Ashfall Prophecy, page 4
“Hey,” I said. “You’re up and about already?”
Tycius blinked like I’d startled him, then started to shake his head but instead ended up massaging his temples. “I’m making sure all the systems are functional before I go down. The med-bay AI recommends a few days in a hibernation chamber to stabilize my injuries. Make sure I . . . ah . . .”
“Don’t die?” I finished his sentence for him.
My uncle slipped a hand into his pocket and produced a vial that he waved under his nose, sucking in a deep breath. I could smell the sharp and tangy aroma from across the room. Ty’s eyes focused, and a glow briefly passed through his aquamarine hair.
“Stimulants are the only thing keeping me sharp,” Tycius said, talking faster and louder than before. “You’re going to need to figure out what to do while I’m down, Syd. You and the others. Can’t just float out here. Too much at stake.”
“I told Aela that we’d bring them back to the collective,” I replied. I hadn’t forgotten the promise that I’d made to my wisp friend back on Ashfall. I intended to keep it.
“Honorable,” my uncle said. “Chart a course, then.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, surprised at how easily my uncle had put me in charge. “I thought you were going to say it’s a waste of time. That we need to think about the bigger picture. Denza, Earth, the Origin.”
“I have been thinking about the bigger picture. At least, when it doesn’t hurt to think.” Tycius paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. “We have to assume that Reno sent a message back to Rafe Butler. He’ll know that there’s no cure for the Wasting. No glorious return to his home world. What does he do in that situation?”
Hiram’s grandfather, the genial pizza maker who ran the show in Denza’s Little Earth, who had been spent decades plotting a return to his home planet when he’d liberate humanity from their own self-destructive behavior. Rafe Butler, who had been able to acquire a Wayscope when my instructor at the institute had shown herself to be a speciesist asshat, all because the Denzan Senate turned a blind eye to his tech smuggling on account of his status as a war hero. What would a guy like that do when hit with the news that his life’s work had been for nothing?
“Maybe he’ll choose a quiet life,” I suggested. “Learn how to make calzones.”
Tycius snorted. “He’ll have a plan B. Reno will also have told him what we saw in the temple.”
I crossed my arms. “She’ll sound nuts. She is nuts.”
Tycius touched the back of his head like he could still feel the old captain’s fingers digging into his skull. “Rafe will keep that to himself. He’ll send someone to get Reno and then send someone looking for us. Aela is the only evidence to really back up Reno’s story.”
“So we’ve got Rafe and Reno on our tails and eventually the institute too once they realize we’re off course.”
“That’s probably already happened,” Tycius said. “Once we’re taken—and we have to operate on the assumption that’s inevitable—our best-case scenario is years of debriefings with the Denzan Senate. So no, Syd, I don’t think it’s a waste of time to bring Aela back to the collective. It might be their only chance to ever return there. And it might be one of the last decisions we get to make for some time.”
I didn’t much like the idea of not being able to make my own decisions. The more I thought about Ashfall, the more it felt like I’d been railroaded. That freaky variation of my dream had really driven the point home—Goldy had pushed me to find my father. The Etherazi had arranged all the pieces to assure I’d fulfill his prophecy. He wanted me to become a world killer. But I didn’t want that fate. It wasn’t my choice.
“I’ll only be out of commission for a few days. You’ll be fine, Syd . . .” Tycius must have seen the shadow pass across my face and interpreted it as uncertainty. He got up from his seat and took a halting step toward me, stopping halfway to lean against the back of a chair.
“You all right, Uncle?” I came forward and grabbed him under his arm.
“Stims are wearing off quicker and quicker,” he said. “I better get back to the med-bay.”
A few minutes later, I got Tycius snuggled up in the coffin-like hibernation chamber that would keep him stable as we sailed through the Vastness. The contraption would eventually mend his brain, which was a good thing because his eyes had lost their focus on our way to the med-bay. He kept trying to talk, but his words came out in fragments.
“Your dad . . . he tried . . . to protect us . . . We can do better.”
“Take it easy, Uncle,” I said, pressing his shoulders back into the cushioning. “We can talk about that when you’re well.”
I gently shut the lid on Tycius, resting my hand on the glass as the hibernation chamber put him under. My dad was on his mind too, but I hoped he wouldn’t have dreams like mine.
What had he been trying to say? That my dad had tried to protect us from the Origin? He’d done that by keeping it buried on Ashfall. When Tycius said we could do better, what did he mean? We’d already undone my dad’s work. The truth was going to spread throughout the universe. All we were doing on the Eastwood was slowing things down.
Or maybe, if I let myself think charitably about the man who’d ditched me on Earth with a bounty on my head, my dad hadn’t been trying to hide the truth so much as he’d been trying to prevent more bloodshed. He was a theoretician; maybe he’d hypothesized the war that now haunted my dreams.
I could change that future. I could make sure I never had to blow up any planets. Buying some time by visiting the Ossho Collective might help me figure out how.
The glass of the hibernation chamber had begun to fog up. With his features blurred, Tycius could’ve been my father in there. Laid to rest properly, his corpse never given over to a Panalax. I missed him and I hated him and I could never really say good-bye to him. My throat tightened and I recoiled from the pod, fleeing the med-bay.
Even now, I was still following in my dad’s footsteps, chasing his legacy across the galaxy.
5
By the time I was done with Ty, the rest of the crew had started to poke their way out of their rooms. Most of us gathered in the mess hall. I sat at the round table with a microwaved bowl of mushroom stew in front of me, the twins dutifully eating the same, while Zara ravenously mowed down one of her specially prepared rare steaks. Hiram hadn’t come out of his room at all, but Melian heated him a bowl and kept it covered in his spot just in case he showed up. We all pointedly ignored the empty spaces at the table where Reno and Darcy usually sat.
To one side of the table, H’Jossu stretched out on his sun bench, which looked a lot like a futuristic tanning bed designed for a gorilla. His fungal sprouts wiggled happily in the ultraviolet glow. Aela stood at the opposite wall, studying star charts on the vid-screen.
“So, your brother filled you in?” I asked Melian.
She nodded, pushing her spoon around the edge of her bowl. “The ancestors of humanity were called Tytons. They were the unkind rulers of numerous galaxies. The Tytons enslaved the Denzans to help them navigate wormholes, and they bred the Etherazi to use their temporal irregularities to reset planets they’d exploited to death. Eventually, the Denzans and Etherazi rose up and defeated the Tytons. Some Denzans wanted to wipe them out completely, while others wanted to trap them on a prison planet that would sap their extraordinary abilities. That planet was Earth. My ancestors fought a war over this, and the whole thing would become our Great Shame. That about sum it up?”
“You left out the part where you Denzans also betrayed the Etherazi and trapped them between universes,” Zara said, picking her teeth with her pinkie claw. “Explains why they have it out for you.”
Melian lifted a spoonful of soup, but then dropped it back in her bowl. “Yeah. That too.”
“I could show you the vision,” Aela offered without turning around. “Seeing is believing, as the saying goes.”
“Oh, I believe,” Melian said. “I think I’m good on the firsthand replay.”
“No one should have to see that,” Batzian protested. “You shouldn’t have even shown Hiram without asking us.”
“Without asking you,” Aela said, then paused for a moment. “Do I require your permission, Batzian? Do I take instructions?”
“No, I mean . . . ,” Batzian stammered.
It wasn’t like Aela to be so prickly, but I guess we were all still feeling a bit raw from Ashfall, even those of us without skin. “Hiram seemed to take it well, anyway,” I jumped in as Batzian fumbled for a response.
“Yeah, so well that he’s been crying in his room ever since,” Zara said with a snort.
“I think it’s a good sign,” H’Jossu said. “I’ve been watching a lot of Earth sitcoms lately. To mellow out, you know? I would say eighty percent of the troubles there stem from humans not being in touch with their emotions. It’s a real problem for them.”
“He’s in touch with one emotion,” Zara replied. “Being a little bitch.”
“By the tides, Zara, enough,” Melian snapped. “Not everyone needs to be as cynical as you.”
Zara leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, looking at us one by one. “You still don’t realize what den Eastwood has, do you?”
I found Zara’s use of “den Eastwood”—the way the Vulpin named their tight-knit clans on Stonelea—to be surprisingly comforting. But apparently Batzian didn’t agree.
“We aren’t a den, Zara,” he said. “This is a Serpo Institute training vessel. One that we’re going to get thrown off of when we’re expelled from the institute.”
“Can’t get expelled if we don’t go back,” Melian said quietly, earning a surprised look from her brother.
“What do you mean, Zara?” I asked. “What do we have?”
“We call it suqatal,” she replied. “A powerful secret. Leverage. Think about it. The entire universe hangs on the information we possess. We should get something out of that, no?”
There had never been a war fought on Zara’s home world of Stonelea. Instead, the Vulpin settled their disputes through cloak-and-dagger games of assassination and subterfuge. Murder and manipulation was a way of life there. It didn’t surprise me that she’d view the Origin as more opportunity than curse. Even so, I found myself shaking my head, a little grossed out at the idea.
“What do you think? That someone’s going to cut us a check for our story? Buy the movie rights?” I asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” she replied. “But yes.”
“‘Suqatal’ translates to ‘deadly truth,’” Batzian said. “You’re really downplaying the deadly part.”
“Don’t be so literal,” Zara said.
“What good is any of this succotash shit if humanity turns against Denza?” I asked. “Or if the Etherazi use this as an opportunity to attack again? Or if Denza decides to leave humanity stuck on Earth?”
I ticked off the possibilities on my fingers as I thought of them. I hadn’t really sat down and laid out the possible repercussions until now. They all sounded bleak. In theory, I guess humans and Denzans could have taken the Origin in stride and agreed to do better in the future with mutual understanding and forgiveness. That sounded too ridiculous to actually say aloud, though. Plus, I knew things didn’t go that way. Goldy had already spoiled the ending.
“Yes, all that might happen,” Zara said with a totally inappropriate grin. “But don’t you understand? We control the information, so we decide. We’ll never have as much power as we have right now.”
Melian slouched in her seat. “I don’t feel powerful.”
“None of what you’re saying matters,” Batzian told Zara. “It’ll be up to the captain to decide.”
“Pah, the captain.” Zara rolled her eyes. “He’s all talk. If it had been up to him on Ashfall, Reno would’ve crushed us all.”
My eyes narrowed. “Watch it now, Zara.”
“Oh, don’t take it so personally, Syd,” she said. “I like your uncle. He’s a good man. And as the oldest, he deserves our respect. This is his ship—sure. But it is also our ship, you know? We took it. We did what needed to be done.”
She meant the two of us—first double-teaming Darcy and then managing to defeat Reno. Zara was right. When the shit hit the fan on Ashfall, it had been the two of us who’d sprung into action. I pushed aside the vision of our older selves staring down at a burning Earth. We did what needed to be done, all right.
“I trust the captain will do the rational thing and bring us back to Denza,” Batzian said. “The Senate needs to hear about this, and the institute—”
“The captain won’t be the captain if we go back to Denza,” Zara interrupted. “We’ll lose the Eastwood. Lose our freedom. Lose our suqatal.”
“I’m okay with that,” Batzian said.
“They’ll probably send us back to the mushroom farm,” Melian said, thumbing her lip. “We’ll have to work for Father. Just where he said we’d end up . . .”
A dark cloud passed across Batzian’s face, but he shook this off. “That doesn’t sound so bad to me anymore.”
“The vise will close on us eventually,” Zara continued. “We need to use our leverage while we still have it.”
“I am that leverage, yes?” Aela spoke up, their robotic voice flat. The wisp had been silent for so long that I’d forgotten they were back there, reading the star charts. “That’s what you mean. I’m your suqatal. What did Vanceval call me? A message in a bottle.”
“Not just you, Aela,” Zara said, shrugging. “Also the weapons I rescued from Ool’Vinn’s cache. Weapons that can actually hurt humans.”
Aela pointed at the screen where they had isolated some distant nebula. “The last known whereabouts of the Ossho Collective were here, in the Comorra system. I believe they were observing the thawing of the planet Cor-IV, which occurs only once every two millennia. I want to return to them.”
Melian cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Can you even return to them, Aela? I mean, you’re—”
“Corrupted, yes,” Aela finished. “I will never be allowed to rejoin the whole. But I can still communicate with them. Share the experiences I gained on Ashfall.” The wisp spun on their heel and turned to me. “You said you would take me home, Syd.”
“I did,” I said. “I will.”
“It’ll be up to the captain,” Batzian said.
“We already discussed it. The captain agreed,” I replied. “We’ll go meet the Ossho.”
“See how you listen to Aela? That’s power.” Zara drummed her nails on the table. “Suqatal. The wisp knows their worth more than any of you.”
The meal broke up shortly after that, but I hung around to talk with Aela. The wisp hadn’t budged from their spot at the vid-wall, the suns of distant star systems reflected in their faceplate.
“Hey,” I said. “You doing okay?”
Aela turned to look at me like they hadn’t realized I was still there. “Syd.”
“Yep,” I replied. “That’s me.”
The exo-suit’s head bobbed back and forth in a slow nod, like the wisp was listening to their own internal monologue. I wasn’t sure thought even worked that way for Aela. Did they have conversations with themselves in their cloud-brain? Did they use first-person narration? It didn’t feel like an appropriate time to ask.
“Can I show you something?” Aela asked.
I glanced at an imaginary watch. “We’re aimlessly floating through a dead system. I think I can squeeze you in.”
I thought Aela would pull something up on the vid-screen, but instead they led me back to their room. Aela didn’t have the furniture that the rest of us had—their chamber was completely empty except for ducts in the floor and ceiling that sterilized the air for whenever the wisp wanted to leave their exo-suit.
“Oh, you meant show me something,” I said when Aela sealed the door behind me and accessed their control panel to begin the air-cleansing process.
“Yes. I will need to enter you.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
Aela cocked their head. “That was a joke,” they said. “You’re joking.”
“Yeah, I—blech—” I snapped my mouth shut and closed my eyes as jets of mist sprayed from the ceiling and floor, soaking my clothes and scouring my skin. It was kind of nice, actually. I’d showered since Ashfall, but I hadn’t really felt clean, like the grime of that place was still attached to me.
“Ready,” Aela said.
“Hold on,” I replied, remembering how my uncle had done a whole formal routine the last time Aela had attached themselves to our minds. I bowed at the waist, trying to remember the words. “I consent to have you in—”
“Unnecessary,” Aela said. Their faceplate popped open and the cloud streamed forth, flowing swiftly into my nostrils and mouth. For a moment, I tasted burned toast and electricity, and then—
I was on a beach. This spot was on Denza, the planet’s three moons hanging like lanterns in the twilit sky. Behind me, I knew, was the craggy bowl of the crater that surrounded the capital city of Primclef. The air was salty and warm, the purplish waves gentle as they lapped at the shore.
“I remember this place,” I said. “You brought me here during orientation.”
“You remember,” Aela said, almost sounding surprised. “Good.”
The wisp stood at my side. Every time we did one of these mind-merges, I was always struck by the appearance they chose—like a humanoid-shaped streak of lightning. Aela was taller than me here, long-limbed, with broad shoulders and curving hips. In place of hair, a flowing comet’s tail of swirling magenta rippled out from their head, like a wild streak of marker in a kid’s drawing. Aela’s expression was unreadable as they stared out across the water. I remembered how they smiled when they first brought me here, totally at ease, and excited to share this place with me.
“Of course I remember,” I said, lightly touching their arm, a fizzy feeling on my fingertips. “This is one of your favorites, right?”
“Yes,” Aela said. “It was.”
I took a closer look at Aela. There were subtle changes to their form. Fine cracks as thin as a spider’s webbing spread across their bare arms and legs. Last time, their eyes had looked like pools of quicksilver, but now seemed duller, like ash from a cigarette.
