Starfire, A Red Peace

by Spencer Ellsworth

  Bill springs down from where he was. Beard-face is heading for the ship, where the kids will be. Gray girl and the stinking Necro-Shit are heading for us. I shoot again. My hand is shaking. The shards go wide and leave smoking trails across the metal of the hangar floor. The three of them dodge and weave, but they’re in no danger of being hit.

  If I shoot wild any more, I could punch holes in this place and send us into vacuum.

  When Bill hits the ground, he fires, evil precise. Gray girl raises her sword, catches the shards, and they go flying.

  He keeps firing and she keeps catching shards—until he’s out.

  Bill decides to act the damn fool and rush her. “I en’t never harmed you!” Bill yells as he runs at her. “I ran guns for your Resistance for ten years, you back-stabbing swine.”

  “Run . . .” I say, but as beat as I am, it comes out as a groan.

  “You’re not worth my time,” gray girl says. She grabs a pistol from her hip, shoots. The shard-fire tears Bill in half.

  “Bill!”

  I shoot her before she can react. Wish the shard-fire would tear her in half, but she’s still got her protection trick—it just knocks her flat. I keep firing. I unload the whole clip on her, and it spins her body across the floor like a blackball gone downcourt but it doesn’t touch her skin.

  “Shit.” The gun’s empty. Quality antique piece; holds only a fingerful of shards. I try to jump out of the cockpit. I just crash to the ground, in front of old NecroWasp, who still stinks like the whole galaxy took a shit together. “Nice to see you,” I mutter.

  The NecroWasp reaches for me with its clawed arm. Its stinger gleams, venom dripping from the tip. It hisses something with that mandible mouth—the usual Death!

  “Rrrrrraaaaaaa!” Z leaps from the cockpit onto the Wasp’s head. With them big fingers, he reaches behind its big black eyeball and rips the eyeball out, splattering himself with NecroWasp juice. “Go! I will die here! The ship! Go!”

  I get up. Gray girl is still lying on the ground.

  Beard-face is walking into the ship, where the kids are. I run, but I en’t got a weapon—my gun is empty. Gray girl’s soulsword lies there in front of me. I grab it.

  I en’t ever held a sword in my life.

  Got in a knife fight once, and got myself good and cut by the Kurgul on the other end of my knife. I seen what the Jorians do, though, when they fight, once on the news screen.

  Maybe it’ll work for any cross, even a scab like me. It’s all I got.

  I slash my arm, carefully, not too deep. Everything hurts so much already I hardly feel it.

  My blood leaps up the blade. Just jumps right up and turns white, and then the black steel turns white too, with fire.

  And I feel something, almost like the soulsword’s my own private node. We’re connected, like this soulsword is a piece of me, ready to burn through the world.

  Damn.

  I run up the ramp into Palthaz’s ship, where the kids are. I duck under the metal braces, past the locked cargo bays, into the common area.

  The common area is lit by the white of red-armor’s soulsword, a good three times brighter than mine. Everything is scattered. Bill’s guitar and all the kids’ clothes are on the floor. A case of clothes is chopped to pieces. He is standing over Toq. Poor kid lies on the ground, staring up. Kalia is against the wall, not moving. Dead? No, she’s trying to move, arms flopping. Bastard probably got a nerve cluster, or hit her on the head.

  Beard doesn’t speak. He’s all business, raising that sword to kill a couple of children.

  Toq bites his leg. Beard snarls and kicks out, raises his sword—

  I run him through from behind.

  I en’t never stabbed anyone before. Good thing I’m evil juiced, cuz I ram that sword in, screeching past bone, harder than I ever hammered in a nail or a rivet. The way that flesh gives and resists at once—it en’t a good feeling.

  The soulsword turns space-cold in my hand. It’s like a pillar, connecting my arm to his insides, and I can feel him die.

  His memories come flooding into me. This man’s killed more people than the primaria virus. Dead, dead, dead Kurguls and other crosses and traitors and humans, and I see him all the way back to the vats, I see battle after battle until he dreamed about blood and shard-fire, until he didn’t care. The whole galaxy is just meat. That’s the thought drives this man.

  I see he’s got a fella, someone he loves, back at home. People are funny. He goes out killing kids and then he goes back to his fella and they sit and hold hands and read.

  He’s rushing into me, his memories, his loves, his whole life, up my arm and into my heart, out my veins, into my brain.

  Then he dies. Like that. Falls to the ground.

  After a moment, I fall down too.

  “Jaqi!” Toq is sitting on me, hitting my head. “Please! Wake up!”

  I look up. There, down the ramp, the NecroWasp is coming for us, a long trail of goo coming out of its eye socket. It stops at the ramp, and does something I wouldn’t have thought. It speaks, a low throaty grumble thick with mucus.

  “He wants me to spare you.” It starts up the ramp, its stinger protruding, bright with the gleam of poison. “My new owner does not understand. Death is mercy.”

  I don’t think I can move.

  Z jumps up behind it, all blood and snarls. He reaches around its belly and grabs the thing’s stinger, and with a roar like a beast gone rabid, he rips the stinger off and jams it into the Necro-Stink’s head. For a second, I figure it en’t done anything—but no, even this thing can’t take a spike in the brain. It topples and slides off the ramp.

  Z, all over bloody, crawls up the ramp.

  I look up into that tattooed face. His veins stand out even against his tattoos, thick rivers of black. There’s a little welt on his chest. “Thought you were going to die. In blood and honor.”

  “There’s no honor in being killed by something that’s already dead.”

  “It stung you,” Kalia says, pointing to the welt on his chest. The little spot’s all swollen and black.

  “I have been poisoned before,” Z rasps. “Go!”

  I slump into the cockpit. Don’t know whether Bill got the coordinates programmed in for his big secret mainframe. Looking out the cockpit, I see that gray girl is gone. Damn. I wanted to shoot her. I hit the hangar controls, and above us the doors open—

  A hail of shards cuts apart the hangar. The bugs, and the Vanguard ship, and everything up there rains down hell on us. “Jaqi!” Z shouts. “Jump! Jump!”

  I reach out and grab the node, and I jump us blind.

  * * *

  It’s cold.

  It’s dark.

  Where the burning hell are we?

  I can see the kids, and Z, but hardly, as if by some kind of pale, sick light, kind of thing that shines from the rotten vegetation in Swiney Niney at night. They look all washed out. The light is faint, white, a little blue. Feels almost like the memory of a light, something I create out of my own mind.

  Kalia’s eyes flicker open. She looks at me. The blood makes a line down the side of her face. “Where— What happened?”

  “Vanguard came close enough to kiss is what happened.” I don’t see anything out the viewscreen. Nothing but blackness. Nothing but—

  “Jaqi?” Toq says. “Jaqi, I think I hear something.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Z says.

  “I hear someone.” Toq looks up at me. He looks a bit too much like his brother. “I hear someone talking.”

  I reckon I hear something too, now he says it. I hold a hand up. Z’s got his usual scowl on, aimed toward the viewscreen. The viewscreen that is completely dark, with not a star to be seen.

  I hear something, all right. I hear little whispers, and they turn my skin to ice.

  We know you.

  We watched you. We watched you, when you tore their bodies. We watched you, when you cut him, he who is dead.

  “Do you hear it?�
� Toq’s voice is marred by his pitiful little-kid trembling, trying to form words when it’s killing him. “Do you?”

  I look out the viewscreen. It’s dark. Total, black darkness, the kind makes you feel like you’ve gone blind. And yet, out there, if you look long enough, you can see traces of that ghost-light. Little, small blips of white and blue, almost enough to give a shape to the darkness.

  My skin was cold, but now I feel weirdly calm. I shouldn’t, with a voice from nowhere saying it’s going to eat me. But I feel, at last, like I don’t need to think. I don’t need to think on my feet and fight my way through this. I can just rest in the darkness, in the voice.

  I stare into the darkness, and I start to see it all.

  Those little, faint rushes of light illuminate a darkness strung together. Hints, edges, vague shapes of a web, thick strings running together, knotting, fibers and cables of absolute blackness the size of planetary systems.

  Tens of millions of knots and strings and patterns, into the infinite distance. Like the collected cobwebs of a million star-sized spiders.

  “Do you hear them?” Toq is going to cry.

  I reach out absentmindedly, stroke his hair. “We’re fine.” We are. I am so calm.

  We are going to eat you.

  “We are in the Dark Zone!” Z says. He seizes me by the shoulder. “Jump us!”

  “But . . .” It sounds so nice. Just to lie back, and let the spiders crawl over me, drag me into the darkness. There won’t be anything in that darkness, except a hungry maw. I won’t have to shoot Vanguard, or swing a soulsword, or anything. I’ll just let them eat me, slowly.

  “We will not die here!” Z says. But his normal growly roaring voice is just a small thing next to that whispering warmth. “This is not where we die, Jaqi!”

  We are coming to eat you.

  The flashes of sick-light increase around us. It’s so dark it’s hard to tell, but I could almost say that something is moving along the cords of those webs. Something vaster than a star, and alive. Many somethings. The cords tremble.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay. We’ll like it.” I won’t remember Quinn dying. I won’t remember Bill dying. I won’t remember . . .

  I won’t remember my mother, either.

  Strange thought. I haven’t thought about my mater in some time. That memory comes, my first memory, of her sprinkling salt on a tomato slice. The tomato is big and red and glistening under our flickering lights. Her voice is singing a field-worker’s song. Bend, pull. Bend, pull. I remember her hand as she gives the tomato to me, the soft, sweet, sharp taste.

  Like sunlight . . .

  I don’t want to forget my mother. Odd thought, that. As nice as this warmth is, as nice as it sounds to go into the dark and be consumed, I don’t want to forget the dirt caking her hands, the way her fingerprints were creased with black and the edges of her fingers were cracked from picking crops. I don’t want to forget the way she slid the slice of tomato into my mouth.

  I don’t want to forget Quinn. He thought I was worth saving, and I can’t just let his brother and sister get et . . . Don’t want to forget Bill.

  No.

  “Shit!” I’m not warm anymore. I’m cold. Freezing, like ice is eating me up an inch at a time. The kind voices turn to hisses, to loud screams in my ears, scream after scream after scream slicing into me.

  “Where are those coordinates?”

  “Right in front of you, idiot!” Z says.

  He’s right. They’re flashing on a readout, clear as day, but in this darkness, it makes it burning hard even to focus. Everything’s getting darker, all around us. The Shir’s screams are high and cutting; they rip through my muscle and bone and open my heart. He promised you to us!

  I en’t never seen coordinates for this node before. It don’t matter. I reach out, find the node we must have jumped through. Even in the Dark Zone the nodes are here; it opens for me and sucks us in—

  They’re fighting it. I can hear their screams, and the screams have a kind of force, like a wind wrenching at you, pulling you off your feet.

  Outside the viewscreen, I think I can see a face, in that sick half-light, an enormous, old face with a hundred eyes and wide broken rings of mandibles and a million spars of teeth, the size of a planet. We will not let you go.

  “Burning hell you won’t!” I grab the node, and I force the jump, sling us into pure space.

  The Shir’s cry of agony follows us into the white flash of pure space. As our ship bends and pitches through speeds much faster than light, their screams echo and echo and echo.

  -15-

  Araskar

  I FLOAT AWAY FROM the asteroid, away from the heat of the shard-fire. The music is gone. It’s been replaced by the eyes. There’s a few hundred of them now, but only fifteen faces; they all share the same fifteen faces. They’re all staring at me out of the darkness. Every last dead one of them. Are you mad at me for living, or are you telling me I’m just about dead? No answer. Impolite bastards.

  The Moth around me is growing cold. It’s been hours since this one left its cocoon chamber, and they degenerate if they don’t go back in.

  Through the Moth’s circle of vision I can see the asteroid, floating up above me, still glowing with shard-fire. I can see the white of the rings, broken, pieces spinning in space. There are bodies up there, or pieces of bodies.

  They were all just kids. Hell, I’ve been five years out of the vat. Were I someone’s true-born cub, I’d barely be reading.

  What did they think they were doing? When the Empire built the first crosses, built us out of the Jorian DNA in their labs and the DNA of humans, trying to make the right combination for the perfect soldier—why did they think that they could construct us only to kill, and yet they made us able to feel?

  We fought this war, this Resistance, because we did not just want to be killing machines. And here we are. We failed. We overthrew the Empire, but we are nasty bastards, and have to find something else to kill.

  It’s colder.

  And something stirs. Far, far out, light-years away, something springs into my head. It’s her. The girl with the music. Not gone after all. Something was keeping her from my senses, but now she’s there, stronger, drawing me. I could find her, if I wanted to.

  I push the thought through my soulsword. Back. Return to the ship. If there’s any strength left, go. Back.

  My hands move, thank Starfire. The Moth trembles. And then two of its thrusters fire, propel me up. Didn’t even know they were working.

  I need to find her. I need to end this.

  * * *

  “He wants to see you.”

  My Moth is lying frozen and useless across the hangar floor, a brown wreck, its ragged edges rapidly shedding skin, turning to papery shreds that scatter across the hangar with each blast of new atmos. I can’t walk. Two of the survivors—there’s only about ten of us—have hoisted me up, put my arms around their necks, and slid me along the floor. Rashiya’s eyes are deep-set, in hollow pits. That gray protective suit she wears has been torn, revealing lines of fine wire and circuitry.

  “Who?” Half frozen, my tongue’s even more useless. I stand in the middle of our ship’s hangar, conspicuously empty now without the burrowing pod and most of the Moths. “Terracor?”

  “Terracor’s dead.” She’s barely standing. Shard-fire has burned away her left ear, turned the circuits and running lights that were part of her face into melted slag. “That little cross bitch got him.”

  “I felt . . .” I felt the girl, full of music.

  Rashiya waits. I don’t know what to say. “You felt what?” she asks.

  “I felt nothing,” I say finally. “Thought I was dead.”

  She looks at my leg. I can tell what she’s thinking. It’s not the kind of wound that should have taken a Moth out. I stand up and stare at her. Perhaps she can tell, from the way I am, from my weariness, that something else is wrong.

  I think about the way my whole body wen
t numb, in the face of the music. Numb, just like I knew it was going to one day, with all those pinks.

  I’m just about ready to tell Rashiya to throw me back out the airlock when she says, “Dad. Dad wants to see you.”

  And that’s how, a few hours after I choke when it counts the most, I am sitting before a grainy viewscreen consulting with our fearless leader.

  John Starfire looks older. He’s still got the salt-and-pepper hair and beard. His eyes still have a kindness that he didn’t pass on to his daughter. His jaw quivers and he tries for a smile, and fails. “Araskar.” The pure-space relay blurs his words a bit.

  I don’t say a word.

  “You failed,” he says.

  Strange to say, but that’s almost comforting. I wait for what he’s going to say. Whatever it is, it’ll be soothing, in its way. You’re relieved of command. You can get high and die. If it weren’t for the girl with the music, it would sound good.

  “Araskar, if you were anyone else, I’d throw you into a prison.”

  I nod.

  “You’re different, and I need you, even if you failed. You have something that other crosses don’t.” He stretches out his hand, from where it’s been clasping his sword. “Araskar, I can feel the Starfire. I don’t often tell people this, but I can. I can feel the power driving the universe, and when I need it, it aids me. Do you feel it?”

  I don’t answer. I just sit there. This is of a piece with everything—our leader’s crazing.

  “Like a flood, Araskar. Like currents twisting together in a torrent.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like music, whole symphonies rising in the distance.”

  I perk up, blink. “Music?”

  “Have you felt it?”

  “I . . .” I was blazed as a supernova at the time. That, and then it came from a girl who shot me.

  “I believe, Araskar, that we are not crosses, but are the first generation of the new Jorians. Do you believe that?”

  I just nod.

  The Chosen One keeps talking. “We will grow stronger and stronger, until we can make our own nodes, until we can return to the old galaxy and find Earth that was lost. Do you know what a memory crypt is?” His hand is out of the frame. I’d be willing to bet all of lost Earth that it’s twitching on that sword handle. “The old Jorians used to seal up their greatest knowledge in memory crypts. They would remove the knowledge they had sealed up, remove it from the minds of the entire galaxy. It was knowledge that they wanted to make available only to Jorians, and once the old Jorians died, the bluebloods couldn’t access the information. Only a true Jorian can access a memory crypt. Listen.” His face is cold now, cold and hard and serious. “When we took Irithessa, the first thing I looked for, in those ancient vaults, miles deep in the crust of the planet, was the vault of memory crypts. I’ve been reading about them since I was a child. I found them. I was able to read them, Araskar. Do you know what that means?” He moves closer to the screen, and his voice takes on that odd, robotic quality. “That means that we aren’t just crosses. Like I’ve always said, we are Jorians, as much as the ancients.”