couldn’t explain. They took more samples.
The machines were confused. Concerned.
A breakthrough: isolation of a limited flux passage, buried deep within the pattern, teased forward and brought to the rippling surface. Vacuole inversion. They could ride on poisons. Liquid space travel became not a dream but a soon-to-be-realization.
Planet One sent orders.
Weeks, months and
the air burned with cold above the lumber plains on the night that she’d been so convincing. Winter had arrived in the hemisphere. The embryo forests stood snow covered in their first hibernation, sleeping through the frigid night until a spring that wouldn’t arrive. The platform didn’t offer much protection against the wind.
It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their midnight song.
Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.
“They’ll all be harvested.”
“Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”
“Then why—”
“Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”
“So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”
“That’s the way we work.”
“No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way
“I can’t—”
“You can’t. But we can.”
She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing above them. Berlin walked to join her.
“We?”
Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”
“Do you think I’d—”
“No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve met someone.”
Berlin stood in a silence only that phrase can assemble.
Kath remembered her indiscretion, stumbled through clarification. “There’s a woman who can help.”
“Help what?”
“She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her…”
“Who?”
“She knows what to do. To make it right.”
“Kath—”
“She’s not like us.”
“If you’re talking about—”
“She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”
“Make
Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war.. Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”
“We had to fight that war.”
“But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—
“It was for the best.”
“
“Our best. It had to be done.”
“We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”
“That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”
“We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”
“We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”
“We don’t
Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”
“Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”
He said nothing.
“A lot of bad people on Planet One.”
“Not all.”
“They started the war.”
“The war’s over.”
“It’s not over. Not yet.”
He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.
“If we take out One, we solve everything. Decentralize the machines’ power. Make room for real people again.”
She reached out. His response was uncertain, but he did hold her hand.
“And you know someone who can do this?”
“A woman from the outer, where the planets still burn. She says she can kill the machines.”
“And her name?”
“Maire
shook from the release of the shiver, stilled. The headless form in front of her fell to the floor in a splash of destabilized proteins.
The gun an extension of her arm, she turned, slowly enough to stir a ripple of widening eyes and furrowing brows in the circle of people before her weapon.
“I’ll ask again. Who can give me a ride into the Drift?”
A jagged chuckle from behind was the only response to her inquiry. Its distance from perceived origin to her ears spoke of safety, but the whisper behind her eyes still warned her to be wary of a drawn weapon. Weapon and head first, body trailing not far behind, she met the source of laughter with a sharp inhalation and her firing finger poised on her shiver gun’s trigger.
“You’re already in the Drift, woman. Come on, sit down.” His hands waved off the concern of onlookers. Business returned to that particular brand of normal that only the edge of Black thrived upon.
He wasn’t short, but short enough, and he wasn’t fat, but fat enough. He leaned forward in his chair and poured another steaming cup of fermented protein gruel for himself. Tilting it toward Maire, he wordlessly offered and she wordlessly refused with the wrinkling of her nose bridge and the downturn of her lips.
“You’re looking for something, this far out. What is it?”
His enormous brow sloped down into a hooked nose. Underneath, two black eyes blinked away drunkenness and crawled over her body, darting imagined tonguetips over erectile tissues. A badly repaired cleft palette barely drew attention away from the ledge of his underbite. His voice reflected more than simple physical impairments.
“Speak to me, woman. I’ve saved your life by inviting you to my table. You stink of sex, of women. Blood and fear, rage. You’re desperate for something out here, looking for something, and I’m the man who can lead you home.”
