Fall and Rising

by Sunny Moraine

  This much remained easy.

  Lochlan was dozing once more, but Adam still couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back and stared up at the dimness of Volya’s ceiling, lips moving slightly as he ran through recent events. Like counting sheep, maybe it would tire him out.

  Or maybe it would just keep him awake.

  At last he carefully disentangled himself from Lochlan, rose to his feet, and crept to the small alcove that served as the cockpit. There, he sank into the pilot’s seat and activated the messaging system in the comm; he hadn’t heard the ping of anything incoming, anyone responding to the feelers they had put out on some of the primary message bands. They had been forced to keep their queries vague—better to not attract more attention than necessary—but Adam had been hopeful.

  Nothing. He sighed and scrubbed his hands down his face.

  He was tired, tired in the kind of aimless way that came from prolonged periods of inactivity. Since leaving Ashwina in hopes of curing the rest of Adam’s people, they had spent weeks skirting the edges of Protectorate space, looking for an unobtrusive way in. Making it into that space had been the objective from the start; Lochlan, usually the impulsive one, had counseled both care and at least some degree of planning—to the extent that planning was possible. There was so much they didn’t know, couldn’t anticipate.

  And there were things they did know. As far as they could tell from trading rumors on outlying stations, little in the Terran Protectorate itself had changed: Its authority on its tributary planets was seemingly solid and its monopoly on trade and governance appeared stable.

  If anything, it had circled its wagons, bulking up border patrols, sending reinforcements to its colonized worlds. The sickness that had nearly killed Adam remained invisible.

  There was no real news about that sickness, nothing beyond vague rumors. Nothing about any of the Protectorate Peacekeepers who had been present on Takamagahara for the Battle of the Plain. Nothing about Commander Marcus Kerry, Kyle Waverly, or Eva Reyes—once an enemy, a best friend, and a low-ranking Protectorate officer, a total unknown. Nothing about Detective Bristol Aarons, though as an investigator for the Protectorate Military Police, he would be used to keeping his head down. They all seemed to have simply disappeared. Maybe dead, maybe imprisoned, maybe in hiding or on the run. If they had decided to return openly, Adam didn’t imagine it would have been taken well, given their questionable loyalties, but he had hoped. He still hoped, if he and Lochlan could get across the border, they might learn more. Might be able to make contact with one of them—with more than one. And there were other potential contacts, if the contacts could be made safely; Adam knew others, people from his old life, though how many of them he could trust …

  He didn’t know.

  They had to get into the center so they could find out what was really happening. What plagued Adam more than dark dreams was that he couldn’t escape the intuition, deep and profound, that something was horribly wrong. He had set out to do this on an instinct and continuing to follow such an instinct was questionable at best—but something was leading him. His orbit was swinging wide, away from where he had come, and he had to follow it. He had to wait.

  But he and Lochlan were being hunted.

  He pulled up a few of the general public-band newsfeeds. Not much there either. A fleet of garbage scows outbound from Inarihad had been seized and searched and an enormous shipment of the powerful narcotic snake had been discovered. Thanks to additional terrorist attacks on Koticki, their shipments of minerals and heavy metals were down.

  And there, in the list of criminals wanted by the Protectorate, right under a pair of fugitives named Theseus and Taur, were his and Lochlan’s images. His drawn from his official dossier, Lochlan’s blurrier—a man in motion. It must have been taken from the surveillance cameras the day Adam had been caught stealing credits and Lochlan had scooped him out of Protectorate hands. Saved his life.

  Started everything.

  There was a high reward offered for delivery of them both alive. But more for Adam. Lochlan was clearly a bonus.

  He sat back and exhaled heavily. Not news. But seeing it still made his skin crawl. The Protectorate’s pursuit of him hadn’t ended with the death of Melissa Cosaire. She hadn’t been the only one who felt he knew too much. That what he knew could break open their efforts to hide what had almost killed him. It could crack foundations. Pull everything down.

  Strange, to have people regard him as so powerful. Powerful enough to break apart the system of faith that underpinned an entire empire.

  Adam glanced down at his hands. Once they had shaken with the disease eating up his nervous system, but now they were steady. Strong. Yet he didn’t feel strong, didn’t feel as though there was any particular power in them. They were the hands of one man. In this moment, the idea that he could break anything so massive and ancient apart seemed ridiculous.

  But there was something he could do. He and Lochlan could turn away from this whole horrible mess, head out to the farthest reaches of human-explored space, and make a life together that didn’t involve the Protectorate at all. Or they could rejoin Ashwina, and the rest of Lochlan’s Bideshi convoy, Suzaku and Jakana. Go back to a place that was, somehow and strangely, a home to him. Back to the friends he’d left behind—friends he had never expected. Kae, Lochlan’s best friend, first to welcome Adam to Ashwina and the first there to be kind to him. Leila, his wife, brave and generous. Ying the healer, gentle and wise. They had all cared for him. He thought about them now and his heart clenched.

  Running would be easy. But every time he thought of it, he saw Ixchel’s face in his mind. Ashwina’s Aalim, her wise woman, who had left her blood on the Plain and her spirit among the wandering stars and the ancient trees of Ashwina’s Arched Halls.

  She didn’t look pleased with him.

  After everything? After so many people died? For this? For you? For what you might become, for what you might make possible? You’d turn your back on their sacrifice? Child, I expected so much more from you.

  It was as though she were right there with him now, her voice so clear, her blind eyes staring into and through him in the way she had always been able to. The mind that lay behind them, sharp as a jambia’s blade. She had never let him get away with anything, had pushed him to the limits of what he thought he could do, and had given him massive, fierce shoves past the bounds of his comfort zones. Like her ancient trees, she had cultivated him, helped him to grow.

  And in the end she had been among the dead. His dead.

  Adam sighed, closed his eyes, and turned his attention out into the night. He had no idea which were his stars anymore, the ones that Ixchel had shown to him—had no idea if they were even visible. But he liked the sensation of them pulling at him, rooting him into the fabric of the universe.

  He hadn’t reached for that connection in a while. Maybe now it would help.

  He focused on the stars, his hands loose in his lap, and let himself begin to drift.

  The stars were pulling at him, was the thing. Not only his birth stars but all of them, knowing him like a son and beckoning him out of Volya’s patchwork metal skin. The spaces between them, which more ignorant people—which he, once—assumed were made up of empty space. There were things dancing in those spaces, strings and lines that extended into him and everything else, their vibrations weaving the tapestry of reality. They made up the roots of the universe, and as he reached out unseen hands and combed his fingers through them, his own roots sung in harmony with them. A sine wave, rising and falling and rising again.

  He wasn’t alone. He would never be.

  Ixchel was waiting in that crowded darkness. Unreal, but more real than he knew how to put into words. A dream, and yet not a dream at all.

  Child, she said, taking his hand, and her face was at once as old as he remembered it and young, shockingly beautiful. You’re waiting for it to come to you because you’re afraid to go to it. But this is not what I taught you. For anything
worth having, you have to be brave enough to chase it, and ready to give up everything. Ask your sweetheart sleeping behind you there. He’ll tell you what he was willing to give for you, in the end.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” he whispered, unsure if he was speaking aloud or merely thinking the words. “I don’t know if I can save these people. I’m just one man.”

  No. You’re two men. And you may be more than that. You may be only the beginning of something else which will grow far beyond you. The universe is vast and very, very strange. Things have been set in motion the ends of which you can’t possibly hope to see. We all of us are building something that we will never see to completion. Our children and our children’s children must take up the work for us, and even they will never see it done. When we took the first trees from Terra and brought them into our homeships, do you think any of us thought we would see what they would become? Even the Arched Halls began as sprouts and saplings.

  He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  Have you ever? She laughed, soft and musical, and it seemed as though the stars themselves laughed with her. You don’t need to understand, my love. Simply be ready. There is power in your blood. Power to take the hands of two warring brothers, two halves of the same human family, and unite them in the end. It was a gift to you. Many died for it. Don’t waste it.

  The vision faded, as though he was being pushed out of the trance rather than coming out of it on his own. He sat, blinking, and looked at the time readout on the console, only faintly surprised to see that over an hour had passed.

  And what had he gotten from it? What had he learned?

  He was so tired.

  He rose, stretching stiff muscles, and made his way back to bed. Lochlan was on his belly now, his tattooed arms under his head and the dim light making his brown skin appear darker and warmer than usual. Adam lowered himself down beside him and slung an arm around his waist, tangling their legs once more. He kissed the edge of Lochlan’s jaw and smiled at the soft, sleepy rumble he got in response.

  He didn’t need to understand. Not right now. For the moment he was warm and safe. He closed his eyes again, and at last sleep took him.

  Isaac Sinder was trying hard to not be resentful. But he wasn’t even meant to be here. He stood on the bright, polished bridge of the Excelsior, the lead patrol ship in this particular extension of the Protectorate’s will, looked over the heads of the bridge crew and out at the star-speckled black, and brooded.

  He had been third in command of operations on the planet Melann, an export center for refined plastics and as such it wasn’t especially out of the way, but it wasn’t by any means central either. He had done well there, but he’d been itching to leave, so when he had been offered a government liaison role on one of the larger warships, he’d jumped at it.

  A week later, and he was starting to second-guess himself. They hadn’t told him the work would be routine patrols in relatively empty space, with little to oversee—no direct, planned searches but merely regular, monotonous sweeps.

  At least what they were searching for was interesting. Little was generally known about what had happened out there in that tiny nebula within which the Bideshi believed hung a central locus of ancient power—the rogue planet Takamagahara, the Plain of Heaven. Little was known about what Melissa Cosaire had done after she lost her mind. But people with access to privileged information knew that the name of Adam Yuga was mixed up in all of it. Even though he never should have been there at all, stricken by a disease that should have killed him—one of the core aspects of the man was apparently a stubborn refusal to die.

  Adam wasn’t just a fallen star, once rising—formerly a promising young engineer with a head for big-picture problems and a probable future in the halls of power. He was someone who sought to undermine the very foundation of the society that had been so kind to him.

  He would make the career of anyone who was fortunate enough—or dedicated enough—to find him.

  “Captain,” Sinder said, clasping his hands behind his back and keeping his stance high and erect. No one at the command consoles turned to look at him, but that didn’t matter—one had to maintain appearances. “Nothing on the scanners?”

  Captain Amanda Alkor grunted and shifted in her chair. “Not since the last time you asked. Sir,” she added—a little grudgingly, Sinder thought, narrowing his eyes. He knew well how peacekeeper officers tended to resent civilian overseers intruding into their commands, and he had come prepared for it, was ready to tolerate it even, but he was monitoring the situation closely in case it veered into something unacceptable. “Pretty sure we’ve covered this sector well enough. About time to move on, do you think?”

  Sinder shook his head. “One more pass. By the book, Captain. We need to be systematic about these things. Do them right. Otherwise we might as well not do them at all.”

  Alkor grunted again, clearly annoyed, and finally turned, her neat gray eyebrows lowered, appearing even more severe for the tight bun that held her equally gray hair fast at the back of her head. “One might argue,” she said, “that we’re wasting time here.”

  Sinder regarded her placidly. “One might. That doesn’t mean it would be a good argument.”

  Alkor rose and gestured to the door that led into the offices off the bridge. “Sinder, I’d like a word, if I may.”

  For a moment, Sinder considered refusing her. He knew how it would appear to the others on the bridge: a disrespectful child called into a private lecture session by a stern adult. That wasn’t an attractive idea, not when backed by days of cold warfare, each of them trying to erode the other’s authority. He was tired of it. It was counterproductive.

  But refusing would look worse: petulant, weak. He nodded, gracious in the face of someone who probably didn’t rate it.

  “Of course, Captain.”

  The offices were small, more cubicles than anything else, and were arrayed around a central conference room where briefings and the other daily administrative business of the ship was conducted. Now it was empty, though brightly lit with the screens set into the glossy tabletop, as if a meeting was imminent. Alkor ushered Sinder inside and closed the door quietly after them. Sinder faced her, loose and relaxed.

  Carefully so.

  Let her make the first mistake.

  “Let’s get one thing straight, Sinder,” she growled, all veneer of politeness gone now. “This is my command. I’ve put up with you for days, sauntering in here with your orders and your credentials and making a nuisance of yourself. If HQ says you have to be here, then I guess you have to be here. But if you want this to run smoothly, you back off and let me make the decisions on my own fucking ship. Is that understood?”

  Sinder arched an eyebrow. Silence descended between them, and he let it play out until it felt uncomfortable. Then he cleared his throat softly.

  “I understand, Captain.” Sinder paused again, his head cocked. He might not yet have risen to any significant heights in the Protectorate’s hierarchy, but he wouldn’t have gotten this far without the ability to deal with things like this. “Now you should understand something. Try, at least.” He leaned forward, bringing them about nose to nose.

  “You have authority over your people, and I won’t interfere with that. I don’t especially want authority over you. I want you to do your job. If you do that, I don’t have to report back that you’re unfit to be doing anything but captaining a long-haul freighter on the outer edges. I don’t want to do that. I want to complete this mission, and then I want to go home.” He extended a hand and laid it against Alkor’s upper arm, and it might have been a friendly gesture but for the ice in the room. “Let’s work together, Captain. Not butt heads like a couple of stupid rutting goatworms.”

  Alkor looked at him for a long moment, and he noted how cold-blue her eyes were, like eyes that had stared at a star so long that all the color had been bleached out of them. At last she released a breath and stepped past Sinder to a cabinet against one wall
, opening it and pulling out a crystal decanter and two glasses.

  With pleasure, Sinder identified it—by the reddish tint to the gold of the liquid—as aged Albaran brandy. Fine stuff. A peace offering? Probably not, but he wouldn’t reject it.

  “I never wanted this mission,” Alkor said as she filled the glasses, her back to Sinder and her head down. “I was supposed to retire a week from now. I had a little place all picked out on the west coast of the southern continent on Yefan.” She turned back to Sinder, glasses in hand, and held one of them out, which he accepted with a nod of thanks. “You ever been to Yefan, Sinder?”

  Sinder shook his head. He knew of the place, of course. A moon circling a small gas giant in one of the more out-of-the-way systems, it was nevertheless significant in how it teemed with an incredible variety of life forms. Half of it was given to nature preserves, and the rest of it was private land, owned by people who tended to value simplicity and quiet and therefore confined themselves to modest houses and cottages set on vast amounts of acreage. Some hunted, some did a little agriculture, and some did nothing much at all.

  So now he knew more about what kind of woman she was. Interesting.

  “The beaches there are beautiful,” Alkor went on, lifting her glass to her lips and taking a slow sip, savoring the richness of the liquor. “Almost untouched. Just these long strands of dark sand with the forests behind them. There are plains too, and in the north there are the deserts, but that part of the coast is mostly trees. I already have a house there, right off the beach. There’s a deck where I can watch the sunsets. I’m supposed to be there now.” She took another swallow. “Instead I’m here. With you. Sinder, I want to go home as bad as you do. But you need to know, if you think getting me a shit assignment somewhere else is supposed to be a threat to me, you better think again.”