“They’re hailing,” said one of the women, and then a voice sounded over the cockpit’s speakers. Unfamiliar. Flat.
“Rogue ships, you have ten seconds to signal surrender. Our next shots will be kill shots.”
“They weren’t already?” Adam coughed a laugh. He was scanning the faces of the people in the cockpit, looking for what they were feeling. They had risked death to make it this far. But now they were being offered a way out, a chance. It was possible that some of them were considering it. Considering their own deaths.
More people potentially on the chopping block because of him.
Except this time, it had been their choice.
Every eye in the place turned to Aarons. He didn’t move, his gaze locked on the ships in front of him. Then, slowly, he shook his head.
“They’ll kill you. All of you.” His mouth stretched into a thin, grim line that wasn’t even close to a smile. “Don’t make it easy for them.”
Not hesitating, the woman who appeared to be in charge of the comm system opened another channel. “You guys hear me? You hear that? Don’t do it. It’s a trick. Run for the gap there, go for it now—”
Multiple explosions of light, multiple streaks. Adam watched it happen in eerie slow motion, unstoppable, horrible. There were an infinite number of ways things might have gone, but this was the path they were on, and there could be only one outcome.
The side of the other transport exploded in a ball of debris and flaming gas. It rocked, then arced downward, burning, pieces of it falling away and spinning off into the void. It was almost graceful, the way it fell back toward the planet, the rest of the shards glowing brilliant red and gold as it hit the thicker atmosphere.
Then it was gone.
“Naomi,” Rachel whispered.
The cockpit was silent. In front of them, the gap between the ships was widening. There were more impacts, but Adam hardly felt them. His hand found Rachel’s and held on and somehow he sank beneath her skin and joined her again down in the deeper reaches of her. Naomi was there too, tiny fragments of her left from the communion that she and Rachel had shared. Together, he and Rachel gathered them up and clung to them and felt their song going out, the rest of the universe small and distant and unimportant. And it wasn’t just Naomi. It was all those people, all joined by the same communion. All bound together by so much more than blood and history.
He hadn’t truly understood what this larger communion would mean. This was something deeper than grief, more visceral than pain. Loss like the loss of a limb. He tried to hold Rachel up, only to find she was also holding him. And through it, there was something more, something distant—something so close.
Eyes that saw nothing. And everything.
The white of slipstream closed over the ship, and they were gone.
At some point, Nkiruka and Satya’s relationship had become defined by everything that wasn’t being said. Nkiruka had no idea if it would ever go back to the way it had been before.
She sighed as she and Satya walked hand in hand down toward Ashwina’s docks, and of course Satya didn’t ask her what was wrong. It would have been a stupid question.
The more crucial question hadn’t yet been officially posed. Nkiruka’s back wasn’t yet officially up against that official wall. But the sense of what faced her was already there—something a little like death. An ending. Everything between her and Satya had already changed, and it would change more once—yes, once—the selection was made fact. Perhaps that was what people meant when they said nothing could ever be the same after a candidate refused. No matter what happened, something would be ruined, even between the candidate and the one they had said no for. Because a person was always the reason why. A person or persons. Records of candidates who said no were spotty at best, but the ones that existed did include the given reason. No more than a line or two, sometimes only two or three words, but something.
It was always ties. Ties that were stronger than the ties an Aalim was supposed to feel for their people, ties that couldn’t be broken. Except now Nkiruka thought she knew the nasty secret behind all that.
They were already broken. As soon as the notion was raised, they were severed as if with an Aalim’s bone knife.
“You don’t have to walk down with me,” Nkiruka said after a moment. “It’s only a routine training flight, it’s not like I’m—”
“Don’t be silly.” Satya grasped at her hand, and Nkiruka held on, by instinct if nothing else. They had been holding each other’s hands for years now. “It’s not like I have anything better to do. Anyway, I like seeing you off. I told you.”
“You did.” Nkiruka smiled faintly, letting go of Satya and stepping to one side to let a laughing group of teenagers past. “Many times. And you know I like when you do it; I’m only saying you don’t have to.”
Satya spun, stopped Nkiruka with a hand on the center of her chest, and leaned in to press their lips together. Today she smelled like rosemary. Nkiruka bit gently at her lower lip, reaching up to tangle her fingers in Satya’s thick black hair and making the little chimes braided into it here and there tinkle softly.
Sometimes she could almost believe that nothing was wrong at all.
“I don’t have to,” Satya repeated, pulling back. Her smile was warm and sweet, but there was darkness behind it. As there always was now. “I don’t have to do anything. I make choices, Nkiru. I do what I want.”
She turned again and started to walk, tugging Nkiruka along with her, and Nkiruka went willingly. That had been something more than it seemed, and they both knew it. A step up to the very edge of that not-saying and peering into the chasm beyond. Like all of us, Nkiruka thought. All of us, on that hard edge and making believe that we aren’t.
She focused on their joined hands, her head briefly spinning. You are my tether. You are my gravity well. Keep me falling around you and never let me go hurtling off into the dark.
All the dark and all the dancing.
The docks weren’t especially busy, the training flight only involving about a third of Ashwina’s pilots. The ones going out were making their leisurely way to and fro, getting into their flight suits, talking amongst themselves, laughing and joking and a few of them even shoving. This, too, was a scene in which nothing seemed to be wrong.
It was like a clean bandage over something beginning to fester.
“All right, you voel. Get yourselves together. I’ve never seen such a sorry display.” It was Kae, striding across the deck with his gunner—a petite woman with short red hair who didn’t look a day over fifteen—in tow. Everyone glanced up at his call, but no one appeared apprehensive; Kae’s tone was play-gruff at worst and everyone could tell when he was in a good mood.
So that was one thing.
“You heard him.” Nkiruka nodded at Kae when he caught her eye, then turned back to Satya. “I should jump to it.”
“Such a hard taskmaster.” Satya leaned up and kissed the corner of Nkiruka’s mouth. “Go, then. I’ll be at the kilns until later this evening. I’ll meet you there? We can go to that place two decks up that has those red bean buns you like so much.”
Nkiruka nodded and let her fingers linger on Satya’s collarbone as she pulled away. But she didn’t speak. All of a sudden she had no idea what she could say.
Kae touched her shoulder as she headed to her gear locker. She turned, half-prepared with an apology, but as soon as she saw his face she knew she wouldn’t need it.
“Is everything all right?” He jerked his chin toward Satya. “With her?”
It’s not your business, Nkiruka almost snapped, and bit the insides of her cheeks in time to keep it back. Maybe it wasn’t his business, not technically, but she never would have cared before. Kae was her teacher. Her mentor. In a few short months he had begun to feel almost like an older brother to her. There was little she had ever kept from him.
But now she was facing two futures, and in one of them, what she did was everyone’s business.
Perhaps in the other one as well, if it came to that.
“It’s fine,” she said, not expecting for a minute that he would believe it. “I’m holding everyone grounded, I should get my gear on.”
“There are at least a few others,” Kae said, following her toward the lockers. “Everyone’s slow these days. Think they’re enjoying how much downtime we’ve been having.”
Nkiruka grunted agreement, opening her locker and pulling out her suit. “It’s strange that we’re having any at all.” And it was. Reports from all over of convoys being harassed, finding it difficult to dock at stations, and a few individuals who did manage to board finding themselves detained on petty offenses. And always, always, the questions, which grew more overt with each instance.
“An exiled Protectorate man was involved in the fight on the planet where you have your meetings. You know anything about him?”
Nkiruka had decided that if she ever met Adam Yuga, she was going to make a level effort to break his nose.
“Not going to question it too closely. Relaxed training now could save lives later.” Kae lingered a moment more, as if there was something else he was trying to say, then gave her a half shrug and turned, heading off across the deck to where his own fighter was docked.
Climbing into her little single-seater used to be a nerve-racking experience. But now it was almost soothing. It was something about the ritual of it, feeling the way her body fit into the larger body of the fighter, listening to the chatter on her comm. What people were saying didn’t even matter; what mattered was the sense that she was not and would never be alone. That, as with everything on a homeship, she was a single part of a much larger whole.
Or such an idea used to be a comforting one. Now she buried her attention in her preflight checks and tried to ignore the comm noise.
“All right,” Kae said—she should probably listen now. “Once we get out there, everyone form up on me. We’re going to try gamma and delta attack formations and roll back into beta defense. We’re only focusing on the motions here, people, so it goes without saying that I don’t want to see a single instance of fire, but here I am saying it anyway, so take me seriously. You all know who your leaders are. Stick with them, hold to the formations, and we’ll all be back in time for the first round of lovina.”
There were crackled affirmations, and Nkiruka issued one of her own, short and clipped. And a little absent. Good thing she wasn’t a flock leader. She really might get someone killed.
She engaged the engines and the night wrapped her in its arms.
Immediately and automatically she checked her proximity sensors. She waited, poised to swoop into an attack on an imaginary enemy—and as she did so, the stars in front of her caught her gaze and held it.
They were moving.
Of course, stars were always moving; they danced and spun and made stately journeys across the universe. But not like this. Not like the ships themselves, shifting position and slipping into patterns.
Coming toward her.
She blinked, and they were back where they had been, apparently stationary. She pulled in a breath, shaking herself—and realized that she was out of formation. The others had begun their runs.
“Nkiru.” Kae, sharp in her comm. “What’s up? Get moving.”
She didn’t wait to acknowledge, pushing her fighter to rejoin the rest of them, the two groups splitting off and arcing outward. The idea was for the wing to divide in order to approach multiple targets but also to remain in sync, re-forming easily and turning to attack again.
There was nothing save space all around them except for Ashwina, and Jakana and Suzaku some distance away, but in her mind’s eye she could see the targets: big, bulbous Protectorate ships hanging there, cold and perfectly lethal. Fighters were coming to meet those targets, rising like a swarm of angry insects from multiple hives, carrying stings that exploded into fire. As they had been when they had all been far too real.
She strafed through them. Turned with the wing. Strafed again, almost seeing the gunfire.
“Delta formation. Go.”
Moving with the others, she spun off into the familiar pattern and found her place. The formation consisted of two flocks made up of two smaller groupings, intended to come from below and above, taking advantage of a ship’s probable blind spots. Aiming for a larger target than the Protectorate fighters. Like the gamma formation, it was almost second nature to her now, and she nestled into it like a pebble into the palm of a hand, focusing her attention on the empty place where the target would be.
Which wasn’t empty. She froze, gaping.
It was full of stars.
Not some stars. Not even many stars. All the stars, all of them at once, the rest of the universe gone dark and cold. They seemed to coalesce into a single star. Such a thing should collapse into a singularity.
But space itself was not the shape it had been. Nothing was as it had been.
Nothing ever will be, she thought, gazing into what should have blinded her in an instant, tears streaming down her face. Everything is a center.
The universe took a breath and held it.
The star’s light blasted the darkness from the roots and Nkiruka cried out and breathed again, the universe breathing along with her.
Adam reached for her. A hundred thousand hands opened at once.
And the star went out.
“Nkiru!”
The voice was more than shouting at her. It was practically screaming at her, its upper registers disappearing into comm static. Nkiruka frowned, stared down at her hands and then at the fighter’s console. None of it looked quite right. And lines, she had such a headache.
“What? I’m here.” Her own voice sounded strange to her as well, distant and rough. “Did something happen?”
“Did something happen?” It was Kae, Kae both angry and frightened. “Khara, Nkiru, you’re on a collision course with Ashwina! Pull up! Pull the fuck up!”
Nkiruka moved without thinking, and that was probably what saved her life. She turned the ship toward the direction her proximity sensors—unheard before now—were indicating and jerked the attitude control, pitching up so hard that she was slammed back into the seat, the breath shoved out of her as if from the blow of a fist. Ashwina’s bulk rushed by beneath her, the chaos of its hull, the glow of its windows and portholes, no more than a hundred feet away. In a few of them she could have sworn she saw faces staring back at her, eyes wide.
She still wasn’t afraid.
Star-speckled darkness rushed up at her again and then she was clear, arcing around to find the wing in front of her.
“Kae?”
“Nkiru.” Kae cursed long and lavishly before he went on. “You scared the fuck out of us. What the hell happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Nkiruka said vaguely. Everything was wrong. Alien. Everything was different somehow.
It’s begun.
“Whatever. Get back to the docks. The rest of you, one more run and we’re done for the day.” Trying to shake off the last of the fog that had settled over her brain, she turned the fighter back toward Ashwina, angled down—maybe flying a little more cautiously than she usually did—toward the row of docks. What had happened? What had she—
Oh God.
She glided through the force field and into the ship, engaged the clamps and landed. Then she opened the hatch and pushed herself out of the seat, unsteady, her limbs jerking.
She was far too connected to everything.
As soon as her feet hit the deck, she stumbled and went down onto one knee, breathing hard. Distantly, she heard shouts and saw figures running toward her, but fragments of the world had faded out, other parts of it fading in and becoming as real as the edge of a jambia. She stared down at the deck and could almost see each atom, each electron, each quark, strange and charm, each vibrating string.
Yes, child. Now you see them.
Someone was standing in front of her. Slowly she raised her head and fou
nd herself staring into eyes that were not eyes at all, but were instead replicas of that star that was all stars that was every star, burning eternally.
Ixchel, old and strong and sad.
Now you see. Others might be able to take the role, fill the barest minimum of what an Aalim might do. But you have gifts beyond any of them, and you have always known it. You can turn away from this now, choose your own love and your own path, in isolation from your people. But that will be the end. It will be the end of everything.
Either way you will have blood on your hands. The only true choice given to you is how much, and why it is there.
And either way, once your choice is made there will be no going back.
“But I can’t …” Nkiruka was weeping again. The figures rushing toward her were now moving so slowly that they seemed not to be moving at all. “I can’t do it. I can’t, I’m not strong enough.” Not strong enough to make the choice. Not strong enough to say good-bye. Not strong enough to put every one of her people on her back and carry them through the night that went on forever.
You can. There are no mistakes, daughter. Ixchel smiled, a ghost of her own knowing and mischievous smile. Anyway, it’s already begun.
Help them find the center.
“Nkiruka. Are you all right?” Hands were on her, lifting her; she tugged herself free and blinked at faces she should recognize but didn’t. “Do you need us to get you to Ying? Here, hold on, we’ll—”
I’m all right, she started to say. I’m all right, she said I was strong enough. Let me be strong. But the deck was lunging up to meet her, and after the dull thud of its impact against her head she knew nothing more.
She was fighting her way out of darkness. Beating herself against it as though it were a wall, as though she were a thing of stone and wood that could break through to the light beyond. It was night but not a good one, not a kind one, and not one she’d chosen. A final night, without fire stitched into her bones and no greater sight to follow the darkness.
Fall and Rising Page 24
