The response is a big swelling of music, like some kind of triumphant march. Easy, we en’t won yet. Listen, how do them Shir do what they do? How do they travel faster than light without pure space?
The music sends what I already know; they got their own system of nodes, it just en’t going through the pure-space dimension what we all know, where the music lives. Traveling faster than light hurts them, Kid “says.” I’m still translating from music here. They will only risk it to try and bear their larvae.
What happens if they try to go back into your pure space, to change back?
The music is clear on one thing—them Shir cannot change back. They used to exist as creatures of pure space, and regular old space twisted them. It’s just a thing that happened. But what happens if they try?
I don’t know, says Kid.
What happens if they remember what they was? I ask.
That’s beyond Kid. No music answers me.
“Jaqi,” Kalia says. “The Thuzerians sent a report about the battle. It’s . . . it’s not going well. There’s two full mothering triads there. Araskar’s trying to hit the planet and stop the eggs, but they say . . .” Kalia trails off into silence.
Araskar. That big slab better live; he went and got me laden! “Let’s go, then,” I say.
“Jaqi . . .”
“What do them scriptures say about this?”
“The son of stars faces the children of giants, and he is armed but with faith.”
I draw Taltus’s old sword. The blue flame sprouts up, a few flickering bits along the length of the black sword. “Faith! There you go.”
“It also says, the children shall be the change, and the change shall be the children.”
“And there you go.” I carefully sheathe the sword—I can do that, at least, without slicing myself up—and point at Scurv’s guns, what she wears at her hips now. “You’re a child, and look how much you changed.”
“Jaqi, what are you going to do against six fully grown Shir?”
“I’m going to try a thing,” I say.
“A thing?”
“I en’t got fancy words, girl! A thing!”
It’s so easy now. Before, I felt the node, and I felt where we needed to go, and it just got us there, but it weren’t foolproof—sometimes I messed up and got the wrong node, sometimes I needed the codes, or the Suits to hack it. It was like that instinct, like hunger or slack or one of those things in the back of the brain.
Now, with the music in my head, the whole of the galaxy’s nodes spread out for me, like points on a map. “Rocina.”
So we go.
Into the music, and spinning out—
“Jaqi!” Kalia says. “Shields!”
Debris is everywhere as we spin out of the node. I already had the sense-field up, but the debris batters it, makes the ship scream. I grab the controls and pilot us through and away—I seen plenty of debris fields, and though I en’t no book reader, I can tell what the computer’s telling me about the speed of the debris.
Bits of cross bodies, bits of metal and bulkheads and all the stuff from the innards of the Navy ships flies away from our sense-field.
“Uh, Jaqi.” Kalia’s voice is hoarse, gasping in the cockpit. “Jaqi!”
“What—ah.”
Sensors take a minute to recognize what’s in front of me. By the time they start telling me I’m well and truly out the airlock, I already know.
The massive, dark forms move in front of us. They’re so huge they have their own gravity well, pulling at us, trying to suck us down into their dark maws, their thousand spars of teeth.
I grab the sword, but the whole cockpit goes dark, and the blue flame of the sword goes out, is replaced with a light I recognize, from when I hit the Dark Zone before. Faint light, kind of white, kind of blue in its own way, like the glow of rotting stuff in the forest floor of Swiney Niney.
And I hear them.
We have found you again.
We will not let you go.
We . . .
Faith, Jaqi, faith. Faith. Hell, I can’t seem to think. What’d I do back on Shadow Sun Seven? On Trace? I en’t no miracle worker, this is madness, this is . . .
We have found you. You who will fill our hunger.
No, I had hope. En’t hope without fear.
Behind their voices, that music’s still moving. My mother’s voice, singing her field-hand song. Bend, pull. Bend, pull. That little song still sounds, in the cold of my mind.
The devils speak, and I can almost feel what they feel. Cold, empty hunger, stretching across all of space. A thousand dead star systems, all eaten up, all hunger. So hungry for more, hungry to extinguish stars and implant their eggs in planets. Their memories are pain, and hunger. Their existence is pain, and hunger. There is no room for anything else, with that hunger.
And I can see their web too. It’s a faster-than-light web, like the nodes, but it sits right on the surface of pure space, like black cracks in something bright and whole.
They almost remember. Something, stuck in the back of the brainpan, tells them they wasn’t always hungry.
I reach out for Kid. “Help me out,” I say. “I’m gonna try singing to them.”
I ignore Kalia shouting, and I open up to Kid. Same thing I did back on Trace, when I healed Z—I reached out and joined that music of the universe, the swelling, pulsing music that Kid puts out with my mother’s simple field song.
Something about music. En’t never put much thought to it, but a beat brings out things in you too deep for words. I had these thoughts before. Like it’s rain falling into my ears and hitching a ride through my bloodstream, notes meeting each other and merging together down in my guts. Pouring up out through my eyeballs. Like light through a scrap of worn fabric.
Like a note deep in my belly, a whole new note made just for this new life inside me.
And so I let Kid’s music flow out, like my mother’s simple field song is channeling it. Not only do I let it flow out to the Shir in front of me, but I reach into their dark web, their dark nodes.
I let the music flow through the Dark Zone.
The dark nodes was sitting like black cracks on pure space, and now the cracks vanish. Them dark nodes is still there, but they’s just nodes now, absorbed into the rest of pure space.
And now the Shir turn.
They hear the music.
It is us.
It is us.
All the Shir across the whole of the Dark Zone hear Kid’s music. And they remember what they were.
And as one, they reach out for Kid.
Kid, uh, you okay? They’re trying to—
They reach out, and they all jump into the nodes.
For a half second I figure I’ve ruined everything. The Shir can use pure space itself now, and they’re going to go after Kid, and they’ll . . .
Jaqi. Kid’s music states my name clearly. Jaqi, they are gone.
I open my eyes and realize I see only the running lights of the cockpit.
And it’s not just Kid’s music. It’s blending with what Kalia says. “Jaqi, they’re gone!”
What happened?
The music swells, and I can sense it, feel it, see it. All across the Dark Zone, Shir turn their massive bodies and move into the nodes, toward the memory of what they were.
They are not meant to go back.
Their bodies are shredded, torn apart, wreckage spread across every node in the universe.
But as they die, they sing. For the first time in a thousand years, they sing.
They remember, they know what they were, just for a second.
And then the devils are gone.
“Jaqi!” I don’t even hear what Kalia says. I collapse to the ground of the cockpit, soaked in sweat, laughing, maybe crying, maybe doing both. Kalia’s on the transmitter and shouting the good news. More voices are coming through. Thuzerian voices, cross voices, hell, I think I hear even Z’s voice again—but then one voice comes through I recognize.
<
br /> “Araskar?” I say. That ragged, slurring voice, talking around the part of his tongue someone shot off. “That you?”
After a long moment, he comes back on the radio. “It is.”
“How are you, slab?”
“Not dead yet.”
“You are in deep shit,” I say.
“I noticed.”
“That en’t what I—we’ll talk.” And then I drop limply to the floor of the cockpit, half crying, half laughing. And, I realize after a moment, surprised by what’s coming out of my own mouth, singing. Singing for my mother, and all the forgotten dead.
-21-
Araskar
OUR CHILD HAS JAQI’S EYES. The minute she looks around the room, I can tell. Open, bright, inquisitive. You could mistake her for scared, but you would be wrong. She’s examining everything, from under her fuzzy crop of hair, her chubby little arms moving as if she still expects to be pushing against the inside of her mother’s womb. I half expect her to ask me if there’s any fresh veggies left, aiya.
I put my big, scarred finger in the little tiny hand, and the tiny brown fingers close on it. Her little clouded eyes look at me, and she twitches.
“You know me?” I say. “You recognize my voice?”
Our child twitches again, kicks out unthinkingly, but the swaddling wrapped around her legs keeps her contained.
“You know me?”
She looks up at me, almost like she’s saying yes. I think—no guarantee, mind you, but I think I see recognition in those eyes.
The music sweeps through me. A faint whistle, like a low organ, a rumbling like a piano in the distance, a shimmer of cymbals, and soaring melody like some instrument called down from heaven.
“Doing great,” the doctor tells me. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Thuzerian without a mask, exposing a scaly Sska face. They will remove them for sacred events, like a birth, and given that she’s just midwifed the birth of a confirmed Saint’s child, this event seems to have qualified as sacred enough. “Four hours of labor is a lot for a cross. We were worried.”
Jaqi and I have been sequestered during the last few months of the pregnancy—not much to do but talk to the ever-growing bulge in her middle. Now, Jaqi is lying down while the orderlies check her over—and over, and over, because they still seem to think she turned to glass when she became a confirmed Saint—for any damage from childbirth.
“Yeah,” I say, not really listening. Our daughter’s eyes flicker up toward the ceiling, down again toward me. Now she’s just back to being a confused little baby.
But for a moment there, we knew each other.
“Bring her over, Araskar, aiya?” Jaqi says, her voice soaked with exhaustion.
“Here she is,” I say, walking to the bed. Jaqi blinks up at me, her eyes half lidded.
“Hey there, fella. Hey there, little girl.” The baby curls up against her and paws at her breast, and Jaqi slips her breast out of the frock the doctors have given her, tries to get the baby to latch on. The little girl stares cross-eyed and opens her mouth and falls on the nipple. She tries like mad to fit the entire thing in her mouth, straining at it half-blind.
It’s beautiful.
God, I never thought I’d see this. Birth, to me, is an adult body being yanked from a vat, hooked up to a dump and absorbing information straight into the brain. At my birth, I got vacuumed down, and given a data dump about the glorious struggle of the Empire against the Dark Zone. By the afternoon, I was at the shooting range, making sure the data dump worked for target practice.
There was even more goo, and plenty of blood, this time, but it was like watching something from another plane.
“Got her mater’s appetite, ai?” Jaqi says. “Come on now. Latch on there. You can do it.”
The Sska orderly seems a little fascinated by the lactation. Not standard for her people, I’d guess. “Be patient. Even for crosses, this may take some time to settle into a normal nursing pattern.”
“How you feeling?” I ask.
“Hungry already,” Jaqi says. “Nurse, you got anything that en’t protein packs?”
“I can look,” the nurse says, with a resigned air. She is used to these requests from Jaqi.
I take my new guitar from the corner and pick at two very slow, subdued chords. I know more chords now, but I’m trying to give the baby some mood music for nursing.
“Come on, there, little Dina,” Jaqi says.
“Dina?” I ask. “You naming her already?”
“Dina was my mother’s name,” Jaqi says. “I reckon it works for a girl.”
I want her to be able to choose her own name, when she gets older, like I did. But as Jaqi points out, and has pointed out many time, she wants something to call the little girl when she’s toddling off.
“Dina,” I say.
It feels right.
I put the guitar down and collapse into a chair nearby. I can’t help noticing that everything aches more than it used to. And hanging out with Jaqi means that I don’t fold as well—we’ve been eating good, and my middle bulges when I sit.
Not that I would trade it for what I had before.
I blink, and realize I’ve just slept an hour or so, and the orderly is standing by my side.
“The Minister wishes to congratulate you.”
Kalia is fourteen years old and has changed, too. Something about those symbionts advanced parts of her aging process, but I suspect that governing in the madness of a war-torn galaxy has aged her all the faster. “How is she?” Kalia looks over at Jaqi.
“Sleeping, looks like,” I say. Kalia and I creep to the bed and I peel back the blanket to get a look at Dina’s face. The little baby’s cloud of hair is all dry now, and her lips are pressed together, folded together.
“Aww,” Kalia says, tracing a finger softly along one baby cheek. “She was so worried about the labor, but it sounds like it went fine.”
“Yeah,” I say, and then laugh. “Well, she screamed and threw a couple of things, and she bled a lot and there were other strange bodily fluids. All my instincts told me to draw my sword.”
Jaqi blinks and says sleepily, “Kalia, girl, I put a sign on the door. DO NOT DISTURB. I read the words myself and everything. And they made sense. Sounded like they was spelled. Unlike half them words you folk write down.”
“Sorry!” Kalia whispers. “I just wanted to see the baby.” She leans over and watches Dina sleep a moment longer. Can’t blame her.
I kiss Jaqi on the head and Dina as well, as gently as I can, and escort Kalia to the door.
“I need to speak to you in the situation room,” Kalia says to me.
“Ah, damn it, can’t it wait?”
“I told you it would wait until after the baby was born,” Kalia says. “The baby’s born.”
I think about saying no, but I don’t, because this is the kind of person Kalia’s become.
We leave the birthing room and go a few steps down the hallway. The communicator on the wall is disabled, but still, Kalia’s got a small, scrambled-frequency comm on the table. And a blanket in the chair. She’s been sleeping here.
Toq is in here too, and he runs to me. “Araskar! Did you have a baby!”
I pick the little guy up. “I did. Her name, at least for now, is Dina.”
“I want to see the baby!”
“Let Jaqi sleep, Toq,” Kalia says, sounding every bit the annoyed older sister.
His face falls. “You can wake her up, Toq,” I say. “She won’t mind seeing you again.”
“See?” he says to Kalia.
“If Araskar says it’s all right, Araskar can deal with Jaqi’s wrath,” Kalia says, and motions her brother to go.
It’s the most human Kalia’s been in a while.
She settles into a chair, flicks the holo. Father Rixinius’s face comes up. He’s still nursing a wound from the battle that kept us from Irithessa a week ago.
“Praise to God and all the Saints, including our newest confirmed Saint, Saint Ja
qi the Lightbringer. Our fleet continues rearguard action against the Resistance forces at Galactic Center. We will soon move to the location we discussed”—that’s one of the disused nodes nobody but Jaqi knows about—“and with God’s help, we will assault Irithessa again, once we have resupplied.”
This is the first I’ve heard of this. My heart sinks. I knew it was possible, but it’s bad news all the same. “The attack on Irithessa failed.”
“The blockade is still too strong. The Resistance still controls Keil, and they can make ships and soldiers faster than we can.”
Kalia speaks up, adding to Rixinius. “If John Starfire is alive, like the rumors say, he’s still got a thriving movement waiting for him.”
“He’s dead. What are you going to do with the prisoner?”
Kalia doesn’t answer, an answer of itself. I can almost hear her saying, Whatever the hell I want. Not that Kalia would ever admit to that. She reaches down and grips the guns that sit naturally at her waist, massages the grip in a way that reminds me too much of John Starfire and his soulsword.
“You can’t prosecute Aranella,” I say. “Not now.”
“Just because she saved your life—”
“She made the operation against the Shir at Rocina possible. Without her, those mothering triads would have been busy elsewhere. We could have lost ten star systems, not four, before Jaqi . . . did what she did. You’ve run the numbers.”
“Aranella committed genocide,” Kalia says, her voice dark. “Remember Shadow Sun Seven? We’ve found six other dark spots like that. Close to a hundred thousand people died in ‘consolidation.’ And that’s what we know so far. The rest of the bluebloods from the central worlds have disappeared. Billions.”
“I’m not arguing with that. I’m saying that we can’t try war crimes as a coalition.” I try not to let the desperation show in my voice.
“I agree with Father Rixinius. The Thuzerians’ bylaws will have to do. There’s precedent. We wouldn’t be the first people to haul in war criminals under religious jurisdiction.” The last time we talked about this Father Rixinius was there, and nodding right along with Kalia when she said, Aranella is going to pay for the crimes of the Resistance.
“No. I won’t accept that. That’s the first step in a religious autocracy.”
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