Shadow Sun Seven Read online

  “Yeah,” Kalia butts in. “Saints have to perform three witnessed miracles. Jaqi’s just done one.”

  That don’t help. “I didn’t do a thing. You stop that bowing.”

  Erdo nods, hair flopping around on his little head. “I’ll go tell the guards, Saint—ma’am.”

  “Ma’am?” I can’t help laughing at the poor kid. “Ma’am! That’s even worse!”

  Erdo starts to say something again, but sputters, and seems to think better of it. He leaves to speak with the sentries.

  These folk.

  They were fine the first week or so. The kindest wanderers you could imagine, all of them with a similar story—they run from trouble elsewhere in the galaxy, and those of them who heard about our trouble were kind. We didn’t speak on the trouble unless asked, and that was well by me. But then word of what I done with Z got around, and one day they start bowing, and calling me Saint.

  “Oh, my gosh, Jaqi,” Kalia groans once her boy is out of earshot. “You don’t have to insult people’s faith!”

  “When did I insult anyone’s faith? And who’s gosh?”

  “People believe in you,” she says, like this is something everyone knows. “Ever since you brought Z back to life, people see you as someone to look up to. That’s only going to increase the longer we’re fighting against John Starfire.”

  “Yeah, well, folk ought to put their faith in something a bit more reliable.”

  “What’s more reliable than a miracle we witnessed with our own eyes?” She turns to her brother. “Right, Toq?”

  “I want Erdo to take me on a horse again,” Toq answers. Unlike his sister, Toq is young enough not to make too much of a fuss.

  “Toq, you don’t think it’s crazy to believe Jaqi can do miracles, right? We saw her bring Z back to life.”

  “Yeah,” Toq says. And with all the energy of a kid, he adds, “You are gonna kill John Starfire!”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Just because you don’t know how you did it,” Kalia says, “that’s no reason not to try and figure it out—”

  Just then the comm crackles, saving me. “Losing power,” Taltus says. “Check the relay orientator, please. Where is Araskar? I need to speak to him.”

  I walk over to where our independent power cell’s been patched into the tower, through several wires fed into a relay orientator. Araskar’s bent over it.

  Araskar.

  My crew is a funny bunch. Bluebloods on one hand, pit-fighting Zarra on the other. A religious type or two.

  But Araskar is the most crazing slab in all the spaceways.

  Up until we made planetfall, he tried to kill us. He was part of that Vanguard that chased us halfway across the galaxy, targeted the kids for murder, and invaded Bill’s, my home. He only decided to join us at the last of all possible moments, when he turned around and killed his buddy what was about to cut down Kalia.

  Goes without saying that I don’t trust him no further than the end of a soulsword.

  All that said . . . he is a grade-A slab.

  He’s only wearing a pair of shorts and his scarred skin is even darker brown than usual, and as he hunches over the power cell I see (oh, do I evil see) the way those scar-laced muscles contract from years of training and soldiering.

  I can’t help thinking that we’re both crosses, and if he gave me the slack, everything would work as intended. It would be a right old time.

  See, these en’t the thoughts of no Saint!

  “You need something?” he asks.

  “Taltus wants your ear.” I hand the comm over. Araskar and Taltus talk back and forth, Araskar tweaking levels on the orientator. “That should do it,” Araskar says into the comm. “Try it now.”

  “Receiving,” Taltus says, his voice muffled by that mask all of his Order wears. We wait, and I try not to let Araskar see how I’m regarding him, a mixture of side-eye for his crazing, and appreciation for his chest.

  “Any answer from your people?” Araskar says to the comm.

  Taltus’s voice crackles through the comm. “It will take time, sss. I have spoken to one lower Adept.”

  “What’d you do to get kicked out of this Order, anyway?” I ask.

  “We had a doctrinal disagreement, sss.” Taltus cuts off the comm signal, like he always does when I bring this up.

  I turn back to Araskar, and for lack of anything to say, offer, “No sign of trouble yet.”

  He puts his hand on the sword at his side, maybe without realizing it. “I’m ready.”

  “What’s that thing going to do?” I point to the sword. “Them Kurguls don’t swing swords. They just turn you into shard-food.” I know what this fellow is thinking. “You going to go get yourself dead? You promised not to. You gonna learn guitar.”

  “I didn’t promise anything,” he says, surly as ever, “but I’m not going to get myself killed. Although life won’t be worth much if the Thuzerians won’t help us.”

  “So optimistic there, fella.”

  “Just realistic.” He squints at me, shading his eyes, looking at the horizon. I don’t see no dust out there, but I en’t never been in a big wide-open planet space anyway. “There are only a few major military powers in the galaxy, and the military monks are the only ones who never pledged to the Resistance or the Empire.”

  “Don’t sound so fatal, slab! We got a chance of recruiting some folk to our . . . what’d you call it.”

  “Counter-resistance.”

  “That’s a terrible name.”

  “You’re welcome to come up with something better.” He turns back to the orientator, like it needs his attention. “Nothing will matter if we can’t learn what John Starfire knows about the Dark Zone. Why it mattered that the kids had that memory crypt.”

  He’s talking about the map we saw, afore we made planetfall here. Evil big map of stars, all the stars swallowed by the Dark Zone way back when. I don’t like thinking about that Dark Zone. Don’t like thinking about the cold, that sick little half-light, about a face the size of a planet, a face that could swallow whole suns. I accidentally jumped in there and got enough for a lifetime. “You, uh, you know anything about them devils?”

  “No more than you. A thousand years ago, the Shir—”

  “Aiya, slab! Don’t name the devil!”

  He laughs, without humor. Told you this fellow was crazing. “All right, a thousand years ago they appeared, at the same time the Jorians disappeared. They killed a thousand star systems, swallowing suns to burn their internal furnaces, before the Imperial Navy was formed to stop them, with the first successful cross soldiers. But that’s just propaganda I got in my data dump. Along with You Are the Hero the Empire Needs Now and Battle: The Purpose of Cross Life and Understanding Sentience: A Primer for Non-Sentient Races.” He laughs, but it en’t a happy laugh. I don’t think he knows how to do a happy laugh. “I don’t know any of the real history from that time. What little information is left is in the memory crypts, or . . .” He pauses.

  “Or what?”

  “Or somewhere no one can find it.”

  This is the way he goes. If he didn’t drive me so mad with his crazing, I’d be worried about him pulling out that sword to use on himself. “Don’t sound so sad about things. Think about your guitar. Think about lunch. Just don’t spend too much time thinking on the dead, aiya?”

  I try to make myself sound friendly. By his scowl and narrowed eyes, I failed. “What do you know?” He turns back to me, them cold eyes surrounded by them scars, and I remember, again, that this slab is a killer, moreso than even Z. “You don’t even understand who you are, or what you did back there. I killed the woman I loved because of you. I—” He cuts himself off.

  “Well, that’s some honesty there. Don’t stop! What else you going to say? That I ought to know how I did a damn miracle? Because I would damn well like to know, slab!”

  He turns back to the horizon, doesn’t answer me.

  “You had the idea. You sa
id you heard music coming off me.”

  “Yes,” he says, hardly without opening his lips.

  “Magic music, miracle stuff that makes me some kinda special.”

  “Yes. I hear it all the time. I hear it right now. I don’t have an explanation for it.”

  “But you just looked at me back there, and you saw Z laid out all dead, and you thought, oh, hey, I ought to have her use that music to bring this slab back to life—that’s what you thought? All from one look?”

  “No, I knew something was special about you. For a long time.”

  “What? When? When did we ever chat before this, slab?”

  “At the asteroid base. I was in one of the Moths that attacked you. I could hear the music then.”

  The base.

  Bill’s.

  My home.

  The home the Vanguard waltzed in and smashed up, and though I killed a good number of them, enough got through that they killed Bill, who was a father to me after my parents died. Then they nearly killed the kids, and poisoned Z. “You knew I was special back at Bill’s.”

  His scars contort with confusion. “What’s Bill’s?”

  “The asteroid.” Now it’s my turn to sound cold. “You knew I was special, and you tried to kill me anyway, and let them folk kill my own?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I—”

  “You hadn’t figured this business out, then.”

  He pauses. “No. Not yet.”

  “Just figured I was special, not figured the Resistance was evil for wanting to kill kids.”

  “It was complicated.”

  “Sure it was.” I’m so angry I could say a thousand things at once, and nothing at all. “Sure it was. I mean, in the spaceways, someone tries to kill young ones, they have a happy accident with an airlock. But it’s more complicated with all your learning. How many Imperial years you seen, now? One? Or you fresher from the vat than that?”

  “I’m five years out of the vat,” he says.

  “So much wisdom in them five years. So much complication.”

  He stares at me for a long time, and his hand twitches on the smaller of the two swords he wears, like he’s about to yank it out and start a fight. “I told you. I was wrong. The Resistance was wrong.”

  “Lot of folk ‘wrong’ is gonna bring back, slab—”

  A shard flies right past us and explodes, blowing an old ship’s engine housing into a thousand white-hot fragments, spinning through the air.

  “Matakas!”

  Shit.

  “Thought we sent out a diversion!” A bunch of desert folk went to hit the Matakas’ storehouse not five miles away, precisely so we could do this.

  “They weren’t fooled,” Araskar says. “Or they’ve got enough drones to deal with both threats.”

  I drop, crawl along the sand on my elbows, gun in one hand. The power cell is the big worry here—they hit that, and we lose communication, and we get an evil explosion and some toxic radiation to spare, given all stored in them batteries. My gun hums with shards, the same nice vintage Zarronen I been carrying since I met the kids. “Where are they?”

  Araskar draws his sword and runs out into the open. I half expect him to vanish in a hail of shard-fire, but he outruns each red gleam, dances between bits of junk.

  “Kids!” I run toward where I left Kalia and Toq. They was just on the other side of the power cell, against the tower, but they en’t there now.

  The comm chooses that minute to buzz. The entire node-relay tower crackles, and the spun-crystal turns bright blue, patterns of blue twisting and spinning along its whole length. The blue light is even brighter than the sunlight, washing me in shades of blue, washing the whole shard-happy junkyard in blue.

  “Jaqi, sss.” Taltus’s lizard voice hisses through the comm. “I have reached the elders of my Order. They wish to speak with you, to determine whether you are truly the one prophesied—”

  More junk blows up, on the other side of the tower from me. “Evil busy over here!”

  “Is this the girl?” A deep voice comes through the comm. “This is Father Abodus, head of the Council of Saint Thuzera—”

  I still can’t see the kids. I bolt from the side of the power cell through the dirt, keeping low. Kids probably took off into the junkyard. That would be the worst thing to do, as it puts them right out there in the dangerous shrapnel, and makes them an easier target.

  I run from one piece of junk to the next, from the burnt-out engine of a Keil Spinner X5 to the still half-decent chassis of a Z-Nova J-26.

  That low voice rumbles from the comm. “How will you destroy the Shir?”

  “What?” They really just ask me that?

  “Tell us how you will destroy the Shir! The Son of Stars must conquer the devil, and bring light unto the darkened stars—”

  A couple of explosions in the distance. “The special oogie of space en’t got a clue about that, and don’t name the devil,” I mutter, but I think the comm picks it up, because they say a few other things I lose in the process of running.

  “Jaqi, sss!” There’s Taltus, shouting now. “Please, speak to my elders. I cannot maintain the faster-than-light connection for long. Please, sss, tell them something.”

  I duck behind a piece of machinery, hating everything in the galaxy, especially them prophecies, that Bible, and bowing most of all. I yell into the comm, “I don’t know how to stop them devils, but I reckon the first step is stopping John Starfire, ai? He’s the only one talked to them and come out alive!”

  The crackle of the node-relay comes through and I hear that same deep voice. “How did you perform this miracle?”

  Another explosion, too close, spattering me with bits of machine and sand. I wipe sand out of my eyes. “Uh, there’s a sort of music, and I reckon it’s like the Starfire, and I used a sword to put the music inside a fella and he came back to life.”

  “Music.”

  “Aiya. I mean yes.” Come on, talk like fancy folk, Jaqi, not like a scab!

  “You used a sword to—”

  “Give me that.”

  A Mataka drone stands not three paces off me.

  He glares through little black eyes, rattling his vestigial wings inside his carapace, like they do when they’re excited. His tentacles quiver, hanging off his face. He’s got a gun—a piece of crap knockoff Keil—trained on my head.

  “Give me that comm.”

  I fake my best swindler smile. “You really going to shoot me with that garbage? I reckon the shard makes it halfway out before it blows your hand off. Now this—this is a piece.” I hold up my gun. “You take it, I keep the comm, aiya?”

  “You are truly the stupidest female I have ever—” A red flash, and suddenly this Kurgul is smeared a good forty feet across the desert.

  Z comes running across the desert at me. “I am sorry, I should have seen you before!” he snarls.

  “En’t no thing, thank you—wait, did you just say you was sorry?”

  Them tattoos on his cheek twist up in a more complicated version of his usual frown. “Yes.”

  Next, Araskar’s gonna kiss me. I thumb the comm. “Okay, where were—”

  And the blue light vanishes.

  Either Taltus lost the connection to my handheld comm, or the Matakas figured it out and killed the faster-than-light node-relay from the master satellites in orbit. “Well, I hope I impressed them folk,” I say, knowing I did the opposite.

  “The children,” Z says.

  “Kalia!” I see her and Erdo, running across the desert, trying to make it to cover behind some of the junk. “Don’t go—”

  Too late. One of them hoverbugs has noticed those kids. It roars across the sand toward us, waves of force from the sense-field underneath it knocking the machinery aside.

  Z and I open up on the hoverbug. I loose quite a few decent shots, one of which hits the back of the hoverbug, sends it into a spin. Z spends his shots on the sense-field in the front.

  “You en’t much of a shot, Z
—”

  “There is no honor in this!”

  They let out a barrage at us, and we both drop to the sand. The hoverbug spins, clips the chassis of an old ship, and goes flying through the air and wrecks against another stripped ship frame.

  I go running to the kids.

  It’s just Kalia and Erdo, both of them clinging to each other. I turn to Z. “You hid Toq somewhere safe?”

  “I did not see him, by blood and honor! I have not seen the youngest boy since we arrived at the tower.”

  “Where is he?” I look at Kalia.

  “I don’t know!” she says. “He went looking for you, just before they attacked—”

  Z doesn’t hesitate—he lopes off right away to find Toq.

  I grab Kalia, pull her close into an embrace. “You well?”

  “I’m okay,” Kalia says, feeling her chest and her legs and arms. “I’m—I’m not even singed.” She turns to the boy with all the simple concern of a girl flush for a boy. “I—Erdo, are you okay?”

  Erdo looks at me, looks at her, flips his hair a bit again, and bows.

  “None of—”

  He keeps bowing. Falls right over, exposing where a huge chunk of glowing shrapnel’s embedded in his back.

  “Oh shit!” I thumb the comm for a local signal. “Taltus, get down here, we need someone knows their medical!” I grab Erdo, try to lay him out—he’s limp as a dead freighter and his eyes glassy, and now I can see how much blood’s poured down his pant legs. A lot. Burning hell and the devil. I never seen so much blood.

  I try not to think it, but I do. Just like Quinn. Another kid dying here, in my arms, another kid didn’t do anything wrong but get mixed up with the wrong folk. I hardly know a thing about this kid. All I know is that he bows. And bleeds.

  “He’s going to die.” I said it out loud. Not again. I promised myself no more.

  “Jaqi, no, wait.” Kalia puts her hand on mine. “You have to heal him, Jaqi.”

  “I what?”

  “You have to heal him! Like you did Z! Just do it again!”

  I look back behind us, in front of us, like Araskar’s going to appear from wherever he run off to. “I en’t got the sword this time,” I say, sounding like the fool I am.

  “Just—just do what you did! Channel the Starfire! Heal him! You did it before!”