Absence of Blade Read online

  “What’s that? If you’re allowed to tell me.”

  “It’s the ShadowStalker protocol, Jan: it’s gone live. We finally got one.”

  His first new breath turned to a violent gasp as suffocating liquid filled his throat and lungs. Mose convulsed, expelling the fluid from his lungs, but there was more, filling them, saturating them. He couldn’t breathe . . .

  Except he could. The liquid was sustaining him. Mose took another breath, shaky but calmer and more controlled than the first. The fluid felt thick and sluggish in his lungs, unnatural but hardly lethal. His eyes eased open, adjusting to their watery environment with a slight sting.

  He floated in a spherical vat of reddish liquid, the transparent walls allowing him a fluid-distorted view of the room beyond. It looked like an operating chamber: a round table crouched in the center of the room, strange undulating contours striating its metal surface. The white walls that curved protectively around his tank scintillated with holographic data readouts. Clumps of Terrans, masked and in white lab coats, huddled around the room. Some monitored the data readouts while others stood talking in small groups. One of them glanced away from a monitor to the tank and started to call the others over, waving his white-gloved hand.

  I shouldn’t be here, Mose thought slowly. They’ve noticed me; I’ve got to leave. He tensed to leap from the tank, then cried out as a sharp stab of pain seared his lungs. Then memories came rushing into the breach of that pain.

  It was almost enough to make him cry out again. Mose remembered the feeling of suffocation—chaos erupting all around him as Za began to strangle on its own breaths. I definitely shouldn’t be here. Unease sliced through his hazy thoughts. I should be dead.

  What had happened to him? Mose felt that was something he should know. Hadn’t there been an explanation at some point? He remembered a name—Fate’s Shears—but then his memories grew blurry; a bright light enveloped the rest of it, fading away to nothing . . .

  Then he remembered Gau.

  A door slid open near the right corner of the room, and the memory fragment slipped away. A new Terran strode into the room, scattering lab technicians in her wake. As the female approached the tank, Mose realized with a start that it was General Shanazkowitz. The general was tall and fit, under dark green slacks and a military shirt with full decorations. Embroidered chevrons of rank ran down her right sleeve. The light brown hair spilling from the general’s cap was long enough to remind him of the uncut mane of an Osk combatant. Though the face beneath it was pleasantly symmetrical, it had a hardness to it that commanded respect. This woman was not one of the soft, cringing politicians who hid in their tall towers behind mechanized defenses. This woman was a warrior.

  Shanazkowitz turned to look into the tank, and her eyes locked with his. Mose did his best to return the stare, but the tremble in his limbs betrayed him and he was grateful when the general turned away to speak to one of the technicians. The words were distorted to a muted glub-glub by the intervening glass and liquid. Immediately after she’d spoken, fluid started draining out of the tank.

  Mose tried to swim upward, but each time he moved it felt like a needle jabbing into his chest. Finally, he lay flat on the cool floor of the tank as the last of the red liquid drained out. He waited helplessly, his own body weighing on him like a lump of lead, as a door opened in the tank’s side. Four Terrans laid Mose on a stretcher and ferried him into the larger room. General Shanazkowitz leaned over the stretcher, her mouth moving, but it was a minute or two before Mose had gathered himself enough to puzzle out what she’d said. Then it came:

  “Can you breathe? Yes or no.”

  Mose opened his mouth, but all that came out was a croaking noise. He nodded up and down in the Terran fashion. Shanazkowitz nodded curtly back in answer.

  “Good.” She stepped back and spoke above his head. “I think we’re ready to go beyond the tank now. Move him to room 14A and continue the treatment.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The speaker leaned over Mose; he felt fingers closing around his arm, the prick of a hypodermic needle—

  Mose went away again.

  7

  There was a point of white hovering before her. At first the light was inconsistent, darting about the blackness, sometimes winking out entirely. Then the bright dot steadied and grew, and there was pain as the luminescence stabbed her dark-adapted eyes. Shomoro tried to shield her face from the glow, but it was everywhere, no longer a dot but a panorama of white. Squinting, she turned her face away from the glare.

  “I think she’s coming out of it.” A harried voice sounded above her head, behind the brightness. The light clicked off, replaced by blurry moving shapes that left trails behind them. Slowly, the space around her sharpened and gained definition as Shomoro’s vision cleared.

  She was on her back, upper and lower bodies nestled into a contoured slab or table whose supportive curves seemed to grip and hold her to the surface. Shomoro stared upward through still-focusing eyes at a Terran’s masked face and outstretched arms. He set the penlight aside and picked up a moist sponge to dab her forehead. She tried to reach out to him. She could seize him as a leverage point, demand with a blade at his throat to know exactly what was going on.

  She couldn’t move. Could. Not. Do it. She wiggled her arms and legs tentatively in the direction she wanted to go. They all moved the tiniest bit before coming up against an inflexible barrier: tough leather loops were fastened around her wrists and ankles, tethering her to the table. An IV needle pierced her skin in the crook of one arm.

  Shomoro was breathing hard and fast now, droplets of perspiration breaking out on her skin. They must have her strapped down for a medical procedure. Oh Oskaran, what were they going to do to her?

  The Terran’s eyes met hers briefly. From what little she could interpret of his expression through the haze of her own terror and confusion, he seemed worried.

  “Sir,” he called over his shoulder, “I need instructions on how to proceed. We can’t delay anymore; her vital signs are becoming dangerously elevated.” Footsteps rang out across the hard floor as another Terran moved into her line of sight. She tilted her head and recoiled as Berkyavik’s features came into view.

  He looked into her eyes, a hand caressing her moist brow. “Don’t worry, Shomoro. You must not worry. We’re not doing this because we want to hurt you. We Terrans are a gentle species; we aren’t like the Urd, not at all.” His voice was the soothing tenor of an adult offering comfort to a hatchling.

  “What . . . what are you going to do to me?” Her words were a dry, panic-stricken rasp; she would have shrieked them, except she couldn’t seem to get any breath in her lungs.

  “‘The White Arrows believe all sentient species can be guided toward light,’” he quoted, placid as ice as he stroked her forehead again. “We want nothing less than to offer you the purest gift one sentient being can give to another. We want to show you the truth of what you are.”

  Berkyavik drew away from the table. “Please proceed according to Schedule Three, Doctor.”

  She saw the Terran doctor nod and tap a bag of clear fluid hanging next to her table, to start the flow to the IV in her arm. Things grew fuzzy again—until at last even her fear had faded to a frantic peripheral flutter, an insect trapped behind glass—and the lights went out on the world.

  Shomoro blinked thrice to adjust her eyes as she stepped from under the archway into the courtyard. After the House’s darkened corridors, the noon twilight of the outside dizzied her with its brightness. The light was not the only disorienting part: Shomoro had rarely experienced sacredness in such concentration before.

  For it was on this day that Shomoro Lacharoksa had received the honor of standing in one of the most sacred places on Oskaran.

  The courtyard was wide and long, with a floor of hard-packed, jet-dark earth and low ceramic walls in brilliant white. Their s
cintillating surfaces were designed to confuse the eye—a teaching tool to help novice fighters overcome their reliance on sight and learn to fight with secondary senses. Shomoro already knew to look away; she led her gaze in a controlled wander, taking in the whole space while noting every detail she might need later.

  Two lines of slender trees flanked the courtyard’s outer walls, their dark gnarled trunks and pale leaves limned silvery blue by the tiny orb of the sun Osk called Choree, First Egg. The sun was at its apex, casting a wan luminescence over the courtyard and the rounded ceramic domes of the House that watched over it. She noticed a large sunken fire pit in one corner of the yard filled with cold embers, and shivered. Averting her eyes to the dusky earthen floor, for the first time she noticed hidden patterns overlaying the black earth; it had been baked and glazed with subtle colors, reds and blues only visible when Choree caught them at a certain angle. The pattern was a tri-Seasonal motif she recognized from other areas of the House, a rare example of Osk representational art. As she crossed to the center of the courtyard, stylized waves rolled beneath her feet, transmuting into the cracked lines of parched earth, and thence to the angular red tongues of a billowing fire.

  Shomoro was hungry for the details. Though she had never entered this arena before in her life, she’d spent the last seven years immersed in its history, in the ancient principles it represented. Every puff of dust she stirred seemed to hold the voices of those long dead. The deliverers of Oskaran had stood in this very courtyard and created a new covenant of peace; now Shomoro entered the same space after seven years of preparation, to learn if she was worthy of their legacy.

  She turned at the near-soundless steps that announced her teacher’s entrance into the courtyard. “Shomoro,” Blademaster greeted her. His movements were languid yet underlaid with a calm readiness as he walked toward her. “After seven years of my tutelage, you have elected this day to be our parting,” he said formally. “Before I give you this final test I must ask you the reason.”

  Shomoro gazed back at the grizzled old Osk for long moments, gathering her courage. Decades of bladefights had inscribed a fine web of scars over his snout and arms, the deeper marks drawing lines of teal on his scalp under the pure silver of his uncut mane. Like all true teachers of the martial Art, Blademaster had been a seph in his youth, and he was a ferocious instructor; by the end of their seven years, pupils of his were accustomed to seeing and smelling their own blood on an almost daily basis.

  It was not his fierce nature that made nervousness roil in the pit of her stomach—for when she looked on him, Shomoro felt not fear but love, and that was what made her decision so hard.

  She took a breath to steady her nerves, inhaling the calm scent of him. “I want to fight for the Surarchy of Za.”

  The corners of her teacher’s mouth turned down, and she heard the slight rush of air as he sighed, but those were his only reactions. Blademaster had superb emotional control. “In what capacity?” he asked.

  Shomoro knew to what he referred: even longer than she’d been training as a seph, she had been pursuing the sciences with the appetite of a vulis in the Dry Season. She’d absorbed much of what was known of Oskaran’s natural history, its ecology, biological sciences—enough to begin to see the gaps, the places where the Expansion had outpaced them. Her people were innovative bio-engineers and organic chemists, but they knew less of straight chemical engineering. They were hatchlings in terms of nanotech, still limited to manufactured smart materials, with none of the self-transforming, self-replicating machines that made Terran science a wonder—and sometimes a terror—to behold.

  Her interests were an open secret within the community of the House. Blademaster was not the only one she’d cornered in conversation to discuss a new hypothesis or experimental model, but he was one of the more enthusiastic ones. They had often conversed, after a training session, about the prospects for her independent research once she chose her adult path.

  She was enough of an adult now to recognize he was offering her an escape. Even now, in this arena, she could modify her commitment if she chose—state she wished to aid Za as a technician, as a scientist . . . anything but the path her soul pulled itself toward.

  “I intend to aid Za as a scientist . . . and as a seph,” she finished in a rush before her nerve failed her.

  Her teacher’s eyes closed at her answer. After a moment, he made the gesture of acceptance, lacing hands behind the saddle of his back so that the blade sheaths were hidden from view. “So you have chosen your father’s path, after all.”

  A thrill of unexpected anger rose in her chest—didn’t he see the path and its risks were her choice? It didn’t matter that her father had also been a seph; she barely had any memories of him alive.

  Then she realized that Blademaster had just begun her final test. A seph must be prepared to fight at all times, especially when they least expect it. It was a maxim of Blademaster’s that he practiced in more than just their sparring sessions.

  “I become a seph of my own free will,” Shomoro responded formally, “and the path I choose is my own.”

  He turned fractionally away. “Is it?” he whispered, so quiet she had to strain to hear. Minimal as it was, his break in control surprised her—but she understood it. Long after she’d embraced seph training of her own volition, Blademaster had never been completely sure he hadn’t made the decision for her.

  “Yes, Teru. It is.” Her own small break in formality brought her teacher’s gaze around. Close as they were, she had never addressed him by hatchname before. Blademaster jabbed his snout forward.

  “This is a heavy responsibility, Shomoro. Were you to stay on Oskaran, your path would not be free of danger by any means, but Olios 3 is a frontier world. A bitter war zone contested by aliens who neither accept nor understand the covenant of peace by which we live. Even the power of the Monarch cannot reach that far, to shelter you from what could happen. Are you ready to face that?”

  “I . . . don’t know if I am ready.” To be a pillar of the Monarch’s power on Oskaran would have been challenge enough; if she remained, Shomoro would still be risking herself in missions, carrying out political assassinations . . . but in a system that recognized the practice as a route to justice and stability. Even as she enforced the law and righteousness of the House, she would know its protection was at her back for as long as she might live. There would be no such certainties on Olios 3.

  “But the universe isn’t going to wait for me to be ready,” she continued. “The world is changing. I feel it like an ache in my blades, or a foul smell on the air. You feel it as well; I smell the uneasiness in your scent. This is not a war we can afford to lose.”

  “And what would you know about the losing of wars?” Blademaster snapped, his voice acidic. “Did you defend the high orbit of Teluk, when the battles lit up the sky for nights on end? Or fight in the swamps of Rreluush-Tren?”

  The questions were rhetorical, of course—she hadn’t even been alive when those storied conflicts reached their separate, intertwined conclusions—but she knew to sidestep them. “No, but I know not to show weakness when facing down a charging vulis. Za is to be our stand against the Expansion. If we cannot defend it—if, after our defeat on Rreluush-Tren, our losses in Diego Two, we allow the Expansion to take Za from us as well—I fear it will be the beginning of the end for Oskaran.”

  “It would be a blow to our interstellar sovereignty,” he replied. A neutral tone cast the words as bare fact rather than opinion.

  “All of this rests on that sovereignty!” Shomoro flung her arms wide, taking in the glittering courtyard, the softly glowing sun framed by the bone-leafed trees. The gesture for whole, used in this particular space, could mean the House or all of Oskaran; the two were interchangeable here. She trotted to one low wall and plucked a pearlescent leaf from one of the trees.

  “Our world is fragile, Teru.” Choree’s light
streamed through the leaf as she held it up. “Even under the peace of the covenant, with all the Surarchies working together, life here balances on the edge of a blade. Imagine what might happen if the Expansion moves in, with their dreams of empire, and tries to make Oskaran into something else, something that suits them. Look at ruined Charel and their terraformed agworlds, and tell me that isn’t possible. I don’t want to fight for revenge or to extend our sovereignty or prove my own bravery. I’m not brave. I’m afraid, terribly afraid—but I fear more for Oskaran than for myself.”

  An unexpected smile broke over her teacher’s scarred features. He stepped forward and surprised her utterly by throwing his arms about her shoulders. She had brought up her own arms with blades half unsheathed in a guard position before she realized it was not an attack, not a last bit of training after all: Blademaster was just extraordinarily happy.

  He pulled back, the smile still on his lips. “You passed the test, Shomoro Lacharoksa. You have grasped within yourself the truth that can’t be taught, though a Blademaster may say it a thousand times: that a seph is a seph when she fights not for self, lineage, or Surarchy—but for Oskaran.

  “You have become a true seph this day.”

  The sweet/sharp tang of his scent, overlaid with hints of peppery spice, brought his gladness to her all at once. Shomoro inhaled deeply, swept up in the euphoria of it even as she puzzled over the ease of this final test.

  “Is that . . . all?” she asked. She was reluctant to break the happy spell, but she couldn’t hold her silence any longer. “You aren’t going to spar with me and test my skills, or make me name every part of the blade from tip to sheath? Ask me to take an oath of fealty to Oskaran, at least?”