Absence of Blade Read online

  Its ruined main engines cut out with a clunk, the back end of the cruiser flaring white hot as it jettisoned them. The ballast shot toward the ground in twin spirals of smoldering sparks, but it wasn’t enough. The cruiser began to revolve in a tight spiral, its nose tilting down as it finally surrendered to the fall. At last the ship glanced against a sharp spar of rock, and gravity hurled it into a crushing embrace with the stony plain.

  A pale gray dawn broke over the impact crater, mercurial light playing over the ripped contours of the cruiser. Rain ran down its fire-blackened sides, steaming on the hot metal. It was the hollow tink of the raindrops spattering the cruiser’s hull that awakened the craft’s pilot at last.

  She’d used the last of her strength to wrench open the stolen cruiser’s emergency hatch. Now the exhausted Osk huddled on the hard ground under a pathetically small rock overhang, naked except for a torn and scorched white cloth flung about her shoulders. She watched the cold rain wash the sticky Terran blood from her chest and arms in thin streams of red. The color dimmed under her gaze, diluted to pale shadows by the rain.

  Pale shadows . . . just like her.

  The sun broke the overcast in fits and starts, glancing off dirty puddles of water in the crater and turning them into hard silver mirrors. She gazed into the water pooling on the rock in front of her, at the Osk reflected there. The face in the water was gaunt and dull-skinned, framed by a spiky, mud-streaked mane. Under the filth, the hair was white. The eyes were bright, empty, and old, old . . . in them she saw something staring back which made her want to look away.

  Her name. The Osk groped toward her own rain-dappled reflection. What is her—no . . . my name?

  My name is . . .

  What? Is what? She clawed her fingers through her white hair; for a terrifying moment, a soft white space filled her mind where a past and a person should have been. Then a strand of pale hair came away in her fingers, twined there like a promise.

  Something clicked inside her.

  My name is . . .

  “Shomoro.”

  The word left her lips almost soundlessly, but it was enough. Her name was Shomoro. Three simple syllables that carried everything else back to her, in a flood of new-old memories that rushed and tumbled over her until she had to gasp for breath.

  Shomoro closed her eyes tightly as that sharp breath brought with it an even sharper pain . . . a burning agony that smoldered along the length of her side as it stabbed down from its apex. She remembered her wound.

  Using the rock behind her, Shomoro pushed herself to her feet and swayed as the rain-drenched world blurred and sounds became distant and tinny. She would not last much longer. The realization was dim and flat of concern, reached from some place outside herself. Her life was a pageant seen and lived many times over. She already knew the story, the characters; the outcome had ceased to interest her.

  Despair doesn’t suit you. The words were softer than her own destroyed voice, and so unexpected that for a moment Shomoro forgot the wound that was killing her.

  I didn’t think you were still here.

  I am, the voice replied. It sounded much like hers. Now get up. We aren’t finished here.

  The voice’s conviction was enough to push Shomoro up the slope of the crater. She staggered as far as the escarpment, her legs aching with every step, before the pain swelled up again. Her strength deserted her, and Shomoro found herself lying on her side, panting, the world spinning. Her blood felt like liquid pain running through her; whenever she tried to move, her side seemed to catch fire.

  So you’re just going to die. Here. Now. The voice was contemptuous.

  I . . . can’t move. It hurts too much.

  Is this what you came back here to do? To lie down and die! Shomoro sympathized with the voice’s anger, but it came too late. She herself was beyond anger. She was only very, very tired.

  What else can I do?

  Live, the other Shomoro answered, and was gone, the anger draining away.

  What replaced it was a kind of clarity. The world that had been fading away in a caul of pain jumped again into focus—into hyper-focus, the edges of things standing out against the ground and sky. Raindrops crashed into the stony ground in bursts. Scents were dizzying: scorched metal, coolant, the blood dripping from her wounds. Intoxicating. Her body felt numb in contrast, the cry of the wound fading to an uncomfortable buzz.

  Shomoro regained her feet. She had learned in her training of the state that descended on Osk balanced on the blade-edge of death: sharpened senses, absolute focus. It wouldn’t be so bad to die this way, she thought . . . except the other Shomoro was right. She hadn’t come back here to die.

  She knew what she had to do, and that was to live.

  And living meant finding the door.

  The door was where she remembered it, buried in the hillside beyond the smoldering wreck of the cruiser. Its burnished silver hatch was an oval outline under a thick layer of dirt and scree. Shomoro dropped to all four knees, cursing weakly as she scrabbled at the rocks and soil. She had to pause every few minutes to catch her breath and rub away the old pain in the bony sheaths under her arms. She dug with a cold-edged energy that came from some place where things were hard and sharp and definite. The place where the voice made its home.

  A last handful of blood-smeared dirt, and the door stood clear.

  The holopad in its center infused with a green glow at her frantic slap, a speaker crackling to life.

  “Password?” Shomoro’s stomach twisted. Her mind was a blank. She had not been long away, a few months—but the things that had happened in between shone an arc light over her memories of the time before, obscuring it in harsh white light. How could she expect small details like the words of a password to survive? She had probably forgotten it, along with so much else.

  As if reveling in her confusion, the rain began to pound even harder upon that desolate land. In the absence of hope, Shomoro could still appreciate irony. The New Great Plains. A name of prosperity slapped on a place of death. It is like so much the Terrans do—a glimmer of memory made her pause. A place of death . . .

  She remembered when the Osk had first been charting Olios 3, choosing their own names for its features. The cartographers named the lava plain with the O’o Nezz word for cemetery—more broadly, a place of death and desolation.

  Shomoro leaned forward and whispered the password into the speaker: “Dursh-Kren.”

  As she suspected, the destruction inside was complete. Looking upon the ruin her home had become, Shomoro’s lips curled around a snarl. The once-neat rooms of her underground lab were now home to a chaos of smashed machines. Ash-caked metal and plastic, the guts of computer consoles, littered the ceramic floors. Shomoro prowled the forlorn rooms restlessly, ignoring the urgency of her wounds. She walked past holoscreens smashed into a puzzle of razor-edged plastic; past rows upon rows of delicate electrical contraptions and fragile glass vials, reduced to shrapnel by brutish hands that had known nothing of their value.

  At last she came to the room that had served as the closest thing to a home she’d had on this alien world. It too was strewn with ash. It had always been clean, if sparse, when she’d lived there, as well-ordered as everything else in Shomoro’s life. There was her nest, recessed into the floor, and beside it the consoles that had tended to all her basic needs, their rounded forms and creamy colors now rusted and brown.

  Her eyes strayed to the stacked rows of wire cages dominating the other side of the room. In the time before, Shomoro had kept several different species of native fauna as experimental subjects and companions. Like everything else in the place, her menagerie now lay in irreparable decay, little more than contorted heaps of greenish bone or exoskeleton behind the bars of their cages. Their hollow eye sockets cast mocking stares upon her; for a moment, Shomoro imagined that she could see hostility lying beneath, as if
she’d become an interloper in what was now their place alone.

  Shomoro stared at the corpses of the animals for long minutes, horror and sympathy warring in her gut. They just left them to die. To die and rot.

  This dismayed Shomoro more than all the rest: the lab had been her domain, her home, impinged on by nothing but fledgling Za colony’s infrequent requests for her services. She’d made it the one place off Oskaran where she belonged. And now they had made her an intruder in her home.

  The White Arrows have transformed this place into a tomb, she thought bitterly, shuffling toward the back wall of the chamber. I did not expect this. I was foolish.

  She pressed on the wall in front of her, expecting nothing. Surely they had been merciless, had left nothing uncorrupted—but the wall melted away at her touch. Startled, Shomoro fell from the desolate room into one completely opposite: dark, the air warm and clear, floor and walls a lustrous, polished black. The smells of bright metal and antiseptic permeated the room.

  She collapsed toward the smooth floor in shock; a bubble of soft matter rose to meet her in response, softening a blow that would have brutally jarred her abused bones. Behind her, the wall sealed up with a feathery whoosh. Shomoro barely noticed. A euphoric relief had swallowed her in soft jaws. For the first time, Shomoro was certain that she would live. She felt as if some power for which she had no name had plucked her from the edge, above that black sea, and placed her safely on the shore.

  The room grew brighter at her arrival, filling with a warm amber glow. Soft pattering and clicking echoed off the walls, computer code made audible, as a gaggle of angular shapes gathered around her prone body. Shomoro rolled her gaze upward in surprise: after the devastation in the rest of the lab, she hadn’t expected any of her machines to survive the pogrom.

  A weary triumph filled Shomoro as the herd of machines slid metal tendrils and jointed appendages tenderly around her chest and lower body to set her on her feet. She made a hand sign: two of the robots kept supporting her as the others scuttled back into a rough circle. Each was a chrome bullet-shaped capsule half a head taller than an adult Osk. Flexible tendrils sprouted from the sides and depended like legs from the base of each machine. Optical lenses in reds and blues ran in lines down their heads like simple eyes, winking at her. Their fronts bristled with smaller tubes which jiggled about as the machines moved.

  The two machines carrying most of her weight bore Shomoro toward the center of the room; the outer circle followed solicitously, their clicking voices seeming to carry a note of concern. Delicate tendrils reached down to pluck away strands of hair from her face. She clucked back at the machines, caressing their fragile tentacles even as she brushed them away from her face. It hurt her teeth to grin, but Shomoro allowed herself a weak smile as she counted them. All the machines were there.

  The zealots had smashed her lab and brought with them all the desolation of the outside world, had turned her entire home into a part of the Dursh-Kren, but in the end her home had beaten them. It had hidden this place from their sight.

  The machines were carriers, each a vessel for an unprogrammed nanotech swarm: the product of six years of endeavor, six years of her trying to understand and harness the technology that would allow the Osk to meet the Terrans on equal ground. The outer lab was a mere appendage in comparison. Its heart lived still.

  The results of her scientific work had survived.

  A stab of pain in her side reminded Shomoro that she herself was far from safe. She dismissed the machines to stand at the room’s edges, forming the long-unused command symbols awkwardly in the supporting grasp of the two machines. When her creations had slithered back, Shomoro rasped a command into the air: “Crèche, lift.”

  A round patch in the center of the floor became gelatinous, a liquid black geyser bubbling up from the polished surface. The mass condensed into a wide circular mound. A rounded slot stretched open in its convex surface; its interior contours looked comfortable and inviting.

  The robots supporting Shomoro laid her gently inside the warm chamber in the full horizontal position, her upper and lower bodies aligned so she could lie flat on her back. Calming scents, designed to soothe her nerves and ease pain, gushed forth from the padded walls of the slit, and Shomoro closed her eyes in gratitude as they washed over her.

  The world became blurry, her own body indistinct as the scents’ analgesic effect trickled along her nerves. From a warm, dark place inside she felt the crèche enact its protocols: a transparent membrane closed off the slit, and the womb began to fill with a bath of nutritive fluids. One of Shomoro’s machines sidled up to the crèche and joined its transfer tubes to ports along the sides of the mound. Through her haze, Shomoro thought she could see the cloud of healing nanites occlude the fluid around her as the medical machine delivered its load, turning it a formless gray . . . or perhaps that was just the color the world turned as it faded away.

  Five months earlier

  Shomoro awoke to a harsh, bitter smell and the feel of cold metal pressed against her bare chest. Though she was awake instantly, Shomoro let her eyes remain closed and her muscles slack, assessing the situation with secondary senses.

  It was dark in the room—that much she could tell through closed eyelids. That didn’t mean anything, of course; outside of her windowless lab, it could be either day or night on Olios 3’s surface. She was still in the chamber near the center of her lab, the one where she slept and kept her live experiments. The room around her was thick with odors: the agitation scents of her pets, trapped in their cages; the flat smells of metal and plastic; the sharp tint of antiseptic and sterilizing solution; and two other scents foreign to her daily life. One she knew, nevertheless. It was the acrid scent of her own fear, hovering around her nostrils in a halo. The other smell, though very close, remained a mystery.

  The metal something pressing her to the cot jabbed her in the chest. Shomoro gasped in surprise and pain, her eyes snapping open.

  “There now,” a deep voice said in broken O’o Nezz. “That’s better. No use playing around.” The voice belonged to a dark figure pinning her to the cot. From the shape of its silhouette, Shomoro could tell it was Terran, but it was too close to make out more details. The scent that had been a mystery with eyes closed resolved into the potent citrus musk of Terran aggression scent.

  The pressure on her chest lifted as the Terran leveled the vertical twin barrels of his gun at her face. Instinct froze her solid as the odors around the firearm wafted to her nostrils: sweat, steel, a faint hint of something metallic that might have been blood.

  The hulking alien shoved a heavy boot into her chest, knocking the wind out of her as he pinned her again. She grimaced in pain as small spikes studding the sole of the boot cut into her flesh. With the rifle still trained on her, the man drew back enough for Shomoro to see who had her.

  Her captor had the solid build of a career heavy, accentuated by his bulky silver combat armor and helmet. His double-barreled slug gun was the standard issue weapon of the Expansion military—the military that answered directly to the Core Worlds Government (CoG) in Sol System. Shomoro caught sight of the insignia emblazoned on his right chest plate: six concentric black rings surrounding a blue and green orb. The emblem of CoG.

  That meant he was not a frontier soldier and did not report to Nheris. He must be with one of the detachments CoG had sent to help their beleaguered colony—but Za Intelligence had estimated the new ships wouldn’t arrive for at least another month, as they ground through the torturous network of hyperspace streams that linked the Expansion together . . .

  Then Shomoro saw the other emblem, emblazoned on his left chest plate. A simple triangle outlined in gleaming white, resting just above the man’s heart.

  Shock and a swirl of real fear shivered inside her. Tremors threatened to run down her limbs, and she bit the inside of her cheek until the sharp pain distracted her. She could not
show fear. Shomoro realized his uniform must be white, too—it just looked silver in the low light. There wasn’t an Osk in Za who wouldn’t recognize that uniform. Only one Terran institution clad its troops in white armor.

  Shomoro had been captured by a foot soldier of the White Arrows.

  The Terran leaned in close to Shomoro and grinned mockingly. She winced at the hot sourness of his breath. His teeth looked white and shiny and sharp in his broad, flat face. Malice glittered in the man’s small, black eyes.

  “Shomoro Lacharoksa?” Shomoro considered her options. She was trapped in her own nest by a warrior zealot who would splatter her all over the walls if she made the slightest misguided twitch. He looked as if his trigger finger hadn’t gotten exercise in months. For now, it was comply or die.

  In a movement as small and nonthreatening as she could make it, Shomoro nodded.

  “Good,” said a second, nasal voice behind the Terran holding her down. The first soldier shifted his weight to look behind him. Another white-clad Terran soldier stood near the animal cages by the wall. His rifle was slung across his back on a black leather strap. He held a lightboard in one gloved hand. His eyes scanned the clipboard, then he tapped it in a quick, short stroke. His gaze darted back up, and he locked eyes with Shomoro.

  “I would suggest you not resist us,” he said in slow O’o Nezz. His deliberate tone made the words sound rehearsed. “We can be done here much more quickly and painlessly if you comply.”

  Shomoro nodded again. She would comply.

  For now.

  Dawn found Shomoro in the cargo hold of a gray land cruiser, speeding away from her lab. Her mane splayed out in a jet black nimbus on the metal decking as she lay on her side, gazing up at the brightening blue-violet sky of Olios 3 through a high, narrow slit that ran along both sides of the cruiser’s hull.