Memory's Blade Page 4

  And then I open my eyes and see the black of space above me.

  Oh, shit, am I in vacuum?

  No, there’s atmos.

  It’s cold and thin, and smells all funny, and I suspect there’s a leak somewhere, but I’m breathing atmos.

  And space is up there.

  But overlaying the stars, sense-field points shimmer. Some kind of relay. Points in the sky that flash bits of overlapping fields between them to keep in an atmosphere. Like a lattice. A kind of Jorian miracle I’ve seen before, where different fixed generators all talk to each other from their spot in the sky and keep the sense-field running.

  I can’t quite move yet, but I cast my eyes around. I’m on a street, stone all broken up and corroded by years of atmos.

  I manage to get up on my elbows and see the kind of place I only ever dreamed about.

  It’s one of them Jorian cities, like I’ve seen on pictures from Irithessa. Big old crystal pyramids in the distance. Fluted columns marching along the streets, and a strange sort of trees I en’t never seen before—trees that shimmer bluish-green, twisting as if in some wind I can’t feel. Some of the towers even stretch up beyond the crystal network in the sky, and I figure them for node-relay towers. Palaces in the distance too, all domes and towers. Stretching all the way up to the relay’s lights. Some of them go above the relay, apparently meant to have landing platforms.

  It’s bigger and fancier than anything I ever imagined.

  I remember Irithessa—I remember smoke drifting between crystal pyramids and huge node-relay towers—from the memories I got from John Starfire.

  This is fancier.

  Gravity’s real low here—or so I think at first. I stand up and walk, and I have to be at half-Imperial. The next step, though, feels about Imperial standard. Grav en’t low, then—the grav generator is going out.

  It means they once had lots of intersecting generating fields, but some fields have failed while some others are still working. Some of my steps carry me what ten steps would in normal grav—and then a second later, I come down hard in standard Imperial gravity. Huh.

  Walking will be fun around here.

  At the end of one of the streets, not too far from me, the lattice lights come down to the planet’s surface. Beyond the lights, there’s the gray of an airless surface, and beyond that, I think, another dome covered with more twinkling lights over another shimmering city.

  A full city? Here? I know them Jorians was supposed to be wise, but what kind of fool builds a city under a dome on an airless moon what can’t be terraformed? I’d bet my left ass cheek this moon en’t got a magnetic field worth a shit in space. Why not leave it alone? Hell, there’s plenty of ecosphere templates left over that can be filled and set to orbiting, and then all a body needs is the mining station.

  Who made this place?

  It doesn’t have the marks of an Imperial reconstruction—a fake designed to give legitimacy to the Second Empire’s regime. Instead it—Wait, those en’t my thoughts. I stand there and shake my head. “I en’t John Starfire. I’m Jaqi the scab.”

  Weird how it feels to have to say that.

  Hang on. Them stars.

  I blink, not sure if I’m hallucinating from the pain where John Starfire stabbed me. But I made it my business to know stars, seeing as how I can’t read words. I can recognize just about any place in the galaxy by the orientation of stars.

  Not now, though.

  These stars are strange.

  Can’t find the Dark Zone. Can’t find what folks call the Field of Fire, the dense spread of stars at the galactic core. There’s a smear of stars that could be a galactic core, but it en’t my galactic core.

  I en’t never seen this configuration of stars before.

  This en’t my galaxy.

  I force myself up, despite the pain. The synthskin gel-packs are doing their work, but not enough. Warm blood is still trickling into my clothes, and the cuts all opened again when I ran.

  Up above, a flash, and the whole network of lattice-lights overhead flashes, like light traveling along a web. So not just any airless planet—one prone to meteor strikes. I stumble around, on my feet, and as my view shifts I see it—a blue planet beyond this empty city. I must be standing on that planet’s moon. And right now, it looks lovely down there. Blue oceans and brown-green land and swirls of cloud.

  Something about it strikes me, on the deep insides. I feel like I used to when I’d spin out of pure space to Bill’s, like I’ve come home.

  After a moment, I speak. “Why didn’t folk live on that nice planet instead of up here on this dead moon?”

  I keep walking. It’s cold in here, and the air is thin; my lungs are starting to hurt. At least the trees smell nice. I reckon they’re some kind of air recycler. Might be I’m far from the oxygen works and if I get there, I can find some stronger air. Might be there’s someone still alive here, or an automated ferry system, could take me down to that nice planet below, or better yet, a ship that could get me there.

  I walk and I try not to think about what I just did. I come through a node. Unprotected. Should have torn me apart.

  To what is, far as I can tell, the far side of the universe.

  That don’t matter now. Need to find a weapon. I’m still limping, but the bleeding has slowed now. If I came through a node, I can go back, and I want to be armed when I do.

  So. Weapons. And bandages wouldn’t hurt, to help the synthskin do its thing.

  I think on weapons for a moment, hoping that one of John Starfire’s memories will pop up and teach me how to swing a sword.

  Nothing.

  Aw hell, could have used something like that.

  I try a door to one of them crystal buildings. Nothing. I try going up some stairs, along the outside apex of a pyramid. I climb the stairs halfway up the pyramid, bouncing through low grav, until I hit a particular patch of Imperial grav, and falling suddenly seems a danger, and then I go back down the stairs real quick. Heights are only nice when there en’t no grav to go with them.

  Everything’s like a massive monument to ghosts. This one pyramid, what I got part of the way up, is almost bigger than that node-tower on the moon of Trace. The node-towers stretching up beyond the sense-field, further into the city, would dwarf any structure I ever seen.

  I get back down to the stone of the street, broken up in some spots by tree roots.

  Along the street a bit farther, there are some less fancy buildings, what look like storefronts. Their roofs are still fancy slanting crystal, of that super-hard light structure the Jorians built with, but these look like the sorts of the places folk might live. It looks like there may have been a private sense-field here one time, but now it’s gone, so I slip in.

  Inside, everything covered in dust. Whatever foodstuffs was in here have long ago rotted away. A door at the back, keyed half open. A funny smell in here, like the dust is made of . . .

  “Oh.”

  I cross into the back, and there’s a small living space. The bare plasticene frame of a couch, long gone moldy and black, possibly because of the consequences of two people dying on it.

  There are two skeletons huddled against each other on the couch.

  This is no good. Something killed these folk, but it weren’t the devil. I turn and run right out of there. Dead folk in an ecosphere—that’s a sure sign of something bad going down, a sure sign you need to run.

  But once I’m out, I realize there was a cupboard in there, and they might have had some weapons or bandages. I take a breath. “Easy, spaceways girl. Check for medical supplies.”

  I force myself to go back in. It en’t easy.

  The smells in here are of rot that’s turned to dust in the last thousand years. They must have built a nice air system, to keep this place in atmos this long. The only way there’s still atmos here is if they have self-regulating reverse-cells, kind of thing cost Bill near a year’s pay.

  I go through the cupboards. Find something that might have bee
n bandages once, but they crumbled to bits ages ago. Oxygen’ll do that. I exhale heavily, and then think about how I’m breathing the stuff of dead folk and get the hell out of there.

  I go through the back doorway, into an alleyway behind the house. Lots more doors here. Lots more houses.

  Lots more of the dead.

  In the spaceways, we was suspicious because it was good practice. Everyone dead on a spaceship or ecosphere meant get the hell away. Even if they look a few hundred years gone.

  This tests my nerves worse than fighting John Starfire. I get into a few more houses. More skeletons, most of them human, though in one there’s a desiccated cricket corpse, a hollow exoskeleton that crumbles away soon as I shift the air. Whatever killed these folk, it took everyone.

  The virus the humans made. Somewhere on the other side of the galaxy there will be whole planets full of the dead.

  The memory bubbles up and then is gone.

  “I reckon you make sense, stolen memory,” I say, to kill the silence. This is the sort of thing happens when a supervirus, like what them Matakas used at a time, gets into a sealed ecosphere.

  Which means I been exposed to this virus. But as I figure the whole place is a thousand years dead at least, maybe—please, gods and goshes—the virus gone inert.

  Or maybe—another memory pops up. Crosses would have to be resistant to the virus. They knew what we must be. The memory floats across my mind, and then vanishes. Hm.

  I sit in an alley outside another house of the dead, thinking that it would be nice to find some vacuum-sealed bandages, and maybe a gun—and then I see movement.

  Who is that? Someone just walked by on the street. Reckon there’s people here after all?

  I sneak to the end of the alley I’m in, peer out at the main street, trying to ignore the pain in my arm.

  John Starfire is walking down the street, away from me, clutching his side.

  Hell! How did he get here?

  He must have heard something. He turns around, looks up and down the street, and speaks as if he knows I can hear him. “This was a mixed-use district, looks like. Anything worth keeping would have been in the warehousing districts a mile north.”

  Okay, maybe he don’t know I can hear him now, if he been saying that.

  “You like this? This was the humans’ handiwork, girl. They created the virus to kill Jorians. Worked, but killed its share of humans too.” He turns around. I feel like he must hear my breathing, it comes so fast. “This is all that remains of the First Empire. Earth, up there, is just as dead.”

  That’s Earth? That fine little planet is Earth lost?

  I been shipped back to the home of humanity?

  I start edging down the hallway. I reckon that if we’re in a sealed dome—sort of like an ecosphere, maybe before ecosphere were a thing—there’s got to be control stations, places where I can figure on how to find weapons, something to kill this bastard. And maybe some guidance for how I done put myself here.

  Then he answers that thought. “I didn’t think it could be done until I saw it. You reached out to the pure Starfire, and you made a new node, spinning right back here to the birthplace of the disease.” He pauses. “Don’t you understand? Will you keep running, or face me?”

  I say it just loud enough that I feel the words in my mouth, but they don’t make no noise. “No more running.”

  I mean it. If that’s really Earth what was lost, then I’ve run about as far as anyone can run. For all his bluster, he’s as much a stranger here as I am. And there en’t no one like a spaceways scab for scavenging up weapons.

  Only one Chosen One is coming out of this place.

  -6-

  Araskar

  OUR SHUTTLE CAREENS TOWARD the planet-cracker. Inside, suited up, we shake as the vessel takes hit after hit. Atmos streams out of the shuttle. Alsethus leans hard on the thrusters to slow us down enough for an attack.

  The planet-cracker has enough of a sense-field to prevent it from taking serious shard-hits.

  I look at the poor Resistance bastards in their spacesuits, clinging to a planet-cracker as it falls toward a planetful of refugees, and I mentally count all the ways that John Starfire is violating his own dictums. We are sentients, and we should not exist only to die. Here’s forty sentients, custom-made to die. The vats must be stopped, and those who came out of the vats must be treated with value.

  “Forty of them.” Alsethus’s voice interrupts John Starfire’s in my head. “Twelve of us. What do we have that they do not?”

  “We have faith!” the shouts ring in the intercom.

  “We have faith.” Alsethus again. “Araskar, you will have to lead us. You know their tactics.”

  “I lead?” I squeak. Of course. It’s not a bad tactic, to put the experienced one in charge—if you’re the sort of idiot that goes by faith. “Uh, well, these will all be fresh from the vat, but don’t mistake them for inexperienced. They’ve had a standard Imperial data dump, and their muscles are conditioned. Don’t waste time with anything fancy, because they won’t—they’ll just go for killing blows.”

  “We’ll drop inside the sense-field, yes?” Alsethus asks.

  “Drop in, get through the shock. Don’t use shards unless you have no doubt that you’ll hit your target. Vat-cooked soldiers have the reflexes of longtime fighters, but they’re untested. They’ll be more cautious about shooting.”

  “We have faith!” Again the shout. “God bears our wounds! God carries our standard! In the darkest of vacuum, God is our node!”

  How can I follow that? “Let’s shoot something.”

  The shuttle bay doors open—

  Shard-fire roars into here and everything explodes and we go flying into space. I manage to orient myself enough to lay fire across the surface of the planet-cracker, but I can’t see the results—I can only work my thrusters, trying to correct the force that launched me into the vacuum.

  I spin through space. It’s suddenly silent, except for the hiss of the intercom in my ear. Shards, wreckage, shredded bodies—all fly past me. Most humanoid sentients would be disoriented, but I was built to home in on a military target, built to keep my head under heavy thrust and g-forces, and every time the planet-cracker comes into view, I orient myself, push my suit’s thrusters.

  I hit the planet-cracker’s protective sense-field, and my intercom screeches in my ear as the field interferes with it. This is a heavy-duty field, powered off the massive shard, and it rattles the insides of my teeth. It’s made specifically to repel shards, a frequency that breaks the integrity of unthunium, but it’s a frequency that rattles a sentient’s bodily integrity too.

  My head splitting and my body screaming, I land on the edge of the planet-cracker. My magnetic boots gain traction, suctioning to the metal, and I look up to see a storm of Resistance troops charging me, swords in hand.

  I fire a few pithy shards at the closest ones, blowing them apart. Their blood and guts fly off into space, freezing into chunks of rock-hard flesh that’ll fly through vacuum forever.

  I can’t risk too many shards or I might punch through and hit the enormous planet-cracking shard beneath the metal shell. Blow it now and it’ll take the Thuzerian ships in range. So I holster my shard-blaster.

  “Alsethus?” I say into the intercom.

  There’s no answer as one vat-cooked soldier comes toward me, and I catch his thrust and our blades spring together, and apart.

  He’s using some basic moves, stabbing and stabbing again, the kind that kill quickly and avoid anything fancy, but he hasn’t trained enough for vacuum—with no gravity, he carries himself forward too far, and his lunges are too vicious, too easy for me to sidestep.

  I slash open his spacesuit under his arm, letting space into his lungs.

  As he dies, I catch a glimpse of panicked eyes through that visor.

  Born to die. Hasn’t done a thing in a few weeks of life that didn’t lead to this. And yet so afraid.

  “Open channel,” I say to
the intercom, as another lunges at me, and I scramble back. This bastard has trained for zero, and her moves are too fast. I stumble backward, and suddenly there’s nothing under me, and I fall back against the nothingness of space and I have to activate my thrusters; then I’m back in her face and our blades close fast, too fast.

  It’s only dumb luck that my opponent’s blade slides past my side while mine finds a home, jabbing under the helmet. The poor stupid idiot stumbles back, blood filling her helmet. She actually unhooks the helmet, some remnant of an old and dumb survival mechanism winning over all the cross conditioning.

  She’s got Joskiya’s face. A face I know well, a face a lot of my slugs had. Vacuum freezes the blood that has soaked her hair and her face, and she stares at me, empty-eyed. As dead as all my friends who bore her face. I can’t help it—I stop and stare.

  “Araskar!” The Thuzerians yell in the intercom. Some of them made the landing on the planet-cracker—black, heavy soulswords light up by the light of the red shards flying overhead.

  “Report,” I say, as I begin running along the edge of the planet-cracker.

  Seven of the twelve soldiers sound off. I hear Alsethus’s strained voice. Still with us.

  “Whoever’s closest to the front of this thing, meet me there.” I run along the edge of the metal. The planet-cracker is basically a massive half-dome, protecting the shard underneath, and moving faster and faster on just a few small thrusters. Even through the suit, I feel the heat of the shard from underneath the side.

  Something punches my leg. A shard? No—it’s an actual projectile weapon, just a rod of metal that’s been sharpened and launched. I hardly feel it, as that leg is entirely artificial after Shadow Sun Seven, but I do feel the suit losing atmos. More little metal fragments go flying through the air.