After a short, calming walk through rippling steppe-grass, the Lodge’s invisible exit blossomed into a sharp-edged hole in the sky, revealing the hard, dark reality beyond.

  Three

  The waist-high, white-furred creatures with tentacles and horse-like snouts belonged to a Lesser Race called the Slintt. They had been menial servants to the Jir aboard the cruiser Draugan, now the Sagaris. Like most slaves, they were not steadfast in their loyalty or displeased see their masters vanquished.

  At least, Arixa gathered these things to be true of the seven Slintt aboard, for Slintt didn’t communicate using Nexus, even if they seemed to understand it.

  Some of the Dawn referred to the Slintt as hooters for the owl-like sounds they emitted through the small mouths set in the necks of their horse-heads.

  Even lacking the ability to directly communicate, the hooters had proved themselves useful as guides and instructors. To Arixa, their helpfulness, genial natures and resemblance to horses made them a welcome presence aboard.

  Still, many Scythians avoided them, finding the strange creatures disturbing to interact with. The Slintt’s tentacle-arms were perhaps a bit too much.

  One of the seven Slintt, a female whom Arixa thought of by the name Roan for the light gray hairs distributed among the soft white fuzz of her abdomen, had been instrumental in the Dawn’s capture of this vessel. The pattern on her front was probably not noticeable or recognizable to most Earth-born, but it reminded Arixa of the flanks of Turagetes, the stallion she’d begun to accept she would never sit astride again.

  Coming from the Vision Lodge, it was Roan who aided Arixa in her search for Zhi when she turned out to be absent from the bridge.

  The bridge, it turned out, was occupied solely by the unlucky Scythian who’d drawn a short lot giving him guard duty. He reported to Arixa that Zhi had left, but he didn’t know where she’d gone.

  After informing the unlucky one that he’d get to spend an hour in the Vision Lodge after all thanks to the delay before Shifting, Arixa left the bridge trying repeatedly, without success, to comm the missing Zhi.

  Fortunately, she ran into Roan and asked the creature a one-word question: “Zhi?”

  The Slintt’s answering hoot sounded affirmative. When it bounded off on its double-jointed legs, tentacles undulating, Arixa hurried after.

  Roan led Arixa to the entrance iris to the Sagaris’s contemplation deck.

  “Thank you, friend,” she said to the little alien.

  Hooooot! it returned before running off.

  The iris refused to open.

  “Zhi?” Arixa called at the tight-seamed metal surface. “Are you in there?”

  As captain, Arixa possessed an override for all locks on the Sagaris. In the present case, she would prefer not to have to use it—assuming it would function, given that Zhi was the one who’d provided the code.

  Keeping override as a last resort, she rapped firmly on the metal and called, “Zhi! Please let me in.”

  With a sharp hiss, the iris yielded, its wave-shaped petals retreating to the edges like a flower explosively blooming.

  Instead of entering immediately, Arixa stood still and silent on the threshold, transfixed by the vista revealed.

  Not long ago, she had known smooth, transparent Parthian pottery as one of the rarest substances in Scythia, the secret of a fallen civilization. Today she knew the stuff as glass, and to the star-folk, it was far from rare.

  Most of the broad surfaces of the contemplation deck, including its floor, were made of glass—or more accurately, according to Zhi, a far-superior material superficially resembling glass. This allowed one not just to behold the cosmos but to stand surrounded by it with feet seemingly planted on nothing at all.

  It was a dizzying and overwhelming sight, this black, infinite void dotted with the lights of many thousands of stars and the clouds which Zhi had taught Arixa were not clouds at all. Rather they were nebulae, simultaneously the birthing grounds of new stars and the wreckage of destroyed ones.

  Catching her breath, Arixa stepped forward onto the smooth, cold, invisible surface and took tentative steps with eyes firmly on the void past her toes.

  It was hard for a simple plains-dweller to get used to walking on metal. It was harder still to get used to walking on nothing.

  “I would prefer not to be disturbed,” Zhi said.

  Arixa looked up to see the Han woman from behind as a dark figure framed by the majesty of the cosmos. At present Zhi stood on one leg, moving her arms in the slow deliberate patterns of a training technique which Zhi practiced. She called it tai chi, and its value was attested by the fact that Zhi could best Arixa ten times out of ten in unarmed combat. Sword or war-pick would be a different story, Arixa swore, although they had yet to put that to the test.

  “I won’t disturb you,” Arixa said, continuing across the star-strewn deck. When she reached Zhi she removed the belt which held her vazer, set it on the smooth nothing and took up a position beside Zhi.

  She attempted to replicate Zhi’s pose and fluid movements. Her efforts were clumsy compared to graceful Zhi’s, but she gave it her best effort in a genuine attempt to learn.

  Time seemed to vanish in this place, so Arixa wasn’t certain how much of it they spent this way, in silence. When she wasn’t staring at Zhi in order to copy her movements, Arixa stared into black, unfathomable depths. Sometimes it was difficult to drag her gaze away to learn the next move.

  It was simple to understand why this was called the contemplation deck. Arixa wasn’t sure whether the Jir or Zhi had given it that name, but it fit. Standing here, a mote adrift on a boundless ocean, one could hardly help but contemplate one’s place in it.

  After an unknown span, Arixa felt Zhi’s hands on her arm and back. She dragged her gaze from the stars to find Zhi adjusting and correcting her posture, guiding her hand through two iterations of a certain movement before resuming her former spot to demonstrate again.

  “Will you teach me?” Arixa asked, a minuscule voice in the universe.

  “I am,” Zhi answered evenly.

  “I meant more often.”

  A brief silence, then, “No. You can ask me to teach you or you can ask me to kill you. Not both.”

  Arixa understood the meaning of her cryptic utterance: Zhi believed their current course to be suicide. They had argued about it in the early days after their departure from Earth and a few times since.

  Ceasing her movements, Arixa let sweating limbs fall slack. “Zhi...” she said. “I don’t wish for us to keep repeating ourselves.”

  “Nor I. Not when I have slept five hours out of the last hundred.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Arixa said. “I haven’t rested either. After the next Shift, you must. I insist on it. I will, too.”

  Eyes on the expanse of stars, Zhi continued her training. “How can I sleep? A great deal is automated in this vessel, but it is not meant to function with a crew of one... much less zero.”

  “I know, Zhi,” Arixa said exhaustedly. “I know.”

  They had spoken almost these exact words before.

  “We have no hope without taking on more crew,” Zhi said. It was not a new request.

  “We will. After,” Arixa promised, just like before.

  With a forceful sigh, Zhi halted her training in mid-movement. She kept her gaze on the stars rather than the human with whom she conversed. “After a frontal assault by a lone cruiser on a station sure to be defended?” she mocked. “A cruiser with a cargo of more than eighty thousand sentient life forms in suspension?”

  “Destoying the Tether Station was your idea,” Arixa returned. “When it’s gone, when Earth is safe for four years, we’ll have time to build a crew. A rebellion.”

  “I said that Earth would be safer if we could destroy the Tether. I said it before we knew from the Draugan’s log that three S-wave messages were transmitted during our assault. The Pentarchy knows. They will expect us at the Tether Station. They will defend it with bigger ships than ours armed with better weapons and experienced crews. I am a single amateur with no experience of war. And beyond that, Arixa... eighty thousand sentients stand to die. That includes sixteen thousand humans whom we just saved from slavery or worse.”

  “Not an hour passes that I don’t think of the Sleepers, Zhi.”

  “Yes, of course. Because they are useful to you—as an army.”

  “Potential recruits,” Arixa corrected. “The choice will be theirs. But Earth’s safety must come first, and that means attacking the Tether. I would fight for the freedom of a living homeworld, not a wasteland.”

  Fury flashed in Zhi’s eyes before she suppressed it with a deeply drawn breath. “And if we fail, as is near certain, then the sacrifice of the Sleepers will have been worthwhile?”

  “Yes,” Arixa replied, swiftly and without doubt.

  “Where is their choice in that?”

  Arixa suppressed a groan and said, “I admire you, Zhi. You want to be a warrior. You are one, at heart. But you don’t know war. This talk of right and wrong has its place. It isn’t here. Not now. These Sleepers were doomed from the moment this ship descended over their cities. It’s because of us that they have any chance at all.”

  “And you intend to throw away that chance.”

  “I intend to do what’s best for Scythia. For Earth. They are my charge. If the Sleepers, who were doomed before, are doomed still, then that’s the fault of gods and Jir.”

  Zhi blinked as if stunned. “I am at a loss sometimes for how to converse with you. That is why I thought it better not to try.”

  “I never stop trying,” Arixa said.

  “Nor I, when it comes to eighty thousand innocent lives. You care only about becoming a legend, and legends refuse to accept when something is impossible.”

  There were few people whom Arixa could allow to mock her. Zhi was lucky to be among that few, even though they had known each other a relatively short time.

  “I care about the Dawn,” Arixa said. “I care about giving my people a future that isn’t dictated by aliens. I care about my friends, including you. Get some rest. Then with fresh eyes we’ll work on a plan to destroy the Warp Tether and save the Sleepers.”

  “No such plan exists,” Zhi said. “No amount of sleep will change that.”

  “There was no plan to stop the devastation of Luoyang and capture this ship until you and I made it.”

  “Your ignorance served us well in that endeavor,” Zhi said. “Now it threatens to destroy us.”

  Arixa replied at length, “I admit I am ignorant of many things. That may make me too bold. A frontal assault on a defended target is not my way. It’s not the Scythian way. But I refuse to imitate this toothless, nameless resistance of which you, Fizzbik and Vax were a part. It’s not resistance at all, hiding and waiting and planning. If we divert from the path of action now, if we go into hiding to build and plan and awaken Sleepers, we’re finished. We’ll have stolen a ship and vanished. So what? That will mean nothing if the Pentarchy simply sends another and hunts us down to finish us on their terms.”

  “You still don’t understand,” Zhi lamented.

  “I understand that even if our chances of destroying the Tether are low, Zhi, they become zero if we wait. Too much delay, and it won’t even matter anymore. Come up with a way to lessen the risk to the Sleepers, and I’ll agree to it. But Earth must come first, and for Earth’s sake, our only choice is to attack now.”

  While Zhi stared silently at the cosmos, Arixa sighed and went on, “You and I are equals in this venture, Zhi. The legend we leave behind won’t just be mine. It will be ours. Together.”

  Zhi scoffed. “Your equal, am I? Keep all the credit. I don’t want to be a legend. What matters to me is that we saved all of these beings. They have value, not only as a horde for you to throw at the Pentarchy but because they are alive.”

  “My people in Scythia are alive, too,” Arixa said. “The Han of Luoyang are alive. I want to keep them that way. If we destroy the Tether, it buys them years, but even if we fail... with us dead, the Pentarchy will have less cause to punish Earth and will not hold it hostage against us. That is what will make the Sleepers’ sacrifice worthwhile.”

  “There is another option.”

  Arixa knew what Zhi meant. She had raised the idea before.

  “No,” Arixa declared anew. “I won’t communicate with the Jir. Not before we strike them. If we survive, I’ll consider negotiation.”

  “We won’t survive.”

  “You’ve seen battle once, Zhi. I have seen it a hundred times. I always believe I’ll survive. Up to now, I’ve always been right.” She looked at Zhi in the dim light of a thousand distant suns and begged, “Please keep your faith in me. I treasure it, and I treasure you, Zhi. I sensed from our first meeting that we’d become friends, however much you resisted it. Stand by me on our present course, for now, and I promise to...” She gazed again at the naked universe and finished, “contemplate your advice. I only wish to do what’s best for the greatest number of my people. Who are also your people.”

  Stooping, Arixa retrieved and refastened her vazer belt in preparation to leave.

  “I will teach you,” Zhi said at length. “In the hope that you’ll make the right choice before it’s too late. Meet me here between Shifts.”

  Arixa nodded. “Return with me to the bridge?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  Four

  120 HOURS EARLIER

  Daraz had died and gone to the Otherworld.

  There was no other possibility. How else to explain why he had awakened bound hand and foot, pinned to the wall by some sort of netting and surrounded by the bodies of dozens of other warriors in the same state?

  How else to explain why his last memories were of violent battle with gray-faced monsters in the iron bowels of their flying ship?

  How else to explain why he seemed to view the metal surfaces around him through a blue veil?

  How else to explain the dark, shapeless forms which passed through the walls now and then, like cloud shadows without clouds or sun to cast them?

  How else to explain why his body had the weight of a feather, causing him to float instead of stand inside the chamber full of shrouded corpses?

  Upon first escaping his bonds, Daraz had tumbled wildly, careening into walls lined with the dead bodies of men and women whose pale, death-frozen faces he had known when they were warm. He had witnessed many of their deaths in the assault on the monsters’ flying ship, particularly those who had not been among the twenty-four warriors of the Dawn chosen by Arixa to visit the star-folk in the frozen north and be augmented by the dog-man.

  Daraz had been among those chosen, his strength and speed and endurance increased, putting him on par with ancient heroes. Following Olkavas through the endless metal tunnels, he had absorbed wound after wound from the enemy slug throwers.

  He had seen augmented Olkavas finally die, his head turned to pulp. Most of the rest had died, too. Where Daraz’s memories ended, the nine warriors remaining of his group had come under sudden fire from behind.

  He had taken heavy wounds. Too many, it would seem, for even his hero’s body to endure.

  At first, Daraz tried to swim in the dimly lit chamber, but the flailing of his arms and legs achieved nothing except to turn him in every direction, none of which seemed to be down. The chill air was not like water.

  On one of the walls, in a bare spot devoid of corpses, some small lights glowed—blue, of course, like everything else, including his own skin. In that spot, the metal surface was inscribed with the faintly etched lines which Daraz recognized as one of the round iris-doors used by the star-folk.

  The Hall of the Dead could not look like this, all smooth metal and strange glows and alien doors, could it?

  Perhaps the similarity meant those gray monsters, the Jir, had been true gods after all.

  It was cold in this place. Daraz’s breath puffed out in blue clouds. Could he have returned to the frozen wastes where he had been augmented? But in that place, the snow’s chill had not penetrated the walls as this did. There, his feet had remained firmly on the metal floors.

  The conclusion was inescapable: this could only be the Otherworld.

  Terrified as he was, Daraz didn’t scream lest the gods be watching, perhaps even testing him. Instead, with considerable effort and many collisions, he learned how to move about with gentle pushes. Eventually, he was able to place himself by the sealed door, which refused to open.

  Pounding on it proved a challenge, for the impacts pushed him backward. Only by clinging tightly to a handle he found—there were many of them affixed to various surfaces, surely for this very purpose—was he able to knock on the metal and produce a hollow thud.

  “Let me out!” he shouted. The words emerged with difficulty, for in spite of his best efforts his lungs refused to fill properly with the chamber’s thin air. After a few more shouts, he gave up on using his voice, focusing instead on hammering at the doorway.

  After some portion of an hour, he gave up on that, too, and turned instead to whispered prayers.

  “Queen Tabiti, Sun Mother, if you can hear me... send me your holy fire. Free me from this cold chamber. Or if this is to be my dwelling place for eternity, tell me that I might know and accept it.”

  No warmth came, no light, no sign.

  That was no surprise. Any goddess, much less a queen, had better things to do than see personally to the afterlife of a single warrior, even if he had the strength of six men and had died nobly in battle with monsters.

  “Tagimasad,” Daraz ventured next, trying that second most powerful deity, “if you can hear me, set me free.”

  But Tagimasad likewise gave no reply. Nor did Aresh or Api. Oitosyros was silent. None of the gods listened, or else they heard and didn’t give a shit.

  After a while, Daraz found among the corpse-nets a cache of weapons belonging to the dead Scythians. Since he had nothing but time, he searched through it until he found his own cavalry ax and took to bashing the door with that. Because the wall was metal and he could only swing with one arm, the other being required to brace himself, there was no chance of even denting it. But it produced more noise than a fist could, if anyone could hear.

 

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