To Walk the Constellations Pt. 10

And I reached inwards and outwards for him.

Nothing.

HISTORY

I started to stalk around my room, muttering under my breath.

"Why won't he talk to me?"

Pace pace.

"Does...he not..." I shook my head. Fiercely. "No. He does. He has to. He...I felt it."

Memory. My palm pressed to his chest. Feeling the buzzing of his purr. My sex throbbed at the memory of it. My ears burned with unshed tears. I ducked my head forward and shook it from side to side. My palms pressed to my face and then I began pacing again.

"Blocked? Is he blocked?" I asked. Maybe. He had to be. Yes. That was it. If he was blocked. I could...

I could imagine swinging into some gothic, overdesigned Hegemonic fortress. Creeping along the ceiling, using handholds and grapnels to get past some shocktroops. Then, landing in his room and cutting the lashes tying him down, keeping him from me. My grin got a bit goofy. Or...maybe...keep the lashes on. For a bit. I bit my lower lip. That mental image was a warm one.

Kissing down his flat belly.

Nuzzling his sheathed blade. Heh. Sheathed...

My eyes blinked and I started. My hand had dropped to my own threshold blade. I lifted it to my eyes and heard, almost echoing, Thale's words: It looks really familiar.

I remembered my duel with the Hegemonic Knight. My blade had had a system programmed into it, to send it rocketing to my hand if missing. I hadn't designed that. I had just found it in the systems. I frowned, then knelt down on the floor. I closed my eyes, filtering out the rest of the ship's tech. It was harder than it used to be. Shaving away the gravitic fields, the thrumming energies, the faint ticking of thoughts and whispered commands between subsystems. Once it was all gone and there was nothing but silence, I began to try something I never had before.

I tried to slide my thoughts into and through my blade.

I felt it's age almost immediately. It was...old.

Older than I had thought.

Programs and memories were snarled, one atop the other atop the other atop the other, written in code languages that buzzed through the edges of my consciousness like exigenic hornets. I gritted my teeth and tried to not bash and hammer. I didn't want to slice through the systems that made me a Liminal Knight in truth. This made the going slower and more painful – the barbs of ancient bugs and errors bumped into the edges of my nerves, and sparks of pain flared behind my eyes. But I found other programs in here. A design for a dart gun, made to fire underwater, and loaded with nano-forged tranquilizers that could work on most carbon based life forms. A medical kit that could reattach missing fingers. A hair styler. A mace that could explode if needed.

Deeper, deeper.

A huge number of books written in a language I couldn't read, ready to be printed and read.

Deeper, deeper.

An emergency tent, requiring a life-form about three meters tall and two meters wide, be willing to kill it.

Deeper...

Then, there.

The lowest levels of the programming architecture. It felt musty and old and if I was in a physical body, not merely a disembodied sense of purpose, I'd have sneezed. Instead, I moved very carefully, brushing against code as lightly as I could as I found that, at the center of it all, was a series of design specifications, specifications I had accessed many times. The specific color, labeled in numbers and symbols. The length. The shape of the holographic guide-lights. All of it logged underneath a single name.

WOTAN HOHMANN.

WHOA

My eyes snapped open.

I was carrying the threshold blade of Wotan Hohmann.

The blade.

The Wotan.

My jaw dropped.

Who'd I tell?

Who could I tell? No one would even come close to believing me. I couldn't prove it to anyone but another Liminal Knight. And all the Liminal Knights out there other than me were, well, working for the bad guys. But the knowledge felt like a smoothed gemstone, nestled into my hand, something I could grip and squeeze and clutch to me. He had stood against the Hegemony. And now, I stood against the Hegemony, holding his blade. Like him, I was an orphan from an unknown planet, standing against evil, marching along the Chain to gain my Knighthood.

Like...him...

My eyes widened even more.

No. No way. No. Absolutely not.

But I stayed up real late that night, looking at the ceiling of my cabins, thinking about what I wasn't.

SPINNING UP THE CHAIN

I know it was a bad thing to think...but part of me hated the spindrive.

The Tiamat hit Atom City's primary and we slammed in while locked up tight in our acceleration tanks. While the new engines and gravity systems meant that we could accelerate at five gravities without even frigging noticing, it didn't mean we could ignore the intense amounts of acceleration that we needed to go under to smash into a star and make an FTL jump. The spindrive just meant that we could stay inside the singularity and jump multiple times without emerging into realspace.

It didn't make the act of being booted in or out any more pleasant.

But since it let us skip systems, it meant that there were worlds out there...I never got to walk.

Worlds I only heard stories about.

I didn't set foot on the moss world of Wormwood, where humans had become slowly one with the native flora, so that each walking person was an ecosystem – a slowly dying mass of moss and flesh, smiling and laughing and enjoying the nerve-endings as they fired off, pleasure filling them as they were eaten, half an inch a week.

But I heard about it from Mal, shuddering in horror.

I didn't see the lasing moons of Que: Massive crystal cores of gas giants who were blasted apart by supernova, leaving behind vast diamonds that the ancient Domain had carefully shaved down into geodesic patterns. Captured by Que's primary, they caught sunlight and acted as vast laser cores, filling space with killing, beautiful radiance. Silver sail ships, as delicate and perfect as gossamer, caught and rode that semi-natural laser light, where humans that had been bred for null-gravity sang gamma-bust songs and listened to the stars themselves.

But I saw pictures, sighing as I wished I was there.

I didn't take part in the atomic surf of Salt Lick, where nihilist poets rode tsunami waves triggered by deep sea nuclear detonations. In the vast salt ocean created by an ancient, nonhuman ecological collapse, nothing lived. And so the water could be used the way I blew bubbles in a bath, and the poets could compose rhymes and songs as their specially carved boards caught boiling hot water and their armored body suits were wreathed in steam and hissing, popping water droplets. I never saw the hazy, radioactive mists that came afterwards, never jammed to the Geiger counter as we sat around in our hazard suits.

But I heard recordings.

I hated it.

But speed was needed. Speed, speed, more fucking speed. Even going full tilt, we would sometimes come to a system with a rebel spy beaming us information from the inhabited world, or from some asteroid holfast: The Victrix had been sighted. They had to be driving even harder than we were. But where the Tiamat, even with her new engines, was just one ship, the Victrix had the entire might of the Hegemony helping her.

The Tiamat had to go ice mining, which required me and Mal and Rossc and Techne to go scrambling outside, affixing cometary shrouds to chosen bits of ice, and dragging them into the ship for melting and plastering.

The Victrix just had ice waiting for them.

We broke our backs and frayed our wits to the end, and I slept in bed between dunks in the acceleration tanks, sullen at miracles slipping through my fingers, growing touch-starved, touch-crazy, desperate for the feel of Thale's hand, any hand. But instead, I dreamed of nothing but the big black mirror, the empty space between me and Thale.

And so we ran.

And we ran.

And we ran.

Until, at last...

We stopped.

GEM

I emerged, dripping and bone-ache weary, from the acceleration tank, even Mal was moving slow and creaky and old. He rubbed his palms against his face and blew out a slow, groaning sigh. "I feel like I've been worked over by hammers," he mumbled, swinging his head slowly to look at me. I gave back a weak little smile. The acceleration tanks were made to keep you from getting squished by acceleration. Part of the trick was pumping your guts with non-Newtonian liquid via a series of cybernetic implants.

It worked.

But it didn't one hundred percent work.

And after jump after jump, without any planetside adventures, the fatigues toxins and the minute bruises and the tiny stresses built up. I leaned against the back of Mal's piloting chair as he slung himself in. Rossc almost sprawled into his astrogation chair and muttered under his breath as he tapped and flicked at switches. Meanwhile, Techne was sitting up from where she sprawled on the ground.

Machinery got stressed. But they didn't feel it like us squishies did.

"One thing I have to say about the new engines?" she asked, rolling her shoulders. "It is nice popping out of stars without half the ship being on fire." She paused. "Most of the time."

Mal grunted, then reached up and slid his glasses on with his foot. "We're a-okay, captain." He sighed. "Planet seven hundred ninety eight. God. Imagine traveling like a Domain ship..." He shook his head. "Do you think they feel this shitty afterwards?"

I groaned. "Don't make me imagine that, Mal. Did we make it before the Victrix?"

"Easily," he said.

The Victrix Imperitata emerged from Gem's primary exactly at that fucking moment.

FIGHT AND FLIGHT

The Victrix didn't emerge, like, behind us. It didn't even emerge close to us. A sun was a big-ass fucking huge ridiculous thing, even when you called it a white dwarf. The Victrix popped out of this star almost a full two days of orbit away from us. It was tumbling and slewing, and we had a few minutes before they detected us with their LIDAR and heat scopes. I immediately thrust out my hand and tried to spoof their sensors. I felt them, and I shut them down, gritting my teeth as I did so. "We don't have long before Thale notices – burn! Burn!"

Mal didn't even glance at Techne. He just nodded and began to tap at controls. The whole ship shuddered. We didn't just use the gravitic engines. We also used our antiproton stores, carefully hoarded until this moment. Proton met antiproton, and the resulting plasma super-heated hydrogen gas and shot the gas out of the back of our ship like a dagger. It sent us accelerating at a dangerous clip. As we climbed away from the primary, the Victrix' sensors snapped back online and my head twinged.

That had been a harsh snap back. Then I felt fingers sweeping through the ship. They weren't Thale's. They were something...stronger and more swaggering. I mentally slapped at them, imagining tiny snakes biting at the fingertips. They drew backwards and I panted.

"This is gonna be a fun few days, isn't it?" I asked, kneeling down. "Techne, uh, I need drugs."

"What kind of drugs?" Techne asked.

"Brain...less...ouchy drugs!" I said, nodding.

"Got it," Techne said.

When she came back with a medical arm band, I was already feeling the pinch. That brash, swaggeriny touch came again and again and again. They never went for the obvious thing. Oh, no, that'd have been easy. The ship was designed to keep people from just turning off the magnetic bottle for the antiproton storage. Instead, they fiddled with the atmospheres and ecosystems. They touched at the communication laser, trying to get us to burn out our own hull with a refocused emitter. They caressed a console, threading it closer and closer towards an explosion of conduits and plastic. And every time they tried something new and nasty, I was there to nip at their fingers, to keep them off my back.

The drugs helped. They soothed the aching in my head, spiked my energies when it flagged. And Techne did come a few times, giving me a water bottle, some ration bars. I chewed and drank and ate mechanically. The only good thing about doing all this near the acceleration tanks was, once my bladder felt achy and full, I could just sit back and let the catheter stick in me again. Then it was back to slapping at the hand trying to turn our sewage system backwards.

And while the fight in the Machine was going full tilt, the Tiamat was running towards Gem at the best burn we could. The Victrix didn't shoot at us, but they did follow. And at a wide, out of plane ecliptic, Meetra's strike force sat there.

Unused.

The fast pass, after all, had been a suicide run.

I was glad that they could wait and come at the Victrix when it was needed.

A REAL BAD IDEA

"So, uh," I said, as the attacks started to become more and more faint – delayed by the increasing distance between us and the Victrix. "I can't help but notice, we, uh, haven't begun to decelerate."

It was a truth, an axiom I had learned, that the time spent accelerating always, always, always had to be spent decelerating too. Accelerate, say, 50 kps of Delta-V and then decelerate 45 kps of Delta-V, and you're smashing into a planet at five kilometer per second and everyone has the worst fucking day.

But we weren't. We were still burning away from the Victrix, which had actually begun to swing around and start their engines for a deceleration burn. As the Victrix turned into another star behind us, a glowing pinprick that only served to remind me of how fast we were going, I turned to Techne and Mal. Mal was looking grim. Techne was grinning her head off.

"What are we fuckin doing?" I asked.

"A real bad idea," Mal said.

"It'll work," Rossck said.

"Assuming nothing goes wrong and your topographic map is right," Mal said. "If it's not, we're all going to die."

"What are we doing?" I asked.

Techne smiled at me, then looked at Rossck. "It's your plan."

Rossck told me.

I looked at Mal. I looked at Rossck.

I grinned. "Fuckin' sweet." I clapped my hands. "I'm down for this."

As I spoke, the Tiamat swung around and began to decelerate.

SPIN

The Tiamat entered into the orbit of Gem going almost fifty kilometers per second. Using its engines and gravitic impellers, it would take thirty minutes to burn off those fifty kilometers, and travel almost forty thousand kilometers in that time. It the Tiamat just decelerated normally, it'd plow into the pale white surface of Gem and create a smoldering crater big enough to kill...if not all life on the planet, it'd at the very least ruin a lot of people's fucking days. But we didn't come in directly. We came at an angle.

This, normally, would mean we'd just bounce off the planet's atmosphere.

I gripped onto the arms of my seat, gritting my teeth as acceleration tugged at me. I needed to be awake for this. The minute adjustments of the gravitic engines and the shape of the gravitational field needed the touch of a Liminal Knight. And I shaped the field, feeling what was needed just so.

The gravitational field was rooted in the center of the emitter. It was connected, without being materially present. Those fields shaped themselves into the same rough form as wings. The change in gravity turned the air itself into an airfoil, and created bizarre clouds, swirling to either side of the Tiamat, as if she had grown feathered wings. As the wings were made of energy, they didn't burn or melt. The air around them did combust, bursting into streaks of flame and smoke, the white clouds turning to raven black and sunset orange. Lightning crawled along the Tiamat, sparking as the interference between the gravitational shield that created less air resistance ahead of it than there was at the wings did weird things to local electromagnetism.

The entire ship groaned as the gravity of Gem, enhanced by the impeller, tried to pull us down. The airfoils braked us, and the internal gravitic generators prevented us from mostly pulping. Since I wasn't in the tanks, I felt the pressure.

I felt something snap.

I felt the thigh bone push through the skin and blood splat onto the ground.

I would have screamed, but my chest was being crushed.

The Tiamat cut a swath through the skies of Gem. Then, the view ahead roiled - we were hitting a stomfront. No. We were hitting the clouds we had fucking cut the first time around. We were getting closer to the ground. And slower. And slower. Slower.

The nose of the Tiamat hit the ground while we were still going real fucking fast.

My head, locked into place by the restraints on the chair, didn't snap forward.

But I did black out.

WELCOME TO GEM

I woke to the feeling of being carried. My eyes went in and out of focus and the dark shapes over me resolved into the shapes of humans wearing green uniforms. I smiled, weakly. When I woke again, it was with my whole body being suspended in a glowing blue tank. Nano buzzed around me and worked with a speed that was so intense that I could feel the chemical heat of the, throbbing around my thigh, my joints, my head. My brain felt fuzzy. Good, though.

When I woke the third time, I was laying in bed, suffused in a feeling of warmth and comfort. There was no Techne waiting for me. Instead, there was a distant alarm sound. I pushed myself up and heard footsteps stomping – and the alarm sound resolved itself into words.

"Repeat: All hands, report to action stations. Hegemony worldkiller in orbit in T-minus-"

The door opened and men in green uniforms came jogging in, followed by a woman in a blue set of armor that glittered like gemstones. My eyes widened. No, that wasn't a woman. It was Meetra, though their hair had been cut to slew slightly more feminine. They pointed at me. "Venn, you mad bastard," they said, laughing. "You cut it damn close."

I grinned, weakly. "Sorry about the mess."

The men helped me to my feet. I was feeling less woozy by the moment. Meetra, though, was all talk. "The Hegemony are hitting geostationary orbit in an hour. Their leader, Praetor Theodosius, has already issued the standard order: Immediate, unconditional surrender, or they target every single rebel city on the planet. Since they don't know who is and who isn't a rebel, it's going to get bloody."

I nodded. The plan was still there, in my head. I gulped. "It may not work," I whispered.

"We have a backup plan if it doesn't," Meetra said. Their eyes met mine.

"Are you ready, Knight Venn?" they asked.

I lifted my chin.

Above us, a worldkiller was coming to a slow, stately orbit. From there, they could see the whole world, and kill with their weapons as they saw fit. I wasn't the naive scrapper from Stumble. I knew what a worldkiller had and what it could do. I knew about the gigajoule X-ray lasers. About the directed guass weapons. About the holds full of brooding, terrible nuclear weapons, waiting to be unleashed upon cities and armies and starships. I knew about the entire army that waited aboard her, ready to deploy on the ground if their masters saw fit: Legions of shocktroopers, armed with weapons I might never have imagined on Stumble.

All that was standing between Gem, between the rebels gathered here, and them...

Was me.

I closed my eyes.

I reached, one last time, for Thale. To feel him.