by Rachel Bach
Nic’s face went suddenly serious. “My father’s beliefs do not always align with my own,” he said. “But he does not allow his will to impede the flow of his children’s. I believe in what Mr. Brenton is trying to do, and father believes in following one’s own path.”
Wish someone would have told my dad about that. He’d only believed in yelling. “So who is your father?” I asked. “How does he know about all this?” Because Mr. Starchild was now involved with two of the primary players in this supposedly secret game, and I was curious.
“Our father has a … complicated past,” Nic said quietly. “But such things mean nothing in a universe where time only flows forward. Wherever we were before, we are all now exactly where we are meant to be.”
“Right,” I muttered, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “So does Nova know what you do?”
“No,” Nic admitted. “I thought it best for her safety if I kept my involvement with Mr. Brenton to myself. Novascape does not possess a duplicitous soul.”
That was true. Nova kept secrets pretty well, but the girl couldn’t lie to save her life. But man, what a pair. Between Nova’s permanent position on the Glorious Fool and Nic acting as Brenton’s private plasmex factory, it was a miracle there were any Starchilds left. “Your family sure likes dangerous work.”
“Living is dangerous work,” Nic said serenely. “And invariably deadly.”
I chuckled at that, and Nic flashed me a warm smile. “I am pleased to share space in harmony with you at last, Deviana. My sister spoke so highly of you, it pained me to be seen as your enemy. I hope our future orbits will continue to be equilibrious.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at that one. “You really are her brother.”
“I would not be false with you,” Nic said, affronted.
“No, I mean you talk just like her.”
“We are children of the stars,” he said, like that explained everything—which it kind of did.
Nic glanced up at the cockpit, where Brenton was sitting in the pilot’s chair. “You really should try to get some rest,” he said softly, his face growing serious again. “We’ll be coming out of hyperspace in another few hours. Once we arrive, I do not know when you’ll get another chance.”
I still had the rest of my suit to clean, but I promised Nic I’d try. He smiled and returned to his seat, pulling up a star map on the projection around him that was almost as complicated as one of Basil’s. Meanwhile, I put my helmet back on and got back to scraping.
An hour later, I called it quits. My Lady was still dirtier than I liked, but without real tools, there was nothing else I could do. My guns weren’t much better. Sasha still had a clip and a half left, but Mia was down to one shot. I could have charged her off my suit, but it would have cost me a day of power and I wasn’t willing to risk it. One shot would have to be enough.
Once all my equipment was sorted out to my satisfaction, I put my armor back on and stretched out on the bench. I still didn’t trust Nic or Brenton enough to actually sleep, but I did doze. I must have been more tired than I thought, because I didn’t notice Brenton until his hand touched my shoulder.
“Showtime,” he said when I jerked away, flashing me a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. He walked back to the cockpit as I sat up, and since I was already suited, I stood and strolled after him to see what I’d gotten myself into.
A lot of nothing seemed to be the answer. Though we’d dropped out of hyperspace, which should have meant we were reasonably close to our destination, I didn’t see so much as a blip marking the asteroid we were supposedly headed for. I didn’t see any asteroids, actually, which was weird. In my experience, space rocks traveled in packs.
“Did we come out in the wrong place?”
“This is it,” Brenton said, easing the throttle forward, though with nothing outside, it didn’t feel like we were moving at all. “Patience, Miss Morris.”
I’m not patient on a good day, and I hadn’t had any of those for a while. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. About ten minutes after our departure from hyperspace, I felt a cold chill run up my spine, like someone was walking on my grave. When it passed, the space in front of us, which a second ago had been nothing but empty blackness, was now taken up by a large asteroid with no less than three xith’cal battle cruisers sitting in space around it.
I’m not ashamed to say I gasped. I’ve never actually seen a nonjunked xith’cal battleship up close. You usually didn’t want to, not unless you were also in a battleship. I’d heard they dwarfed even the Royal Cruisers, but even that didn’t prepare me for the sheer mass of the huge dark-green ships hulking above us like ugly giants looking for something to step on.
I expected Brenton to whip our little ship around and hit the thrusters, but he just kept flying forward, matching the asteroid’s slow spin as he piloted us toward the huge floodlit cave in the space rock’s side. This trajectory took us directly under the battle fleet, and as the xith’cal’s lights hit us, I felt the need to say something.
“Brenton,” I said with a calm I was not feeling. “Why is your asteroid surrounded by lizards?”
“Because it’s not my asteroid,” Brenton replied. “It’s theirs. They’re the experts I was talking about.”
And this was where even the appearance of calm went out the window. “What?” I shrieked. “This is who you’re taking me to see? The goddamn xith’cal?”
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” he said. “Haven’t you heard that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“I don’t care how many enemies away they are!” I cried. “Have you forgotten the part where the lizards want to enslave and eat our species?”
“No more than I’ve forgotten who made the virus that’s the only reason you’re still alive right now,” Brenton said, glaring up at me. “Where did you think I learned all that stuff about Stoneclaw from anyway?” He looked back at the rapidly approaching asteroid. “Relax, Deviana. This is a long-running arrangement. I have everything well in hand.”
I didn’t believe that for a second, and I was feeling decidedly less happy about the new alliance that Brenton and I had struck, but I kept my mouth shut as he navigated our little ship into the asteroid’s entrance as delicately as a tailor threading a needle.
The floodlit cave was too straight to be a natural formation. It ran a good three hundred feet into the black space rock before ending abruptly at a huge steel door that had started rolling open as soon as our ship passed the cave’s mouth. Inside, I could see a huge, brightly lit cavern, though the details were obscured by the blurry lens of the shield that kept the atmosphere from escaping.
Brenton cut the engines at the fifty-foot mark, and we floated the rest of the way, sliding through the thick shield like a slow-motion dive into a clear pond. The artificial gravity snagged us the second we were in, and Brenton hit the thrusters, jumping us up several feet before the ship’s fancy autopilot took over and set us down light as a falling leaf.
The cavern was just as artificial as the tunnel leading into it, an enormous carved-out hangar packed to the brim with ships, mostly smaller xith’cal fighters and what looked like civilian vessels, if the lizards could be said to have anything so civilized as civilian craft. But though the lizard ships took up most of the room, a small area toward the front corner seemed to have been designated for human ships. There were two at the moment, a small trade freighter not too dissimilar from Caldswell’s Fool and what looked like a six-man version of our little stealth ship. The human vessels were separated from the xith’cal ships by a wide stretch of empty pavement, and it was in this empty space that Brenton set us down.
As we landed, I took note of the lizards’ positions. Fortunately, most were well away from us, clustered on the hangar’s far side. None of them had suits on, which meant the air was breathable, though undoubtedly full of arsenic like the xith’cal preferred. It wouldn’t hurt me unless I sat around breathing it for days, but I sealed my Lady anyway. A
virus was bad enough. No way was I adding poison on top of that so long as I had a viable clean air supply.
Nic lowered the walkway as soon as we were stable, but I waited to let Brenton go out first. After my experiences with Hyrek, I’d revised my shoot-all-xith’cal policy. Slightly. But I was not about to be the first one into the lion’s den when I wasn’t even getting paid for it. And despite Brenton’s claims that everything was under control, I put my suit in battle mode and kept it there as I followed him down the ramp to where a trio of the strangest-looking xith’cal I’d ever seen were waiting to greet us.
My best guess was that I was seeing living, healthy female xith’cal for the first time. Like the sick females I’d seen on the ghost ship, they were shockingly short, not much taller than I was in my suit. They were also bright green, greener even than Hyrek, and they wore what looked like long chains of delicate silver metal that jingled when they moved looped around their necks, arms, and over their stubby horns.
They watched us descend through slitted yellow eyes. When we reached the end of the ramp, the female at the front of the pack pulled on the largest of the chains wrapped around her wrist. A second later, a small shape shuffled out from behind her. It was so stooped and dirty I thought it must be some kind of alien dog at first, but then the female xith’cal jerked the chain again, and the thing straightened up, turning a small, frightened face in our direction.
It’s one thing to hear that the xith’cal keep human slaves, but it’s another altogether to actually see one. The cowering creature on the end of the xith’cal’s chain was a woman about my age. She was shorter than me with skin that might have been coppery if it wasn’t so dried out. Her cheeks were sunken, her dark eyes made darker by the deep circles below them, but the fear in her face wasn’t for the lizards behind her. It was directed at us. More specifically, the girl was looking at me like I was her death. For a second, I couldn’t figure out why, then I saw her eyes roving up and down my suit, and I realized that this woman had never seen powered armor before.
When her human was in position, the xith’cal spoke. Her voice was higher than any of the xith’cal I’d killed. Higher even than Hyrek’s, but it had that same tearing metal resonance that all xith’cal shared. When she was finished, the slave woman lifted her head and put on what she probably meant to be a haughty expression. “Highest Guide Krisek, chosen flesh of Reaper, welcomes John Brenton,” she announced in Universal. “She wishes to know if this is the specimen you promised her.”
The woman’s accent was the strangest I’d ever heard, thick and too sharp all at once. I was so busy trying to place it that I missed the Reaper part of her greeting entirely until Brenton answered. “Thank you, Highest Guide, and thanks be to Reaper, long may he guide the flesh of his flesh. This is the one I spoke of.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, and the three xith’cal backed away with a hiss. The human girl looked like she was about to try climbing up onto her lizard’s shoulders to get away, but she didn’t get a chance. The lead xith’cal—Highest Guide Krisek, I guessed—was speaking again.
“It must be tested,” the girl translated when the Guide was finished. “We must know the extent of its contagion. Will it be safe in its containment suit?”
“It should be,” Brenton said. “Are you ready now?”
All three xith’cal started speaking at this, and the sound of them talking to one another was like listening to a garbage compactor eat a wind chime. The translator girl cowered back against her lizard masters, staring at me like I was the one who might eat her, but I didn’t care about her anymore. I was glaring at Brenton. “What test?” I asked in King’s Tongue, since I was pretty sure the girl didn’t speak it but I knew damn well that Brenton did. “And what’s this about my suit? And why are they calling me an it?”
“Xith’cal have a hard time telling human genders apart,” Brenton answered with a shrug. “And I messaged them on our way in that your suit was a containment unit so they wouldn’t try to make you take it off. It’s not like you’re contagious, right?”
“I could be!” I hissed, eying the arguing females. Apart from the three who’d come to greet us, there had to be at least fifty other lizards in the hangar. If I set off an outbreak, things could get very bad very fast.
“Relax,” Brenton said. “I don’t like working with lizards any more than you do, but they’re the only ones who can work on the virus. Just play along, and if they try anything that jeopardizes our goals, we’ll deal with it.”
“Deal with it how?” I snapped. “We’re kind of outnumbered.”
“Not so much as you would think.”
His eyes slid past me as he said this, and I followed them to the two other human ships. What I saw lifted my spirits a bit. There were ten people standing a little too casually between the hauler and the larger version of the ship we’d flown in on. They were evenly mixed between men and women, and though none of them wore armor and only one had a gun, all of them were in the fantastic shape I’d learned to associate with symbionts. That cheered me up enormously until I caught sight of a small figure at the very back.
In the door of the freighter, a girl was slumped in a woman’s lap. She was skeletally thin, her face hidden behind the fall of her limp, brittle hair. That didn’t matter, though; I already knew what she looked like.
“That’s your daughter, isn’t it?” I whispered. “Enna.”
“She’s actually Mettou’s daughter,” Brenton said. “I shot my last daughter years ago when she’d degenerated to the point where she was killing people in her sleep. But it makes no difference, they’re all Enna to me.”
“Aren’t you worried the Eyes will use her to find you?” I asked. “I mean, the daughters are all connected, right?”
“They are,” Brenton said. “But you forget, Maat is the one who connects them, and she’s on our side.”
Trusting a crazy woman to keep our secret didn’t sit well with me, but then, if there was anyone who hated the Eyes more than Brenton, it was Maat. That made me feel a little more secure, but something Brenton had said was still bugging me. “Who was Enna?” I asked. “The real one, I mean.”
“A little girl who loved me very much,” Brenton replied. “If you ever get the chance, you should ask Caldswell about her. He loves that story.”
I winced at the naked hate in Brenton’s words. I was debating whether or not it was worth trying to get more information when the human slave spoke again.
“Highest Guide has agreed that we are ready to test the human carrier,” she said, standing as far away from me as possible. “You will follow us.”
The female xith’cal nodded and patted her clawed hand on the human’s head like a master praising a dog. The woman leaned into the caress, her eyes closing in happiness, and I had to turn away before I gagged. The other xith’cal were already walking toward the far end of the hangar. Brenton sent Nic over to the rest of the humans before falling into step behind them.
At the back of the giant cavern was a surprisingly small tunnel with a low ceiling and a rail set into the floor. Perched on the rail was what looked like a converted mining train with seats instead of ore carts. I sat gingerly on the metal bar that served as a bench, and Brenton sat down next to me. As soon as we were settled, the lizard called Highest Guide said something that sounded like a gunshot, and the train shuddered to life, rolling down the rail into the tunnel.
Once we left the hangar, the lights were few and far between. There was a light on the front of the train, but it was pathetically dim, probably because xith’cal didn’t need much light to see. I did, though, so I turned on my suit’s floodlight. It might have been overkill, but this was the path to my test. I wasn’t about to miss anything, especially since I might have to leave in a hurry.
We traveled for what felt like miles at a slight downward curve, or at least down according to the artificial gravity. I knew it couldn’t actually be miles since the asteroid wasn’t that big, but by the time we f
inally rolled to a stop, I was more than ready to get off.
I hopped down and looked around to see where the train had brought us, but all I saw was more tunnel. The xith’cal were getting off, though, and the one in front was saying something.
“Highest Guide commands you to follow her,” the slave translated, pointing down the tunnel. “This way.”
We didn’t have to walk long. A few dozen feet from where the tracks ended, the tunnel curved sharply and opened into a cave the size of a small house. The xith’cal stopped at the place where the ceiling began to rise and turned to look at me. Brenton was looking at me too, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Was this the test? Was I failing it? I was trying to think of some way to ask what they wanted without giving myself away when I saw a white line drop down through my cameras.
My hand shot up, popping my visor. Cold, thin air rushed in as my suit’s seal broke, letting in the bitter smell of the xith’cal’s atmosphere and the dusty metal reek of the asteroid itself. My front camera feeds vanished as soon as my visor was up, and as my eyes took over, the empty cave filled with the most beautiful light I’d ever seen.
CHAPTER 10
Phantoms crawled over everything. There were even more here than there’d been in the cargo bay back on Io5. They came in all shapes and sizes, from tiny pinpricks to glowing worms almost as long as my hand. Some looked like little more than bundles of legs crawling across the ground, others were rolling blobs with no legs at all, and still others floated in the air like jellyfish, their glowing tendrils filling the room with light. Their combined brilliance was so bright it was actually hard to look at. But crowded as the cave was, I had a buffer.
Not a single phantom was within three feet of my body. This clear zone stayed with me when I took a step forward so the xith’cal could enter, sending the creatures scrambling over one another to get out of my way. They ignored everyone else, floating through the lizards, the human slave, and Brenton like they weren’t even there. But when I moved, the whole room moved with me, all the tiny glow bugs running as one to stay clear of my path.
