The firmament of flame, p.33
The Firmament of Flame, page 33
That liquid-not-liquid lay beneath us—and in front of us, at the far side of the massive reservoir, was a single bright beam of light, cutting all the way across the metal length of the far side of the room, splashing the entire space with bright orange light. No, not a beam: an aperture, a slit, cut into the bulkheads of the facility itself.
That must have been the exterior wall: we’d pushed all the way through the Dead Furnaces, and that was the interior of the ring, the slit open to the tendril of stellar flame that the facility had been built to surround. Out past whatever force field was holding the void back, keeping the impossible heat coming off that flare from melting us alive: the solar converters, the storage batteries, the machinery that this place had been built to run.
An ocean of glass beneath us; a slit to the bright blaze of the star beyond, and in the center …
The thing rose up in twists and turns, bisecting the line of bright light from the far wall, a kind of … pillar, a massive, intricate mechanism: the thing that was pulling at me. I knew, somehow, without any descriptors left behind by the forerunners, that pillar was the key that turned in the lock of this place, that this entire room was, somehow, the pilot light of the Furnaces. The liquid in the reservoir, the strange pillar rising up from that molten sea, the torrent of stellar energy beyond: it was … machinery, in its own way.
And if that machinery was activated, all that brightness cutting across the far wall—and the energy from the batteries beyond, drawn from the stellar flare itself—would somehow pour through that breach in the bulkheads, down into the glass, which would in turn feed the pillar, the whole thing acting as a channel for the stellar energies. The ocean of glass was like a focusing crystal, a lake of unformed potential just waiting for some sort of definition, and when that solar spill arrived, through the breach, the Dead Furnaces would become … well, no longer “dead,” at least.
Was that … was that something we wanted? It had to be, right? Based on the writing we’d found, this place had only been the first step in the forerunners’ ambitious agenda to rid the galaxy of the pulse, an agenda that might well have taken them generations, centuries, after the creation of this station. That plan that had climaxed at this Palace the Bright Wanderers were trying to reach, where the forerunners had somehow managed to rid the galaxy of the pulse for eons … right up until the Justified came along and unwittingly opened the door for its return. But even setting those later events aside, it still sounded like the Dead Furnaces themselves had been designed to protect specific planets from the pulse: namely, the “cradles,” our homeworlds. Specific planets that were thousands of light-years away, if not farther. If we could somehow direct it, aim that power, that protection, at worlds we designated instead, a few key sites like the Barious factories on Requiem—
—if we activated it, the Justified would become what the Bright Wanderers were claiming to be. I had no doubt that their recruitment spiel—“freedom from the pulse”—was driven by the Cyn’s ability to eat pulse energy, an ability that would let them prove that the devotion they demanded could provide a result. But a single Cyn—hell, a thousand Cyn—couldn’t cleanse an entire planet; for that, you’d need …
You’d need this. This place, whatever it was. And to do more than that—to affect the entire universe—you’d need what lay beyond. The Palace.
The power that could give us … the power just the Dead Furnaces alone could give us … did it really belong in anyone’s hands? Even the Justified’s? The sect had changed after we’d set off the pulse bomb; what would we become once we were handed the power to take—and likely give—pulse radiation at will? As the only sect able to protect a handful of worlds, a handful among millions … the others would come begging for aid. I might trust the current Council to do what was right—but the current Council wouldn’t always be in power, and there was no guarantee we’d be able to find this Palace, to use it to cure the entire galaxy of the pulse, or even that the facility would still be operational if we did.
“Power corrupts.” That wasn’t just one of Jane’s mottos—though it was that, too—it was a key truth that held across almost every ideology and philosophy I’d ever been exposed to, not to mention proved out by the lunatics I’d fought, over and over, to keep those I loved safe, to keep the galaxy safe. With the Pax, that corrupting power had been basic strength—they thought the strongest deserved to rule, and so spent all their energy toward growing stronger. With the Cyn, the “chaplain,” it had been his natural advantages that let him look down on the other species—he’d seen organics, and Barious, as “other,” not truly living, simply beings that stood in his way, beings he had every right to tear apart if it suited his whims or the whims of his goddess. Even the Bright Wanderers were using the power they held over their recruits—the promises of better worlds, better lives—to turn them to whatever ends.
Would this much power turn the Justified into the same thing? Into something worse?
And if the Bright Wanderers wanted this place activated—if for no other reason than to show the Cyn the way to the Palace—why hadn’t they done so already?
Clearly, they’d had control of the facility for a good long while, long enough to repurpose the communications tower on the nearby world from a forerunner artifact into a drone fleet control; hell, they’d had enough time to build the drone fleet itself. Yet outside of the two adherents we’d cut down at the shrine in the next room—and maybe the gunfire we’d heard, a moment ago—we hadn’t seen any indication that the Wanderers were even trying to make this place operational.
There was too much we just didn’t know.
Meridian was right; before we did anything, we needed to find the others, we needed to—
A sound: not more gunfire, but instead a single note, sustained out to infinity, a low moan I could feel in my gut like someone had pressed a single key on an organ and was just holding it down, the noise just going on and on and on. I turned toward Meridian, and her eyes were wide with fear even as she nodded: it was her gift making that sound; she’d been using it as a kind of early warning system again, but every single other being she’d ever channeled had created actual music. That was how her gift worked; this was just a … drone, a repetition, the same note—
—finally shifting, a minor-key step upward on a scale, that single step creating a kind of awful tension just out of the apprehension of the next climb in the sound. So it was music, of a kind; the kind of music that created knots of dread in your stomach. As we’d stared out over the basin of liquid glass, we’d all walked out onto the platform itself—now, we all turned, backing farther up the metal lattice of the platform, up the handful of raised steps at the back, our weapons aimed ahead of us at the door we’d come through, where the “music” was originating. Because whoever it was, if that droning terror of a song was the sound of their subconscious mind, it seemed very, very unlikely they were going to be friendly.
CHAPTER 15
Jane
JackDoes stayed tight with me as we moved deeper into the corridors of the station, close enough that I had to pause occasionally to take him by the shoulder and push him a little bit away, making sure I had enough freedom of movement to respond to an attack so that an enemy assault wouldn’t hit both of us at once. Each time, he’d nod, tighten his grip on his gun, and then start gravitating just a little closer to me with each strange room we passed through, until we had to go through the whole damn thing again.
Meanwhile, no answers, no sign of Esa and the others—we were still being led, each room we entered with only one way out, one doorway not blocked by a force field, something guiding our path through the station in a way I truly did not like. We’d lost communication with Javier and the others almost as soon as they were out of sight, the same way we had with Esa and her team: we were alone in these twisting corridors, and this place—
We opened another door, and found another Cyn.
It came at us. It just lunged: no threats, no declarations of heresy, just a full-on attack, and this Cyn hadn’t been forced to pass through one of the glowing barriers to get to us, so it was still wearing a full exosuit, complete with a massive spear in its grip.
I didn’t know if the Cyn’s rejection of firearms was symbolic, or if they’d simply never developed that sort of weapon—but either way, our own guns were worthless against that much armor, a fact I knew already. JackDoes, however, didn’t: he fired, a single three-round burst and then another, the gunshots loud and echoing outward in the chamber we found ourselves in. They did nothing, just whined about the empty space in a ricochet, the Cyn simply brushing them off even as he swapped the target of the charge, aiming for the little Reint instead, the one who had presented himself as a threat.
A mistake. The environs we found ourselves in—a narrow passage with a wall on one side and a kind of open chasm on the other, though what lay beneath, I had no idea—limited my options significantly, but it also limited the Cyn’s path: his way to JackDoes led him straight past me, and I slipped under the sweep of his spear, pulling a knife from my boot as I did and jamming the blade in a crease in his armor, one of the grooves where it would split open to allow him to spill out. Those grooves were almost invisible, but I knew where to look, and he whirled on me, the spear making a deadly arc at shoulder height, but I was already gone, ghosting backward, and the hilt of the knife was glowing red, because it wasn’t just a cutting blade.
The explosives in the hilt blew a hole in his armor; he staggered with the force of the blast, but he still managed to reach behind himself and rip the gun from JackDoes’s hands, nearly carrying the Reint off the edge of the chasm as he did so. I hit the bastard, trying to keep him off guard: once, twice, three times, both of my knuckle mods active, electric shocks coming from the sharp jabs I threw with my left, massive dents appearing in his armor as I caught him with heavy hooks from the force-amplifiers in my right.
He staggered backward again, trying to get his spear raised, but I was in too close for that, and I planted another explosive blade, this one just over his heart, then rolled away before it could detonate. That was that, his armor wasn’t functional anymore, and he flowed out of it like a storm of lightning contained in metal, except not so much contained anymore.
I retreated—slowly—toward JackDoes, controlling my breathing, focusing on not letting any fear show on my face, though I was definitely feeling plenty. It had taken all of our team—minus Esa and the other gifted—to take on the first Cyn we’d met here, and Sahluk had wound up grievously injured in the process. Now it was just JackDoes and myself; we were out-gunned, and the only card I had to play was that the Cyn himself didn’t seem to—
A gunshot; the Cyn stared at me for a moment, his “face” swirling and darkening, and then he dropped to his knees, pieces of his “heart” falling free of the fire in his chest.
Julia stood behind him, some sort of truly massive rifle in her hands, a bolt-action thing, likely designed expressly for Cyn-killing, and not much else. “I told you,” she said—not to me, but to the fading corpse of the Cyn, lying on the ground—“she’s mine. No one else gets to touch her.”
“How … how the hell…” I just stared at her for a moment; we’d left her floating, adrift on the sea of neon beneath the storms of the Furnace’s Gate, and then we’d come directly here, directly to this system. We would have known if another ship had arrived behind us, would have noticed if the direct rift had opened again—
She just shook her head, dropping the big rifle to one side, one hand swinging almost casually toward the pistol at her hip—but I’d already done the same, and we both just stood there for a moment, watching each other. “Come on, Jane,” she said, a small grin flickering at the edge of her face. “Put it together.” I knew that grin, knew the fake-annoyed, resigned tone in her voice: the years just melted away, and I could hear her, chiding me over some flickering, shot-to-hell terminal, as we tried to find our way out of whatever mess she’d gotten us into and she was seeing something in the data I wasn’t.
Because she’d always been smarter than me.
“I got fished out of the neon sea two days after you left,” she told me, the smile growing wider, meaner. “Took a few days to prepare, too, because I knew I had the time. Direct rifts might be more efficient, but they’re not faster than a standard hyperdrive: I’ve been waiting on you for almost a week.”
Goddamn it. God damn it. I’d been right—I’d been right all along. It had been a trap. The drones, Wanderers defending the watchtower—all just … just fodder, stationed there to convince us this place wasn’t completely unguarded.
But if it was a trap, that meant they wanted us here: why?
The same reason the Cyn had been on Kandriad; the same reason he’d been on Valkyrie Rock—they wanted the gifted, the next generation, Esa and Sho and Meridian.
And we’d handed them over like a solstice present, alone and fucking gift wrapped.
She saw my expression change: even after a hundred years, she could follow every thought that wound its way through my mind. My well-schooled expression, painstakingly trained not to give anything away to an enemy—not fear, not anger, not grief—was an open book for someone who had known me so long, had known me so early.
She saw the realization come, and she laughed, knowing I’d put together what she’d done, and what she was after. “Yeah, you really shouldn’t have let her wander off without you,” she told me, her hand dropping another millimeter toward her weapon—but stopping, as mine did the same. “A lost little girl, in this place, well … let’s just say there’s something here that likes the taste of little girls. Especially gifted ones.”
I shook my head, taking a single step back, turning, just slightly—presenting a narrower target, for when she inevitably went for her gun. We both knew there was only one way this was going to end. “Esa can handle herself,” I told Julia flatly.
Her response was just as affectless, the mean-spirited laughter that had been in her voice before gone now, vanished like a mirage. “No. She can’t. Nothing’s changed, Jane. This is how wars are fought. This is how wars are won. By taking away what your enemy cares for. By making them hurt.” She could read me, and I could read her: there was real hate flashing across her eyes on those last few words, hate so strong it was like a need, no matter how hard she was trying to play at being empty, hollow inside. She didn’t just wanted me dead: she wanted me to suffer.
She’d loved me, once. Only love could make you hate someone that much.
“And you want to … you want to hurt her, to hurt me? That’s your … she’s not a part of what happened between us, Julia. She wasn’t even born when—”
“You’ve got it backward, as always,” she shook her head. “Bringing her here was the price I paid, so that I could get to you. If I had my way, she’d already be dead, and I would have been the one to do it. While you watched.” Anger, hidden under her voice there, just like the hate had been: someone had stopped her from targeting Esa, and she wasn’t happy about it. “But the goddess has other plans for your little girl. The sins of her past are hunting her, just like I’m hunting you.”
“She doesn’t have any—what the hell are you saying? She hasn’t done the things I’ve done, the things we’ve done: she hasn’t made the same mistakes. She doesn’t have any sins, Julia.”
“She was born.”
That was it: that had been my window—I should have pulled, pulled and fired, right then. Julia was too wrapped up in her predatory anger, too busy thinking about how much Esa was going to suffer; she’d given me a split-second advantage, the point where I should have acted.
But I couldn’t do it. She was still my sister: even all those years ago, when I’d burned her down to save the lives of our enemies, I’d had to do it from the cockpit of a warship, unable to stare her in the face as I betrayed everything she believed in, everything we …
Even then, I’d been a coward.
She saw the hesitation, and that smile returned, mean, and predatory, and cruel. Whatever else she’d been, when I’d known her, she’d never been that—not without purpose.
A hundred years changed a person, I supposed. Or maybe I’d just never known her at all. Like I’d told Esa: we see what we want to see.
“All these years,” I told her. “All these years, and you’re still fighting someone else’s war.” Don’t think about what she was saying about Esa; don’t think about what she was implying might be happening, right now, to the girl I’d protected, who had protected me, who I’d come to think of as a daughter. Think about this moment, here, now; think about trying to get the advantage over her again.
“What else do I have?” she asked me, a snarl at the edge of the words. “What else did you leave me? Do you know what my first instinct was, when I crawled out of the wreckage of my ship on Hadrian’s Gambit? I was bleeding, I was hurting, the sky was on fire—and the first thing I remember was a single thought: ‘I need my sister.’ I needed you. And you weren’t there. Because you were the one who had betrayed me. Who had burned our world, our cause. All of that: you.”
That was all she remembered now. That was why—when this “goddess” had told her I was still alive, had offered to let her hunt me, in return for delivering Esa here—she’d said yes, no matter the cost to the universe, the cost to her. When she saw me, all she saw was betrayal. The thought was a sick twist inside me—it meant that all we’d had, all we’d been, meant nothing to her now, but it meant something else, as well:
It meant I knew how to find my moment again.
