by R. Z. Held
“Yeah? And what do we do now?” Genevieve demanded, countering with anger, because that was simple enough for her to manage at the moment. Anger at herself could be turned outward.
“I don’t know!” Carex shouted it into her face, collapsed back into the pilot’s chair, looking even more gray. “The Pax Romana made me, body and soul. You’re the one who knows how to be something different.” A pause, then the last word Genevieve would have expected from him, in a tone she would once have said he was physically incapable of producing: “Please.”
And what could Genevieve say to that? Nothing, in the end. She pulled in a deep breath, reached back to her memories of first waking up an Install, the lack of direction, bone-deep fear. Momentum was the key. The particular goal was less important than momentum toward it. “Tsuga won’t be safe for us. But if we can get a message to Pyrus and any of the others—we need medical care, he can provide it if we can meet them somewhere…” And for selfish reasons too: what she wouldn’t give to have Pyrus here to lean on, to hold her after her first-kill-of-hundreds-at-once.
She unfolded herself enough to face the main screen, searched for some indication of the coms. It was so slow and awkward to do it all by reading, rather than absorbing the information from her internal system. “If we can send a message without it being intercepted by someone once everyone else figures out what’s happened at Headquarters and turns their attention to finding the culprits.”
She prodded at the controls, apparently so ineptly that Carex couldn’t stand it. He growled and pushed her hand aside, but that growl had returned to a familiar timbre. “Might as well send it in the clear before our hyperdrive burst, and set the meeting point somewhere only Pyrus would recognize.”
Carex brought up a map, pushed from the chair to manipulate it directly with a fingertip. Now she’d goosed him into forward movement, Genevieve felt the guilt start to suck at her once more.
No. She shoved herself standing. “While you figure out the meeting spot, I’ll find some food.” Roused by the thought, an emptiness near implosion made itself known in her belly. “No more calorie restrictions.”
“Bring it back here.” Carex cast a distracted frown back at her. “My system doesn’t have enough energy to guide a burst on my own, I presume yours doesn’t either. We’ll have to tandem it and coast in sublight while we sleep.”
Genevieve pressed a hand to her stomach—if only it would shut up again for a minute—and shifted closer, though the controls still only showed the map. “Why can’t the ship system do it?” There were plenty of ships in the known universe, and all but a handful functioned perfectly well without Installs at the helm.
“If we want our burst initiation point to plainly indicate our destination to anyone who stops by to measure it, sure. We have to guide from within the burst to change that destination while it won’t leave a trace. A ship this small doesn’t have room for the hardware and processing power to allow an unalt to do that.”
“Well, shit.” Genevieve had never piloted anything before in her life, never mind even half-guided a burst. “Good thing you’re along.”
At least she’d have no time to be distracted by her guilt while learning to fly the ship and work tandem, she supposed.
***
It bothered Genevieve for about a day, how terse their message to Pyrus had needed to be. It was text, not voice, just a line from an old poem, and request for acknowledgment, which they received promptly and just as tersely. After that first day, she was either flying or passed out, no thoughts to spare for Pyrus or herself or anything, no physical strength to keep her awake to have any thoughts at all, really.
They arrived at their destination early in that day’s flying shift, however, leaving Genevieve at least the bandwidth to collect a few impressions as she drew in air so dry her throat spasmed near to coughing with every other breath as she stood in the open doorway of the ship. Ruins surrounded them—hardly ancient, or at least identifiably plascrete and plexi, but scratched and ground down to shoulder-huddled shapes over the passage of decades or perhaps simply years of violent sandstorms. She ventured out to where early evening shadows stood long and sand slid and danced over the plascrete floor in little breezes, peered out through what once had been a doorway of the building—or perhaps warehouse, given its open space without intervening walls. A whole warren of walls stretched beyond, up to two or three stories of their original heights, with de facto roofs formed of fallen pieces of floor.
De facto roofs that probably had had help, she would guess, given that Carex had guided the ship under a section braced professionally with girders in this ruined warehouse. “Smuggling planet?” she guessed when Carex ambled to join her. “What happened to the original inhabitants?” A cough stole her voice at the end, but she smoothed it over.
“Abandoned it due to a climate shift. Wasn’t a desert when they built it.” Carex’s voice didn’t seem any additionally roughened by the air. “Eriope used to meet her suppliers here sometimes, I believe. Anyway, all the spots that fit two ships out of sight to pass the goods are claimed and sometimes defended, so I don’t know where Pyrus will set down in relation to us. He might have to walk in a ways.”
They were certainly in no shape to walk to Pyrus.
Though standing still, he staggered as if lightheaded and Genevieve guided him to the support of the opposite side of the doorway. “And Pyrus? What about him?” The words slipped out without conscious thought.
“How the hell would I know?” Carex snapped, and Genevieve winced. The door was a little too small to hold both of them, so she ventured out to the street, which had a similar mix of shadow stripes and oblique sun as the roofless section of warehouse she’d left.
Eriope jogged around a corner, and her whole face lit up. She hit Genevieve with a tackle worthy of one of their games of full-contact capture the flag, wrapping her into an embrace. “We didn’t know from the message if you’d gotten out too!”
“Watch the back!” Pyrus, not far behind Eriope. Relief combined with the sudden burden on her pain blocks made Genevieve feel like a puppet with the strings to its legs cut. Even now, Pyrus looked calm and centered in a way that Genevieve wanted to cup her hands in and drink down until the fear in her was washed away.
“Woah, shit. Sorry.” Eriope caught Genevieve when she wavered on her feet, and handed her off.
Genevieve caught Pyrus’s hands, held tight as she could and he held back like he’d never let go. Her question must have been in her face, because he shook his head before he dropped his chin. “I saw your amputated wings, so I knew your back would be worse.” The angle put his face into shadow, and Genevieve suddenly imagined once more what it must have been like for him, with nothing but that stupid message of hers to hold onto. She drew breath for a reassurance, but he preempted her. “May I see?”
“Carex said the scar was stable,” she offered. He had the full suite of medic permissions to her system, and could have done whatever he liked, but she felt him take the steps slowly and deliberately so she could watch as much as her fuzzing-out system would allow. Check blood flow, check pain behind the blocks. He turned her, unzipped her jacket to below the scarred section. He must have touched it, but with the pain blocks up she couldn’t feel the sensation of his fingertips. That was all right, his deliberate steps in her system were as intimate and familiar as any caress.
“Oh, Genevieve,” he said, and embraced her from behind, desperate while still gentle. He kissed her hair, pressed a cheek against it, held it there long enough she felt dampness seep through. “When we get proper facilities, I can fix this.”
“And Carex.” Genevieve knew she was contradicting herself, telling Pyrus to go check on his brother-in-arms while layering her hands o
ver Pyrus’s on her stomach so he could never let her go again. “Different damage, not really much better shape.”
“Seriously, you both look like you have one foot in the grave.” Eriope sidled up to Carex and peered at his face, then danced back as if expecting a mock blow that never came. Her face shadowed at the lack. “How did you even manage to fly here?”
“Two half-dead pilots make one alive one.” Carex shoved himself off the doorjamb and stood straight like someone who didn’t need any help, thanks. The act gave Genevieve the push she needed to release her grip on Pyrus, let him join his friend. Pyrus squeezed Carex’s shoulder before his gaze went vague, attention on Carex’s system.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t have to go any farther, though.” Which brought up a very important question Genevieve had almost forgotten in the relief of seeing her partner. “Where do we go now?”
“Anywhere we want for now, probably, as long as we erase the trail.” Pyrus returned to the here and now, and crossed back to gather Genevieve back to his chest. “Tsuga’s empty; everyone there got out while the getting was good. When the chaos finally ends, there’s going to be a lot of people in the wind for them to chase down, but I suspect we’ll be priority.”
For a breath, that simply didn’t compute, in Genevieve’s mind. “The military’s not that centralized, is it? Things didn’t look good at Headquarters, but once everyone figures out the situation—”
Pyrus’s silence had a shocked quality for a beat. Genevieve pulled away from him to see him exchanging looks with Eriope. Shit. Shit. “It rode the coms to other planets,” she guessed. “Did you—were you able to warn anyone? Did you even understand—” Her voice was getting thin, and that wasn’t right, it wasn’t him she was blaming, it was herself. “I couldn’t turn it loose just on one guard, that wouldn’t have helped us, but even if it kept spreading, I’d hoped maybe you could—”
She was speaking too fast, and Pyrus cut her off by tightening his embrace, murmuring nonsense syllables under his breath. At some signal—maybe her heart had slowed a little—he returned to words. “I understood, though not all of it until I actually tasted the chili sauce. I warned as many people as I could—no one at Tsuga got hit—but most of those few still on active duty who owed me favors wanted to know where the warning had come from before they’d believe it.”
“So what’s the extent of the damage from this—burnout thing?” Carex demanded. “Thanks for letting the guy in charge know about your little mass weapon, by the way.” It was aimed at Pyrus, but Genevieve flinched anyway.
Pyrus seemed unmoved. “I’ve heard you complain no few times about situations in which you had to keep the dirty secret for others’ peace of mind—turnabout is fair play.”
“No one mentioned it to me either, but I suppose I can’t blame you guys for that.” Eriope took a few pacing steps, over a shadow-stripe and back. “We don’t actually know that much more than you. No one’s answering, basically. Could be some people heeded the warning, though, and are just busy helping the rest. We have no clue about the mortality rate.”
“But since that ‘no one’ encompasses all Installs, the best we can figure is that the empire’s frontier is about to abruptly collapse. So. We can go where we want, short-term.” Pyrus gave a low laugh. “No one’s going to notice.”
All Installs. Guilt seized up Genevieve’s body, so badly she couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry…” That took the last of her air, and Pyrus had to take her weight until sheer survival instinct sucked in a new breath and she coughed on the desert of it.
“Out of a universe of bad choices, you made one of the least bad,” Pyrus said, as intense in his—anger?—as she’d only heard him be on a handful of occasions before. “Call me selfish, but I don’t count any of the ones where you wouldn’t have survived as choices at all. And I know as soon as you can, you’ll start trying to help again. If we can go to ground and start up our research, there must be someone who would accept it—”
“In exchange for what, in your fevered imagination, a pardon?” Carex’s curled lip was audible in his voice. “I was always amazed at your ability to contort yourself to keep your loyalty to the empire, but this is next level. She saved herself—and my sorry ass too—and the empire would sooner kill her than accept her research.” Carex circled to where Genevieve could see him around Pyrus’s shoulder. “Where are we going now?”
“How the hell should I know?” Genevieve countered, but the unconscious echo tugged at her memory, made her laugh weakly, and got her mind moving forward again. “What planets do we have the fuel to reach, first off?” Her system registered that Pyrus was trying to send her something—maybe an extrapolation of the range of the ship he and Eriope had arrived in. “Come inside, I need a screen.”
The inside of the ship was a blessed relief from the sunlight, even with no other active cooling going on at the moment. There wasn’t room for all four of them in front of the control screen, but only she and Carex needed it anyway. Pyrus pressed against her back and Eriope stayed back in the passageway. “You have more fuel,” he said after a beat of interfacing with the ship’s system. “This ship is newer, too, so it’s more likely to be noticed if we leave it here. Don’t want to give eventual trackers any clues that can be avoided.”
Right. Genevieve brought up a list of planets, sorting them with her fingertips as she thought out loud. “We want somewhere populated, to disappear into the crowds. Not a newly freed frontier planet. Somewhere our currency will spend and people won’t come after us for looking Pax Romana even if we hide the wings. But not a core planet; we want somewhere low tech enough we won’t be recorded at every turn.”
And, oh, wasn’t there a very familiar planet within range that fit those criteria. The only one that fit all of the criteria, in fact. She hovered her fingertip above the name: Idyll. “And that’s the very first fucking place they’ll look for me,” she growled, mostly to herself.
“What the hell planet is that?” Eriope had undoubtedly been repeating the display on her own internal system, but she leaned in around Carex’s shoulder anyway. “Idyll?”
Her warping of the name’s vowels to Linguan ones made Genevieve wince. That, combined with her earlier comment, seemed to give Eriope what she needed to put it together herself a beat later. “You know, I’d never heard you say where you were from before.”
“That may have been for the best, given ‘Paradise is freedom’ and all that,” Genevieve said, switching to Idyllian for the quote. Carex snorted.
She’d expected confusion on Pyrus’s part, over words he’d understand, though their literal meaning was far from helpful, but instead he breathed a low, “Shit.” At Carex’s raised brows, he shook his head. “Genevieve didn’t want to hear anything about it, but I followed what news trickled as far as us.”
“Well, that’s what started this all, I guess.” Genevieve looked away from the name, cupping her elbows in her opposite hands.
Carex shouldered his way past to perform his own sorting of the planets within their range. “Maybe a local rebellion is just what we need, given our limited choices. Sure, they’ll look there first, but if they can’t find anything in the chaos…”
A sudden longing to go home slammed into Genevieve’s gut like a fist. She wouldn’t put the others in danger for that longing, but if there really was an argument to be made for Idyll—“And two of us speak the language. That will help with blending in.”
Carex eyed Pyrus, and pulled a face. “You quick-learned it to better whisper sweet nothings in her native tongue? Ugh.”
Maybe it was the relief of having a direction, maybe it was the anxiety about what she’d find at home, or maybe it was the massive weight of guilt, but Genevieve’s head started to ache with a throb she didn’t have the bandwidth to block or fix. “Eriope, you wouldn’t happen to have any Sweetheart on you, would you?”
“Always.” Eriope’s face creased with concern as she pulled out one heart-shaped pill in the darl
ing-pink shade, then a second when Genevieve held up two fingers. “If the medic approves?” she asked belatedly, withdrawing her offering hand by a few centimeters.
“As many as she wants and you can spare, until we get to a real clinic,” Pyrus said.
Genevieve swallowed one immediately, and extended the other in Carex’s direction. When he glowered his refusal, she snapped her fingers over it, then opened her palm more emphatically. She was too damn tired to argue, and she knew perfectly well he was just as badly off as her but with twice the pride to prop up.
Carex was too damn tired to argue as well, it appeared, as he swiped it up and tossed it back, much to Eriope’s visible consternation. The build of pleasant happiness was slower than Genevieve remembered from the last time she’d had one, which admittedly was some time ago. Her nanites weren’t processing anything fast right now, she supposed.
Things would be all right, though. Her guilt, it was still there, but held back like the pain impulses from her nerves. Pyrus was here, and he loved her—she loved him—and things would be all right.
“What…just happened?” Eriope asked, staring at Carex. “You actually accepted something that might make things easier on yourself?”
Carex’s face cleared, and he muffled a chuckle against his hand. “Just keeping you on your toes, Eriope. Don’t you know I stay up at nights, thinking ‘How can I possibly confuse Eriope now?’” He looked both younger and older without his perpetual frown, older because he seemed more grounded, less buffeted by the currents of the world.
“Right.” Pyrus guided Genevieve to the copilot’s chair, then settled himself in the pilot’s. “Let’s get out of here. We can stop by the other ship on the way out to pick up our supplies.”
Genevieve curled up, content. Things would be simpler from here on out.
***
Sweetheart squired Genevieve to sleep, then left her high and dry to wake. Lights were low in the small cabin, Carex in the bunk across the aisle, and Eriope in the one above him. Off-shift from flying, Genevieve put together, though she’d been too out of it to pay attention to any logistical discussions as they left the smuggling planet.
