by John Daulton
Orli could never know what all that she had witnessed added up to precisely, but she knew well enough what it meant. Blue Fire had tried to convey the essence of what her species, her race, was. Everything she’d just seen blasting through her dream was Blue Fire’s idea of self and of others like her, whatever they were. “I understand,” Orli said then. “You are that, as I am this.” She traced her own figure with her hands as she stood upon the endless black plane of her dream. “We are dandelions across the pond of space.”
Truth.
“Well, then we must find the other one of … all of that you showed me just now.” She did her best to send back some distilled version of all that Blue Fire had sent, the swarm of images. “Another living world, like you. Do you know where there is another?”
She got the sense that Blue Fire did not. A feeling of vacancy.
“But there must be one somewhere close,” Orli insisted. “How else could it have found Earth?”
Orli saw a pink ocean appear before her, great swells of it rising and falling, but its surface smooth and glimmering. A tone sounded, brief, like the plucking of a bass string on some enormous cosmic cello. A dent appeared in the surface of the pink ocean, as if someone pressed upon a tightly stretched span of pink plastic tarp. Then ripples came, as if a rock had been thrown into water, spreading away from the source, expanding until finally the energy was spent, diffused in time to nothingness. See, came the sense from Blue Fire. See. Use. Come.
“I don’t know what that means.” The words left Orli’s mind on a wave of utter confusion. She dreaded starting this process again. Working through Blue Fire’s puzzles was mind-bending.
A flare of frustration washed back over her, suggesting that Blue Fire felt the same way about trying to be understood. But then planet Prosperion appeared in the pink ocean, half submerged, as if it were a fishing bobble. Again came the cello string sound. Ripples spread outward from the planet, traveling across the smooth pink sea. Again came the sound. More ripples. Orli followed the ripples as they moved away, her vision guided by Blue Fire’s compelling dream-speak. She followed as if surfing upon the wave of them until there, in the distance, was Blue Fire, the planet that was Blue Fire with its vast landmass and polar seas. Blue Fire see, repeated Blue Fire. Orli Love world use. Blue Fire see. Orli’s view was quickly sent back to Prosperion floating in the pink ocean, and once more, after the sound came again, she watched the ripples flow out toward Blue Fire’s world far away.
Orli was stricken by the thought, the revelation of what she’d just seen. Several of them, actually. “You know where Altin’s world is? You know about Prosperion? You always have.”
Sorrow filled her then. A great sadness and mourning, though different than any she’d felt from Blue Fire before. Maternal mourning. She saw Prosperion again, and this time there was a large black orb streaking toward it like a meteor. The orb, black as coal, flew into the planet’s atmosphere and crashed into a patch of desert in the south of Kurr. The impact punched a perfect hole into the planet’s crust as if the orb were a cookie cutter and the planetary mantle but a stretch of dough. Orli recognized the spot immediately. It was the Great Sandfalls. Altin had taken her there one time, a time that now seemed so very long ago.
Make new, came the thought then. She saw Blue Fire’s yellow sun next to the blue star at the center of the system that had been her mate, Fruitfall as Orli knew it now. Once again came the long, long gush of textures and temperatures and all the things that represented whatever it was that Blue Fire and her mate were. Planetary beings, centered around a patch of pulsing crystals at the heart, which humanity only knew as Hostiles. She saw the orb again, striking the desert sand. This was followed by a cloud of dandelion seeds blowing across a lake. She saw birds’ nests filled with eggs. Tiny round balls of spider web, like marbles made of thread. Other things she didn’t recognize, globes and globules, pods, even strange obelisks, alien things nestled in dens and burrows or deep down at the bottoms of lakes and streams. Make new. Death, Blue Fire sent. There came a flash of light, then darkness, sorrow, and Orli knew Blue Fire’s mate was gone. Once again Prosperion appeared in Orli’s mind. Now Orli Love world. Again came a wave of grief, this time maternal. The grief that can only come with the loss of a child.
The power of Blue Fire’s grief was so intense this time, it so overwhelmed Orli, that the sobs broke the dream. She woke up choking and gagging in turns, unable to breathe for the fluid now clogging her sinuses and with her mouth plugged with the ball gag still strapped in place. She coughed and choked, blowing mucous out of her nose and saliva out from around the hard rubber of the gag. The tears pouring now were caused by pain, and her nose and cheeks burned with the pressure of each cough, the back pressure swelling her sinuses and making her fear that she might drown in her own spit. Panic threatened as she frantically clutched the ball gag in her teeth, pushing it outward with her tongue as she pulled a breath around it. She took several long breaths as she waited for her heart to stop racing, pushing back the panic of near suffocation. She breathed until she could think again. She thought of Blue Fire.
“You lost your baby on Prosperion?” Orli spoke aloud, her words, of course, muted by circumstance. And, of course, Blue Fire could not hear or answer now. “I’m so sorry,” Orli said anyway.
She threw herself back into her pillow and willed herself to sleep so she could speak to her again, but sleep would not come. Nearly choking had shocked her system wide awake.
She stared at the ceiling, the ridiculously bright diffusion panel filling her with hate. What if she’d choked to death just then? Would anyone have even come? For a moment she thought at least someone might have gotten in trouble for that, maybe even get a real court martial for incompetence. A small victory in that at least. Fucking bastards. Somehow she would show them. Make them pay.
But how? She was lying there helpless, watery-eyed and trapped, as pathetic as that poor unicorn in Thadius’ menagerie. Which got her thinking again about all that had happened to her, the kidnapping and all that had transpired since. She thought about Tytamon too. Poor Tytamon. She wished he were here. He’d know what to do. Tytamon had told her she was supposed to be the one hope for everyone. Like somehow she could help save them all. How the hell was she going to save anyone if she choked to death in her sleep? Or if she died tomorrow filled with chemicals.
She lay there for some time stewing on that, gnawing on the gag in her mouth with her front teeth. She couldn’t help marvel at how stupid they all were, gagging her as if she’d somehow become a sorcerer like Tytamon. Like Altin. What idiots.
She thought about Altin. Imagined his sweet face. She hoped he was okay. She knew he was. The fact that he’d accused Blue Fire was oddly comforting in that. At least he was alive, a fact confirmed. She could understand Blue Fire’s feelings on that front. Altin did make her feel safe. There was safety in the constancy of his love. She realized how much she’d taken it for granted the more she thought about it, the more she allowed herself to feel the emptiness of Blue Fire’s last million years. One lover in all of time, torn from her in the hot blast of a sun. And worse even in that she’d lost a child as well. Questions and imagination mixed with the images Blue Fire had put into her mind, becoming a sequence of empathetic daydreams too horrifying to be the precursor of sleep. She couldn’t even bear to imagine it.
Blue Fire’s life was an awful tale of misery, endless loneliness and loss. Orli could not remotely conceive how torturous such an existence would be. She marveled that Blue Fire hadn’t found a way to kill herself. At some point, wouldn’t eternity like that become unbearable? If the sorrow never ends, never heals, how long could anyone be expected to endure? And yet, she had endured, and she hadn’t killed herself. Perhaps Blue Fire couldn’t even do that, couldn’t take that much of fate into her own control. Or maybe she just wouldn’t. Either way, what a cruel, cruel plight to live through. What unspeakable, unremitting agony.
And worse, the poor thing
thought Altin was going to abandon her now too. She had Altin blaming her for the attack on Earth. Somehow he had cut her off based on misunderstanding, on truth that was not truth. The very thing that had cost billions of Andalian lives, and now the very thing that was going to cost more lives, lives everywhere it seemed. The scale of the injustice was truly cosmic.
Orli had to get back into her dream. She rolled onto her back and tried counting backwards from a thousand. She counted it all out, down to zero. Twice. She couldn’t stop her mind from wandering to thoughts of her impending execution. If they really did kill her, if somehow Altin didn’t find her, she wouldn’t be able to help Blue Fire at all. She couldn’t help anyone. Whatever planet was attacking Earth, whatever Hostile world—she hated to use that term, even mentally, but what else fit so well, so familiarly?—whatever and wherever it was, it was going to keep going until all humanity on Earth was destroyed, just as it had been on Andalia. Total obliteration. Erasure even.
Or if not that, if somehow the fleet managed to hold off the invading orbs, then Blue Fire would die in the counter attack. She would be gone, perhaps mercifully for her—and still the Earth would be in jeopardy, for the real assailant would remain. Somewhere.
If there was a god or gods out there, she wondered if they were laughing. She could imagine them wringing their vicious hands in delight, capering about their god houses giddy and pleased with how clever they’d made their little cosmic show. All of this seemed too cruel to be an accident.
She had to tell someone, had to let someone know before … in case she didn’t make it through. She had to tell the guards at least. She had to explain what was happening, that it wasn’t Blue Fire for sure. It was another Hostile world. Somehow it must have found them.
But how? How had it found them? And why now?
Something about ripples on a pink ocean. Coming from Prosperion. Which made no sense. Unless, maybe, life made ripples. But even if that was the case, if somehow another Hostile had … had felt the ripples from Earth, the timing was difficult to believe. If the ripples were some kind of life waves, why hadn’t the nameless Hostile world come before? Long before.
So it couldn’t be life.
But if not life, what then? What else was there? Oxygen? Water? There was plenty of that all over the universe, and even if that was it, it left the same question of timing anyway. It had to be something else. There was technology. That was what had gotten the Andalians killed. Blue Fire had told her as much months ago, shortly after they’d begun speaking through her dreams. But was that how she’d found Andalia? It was definitely why she’d killed them; that much Orli knew. Blue Fire saw all their digging and the harnessing of the materials stripped from their world as an act of cruelty, the symptoms of a disease ravaging the planet. She’d wiped them out to save it. She thought she was being kind. She didn’t know the Andalians were sentient, that they were human, the same species as those found on Earth and Prosperion. She hadn’t known because she’d never found one of them to share dreams with, never learned that they had intelligence and, most importantly, that they had love. She hadn’t known until she found Orli in a dream.
For a time, Orli tried to convince herself that it must be technology that somehow caught her attention, some particular discovery on the part of the Andalians that sent the ripples out for Blue Fire to see, but then she realized it couldn’t be that either. Altin’s world had no technology, at least nothing to speak of beyond an enchanted windmill or some other simple, ancient-seeming device. Whatever bit of technology might have served as a signal did not exist on Prosperion. And even if they had somehow discovered it, that hole had been punched into the desert long before his people had even invented the wheel. Altin said the origin of the Great Sandfalls was beyond history, a mystery relegated to myths alone. It might have happened hundreds of thousands of years before humans had evolved, millions even. She had no way of knowing. But whenever it was, that was the time Blue Fire had discovered Prosperion. So technology wasn’t it either.
That left magic. Perhaps magic was how the Hostile worlds found life. It made sense. In fact, Orli even recalled Altin’s having mentioned that he perceived “mana,” whatever it was, as being a thing of pink and purple currents, whorls and vortices. It would make sense for that to be true, as Blue Fire obviously had magic powers to spare. Perhaps she could detect a world when someone or something on it used magic. The problem was Earth had no magic, so whatever world was attacking Earth, it didn’t find it by ripples in the mana either.
Leaving Orli with nothing to hold on to. Certainly not enough to make a case to fleet command. Hell, she couldn’t even shout it to her guards, assuming there were any outside. Not only would they have no idea what she was talking about, she had a goddamn gag in her mouth. They’d taken away her only way to warn them. The fools. Which meant all she could do was wait. Wait for fate or God or random chance to do whatever it had in mind for her in this sick game it played with everybody’s lives.
Chapter 13
Roberto marched in handcuffs alongside Captain Asad into the hangar, a pair of Marines behind them looking almost as stern as the captain did. The captain went up the ramp first and once inside the ship leaned out the hatch and motioned for Roberto. One of the guards shoved him up after the captain by jamming the butt of his rifle into the Spaniard’s back.
“We have orders to shoot him if he even turns back to look, Captain.”
“He won’t.”
Roberto knew better than to tempt them. He could still feel tingling in his feet and fingers from where the electricity had jolted him to unconsciousness, and his whole body was sore. He’d almost made it to the same floor Orli was being held on before they caught him. Almost. He didn’t remember much from there. He’d “just been going to say goodbye.” At least that’s what he told them when he woke up. Everyone knew that was bullshit because he’d jump-wired two sets of elevator controls and knocked out the staff sergeant at the receiving desk on the floor above the level where Orli was. That was how close he’d gotten. Only Captain Asad’s connections—and the fleet’s desperate need for pilots of Roberto’s skill—had managed to get him out of the predicament. Otherwise, he might have been in that cell with Orli now, and not in a rescuing way.
Roberto took his seat in the pilot’s chair mechanically. He couldn’t shake the malaise that lay upon him, the frustration and sense of futility, and the outright grieving that had begun. That trial had been a farce. The child of an attorney they gave Orli had never had a chance to get her out of it, and he knew it now. He wished he’d lied on the stand, but he hadn’t realized what was happening until too late.
He hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know, though. And he had tried to put things in context as best he could. So much so that Commander Adair had accused him of being a “hostile witness,” but Roberto still felt like everything he had said was a nail in Orli’s coffin. A coffin he wasn’t even going to get to stand beside. There would be no NTA flag draped over it, no honors for what she had done to save all the survivors of the Aspect’s crew. No nothing. Her only monument would be in memory. His memories. His recollections of her struggle to stay sane during all those years in space followed by a few glimmers of happiness on Prosperion—even those stolen from her at the end—and then a ramrod trial that would end it all. He wondered if Colonel Pewter even knew. His absence at the court martial suggested he did not. And the more Roberto thought about how it had played out, the more he was sure there was no way the colonel had been told. The fleet had to be unbelievably paranoid to do what they had done, to simply throw out the rule of law. Intellectually, he understood that the Hostile invasion gave them reason, but how much of a threat could Orli really be? Or even Altin for that matter. What more could Altin do if he did come? How much worse could it get? There were Hostiles literally everywhere. One more magician one way or another wasn’t going to make a difference now.
Roberto considered trying to get word to Colonel Pewter, but
he couldn’t help wondering if that would be a terrible idea. What brand of recklessness would that initiate? Probably recklessness of the variety Roberto himself had just tried. Or worse. And the colonel was not in favor with the upper echelons of the fleet like Roberto was, not after he snuck off ship just as the fleet was about to attack Blue Fire, abandoning his post to assist Altin in searching for Orli right at the moment the battle began. No, the colonel had burned down any mercy he was going to get with that maneuver. And likely Roberto had burned down all the mercy he had coming for himself as well. And since the fleet was not interested in fair hearings at this moment in history, he knew exactly what would happen if he got caught leaking Orli’s plight to the colonel, just as he knew what would happen to the colonel if he got caught doing whatever he might do to try to stop it. They’d all three of them, Orli, Roberto and the colonel, be lying on the executioner’s table with poison running into their veins. The whole thing was so infuriating he could hardly concentrate.
Captain Asad removed the handcuffs once the hatch was locked. Neither Roberto nor the captain spoke as they left Earth’s atmosphere and headed back through the melee that seemed to be everywhere in orbit at once. Roberto flew as if he were the autopilot function of the ship, emotionless and detached, his movements automatic, his evasions of the incoming Hostile shafts reflex. He avoided death without interest, his ability to care parched to nothingness by electricity and the realization of the kind of world he lived in. He was simply part of the machine making its way back toward the Aspect, back toward the fight, unsure what it was they were fighting for anymore. But he did. That was who he was.
