The Firmament of Flame, page 23
She’d been in pain as well. Just like Jane.
“I told you once, I think,” Jane said to me, pouring herself another glass. “Warned you, more like. That you don’t want to know my story. That it wasn’t … wasn’t a good one.”
“And here I was thinking you grew up surrounded by milk trees and honey lavender,” I told her with a snort; Schaz had extended another shelf, this time with a chilled bottle of beer on it—my preferred drop. Where was she getting this stuff, anyway? “I know you grew up in the sect wars, Jane—on the front lines. You’ve mentioned it, once or twice, when you forgot, just for a second, that you didn’t want to tell me about it.”
“You saw Kandriad,” Jane nodded, staring into her glass, referencing Sho’s homeworld—she wasn’t drinking her whiskey, just staring into the murky clouds of liquor. “That’s what you think my homeworld was like.”
“I think it was more like Kandriad than any other world we’ve seen,” I told her, tempering my response as I twisted the cap off of my beer. “That doesn’t mean I think it was exactly like that.”
“Well, you’re wrong, either way. You want to know what my homeworld was like? Kandriad wasn’t the closest you’ve come to that. The Battle of Sanctum was. The Pax invasion. Imagine that—all that fighting, all that chaos—over, and over, and over again. Every day. For twenty years.” I couldn’t. I couldn’t, and she knew it. My mind just couldn’t grasp the concept. “I grew up before the pulse, Esa,” she reminded me, her voice almost gentle. “That means my war wasn’t just artillery shells and poorly machined rifles, nor chlorine gas and creaky prop warplanes—it was orbital bombardments and subsonic raids, failing shield projectors and viral invasions. Every day, a new way for the enemy to attack us.
“You know what was the only thing worse than growing up on a resource-poor world during the sect wars?” She took another drink; she wasn’t using the pause waiting for me to answer—just waiting to set the answer right herself, in her mind. “Growing up on a resource-rich one. Telarium. Deep veins of it. It’s nothing really special, but it can bond with anything; it’s the cheap sheet-rock of zero-g construction, used in damn near every alloy you can think of, just to bulk it up without making it brittle. There’s more than a little telarium in Schaz, you know—maybe even some of it came from my homeworld.”
“And so everyone was willing to kill to get it.”
“And so everyone was willing to kill. And die. Every day. Over, and over, and over again. Living through that … living with that … it changes a person. Makes them … hard, or hollow. Or something else.” She reached over and poured herself yet another drink; I think she meant to polish off the entire bottle before I was even halfway through my beer. “Most people on the front—after growing up like that, in that—you could see it, in their faces. Eyes like granite: cold, distant, empty, nothing behind them at all, their minds … locked off, behind walls. Even to themselves. What little hope they had that hadn’t been whittled away by the war, well, it was stolen by the teachings of our sect. Because hope makes people unpredictable, makes them fight for something other than their beliefs, their survival—a brighter future, maybe—and the elders didn’t want that; that was something they couldn’t control.”
“And you?” I asked softly. “Did you have eyes like that?”
“I’m getting there,” she said. “You want to hear this, you’ve got to let me tell it.” I nodded my acknowledgment, and she continued. “Point is, those ones—the ones with the eyes like cold iron—they weren’t the ones you had to look out for, not really. They wouldn’t lift a hand to save you, but they wouldn’t tear you down just because, either. That was your worry with the others, the ones who looked at you and only saw fire—they were the ones you really had to watch out for. Faith was all they had, and that—the very fervency of their belief, the desperation with which they clung to it—it left them unable to feel kindness, compassion, to feel anything other than righteous zeal.” I’d known Jane’s upbringing was the reason she didn’t hold much to religion—to any religion—and I’d known she came from a kind of hard-line, zero-tolerance fundamentalist sect, but this … There was a level of fear in her voice I’d never heard, like somehow, even a century later, those zealots would reach out from the shards of her past and drag her, screaming, to stand trial in front of some tribunal, to be punished for her imagined sins.
“And the woman?” I asked. “The pilot?”
“She didn’t have eyes like that,” Jane shook her head, though that wasn’t what I had meant. “At least, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I did, either. Somehow, we’d both of us come through all that … shit … and still managed to hold on to a little something, a little piece of ourselves, pieces that weren’t calcified into cold granite, or burned clear by fervent hate. She was my sister, Esa.” I started at that; just a little, but enough that Jane noticed—almost smiled, until she didn’t. “Oh, not by blood, just by … like you and Sho. She was by my side, had my back, and I had hers, all through … through all of it. All of it. We joined up together, trained together, served. And no matter what we did—did to survive, did because we were ordered to—that something … else, not granite, not fire … it was always there. We fought more for each other than for the cause; more for the fighting than for the fight, if that makes sense.
“And maybe that’s not better, I don’t know.” She took another drink, went back to staring straight ahead, as if she were seeing her war—her wars—projected on Scheherazade’s bulkheads, bright blooms of fire over distant shattered horizons rising just on the far side of the wall. “But it’s what we had. We survived the fronts together, survived all our rookie mistakes, and by that time, the tides of the war had started to shift. My people—my sect—started winning. We reclaimed our cities, took back what had been ours, then started to move outward, taking the fight to those who had been trying to kill us for so long, and I … I understood that, you know? I’d never believed, never fought because of the faith, but they’d hit us when we were weak; it made sense to hit right back.
“And we kept winning, reclaimed the whole world, and our elders told us to carry our fight to the stars, and I understood that, too—our enemy had invaded our home, so we had to punish them, to drive them back until they couldn’t ever touch us again; not just wouldn’t, but couldn’t, had been stripped even of the capability to do so.
“And so we fought that war, the one out in the deep—that’s where I learned to pilot starships, because I’d flown low-altitude bombers during the terrestrial fighting—and then we just kept pushing forward, kept taking territory until we were on their homeworld, not ours, and there, they were just as desperate as we had been, fighting to defend their own homes, and the war ground into a stalemate.
“That was when Mo found me—found us. After ten years of war, ten years of fighting—not just surviving the fronts, but of serving, of waging the war, as soldiers—we’d risen up through the ranks, Julia and I both, both of us together. We’d survived, together.”
“And Mo—”
Again, she shook her head. “Maybe it was just because we had … access, I don’t know. Maybe we were the only ones who could do what needed to be done. But I like to think he saw something in us—in me—that wasn’t in the others he could have turned to; that same … thing, the thing behind our eyes that had kept us from becoming just … broken, like the others had been, the others we’d grown up with on the fronts, most of whom were long since dead. Hope, maybe.” She shrugged, took a drink. “I’m not even sure for what. But whatever it was … I like to think he could see it. In her eyes, as well as in mine. That I wasn’t the only one who saw it; that I wasn’t the only one who was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
She nodded, still staring forward, like she was trying to lead a target with Schaz’s forward guns. “We see what we want to see,” she said slowly, like she was answering a question I hadn’t asked, maybe one that she had, in her own mind. “When we look at each other, even when we look at ourselves. We read each other based on what we need to believe. I read her wrong, and she … she did the same to me, and it’s only in looking back that I can admit that there may have been more granite behind my eyes than anything else, that the flicker of hope I thought I’d seen in hers was really just fire. It could just be … hard. To tell the difference. When desperation is the coin you pay to live even another hour, hope and hate can start to look … very similar.”
“So what was it Mo … wanted?” This part, I knew—the outlines of the thing, at least—from Mo himself, but there were pieces I didn’t know too, and I had a feeling this was where it had all gone … wrong, with Jane. Not just with her sister, but with the walls she’d built around herself, walls made from the very same granite that had protected her during the war, walls I’d—first inadvertently, then more purposefully—been chiseling away at the whole time I’d known her.
“The Justified were different back then,” she said. “Before the pulse. A kind of … forgotten arm of an ancient peacekeeping body that had long since imploded in on itself. Their goals were simple: to keep the carnage of the sect wars at an absolute minimum. And my people—advancing across the stars on our enemy’s homeworld, the zeal with which we fought, the total control the elders had on most of our population—that had put us on the Justified’s radar, and not in a good way.
“Mo found us, Julia and me, and he told us what the elders were building, in secret—a system-killer, a stellar fission tear, one that would end the war for good, except it wouldn’t, because once they’d used that sort of weapon, it would be all too easy to use again, and again—there’d be another war, and another beyond that, our battle for survival become a crusade unending, at least until we came up against another sect with a planet- or a system-killer all their own. I believed him—Mo—when he told us that, and I believed him when he said there was only one way to stop such a weapon when it was so close to being primed. Julia didn’t. She couldn’t. Like I said: eyes of granite, eyes of fire.”
Jane took another drink, then reached for the bottle again, paused before she gripped its neck, to clench her fingers into a fist and make the tremors go away. “She needed to believe in what we’d fought for,” she said, just staring at her hand, “needed to believe we were somehow … better. But we weren’t. And now that she knew what Mo and I had planned, what we were willing to do in order to stop the weapon from firing … I didn’t have another option. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. Then, and now. I didn’t see another way.
“I lied to her—told her I’d go with her, to warn the elders Mo was coming. And then I made sure she couldn’t do exactly that. The first casualty of my war against my own sect: my sister. I shot her out of the sky, without warning, without even giving her a final chance to … to…” She was crying—of course she was—but she wouldn’t admit it; wouldn’t even raise up a hand to wipe the tears from her face. “And I knew, then, that I’d be able to do it, to turn the system-killer against my own people, to overload it and destroy the moon it was built within, because if the love she had for me couldn’t stop me, nothing could. Over two hundred million souls, on Hadrian’s Gambit, the military moon where the weapon was constructed, where I shot Julia down. Two hundred million.
“They didn’t all die at once. I sabotaged the weapon, it backfired, and it melted the atmosphere. Not just burned it away, but actually melted it down, bit by bit—and it took weeks for the moon to come apart altogether. So some of them made it out.” She shrugged, managed to pour herself another drink, finally. “Of course, there were three times that number on our homeworld below, the world I knew would be forever changed by the destruction raining down from above. Nearly a billion lives, all told. I don’t know how many died. Maybe as many as a quarter; maybe more.”
“And the world you saved?” I asked her, stressing the last word, even though I knew it wouldn’t matter—not to her. “The world of your enemies?”
“Not just a single planet; a whole system, including a handful of worlds that weren’t even involved in our war. Forty-six billion. Forty-six billion souls that would have died if I’d done nothing. When you look at it that way…” She shrugged, and let it lie.
Of course she’d done it. Of course she had. And of course that math—that justification—meant nothing, afterward. Not when she’d had to burn her own world to make it happen; not when she’d shot her own sister down to save those strangers, those enemies, who would never know what she’d done.
God, no wonder she’d leapt at the chance to detonate the pulse bomb. A way to end the threat of system-killer weapons for good, without collateral damage. And then that had gone sideways too, and now she just had … this. All this weight, all this guilt, all this grief, on her shoulders, every day. Forever. The pulse, and the lives it had claimed; the weapon she’d turned on her people, and its casualties; her sister. The first—the first that mattered.
And now that sister was back, and she wanted her revenge.
Jane raised the glass toward her lips; it didn’t make it. I’d pulled her too close for that; pulled her tight, and just held her, and I wept with my face pressed against her hair—wept, because she wouldn’t admit she was doing the same, wouldn’t admit that the wounds she’d carved into herself were still bleeding, that she still felt them, every day, every hour, every second of her life. Because she’d simply told herself that living in agony was just living—that was the way life was.
And Schaz sailed on, through the tiny universe all our own, toward whatever future we’d earned with all our tears, and all our pain.
ACT
THREE
CHAPTER 1
Jane
Seven weeks. Seven weeks we were in the rift, flying blind—actually not even “flying” at all, given that the quantum rip in space-time was just carrying us along, Scheherazade’s engines not even firing. Seven weeks trying not to think about the revelations from the forerunner relic, about what it meant—what it might mean—for the galaxy, trying not to think about what the Bright Wanderers and the Cyn might be planning at our destination, trying not to think about Julia: where she’d been for the last hundred years, what she’d seen, what she’d done. Seven weeks and we were hurtling toward the unknown, until we just … weren’t anymore.
There was no warning; I felt us come out of hyperspace while Esa and I were in the middle of breakfast. She felt it too, the shifting ripple in something that wasn’t quite gravity that identified when a ship all of a sudden wasn’t flying through a tear in space-time any longer—there was no fading of the thrum of Scheherazade’s engines that usually accompanied the sensation, because her engines hadn’t been firing, but we felt it, all the same.
We both stood, our meals forgotten. “Schaz,” I said, already heading toward the cockpit, trying to prepare myself for anything—a fleet of dreadnaughts, the Cyn homeworld, some new remnant of the forerunners darkening the stars. “Where the hell are we?”
“Trying to calculate our position now, but we’re … well off the maps, boss,” Schaz replied. “We’re in-system, at least, not just in the middle of nothing—there’s a … huh. Would you look at that.”
“Look at what?” I dropped into my seat at the helm and buckled myself in; whatever it was we were supposed to be looking at, I doubted it was friendly. I doubted it was—
Then Schaz put the system’s star at full magnification, and all my attempts at preparedness dropped away. I forgot to be worried, I forgot to be tensing myself for combat; I forgot to be anything other than awed.
I’d seen a great deal, in the systems I’d visited—hundreds, all told, if not more—astronomical phenomena of every shape, size, stripe, and severity. But I’d never seen anything like this.
There were two black holes, at the very center of the system. Unlike the hungry vortexes that ringed the outskirts of Sanctum, flanking the approach to the planets that circled the Justified’s star, these maelstroms of gravity were so close they’d already eaten every world that might have once orbited this system’s sun—and now they were working on the sun itself, doing their damnedest to gobble up all the energy and light the star was putting out. It was the sort of thing that should have been inevitable, the star’s remaining core of fusion being inexorably devoured, except the two swirling patches of hungry nothingness were perfectly matched to the orb of fire: matched in distance, matched in appetite.
The bright yellow light of the star was being pulled, in ribbons, toward each black hole, the sun twisted into a kind of curving, elongated strand of fire, but the heart of the stellar furnace, the constant explosion of energy that was a star: that lay perfectly centered between the two hungry collapses, the very pull of each keeping the sun itself stable between them, its fissile output an exact match for the amount of energy the black holes could eat. It was like a child’s game of tug-of-war, played to a stalemate between nearly infinitely powerful cosmic forces, each black hole drawing the star toward itself, so the star was held in the center between them, the unimaginably intense gravitational pressure warping its surface until it was something no longer an “orb,” but something with a shape more like a spiral instead.
That in and of itself was … definitely of note, if just for its cosmic rarity—a system with three stars, rare enough; a system with three stars, two of which had collapsed into black holes, even rarer; a system where those two black holes were perfectly positioned to keep from devouring the third star, rare enough to seem almost an impossibility—but there was something else in-system as well: the Vyriat explorers hadn’t pointed their direct rift here just for the light show.
