Edge of Dark (21 page)

“I braided with Jhailing. Just once.”

“What?”

The door opened before Yi could answer. Katherine walked in stiffly and closed the door behind her. She looked as changed as the rest of them. The faces they had been given were expressive. Yi and Jason had looked relieved to see Chrystal when she walked in. She was sure she had looked the same.

Katherine simply looked shocked. Her features were still and almost unmoving, her eyes a little bit wider than Chrystal remembered, but the same beautiful green. Her tattoo was a slightly different shade of red on the robotic skin, brighter. The dragon draped down her chest the same way it always had.

Chrystal hadn't looked into a mirror yet. She glanced down to see the tail of her own dragon, a bright blue and green one that matched her old friend Nona's. Katherine's had come later.

Chrystal let go of Yi's hand, leaving an opening for Katherine to step into.

Katherine gazed at them, her eyes still wide and her perfectly pink mouth open. She sat down just inside the doorway, very carefully. She barely had enough control of her body to get to the floor without falling.

Chrystal nearly fell trying to get to her. They surrounded Katherine, all of them touching her. Jason stroked her cheek, Chrystal held her hand. Yi touched her shoulder.

Katherine screamed, “Get away from me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHARLIE

Charlie sat by himself in the conference room off of command. He had learned how to flick the wall displays from view to view. All four forward cams displayed part of the Deep at a slightly different angle and zoom level. It made him feel like he was surrounded by four different space stations rather than like they flew toward one.

When he had been on Lym he had known what to think about the greedy, rich, indulgent space stations. So many of the truths in his life had been exposed as lies in the face of the reality of these people and this ship and now the station that he felt thin, as if the things that defined him had turned out to be made of air and clouds.

The center spine of the Deep looked like a river of soap bubbles full of light. A thousand thousand ships were moored to the river. Ships far bigger than the
Sultry Savior
—ships so big all of the population of Lym might fit in them. As he watched, the bubbles resolved into habitats, farms, and mechanical structures he couldn't quite attach a purpose to. Some bubbles were connected to one another by tubes. Spaghetti strings of tunnels wove in and out of bubbles and even through of a few of the ships.

Trains ran inside some of the spaghetti strings.

Tiny lights buzzed around the station like insects. Small ships, delivery ships, passenger ferries.

So big.

Satyana had told him that the Diamond Deep had more living space than the entire surface of Lym.

He believed.

The
Sultry Savior
approached the station somewhere near the aft end. He lost the ability to see it all but gained finer detail. The curve of clear tubes, closed tubes. A flash of green. The arrowhead shape of a small ship and another one like a cylinder with windows. The aft superstructure of a ship far bigger than theirs, looming.

Nona came and stood beside him. “It's the first time I've seen it this way, too. Flying into it. It looks more friendly when you're inside.”

“I hope so.” They headed toward an opening full of blackness and periodic, punctuating colored lights. “How big was the High Sweet Home? Comparatively?”

She called out to the ship's AI. “Helix? Can you answer that?”

A soothing female voice responded. “The Diamond Deep is roughly thirty-seven point five times bigger than the High Sweet Home.”

Charlie thought through the math. “That's still really, really big.”

Helix continued. “The last census counted five thousand seven hundred and four civilians on the High Sweet Home. There may have been as many military staff.”

Nona added, “The Deep is the biggest by far. Home to tens of millions.”

“It's amazing,” he told her. Whether or not he ended up liking the Deep, he was grateful for the chance to see it.

“It doesn't look vulnerable,” Nona mused. “The High Sweet Home must not have looked that way either. It would have been bigger than the part of the Deep that we see now.” Her fingers roamed the dragon tattoo on her neck, maybe unconsciously.

“Everything is vulnerable.” He was thinking of Neville, and how that had once been a thriving city in the middle of a well-peopled continent. “Time kills everything.”

She moved closer to him, almost touching. Close enough he could smell her soap. “At least Lym isn't at quite as much risk.”

“You can't know that.” He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he knew better. “Lym almost died at our hands. That's what we've spent so many generations fixing.”

She nodded, her gaze still turned toward the station and not on him. “We'll find a way.”

Resolve in her voice. Good. “We will.”

Nona was right. The Deep didn't feel as immense from the inside. It also didn't feel at all like a planet. It felt more like a massive building, or maybe a maze. The lack of horizons felt like a trap. Even if he looked out a window, the dark of space wasn't a horizon—it was a field. A field paled by the wash of light coming from inside the station; an unsettling lack of break between up and down that challenged his equilibrium.

He walked behind Nona, who walked behind Satyana. He flinched as people streamed around them and sometimes cut between them. Jeweled people and extra-tall people and people covered in tattoos. Men and women with colored skin and lights in their hair and lots of clothes or almost no clothes. He'd thought Nona exotic with her jeweled cheek and colorful hair and tattooed neck and wrists, but she looked tame here among the rich and decorative, and Satyana looked positively boring.

Eventually, they took a ferry to a far bubble and lost some of the crowd. Satyana led them through a corridor that felt so tight he hunched his shoulders and ducked. A woman in a blue uniform stood beside a plain doorway. She smiled at Satyana, obviously expecting her, and let them in.

They stepped into a single living room built for parties. A long table of inlaid wood occupied the center. It was empty at the moment, but Charlie could imagine it full of food and drink. Comfortable chairs waited in scattered groups for conversation seating. Standing tables had been artfully placed across the floor, all of them in muted colors that screamed taste and credit.

A very dark-skinned man who must mass twice as much as Charlie came up and folded Satyana in his arms, lifting her and planting a kiss on her forehead. He greeted Nona with a big sloppy grin and a quick, warm hug.

Charlie recognized the man just as he turned to Charlie and stuck his hand out. “I'm Gunnar. Pleased to meet you.”

“My pleasure.” He managed to take the shipping magnate's hand without shaking. Gunnar Ellensson owned most of the traffic between Mammot and the Deep, and a little bit of the traffic around Lym. Mostly Mammot, though. The only other rocky planet in the system, Mammot had suffered a different fate than Lym's. In some far dark past the Glittering had agreed to leave Lym alone in trade for the ability to mine Mammot. Bar jokes put the damage at a quarter of the total weight of the planet taken away. People lived there; more than on Lym. They inhabited complex and architecturally fascinating cities. But their work was the opposite of Charlie's. They tore down.

The man in front of him had more power than most, more by far than Satyana with her entertainment empire and her multiple ships. Satyana was to Gunnar like he was to Satyana. In his darkest nightmares on Lym, Gunnar Ellensson shifted his focus to Lym and demanded mining rights to as-yet-unrestored parts of her.

Gunnar let go of his hand. “I hear you and Nona plan to fly into a swarm of pirates and save someone who's already dead.”

“We don't know that!” Nona protested. “Someone's got to care what happened to the people on the High Sweet Home.”

Gunnar ignored her comments. “If you wait awhile, the damned pirates are on their way to us.”

Satyana frowned and corrected him firmly but quietly. “Next.”

Gunnar smiled softly at her, but he said, “I'll call them whatever I want.”

Satyana busied herself rearranging chairs.

“They do act like pirates.” Gunnar didn't sound at all apologetic.

“Have you ever lost a ship to the Next?” Charlie asked him.

“Three of them. Two in my first year—they almost broke me. Then, that was ten percent of my fleet. It took me five years to recover, and of course I had to add defensive ships to my line. They didn't get me again until this year.”

“What do you know about them now?” Satyana asked.

Gunnar looked grim. “They found a better way to steal my ships. The High Council is pressing me to turn half my fleet into warships.”

“Can you do that?” Charlie asked.

Gunnar gestured toward a couch and a few chairs. “Are you hungry?”

“Sure,” Charlie said, realizing it was true.

Gunnar called a small serving-bot that Charlie hadn't even noticed. As it whirred quietly across the floor, Gunnar went on, “I can give the station all of the protection I've bought for my fleets and then idle the barges or let them travel with no escort. Except of course, I can't do either. Not really. The Deep needs the minerals I'm carrying, and the barges need protection.” The serving-bot had reached Gunnar. He pushed a few buttons on it, and then said, “The Edge is only one source of piracy.”

That triggered a thought that had been going through Charlie's head for a while. He was still power-smacked, awed that he was here talking casually with Gunnar Ellensson, and it seemed hard to get his words out right. “There is a lot of space. I mean, it's big. Space is big. So why not just let them in?”

Nona's face flushed red, and Satyana went still. But Gunnar smiled. “It's a good question.” He looked at Nona. “You want to be a diplomat. You've got that training. How would you answer Charlie?”

Nona leaned forward. He could almost see her thinking. Instead of giving him an answer, she asked a question. “What do you know about the history of the Edge?”

Charlie said, “My mother told me the ice pirates wanted to be more than us, better than us. That they didn't understand the soul is linked to the body, and that they were really stupid humans for turning themselves into robots. She said they would have torn away our humanity if we didn't banish them.” He hesitated for a moment while the serving-bot re-appeared with four glasses of water, a bowl of fresh fruit, a plate of warm, steaming bread, and some tiny cookies. He took water and bread, while eying the fruit. It was a strange shade of orange he'd never seen on Lym. “She also told me that if I didn't do my homework, they'd come and take me away and make me into a machine.” He winced, able to hear the naiveté in his answer. And if
he
sounded backward—a member of one of Lym's founding families—what must most of the people from Lym sound like? He added, “I'm most afraid that they'll want a piece of Lym, to mine it or hurt it or to live there.”

Gunnar nodded. “Or Mammot, which would be worse. We've learned to live without Lym, but we need the minerals we take from Mammot.”

Charlie managed not to say anything. The same treasure huddled in Lym's crust, and there were still old mines pocking its surface in some places. He took a piece of fruit, which tasted as sweet as an orchard peach.

Nona went on. “We don't know what the Next want. They started as rebels, uploading human brains into computers. It kills the humans—your mom was right about that. They're willing to die to become whatever they become out there. Some were religious—looking for machine nirvana. They left art and immersives behind. We studied them in one of my college classes. Some of their work is like a vision, as full of sincerity as any preacher we have here. But when you study the actual history—what happened instead of what people said—” She looked at him as if making sure he understood what she meant by the distinction, and when he nodded she went on, “There was a lot of exploitation. The minds of children uploaded into sex-bots, the creation of super-powerful robots that enslaved a whole station of humans, and then killed all the humans, and then died themselves.

“The—beings—beyond the Edge don't necessarily have the same philosophy, or even the same values from one to another. The common thread for people and machines included in the exile is that they were too dangerous to stay here, too powerful.” She paused, looking quizzically at Charlie, as if wanting to be sure he got her point. Light winked from the jewel in her cheek. “They've grown more powerful since then. We just weren't watching very closely.”

Gunnar said, “Nicely done.” He sipped his water and looked at Charlie. “Now do you understand why we don't just let them come in and live in any orbit they want?” They have enough firepower to squash us, and they probably think we're about as irritating as a swarm of mosquitos.