by Alex White
At his feet lay the bodies of slain crew, their faces choked in agony. One by one, more figures in gas masks entered the bridge, surrounding him and throwing themselves prostrate before him. He held out his hands in benediction, and they arose, shaking with zealous elation.
Boots crossed her arms, her stomach in knots. “That’s Henrick Witts?”
“Correct,” said Kin, highlighting one of the cultists. “And that is Jean Prejean, according to the serial number on his shoulder patch.”
Henrick grasped Jean by the face with hands of blue flame, and Jean began to scream. When he released Jean, the man fell to his knees, his eyes glowing with that same fire. The feed switched to a headshot of Prejean, a blond youth with a baby face. Prejean’s widow had told the horrifying story of an all-powerful oracle, twisting fate across the galaxy. Could there be someone more powerful than him?
“What did he just do to Prejean?” asked Armin.
Boots closed her eyes. She didn’t want to be right. “That’s his piece of the spoils. Arcane power.”
“And they didn’t scuttle the Harrow as well, because …” Armin trailed off.
“It’s still too valuable. The spell they fired burned out the casting discs of the entire Winnower Fleet, but this is still a technological marvel. If Henrick Witts wishes to go to war, he’ll need a ship like the Harrow at his disposal.”
“That’s insane,” said Nilah. “If a spell that big had ever been fired, we would’ve heard about it.”
“Not necessarily. With the correct resources and the right cover,” said Kin, “one could extract near-limitless arcane energies to bank for later. Human beings are almost perfect batteries and conduits for magic.”
Boots’s mouth went dry. She didn’t want it to be true. “Kin, what was the Winnower Fleet’s purpose?”
“Remember your promise, Lizzie.”
“Just tell me what you know!” She became acutely aware that the entire crew was watching her.
After a pause, the images overhead reconfigured into the Araujo Arm, Boots’s home turf. Eight points of light popped into existence at various points in space, each with a name: Kingbreaker, Blackstar, Feyhammer, Empyrean, Crow’s Quill, Obsidian, Songmaiden. The Harrow was the last to appear, and the view zoomed in close on its exterior, hurtling past star systems. When at last the Harrow was the size of Boots’s fighter hanging over their heads, the brass disc mounted on its front activated, tracing the largest bloodred glyph Boots had ever seen. The view then rushed back out to the galaxy, showing the other seven ships doing the same, represented by icons of the glyphs they cast.
Boots glanced at Nilah, and the racer’s hands began to shake as she watched the simulation. The glyphs formed a conduit, and arcane energies raced through the Araujo Arm, creating a sigil a hundred light-years wide. It then faded from existence, as though fizzling away.
“That’s the usurer’s mark,” said Nilah, her voice quivering.
The mark that exchanges life for power.
Boots didn’t want to know the answer, but she had to ask all the same. “This was … in 2869? They … They actually cast the spell?”
“Yes,” said Kin. “The same year everything on Clarkesfall began to die. The year before the Famine War began.”
She squinted, taking a step forward as though she could rise into the air to pick apart the visualization with her hands. There, pulsing in the exact center of the fading glyph, was her home planet. She thought of all the friends she’d lost, the children she’d seen starved to death, the choked ball of sand that was once her home.
At the center of it all had been the Harrow.
Rage, fear, and shame swept through Boots like a sea of acid, dissolving everything she loved and leaving behind a hollow shell. They’d made a meal of her people, siphoning away all of the life on her home, and all the while, she’d fought like she could make a difference. All the Fallen had. The soldiers who died in service to their country weren’t brave—they were prey. They’d been turned from young people into corpses, into tiny components of the most cataclysmic spell ever cast.
“Kin, that’s not right,” said Cordell. “That can’t be right.”
Armin sank to the floor, slumping against a wall.
Shut down the pity, Boots. You promised to be battle-ready.
The view switched to a surveillance video of the bridge, Henrick Witts bathing in a sickly pink light as magic suffused his being.
“It is, I’m afraid,” said Kin.
Orna pounded the wall hard enough that it would’ve broken a lesser person’s hand. “I say we get this sucker started and send it back where it came from! Give the Taitutians a taste!” She made for the controls.
“Of what? Billions of pointless deaths?” said Aisha.
The quartermaster shoved her away. “Turnabout is fair goddamned play, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not! Not when you’re talking about innocent lives!” The pilot put a hand on Orna’s shoulder, but the quartermaster smacked it away.
“Touch me again and die. Never forget: I was still living in that hell when everyone else fled.”
“Stand down, Orna,” called the captain, though his voice was only a shadow of its normal majesty. He sounded like he’d been punched in the gut. The quartermaster ignored him, searching for the computer station she could use to jump-start the ship.
Kin interrupted her. “This ship is jump-capable, but its disc is burned out. I suggest you consider an alternate course of action, Miss Sokol.”
Battle-ready. The captain ain’t going to fix this.
Boots wiped her face clean with a palm and smoothed down her hair. “Don’t be stupid, Orna.”
“So I’m just, what, acting out?” Orna screamed.
“Yeah,” said Boots. “You are. Like a child. And no one can blame you for being so angry and being out of your mind. But you don’t want to kill all those people. I can’t believe that’s how you really feel.”
Orna’s jaw muscles flexed. “And why not?”
“Because if you did, you’d be just like the monsters who built this ship—and each and every person in this room would put you down like a dog.”
That shut everyone up.
Boots turned to address the room. “Orna is right about one thing: we need to bring the Harrow back to Taitu. People have to know what happened to Clarkesfall.”
Cordell shook his head and gestured to the massive bridge. “I don’t even know where to start. I’ve never captained something like …”
She set her jaw. “We can figure it out, Captain.” She intoned his rank like a wake-up call and saw the fire reignite behind his eyes.
Nilah had never felt so out of her depth. Like Aisha, she wasn’t from Clarkesfall, so she wasn’t qualified to comment in any way. The argument rose and fell like a stormy sea around her, and each time it seemed to subside, the whitecaps would rise up and smash the group down again.
Her maybe girlfriend had advocated for the killing of several billion of her people. That, Nilah suspected, was merely a reaction to the worst news Orna had ever heard in her life. She could forgive extreme behavior under the circumstances.
For Nilah, the worst part was seeing the map, with its various glyphs from the Winnower Fleet. She gaped at the glyph cast by the Obsidian. She recognized it from somewhere.
“Kin.” She nearly choked on the word.
“Yes, Nilah?” he asked through a nearby console, so he didn’t get in the way of the ongoing argument.
“Can you cross-reference the Winnower glyphs against the 2894 PGRF championship tracks? Just overlay them and see which ones don’t match up.”
“Indeed.”
Maps of all nineteen races appeared in the air above her, and the Winnower glyphs spun, resized, and mirrored until they locked in place on top of each of them. Of the ten Winnower glyphs, only one fell across a race that had not yet happened—the Voranti Grand Prix.
Around her everyone was still shouting.
“Just
because we want revenge on the actual perpetrators, doesn’t mean we can be reckless about it!” said Boots. “We’re all glad you stopped with the genocide talk, but we’ve got to think this through.”
“Everyone calm down,” said Cordell.
“Excuse me.” Nilah raised a hand, but no one looked her way.
The vicious squabble between Armin, Orna, and Boots continued unabated. The captain tried to calm them, but he simply wasn’t himself. No one particularly cared to listen to him, except Boots.
Nilah dug her nails into her palms. “Listen to me!”
The group stopped fighting long enough to spare her a glance. Even Armin blinked up at her through tearful eyes.
“We do have to be somewhat reckless,” said Nilah. “They’re going to cast the grand glyph again.” She jerked her thumb back at the display of sigils overlaid on racetracks. “In five days, they’ll have completed another, ah, bigger spell.”
“How big?” asked Cordell.
Nilah thought about it, but there wasn’t a great expression of scale here. This new one would be millions of times more powerful. “Um … all life in the galaxy big.”
Armin rose to his feet. The others gave her their undivided attention.
Kin chimed once. “I’ve located a set of records using the names you provided from Alpha. They match up with the highest echelons of officers in the Winnower Fleet.”
Above the tracks, Kin materialized a hundred disembodied heads, large enough for everyone to see their features. Underneath each was a glowing nameplate.
“Given the visible light sensor data from the attack in your hotel room on Carré, Boots,” said Kin, highlighting one of the heads, “I estimate a 97 percent chance this is Mother, the commander of the Blackstar.”
The woman in question had a hateful face, already much older in years than the rest of the crew. Her cheeks bore numerous creases from a constant scowl, and her thin nose crooked to one side where it had been broken. “Major Marlisa Gwerder—Developmental Operations Team.”
“That explains the godlike power of her glyph,” said Boots, jaw muscles flexing.
The rest of the group locked onto Mother’s image, staring intently as though their gazes alone could kill her. However, Nilah found herself distracted by two other faces she recognized. The nameplates said Harriet Fulsom, commander of the Crow’s Quill, and Kendall Hopkins, commander of the Kingbreaker, but Nilah knew better: they were Claire Asby, chief of Lang Autosport, and Dwight Mandell, prime minister of Taitu—the two biggest influencers of new track design and placement.
Nilah rubbed her eyebrows. That couldn’t be right. She blinked, but they were still there, staring at her in their military identification images. She took a step back, and another, until her back came to rest against one of the battle stations, trapping her with the undeniable truth: her mentors were liars.
If they were using the racetracks as the foundation for their next grand glyph, they’d have to have some support from the inside. She thought back to the press conference she’d watched in the bank lobby on Carré.
“Obviously, I want her to turn herself in so we can move forward. If she could—”
“Do you believe she’s guilty? The police claim they have compelling evidence.”
“I’ve seen the videos, but I’m not a forensic arcanist. I … I don’t want to believe she’s capable of doing something like that … but I don’t know how to disagree with what I’ve seen.”
It had been so subtle, Claire’s betrayal, and Nilah had loved her like a mother all the while. Claire had played dumb, pandered to Nilah all those years while setting up the biggest heist in the history of the universe: billions of lives’ worth of magic. And when Nilah had gotten crossways with her conspiracy, Claire had gone on galactic television and pretended to be disappointed—pretended Nilah was guilty.
How many others were Claire’s puppets? Cyril Clowe had been at one point or another. How much did he know about his part before Mother had murdered him? What about Uziah Lesinski and his glyph-casting on Claire’s behalf? Was he aware he was participating in genocide? What had they promised him?
Nilah knew one thing for certain: Claire was well aware of what she’d done to Clarkesfall, and she would do it again to another planet, a whole galaxy, given the chance.
The luminous images all vanished, leaving the tiny crew bewildered in the shadows of the bridge.
“Kin!” called Cordell. “What gives?”
A deep red bathed the bridge as klaxons sounded across the ship. “Contact, Captain. Mother’s battle cruiser has just jumped into the system.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Switchback
Nilah bit her lip. The time had come to face the witch once more.
“How many ships?” shouted the captain.
Kin spun streams of light into images of the one ship with a small wing of fighters barreling toward them, then revealed the craft on a map. “I can see one cruiser, though there may be more.”
The captain sat down in the commander’s chair and tapped one of the panels. “You’re not sure?”
“I can’t be. I don’t have access to long-range scanners from my current connections.”
“What?”
“I can inspect the ship’s memory banks and security and operate most of the display technology. Sensors, guidance, navigation, weapons, propulsion, and most other systems are air-gapped; the networks never touch each other. Furthermore, there could be more ships in the antimagic zone outside the umbra.”
“We have to get to the Capricious!” Armin’s voice shook so hard he sounded like he’d start screaming at any second.
Orna yanked him up by his collar. “Don’t be stupid! They’d run us down like dogs. We make a go of it here.”
“No critical systems, Miss Sokol,” said Cordell. “We can’t stay on the Harrow. We can’t steer or shoot.”
Boots snatched up her helmet. “I don’t want to turn tail, either, but if we’re lucky, we can get caught in Mother’s spell again, do an automated jump through her magic. It won’t be far, but we can lose them in the antimagic field. I’ll run escort so we can—”
“Starve to death or run out of oxygen,” said Aisha. “Orienteering in that field is a nightmare. We won’t make it out of the system.”
“I’ve got it,” said Nilah. “I know what to do.”
Cordell eyed her from the commander’s chair. “All ears, sweetheart.”
Nilah took a breath, talking herself into volunteering. There were bound to be hardwired defenses ahead of her. “I’ll get Kin connected to the Harrow’s main computer core. With our magic and direct access, Orna and I should be able to tear up the main cyber defenses and get him completely integrated. He can get us access to the remaining systems and act as station crew. He’ll fly the ship for us.”
Cordell scowled. “That’s illegal for a reason. If he starts making decisions on his own, we can’t stop him.”
“Captain,” she began, “those people out there erased a whole planet, and they’re going to do it again. I’m not sure now is the time to worry about ancient protocols.”
“I’ll go with her,” said Orna. “I need to fight something.”
“So when you take Kin, what happens to us?” said Armin. “Are they going to board? Does the mutineers’ code still work?”
“They already know you’re here,” said Kin, new alarms spraying across the bridge like a belt of red stars. “They transmitted unlock codes, and finding me, their AIs are trying to break my hold over the ship. I believe that Miss Brio’s plan is the most sound of all our options.”
“So we send Nilah and Orna down and keep the bridge clear?” said Boots.
“Yeah. Along with Kin, the only thing keeping Mother from taking over the Harrow’s security,” grumbled Cordell.
A map of the ship appeared, along with several waypoints, before Kin spoke again. “These are the most advantageous choke points if you want to hold the bridge. I’ve already shut down
external data links, but there will be other back doors they can use to attack our information systems. We won’t have long. I’ve installed some malicious code to keep the ship’s comms down, but if my viruses aren’t connected to me, they can’t adapt.”
Cordell stood, squaring his shoulders. “All right. Mister Vandevere, you’re in charge of overseeing operations from the bridge. You won’t get much information here, but start collating everything you can. Find a station and interface with the ship—I want that datamancy working overtime. Missus Jan, Miss Elsworth, you’re with me. We’re going to take the furthermost choke point and hit them as hard as we can. Then, we fall back in stages. Kin, are you ready to disconnect?”
“Yes.” And his crystalline cube slid out of the main console.
Nilah picked him up with her bare hand and, tracing her glyph, forged a psychic link with his memory. She sensed him as a warm star within its structure.
Shall we get started? he asked, his voice an echo in her mind. I can guide you to the core.
I suppose we’d better.
The quartermaster slipped from cover to cover ahead of Nilah, checking each corner before allowing her to proceed. Their path to the bridge had been littered with springflies, their clicking talons ready to eviscerate them at a false move. The journey back into the data core was considerably quieter, which did little to quell Nilah’s nerves.
Where are all of the countermeasures? she thought to Kin.
I’ve redeployed them to the rear of the ship. That should give you about sixty-seven seconds to return to the bridge and seal it in case things go wrong.
So we better not mess this up?
No. I recommend not messing anything up.
Orna signaled the all clear as they rounded the bend, coming to the elevators. Nilah punched in the code Kin gave her, calling the car before flattening against one of the walls to wait. Once inside, she stripped off her jacket, exposing her bare arms. She’d suppressed her dermaluxes, but she gave them test pulses of red, green, blue, and white, watching the waves come alive.
“Close your eyes,” she said, and Orna turned away, checking her slinger with a scoff.
