Starfire, A Red Peace Read online

  The audience is running. Z takes a long, tattooed, and angry look at me, then Cade’s body, and bellows the only words he’s said so far. “Where is my money?”

  I en’t got any thoughts to answer him. I’m busy looking at Cade. Eyes red, skin gone gray, and for all that big old stab wound, not a drop of blood. I’d bet lost Earth that his memories just outlived his body.

  This man has enemies, but on this day of all days, why is a dumb human con being stabbed, secret-like, by a Jorian soulsword?

  -2-

  Araskar

  WINNING A WAR isn’t the best feeling of my life, but it’s up there.

  My ears haven’t stopped ringing, so I don’t hear much of the speech. After planetfall, and after having a pyramid explode next to me, I doubt they’ll ever stop ringing. The important thing is I see him—John Starfire, the Chosen One of the whole damn universe, standing in the doorway of the Imperial Senate, and he’s shouting something, and I can even feel it, a wave through the universe itself.

  It’s over.

  I’m sweating and bleeding and every one of my muscles is as wrung and worn as old rope. The sweet planetside air of Irithessa tastes beautiful. Even the smoke tastes beautiful.

  I raise my soulsword and cheer, too, as much as I can. The synth-fibers stretch in my reconstructed tongue, the wires in my reconstructed muscle strain, the wounds beneath the surface always evident.

  Cheer for freedom and all that crazing shit. Cheer most of all for my friends, the unlucky bastards who didn’t live to see today. I’m here, now, cheering in your place.

  A thousand exhausted arms raise a thousand bloody soulswords into the smoky air of the City Imperial.

  John Starfire takes his soulsword to his own arm, cutting a fine line across the skin. His blood runs down the channels of the sword and catches fire, a bright, white corona that gleams over the crowd, sends ripples of light up the black-and-white banner behind him. He lowers the sword and the crowd starts buzzing.

  “Did you get that, sir?” Rashiya asks me, when I turn around. Her face is streaked with carbon, and the strip of circuit in her temple is flickering. The synthskin around it is half melted. Her synthskin is a remnant from the same battle that took my original tongue, a chunk of my leg, and a couple of my original fingers. We are damn lucky these are our only souvenirs.

  “No,” I slur. “Let me guess. Glorious victory. Go back to the lines.”

  “Not quite.” She smiles, and she can’t help herself—she touches my arm, her green eyes alive and shining. Her red hair is slick with sweat, and it makes her look damn good.

  Yes, she’s my subordinate and we shouldn’t have become involved, but even vat-cooked crosses have got to keep warm. Hell, I don’t need to explain myself. I’m a goddamn war hero. “Find a place to bunk. Looters will be shot. Food’s fair game.”

  “Shot. Right.”

  “I need to make sure that Helthizor’s all right,” she says. “That kid took quite a hit in the leg.” She touches my hair. “You need to get some rest. I didn’t know you had this in you.”

  “Had what?” I say.

  “You took out two gun posts in less than an hour. Don’t you remember?”

  “It blurs.”

  She, in defiance of all sense and regulation, moves close and hugs me, and whispers in my ear, “The dead can finally rest easy.”

  I can’t help it. I put a hand in her hair and hold her close.

  “You rest too,” she says.

  “Not a chance. Stamp your boots and open your sheath,” I say.

  “Aye, sir.”

  And then I go, away, away from the crowd full of milling soldiers, away from where the main conflict spilled over from the aerial campaign, past the ancient crystal pyramids and shattered grav-tracks, into the darkened canyons of the city.

  That is to say, I go places that any soldier should know better than to go a few hours after battle.

  So half an hour after I’ve won the glorious victory for the Resistance, I find myself kneeling in a dirty alley between two Kurguls, who are holding guns to my head because I tried to steal their drugs.

  “You know I’m a war hero, right?” I say.

  They don’t say a word. Their little tentacled mouths curl up and they rattle their vestigial wings under their ugly carapaces. Just waiting on a command from their local nest queen to wipe me. One mutters a string of grunts. The other says something I actually understand, which means he must want me to hear it. “No one will miss another Jorian cross.”

  “No one will,” I agree. “I don’t know why you’re waiting on approval. Your nest is most likely dead.”

  The one on the left pushes his gun into the back of my skull. “Toss the soulsword,” the Kurgul says, “and we’ll give you a clean death.”

  Kurguls. Superstitious bastards, the lot of them. They’ll shoot a Jorian, but they want us to be far from our weapon. Soulswords have quite a reputation among the religious. “Despite the name, these things only take your memories, fellas. They’re neuron-keyed. If I could take souls, I might have something worth keeping.”

  I draw the sword. The Kurguls grip their weapons, ready to riddle me with shards if I make a move.

  I toss the soulsword down the alley and sink to my knees.

  “Do it. Give me some drugs or kill me.” Their shard-rifles heat up. I close my eyes, and feel the relief I’ve been waiting for, for ages. I can see my friends’ faces. Not like the last time I saw their faces, when they were just bits of meat torn from the bone and scattered across the hallway. No, my friends are smiling now, still breathing.

  The Kurguls scream and shards whistle past my ear with a rush of heat. I open my eyes.

  Rashiya is standing there, holding a shard-rifle of her own. The Kurguls are both missing their heads. She is not watching their corpses. She is looking at me, and her eyes are narrowed, reddened.

  I stand up. Still not dead. “Stamp your boots and open your sheath,” I say, with my best half-cocked smile.

  Someone else walks out from behind her. I drop to one knee.

  “Get up, Araskar,” says John Starfire himself. “My daughter here told me about you. The war’s not over.”

  * * *

  “You have an Imperial minute to explain yourself,” Rashiya says.

  “You can’t pull rank on me, Lieutenant.” I’ve been waiting for the day my luck would run out, but I figured it would be a hot shard tearing out my brain, not my one friend and bedmate turning out to be the daughter—the daughter!—of the Chosen One himself. Do you know what I’ve done with this woman? Does her father know?

  “You’re going to be sleeping outside an airlock tonight unless you explain yourself.”

  I sit there for a minute, trying to read into her words as much as I can. I don’t think she heard me talk about the drugs. Good. “We won,” I say. “There wasn’t anything left for me.”

  “I’m not anything,” she says.

  “Damn it, you know what I mean,” I say. And then, because I’m winning the war of idiocy too, I say, “Actually, you don’t.”

  It’s the funny thing about being a cross. You never get a real family, unless you’re one of those odd cases, like Rashiya, whose parents managed to reproduce. If you’re like me, your vat batch is your family. And my batch mates, my battalion, all my best friends, died the moment they boarded our first Imperial vessel, turned to blood and meat by shard-fire. Only I, last out of the burrowing pod, survived.

  Then I killed half that ship with my own vat-grown hands. Got the Resistance’s highest medal for it. Irony’s a cold bitch, ai?

  “The war’s over, Rashiya. Now I’ve got no reason for them all to be dead and me to be here.”

  She turns to the door. “That’s your answer. That.”

  Well, that and the fact that I’ve been doing so many drugs that I ought to get another medal for surviving. “You didn’t come from a batch, Rash. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  She turns back to me, her face
cold as stone. “My father wants a word with you, so I won’t kill you now. I saved your burning life today, sir, so I expect that next time I see you you’ll be more grateful.” She opens the door and leaves me in the cell. I lie back and stare up at the ceiling.

  Her pater comes in.

  Until a little while ago, I had only seen the guy in our newsreels. In person, he looks older, his hair and beard more white than black. Tall. Strong. Every bit the hero, except he’s got his hand on his soulsword hilt, clutching it, releasing and clutching again. I guess when you’ve spent that much time fighting, that’s what happens.

  He sits on the bed next to me. Right next to me. He puts his hand, the one not twitching on his hilt, on my leg.

  “That took a beating,” he says. He rolls up his sleeve—simple black shirt for John Starfire, no Vanguard uniform. His arm is a map of scars, over slashes of steel mesh. “I lost the entire arm at Daruthal,” he says. “And most of this leg. My face was still okay. That was a relief to Aranella, my wife.”

  “I know,” I say. Aiya, do I sound stupid. You’d think I could get rid of that slurring voice for the Hero of the Galaxy himself. “I read about it.” Come on, Araskar, speak like a man before this guy takes his soulsword to your man-parts.

  “What else have you read about?” His eyes twinkle, like a proper old man. “I’m interested.”

  I try to think. It’s tough to think through this relief, given that he hasn’t yet told me to fall on my short soulsword. “The news says you took down old Emperor Turka in a proper sword fight.”

  “I wish. I had the Vanguard put us in a room together, just like he wanted. That blueblood bastard ran, and I couldn’t get him to turn and face me, so I gave up and opened him from spine to shitter.”

  He laughs. I laugh too, because I figure he’s trying to put me at ease. That’s more frightening than the alternative.

  “Araskar, I’m not sure whether to treat you as a disobedient subordinate, or my daughter’s suitor.”

  What’s a man supposed to say to that? “Ass is chapped either way, sir.”

  And then his face turns serious. “Have you read the Third Book?”

  That would be the scripture that foretold the coming of John Starfire himself. As I said, my ass is chapped, so I tell the truth. “Didn’t have much time for reading in the last few years.” I used to like reading. Had the full collection of the Scurv Silvershot comic books, in real paper. They burned up somewhere outside the orbit of Brathaag, where all our supplies for the Larthe’ea campaign vanished. Lost my guitar, too.

  “Do you believe the prophecy?”

  Another one of those hard questions. “We’re here, sir.”

  He sighs. “We are here. We are here, and I’m still not sure if I believe it. You’d think I would know whether or not I really was the man in the scriptures, but there’s a lot of it that didn’t happen the way it was prophesied. Am I the son of stars? Are the bluebloods the children of giants?” He draws his soulsword—about time, way he’s been clutching it. “Like these. The legends say that a Jorian soulsword was a thing of miracles. Could cut through anything in the universe. Could draw the essence of the Starfire into it, the fuel that burns in pure space. But these are metal with psychic resonators built in, made in a factory and matched to the psychic signature of crosses that come from the vats downstairs. Still, these swords, and those vat-cooked crosses, have won the galaxy back.”

  I curse myself for saying it, but I have to ask. “What about your sword?”

  “Mine?”

  “It do what they say?” I nod toward his soulsword. “Like in the legends? It can bring a soul back?”

  “No,” John Starfire says. “No, I’m afraid that if there are any soulswords like that, they’re lost to the ages.”

  Well, I got my chance to ask that.

  He looks at me with those crystal blue eyes. “My people believe I am the Chosen One, and so I have to act that way, and destroy the threats to my people. You”—here he taps my rebuilt leg—“are a hero, and whether you believe so or not, you have to act that way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stands up. “The war isn’t over, Araskar. It won’t be over for a long time. The blueblood stain—that human stain—is everywhere.” His hand is back on the soulsword hilt, clutching and pawing it unconsciously. Human stain? “There’s at least ten thousand crosses still coming out of functioning vats, and the remnants of the Empire control most of them. We have new conscripts, kids who need brave commanders. They have new conscripts, too. Consolidation is going to be long, hard work.”

  Like I suspected. Glorious victory. Go back to the lines.

  “I want you for the Vanguard,” he says. That one wakes me up. “My closest circle. You’ll be one of five Secondblades under Firstblade Terracor, leading a specially trained division.”

  “Sir . . . thank you?” I didn’t mean it to come out as a question, but . . . “Me? Why the hell me?”

  “Rank means many things, Lieutenant. In this case, it means survival.”

  There it is. He’s going to put me in charge of some little half-trained slugs, so that I don’t go offing myself.

  “I need men like you. And if I catch you chasing trouble with Kurguls, the only Secondblade you’ll see will be the one that takes your head off.”

  I can’t help asking. “Rashiya?”

  “I’ve got another mission for her.” He pauses. “I didn’t help her, Araskar. She joined on her own, and it wasn’t until a few days ago that I knew she had survived. Respect that.”

  “Right.”

  “Get some sleep,” he says. He takes that twitchy hand off his hilt and puts it on my arm. “Stamp your boots and open your sheath.” And then his hand goes right back to the hilt.

  I stand up and salute as he turns to go. Vanguard. Little slugs like me don’t become Vanguard. All I’ve ever done was kill a bunch of other crosses. Once I got command, I tried to keep my kids together, but we lost plenty of them. I could have been shot down in Irithessa’s orbit, in planetfall, in the assault on the capital. I’m only here by luck. And as for respecting Rashiya, I was. She deserves someone a lot better.

  I sink back down, and dig around in my pocket. I pull out a handful of the little pink pills that were so much trouble to get from those Kurguls.

  They sit in the hollow of my hand, five dots.

  The Kurguls call these brain bullets. Most folk just call them pinks. They’re simple tranquilizers as far as the galaxy is concerned. Unless you’re a Jorian cross.

  For one like me, these tranquilizers put you in touch with the beating heart of the universe. It’s like music. You have no idea what music can sound like, until you’ve heard the background music of the stars. Only a few crosses can hear it. I am one of the lucky few, when I take these.

  A soft, low whistle like wind through tall trees. Over it, the dropping notes, like cool pinpricks of rain. And when I have these, I don’t care about my soldiers. I don’t care about Rashiya and all my friends dying on that ship, the Vanguard, the bloody mission.

  Winning a war isn’t the best feeling of my life. It’s up there, but it can’t compare to forgetting the war completely.

  -3-

  Jaqi

  YOU’D BE AMAZED how quick a batch of scabs can clear out a fighting pit. There’s not a lot of places to go on an ecosphere only a few miles around, and there are a lot of people crowded in port at Swiney Niney. But everyone from that fighting pit scatters, leaving me alone.

  And it just so happens that this fighting pit is deep in what was originally the parkland of Swiney. Probably a nice place, once upon a time, but since the environmental controls broke, this green is now a thick, stinking jungle.

  There’s pathways here, through mud and roots and all sorts of weird-looking plants. Might lead to another fighting pit, and maybe another sleaze who tosses me in a cage with centipedes—aiya!—and there’s plenty of footprints on the paths, but I don’t see anyone as I wander over roots and rock
s, through mud, and try to ignore the pain in my face and shoulder where the Necro-Thing threw me to the ground.

  I wade through mud, keeping one eyeball on the sticky flowers all around me. Probably some carnivorous crossbreed, illegal as living forever, dropped here. They cluster and sprout and get big and toothy on the remnants of those fighting pits. Yep, that’s what an ecosphere is like on the edge of wild space. Fun, ai?

  The path winds around a small hill, or a giant pile of moss, depending on your point of view. From around the side of the hill, I can see down, back to the port. Concrete buildings huddle against the honeycomb of black tunnels in the air that will take you out of the ecosphere. I was being dragged by the big Rorgs before, so I can’t say I paid much attention to the details.

  That’s when I see a familiar face, frozen on the path ahead of me. Big head, like a melon, all covered with boils, and an eye patch. “Ai! Palthaz? Palthaz Perron!”

  He stares in my direction for a minute—Zu-Path, as a race, aren’t famous for their wits—and then steps off the path, running up that small hill.

  “Wait, Palthaz! It’s Jaqi! From Bill’s!” I saw this sleaze come in and out of port a thousand times. He’s even fatter than he used to be, which means I catch up with him.

  “Palthaz!”

  He hustles onward. “Not now, Jaqi.”

  “You remember me! Listen, Palthaz, I’m in an evil way. Between jobs, and I just want something to eat—”

  “Run off!” he snarls at me. But of course, I’m still able to keep up with him. He sinks farther into the mud than I do. That’s my benefit of never eating.

  “Trade you this,” I say, and hold up Cade’s gun. “Nice piece. Vintage Zarronen A-5. Better than that Keil piece of crap you’re carrying.”

  He eyeballs it. There’s no greed like a smuggler’s greed. “I— No! Off, Jaqi.”

  “I will not!” I say. I raise the gun, and he freezes, without a blink. “Give me some damn food!” I’m in pain and hungrier than ever and in no mood for this.