Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  THE WAITING STARS

  Aliette de Bodard

  The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalizing than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided—skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

  Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move—living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the Outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

  On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars—things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved—catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles—Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within—dead or crippled, forever unable to move . . .

  “She’s not there,” she said, as more and more ships appeared on the screen in front of her, a mass of corpses that all threatened to overwhelm her with sorrow and grief and anger.

  “Be patient, child,” The Cinnabar Mansions said. The Mind’s voice was amused, as it always was—after all, she’d lived for five centuries, and would outlive Lan Nhen and Lan Nhen’s own children by so many years that the pronoun “child” seemed small and inappropriate to express the vast gulf of generations between them. “We already knew it was going to take time.”

  “She was supposed to be on the outskirts of the wards,” Lan Nhen said, biting her lip. She had to be, or the rescue mission was going to be infinitely more complicated. “According to Cuc . . . ”

  “Your cousin knows what she’s talking about,” The Cinnabar Mansions said.

  “I guess.” Lan Nhen wished Cuc was there with them, and not sleeping in her cabin as peacefully as a baby—but The Cinnabar Mansions had pointed out Cuc needed to be rested for what lay ahead; and Lan Nhen had given in, vastly outranked. Still, Cuc was reliable, for narrow definitions of the term—as long as anything didn’t involve social skills, or deft negotiation. For technical information, though, she didn’t have an equal within the family; and her network of contacts extended deep within Outsider space. That was how they’d found out about the ward in the first place . . .

  “There.” The sensors beeped, and the view on the screen pulled into enhanced mode on a ship on the edge of the yard which seemed even smaller than the hulking masses of her companions. The Turtle’s Citadel had been from the newer generation of ships, its body more compact and more agile than its predecessors’: designed for flight and maneuvers rather than for transport, more elegant and refined than anything to come out of the Imperial Workshops—unlike the other ships, its prow and hull were decorated, painted with numerous designs from old legends and myths, all the way to the Dai Viet of Old Earth. A single gunshot marred the outside of its hull—a burn mark that had transfixed the painted citadel through one of its towers, going all the way into the heartroom and crippling the Mind that animated the ship.

  “That’s her,” Lan Nhen said. “I would know her anywhere.”

  The Cinnabar Mansions had the grace not to say anything, though of course she could have matched the design to her vast databases in an eyeblink. “It’s time, then. Shall I extrude a pod?”

  Lan Nhen found that her hands had gone slippery with sweat all of a sudden; and her heart was beating a frantic rhythm within her chest, like temple gongs gone mad. “I guess it’s time, yes.” By any standards, what they were planning was madness. To infiltrate Outsider space, no matter how isolated—to repair a ship, no matter how lightly damaged . . .

  Lan Nhen watched The Turtle’s Citadel for a while—watched the curve of the hull, the graceful tilt of the engines, away from the living quarters; the burn mark through the hull like a gunshot through a human chest. On the prow was a smaller painting, all but invisible unless one had good eyes: a single sprig of apricot flowers, signifying the New Year’s good luck—calligraphied on the ship more than thirty years ago by Lan Nhen’s own mother, a parting gift to her great-aunt before the ship left for her last, doomed mission.

  Of course, Lan Nhen already knew every detail of that shape by heart, every single bend of the corridors within, every little nook and cranny available outside—from the blueprints, and even before that, before the rescue plan had even been the seed of a thought in her mind—when she’d stood before her ancestral altar, watching the rotating holo of a ship who was also her great-aunt, and wondering how a Mind could ever be brought down, or given up for lost.

  Now she was older; old enough to have seen enough things to freeze her blood; old enough to plot her own foolishness, and drag her cousin and her great-great-aunt into it.

  Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps; if they were blessed enough to survive.

  There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were—and, in any case, one only had to look at them, at their squatter, darker shapes, at the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. There were other clues, too: the memories that made Catherine wake up breathless and disoriented, staring at the white walls of the dormitory until the pulsing, writhing images of something she couldn’t quite identify had gone, and the breath of dozens of her dorm-mates had lulled her back to sleep. The craving for odd food like fish sauce and fermented meat. The dim, distant feeling of not fitting in, of being compressed on all sides by a society that made little sense to her.

  It should have, though. She’d been taken as a child, like all her schoolmates—saved from the squalor and danger among the savages and brought forward into the light of civilization—of white sterile rooms and bland food, of awkward embraces that always felt too informal. Rescued, Matron always said, her entire face transfigured, the bones of her cheeks made sharply visible through the pallor of her skin. Made safe.

  Catherine had asked what she was safe from. They all did, in the beginning—all the girls in the Institution, Johanna and Catherine being the most vehement amongst them.

  That was until Matron showed them the vid.

  They all sat at their tables, watching the screen in the center of the amphitheatre—silent, for once, not jostling or joking among themselves. Even Johanna, who was always first with a biting remark, had said nothing—had sat, transfixed, watching it.

  The first picture was a woman who looked like them—smaller and darker-skinned than the Galactics—except that her belly protruded in front of her, huge and swollen like a tumor from some disaster movie. There was a man next to her, his unfocused eyes suggesting that he was checking something on the network through his implants—until the woman grimaced, putting a hand to her belly and calling out to him. His eyes focused in a heartbeat, and fear replaced the blank expression on his face.

  There was a split second before the language overlays kicked in—a moment, frozen in time, when the words, the sounds of the syllables put together, sounded achingly familiar to Catherine, like a memory of the childhood she never could quite manage to piece together—there was a brief flash, of New Year’s Eve firecrackers going off in a confined space, of her fear that they would burn her, damage her body’s ability to heal . . . And then the moment was gone like a popped bubble, because the vid changed in the most horrific manner.

  The camera was wobbling, rushing along a pulsing corridor—they could all hear the heavy breath of the woman, the whimpering sounds she made like an animal in pain; the soft, encouraging patter of the physician’s words to her.

  “She’s comi
ng,” the woman whispered, over and over, and the physician nodded—keeping one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it so hard his own knuckles had turned the color of a muddy moon.

  “You have to be strong,” he said. “Hanh, please. Be strong for me. It’s all for the good of the Empire, may it live ten thousand years. Be strong.”

  The vid cut away, then—and it was wobbling more and more crazily, its field of view showing erratic bits of a cramped room with scrolling letters on the wall, the host of other attendants with similar expressions of fear on their faces; the woman, lying on a flat surface, crying out in pain—blood splattering out of her with every thrust of her hips—the camera moving, shifting between her legs, the physician’s hands reaching into the darker opening—easing out a sleek, glinting shape, even as the woman screamed again—and blood, more blood running out, rivers of blood she couldn’t possibly have in her body, even as the thing within her pulled free, and it became all too clear that, though it had the bare shape of a baby with an oversized head, it had too many cables and sharp angles to be human . . .

  Then a quiet fade-to-black, and the same woman being cleaned up by the physician—the thing—the baby being nowhere to be seen. She stared up at the camera; but her gaze was unfocused, and drool was pearling at the corner of her lips, even as her hands spasmed uncontrollably.

  Fade to black again; and the lights came up again, on a room that seemed to have grown infinitely colder.

  “This,” Matron said in the growing silence, “is how the Dai Viet birth Minds for their spaceships: by incubating them within the wombs of their women. This is the fate that would have been reserved for all of you. For each of you within this room.” Her gaze raked them all, stopping longer than usual on Catherine and Johanna, the known troublemakers in the class. “This is why we had to take you away, so that you wouldn’t become broodmares for abominations.”

  “We,” of course, meant the Board—the religious nuts, as Johanna liked to call them, a redemptionist church with a fortune to throw around, financing the children’s rescues and their education—and who thought every life from humans to insects was sacred (they’d all wondered, of course, where they fitted into the scheme).

  After the class had dispersed like a flock of sparrows, Johanna held court in the yard, her eyes bright and feverish. “They faked it. They had to. They came up with some stupid explanation on how to keep us cooped here. I mean, why would anyone still use natural births and not artificial wombs?”

  Catherine, still seeing the splatters of blood on the floor, shivered. “Matron said that they wouldn’t. That they thought the birth created a special bond between the Mind and its mother—but that they had to be there, to be awake during the birth.”

  “Rubbish.” Johanna shook her head. “As if that’s even remotely plausible. I’m telling you, it has to be fake.”

  “It looked real.” Catherine remembered the woman’s screams; the wet sound as the Mind wriggled free from her womb; the fear in the face of all the physicians. “Artificial vids aren’t this . . . messy.” They’d seen the artificial vids: slick, smooth things where the actors were tall and muscular, the actresses pretty and graceful, with only a thin veneer of artificially generated defects to make the entire thing believable. They’d learnt to tell them apart from the rest; because it was a survival skill in the Institution, to sort out the lies from the truth.

  “I bet they can fake that, too,” Johanna said. “They can fake everything if they feel like it.” But her face belied her words; even she had been shocked. Even she didn’t believe they would have gone that far.

  “I don’t think it’s a lie,” Catherine said, finally. “Not this time.”

  And she didn’t need to look at the other girls’ faces to know that they believed the same thing as her—even Johanna, for all her belligerence— and to feel in her gut that this changed everything.

  Cuc came online when the shuttle pod launched from The Cinnabar Man-sions—in the heart-wrenching moment when the gravity of the ship fell away from Lan Nhen, and the cozy darkness of the pod’s cradle was replaced with the distant forms of the derelict ships. “Hey, cousin. Missed me?” Cuc asked.

  “As much as I missed a raging fire.” Lan Nhen checked her equipment a last time—the pod was basic and functional, with barely enough space for her to squeeze into the cockpit, and she’d had to stash her various cables and terminals into the nooks and crannies of a structure that hadn’t been meant for more than emergency evacuation. She could have asked The Cinnabar Mansions for a regular transport shuttle, but the pod was smaller and more controllable; and it stood more chances of evading the derelict ward’s defenses.

  “Hahaha,” Cuc said, though she didn’t sound amused. “The family found out what we were doing, by the way.”

  “And?” It would have devastated Lan Nhen, a few years ago; now she didn’t much care. She knew she was doing the right thing. No filial daughter would let a member of the family rust away in a foreign cemetery—if she couldn’t rescue her great-aunt, she’d at least bring the body back for a proper funeral.

  “They think we’re following one of Great-great-aunt’s crazy plans.”

  “Ha,” Lan Nhen snorted. Her hands were dancing on the controls, plotting a trajectory that would get her to The Turtle’s Citadel while leaving her the maximum thrust reserve in case of unexpected maneuvers.

  “I’m not the one coming up with crazy plans,” The Cinnabar Mansions pointed out on the comms channel, distractedly. “I leave that to the young. Hang on—” she dropped out of sight. “I have incoming drones, child.”

  Of course. It was unlikely the Outsiders would leave their precious war trophies unprotected. “Where?”

  A translucent overlay gradually fell over her field of vision through the pod’s windshield; and points lit up all over its surface—a host of fast-moving, small crafts with contextual arrows showing basic kinematics information as well as projected trajectory cones. Lan Nhen repressed a curse. “That many? They really like their wrecked spaceships, don’t they.”

  It wasn’t a question, and neither Cuc nor The Cinnabar Mansions bothered to answer. “They’re defense drones patrolling the perimeter. We’ll walk you through,” Cuc said. “Give me just a few moments to link up with Great-great-aunt’s systems . . . ”

  Lan Nhen could imagine her cousin, lying half-prone on her bed in the lower decks of The Cinnabar Mansions, her face furrowed in that half-puzzled, half-focused expression that was typical of her thought processes— she’d remain that way for entire minutes, or as long as it took to find a solution. On her windshield, the squad of drones was spreading—coming straight at her from all directions, a dazzling ballet of movement meant to overwhelm her. And they would, if she didn’t move fast enough.

  Her fingers hovered over the pod’s controls before she made her decision and launched into a barrel maneuver away from the nearest incoming cluster. “Cousin, how about hurrying up?”

  There was no answer from Cuc. Demons take her, this wasn’t the moment to overthink the problem! Lan Nhen banked sharply, narrowly avoiding a squad of drones, who bypassed her—and then turned around, much quicker than she’d anticipated. Ancestors, they moved fast, much too fast for ion-thrust motors. Cuc was going to have to rethink her trajectory. “Cousin, did you see this?”

  “I saw.” Cuc’s voice was distant. “Already taken into account. Given the size of the craft, it was likely they were going to use helicoidal thrusters on those.”

  “This is all fascinating—” Lan Nhen wove her way through two more waves of drones, cursing wildly as shots made the pod rock around her— as long as her speed held, she’d be fine . . . She’d be fine . . . ”—but you’ll have noticed I don’t really much care about technology, especially not now!”

  A thin thread of red appeared on her screen—a trajectory that wove and banked like a frightened fish’s trail—all the way to The Turtle’s Citadel and its clusters of pod-cradles. It looked as though it was headed stra
ight into the heart of the cloud of drones, though that wasn’t the most worrying aspect of it. “Cousin,” Lan Nhen said. “I can’t possibly do this—” The margin of error was null—if she slipped in one of the curves, she’d never regain the kinematics necessary to take the next.

  “Only way.” Cuc’s voice was emotionless. “I’ll update as we go, if Great-great-aunt sees an opening. But for the moment . . . ”

  Lan Nhen closed her eyes, for a brief moment—turned them towards Heaven, though Heaven was all around her—and whispered a prayer to her ancestors, begging them to watch over her. Then she turned her gaze to the screen, and launched into flight—her hands flying and shifting over the controls, automatically adjusting the pod’s path—dancing into the heart of the drones’ swarm—into them, away from them, weaving an erratic path across the section of space that separated her from The Turtle’s Citadel. Her eyes, all the while, remained on the overlay—her fingers speeding across the controls, matching the slightest deviation of her course to the set trajectory—inflecting curves a fraction of a second before the error on her course became perceptible.

  “Almost there,” Cuc said—with a hint of encouragement in her voice. “Come on, cousin, you can do it—”

  Ahead of her, a few measures away, was The Turtle’s Citadel: its pod cradles had shrivelled from long atrophy, but the hangar for docking the external shuttles and pods remained, its entrance a thin line of grey across the metallic surface of the ship’s lower half.

  “It’s closed,” Lan Nhen said, breathing hard—she was coming fast, much too fast, scattering drones out of her way like scared mice, and if the hangar wasn’t opened . . . ”Cousin!”

  Cuc’s voice seemed to come from very far away; distant and muted somehow on the comms system. “We’ve discussed this. Normally, the ship went into emergency standby when it was hit, and it should open—”

  “But what if it doesn’t?” Lan Nhen asked—the ship was looming over her, spreading to cover her entire windshield, close enough so she could count the pod cradles, could see their pockmarked surfaces—could imagine how much of a messy impact she’d make, if her own pod crashed on an unyielding surface.