by Calinda B
“But I want them now!” The taste of salty water at the corners of her mouth was a nasty contrast to the sweet-tartness she desired. But worse than the denial of the treat was the awareness that something else was amiss. It wasn’t just the berries that were missing. Other things had begun to disappear. First her father, then Mama’s pretty sparkles that Daddy said made her eyes light up, then her two older brothers’ best toys, then their big home near the fields when they moved to a cramped space high in a building with so many others who watched her with eyes that did not sparkle, not ever.
“No tears, sweet child. Do you want your baby sister to cry?”
She didn’t, not when she knew the little one would gasp and turn blue if she breathed too hard. So she let her mother wipe her face.
“Now when the men come, no tears for them either, do you hear? You have to be strong. They want tough, not tears.”
Shaxi couldn’t nod or shake her head, not with her face clasped so tightly between her mother’s palms. “I’m tough.”
“Oh, sweet, sweet child, I know. I know you are. And that’s all that’s saving us.”
“No tears, Mama. I’ll wait for next year’s pix.”
Shaxi slumped over in the runabout. The throttle jammed up under her breastbone until she thought her heart must be punctured. That would explain the ache.
Was that the day her mother had sold her to Hermitaj?
With the memory of tears came another, older memory, of playing rough with her big brothers—something about who would go first jumping off the high wall around the garden—and breaking her arm. They’d begged her not to cry and she’d tried her best, but even though a few tears had leaked through, the medic had said she was a very strong little girl.
Perfect fodder for Hermitaj, apparently.
Even the memory of tears had been lost since then. Until Eril’s codejacking.
No wonder he’d never finished his tattoo. The delicate silver fern was a symbol of unfurling, endless new life. And he was death incarnate.
Stiffening her spine, she sat up, locking the throttle. But the pain in her heart didn’t ease.
She wasn’t sure how she’d untangle the mess of decaying programming and subtle new mal code, but ironically, at least she was safe for the moment, locked in this abandoned port city with the storm bearing down. No one could get to her, and she couldn’t get to anyone else.
She left the runabout, taking her small satchel of belongings with her, including the RTEs and water from the runabout’s stores, and climbed to the observation dome on the top decking of the hangar. On a clear day, the dome would have given a wide view of the valley and incoming sheerships and vehicles. There was even a small vertical hatch for launching hoppers from the belly of the hangar directly into the sky. Hoppers were barely larger than the runabout, although they could sustain low-altitude flight for short distances, which would have been used if Rampakh had ever become a bustling port with a thriving mining operation.
But Rampakh was falling apart. Like she was.
The deck was a sand painting with the wind tracing unreadable, shifting symbols in the ankle-deep drifts. Floodlights had kicked on as the day darkened, casting bleak shadows that washed out every time the ion field overhead sparked with dust. Already the sparks were almost continuous, and Shaxi didn’t see how the protective field could last through the storm. No wonder everyone had left, although Kala said a few hardy souls would take shelter in bunkers beneath the port.
Shaxi wouldn’t be one of them.
Standing at one of the windows, she could feel the hum of the polarization and, beyond that, the storm seeking a way in. She angled her wrist to the light, looking at the small wound, the evidence of Eril’s treachery.
She’d thought she wanted to remember him, the experiences he’d given her. Well, if she couldn’t unravel what he’d done to her, he might be the only thing she remembered. She tensed her jaw. No, if it came to that, she would walk out into the storm and let the shriving take it all away.
She wouldn’t be a puppet anymore, not to Hermitaj, not to Eril Morav, not even to her own delusion she could tough out this unfathomable betrayal. She would be her own master from now on, to the end.
Withdrawing a utility knife from her satchel, she cut open her inner forearm from elbow to wrist. It pumped blood for a few frantic heartbeats, crimson pouring over her skin and soaking the sleeve of her combat jacket before the implant sent an impulse to close off the severed edges. She wiped away the gore. At least Eril had used a less physically invasive method of accessing the port; maybe she’d thank him. With her hazer set to kill.
If she ever saw him again.
She sent the implant an internal release code—which had always been unbreakable to any but her and Hermitaj, as far as she’d known—and stared down at the inescapable truth of what she was.
She’d had to do an emergency recoding herself once before. The exact mission had been erased from her data, but Hermitaj had left her the experience since it was useful. Her strike team had been cut off from base, conditions had changed, and no new orders had been able to reach them. She’d reassessed, reprogrammed, and sent the new mission parameters to her unit. Because of her changes, most of them had survived.
She hadn’t cried over the ones who were lost, but she’d spoken their designations—since she didn’t know their names—as she torched the corpses with their proprietary Hermitaj tech, and hoped some molecule of ash made it home.
Too bad there would be no one to whisper her name to the stars.
She hooked her tablet directly to her implant port, extracting pure data and prepping the system for a hard reset.
Eril’s mal code had been able to match and infiltrate her encryption, remaining nearly undetectable. Which meant it would be using something similar to her native data patterns to hide itself… There. She’d had no Hermitaj coding for sweet dreams, which is what he’d said to her before touching her with the device, somehow sending her to sleep and making her forget.
Once she had the “flavor” of mal code, she followed its path. It hadn’t gone far, just duplicated the Hermitaj patterns for suggestibility, compliance, and dedication. Whatever orders he sent along that path, she would’ve followed, willingly and completely.
And what were those orders, exactly? She looked for more paths that led to commands like “sleep and sweet dreams”. She found another compulsion that should have induced her to stay on the Asphodel.
She remembered how hard it had been to rise from the bed beside him and to walk away. How she’d longed to touch him and wake him and have him touch her again. Because she thought he wanted her to stay. Wanted her because he loved her.
As she loved him.
Her stomach heaved at her ignorance. She’d thought there was a link between them, and oh yes, there had been. A mechanical leash and an encoded collar. The link was a one-way lie, and she’d been lying to herself.
She’d wanted a connection so badly, to anyone, to end the silence in her heart, she’d all but put the leash and collar on herself.
The lie should have worked, though. She wasn’t sure why it’d failed, when the sleep command had worked so well. He’d wanted her to stay on the sheership with him, and yet she had gone.
Because she wanted to prove herself a real woman, a woman worthy of the love of a flesh and blood man.
A man who was a liar! And a thief, trying to commandeer the small bit of soul she’d wrestled back from the oblivion where it had been banished.
He did not deserve her, heart or soul, or body. And not her strength.
Seething anger made her hand clench involuntarily, and blood oozed out from the edges of the wound, despite the seal imposed by her implants.
She stared impassively at the gore. Evidence, she supposed, that her programming could be washed away in blood and fury.
He would have no idea what hit him—
She slammed through the coding, relentlessly searching after his purpose. Certainl
y no one did such a thing to another person—and she was a person, no matter what it said on Hermitaj’s charter, approved by countless federations and alliances—without a dire purpose.
She found it, running parallel to the last mission she’d given herself. Keep the twins safe.
And there was his mission alongside, which he’d stated aloud to her on several occasions, as if he was speaking the truth to her. Preserve the sheerways.
And in an ugly tangle, like a dark reflection, his mission twisted hers back along itself.
Kill the l’auraly.
Sickened by the loss of the blood and the realization of what she might have done—worse even than what had been done to her all those years ago—she sank to her knees. Her forehead rested against the dome, and the low thrum of the storm reverberated in her, as if her bones had gone hollow, as if she was empty already.
But she refused to let the emptiness win. There was nothing to fill her except what she gave to herself. And she would not let him hurt the girls. She’d given herself the mission of guarding them until they’d left Khamaseen. They’d still had hours of work on the Asphodel before they could break atmo. She might have time. To save the girls, to save herself.
She thrust to her feet.
The vibration in the dome was almost subsonic now, and she feared the transparent plysteel would shatter under the force of the shriving storm. Closing the edges of her wound, she slapped a sealant patch over the incision. It would have to hold. She had to hold on.
She gritted her teeth, her ears pounding with the near-constant explosions of sparks from the ion field. As she turned for her descent to the runabout, the field overhead stilled.
But the rumbling intensified.
Out of the red-black darkness, a sheership—hull ablaze with electromagnetism—streaked across the sky, thrusters screaming at the sand and shooting out garlands of burning dust behind.
Shaxi raced to the opposite window, following its path, frantic to catch its insignia.
Nothing. Just a blackened bulkhead where its designation should be.
She knew how that felt.
The subsonic rumbling eased as the ship sped away. She ran back to the deck comm panel and summoned up its menus. It was intended to track incoming ships; it should have caught the ship’s ID.
No name. No manifest. Just a notation of class and subtype, surmised from the vid clip as it blew past. But Shaxi didn’t need the confirmation; she already knew what it was.
A shipkiller.
And it was on course for the blind canyon where the Asphodel was hidden.
Chapter 17
Jorr was back on babysitting duty and was none too pleased about it, though neither were the twins, for that matter.
“She left without telling us?” Alolis was asking.
The girls sat at a banquette in the mess hall, getting a last meal before the inevitable lockdown in their suite while the Asphodel made the risky run off Khamaseen back to the relative safety of the sheerways.
Not that they were safe there either. And this might really be their last meal.
Eril watched them while he prepped the galley for a rough passage.
“Bené only paid her for while we’re planet-bound.” Torash pushed a mug of tea back and forth between her hands. “We’re leaving, so of course she left.”
“But without saying goodbye?” Alolis reiterated.
From his slouching seat at the next table over, Jorr grunted. “Sometimes better not to say unnecessary things.”
The man’s insight surprised Eril, maybe the girls too, since they both turned to look at him.
The use of the phase tuner on Shaxi had prompted a rare message from the underwriters. The encoded burst had been short. Very short.
They’d asked: When?
They wouldn’t expect an answer. They knew he had to be cautious, and even encoded messages could be intercepted. This was just their way of reminding him.
As if he could forget.
He’d let Shaxi go to her probable death, and he didn’t even have the completion of his own mission to show for it.
“I just thought Shaxi liked us,” Alolis said with a sigh.
Torash shoved the mug aside. “So much for those perception exercises Bené keeps running on us.”
He liked them too: pretty, carefree Lis and moody, sarcastic Tory. Although he couldn’t let that stop him, not when there was too much at stake.
But what was the point of preserving the freedom of the sheerways if he was forced to hijack one woman’s mind and body to kill two others?
Was that a universe worth preserving, regardless of Moirai’s conspiracy?
Disgust as his own hesitation made even the gentle perfume of the tea sicken him, and he slammed the last of the galley cabinets closed.
All three of the others turned to look at him.
He couldn’t stay there another moment. “Put your mug in the sink,” he told Torash. “I’ll get it later.”
Without waiting for an answer, he strode for the doorway.
“I think she didn’t say goodbye to him either,” Alolis murmured.
In the corridor, he paused, the uncertainty swamping him. Shaxi had been on the ship mere days and there was no place he could go that didn’t remind him of her somehow: med bay where they’d kissed, the shower and her quarters where they’d done much more, cargo bay where they’d worked, the galley with its pixberries. Even his own bunk held dreams of her.
How had she—in days—countermanded a lifetime of dedication to his cause? Extremists had destroyed his past and made him the ideal, committed recruit for the underwriters, who were themselves dedicated to keeping the sheerways flowing.
If he let the girls go, he might as well let the extremists win, proving his parents and planet had died for nothing. The Asphodel couldn’t run forever and the captain, for all his sly maneuverings, couldn’t fight the resources arrayed against him. Even the underwriters, who had considered merely disappearing the twins, had acknowledged they couldn’t keep them secret, that the only way to truly end the threat was to end the girls. If they lived, they would be taken, eventually, and the fate of the universe would fall into the hands of the anonymous Moirai who cared for nothing but its own coveting.
The sheerways would pay for his wavering, and he didn’t think he would survive that guilt. Assuming the underwriters didn’t take him out if he didn’t answer their query in the only way they seemed to think possible.
Which made them seem every bit as extreme as the forces they allegedly opposed.
All the tasks he’d performed for them over the years bit at his conscience, each tooth sharper than the last. And still he stood unmoving, caught in the empty corridor.
He didn’t even have the conviction of an encoded cyborg, who wanted nothing more than control over her own destiny.
He wondered where she was. She must have made it to Rampakh, but the storm would have circled over the port by now, which was why the Asphodel needed to take off, even though Fariz and Kala hadn’t finished their final inspections and warned against the cold departure.
If he didn’t kill the twins now, before they left Khamaseen, he would have to complete the mission while trapped with them on the Asphodel. The blame for their demise would fall squarely—and rightly—on him. And then the captain, or more likely, Benedetta, would kill him.
At least it would be over.
He took the phase tuner from his pocket. After it had broken through the last of Shaxi’s encryption and he’d placed his commands, he’d left the link open.
In case he’d needed to change anything, he’d told himself.
But mostly to keep her near him, in just this small, terrible way.
He looked at it one last time, then swept his thumb across the pathway, blanking it. Ending the link.
Setting her free.
Whatever she became out there in the desert storm, she was not his. And never had been.
Stating the truth brought him no se
nse of release. She might be facing almost certain doom in the shriving, but he was the one who was too far gone.
What she lacked in real flesh and bone, she made up for with heart, while he had squandered his inherited humanity on an ever-expanding, guilt-induced need for revenge. The chill of hatred—for the underwriters and their faceless enemy, but mostly for himself—settled into his skin, deeper than any sandstorm could scour.
He stared blindly at the empty screen, his body drained of purpose and cold as death. As if that link to her had been all that animated him, the only pulse that pushed the blood through his veins.
He dropped the tuner to the deck and lifted his boot.
A red blip zinged across the screen.
His boot came down hard, straddling the device. He stared at the blip, his heartbeat racing.
Was it her? Had she somehow found and re-established the link?
But the encrypted source the tuner had locked on was too close and even more complicated than the Hermitaj coding.
And followed the same algorithms as the ones Shaxi had deciphered after the attack at the hangar in Levare.
Eril whirled to the comm and slapped his hand over the panel. “Captain!”
“Morav, I told you—”
“Incoming ship. Moirai signature. We need to get out of this canyon, now!”
For a moment, the command hung in the air.
Despairing, Eril thought the captain would question who he was to give orders.
The roar of thrusters firing in full launch mode echoed through the corridors, amplified by the rock walls. The ship lurched. All power was being diverted to the engines, Eril knew, with none left for stabilizing.
The mess hall door slid open and Jorr appeared, hazer drawn. “What in the hells?”
“Get the girls to their suite,” Eril snapped. “Stay with them, and lock it down. Don’t open to anyone except the captain or their sister. No one. Do you hear?”
Jorr sputtered. “Since when do you—?”
Torash crowded his elbow, her black brows drawn together. “Are we under attack? Again?”
