying to put into words how unsettled his time on the chariot had left him; how much he felt that the universe had shifted beneath his feet and all his prior certainties had been dissolved.
"I'm afraid that's a perfectly rational reaction to what you've just been through," the therapist had said. "After all, you met three alien species in a week, and learned things about human history that the historians are still refusing to believe. We're all feeling like nothing will ever be the same again." She had cast a quick glimpse of the sky out of her window and smiled ruefully. "Because it won't. The truth is, everything has changed. All the alliances on which we've built our civilization have been called into question. The Ocuilin are debating how easily one of their own was ignored and sidelined on the chariot," she raised a hand to silence his automatic protest. "They know your crew weren't in their right minds, but it has stirred up a level of resentment we hadn't been aware of. And Lieutenant Desultory's very kind treatment at the hands of the Svartalfr means the Ocuilin have a very different take on the dynamics of these two elder races. We are fortunate that it will not now come to a point where humans and Ocuilin have to choose which of the elder races to ally with."
"They wouldn't really... I mean, we've been friends forever," Yas protested. "They wouldn't side with the Svartalfr against us?"
"If you felt that your race had routinely been ignored, sidelined, tokenized by your current allies—your current allies who were willing to see you either forced into life-damaging changes or killed—and another ally came along who respected you for what you are? Would you change your allegiance?"
"I... yeah, I would consider it."
"Well then."
Yas had come out of that session a little soothed on the matter of Dezba, but much more worried about the current state of galactic politics. Did the NXA really discriminate against the Ocuilin? Wouldn't he have known? Perhaps he wouldn't. There were not many Ocuilin on his world, and sometimes it was hard to see prejudice when you weren't the subject of it.
Hadn't he thought himself how odd it was that the crew dismissed Desultory's wellbeing so thoroughly? Maybe it hadn't been all brainwashing, but brainwashing on top of an ingrained feeling that the Ocuilin was less of a person than they? And if that kind of thing happened widely and often, no wonder the Ocuilin were reconsidering their options now they had them.
He shook his head. Life never stopped throwing down stones in front of his foot. The trick was to jump over them.
The second week, he and his parents took the teleport to the public library a mile down the track from his father's house and walked over to open up the rooms and greet the horses, the sheep and the chickens. Here Yas could sleep in his childhood bedroom and see familiar stars through his window, and here the trees had given way to desert, desert with its piercing clarity and the almost ozone flavor of its luminous sky. They lived on the very outskirts of a plain where nothing but cacti grew. It was chilly, but dry for twelve out of thirteen months in the year. The rainy season was not far off, in which the plains would coat themselves with multi-colored flowers, but for now the peace and the emptiness was filled with expectation, as if to say "it looks bleak, but just wait!"
Riding the horses and picking the sheep out of whatever ravine they had wandered into left him more centered in himself every day. By the end of the second week, when the call came from NXA headquarters in the capital, he was ready.
"This is Captain Anderson," said a familiar voice, and a moment later the aged viewscreen in the house's main table flicked up and showed the ever-smiling face of the man who had taken Captain Harcrow's command away.
"Captain," Yas acknowledged. As always, Anderson's uniform was as immaculate as if he had taken it fresh from the press a minute ago. Yas was covered in biscuit-colored dust and had wrapped a bandana around his forehead to hold back his hair, but oh...
Sometimes he forgot he was not being recorded now. He was off duty and there was no one watching to care.
"I presume you would like to hear how the court martial went?"
"I would. Thank you, sir, that's very kind of you."
Anderson beamed. His eyes twinkled as he insisted on catching Yas's gaze and keeping it. It was very hard to see him as sincere, he made such a performance of it.
"You'll be glad to know that, just as I predicted, it was a complete formality, and Captain Harcrow has been restored to his rank. He has been given command of a new ship being built at Liluth, and he has been given the right to nominate his old crew to serve on his new ship. If he hasn’t yet been in touch with you, I imagine that will come."
Yas let out a long relieved breath. He hadn't known he was worried about Harcrow too, but he was very glad the man was back. The whole crew were a bunch of freaks, but they were his freaks and when Harcrow asked him to return, he thought he would do so almost gladly.
Anderson's mega-watt grin narrowed and turned a little impish. "Also, in recognition of the part you played in the defeat of two hostile alien forces with one blow, you are to present yourself in two days time at the NXA headquarters in the capital, where there will be a commendation ceremony and you will receive the purple star, second class. Full dress uniform please, and yes, you may bring your parents."
"A medal?" His mum said from the doorway where she had been listening in. "You should have had an eagle feather."
"Mum!" Yas broke into his own grin of mingled delight and embarrassment, but determined not to be such an entitled little brat as he had been at his commission. "The feather should go to Dezba."
"You don't get to decide that," she said, taking his face between her hands and pressing her forehead to his. They stood in wordless communion for a moment, and then she looked up, brighter than she had been since the loss. "But now we must go back to the capital at once. There's shopping to be done!"
Two days later, having been washed and shaved, his hair braided, his new, starchy uniform ironed within an inch of its life, Yas stood on a dais in the large conference r
oom of the Nahasdzáán Hilton with the rest of the crew, and Admiral Agwuegbo pinned the purple star to his breast while he raised his chin high, desperately trying not to catch anyone's eye.
The ceremony was being broadcast to the whole galaxy, and a large screen across the room from him was beaming his own face back at himself. He looked far too young, callow and starry eyed, but his own people were cheering for him and he couldn't help but grin ‘til his face ached.
He studied the rest of the crew. They looked like heroes. Keva had finally had some medical treatment for the infection around her rods—her scars were now silver and not the horrifying raised reddish-black they had been. Zardari wore a bindi like a yellow sunburst, but it still did nothing to indicate their gender—their slender, doe-eyed beauty reminded him a little of Ruari, who he was going to miss.
Lt. Vasto Mari was Mari for this, though it took Yas a moment to notice. He had started thinking of the lieutenant as a blend of both, and it was no longer jarring to watch her swing between one and the other.
And Harcrow looked like a man who had found himself again. He had the lines of wisdom that he had gained in the pit. Even Yas could remember once or twice seeing the sad spectacle of this broken down alcoholic reflected on a newsfeed for public mockery, but that sat lightly on him now. His eyes were clear, and though he was never one for emotion, his small smile said volumes.
We won, Yas thought, his grief shifting suddenly and unexpectedly into a joy lifted by the cheers of the crowd. We actually won!
After the medal ceremony, the crew and their guests were escorted into a smaller function room and served with canapes and champagne.
A live band was playing contemporary flute music. Yas left his proud parents talking to one of the Admirals and looked for Desultory, who had parked himself in front of the musicians. The rhythms of the music flowed visibly across his skin in a psychedelic array of colors, and he undulated slightly, stretching out eyestalks and waving them when a particularly pleasing passage was played.
