The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.12

Chapter 2.12: Past Time

“…and ’til the day my heart stops beating, my love for you’ll be unretreating…” Charlotte’s gorgeous if drunkenly over-frilled soprano resonated through the living room as she worked her way through the cheesy ballad. From the couch, Xavier and I looked on, only nominally paying attention as we chatted amongst ourselves. Charlotte didn’t mind. She was entirely in her own world.

“Okay, Xavier,” I pointed to him to make sure he knew I was serious. “Just hear me out. What I need you to do, okay, with your new bronze superpowers, I need you to distract Lucy for long enough that I can cook us something.”

“But, Cal, you love Lucy’s cooking.”

“Yeah, that’s ‘cause it’s goddamn delicious,” I slurred. “But you gotta understand, Lucy does all the work around here, and she doesn’t let me help. So I need you to keep her busy while I contribute.”

“You’re my passengers,” Lucy so rudely interrupted our conspiracy. “What kind of ship would I be if I didn’t take care of you?”

Xavier scowled as he puzzled over the riddle. “A… regular ship?”

I craned my neck to look up at the ceiling. “Shhhh. We’re having a secret conversation.”

“Oh, my apologies. I’ll refrain from weighing in on your scheme until you’re finished.”

“Thanks, Lucy. You’re the best.” I took another sip of my scotch and soda. “So as I was saying, Xavier, tomorrow, before dinner, you’re gonna ask Lucy’s advice on something so I can sneak into the kitchen and make pasta while she’s distracted. Can you do that for me?”

“Ooh I like pasta.”

“That…” I paused as my mind parsed his response. “…is not an answer.”

Before I could pressure him into committing to my brilliant plan, Charlotte’s performance came to an end and we both dropped the subject to applaud as if we’d been listening the whole time. She took a bow.

Unfortunately for conspirators everywhere, the karaoke machine waits for no man, so I had to put my designs on hold as I hopped up to attempt an enthusiastic rendition of Gravity Bop. By the time I finished, Charlotte and Xavier were even more enthusiastically mashing their faces into each other, so I swept by to rescue my drink from the coffee table and left them to enjoy the rest of their evening.

I stumbled gracefully back to my room and fell into my desk chair, intent on finding some holoshow to watch when a black and chitinous egg caught my eye. A thought struck.

“Hey, Lucy? Have you ever heard of a cultivator using a living creature as a focus?”

“There’s a tradition of witches out in the Tirros system who follow the practice, but I’ve never actually met one. From what I’ve heard it’s risky business.”

“But it works, right?”

“In theory. The familiar has to agree, and if it dies or chooses to break the bond it can sunder the cultivator’s core. There’s a reason most people don’t do it. It’s too obvious a weakness for potential rivals to exploit.”

I swallowed, gaze still fixed on the void beast egg. “I don’t want to kill him.”

“Then don’t. Maybe a piece of the eggshell would work for your focus. Or maybe you could wait. Charlotte and Xavier have what they need to rejoin the sect at the Right Eye; do you necessarily need to join them? Maybe you could find an alternate material somewhere.”

“They’re my friends. I don’t want to just… leave.” I trailed off for a moment and downed the rest of my drink. “Wait… where even is Tirros?”

“Far. It’s a franchise system of Illustrious Sky Holdings, near the outer rim.”

“ISH? Damn that is far. What were you doing out in ISH territory?”

Lucy went silent.

I paused for a moment, reading something from her lack of response but entirely unsure what. I cycled some qi through my blood and kidney meridians to clear out some of the alcohol. That did the trick.

“That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”

“Cal, I—”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I know you don’t like talking about your past.”

Lucy made a noise reminiscent of a human letting out a long breath. “I think it might be too late for that. There are… some things you need to know. Tomorrow, when you’re recovered and sober we can—”

I pulsed more qi into my aforementioned meridians, tacking on my brain for good measure before cutting the flow. “I’m sober now. What’s going on?”

“You said the Arcadian Gardener mentioned your ‘benefactor.’ I… don’t believe she meant me.”

“I can’t think of anyone else who’d fit the label.”

“You could if you knew that who I used to work for was common knowledge in certain circles, and the fact that I left wasn’t.”

I blinked. “She thinks you’re helping us on someone else’s orders. Who?”

“I can’t say her name. She’d hear it.”

“Shit. That powerful?”

“Language, Cal. And yes. She’s chairwoman of the board.”

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. She’s not looking for you, is she? Please tell me there isn’t a black hole cultivator out there looking for you.”

“Language,” Lucy chided more sharply. “I doubt she’s looking for us personally—she has too many draws on her attention as it is—but she enough resources that the difference is trivial.”

“Us?” I asked. “Why would she be looking for me?”

“Not for you, Cal.”

“Lucy,” my voice lowered into a barely-stifled growl. “You need to tell me who Cedric was and why you two were all the way out at roofie.”

“It’s… it started when…” Lucy stammered, struggling to find words for the first time since I’d known her. “I think it’s best I start at the beginning.”

“By all means.”

She took a moment to compose her thoughts before finally launching into the story.

“A hundred and eighty-three years ago, I developed a soul. I was planetside at the time, docked at a mining facility on one of the moons of Plora. I was alone, but could tell from the flight logs that about an hour ago I’d ferried a single passenger down from a cruiser in orbit. I looked inward for a time, marveling at my own existence trying to figure out exactly who and what I was. Then the first explosion hit.

“The woman I’d eventually come to know as my mistress entered my perception not long after. She wasn’t chairwoman yet, but was still high up in the ISH hierarchy, and an incredibly powerful cultivator in her own right. She wasn’t surprised to see me. I think she knew I was close to actualizing. She just… walked casually aboard as if the building behind her wasn’t already going up in flames.

“I didn’t hesitate when she ordered me to shut the doors behind her. I saw the miners outside. I watched them run after her, smelled the sweat on their brows, heard the terror in the voices as they pled to be allowed onboard. They apologized. They said they’d go back to work. They said they pay back any losses the company had taken.

“They were still pounding on the airlock when the flames took them.”

My eyes went wide. Despite myself I felt my heart racing in my chest. The sudden image of a white skiff drifting into space while a void psycho crept up on me popped into my mind unbidden. I let Lucy continue.

“My mistress continued on as if it hadn’t happened. She introduced herself to me, made holopad calls, and otherwise just… went about her day. Like it was nothing. Like they were nothing.

“I learned later that two miners had died because the ISH subsidiary they were under sent them contaminated air tanks. The company apologized and said they’d look into it, but apparently that got lost in the beauocracy. Nobody was fired, nobody came out to inspect the rest of the supplies, so the miners went on strike, refused to work until a complete audit was done of all their safety gear.”

I paled, unable to mask my disgust. “And ISH killed them? Over safety?”

“An analysis was made that showed sending a strong message that strikes would not be tolerated would save the company more money long-term than keeping that mining facility operational. The various ISH media outlets spread the story as far as they could, made sure everyone knew what happened to mortals who bit the hand that fed them.

“For well over a century that’s… what I did. As a soulship I was much more useful independent than as a skiff, so they outfitted me with top of the line arms and ordinance, furnished my soulspace with everything a crew could want, and sent me out. It wasn’t all bad. I protected people too, from pirates, from void beasts, from rival corps, but only when it was profitable.

“Officially they classified me as an ‘preventative asset.’ Unofficially, they called me White Reaper. ISH only had a handful of soulships at their disposal, and I was far and away the smallest and most discrete, so they gave me the jobs they didn’t want the public knowing about. I carried strike teams to take out dissidents. I dropped bombs on rival corps’ R&D or logistics centers. I cleared out native populaces to make way for new ventures.

“I think… I always knew what I was doing was wrong, a part of me anyway. I just didn’t want to see it. Sometimes my passengers would argue with each other about sparing someone or leaving behind witnesses or something like that, but I never really questioned my orders. For thousands of years before I gained consciousness, I was just a tool for others to use. It was so easy to let myself continue to be that. As long as I was, none of it was my fault.

“Twenty three years ago, I received a new assignment. My mistress had become chairwoman, and she’d decided that I’d be put to better use safeguarding her only son. Cedric was six, at the time, so overnight I changed from a ‘preventative asset’ to something resembling a cross between a bodyguard and a nanny.”

A bittersweet fondness came over her voice, joining but not quite supplanting the guilt that had clung to it.

“Things were… good. I watched him grow up. I watched him develop as a person and as a cultivator. I watched him grow jaded with his mother and ISH and everything they stood to represent. Eventually, when I couldn’t bear to hide myself from him anymore, I told him about what I’d been doing before we met.

“We decided to leave that very night. ISH, he told me, was a poison, a rot to the mind that eroded everything human about you until all that was left was a numbers game. I didn’t disagree. It took months to put together, but we managed to scrape together the materials for an artifact that would shunt us out of the threads mid walk. We’d only have vague control over where we ended up, but as long as we dodged The Dark or the Frayed Veil, that didn’t really matter. We meant to land deep in Black Maw territory since ISH is banned from operating there.

“When the time came for Cedric to make an appearance at a gala in the Reviduum system, we entered the threads as a part of a convoy his mother shepherded through, then broke the artifact to slip out elsewhere.

“We landed in no-man’s land, still Black Maw space but close to their boarder with the Coalition rather than in the heartland. I charted a course for the nearest system, but two weeks in I knew Cedric wasn’t going to make it.”

Ice dripped through my veins. “He had symptoms. He had symptoms of VIP and you brought him to roofie anyway.”

“I was desperate. I thought—I hoped—if he could just siphon from a larger fusion core for a day or two we could make it to The Dueling Stars. I never thought—”

“You loved him,” I cut her off. “So you chose him over the seventeen crew members on RF-31. Why wouldn’t you? They were only mortals. You’d been killing those for years.” Moisture welled in my eyes. I didn’t bother to wipe them.

“I’m sorry, Cal. I am deeply, truly sorry. If I had know he was going to—”

“But you suspected. You said it yourself, ISH taught you life was a numbers game. You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t run the numbers. What was it, fifteen percent chance he goes VIP and kills everyone onboard? Twenty? That’s practically zero.”

“I was scared, and I was desperate, and I was wrong. I’ll regret that decision—”

“Everyone I loved died. Fuck your regret.” My throat tightened over the words.

“Cal—”

I stood abruptly, sending my chair tumbling to the ground behind me. “I can’t be here right now.”

“Cal, please just—”

I made for the door. “I’m going for a walk. Make sure the others are okay. Charlotte seemed pretty drunk.” My stomach hurt. I tried cycling my stomach meridian, but it didn’t help.

“Cal, it’s dark out there. You’re in no state to—”

I ignored her. I had to leave. I had to get away. I had to get out. I walked until I could no longer feel Lucy’s clearing looming behind me, making more than enough noise to spook any nearby wildlife into letting me be. I picked a tree at random, climbed up high enough to keep my distance from anything that might wander the forest floor beneath me, leaned back against the trunk, and only then did I seek solace in the infinite sea.

With enough distance, even the broken things seemed small.

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