Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "As for the third thing. After the war wrapped up, when it came time for us all to take our swords and beat them into plowshares or what have you, I looked around and I thought, Man. It felt like I didn't really fit into what the new world was going to be. Or maybe I'd just seen too much and had to get away and leave all the ghosts behind. I still don't know. Probably never will."

  As he said these last words, he'd been gazing into the distance past the camera. His gaze snapped forward and he gave that off-center smile again. "I don't know why I'm telling you all this. None of you even know who I was. Background, I guess. You see, after I left, I did a lot of thinking. It seemed to me that what happened to Earth could easily happen again. Or that we'd be the ones to screw it up this time, nuking the whole planet or whatever. That would be it. The end of the whole stupid species. That would be a pretty lame thing to happen after how hard we fought to save it. So I talked it over with Sebastian, and he and I came up with an idea.

  "You're not alone anymore. You're not the only ones out there. Now if you're seeing this for the first time, I'd bet you're probably not quite ready for it yet. It's a long ways away, after all. But when you are ready…come on out and say hello."

  Ness turned his back and hiked up through the blue grass toward the top of the hill. The camera followed smoothly, an automatic drone. Ness and the camera crested the peak.

  The sky was a strange shade of pink, the sun a blood orange in the sky. The trees that rose from the blue grass were pure white, long, long threads rippling from their branches like a woman's hair in the wind.

  The world was not Earth, nor any of the habitats that humans had ever built in the System. But the children who ran and laughed in the blue fields below were fully human.

  "He brought us to another world." Rada's voice was hoarse. "Even if every one of us had died fighting the Lurkers, humanity would have lived on. We're not alone. We never were!"

  As if he'd heard her, Ness turned back to the camera, grinned, and waved.

  EPILOGUE

  Her name was Dana. They married in a church in Bluehill that she had helped build. A dense fog lay on the coast and when they headed out the church doors it was like walking into the afterlife.

  Webber was enjoying his fourth (or fifth?) flute of champagne when his device pinged. He checked it and looked up into the fog. "You might want to stand back."

  Dana backed away with him, tilting her head to the sky, her long blonde hair swept up for the occasion. The ship lowered into the grass with a deep hum, fog wreathing its belly. It was perfectly black and perfectly oval and there wasn't a single seam on it. The crowd gaped.

  "What," Dana said, "is that?"

  "Our chariot has arrived," Webber said. "To take us to our honeymoon."

  A door opened on the side, lowering a staircase to the ground. A man in a black suit and the blandly handsome face of a Dark Solutions agent stepped down.

  He gave Webber a knowing nod. "Congratulations, sir. Are you ready to depart?"

  "Been looking forward to it for a long time."

  They climbed aboard. The cabin was impeccable.

  Once they had taken flight, Dana cocked an eyebrow. "Do you plan to finally tell me where we're going?"

  "Wait and see. It'll be more fun that way."

  The flight took them halfway around the world, but the ship touched down two hours later. The pilot opened the door and let down the ladder. After the cold fog of Bluehill, the warm and humid tropical air felt like a bath. They stepped out onto a strip of white sand between a forest of tall palms and a teal blue sea.

  Dana gazed out at the water, then at the jungle mountains behind them. "Where are we?"

  "Tandana," Webber said. "Pretty, isn't it?"

  "Tandana? Isn't this the island that was infested with Lurkers?"

  "Yeah, but that was more than two years ago. Nobody's seen any aliens here since." Webber rubbed his chin. "Just watch out for tigers."

  "This place looks completely deserted."

  "It is."

  "Then where are we staying? What about clothes? I'm still in my dress."

  "Our friends have taken care of it. We'll deal with it later. For now, let's just go for a walk."

  He took her hand. Dana looked ready to give him what for, then laughed and shook her head.

  They walked barefoot through the sand. The surf was so low it rolled over onto the beach with a thump as soft as a man dropping his shoes on the floor. Out to sea, a whale breached and blew a spout into the air. Webber had never seen a more beautiful day in all of his life.

  ~

  Ships cut and zipped through the void, forty strong. The battle had already begun and missiles and miniature drones clouded up the dogfight. Kansas watched with a frown as one of the ships curved back toward the missiles pursuing it. It was attempting to get the missiles to bunch up, where they'd be vulnerable to a single salvo of counters. But two of the incoming rockets simply arced around the ship's counter-missiles and beelined toward its hull.

  They went off. The ship was bathed in red light. When the light faded, the ship blinked with the white signals that meant it had been deemed totally destroyed. Its autopilot kicked in, delivering it to the "dead zone" not far from the landing pad.

  The zone filled up with more and more ships as the battle played out and came to a conclusion. Not bad. Not great—Kansas expected to do some yelling when they reviewed the tape—but not bad.

  "That's it for today," Kansas said. "Call them in for hand-to-hand."

  Master Nelson nodded shortly and ordered them in. The ships reactivated and touched down on the pad, some more shakily than others. They popped their hatches. Forty children hopped down to the pad, none of them more than ten years old. Behind them, the ships were no bigger than your average ground car.

  "Suits off," Nelson said. "It's time to get up close and personal."

  The kids grinned and dashed to the lockers to change. Kansas strolled over to the dojo. She folded her hands, regarding the wall-mounted punching bags and freestanding kick bags.

  One of the many issues regarding how to best train her young troops was exactly how broadly to train them. For instance, was martial arts of any serious practical value? The kids loved it, but realistically speaking, there was almost zero chance that a trained pilot was ever going to find him or herself fighting as infantry. And there was practically a negative chance that they'd ever find themselves fighting as infantry against enemy soldiers when they were completely unarmed. Nearly all of her generals and advisors agreed that the pilots' time was best spent in a flight simulator or, ideally, behind the controls of an actual ship.

  Kansas had overruled them. It just felt right to train them to defend themselves with nothing but their bare hands.

  Besides, the kids really did love it.

  The forty students hurried back to the dojo and formed up into four lines. Nelson put them through their paces, starting with their forms, then a new joint lock, then sparring. The kids fought eagerly, confident and fearless. Even when one of them got injured, they never looked troubled by the pain. They looked more hurt by the idea that they wouldn't be able to fight again for a while.

  There was a part of her that wondered if she had simply replaced the Locker crews' care debts—the same care debts she'd fought violently to end—with a new form of indentured service. If she was robbing these youth of a normal life of friends and play and skipping school. If she was taking their childhoods from them.

  But she had done a lot of reading over the last few years. History. War. Culture. The natural state of childhood was not one of carefree irresponsibility. That had been a fully modern invention. The luxury of an age of peace. Well, the Lurkers had blown that age to hell. Kansas wasn't sure that it would ever come back.

  The kids fought on, sweaty and flushed, laughing and clapping whenever someone landed a clean strike or tossed their opponent to the floor. The truth was, she didn't think she was taking anything from them. From what she'd seen in li
fe, nothing made you happier than being strong. These children would become the strongest people she'd ever known.

  And the Locker and its allies would be under their protection.

  "Enough beating up on each other." She walked forward, one hand raised. "Which of you has the guts to fight me?"

  They stared at her, waiting for her to say she was just joking. When it became clear that she wasn't, a small boy raised his hand. Every boy and girl in the dojo then raised their hand as well.

  "Good." Kansas dropped into a fighting crouch. She beckoned with her left hand at the first boy who'd raised his hand. "You first. Now come and get it."

  The small boy lowered his shoulders, yelled a high-pitched battle cry, and charged. Kansas laughed. Not because it was obvious that he had no chance to win.

  But because he knew this and was still willing to try.

  ~

  They set out from Land's Touch with new suits and full packs. It was eighty miles of open land to Sky's Reach. No roads. No trails, except for the first quarter mile out from the settlement. Just the ice and rocks of wild Callisto. Supposedly once you'd been a resident for a full year, they let you use carts and fliers to get between the two settlements.

  Until then, the only way there was on your own two feet.

  They hiked between craters and through fields of boulders. Mina kept pace without any trouble. Jupiter hung above them, the reds and oranges and browns of its surface swirled together like oil paints. They were tidally locked to it and the planet's face barely budged by the time they made camp and planted their tent.

  There was no day and night, per se, and they started off again after a good rest. In time, the way forward was blocked by a rift valley filled with pale blue ice. They got out their climbing tools and started across it. When MacAdams had first made the crossing, the locals had warned him to watch out for the yellow ice. He'd joked about all the stray dogs they must have out on Callisto, but the locals were dead serious: apparently the yellow minerals were common where the ice had been weakened, leaving it ready to collapse and dump you down a crevasse.

  He and Mina made their way across. Tough work, but the kind that cleared your mind. Three hours later, they stepped onto the bare rock on the other side of the valley and grinned at each other.

  MacAdams had brought about everything you'd ever need in case of hardship or emergency, but they made it to Sky's Reach without needing anything but the basics. The domes of the individual plots gleamed under Jupiter's weird glow. Lights within the domes showed houses, bunkers, and crops.

  "There it is." MacAdams pointed. The dome hadn't been hard to spot: it was the newest, and completely empty.

  They walked up to the airlock. Mina entered the code. The door slid open and she winked at him. They crossed through.

  "Just look at all those rocks," Mina teased. "Is it everything you ever dreamed of?"

  "No," MacAdams said. "It's even better."

  "You're serious, aren't you?"

  "I'm not excited about what is. I'm excited about what it's going to become. Come on. Time to start building our new home."

  ~

  "Can that thing even fly?"

  "Of course it can fly. It's just a little slow to accelerate. And why wouldn't it be? It's the biggest ship ever built."

  Rada couldn't argue with that. The World Within Itself hung in space like a soggy ham hock. Its residents had been living in its core modules for over a year while Dark Solutions continued to graft on new engines, life support, and living space. They had also attached a few asteroids for raw materials, to be used in the future however the residents saw fit.

  For the World Within Itself was a colony ship. Rada had thought that, with the revelation that there were already human colonies out among the Swimmers, progress toward additional ones would stall out. If anything, the revelation had spurred DS to work harder.

  The interesting thing about the WWI was that it had no specific destination. It was the colony. It would boost up to speed on the power of its own engines, ride the solar winds to the edge of the System, then scoop hydrogen from the vacuum to continue to fuel its nuclear systems. The colonists could take it wherever they wanted: another world, if they found one that looked good.

  Or they could just keep on flying forever.

  "Here we go," Winters said. "The start of a new era."

  Slowly, slowly, the uneven circle of modules and matter began to boost away. Winters wasn't being hyperbolic. With the destruction of the Lurkers, the limits of exploration had finally been lifted from humanity. That had been three years ago. But they hadn't truly broken those limits until this very moment.

  Winters grinned at her, almost childlike. She smiled back. She wanted to share his exaltation—with all of the Hive's resources at her disposal, she'd done plenty to help Dark Solutions reach this milestone—but something was holding her back.

  For over a year, she'd been having dreams of the war. She couldn't tell if they were good ones or bad. Toman was in most of them. He was trying to tell her something, but even if she woke up in the middle of it, she couldn't remember anything he'd said. All she was left with was the spectral sensation that something was wrong.

  The World Within Itself shrank against the darkness. Once you could no longer see it with your own eyes, she returned to the Tine and boosted away from the station. She knew she should get back to the Hive, but she didn't enter a destination, aimlessly gathering speed.

  She stared out into space. Earth had returned to a frontier state. Out at the Locker, Kansas was building a set of new stations to consolidate Saturn—and a new fleet to protect her little empire. With Earth's influence removed from the picture, the Belters and Dashers had become a hub of trade, drawing in corporations—and the nests of pirates that always followed.

  Mars was enjoying a renaissance of its own, authorizing those ex-Earthers who were tired of roughing it and who preferred to live on a planet over a station to establish several new colonies there. The resulting need for construction, agriculture, and services had been an employment boom for the citizens of the long-quiet warrens. Just about everywhere you looked, people were thriving.

  Yet Rada couldn't seem to shake the feeling that while they were settled around their cozy new campfire, the wolves were watching them from out in the night.

  The steadiness of the engines lulled her to sleep. She dreamed of ships clashing and dying. She dreamed of places she'd never been to. She dreamed of being an old woman alone in the Hive, wandering its halls while she whispered to people who'd been dead for decades.

  She woke. She finally knew what she had to do. On some level, she'd known it for a very long time.

  She opened her comm and sent a transmission out into the darkness. Hours later, the darkness responded.

  ~

  It turned out the Tandana "airport" was a mowed strip of grass where the biggest rocks had been dug out of the landing strip. Its high-tech traffic control consisted of a guy with a device and a pair of signaling wands to bring her in. Rada brought her jet in easy, landing without any trouble. Although she highly doubted there would be any other traffic before she left, she rolled her jet into the taller grass next to the strip.

  She unrolled the stairs and climbed out into the hot, damp air. She wanted to do some swearing at the crewman for not taking better care of the grounds, but she'd brought passengers with her. MacAdams and Mina were already heading down the jet's stairs with their toddler and newborn.

  Once the toddler reached the third step from the bottom, he took a flying leap into the grass. He fell on his face, rolling over and looking up at his parents with shiny eyes and a trembling chin. MacAdams lifted his eyebrows. The boy wiped his eyes and got to his feet.

  There was a car waiting for them. They got inside and it drove them along a dirt road lined with palms on both sides, the ocean doing its thing just sixty feet to their left. The palms thinned. Simple stilt houses appeared between the trees. The car came to a stop.

 
Webber strolled toward them, looking very tan and a little bit plump. "Esteemed visitors. Welcome to Tandana!"

  "Mayor Webber," Rada said. "What a great honor it is for you to take time out of your shore fishing schedule to come meet us yourself."

  MacAdams shook his head. "Of all the places on Earth, you had to go and build a town here?"

  Webber shrugged. "You and I conquered this island, didn't we? Seems that gives me the right to build whatever I damn please on it."

  "Should have built a giant cannon instead. And then shot it into the center of the island until it sank."

  A round of hugs was exchanged, then Webber brought them inside his house—a very spare thing, the furniture home-built but charming—where they met Dana, Webber's wife. Rada smiled to herself. In some way, she still thought of Webber as a degenerate pirate. It was strange to think of him as married. And even stranger that his wife seemed to be so happy about it.

  They talked for a while, catching up on everything that had happened in their lives. Webber made jokes about the war and MacAdams' "invisible cattle ranch" at Sky's Reach. MacAdams replied that Webber must have to keep Dana on a little island so she couldn't run away. The toddler, whose name was Dirk, asked Rada to tell him stories about fighting the Lurkers up in space. She made him promise he wouldn't get scared—he promised that he wouldn't—then told him about the great battles, the losses and the sacrifices that had led, at last, to victory.

  It was good to see them all. So good that Rada almost changed her mind. After dark, they brought buckets of beer down to the beach and built a fire. Rada hadn't had one in years, but she took a beer and twisted it open.

  The kids were in bed and they drank and laughed and watched the shooting stars. Dana pumped them for ridiculous stories about Webber, which MacAdams willingly obliged; there seemed to be no end of them. It gave Rada a little more time to decide whether to tell them now or at the end of the visit. Now, she thought: there was no sense hiding things. Not from them.