“Every time I think this can’t get worse,” Liyeusse said while Rhehan worked, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Let’s strap ourselves in and get flying.”
“What, you don’t want to appraise this thing?” They held the Incendiary Heart up. Was it warmer? They couldn’t tell.
“I don’t love shiny baubles that much,” she said dryly. She was already preoccupied with the ship’s preflight checks, although her grimaces revealed that the painkillers were not as efficacious as they could have been. “I’ll be glad when it’s gone. You’d better tell me where we’re going.”
The sensor arrays sputtered with the spark-lights of many ships, distorted by the fact that they were stealthed. “Ask the general to patch us in to her friend-or-foe identification system,” Rhehan said when they realized that there were more Kel ships than there should have been. Kel Command must have had a fleet waiting to challenge Kavarion in case Shiora failed her mission. “And ask her not to shoot us down on our way out.”
Liyeusse contacted the command ship in the Fortress’s imposed lingua.
The connection hissed open. The voice that came back to them over the line sounded harried and spoke accented lingua. “Who the hell are—” Rhehan distinctly heard Kavarion snapping something profane in the Kel language. The voice spoke back, referring to Liyeusse with the particular suffix that meant coward, as if that applied to a ji-Kel ship to begin with. Still, Rhehan was glad they didn’t have to translate that detail for Liyeusse, although they summarized the exchange for her.
“Go,” the voice said ungraciously. “I’ll keep the gunners off you. I hope you don’t crash into anything, foreigner.”
“Thank you,” Liyeusse said in a voice that suggested that she was thinking about blowing something up on her way out.
“Don’t,” Rhehan said.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“They need this ship to fight with. Which will let us get away from any pursuit.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re all the enemy.”
They couldn’t blame her, considering what she’d been through.
The scan suite reported on the battle. Rhehan, who had webbed themselves into the copilot’s seat, tracked the action with concern. The hostile Kel hadn’t bothered to transmit their general’s banner, a sign of utter contempt for those they fought. Even ji-Kel received banners, although they weren’t expected to appreciate the nuances of Kel heraldry.
The first fighter launched from the hangar below them. “Our turn,” Liyeusse said.
The Flarecat rocketed away from the command ship and veered abruptly away from the fighter’s flight corridor. Liyeusse rechecked stealth. The engine made the familiar dreadful coughing noise in response to the increased power draw, but it held—for now.
A missile streaked through their path, missing them by a margin that Rhehan wished were larger. To their irritation, Liyeusse was whistling as she maneuvered the Flarecat through all the grapeshot and missiles and gyring fighters and toward the edge of the battlefield. Liyeusse had never had a healthy sense of fear.
They’d almost made it when the engine coughed again, louder. Rhehan swore in several different languages. “I’d better see to that,” they said.
“No,” Liyeusse said immediately, “you route the pilot functions to your seat, and I’ll see if I can coax it along a little longer.”
Rhehan wasn’t as good a pilot, but Liyeusse was indisputably better at engineering. They gave way without argument. Liyeusse used the ship’s handholds to make her way toward the engine room.
Whatever Liyeusse was doing, it didn’t work. The engine hiccoughed, and stealth went down.
A flight of Kel fighters at the periphery noted the Flarecat’s attempt to escape and, dismayingly, found it suspicious enough to decide to pursue them. Rhehan wished their training had included faking being an ace pilot. Or actually being an ace pilot, for that matter.
The Incendiary Heart continued to glow malevolently. Rhehan shook their head. It’s not personal, they told themselves. “Liyeusse,” they said through the link, “forget stealth. If they decide to come after us, that’s fine. It looks like we’re not the only small-timers getting out of the line of fire. Can you configure for boosters?”
She understood them. “If they blow us up, a lot of people are dead anyway. Including us. We might as well take the chance.”
Part of the Flarecat’s problem was that its engine had not been designed for sprinting. Liyeusse’s skill at modifications made it possible to run. In return, the Flarecat made its displeasure known at inconvenient times.
The gap between the Flarecat and the fighters narrowed hair-raisingly as Rhehan waited for Liyeusse to inform them that they could light the hell out of there. The Incendiary Heart’s glow distracted them horribly. The fighters continued their pursuit, and while so far none of their fire had connected, Rhehan didn’t believe in relying on luck.
“I wish you could use that thing on them,” Liyeusse said suddenly.
Yes, and that would leave nothing but the thinnest imaginable haze of particles in a vast expanse of nothing, Rhehan thought. “Are we ready yet?”
“Yes,” she said after an aggravating pause.
The Flarecat surged forward in response to Rhehan’s hands at the controls. They said, “Next thing: prepare a launch capsule for this so we can shoot it ahead of us. Anyone stupid enough to go after it and into its cone of effect—well, we tried.”
For the next interval, Rhehan lost themselves in the controls and readouts, the hot immediate need for survival. They stirred when Liyeusse returned.
“I need the Heart,” Liyeusse said. “I’ve rigged a launch capsule for it. It won’t have any shielding, but it’ll fly as fast and far as I can send it.”
Rhehan nodded at where they’d secured it. “Don’t drop it.”
“You’re so funny.” She snatched it and vanished again.
Rhehan was starting to wish they’d settled for a nice, quiet, boring life as a Kel special operative when Liyeusse finally returned and slipped into the seat next to theirs. “It’s loaded and ready to go. Do you think we’re far enough away?”
“Yes,” Rhehan hissed through their teeth, achingly aware of the fighters and the latest salvo of missiles.
“Away we go!” Liyeusse said with gruesome cheer.
The capsule launched. Rhehan passed over the controls to Liyeusse so she could get them away before the capsule’s contents blew.
The fighters, given a choice between the capsule and the Flarecat, split up. Better than nothing. Liyeusse was juggling the power draw of the shields, the stardrive, life-support, and probably other things that Rhehan was happier not knowing about. The Flarecat accelerated as hard in the opposite direction as it could without overstressing the people in it.
The fighters took this as a trap and soared away. Rhehan expected they’d come around for another try when they realized it wasn’t.
Then between the space of one blink and the next, the capsule simply vanished. The fighters overtook what should have been its position, and vanished as well. That could have been stealth, if Rhehan hadn’t known better. They thought to check the sensor readings against their maps of the region: stars upon stars had gone missing, nothing left of them.
Or, they amended to themselves, there had to be some remnant smear of matter, but the Flarecat’s instruments wouldn’t have the sensitivity to pick them up. They regretted the loss of the people on those fighters; still, better a few deaths than the many that the Incendiary Heart had threatened.
“All right,” Liyeusse said, and retriggered stealth. There was no longer any need to hurry, so the system was less likely to choke. They were far enough from the raging battle that they could relax a little. She sagged in her chair. “We’re alive.”
Rhehan wondered what would become of Kavarion, but that was no longer their concern. “We’re still broke,” they said, because eventually Liyeusse would remember.
“You didn�
�t wrangle any payment out of those damn Kel before we left?” she demanded. “Especially since after they finish frying Kavarion, they’ll come toast us?”
Rhehan pulled off Kavarion’s gloves and set them aside. “Nothing worth anything to either of us,” they said. Once, they would have given everything to win their way back into the trust of the Kel. Over the past years, however, they had discovered that other things mattered more to them. “We’ll find something else. And anyway, it’s not the first time we’ve been hunted. We’ll just have to stay one step ahead of them, the way we always have.”
Liyeusse smiled at Rhehan, and they knew they’d made the right choice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YOON HA LEE’s work has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed. Lee’s first novel, Ninefox Gambit, came out in 2016 from Solaris Books. Its sequel, Raven Stratagem, is forthcoming in June 2017. His stories have also appeared in anthologies such as The Year’s Best SF 18, ed. David Hartwell; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, ed. Rich Horton; and The Year’s Best Science Fiction 29, ed. Gardner Dozois. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
THE UNIVERSE, SUNG IN STARS
KAT HOWARD
There is music in the stars. The stars, the planets, the asteroids, the galaxies. Everything that is flung, whirling in orbit through space and time. We dwell inside an enormous, ever-changing symphony, and each of the many universes sings a song of its own.
I replicate them. I make clockwork universes, astraria and orreries, planets and stars and galaxies made microcosm and set ticking in orbit. Gears of bronze and iron and titanium, planets of marble and stars of precious faceted stones, diamonds that twinkle in the light. Each orbit in perfect harmonic distance so that the piece performs the music of the spheres. It’s a different kind of beauty from that of the living universes, one artificial and made in miniature, but the songs are no less real for it, and the beauty no less true.
There’s a joy, too, in making things precise. The music of a universe, like the music of a symphony, will never be perfect. There will be dropped notes, missed rests, accidental sharps or flats. They are living things, and so they are flawed. Orreries are mechanical. If I do my work properly, there is no unexpected variance in their song.
I had just finished setting a rhodolite in the turning rose of a nebula when Carina walked into my workshop. She had a universe spinning around her as well—stars blinked in the darkness of her hair—but hers was living.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, picking up my loupe so I could examine it more closely. Pocket universes weren’t as rare as they used to be, but I had never seen one in resonance with a guardian before.
I walked an orbit around Carina. A comet flamed through the wildness of her curls, then flashed and died, bright echoes of its passing sparking like inverse shadows in the darkness.
“You should talk to them, Vera,” she said. “They’re always looking for qualified guardians, and you’ve kept that star going longer than anyone expected.”
My hand went to the nape of my neck, where a white dwarf cooled. I only wore it outside when I was working. Potential customers were fascinated by it.
“I don’t think it will last much longer.” It was becoming more and more atonal, which was usually an indication of imminent death.
“All the more reason to see if you can be approved for a universe.” A galaxy whirled like a halo at the back of Carina’s head, and I could hear its resonance. “I’ll put in a recommendation for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I unwound the star from my hair when I got home that night, rolling it from palm to palm, watching the pattern of shadows made as its light shone through my skin. The discovery of the pocket universes had proved the Titius-Bode law—all orbital systems of the pocket universes had stable and self-correcting orbital resonances with each other. In those resonances was the music of the spheres, and in those resonances, my calling.
The discovery had been dismissed as ridiculous at first—singing universes were impossible to take seriously as proper science. But then the pocket universes started dying. In some cases, they would collapse in on themselves almost as soon as they were born.
So, the pocket universes, and the salvageable pieces of the dying ones, were assigned guardians. Someone to ground the resonance until they were stable, or to help ease the passing of the dying stars. Someone to play them music until their own songs were known. That last was the key. Without music, the pocket universes could not survive on their own.
I had built a musical universe for my dying star. A rotating cylinder inside a clockwork box that plucked a series of steel teeth I had etched with constellations. I had, as much as I could, calculated backward, based on the white dwarf. I had considered its probable orbit and origins, and designed the music box to play the song of the dying star’s universe. Hearing it, I hoped, would make the star less lonely in its passing.
The music box only played when I hung the star inside of it. I closed the mechanical universe around the solitary star and listened as the quiet lullaby began.
Approval, when it came to custody of a universe, didn’t mean paperwork and background checks. It meant being walked through a white room, full of universes being born. Tiny explosions of infinity becoming finite. It gave me vertigo.
“Don’t worry,” the tech said, her hand gentle on my elbow as she led me through the rows. “That happens to most people. The vertigo is actually an indication of who will make a good guardian. If you resonate at the right frequency for one of the universes, it stops.”
I nodded once, not trusting myself to speak through the dizziness without vomiting. But then the vertigo cleared. I could hear the beginnings of a song, bits and pieces of it, something that was almost familiar. I leaned closer and stretched my hand out, and the universe in front of me expanded into it. The dying star in its musical cage next to my chest pulsed once, a bass thrum. The young universe wound itself around me, making me a fixed point in its spin.
The song grew louder.
When a universe is being born, it hasn’t yet settled into itself. Much like a child learning to speak, there are mistakes. Babbles. So, I didn’t pay any special attention to the shift in the music of my universe, the way the song changed from what I had originally heard. Not at first.
Carina’s universe had expanded enough that if I stood close to her, I could hear it sing. “I’d like to commission an orrery,” she said. “Something that has the same song. Ridiculous to get so attached, I know, but I’m afraid when it’s time for this one to leave me, I won’t be able to sleep without hearing it.”
“Of course.” I began taking the necessary measurements, recording orbits, and wavelength, and brightness.
“I’m sorry for the death of your star,” Carina said.
The new universe orbiting my head meant that I had stopped wearing the star when I worked. “It hasn’t died. I have it right here.” I unhung the star from its orrery and held it in my hand.
Carina stepped back. “That can’t happen. You could contaminate your universe. You have to get rid of it.”
I wasn’t about to murder a dying star. “I had it when I went in to the birthing room, and I was wearing it when this universe chose me. The resonance was there, and the songs aren’t atonal with each other.”
“You’re supposed to stabilize your new universe as it’s being born, not change it.” Carina said.
“I don’t think I have.”
When she left, I sat down and listened. To the expanding symphony of my borning universe, and the places that echoed the music I had created to make a star feel less alone in its dying. To the fluttering thrum of that star, ringing a counterpoint. It sounded, I thought, less hesitant than it had. Stronger. I removed it from its cage and held it up.
There was a great ringing clang, as if every instrument in an
orchestra was dropped mid-note. The star lifted from my hand and then pushed itself in to the universe’s orbit.
The song of the universe began again. Changed.
It doesn’t happen often, but stars can escape their galaxies. The ones that do are called hypervelocity stars, some large and flung from the center of the galaxy. Some are much smaller, and their escape route remains unknown. All that is certain is that they are gone, crashing out elsewhere into the universe.
That is not their only name, these stars that are flung out of the galaxies they are born in. They are also called outcast stars.
Every so often, these outcast stars make new homes for themselves. They crash into other galaxies. In these explosions, new stars are born.
My original star, the white dwarf, made itself at home in the young universe. I could hear its song getting stronger and integrating itself into the resonances of the new system, and the song of that universe steadied and expanded. It incorporated parts of the dying star’s music into its own song, variations on a theme, movements in a minor key.
The new universe flung out stars in a kind of ecstasy of birth. They fell like rain, shedding themselves down my back and into my workroom. They hung themselves in corners, cobweb galaxies, chiming like bells, ringing like cymbals.
Stars sparked from the ends of my fingers as I worked, formed constellations in my orreries, orbiting on wires next to planets made from glass. They added new choruses to older, established songs.
It seemed like chaos, but when I listened, they matched the existing songs in rhythm and tone. When I measured, they fit exactly in the orbits they were predicted to, resonating with the other pieces.
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