Songs of Love and Death

“Why?” Jahan asked.

“When you think something terrible is about to happen, you want to be with your loved ones,” Mercedes answered.

We had ended up landing the Selkie at the small spaceport. The Wasp could only comfortably carry two, and the melancholy music and the lack of human voices had me jumpy. I wanted backup. Jahan radioed our plan back to Melin, Jax, and Dalea.

Our footfalls echoed on the sidewalk and bounced off the sides of the buildings. I realized that something else was missing besides the people: the smell of cooking food. There were hundreds of restaurants in Edogowa. Most business was conducted over a meal, and deals were sealed with alcohol. Food was a ritual on Kusatsu- Shirane. But now all I smelled was that pungent mix of dust and rain and ozone as the storm approached.

The business district gave way to small wood houses with shoji screens on the windows, and graceful upturned edges on the roofs. Now we found vehicles, carefully parked at the houses. The clouds rolled in, dulling the color of the flowers in perfectly groomed beds. Overhead, thunder grumbled like a giant shifting in his sleep.

We picked a house at random and walked up to the front door. I knocked. Silence. I knocked again. Mercedes reached past me, grasped the knob and opened the door.

“Trusting kind of place,” Baca muttered.

“They want us to come in. To see,” Mercedes said in a hollow tone.

No one asked the obvious see what question. It had taken me longer, but I had finally come to the same point as Mercedes in my analysis. Japanese-influenced culture, imminent loss of their children and their way of life—for the people of Kusatsu-Shirane there was only one possible solution.

The family was in the bedroom. The children lay in their mother’s arms. Her lax hands were still over their eyes. She had a neat hole in her forehead. The children had been shot in the back of the head. The father slumped in a chair, chin resting on his chest. Blood formed a bib on the front of his shirt. The pistol had fallen from his hand.

Mercedes remained stone-faced as we toured more houses. It was the seventh house before she finally broke. A sob burst out, she turned toward me. My arms opened, and she buried her face against my chest. She was crying so hard that in a matter of moments, the front of my shirt was wet. It made me think of the father in the first house, his shirt wet with blood. I closed my arms tight around Mercedes, trying to hold back the horror.

“Why? They would have had a good life! Especially the children. Why would they do this? They’re insane!”

“Because the life we offered wasn’t the life they wanted,” I said softly. “This was the last choice they could make for themselves, and they made it. I’m not saying it’s a good choice, but I can understand it.”

“They killed their children,” Mercedes whispered. “Thousands of children.” She broke out of my embrace, dragged frantic fingers through her hair. “Why? To keep them from us? We’re not monsters!”

“That depends on where you’re sitting in the pecking order,” Jahan said in her dry way.

There was a silence for several long moments. Mercedes stood in the living room, surrounded by the dead. She looked lost and terribly frail. I stepped to her side and put my arm around her.

“Let’s go,” I said softly. “There’s nothing here.”

“Ghosts,” she whispered. “They’ll be here.”

MELIN PLOTTED OUR course for Cuandru, the Isanjo home world. We boosted out of orbit, heading for open vacuum between the planets before we entered the Fold.

I left the bridge and went to visit Jax in his office/cabin. He was standing in a wading pool of water rehydrating his leaves, and holding a computer while he ran figures. Nervous whistling emerged from the sound valves that lined his sides. Each valve emitted a different, discordant tone. It was like a dentist drilling.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Bad. We didn’t sell the low-tech farm equipment on Kusatsu-Shirane, which meant we didn’t pick up loads of lacquer knickknacks to sell to your jaded ruling class on League worlds. We must hope for a big reward for rescuing the Infanta,” Jax concluded.

“That’s it? That’s your only reaction to the death of a million people? We couldn’t make the sale?”

The seven ocular organs around the alien’s head swiveled to regard me. “What was it one of your ancient dictators said? One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. And, bluntly, they were not my kind, nor is it a choice I can condone.”

And that’s why they call them alien, I thought as I left. I decided not to ask the other alien members of the crew how they felt.

The bizarre philosophical discussion had meant that I hadn’t voiced my real concern: that the League would decide we were somehow behind the destruction of the fleet and slap us in prison. It would be a black eye for the navy and the Infanta if the government had to admit that the citizens of a Hidden World had destroyed a battle group. Better to blame a slightly shady trading vessel commanded by a disgraced Imperial officer. I decided that it couldn’t hurt to clear things up with Mercedes.

I had given her my cabin. It was slightly larger than the crew cabins, and the bed could actually hold two assuming they were friendly. Privacy on ships is the opposite of what one might expect. You’d think that people living in close confines inside a tin can would want the closed door and a private place. Instead I found that crews tended to live in a constant state of togetherness, like a group hug. We walked in and out of each other’s cabins. When we weren’t on duty we played games that involved lots of people. I think it’s because space is so vast, so empty, and so cold that you want the comfort of contact with other living things.

Which is why I just walked in on Mercedes. She was kneeling in front of the small shrine I maintained to the Virgin, and she was saying the rosary. The click of the beads set a counterpoint to the bass throb of the engines, and I was startled when I realized she was using my rosary. But of course she would have to. Hers had been reduced to dust and atoms along with everything else aboard the Nuestra.

She gave me a brief nod, her lips continuing to move, and the familiar prayer just the barest of sound in the room. I sat down on the bed and waited. She wasn’t that far from the end.

I closed my eyes and took the opportunity to offer up a prayer for my father, still laboring away in the tailor shop on Hissilek. A stroke—brought on, I was convinced, by my court-martial and subsequent conviction—had left him with a crippled right leg, but he still worked, making uniforms for the very men who had ruined me. Sometimes it felt like the most personal of betrayals, and I hated him for it, but in more rational moments, I realized that he had to eat, and that he had spent a lifetime outfitting the officers of the Imperial Navy. It wasn’t like he could become a designer of ladies’ fashion at age sixty-eight.

I jumped and my eyes flew open when I felt cool fingers touch my cheek. Mercedes was standing directly in front of me, and so close. She jerked back her hand at my startled reaction. I didn’t want her to take my response as a rejection, so I reached out and grabbed her hand.

“It’s all right; you just startled me,” I said.

While at the same moment she was saying, “I’m sorry. You just had such a hurt and angry look on your face.”

“Memories.” I shrugged. “They’re never a good thing.”

“Really? I have some nice ones of you.”

“Don’t.” I stood up and brushed past her. “All this proves is that the universe is a bitch and she has a nasty sense of humor.”

“We were very good… friends once.”

“Yes, but that was years ago, and a marriage ago.” I couldn’t help it. I looked back, hoping I’d hurt her, and was embarrassed when I realized I had.

But it was hard, so hard. She had married my greatest enemy from the Academy. Honorius Sinclair Cullen, Knight of the Arches and Shells, Duke de Argento, known to his friends and enemies as BoHo. He was an admiral now, too. I touched the scar at my left temple, a gift from BoHo, and his mocking tones seemed to whisper in the throb of the engines. Lowborn scum.

Mercedes sank down on the bed. “We all do what we must. That must be what the people on Kusatsu- Shirane thought.” There was an ocean of grief in her dark brown eyes.