Uprising Page 4

  “That was then.” She took a sip and rolled the spirits in her mouth. It was a pleasant burn.

  “Bana.” He spoke the endearment in his most reasonable tone. “You picked a fight with the Lancer and started a riot. That seems a little excessive for a bit of piqued pride.”

  “I did not start a riot. I was halfway home by then.”

  His patient look made her itch. “Fool others if you will, but don’t try to fool me.”

  When she made no answer but to stare into the golden depths of her glass, he sighed and pushed himself out of his chair. It was angled forward, giving him easier egress, and a hand-carved wooden clip at each side held the canes he needed to walk.

  They had been playmates as children, friends during their training and apprenticeships, and lovers after that. She had never imagined anyone else as her bondmate and still could not, despite the burden of his disease. It ate away at his lower musculature, and though it could be slowed, it could not be stopped.

  The disease had been part of their lives for almost as long as they had been bonded, and she knew not to offer assistance unless asked. But she could help in other ways. Every time she watched him slide with such ease from the chair she had designed and built, she wondered if Fahla had made her a builder for this reason. Her designs for their furniture, their house, and Irin’s workplace had become globally recognized, changing the lives of all Alseans with mobility limitations.

  In time, her work brought her to the attention of powerful caste leaders who eventually set her on the path to Prime. Now she was collaborating with an alien to build their first space elevator and send her people to the stars.

  She owed it all to this gentle man crossing the room with the aid of two canes, his eyes never leaving hers.

  “I have always loved your fire,” he said when he reached her. “It set you apart when we were children and it sets you apart now. That fire pushed our caste to rebuild faster than we believed possible, and now it’s pushing us into the stars. But sometimes it burns things it shouldn’t. I know she killed your friend. But he didn’t give her a choice, and you have to stop punishing her for it. I fear for you and our caste if you don’t.”

  “I’m not punishing—” She stopped at his look. “Is that truly what you think? This wasn’t about Shantu, it was about her stealing my work!”

  “What did she steal? Chief Kameha is an Alsean citizen. She didn’t take that from him.”

  “He should have been the first!”

  “But he doesn’t care.”

  She could still hear Lancer Tal’s voice, dripping with contempt, telling her that she had done all that work not for Kameha but for herself.

  “Do you think I’m selfish?” she asked.

  He tilted his face toward her, a silent cue, and she leaned down so he could kiss her. They rested their foreheads together, ridges intermeshing in a way that gave comfort to both.

  “If you were selfish,” he said, “I would not be bonded to you.”

  “Because you’d have left me.”

  “No, Bana. Because you would have left me.”

  5

  Consequences

  Rax bolted upright, gasping for air, the searing orange of the flames still burning in his mind’s eye. The details of the nightmare were already slipping away, but his heart raced and the sweat trickled down his chest.

  Then he woke fully and realized that the orange light was still there, staining the walls of their shared bedroom in an eerie echo of his dream.

  He threw the covers aside, took one look out the window, and ran for his clothing. “Vagron! Wake up!”

  As he scrambled to dress, Vagron stirred in the other bed.

  “It’s the middle of the damn night,” he muttered. “Go back ta sleep.”

  “Get up! The dining hall is on fire!”

  Vagron bolted upright. “What the—” He leaped from the bed and dashed to the window. “Shit!”

  Less than a tick later, they were pelting down the brick path that led between two rows of dark houses to the center of their village. Each tiny house held a living area, kitchen, single shared bedroom, and full bath. For soldiers accustomed to living four to a bunk room, they were palatial. Right now, Rax wished there weren’t so damned many of them. The dining hall seemed like it was fifty kilometers away.

  When they arrived, a curtain of flames had already engulfed the back wall and was licking at the roof. The loud crackling raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “I’ll get the bell,” Vagron called as he sped toward the back deck.

  “I’ll get the water. Be careful!” Rax shouted. The deck wasn’t yet on fire, but those flames were too close for comfort.

  At meal times, the large bell suspended above the deck railing sounded sonorous and lazy, its deep notes pealing through the village in a slow rhythm. Now it rang a furious tempo, loud and chaotic.

  Lights began appearing in the houses.

  The fountain in the courtyard at the center of the communal buildings was a brilliant idea, drafted by one of their engineers and built by several others who had experience with plumbing and bricklaying. In addition to providing a gathering point and a place of restful beauty, it hid the hose and extra-wide standpipe they had installed for emergencies.

  Rax opened the door beneath the fountain, dropped into the crawl space, and slammed down the firehose lever. With a quiet hum, the compartment holding the folded firehose swung out from the wall, lowered into a horizontal position, and lifted itself through the opening. Rax climbed out after it. He was pulling the nozzle toward the dining hall when the first settlers arrived.

  “Take it around back!” He shoved it into the hands of the closest settler. “I’ll get the valve. Hit the button when you’re ready.”

  Several of them got to work, helping to haul the hose around the still-dark front of the dining hall. Rax went back under the fountain and waited.

  A green light blinked on beside the valve. He rotated the hand crank, listening to the splash of the fountain slow, then shut off altogether. All water was now diverted to the hose.

  People were running in from all directions when he climbed out a second time, and a crowd had already gathered to watch the water being sprayed over the flames. The crackle was joined by furious hissing as fire and water fought for dominance, smoke rising from one and steam from the other.

  Though the fire was vanquished in less than thirty ticks, the remainder of the night buzzed with noise and activity. Emergency response skimmers arrived from Blacksun Base to take over the firefighting and make sure the last sparks were out, the base investigators came in their own skimmer to examine the scene, and the settlers all pitched in to pull burned wood away from the building and save what they could of the interior. By the time the sun illuminated the still-smoking scene, Rax’s exhaustion rivaled that of his first days of military training.

  He was wiping the soot off his face with the bottom of his shirt when one of the base investigators appeared in front of him with a sensor device in her hand.

  “Bad news,” she said. “That whole wall was splashed with accelerant. The fire started there, not inside. This wasn’t an accident.”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could say I was surprised.”

  “I wish I could, too.” She hesitated, then looked him in the eye. “I don’t approve of revenge tactics like this. But you should have known better than to send one of your soldiers to take a red medal in the sniper competition. You’ve thrown a stone into a wasp nest.”

  “I know. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  Her expression said yes, that was as stupid as it sounded. “I’ll report my findings to the State House as soon as it opens. The Council will need to know.”

  As she walked away, he dropped his head back and gazed up into the rosy dawn sky. The usual rich scent of dew-laden grasses and moist soil was overpowered by the stench of burned wood and fabrics.

  He did not want that investigator to make her report
. Getting the Council involved meant that Lancer Tal would hear about it.

  When he was first named spokesperson, she had given him a wristcom programmed with her personal com code and instructed him to call if the situation warranted. He took pride in never using that code. The last thing he or any of them wanted was to feel dependent.

  Now the Council would probably vote to call in warriors from Blacksun Base for the next nineday or two. He would have to submit a proposal for his people to stand guard instead. Limited as they were by their no-harm empathic directive, they would still need warriors to catch and detain any trespassers, but at least they could act as their own eyes and ears.

  With a sigh, he turned toward home—and stopped dead when he saw the garden.

  All night long, they had focused on the fire and its aftermath. No one had looked behind them at the garden.

  It must have been producers. Only they would have had the tools and the skills to cause such irredeemable havoc so quickly.

  Every single plant had been sliced off at ground level and left to die. It was a swift, devastating assault that destroyed any possibility of recovery. Had the plants been uprooted, they could have been replanted. Had they been hacked with less precision, they could have regrown. But this method . . . none of them would survive. They didn’t have large enough root systems to provide food while regrowing leaves. Without the nutrients derived from photosynthesis, the root systems would die.

  His legs wobbled beneath him, and he sat abruptly on the edge of the deck.

  In the hanticks he had spent preparing and planting that garden, he felt at peace for the first time in ages, perhaps since leaving the family farm to join the military. He had wondered if his parents thought of him while setting out their own first plantings, or if they even knew he was alive. The Voloth government had probably reported all the settlers lost in battle to save face. But with the warm soil crumbling between his fingers and the plants looking healthy and vigorous in their new places, he had hoped his parents might find a similar comfort. Maybe the act of doing what he had spent his adult life disavowing would create some sort of energy that could reach them.

  The garden and his peace were gone. They did not have the funds to replace the starts. Seeds were much cheaper, but there was no time to plant them. The cooler weather was coming, bringing rains and soggy soil with it. Anything not already established would flail, sputter, and likely not survive the harsh environment before second spring.

  They had lost their crop. Sure, they could plant summer crops, but the yields would be moons away and not the foods he had planned for.

  Just like the Games, they had planned and worked and done their best, and it had all fallen apart.

  He buried his face in his hands and swallowed against the constriction in his throat. Grown soldiers did not cry over a few dead plants.

  The stressed boards of the deck creaked next to him, and a warm hand landed on his back. After a pause, Vagron said, “Well. They knew how ta hurt us, didn’t they? We’ll fix the dining hall in a couple of ninedays. But this . . .”

  “Yeah.” Rax rubbed his eyes. “They knew.”

  6

  Hate and hope

  Anjuli tore off another piece of warm bread as she watched the news report on the fire at New Haven.

  “I never understood why they called it that,” she said. “You’d think at least one of them would have the sense to realize how insulting it is. They bombed our cities, tried to kill or enslave us, and then had the nerve to call their village New Haven. As if we invited them to settle here. As if we’re some sort of safe paradise they escaped to.”

  “Maybe we are.” Irin refilled his shannel cup and set the pot in the wide swath of sunshine that illuminated their kitchen table. His chair was in the same path of light, setting him aglow with the warmth of the morning sun.

  It was not an accident, this positioning. She had designed their kitchen with an eastern and southern exposure and installed large windows in both outside walls, ensuring that Irin could sit in the sun for all their meals. Heat eased his joints and muscles, so she made sure he had access to as much of it as possible.

  She picked up the shannel pot and topped off her cup.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Irin said. “I would have done that.”

  “You were busy feeling sorry for the Voloth.”

  He eyed her over his cup. “Do you truly feel no responsibility? That was an act of revenge for yesterday.”

  “I didn’t enter an enemy sniper into the Games.”

  “But you did instigate a riot.”

  “You can’t blame me for the actions of a few hundred angry Alseans.” Nodding toward the vidscreen, she added, “Or the few who did that. All I did was recognize a young woman who honors the memory of her bondfather.”

  “All right,” he said in that reasonable tone that set her teeth on edge. “Let me ask you one thing. As a builder, do you not feel any sympathy for these Voloth who built their own village and just watched part of it burn?”

  She laughed at the idea. “Irin, you are the kindest man alive, but in this case it’s misdirected. You haven’t seen the damage they did.”

  “I’ve seen images.”

  “That doesn’t begin to prepare you for seeing it yourself.”

  They were fortunate to live in Blacksun, which had been protected from the invasion by Captain Serrado and her crashed ship. And Irin never left the city. Travel was difficult for him, but the real deterrent was his disinterest in the macro world. Irin was a builder in the nano world, spending his days staring at a microscope screen and working with concepts she could barely grasp. She liked things she could get her hands on, things she could see and feel and snap together.

  “If you had been in Whitesun,” she continued, “and stood there in the rubble that was all they left of our caste house, you would have wept with me. Eight hundred cycles of architectural history, and they called it a target. They took the oldest dock in Wildwind Bay, the one where generations of children learned to swim, and smashed it to splinters. They burned an entire wing of the library. The only reason the books didn’t burn with it was because the library staff worked night and day to get everything underground before the invasion. Those blindworms bombarded Whitesun, broke it and burned it and tore it apart, and we’re still not finished rebuilding. We’re not finished in Whitemoon or Redmoon, and great Goddess, those villages that were wiped off the map by crashing fighters . . .” She shook her head. “You want me to feel sympathy because something they built burned? I wish more of it had burned. Maybe then they’d have some tiny idea of how much pain and suffering they’ve caused us.”

  He sighed. “I understand how you feel—”

  “No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be trying to paint them as victims. They’re not Fahla-damned victims! They are invaders.”

  “They were invaders,” he corrected. “And we destroyed them. We killed most of them and broke the rest. They’re not our enemy any longer, Bana. The battle is over.”

  Her appetite lost, she shoved back her chair and stood. “I’ll tell you when the battle is over: when the very last stone is put back in place. When I stop having to review budgets and blueprints for rebuilding. When I can spend all my time looking forward, instead of diverting resources to rebuild what they destroyed, then the battle will be over.”

  “And then will you forgive?”

  She stopped, startled by the question. “Forgive?”

  “Yes. When you can spend all your time looking forward, will you stop looking back?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  He nodded. “When I build a nanobot, every addition changes the nature of the machine. If I make a mistake, I can’t go back. I have to discard it and start over. So I look forward, because there’s no purpose in looking back. Back is done. Back is useless. It’s in the discard container.”

  “Alsea is not a nanobot.”

  “No, but every change alters it irrevocably. Alsea is change
d, Bana. You’re building a space elevator. You can never go back to how it was before.”

  A soft chime broke the silence. She looked down at the rolled reader card tucked into her belt pouch and found its edge glowing green. A message from her aide, no doubt, since she hadn’t yet put on her earcuff and couldn’t be reached by voice.

  “That’ll be the call for a High Council meeting this morning. We’ll have to make a recommendation to the full Council on how to respond to this.” Which would be half a hantick out of her day, a loss she could ill afford. “I have to go to work.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to leave us like this.”

  “We’re fine. As long as you don’t forget to kiss me before you go.”

  Ten ticks later, she swept into the kitchen for her last stop before leaving. Irin was still in his chair, holding the shannel cup between both hands and smiling into the sunlight with his eyes closed.

  “Absorbing?” she asked.

  His smile grew larger as he looked up at her. “Thinking. I was wrong; some things don’t change. Like mornmeals with you, and sitting in the sun. And the way I know you’re ready to leave by the sound of your bracelets.”

  It was a quiet apology, even though he wasn’t at fault. She loved him for it. Leaning a hip against the table, she spun one of her many bracelets—which she had indeed just put on in preparation for leaving—and asked, “Why is it so important to you that I find a way to forgive?”

  “Because your anger doesn’t bring you joy.”

  For the first time, she thought she understood. “My anger doesn’t bring you joy, either.”

  “We’ve been together a long time. I can’t help feeling what you feel. In some ways, you were happier right after the invasion than you are now.”

  “I was focused on rebuilding. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

  “Perhaps it’s time to find another focus?”

  She shook her head, amused despite herself. “That was a setup. You led me in a logical circle. I am the Prime Builder, you know. I’ve some experience with debate tactics like this.”