Shadow Sun Seven Read online

  “I did, didn’t I?” Still sound like a fool. “I—” Okay, Jaqi, this boy’s bleeding out in front of you. You done this before. Where’s that music? I thought about my mother before, thought about them field songs she sung. Just a simple beat. Bend, pull, bend, pull. So’s I start to sing it.

  “Bend, pull, take the weed, bend, pull, take the weed . . .” I don’t remember any other words, but I reckon there was some, so I stop and think and Kalia yells, “Jaqi!”

  “Oops, I mean, bend, pull, music, come on music, come on, come . . .” Where’s the music? Where’s them big, sweeping songs coming out of the stars? “Any minute now, bend, pull . . .” I don’t hear a thing but the wind and the buzz of other hoverbugs.

  Erdo gives a twitch, then dies in my miracle-working arms.

  -2-

  Araskar

  IN THE STOLEN MEMORY, my stubble tickles Rashiya’s cheek. She clings to my neck, her breasts pressed against my scarred back. I smell of sweat and stale spaceship. Her chin nests on my shoulder while we both read the comic book.

  On the comic book page, Scurv Silvershot takes a drag off his cigarette, raises his gun, and fires one last shot. The drawn shard arcs through space, through miles of vacuum, and hits another character and produces a cascade of poorly colored blood, the wound gushing in lovingly rendered pen-and-ink detail—

  She puts a finger to the word bubbles. The garish page of Scurv Silvershot comic book ripples under her hand. “Finding some wisdom?” she says. She’s never met another soldier who collects comic books. She rather likes them.

  “Look at that.”

  On the faded page, the wounded character bleeds out poorly colored blood, and Scurv Silvershot stands over him, Scurv’s jutting chin filling the comic panel.

  “Read it to me,” Rashiya says.

  “So right here, Scurv Silvershot’s partner is talking. He says, ‘Remember on the Omnitron, when we stole the memories of a thousand worlds? Remember what you said?’ And Scurv Silvershot answers, and shoots his buddy in the head to make it quick. ‘That I do, partner. Memory’s blade cuts deepest of all.’”

  “Good wisdom in the comic books,” Rashiya says. “Why’d he have to shoot the guy?”

  “Betrayal,” I say.

  And that breaks the spell of the memory.

  My vision reshapes into Jaqi, staring at me, her dark skin and braided hair covered in dust and sweat, her eyes narrowed, her hand twitching angrily. Music rolls off her, a restrained, low pulse of percussion under a furious stringed instrument. “So much wisdom in those five years.”

  The word wisdom spreads out from her in a rush of music, three repeated notes with a swirl of tones sustaining them, harmonizing with Rashiya’s sentence. These memories wash over me whenever I don’t expect it.

  “So much complication.”

  My hand strays to my short soulsword, clutches the handle. Here, Jaqi. Here’s some wisdom. Memory’s blade cuts deepest of all.

  I see what I could do, like it’s a memory I haven’t earned—or stolen—yet. I could take the short sword out. Stab it right into my arm—not too deep, just enough to part the skin, to send a steady flow of dark blood into the crook of my elbow, turn to white fire and blaze up the blade of the sword—and suck up the memories.

  Forget my friends, turned to meat in the hallway of an Imperial dreadnought, forget my slugs, turned into space debris by Jaqi. Forget the pills, pink dots sitting on my callused palm, all the times I swallowed my doubts about the Resistance with those pills. Forget the horrible wrench in my hand, when my soulsword stabbed the woman I loved. She was a monster. She was trying to kill a child. I still loved her.

  I’m past wanting to kill myself. I’m fine with living, as long as they’ll let me forget.

  I asked. Asked Taltus, as he seemed removed from the whole thing. We cannot let you forget, sss. You are the key, Araskar, with the intel you took from John Starfire’s daughter. I asked the Zarra. There is no honor in forgetting.

  I don’t care. I can’t live another day with these memories.

  Jaqi is staring. I clear my throat. “I told you. I was wrong. The Resistance was wrong.”

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

  Shards fly past Jaqi and I.

  Thank the Starfire. I unsheathe my proper soulsword, made for offense, and slash my arm.

  White fire springs up the blade.

  I grab my armor-shirt and helmet where I’ve left them on the sand, throw them on. Here I am in the Vanguard’s armor again. Hopefully I’ll die in it this time.

  The Mataka hoverbugs roar, circling the junkyard. Shards flash, red-and-white trails across my vision, contrasting with the sudden blue of the lit-up node tower.

  One of the hoverbugs kicks up its heavy thrusters, and flies up the side of the tower. I run into the open to distract them, so they won’t kill poor Taltus.

  Shards come flashing red at me. One whistles past my leg. One past my head, close enough to burn off hair. I dodge between bits of space junk, even though a shard isn’t a bad way to die, with a direct hit. A small shard pings off my soulsword. Around me, the junk explodes. Metal chunks and splinters fly through the air in bursts, rain down on me, but despite all the white-hot metal in the air, my Vanguard armor holds.

  Bleeding out here would be a lousy death. Although it wouldn’t take too long, if I lost the right limb.

  I drop, roll behind some wreckage, and wait for the hoverbug chasing me to fly over me. I jab up, slice its fuel line, yank the soulsword down just fast enough to keep it from being pulled out of my hand.

  The hoverbug spins, knocking divots out of the dirt, and wrecks into the side of the tower, scattering junk and Kurgul drone bits all across the landscape.

  I sheathe my sword, grab a strut of the tower, and climb up a good hundred feet, fast as I can.

  The female Zarra in our desert crew stands on one of the tower platforms, firing down at the climbing Kurgul drones, picking them off. We call her X, as her real name’s a mouthful.

  She sees me and nearly shoots, only stopping just in time. Her tattooed face twisted into a familiar grimace. “Araskar! Aid me!” She tosses me her rifle.

  I catch the rifle. It displays a blinking yellow light. “This is empty!”

  She smiles, because Zarra are insane, and draws a long knife and a sense-rope. “A fine club, no? Blood and honor!”

  A hoverbug rises to the left of me, drones yelling insults as they prime more shards in the big gun mounted to its front, ready to blow us right off the tower.

  I leap from the node-relay tower to the hoverbug, the distance yawning beneath my feet, and suddenly I’m standing on the hood of the hoverbug, looking down the barrel of this mounted rail gun, holding a much smaller gun, losing my balance, my gun entirely out of shards, so I shove my empty rifle down the rail gun’s barrel—

  The explosion throws me back against the tower. Lucky for me the shard load itself blows out the back of the rail gun, breaks the hoverbug apart, just giving me a blast of white-hot shrapnel that embeds itself in my armor—except I fall, grabbing for a spar of the tower, and I miss and falling might just be how I die—

  A sense-rope catches my ankle, the glowing white length lifting me back up. X pulls my singed self up to the platform.

  Not dead yet.

  Thick, tattooed Zarra arms lift me over the edge. “Do not be so quick to die!” She spits out the words at me, and slaps my helmet. “There is no honor in avoidable death!”

  “You’re welcome,” I croak. My ribs ache from the hit against the side of the tower, and the shrapnel embedded in my armor burns, even through the high-impact fiber.

  “I too have lost honor, coming to this moon,” she says, like she’s explaining something to a child. “It pains me greatly, every day. But a quick, foolish death will not restore you in the eyes of the ancestors. Only blood and honor go with you to the River of Stars, where the ancestors wait.”

  “I don’t have any ancestors,�
�� I say.

  “That is a great tragedy. Had I time, I would sing a mourning song. Go assist Taltus with his machinery.”

  I climb up to Taltus, one crystalline platform above. Sska tend to be short, but Taltus is some kind of genetic mutant. He’s massive, even taller than Z. The bone-mask, sign of his Order, sits crookedly on his face, showing hints of the scaly features beneath. He wields a soulsword very different from mine, a massive, T-hilt broadsword, a black-bladed thing sprouting blue fire. Thuzerian soulswords are forged by hand. Unlike our psychic resonators, theirs are supposed to work entirely on faith.

  He’s frantically punching the display of the screen that interfaces with the node-relay, trying to reestablish contact. “She was going to tell them! Tell them how to save all the stars, to end the thousand-year darkness, end their retreat and stand, and I could come back to the Order—”

  “I don’t think Jaqi was going to say all that,” I mutter, slumping to the ground. I reach for the water on my belt.

  My fingers meet a huge hole in the metal of the bottle. A piece of shrapnel has robbed me of my water. Damn it.

  I hear a rush of music, high dissonant notes. My head jerks of its own volition, to look down. “Jaqi’s in trouble.” Taltus follows my gaze, to see a Kurgul with a gun trained on Jaqi.

  “The Son of Stars!”

  “I’ll keep an eye on this,” I say. “Go help her.”

  Taltus climbs down. I pick up his screen and try punching a code, to get the transmission back—and then another hoverbug rises up behind me. I whirl around, armed only with my soulswords, pretty sure I’m finally going to die, thank God—

  A Mataka drone, this one with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low, sits in the gunner chair of this hoverbug, holding Toq, a gun pointed at the kids’ head. Toq cries. The Mataka in the hat shakes the kid. “Put down the sword, or I see if this kid can fly.”

  I hesitate. The soulsword feels good in my hand. This would be a good place to die.

  “Come on, Araskar,” the drone says, addressing me by name. “You’re the big payday. Don’t you want to take the heat off the others?”

  A drone hops from the hoverbug, holds up a pair of manacles. I sigh, and hand the swords to the drone.

  Still not dead yet.

  * * *

  The ocean coast of the moon of Trace is lovely. Grassy green hills as far as the eye can see, dotted with clumps of red-barked trees. Fluted, spun-glass Jorian towers atop those hills. Deep, rushing rivers and babbling streams fill the bottomlands. If I didn’t have a gun in my back I’d take a picture.

  Of course, the Kurguls tend to ruin everything they touch. Take the Jorian ruins we’re piloting toward. A couple of the airy, crystalline structures catch the light of Trace’s sun, reflecting off Trace itself, the glowing Suit planet that takes up half the sky. It should be gorgeous, the sun and the illuminated curve of the planet reflected a thousand times through the Jorian architecture. But the light-catching towers all are bedecked with enormous globs of Kurgul nest, like leaking bubbles of pus.

  Smoke pours out of the holes in the nests, mars what little light comes through the structures. The nests are made up mostly of secretion from the nest queen, whatever twigs and rocks are handy. And pieces of dead Kurguls. We circle a giant pustule of nest, made of thousands of arms, heads and bits of exoskeleton glued together, the innards having been cleaned out.

  “You sure know how to ruin a view,” I say.

  A drone shoves a hot shard-barrel against my cheek, burning it, the heat aching in my teeth, then kicks me in the stomach. “Don’t talk, cross.”

  When we land, the Matakas shove us out of their hoverbug at gunpoint, up the walkway.

  They haul X out of another hoverbug, manacled and covered in far more burns and cuts than me. “You dare use a child to manipulate your enemies—your shame is compounded to the stars, you are—”

  “Shut up already.” They prod her with a shock stick, and she falls over, lurching into me, all seven feet of her. I’m unable to catch my balance with my hands bound, so down we both go. Ow. I hurt enough already.

  “Easy!” I groan, from underneath X. “I have a plan! Easy!”

  “Blood and honor,” she snarls, but rolls off me and lets the drones pull her to her feet, then stands there unmoving until one jabs her with the shock stick again.

  We walk through a smoky hallway, choking and coughing, under bits of carapace, severed heads, and lots of little spindly Kurgul arms mixed in with the cement and the sticks in the walls. The whole species crossed about a thousand years ago to stop a population crisis and ended up with a surplus of drones. Even now, nest queens should give birth to mostly workers, but their eggs are sixty percent angry, touchy, crime-hungry drone. Drones deemed useless get turned into infrastructure.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” I say, leaning toward Toq in the shackles that bind my entire arms. Far away, the music spirals up, notes upon notes, letting me know Jaqi is worried about this kid. “I’m a good talker.”

  “What if they don’t listen?”

  “Kurguls always listen. You offer them a better deal, they can’t help but take it.” I don’t mention that I may not actually have the better deal. Kid’s reassured, right? That’s what matters?

  He starts crying.

  So, not reassured. Give me a break; everyone I know was born an adult.

  Then he wipes the tears on his upper arm, moving his manacled arms as much as he can get away with, and says, “Really?”

  “Soldier’s honor.”

  Please don’t ask what a soldier’s honor is actually worth, kid.

  They pull open a couple of ancient Jorian doors, wide and round, fine crystal webs studded with gobs of Kurgul secretion.

  The nest queen of the Matakas stands on the other side, on a dais made of dead drones, her wide-padded feet propped up on staring severed, eyeless heads.

  She could almost pass for a worker Kurgul, but more stocky and thick-set than the small figures that scurry around her. A large, sticky belly juts from her middle, glistening with royal jelly. Unlike the drones, with their black eyes, face tentacles, and little sucking mouths, she’s got a wide head with thick mandibles that shine in the dim light that comes through the crystal overhead. Behind her sits a distended and swollen egg sac, taking up most of the dais.

  About ten thousand new Matakas in there.

  Machinery takes up much of the dais as well, a forest of wires feeding into the egg sac. Unlike the bluebloods, and most religions of the galaxy, Kurguls embrace the act of crossing. The nest queens like the competition among their drones. They monitor the genetic mix and harvest from the best genes they can find to make their next batch all the more ambitious, evolving with each generation.

  Swez approaches the dais and bows, then is allowed to walk up the steps made of the dismembered bodies of his brothers, and he is allowed to take one solitary lick of the nest queen’s belly.

  After that, her workers grab him and toss him down the steps. He rolls downstairs over bits of exoskeleton, crawls back to his knees, and continues to genuflect.

  Kurguls are weird.

  She barks something at Swez and he answers back—and I understand it! “Egg-layer, I have given you a key to undo our nest’s shame.”

  I speak Kurgul? I guess I must. Got it with the data dump, when I came out of the vats.

  Cross brains are built to have a kind of recall most sentient minds can’t evolve, and along with my standard Imperial propaganda data dump (the highlight was It Doesn’t Matter Whether You’re Sentient or Not) when I came out of the vats, it seems I got Kurgul.

  Knowledge filters in. Any interaction between the nest queen and the drones can be considered part of the courtship ritual. If I keep letting Swez speak for me, I’ll look like the weakest worker in their hive. Or worse, a disgraced drone. I can use the generic pronouns for a foreigner, but Kurguls don’t like being referred to as foreigners in their own language.

  A worker’s pronouns and tenses are
entirely subservient. I don’t want that.

  So a drone I must be.

  Which means, by default, I’ll sound like I’m bidding to mate.

  Only a week after I killed my last girlfriend. Way to move on, Araskar.

  “Egg-layer,” I say, using the pronoun a drone does.

  Swez brings up the shock stick, but the queen barks a command and he stops.

  “Wingless one,” the queen replies. She’s referring to me as a beaten drone, one she’s about to rip apart and weave into the infrastructure of their home.

  Not a good start.

  “Wingless one? I killed three of your drones and was not mutilated, egg-layer.”

  “They have your wings,” she says, and two long antennae unfurl from her head to point at the drones who hold my soulswords, at the back of the chamber.

  I laugh. “I’m not crippled without those. Come now, egg-layer. Let me into your dais.” Once again, as a worker, I would ask to approach the dais. Makes me feel like I need a slick-down soundtrack and a few open clasps on my shirt.

  She unfurls one of her antennae, strokes her long swollen pupator. “Why does John Starfire have your face smeared on every screen in the wild worlds?”

  “I killed his daughter.”

  She makes a noise that I suspect is a Kurgul sigh. “Why do some sentients care so much for spawn? If his child fell in battle, then her genes were too weak to continue.”

  “Egg-layer, I have come through thousands of battles. I stood in the smoke of Irithessa’s great pyramids. I have battled the galaxy’s great drone, John Starfire.” Well, close enough. “I come here with an offer.”

  “An offer? An offer better than what John Starfire offers for you?” Her mandibles twist as if they’re looking to grab something. “I’m about to see whether the Chosen One will take a cross without even half a tongue.”

  “The Resistance is broke.” I enunciate every word. There’s nice ways to ask someone to speak clearly, but Matakas don’t know that. “Now that shouldn’t surprise you, as we were always living off charity. Funny thing is, once we got into power, we found out the Empire was broke, too.”