Starfire, A Red Peace

by Spencer Ellsworth

  Hell, this is why I take drugs—to avoid nightmares like this.

  “Come on,” she says. And a moment later, “As long as you’re going to be honest.”

  “I will be if you are.”

  -7-

  Jaqi

  WE COME SCREAMING OUT of pure space, spinning through the black.

  “Where are we?” Z says. He unbuckles himself, rises in zero.

  He runs his fingers, each one about the thickness of my wrist, over the running lights. Knows his way around a cockpit. Probably could fly this thing, if not navigate. I can tell from how he moves that he’s well in zero, which means he’s spent a good amount of time in the deep black, where grav is a luxury for full fuel cells.

  Look at this hidden depth to Zaragathora, Eater of Flesh. Kills and—does other things!

  “Are we far from the ecosphere?” Kalia asks.

  “We’re nowhere.” This is a nice chunk of nothing, empty of everything except ghosts. The star field is distant pinpricks, all around, above and below, except for the wide black blotch of the Dark Zone. “This is why I’m good company, kids. There’s no fixed nodes anywhere near here, no hints to our location. I dropped you right on the big ass of nowhere. Good spot, when there’s trouble.”

  Kalia and Toq don’t speak. Poor kids. Still in shock.

  “Why here?” Z says. “We’re burning fuel.”

  “If I know Palthaz, it’s been a while since he ran a basic diagnostic.” And he probably never learned the trick of routing through med-grade bacterial fiber to save on said fuel. “We need a second before we go . . . on.”

  Where’s on, Jaqi?

  That takes a minute to figure out. After that minute, it takes another minute.

  I’m going to have to take them to Bill’s. He knows everything in wild space. He’s probably got the line on this kill order from the Vanguard. If there’s one spot in the wild worlds even the Vanguard couldn’t find, it’s Bill’s.

  They’ll be safe, and I can get out of this grim and back to that business of living a real life.

  I flip open a panel on the ceiling, revealing the grav controls. “Who’s in the mood for some gravity?” My guess is that these kids haven’t been running in the deep black long; they were raised planetside, and they’re going to need a few good hours of grav a day to keep healthy.

  “I peed my pants,” Toq says. “I was too scared to hold it.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I would have peed my pants too.”

  “Why?” Toq says. “Were you scared?”

  “Enough for my heart to burst,” I say. “But they make crosses so we don’t pee under stress. We’re supposed to be perfect soldiers.”

  “I peed too,” Kalia says, after a moment.

  “Palthaz must have some spare clothes around here.” They both look ready to cry. Damn. Bring some funny, Jaqi. Cheer these ones up. “How about you?” I ask Z. “Did you hold it? Or are you Zaragathora, Pee-er of Pants?”

  The kids chortle. Z frown-snarls. So far, he’s about as funny as a constipated Imperial officer.

  “I will find clothes,” he says. “Are you hitting the gravity or not?”

  “Hold your pee, Z,” I say. Both of the kids giggle again. Hey, look at that. Not crying. I switch on the gravity and Z is knocked down into his seat. They laugh again.

  Palthaz’s gravity is special nasty, making me feel like a cat’s scratching the top of my head. Probably just repurposed an old shock field generator. I’ve heard—not that I’ve ever been planetside, not since I was too small to remember—that planetside gravity feels nice, natural, not like this skin-busting itchy pressure, and not even like the ecospheres. Kalia and Toq’s expressions tell me this is true.

  “I don’t like this,” Toq says. “I think we would rather float. Palthaz let us float on the way here.”

  Polite kid. I unbuckle them. “You need some grav, or you’ll get the bends once you get planetside again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We should just do what she says, Toq,” Kalia says. “She knows about spaceships.”

  Z comes back with clothes. Looks like Palthaz had some extra packed for them. Toq starts pulling off his wet pants. He looks at me and Z for a minute, as if deciding whether he can strip in front of us. Kalia pulls Toq into the room right behind the cockpit—Palthaz’s cabin, I figure—and says, “Sorry! We’ll change in here!”

  I look at Z. “Bluebloods, eh? I guess they can afford to be embarrassed about their starks.”

  “The dead boy has spare clothes, as well,” Z says. “If you want to change, they will fit you.”

  Takes me a minute to realize what he’s saying. Quinn. The damn kid who died because he thought he was helping me. I knew him for about two hours, and I figure he was the bravest soul in the galaxy.

  “They won’t like seeing me in their dead brother’s raggy.”

  “Their brother died well,” Z says. “You would honor him by wearing his clothes.”

  “You’re an odd scab, anyone ever tell you?”

  He stands a bit closer, and the hot, stinking breath from between his sharp teeth is almost as bad as the skin-prickles from Palthaz’s cheap-ass gravity. “You promised pay.”

  “You’ll find money in your hand soon enough,” I say. “Just make yourself useful.”

  “You will pay me,” he says, “when we get where we are going.”

  “All right, all right, just breathe in the other direction.” I shove him away gently, hoping he doesn’t rip me in half for it. “Why do you need money so evil? Don’t tell me you got into pit fighting to help your poor sick mother.”

  He holds his peace, long enough that I actually look in his big red eyes, surrounded by that stark white skin and black curling tattoos. He’s looking out the porthole at the starless patch of the Dark Zone.

  “It is for my people,” he says. “We are fighting our own war, against the corrupt rulers who stole our land.”

  “Oh, right. You know, this trip really needed more believers.”

  * * *

  Araskar

  “You first,” she says.

  I, with great pride in my levelheadedness, avoid pointing out her hypocrisy: tell me everything, and I’ll tell you nothing. “You deserve the truth, Rash.”

  “If you’re here to tell me about how you were out of your head, save it.”

  “I wasn’t out of my head yet.” I ease myself onto a slab of concrete. You would think this place was uninhabited, given that only corpses and Vanguard are filling the square. Quiet, too, other than the subtle buzz of the engines, and the chatter of the animals in the woods. I wonder what sort of magical fun we’ll run into out in the wild there. No doubt there’s enough contraband to make up for the pinks I just finished off.

  Not the time to think of that. I focus on Rashiya. She looks older already. Funny, that. It’s barely been a month.

  “So, I’ve never told anyone this, but I used to have a little . . . habit.”

  She doesn’t speak. That’s good, I think. I’ve got her attention.

  “On Irithessa, I wasn’t trying to die,” I say.

  “You told those Kurguls to kill you.”

  “True.” I had forgotten about that. “I didn’t go looking for death, Rash. I went looking for drugs.”

  She nods, still facing away from me. “I hoped you would tell me.”

  “You know?”

  She nods. “Helthizor.”

  “That little shit.” I suppose it’s too much to ask that people would keep their mouths shut. “Just now?”

  “He’s known for a while, Araskar. Said he didn’t know who else to tell, and he was afraid of what Terracor might do to you. They need you.”

  “He’s got no right to tell you that.”

  “You have no right to endanger your life like this.”

  “Brain bullets never killed anyone,” I snap.

  “No, just made them stupid and slow and got them killed in the field. You think I’ve
never seen this before? You think you’re the first soldier that did this?”

  I really don’t want to hear about other sad-case soldiers like me. “You and little Helthizor have nothing to worry about. I quit a while ago. The supply ran out, and it seemed like a good time.”

  She turns back to me. It’s funny, but sometimes a little thing can make a war-hardened soldier turn into a kid. The way she looks at me, I remember that she’s spent a lot of the last few years with her father at risk. I suppose when you know your pater’s chopped head could show up on the news, it makes you look at life a little different. “You need to promise me that’s the truth.”

  It’s in the orbit of truth. I didn’t plan to quit but . . . why not? “My word of honor, for what that’s worth.”

  “Worth enough to me,” she says softly.

  “Now it’s your turn,” I say. “I want truth about this mission. Hell, about consolidation in general.” I motion toward the body. “Young, for a kill. Start with him.”

  “There’s an intel leak, going as high as my father’s inner circle, and as far back as Irithessa.”

  “I heard. That intel got twelve of my best killed on Keil’s moon,” I say. “Terracor was willing to crack a moon open for it. And you’re stuck here in the shits of space, killing kids for it? What leaked?”

  She sits next to me. “That, I haven’t asked. My father doesn’t tell me everything. High-level leak, and the kids have it, and we’re supposed to recover it.”

  “I suspect he tells you more than he tells us.”

  “You’d be surprised.” I can’t tell if she’s lying.

  This air tastes awful. Feels like I have to chew it. I would evil like to get back to Irithessa, where there’s real atmos. I suppose it’s too much to ask that I could breathe good air now and then. “Are we back on the mission together?”

  “For now,” she says. She rubs at a patch of synthskin, a piece of her head that’s been repaired. It’s taken a hit recently, a good hit. Her neutral gray getup is hiding a personal shield, I can tell, so it must have been quite a shot. She peels away the half-melted synthskin from her forehead, rolls it into a ball, tosses it on the ground. “That’s sloppy work.”

  “You should see this leg,” I say. “Had it all rebuilt on the fly after Keil, and it’s barely one step up from a peg.”

  “That’ll make it even easier to knock you on your ass,” she says.

  “Oh, your day is coming in the ring, young Miss Starfire.” I tap my soulsword hilt. “One of these days, the practice blade comes for you.”

  “Don’t call me Miss Starfire ever again.”

  “Tell me the truth about all this. Consolidation. What’s it really about?”

  She looks at me like I’m stupid. “About making a government that could last.”

  “It’s not about killing humans?”

  She laughs. “You think we could kill every human in the galaxy? Three trillion sentients?”

  “That number’s gone down of late,” I say. “Look, everyone—Terracor, all the other superiors—they’re not talking like this is about intel. I heard plenty of folks—” I stop myself from mentioning her pater. The human stain.

  “Of course,” she says. “You don’t go telling the spaceways that you’ve got an intel leak.”

  “They’re talking,” I say, “like it’s about humans. Not bluebloods. But humans.”

  She shrugs. “I can’t blame anyone for hating humans, not after what we’ve been through.”

  “We been through as much as we could expect,” I say.

  “Three trillion humans in the galaxy. Since the founding of the Second Empire, at least six times as many crosses went to death in the Dark Zone.”

  “Okay, so it’s about . . .”

  “It’s about intel. I think it’s about time that we get back to finding it.” She turns back to the doorway.

  “So,” I say, getting to my feet. “See you in the ring?”

  She doesn’t answer. And I stumble out into the grating filtered sunlight of this ecosphere, for what I have just pronounced my first day sober. Everything stinks.

  -8-

  Jaqi

  “WHAT WERE YOUR PARENTS like, Jaqi?” Kalia asks. She and Toq are sitting at the table, their seats bolted into the wall of the common area, which, as common areas go on tiny spaceships, is almost designed for humans. Seats around the triangular space, a good five paces across. A couple of games and books in a latching cabinet that the kids have popped open. Protein packs open, and the smell makes my stomach rumble and makes me sick at the same time. I sit down and take a bite.

  It tastes almost as bad as I smell.

  Z and I finished the diagnostic an hour ago, having been up in the guts of the ship a good day, checking all the lines and the cells, emptying the acid dumps, starting new cultures growing on the batteries, and it’s hot and nasty in there, and you’ve got to grease up with anti-oxitate, no matter how it burns your skin. After the full diagnostic, a girl gets tired, aiya, and ready for at least a cleaning-field when there’s no water for a bath. So I found the cleaning-field and turned the thing on, and didn’t get a damn thing except a few sparks. Should have run a diagnostic on that while I was at it.

  I guess I’ll get clean at Bill’s. For now, I smell about the worst that anything’s ever smelled in the galaxy. Except for Z.

  “Jaqi?”

  “I told you about my folks back on Swiney, didn’t I?”

  The girl and her brother have a couple of books spread out on the table. The boy is looking at the pictures, and moving his hands along the words under the pictures, making the sounds with his mouth.

  Wonder if the letters go all fuzzy on him too. Wish I could ask.

  Kalia says, “I mean like . . . did they take you to the beach, or did they like to go flying, or . . .”

  I think she’s joking. She must be. Go flying? Like, for fun? In a spaceship? Who gets in a cramped little recycled-air rustrider for fun? I guess she’s just trying to talk instead of think about her dead brother. And dead dad. Poor kid.

  “They worked, mostly,” I say. “My mother liked to sing. She would sing me to sleep at night.”

  “Oh, I heard about that,” she says. “Yeah, you can tell when a cross goes wrong because they like music. The vats are supposed to grow crosses that don’t really like art or music or anything that will distract them from fighting. Crosses that sing or that make music or draw are supposed to go back into the vats.”

  “How’d you know that? Your pater?”

  “No,” she says. “I read it in a book.”

  Books. I try not to sound stupid. “There’s a, um, book about that?”

  “There’s lots. I had to read about it for school, but that was just propaganda about how the crosses want to fight. My dad gave me a book by a guy who joined the Resistance. My Private Vat. Did you ever read that?”

  “No, don’t figure I did.” If we keep talking about books, I’m going to look evil foolish. “You ever—”

  She starts right in lecturing. “It’s all about aberrations. The Jorians that escape, and have kids, and how crosses are people and they all live in fear, and it says that this has been happening ever since the beginning. I guess after the Fall, when all the original Jorians died, the elite families had this big cloning project to bring the original Jorians back. That’s where the vats came from. But it was corrupted. First the original Jorians couldn’t be replicated, then they mixed the DNA with human to make crosses. The guy who wrote the book, he knows a lot because he’s a cross and he traveled with crosses. You know?”

  “Oh, right.” What in five suns is the Fall? Does everyone who reads books talk like this?

  I figure my confusion must be visible, because she starts explaining some more. “So I guess there’s like, five parts of history. For humans, anyway, and you’re kind of human. There’s Earth. There’s the Alliance, which is when humans and Jorians joined together to make the nodes between the old galaxy and here. There’s
the First Empire. And then there’s the Fall and the Chaos. When the old galaxy died and its stars were scattered.”

  “You’re talking about church,” Toq says. “Church is boring.”

  “Quiet, Toq. God hears when you say stuff like that, you know.” She bites her lip. “And there’s the Second Empire. And I guess . . . I guess the Second Empire is over, now. We’re in the sixth part of history for humans.”

  Yeah, part six is probably going to be titled The Part Where All the Humans Died. “Your pater, he, uh, he made crosses, though. Did you tell him you read about how it’s wrong, and all?”

  “Oh, yeah. Dad gave me the book. He told me that he stopped sending the aberrations back to be melted down. He thought the Resistance had the right idea; our whole church had like, secret meetings for people who agreed with the Resistance. He let Quinn in. I listened at the door.” She smiles. “I know that he started shipping his crosses secretly to the Resistance. At least the aberrations. He said that he had to keep selling some crosses to the Empire, or they would come for him, but . . .” She nervously turns the pages of one of her books. “The Resistance came for him instead.”

  Z walks in. He’s given up on finding something that fits; he’s just got a towel wrapped around his middle, which I guess is close enough, considering he was just wearing synth-scale trousers before.

  “Turn off this damn gravity,” he says. It’s almost not a snarl.

  “I was just starting not to notice it,” I say. I’m used to scratchy grav fields in cheap ships.

  “I want to float,” Toq says. “Can we turn it off?”

  “Yeah, the gravity itches me,” Kalia says, in that tone that’s still a bit snooty. All I need now is for her to sniff and mutter, Something must be done, like one of those old ladies in the dramas. Nice girl, though, no matter how big a catch her pater had. And a church girl! I en’t never met someone who went to a real church, and talked about a God and all.

  “What were you talking about?” Z says. “The book. About vats.”

  “My Private Vat,” Kalia says. “Did you read it?”

  “Yes,” he says. “The author wrote another. About indigenous peoples and Imperial domain. Our Blood, Our Land, Our Hell. Every sentient should read it.”