Starfire, A Red Peace

by Spencer Ellsworth

  “Keep on praying, girl,” I say. “Tell me if that guy hears, too.”

  The Engineer has done his work well; I hit the buttons and we answer their shard-fire with a volley of our own, and we do some nice ducks and weaves right through the air. Nonetheless, they’re closing. Coming to get us. Fast as they know how. Not even bothering with the bugs this time; just trying to get close enough for a tractor beam. That big black ship, sleek and marked with the flame of the Resistance in red against the black metal, moves across the stars.

  “Do it, Engineer,” I say. What the hell’s he waiting for?

  Closer. Fast as we’re moving, that Vanguard ship is going faster, getting closer, spitting out those shard-bolts, trying to disarm us at least. We’re far enough away from atmos now that the ship could blow a hole in us and just do some salvage; maybe they’re still shooting to cripple because they want the kids alive.

  “Any time, Engineer!” I mutter.

  Closer, the Vanguard come.

  And there it is.

  The yellow cloud streaks across space. Like a nice breath after a good smoke.

  The Vanguard, smart as they are, should be able to identify it. Nano-Suits en’t unheard of around the galaxy. But the Vanguard are pretty damn focused on us. And so that yellow stream reaches up from the planet and catches the Vanguard ship, even as it pours forth another red volley of shard-fire, across the sky at us. Fingers of yellow creep up the ship. Gobs of red streak from it. Black bits of metal start to break away as the Suits eat the Vanguard ship.

  And one of those shard-blasts connects.

  We go spinning through space. The ship groans and pops, atmos leaking, suddenly strained for power. Kalia’s prayers go higher and screechier. “Our Father!”

  “It’s okay,” I say. It en’t, but maybe. “We just need to make the moon. We just need to—”

  The ship roars as one of the thrusters burst, blows. We are all thrown forward, our ship hurtling through the darkness. And that’s when everything decides to go black for me too, as I’m slammed against the console.

  * * *

  Araskar

  The ship’s tough to see, with my eyes. The whole planet is lit up, after all, a mass of running yellow and white lights in the darkness, and so one little light rising out of that—who could tell?

  I can. My whole soul is burning, alive at the presence of the music that’s in her. It’s like I took all the pinks in the galaxy. It’s all I can do not to walk out the airlock after her. The stirring, sweet notes, the whirl of the strings over the low, pulsing harmony. It visibly pulses around that little baby’s-head ship.

  “Shoot them,” Rashiya commands.

  “To cripple,” I counter. “Just take out a thruster.” Our skeleton crew has rerouted both the links and the weapons to three different stations on the bridge. We’ve shut off life support to our lower decks and all crammed into one barracks room; with only ten of us left, there’s no point. And so a maintenance engineer and a cook deliver the shard-bolts.

  “To cripple,” Rashiya confirms.

  “I’ll do my best,” says the girl on firing duty.

  Rashiya leans forward. “This is it,” she says. “I can feel it this time.” She looks over at me. “Almost over.”

  “After this,” I say, “we go somewhere far away. Where the rest of the galaxy will never find us.”

  She doesn’t notice how closely I watch her as she laughs. “If only. I have whole years of orders in front of me. Consolidation.” She shakes her head.

  “Maybe just a bath,” I say. Her eyes are still on the screen.

  “Now that’s crazing talk.”

  We close in, and one of the shard-bolts catches their thruster. The thruster explodes, throwing what’s left of their ship forward, faster and harder along their original destination. “Grab it!” Rashiya says. “Tractor beam. Don’t let it get away.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the command tech says, sounding audibly relieved. “I— What’s this?” He looks up at me. “Secondblade, I don’t know what these readings mean.”

  I look at the readings. Confusing. The tractor beam is—is it being rerouted or shut down? “Rashiya, what does this—”

  That’s when our ship really starts to come apart.

  * * *

  Jaqi

  When I get my head up, the moon is much bigger.

  Its brown surface fills the screen. The link is squawking; some Matakas are shouting at us. Any minute they’ll start shooting too, but no, we’re falling so fast we’ll burn up as soon as we hit atmos. Too fast. I grab the controls, yank the thrusters. Fire, slow us down, damn it. I fire thrusters like I’m trying to come to a dead stop. Slow us down, just ignore that grav—

  The ship is fighting grav, our own inertia, and the thrusters, our three remaining thrusters, are firing and firing. The air in here is getting thinner; I rerouted power to the thrusters just for this quick run so nothing’s pumping atmos. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that my vision is going black, as long as we can make planetfall. I watch the gauge. We’re falling too fast.

  Alive. And my chest hurts cuz there en’t any air in here. We’re falling toward a big empty brown spot in the middle of a continent that’s getting closer and closer.

  Gravity, real gravity, grabs us and pulls us in. The sky is black, the air is flaming hot, and then, too fast, it’s beautiful, bright blue.

  “I en’t going to die here!” I shout. Didn’t even notice I was shouting it.

  The ship screams from the pressure of real atmos, metal superheating. The thrusters scream too, fighting gravity to slow up to a safe jumping speed. The pressure fields nearly can’t bear it. Z screams, near drowned though he’s next to me. His veins are black as his tattoos. He grabs Toq. The fields go, and suddenly all that air, the real live oxygen and carbon dioxide of this moon, slams through our ship.

  Z and Toq go flying out the big empty space at what used to be the back of our ship. Into the sky.

  I pull the ship up hard, fighting the throttle. Fighting and fighting until—screech—the throttle breaks right off in my hand. The shock runs right up my arm. A metal fragment of the throttle pings off the screen, bounces around the cockpit.

  I en’t never flown in real atmos. Flown plenty in the bigger ecospheres. Flown with lots of tractor beams trying to grab me. But there en’t nothing like this. This real grav just wants to eat us.

  I hit the autopilot, for whatever it’ll do. I jump up, and I grab my pack, grab Kalia, hold her tight and run—just as the side of the ship erupts in flame, the heat screaming a trail across the sky. I jump out of the ship, away from the flame—

  Brown below, then blue, and the wind whips us along, falling, always falling toward the desert below.

  And pulling at my arms! Kalia is wrenched away out of my grip—I grab her elbow. Her eyes come open, and I yell, “Five!”

  The wind pulls her out of my grip. She goes up, up into the blue above me—and her chute opens.

  “God!” I shout, and it’s about my most devout moment ever, flying through the air, the real air, not vacuum, not ecosphere grit, not canned air but the real thing, then falling, and damn, I have to look down and see that brown desert coming closer and closer before I remember oh yeah and I hit the button for my own chute.

  It yanks me so hard my eyes go black, but then I’m drifting along in the sky.

  In the distance, our ship explodes in a ball of fire over the desert, either from its own disintegrating self or from Mataka fire.

  And I sail, through the sweetest air I ever smelled.

  Below me, about the most beautiful thing in what must be the entire galaxy. Far as I can see, sand, cut by rough red hills, some of them little more than rocks sticking into the sky, worn away to spires. Scrubby little trees, like black dots. Some big animal is loping across the sand, followed by riders on—are those real horses? Like in the stories?

  Wild as the wild worlds come, this moon.

  “It’s real pretty,” I whis
per, and my face feels wet. “Real atmos. Real plants.” As if in time with the air and the landscape, the guitar strapped close to my back thrums, a deep resonant sound.

  I’m coming down, too fast, at a pile of high, sharp rocks about the size of them Suit towers. “No, no!” I shout, like that’s going to make a difference. I pull my legs up, try to direct myself, and I barely miss the tallest of the rocks, and I’m heading in, toward a wide open space of dirt, but I’m skimming over the ground too fast, my legs scrambling but just moving too fast, and then—

  I crash into a sand dune, which is about the only thing that saves me from breaking everything. Sand goes flying everywhere. Sand goes in my eyes, down my throat, up my nose. Scrapes my poor fingers. It burns—it’s hot, and it chokes me, dry as space. I gag and fight my way out of the sand and vomit up sand and water and try to wipe sand from my eyes, which only puts more sand in them. Finally I get up, and I can see, bleary, the brown expanse around me, leading to the high rocks I saw before.

  I cough and spit out sand. Nice to make your acquaintance, real matter from real earth. Didn’t have to come on so strong.

  I reach behind me, feel the guitar. Feels like it’s still in one piece. I drop the parachute and, on legs that are still throbbing in pain, I stumble across the openness toward the rocks. Maybe some water over there. They got water all over the place on these real planets. No need to go get your recycled liquid depot. Real water, better than comet-stuff, and I can just stick my head in one of them big rivers folks talk about and wash all this sand off—

  A loud boom echoes through the atmosphere.

  I look up. My eyes en’t so good, full of sand, but I can see it. I recognize the shape, even from here.

  It’s a pod from that Vanguard ship.

  -20-

  Araskar

  THE POD RATTLES and we lurch along through the atmos. Kurguls are shouting in our comlink, no doubt ready to come shoot us down, but this is one empty, nasty, waterless, and Godforsaken piece of desert moon, and I don’t think they’ll find us before we find our quarry. We can deal with Kurguls, even Matakas. Too bad we couldn’t deal with microscopic Suits.

  Even after the chutes deploy, our pod lands hard, skidding across sand and rolling, and we are out as soon as it quits shaking.

  Rashiya exhales. “I’ve got the reading on the memory crypt.” She runs her hands along the circuits in her forehead. “This is almost over. Almost over.” She looks up into the sky. “I hope the other pods made it. Between Matakas and the Suits . . .”

  “Let’s finish the mission,” I say.

  My hand isn’t shaking, I notice. It feels nice and calm on the soulsword’s hilt. I hope the crew made it, too. I hope there aren’t any more needless deaths today.

  Stupid hope.

  Ridges of weathered stone reach to the sky, higher and more varied than towers in any city, run between empty, sandy stretches. The only trees are small, scrubby things clinging to the slopes of the rock. In the sky, the Suits’ world is just visible as an impression, a huge dark crescent. It’s beautiful, in a desolate kind of way, and as the first naturally occurring atmos I’ve breathed since Irithessa, it goes right to my head, rushes into my blood. It even kills the headache that I’ve had since I tossed the pinks.

  We are close to a curved rock shaped like a sword; a high weathered red thing stretching into the sky. Reminds me of something, though I can’t say what.

  “The human girl is just over here,” Rashiya says. She trudges off into the sand. I follow her.

  In the shadows of that curved rock, a figure crawls along on hands and knees, dragging the weight of a parachute behind her. She looks up at us, myself, and Rashiya. I catch up with Rashiya, stand next to her.

  This is the human girl, then. Formoz of Keil’s daughter, keeper of our much-desired intel. About ten years old, face bruised and streaked with dirt and lips trembling. Sand has crusted on her eyelashes and is thick in her hair. She’s praying, I realize. Probably has been praying for weeks.

  And here is what my slugs died for, what that ash pile was for: a crying little girl at the end of the wild worlds.

  “Give it to me,” Rashiya says to the little girl. “Give me the memory crypt.”

  “Father in Heaven, Father . . .”

  “The black box. Give it to me.” Rashiya draws her soulsword, a loud, ringing song of steel in the empty desert air. It shines black, radiating heat.

  I draw my own sword.

  The girl gets up, on her knees, still babbling.

  “I won’t hurt you. Just give it to me. You came this far, and there is nothing else you can do to get away. To resist me would be very stupid, and would get you killed, like your brother, and you want to live.” Rashiya leans forward.

  The girl finally stops praying long enough to untangle the parachute straps. She reaches inside the dirty coveralls she’s wearing and pulls out a little box.

  Rashiya snatches it up. “Good.” She looks over it. Looks just like a black box, unless you look closely and see the tiny curves of Jorian writing. She visibly slumps in relief. “Devil take me, I thought I’d never finish this mission.”

  “What’s it say?” I ask the girl.

  Rashiya perks up, looking between me and the girl.

  “What does this thing tell about?” I ask. “I know it’s a memory crypt. What did it tell you?”

  The little girl’s face contorts, bits of sand falling away from it. “You murdered my brother!” She clutches at the sand. “I won’t tell you anything!”

  I cut my hand with the soulsword, let the fire spring up. “Tell me,” I say. “Your other brother and your friend are still close enough for us to find.”

  And as she meets my eyes, I wonder if I look any different than Rashiya did, when she killed the girl’s brother. Probably not. Probably I look worse, with my scars and my slurring voice and the blood trailing off my fingers. The girl begins to cry. “It’s . . . it’s a star map. It’s a star map, of what the Dark Zone used to be. Oh, God, don’t hurt my little brother! Don’t hurt Jaqi!”

  Rashiya takes a minute, then whispers to me. “Araskar, if what she said is true, we can’t leave her alive. We can’t risk anyone knowing. I’m sorry, but . . .”

  I close my eyes and I bring the faces to my head. It’s not hard. My dead friends, my slugs, my batch mates, were all cut from the same fifteen models, so for all that I have a thousand ghosts haunting me, they all have the same faces.

  I turn to Rashiya. “We can’t leave any humans alive, you mean.”

  She doesn’t seem surprised. She just sighs. “Soldiers gossip, ai?”

  “I figured it out.” I hold my soulsword up to her. “I didn’t sign on for genocide, Rashiya. Neither did my slugs.”

  She holds up her hands. “Fine. We won’t kill kids. I have the box, we’ve got the intel, no one else needs to know.”

  It would be so easy. If I just nod, then we could get back to the pod, and then threaten the Matakas with Vanguard so they give us a ship, and we could even say that the kids are dead, killed in planetfall. We could go back to Irithessa and pass on the intel, and I could finally ask for reassignment, far from the battlefield, where I can just not think about what the Resistance is really doing, what “consolidation” really means, and I can go back to the pinks and no one will care, sit with the music and not care that John Starfire himself, the Chosen One, is mocking what my friends died for.

  “Araskar,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Oh?”

  “You have two choices, Lieutenant,” I say, and I summon those fifteen faces. “You can tell me exactly why your pater’s keen to kill half the galaxy. Or I can find it out for myself, with this.”

  “I said let’s go, soldier.”

  “I’m not your soldier anymore.” I slide into a ready position, my soulsword ready to catch the blows from hers. “Consider this my resignation.”

  She lunges. I counter her stab, sling her swor
d away. She turns, and she’s back at me, beating at my strokes, her sword too fast, too quick, as I hammer her blows away. I go backward, across the dirt, up the scrubby, rocky slope.

  She’s going to kill me. We played this through practice, and each time, her practice sword struck my breastbone, my solar plexus, my neck. I’m catching and deflecting a few blows. Our hilts lock and I run back, she stabs and I parry to the side, and then her next blow slashes open my arm, and I catch another blow at the hilt but it pierces my side, rips a hole.

  “Araskar!” She dances back from my pathetic thrust. “Don’t make me do this!”

  My blood runs down the hilt onto the blade of my soulsword. It glows with white fire, shining even in the desert’s afternoon heat. I parry her next blow, try my own stab, but she’s so damn fast.

  She backs up, inviting me forward. “You know we have orders—”

  I throw myself into a downhill lunge. She catches it. Faster than she should, she throws my blade off and her own blade strikes at my neck. I twist, turn away, but it slices deep into my shoulder and blood coats my sword arm and I drop my soulsword, stumble and fall on my face into the dust. I try to get up, on my good arm. I fall again.

  She kicks me. As she stands over me, I see both that hate and that sorrow in her eyes. “I have a mission,” she whispers. She puts her boot at my throat. “You know I have to finish it.”

  And then she is walking away. Holding her soulsword high. About to kill the little girl.

  I will not let this happen.

  The music swells inside me, a feverish living roar. I get to my feet and grab my soulsword in my bad left hand and I charge and she turns and she looks genuinely, awfully surprised as I shove the blade through her chest.

  “Araskar, I—” She can’t say any more, not through the metal in her airway.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and feel totally stupid. “I’m sorry.”

  She coughs, gags out a few words. “Pull it out. Don’t do—”

  I don’t pull it out.

  My soulsword sucks up Rashiya like a thirsty man at a tin of cold, clear water.