The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  He shrugged uncomfortably as the stiffness in his shoulders began to thaw. He remembered. And he remembered not really believing her answer, because it had seemed unfathomable to him—a people so proud, they would refuse even the help that could save them. “You said this was The Heron’s war.”

  Nivy nodded, her expression urgent like it had been all those times she had needed him to understand what she was saying without any words to help her. “We’re not fighting for the Epimetheus galaxy. We’re fighting for our freedom. And right now…I do need your help. As your friend.”

  Reece was silent for so long, scrutinizing Nivy as she stared at him resignedly, Scarlet said quietly, “I’m going to go after Hayden. Someone needs to be there when he wakes up.”

  The hard kick of guilt in Reece’s gut snapped him out of his study of Nivy. He looked at Scarlet, grateful and apologetic, as she touched his arm and swept away, holding up the dragging train of her borrowed coat. When he returned his stare to Nivy, she was smirking to herself.

  “I haven’t answered you yet,” he reminded her, annoyed.

  She shrugged. “I can wait. Now hobble this way, Captain.”

  With a grudging sigh, Reece wincingly followed her across the bridge, rubbing his hands together for warmth as he tried to keep up. “Where are we going?”

  “The labs.”

  “Why?”

  As they hurried down a wooden ramp and doubled back to the left, Nivy glanced up, as if out of habit. More screens were fixed to the bottoms of the overhead bridges, gushing with code and making weak light puddle in squares on the floor. Whatever she read in the numerical gibberish made her frown. “I need a Spinner,” she said absently.

  Reece’s hand unconsciously rose to rub his temple, remembering a prick there, a distant sting—a leak being sprung in his head by The Kreft they’d known as Charles Eldritch. “A Spinner. You mean that bug Eldritch used to harvest my memories?”

  “Heavily modified for use by The Heron, but yes. Most Kreft technology gets broken down and recycled into our facilities eventually. But then, our technologies are similar to begin with.”

  Nivy refused to acknowledge Reece’s sidelong look, though he was certain she’d seen it. He didn’t appreciate her offhandedly alluding to the unsettling fact her home looked like a place Kreft ships should be docked without explaining herself, but that was just Nivy. For all the months he had known her, she’d never once explained herself when she didn’t feel like it, and her being mute had nothing to do with it.

  Columns of artificial light marched over their faces as they passed beneath the bridges and stopped at a rough oak door with a barred window. Nivy leaned a shoulder against the door and rapped on it, three quick, hollow knocks. A round face materialized behind the bars, squinted out at them, and upon seeing Nivy, lit up like a photon globe.

  “Nivy!” the man whooped. “I heard The Six were all in a bustle about something. Never would have guessed it was you!”

  “Hello, Murley.” Nivy’s pleased smile faded. She leaned upright as the man, humming a croaky celebratory tune, began unlocking the door. “I heard about Bai. No news?”

  Murley paused, then pushed the door open to admit them. He was a huge man, not fat, just thick, with hands Reece estimated could have crushed his head like a barbean fruit. He scrubbed one of them back through his long wavy hair and shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid not. It’s been more than a month since we heard from his team.”

  “And I was gone for more than a year,” Nivy reminded him. “He’s alive. He has to be.”

  “Well, of course. You’d kill him if he wasn’t.”

  Nivy nodded matter-of-factly, glancing past the bear-like man, who was busy making Reece uncomfortable by squinting at him long and hard. “Are the labs full?” she asked.

  “Three, four, and six are in use. Five is empty.”

  “And is anyone else on duty at this entrance?”

  “No. With The Six in an emergency assembly, no one—”

  Reece jumped back as Nivy one-handedly slammed Murley’s head back into the door, dropping him like she’d been knocking out huge men in her spare time for years. She stepped over him before he’d even finished slumping, leaving Reece to either hurry through the dark door after her, or wait around to be found gaping stupidly at the unconscious man on the floor. After that display, he almost wanted to wait around. It seemed Gid had been right about Nivy all along: she was as crazy as a nightcat with Mead Moon Fever. He skipped after her with a grimace.

  The new corridor was deceptively short; a mirror of black glass on its back wall doubled the number of its few doors and overhead dome lights. At the operation panel beside the second door on the left, Nivy stopped and began typing with two fingers. Dots of color bloomed and then faded under her fingertips with musical bleeps.

  “So,” Reece said, clearing his throat as the sequence of bleeps grew longer and longer. “An emergency assembly. That doesn’t sound good.”

  Nivy’s fingers continued their tap dance on the panel. “It isn’t.”

  “But you’re not surprised.”

  “I read it on the consoles. The Six convened an hour ago to discuss the strange behavior of The Kreft. They’re typically spread thin around The Ice Ring, but there are reports coming in from the different moons that they’ve regrouped along the border.”

  “Why?”

  Nivy blinked as the door hissed open. “I expect that’s what they’re discussing in aforementioned emergency assembly. Which will be over soon, which is why we need to hurry.”

  Without further ado, she grabbed his arm and hauled him into the so-called lab. He would have called it a library; it had the same suspenseful quiet, the same musty, papery smell. Their reflection wavered on the tiled stone floor, which was black like the vaulted ceilings, the desks spaced sparsely around the room, and even the packed grid of tiny wooden drawers covering the walls from floor to ceiling like the boxes at a postal office.

  Nivy moved confidently across the room and jumped on one of the ladders leaning against the drawered wall while Reece followed more slowly. After a moment, she made a triumphant sound and slid down the ladder one-handed, holding something in her closed fist.

  They met at a desk in the middle of the room. She showed him the brass Spinner, as small and delicate as beetle in her palm, and for a second, Reece was back on the bridge of The Jester, staring at an identical bug in the wrinkled, bony hand of Charles Eldritch.

  Nivy sat on the stool behind the desk, carefully positioning the Spinner between her thumb and forefinger with her teeth slightly bared. Reece hadn’t seen that look on her face since the masquerade at Emathia. When she’d known she was about to be shot. “Watch the door. This will take a minute. Then it’s your turn.”

  As he stared, she closed her eyes, pressed the small disc like a button to her temple, and went rigid. Slowly, her eyebrows drew down into a look of fierce concentration, and even though she was no longer aware of him—she’d be lost in whichever memories the Spinner was sifting through—he knew better than to wait for her to return to the present and find him loafing about staring at her. With a sigh, he began walking the perimeter of the room, his hands in his trouser pockets.

  At least he wasn’t the one having his worst memories paraded vividly through his brain by the Spinner; that was a possibility that had made him feel cold inside. Those memories marched enough on their own nowadays, during quiet spells like this one, when the guilt he was always just barely suppressing tried to creep up his throat and get into his head to distract him like he couldn’t afford to be distracted. And, call it his captain’s intuition, but he somehow knew that whatever Nivy wanted to show him—this something she didn’t trust herself to leave to words to explain—was going to make his current problems look piddly in comparison. He needed to take his breaks where he could get them.

  He ended his circuit of the room in front of the desk where Nivy was still sitting straight-backed and stiff, beads of sweat dotting h
er forehead. Tiredly rubbing his face, he perched on the edge of the desk just as her eyes flew open. She caught the Spinner before it could hit the floor, letting out a breath as she turned it over in her hand.

  “I’ve been dreading this a long time,” she admitted.

  “You’ve been keeping a lot of secrets,” he guessed tonelessly, accepting the Spinner from her.

  She shrugged. “It’s what I do.” Finally, she looked at him, and there was something so earnest about her stare, so…effortlessly sincere. She meant what she said, and she meant it just the way she said it. “But it’s hard, sometimes. Keeping them from the people I care about.”

  He nodded—mostly because he had no idea how else to reply without sounding pleased with himself—and held the Spinner up to the light. Funny, how intimidating its frail little legs suddenly looked.

  Nivy studied him. “Scared?”

  “I’d almost rather go swimming in a Freherian marshbed, truth be told.”

  “You’ve mentioned this Freheria a couple times now,” she remarked, peering idly up at the ceiling. “It must be a very unpleasant place.” As Reece started to position it on his temple, she stopped him with a cautious, “Reece?”

  He looked at her. For a minute, he could see through the crack in her tall walls just enough to recognize the struggle inside of her, the guilt and anger and insecurities she was fighting to not let herself feel, let alone show. It was a feeling he could relate to. Just not one he knew how to solve.

  Nivy drew a breath and looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m sorry,” she finally said.

  With that thoughtful reassurance, Reece pressed the Spinner flush with his skin, and he was yanked away from his body with a stab of dull familiar pain.

  XXVI

  Truth Be Told

  Before either The Heron or The Kreft, there were the ancestors.

  The voice rang like a bell in Reece’s head. Or he thought it rang in his head; being on this end of the Spinner’s functions was disconcertingly dreamlike. He saw things and heard things, but from an unattached place, as a floating observer. As far as he knew, he didn’t even have a head in this foggy world.

  Before he could more than wonder if Nivy had neglected to provide him with some key instructions—like what the bleeding bogrosh he was supposed to do now—the real images started, and he felt his body gasp, felt it like he might feel himself jerk in his sleep: as if from a million miles away. He’d thought he would prefer being on the receiving end of the Spinner, where there was no dizzying whirlpool drawing on his memories, turning his brain into a husk. That was before he’d realized how much worse it was to be the recipient of a flash flood of staggering information. Forget the husk. His brain felt like it had been wired to a pyroic thermal generator and fried to a crisp.

  What he now saw…what he knew…changed everything. No wonder Nivy hadn’t had the words for this. The scale of it was harrowing and ungainly; he couldn’t fully comprehend it, but he understood it well enough to feel soaked to the bone with cold dread.

  Before either The Heron or The Kreft, there were the ancestors. The first true inhabitants of the Epimetheus galaxy. In Nivy’s memories, they were faceless, humanoid blurs. Reece automatically understood that to mean she didn’t know what they’d looked like any more than she knew their real name. No one did. They’d been extinct for a thousand years.

  But once, they’d been a brilliant people of explorers and innovators who thought the singular purpose of their existence was to irradiate every last corner of The Voice of Space to harvest knowledge for the advancement of future generations. Because they were so brilliant, they lived in fear of one thing only: dying out, and taking all their incredible knowledge with them.

  For many years—longer in whole than the Epimetheus galaxy had even been civilized, as far as Reece knew—they fulfilled their purpose. As they quested, their entire people moving as one nomadic space tribe, they made advancements the likes of which the rest of the Epimetheus had yet to improve upon. They crafted technologies that eliminated the need for steam or coal in engines, that revolutionized irrigation and pollution problems, and stopped decay altogether. Technologies that weaved human biology and automata, to sustain life almost indefinitely. They were next to immortal, living six, seven, sometimes eight hundred years.

  And they needed every year of that time to account for travel from one galaxy to the next. They were living in a time before the Streams; even with their sleek, black ships that could have outstripped a Nyad with only one wing and half an engine to boot, the very thing they were living for—exploration—was taking too long to accomplish. They needed something to speed them along, because regardless of whether or not they lived for eight hundred years first, they were still dying. In fact, they were dying faster. Too many of them had grown old without children. Too many had sacrificed the ability to procreate for automata parts that could sustain them just a little bit longer.

  So they set up an outpost on the very edge of an empty galaxy, on a good sized planet in the middle of a ring of snowy moons. For the first time, they built themselves something that would stay behind even when they moved on—a home.

  Settled in for what they thought would be a long haul, the ancestors tackled the problem of their travel, and in their laboratories, created a self-aware, sentient tool, organic but programmed with a single directive: to spread out across the galaxy, leaving trails in their wake that would catch up any object with mass and bear it along indefinitely.

  They called them The Kreft.

  For the first hundred or so years, their plan worked. The Kreft obediently set out to pave roads through The Voice of Space. At first, the roads wouldn’t hold; they faded unless a Kreft traced them again and again, setting them like a well-worn trail. This took time. In that time, the ancestors noticed The Kreft changing…evolving. Thinking for themselves, writing their own moral code, their own laws. One feature of their unique physiology was that they could compress their membranous selves and animate humanoid bodies by putting down roots in the neurons of a brain. They took to wearing bodies borrowed from the ancestors and assisting them in their laboratories. Trying to learn, unbeknownst to the ancestors, how to perfect themselves.

  By the time the ancestors decided The Kreft had become too independent, hundreds of them had been bred, pitting the creations evenly against their creators, who were still dying out. War seemed immanent, and it would be a massacre. The Kreft had access to the ancestors’ technology, the one thing that would have given them a fighting chance. Not only that, but over the fifty years the ancestors’ alliance with The Kreft had been deteriorating, civilization had begun bleeding out into the rest of the galaxy from all different sides. Thanks to The Kreft’s trails, new peoples were finding homes on the once-silent planets closer to the sun. If The Kreft won the war, the peoples would be left to suffer them alone.

  So, in a desperate attempt to reverse what they’d done, the ancestors poured their collective resources into one final technological wonder. A failsafe. A weapon that would, as a very last resort, simultaneously destroy all The Kreft at the cost of great catastrophe for the sake of eradicating them once and for all. They constructed it in secret, and as their moons were one by one overtaken by the invading Kreft, sent it beyond the edges of the galaxy, into the uninhabited Voice of Space. Its key they kept for themselves on their home planet Icarus, fearing both the weapon and the means of activating it falling into Kreft hands should their plan to bring the weapon in at the last possible bell stroke fail.

  As The Kreft overthrew the last moon, the ancestors sounded the retreat and ran for the weapon. They were obliterated in the pursuit. The weapon drifted, unmanned and undiscovered, lost between galaxies forever.

  Upon their victory, The Kreft were freed from the ancestors. But not, as it turned out, from their directive. Deep inside of them, written into their genetic code in a precise hand, was a need to go forth. To pave roads. To conquer. They abandoned Icarus, left the galaxy that had been
their prison, and disappeared.

  Over time, the rest of the galaxy settled into itself. Planets were named. Cultures sprung up out of peoples that had come as saplings cut off a larger tree. The galaxy became the Epimetheus. And even the frigid Ice Ring with its long-dead cities couldn’t stay uninhabited forever.

  The first people to discover the skeletal remains of the ancestors’ civilization on Icarus were a browbeaten troupe of travelers who had fled their planet on the back of famine. Browbeaten, but resourceful and shrewd. The Heron.

  The ruins of the ancestors’ old cities provided The Heron with a building block for their fledgling culture. They flourished, but were perfectly content to remain removed from the rest of the Epimetheus, because they were proud, so proud, and when they’d inherited The Ice Ring—the arctic little corner of the galaxy no one else had wanted—they’d also inherited a wealth of knowledge and power, two dangerous weapons in what they considered less capable hands. The other inhabitants of the galaxy were disorderly, struggling to build themselves cities and governments, fighting amongst themselves, and mostly—probably unwisely—ignoring The Ice Ring altogether. As The Heron had rebuilt the ancestors’ cities, they’d also rebuilt their story, and if nothing else, it had taught them to be careful who they trusted with their secrets. And they suddenly had a lot of secrets.

  In the end, it wasn’t the Epimetheus The Heron should have been keeping an eye on. Less than three hundred years after The Ice Ring had been rebuilt, The Kreft tracked rumors of a great weapon back to the home of their old enemy. They suffered no illusions that the weapon was the Heron’s; they knew if such a thing existed, it had to have been inherited from the ancestors. They determined it would be no one’s if not theirs.

  War raged as The Kreft were caught off guard by The Heron’s resistance. Whole planets were destroyed; others were damaged beyond repair. The Heron held fiercely to their small piece of the galaxy, because they were terrified of what they knew, afraid of The Kreft discovering the means to finding the lost weapon—something that still alluded them, even after having the ancestors’ information at their fingertips for three hundred years.