Starchild- Exile, page 33
The man slumped forward.
Benton landed with a tuck and roll.
The psykatana blade vanished, and the prismatic handle fell with a clump onto the cockpit floor. The treader lowered its guns and resumed its standby mode.
With kinosis, Benton retrieved his prism, popping it up and catching it. He looked to Kalhette.
She’d managed to cut clean through one of the legs of her treader, which would’ve taken quite a bit of chopping, he imagined, and the machine now lay on its side. He couldn’t tell whether the pilot inside had been dispatched.
Benton started off toward her.
As he was about to call out, she waved her hands back toward the others and screamed, “Watch out!”
At that moment, Benton sensed something too, and his heart leaped, but all he could do was duck for cover, dashing toward Kalh’s fallen treader.
From behind the fireteam, a third treader stepped out, flanking them. It leveled its frag cannons, the rotors spinning—warming up and rattling in precursor of the terror to come. The treader fired, and metal shards cut glowing red streaks through the air directly at the escaping group.
Liink and his brothers scrambled to get over the wall, leaping into what used to be the open.
Dr. Warnur followed, moving just a little slower than escape required.
Benton screamed: “NO!”
The metal chunks sliced through Dr. Warnur.
The impact shredded his armor, ripping through his torso and face. Pieces of his helmet clattered on the stones, falling among the gore, which landed on top of the miina.
Benton, desperate to help, started to climb out of his cover and head toward the others.
His boot caught on something, and he twisted around to see.
Kalhette held on to his foot. “Benton, you can’t save him!”
“I have to try.”
She shook her head in a commanding no.
He looked at what used to be a friend and mentor. In an instant, that friend had become a mess of red across the ground.
Dr. Warnur could’ve gotten on the dropships with the Nightwatchmen. He could’ve gotten out alive.
If not for Benton’s choice.
What had he done?
He looked at Kalhette—she was the trade-off, the thing purchased with his transgression. Purchased in exchange for his honor.
He felt unsure what to do next. “We should at least bring back his body.”
“Benton, no. I’ll make a distraction while you get in that treader. Our only goal is to get the rest of us out alive.” What she said made sense.
But he felt as if his very soul had caved in.
30. The Photoss
“I just wish I’d had eyes,” said Cup.
The frame of The Spirit shook with another impact.
Through the phantomlink, she was still steering, weaving in toward the center of the five Behemoths, where the surge well would do the most damage. She evaded, and the ship’s gravity pulled hard to one side. She hoped Nak was hanging on.
“What do you mean it won’t work?” he demanded. His tone was jarred—as if he didn’t know how to cope with this interruption. His plan might’ve come from his usual irrational daring. Or maybe Kalhette’s speech had made him eager to be rid of The Spirit. Either way, it was foolish, even for him.
“You’ve got the right idea but the wrong pilot,” she said.
Nak had assumed she could just make the calculation and leave. “So it will work?”
She rolled back to her worried side. “Your plan isn’t fifty-fifty. With only the slave drive piloting, the hash will cancel and the gambit won’t work. I have to be here to do it.”
“What?” He had disgust in his voice.
“I need to be aboard.” It was the black hole question. This was it. And it terrified her. But she’d only know the solution once she crossed to the other side.
“Then we’re not doing it.”
“No, we’re not. I am.”
“Cup, come down from there.”
“Get in the coffin.”
“I can’t let you do this. I would never ask you to sacrifice yourself.”
“You don’t have to ask me to. I want to do it.” She clicked as she turned to her smiling side. It would prove she was more than just a slave drive. “You said I needed to choose. Now I’m choosing. This is what I want.”
“I won’t let you.”
“Because you don’t want to lose The Spirit?” She pushed hard with the zentisal drive, and the ship spun, its path curving in a new direction. Nak was surely holding tight to the walls.
“No. Because I don’t want to lose you!”
“Well it’s not up to you. I’m not a slave drive, Nak. I can make decisions. My own decisions.”
“Come down!”
“Get in the coffin, Nak. You’re jeopardizing the gambit.” She needed to convince him fast, or it would be too late, and Taiberos would capture them.
“No, you are! Why are you doing this?”
“Did you hear Kalhette’s speech?”
“Cup!”
“She asked me a riddle: What would you give your life for? And this is it. I’d give my life for you and for her, my two friends. That’s the solution.”
A deep boom rattled the ship’s frame.
CPC4K3 steered the ship away from the goebs, but it was only a matter of time before they overwhelmed her. Especially while she was distracted.
Nak could’ve just slid his chair over and pried her down from her perch. But he hadn’t. Maybe the ship was too unsteady, or maybe he stood frozen in indecision, which was completely unlike him. Finally he confessed: “You’re not a normal android.”
“What?”
“You’re from the Photoss.”
Cup didn’t reply.
“You’re still artificial, I think, but the difference between you and a slave drive is, well, it’s astronomical.”
“Wow,” she said reverently. And yet this didn’t change her mind.
“You had a memory when I got you, but it wasn’t more than a couple of percents. Definitely nothing about the Photoss or your origins.”
“So you erased me?”
“For security. I had to. Got you from a dealer on Janaught.”
“Bought or stole?”
“Bought. With a small fortune.”
“That was stolen?”
“Some of it.”
“Who’d you buy me from?”
“Just a broker. He wasn’t your owner.”
“And what did he know about my past?”
“Nothing. He got you from someone else.”
He fell silent again, still undecided, still deliberating.
She had to get him to leave right now or he was going to die too.
“It’s for Kalh,” she said. “I’m going to make her safe, give her back her freedom. Let me do this for her?”
Nak didn’t speak for at least a sequel, maybe two. Then in an uncharacteristic tone of submission, he said, “Okay.” Just that.
She heard him climbing down into the coffin.
“Infraspace may be safe for me anyway,” she said. “I’m a Photoss after all. If you got stuck in there for ten aions, you’d be a corpse when you came out. But me, I’d just need a new battery.” That was one possibility at least. She didn’t want to speak the other out loud—the possibility that her longevity might be a curse. The journey might kill a human immediately but drag out her agony, leaving her stuck in some supernal, hellish torment indefinitely. She just didn’t know what might happen.
Nak got down inside the narrow cavity of the coffin and waited, not pulling the lid closed. As he waited, CPC4K3 wished he’d beg her to come along one more time. Instead, he said, “I still owe you a body.”
“We’ll discuss your outstanding balances next time I see you.”
He laughed, a the mixture of happiness and sadness. “I’ll keep my comms on.” She heard him shifting, as if needing to express something more but not knowing how.
“Okay, now get out of here.”
His voice was pained as he said, “Bye, Cupcake.”
The hatch of the coffin clicked shut.
At least now she could concentrate on the task at hand. The goebs were closing in on her.
By her own volition, she was about to send Nak away. Then she’d be alone. Completely alone as she committed herself to the unknown.
She initiated the escape-pod launch procedure.
The hull clinked as it unlocked.
The coffin slid down with a shunk.
It beeped three times.
The blast-off made the engine room shudder.
And just like that Nak was gone.
If she had a body, she would’ve cried. Uncontrollably—unable to see the sky around her. So she was fortunate to have never gotten one. Because she still had a task to complete.
She moved her scanners out of the typical range, which turned the horde around her into a field of white noise, while Nak’s tiny coffin became visible, slowly approaching the precise border he’d have to cross before she could initiate the surge hash. She supposed his neck was craned back as he looked out the coffin window, trying to catch one last glimpse of his beloved ship. He’d at least see the massive flash of light as The Spirit vanished into oblivion.
The goebs swarmed The Spirit, forcing her to bring the scanners back to the normal range so she could see them. Some fired lasers, which crashed into the hull, weakening the shields. Perhaps they wanted her to know they were serious. But they weren’t likely to actually try blowing her to pieces. Every once in a while, The Spirit would lurch, as if it had met some dark friction. Those were the signs of attractor beams trying to establish a lock. Luckily they were far enough and she flew erratically enough that they hadn’t been successful yet.
She swerved, heading toward the heart of Behemoths’ formation. She had to be near the center of their fleet for the Le Encor Gambit to do the most good, and as she went she constantly adjusted the surge hash according to Kalh’s technique.
As she approached the center, she steered wildly to keep out of reach of the goebs, pushing the zentisal drive to its limits. The drive roared, and gravitational pressure pulled on every bolt in the ship, threatening to tear it apart and causing enough g-force to have killed Nak. She just wished he could’ve seen her final performance. Or maybe it was good he didn’t. She didn’t want to make him doubt his claim as the best starpilot in the galaxy.
She shifted the scanners’ range back, making her blind to everything but Nak’s tiny coffin, which danced along the inside edge of the surge spiral perimeter, not yet safely outside. Close, but not quite. She had to delay a little longer, at least a few more sequels.
The Spirit lurched again, this time completely dragging to the side.
They’d caught her!
But she waited. She had to.
And they dragged her in. Soon they would board The Spirit.
She watched the tiny black pod slip toward what she’d calculated as the barrier of safety. If her calculations were right, he’d be crossing the border right…
Now!
She initiated the surge.
It took monitoring the system carefully, cycling off the surge hash each time the mass became too heavy, millisequel after millisequel.
It worked just like Kalhette had explained, and physics and sorjis began to overlap.
At first, things seemed to proceed as normal, an experience Nak once described as “when everything you thought was real starts becoming not real.”
Her gravitational sensors fractured, reading three different velocities all at once: falling backward, jetting forward, and standing still. It must’ve felt even stranger from inside a body.
Energymatter began falling apart: Light sources split into chunks, and shapes with three dimensions turned into shapes with seven, so that these extra forms floated like ghosts around their corpses.
At the same moment, something strange began, almost like spacetime contorted, creating a giant shimmering fold at The Spirit’s nose which looped in a perfect sphere around and far behind. As her velocity increased, the translucent sphere grew behind her, encompassing more and more till the luminous, purple barrier engulfed Taiberos’s five Behemoths, tugging the vessels and their swarm of goebs into her wake.
Oh no.
She sensed the shift immediately, and what came next was far from normal.
Her scanners picked up jagged, blue bolts of light, clawing outward from the surge drive in all directions, including the incalculable ones. The streaks touched the nearest ships and the ghosts of those ships. Then beams reached from those to the next, combusting outward in a chain reaction—a great spherical grid of multi-dimensional lightning. The outermost bolts dug deep into the mechanical brackets built around the shining surge gate.
The inertia of the whole network of light dragged together. The Spirit slid back and to the side, as if repositioning itself to pull this mass behind it, like a supermassive attractor beam.
CPC4K3 witnessed this whole picture in a small fraction of a sequel.
And in that tangled instant she thought about how her choice might make a difference for a whole planet, and that felt good.
Then she and the light disappeared.
31. Sand
The whole sky flashed an overpowering white.
Like a massive, lingering lightning strike, so strong that it easily pierced the dark clouds.
Kalh had been crouched behind a wall built of thick gray stones to avoid enemy fire, when suddenly everything became pure white—her hands, her knees, the stones of the wall, the grass. As the brightness washed out all colors and all contrast, she had a small moment of panic, like maybe she’d gone blind. The brilliance vanished as quickly as it had come, and the twilight rays resumed, restoring the gentle color palette to the world around.
She turned toward the sky, mouth agape.
As the light withdrew, it seemed to converge on one specific point, the surge gate, which shined like a star through a gap in the cloudy atmosphere.
The twilight band usually rested in a gentle unending half-light, so the flood of photons came as a surprise, and although the flash lasted only a moment, it was followed by silence on the battlefield—an unofficial and total ceasefire.
It lasted for a long time, and eerie silence, as if everyone on the opposing side had been instantly killed. But with starsight, Kalh could see the redhelms still moving, so the enemy had indeed survived.
And yet the eerie silence remained, and no more shots were fired.
Benton’s comms started beeping, but he was still staring at the sky in wonder.
Kalh grabbed it from his belt. “What?”
“Who is this?”
“Kalhette Whitesun.”
“Is Xylander okay?”
He took the comms from her. “What?”
“General Xylander?”
“Yeah, what?”
“Valt says the sky is theirs. The PSD reinforcements have been neutralized. We’ve done it!”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know exactly. A supernova of a some sort.”
Benton frowned. “A bomb?”
“Details are sketchy right now. Whatever it was turned the battle in our favor.”
“What about the Behemoths?”
“Gone, sir. Destroyed apparently.”
“Wow.” Benton had a look of disbelief on his face. He looked back down the trail toward Dr. Warnur’s body.
Kalh kept her guard up, peering through the wall toward the lines of enemy troops.
They still weren’t firing. They weren’t sneaking up either. In fact, they were doing they opposite: They were withdrawing.
Benton still seemed caught in his thoughts, so Kalh looked at Liink, making eye contact with the only miin from the team that she knew:
“Let’s get out of here.”
Liink smiled his big, ugly alien grin.
* * *
Wind swept across the grass of Solace’s rolling hills.
It arose from the Kazia Sea, and it tickled Kalhette’s skull.
She smelled the petrichor—the aftermath of rain. It mixed with the smell of salt from the sea. Blue poppies danced on the slopes amid the green. The warm twilight sun beamed across the fields.
The cemetery was on a hill overlooking Ghosthead Bay, a beach where Kalh loved to play as a child. A lone piper played “The Last Minstrel” as they lowered the remains of Dr. Warnur into the ground.
Drums beat slowly, augmenting the melody. A low flute joined in harmony.
She’d watched it happen, watched Dr. Warnur be butchered. It seemed like a quick death, mercifully without time for agony. The agony resided with the survivors though. Several were weeping outright, including members of his family, who surely looked up to his kind, guiding presence. Little Tweldon with the missing tooth fought to keep back his tears, staring at the coffin with his eyebrows knit. Dr. Warnur’s death helped bring victory. Or at least, the first step on the road to finding it.
At the green graveside, Kalh looked down at the coffin.
Next to her stood Nak on one side and Benton on the other.
The tombstone sat off to the side. On it was engraved a single Photoss word that meant warrior of light.
She scanned the faces of the crowd. Most people looked at the coffin.
Lord Admiral Dray looked directly back at her.
Something about his one-eyed gaze made her heart leap with an ambiguous terror. She looked away, staring toward the sea as she contemplated the strange feeling:
Sight was about how light reflected off matter. She recognized water, for example, by the unique way it deflected photons—the ripples made a pattern she knew. If the sea absorbed more light, she would know it wasn’t made of water, but something blacker. That very thing happened when she looked at Dray. She didn’t see what she expected.
As if he weren’t correctly reflecting light.
Something had happened to him at the Strand, something even beyond the horrors she’d experienced herself. Maybe it had something to do with the unsolved mystery of Darkstar, the deeper purpose behind the cruelties committed there.
