The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 21
Release
“Love is the strangest alchemy, able to make even the most leaden heart as light as air.”
– Xie, Ixthian chemist (856 MA)
It was just as well that Xia didn’t keep strong pain medications stocked in the Blue Phoenix’s medical bay. The baby was coming early and Kessa screamed with the effort. If Xia had any chemicals more potent than the basic blockers that Tiberius often pilfered, she would have given them to the wailing girl hours ago. They weren’t good for the baby, but it was hard to watch Kessa suffer.
She lay on the examination table, her borrowed denims and shirt replaced by a pale green surgical sheet. For the moment, the sheet simply preserved Kessa’s modesty, but Xia feared that she would have to use the sheet for its original purpose if the child did not come soon. She hadn’t performed a surgical birth in years, not since her intern days, and wasn’t eager to test her memory. Xia held Kessa’s sweaty hand in her smooth silver one and mopped the Dailon’s blue brow with a sponge.
“Push,” Xia urged.
“I can’t! It hurts so much!” Kessa cried. She flopped back on the table. “Oh God, it’s too soon. I’m not ready! I can’t do this, Xia!”
Xia released Kessa’s hand and dropped the sponge into a tray of cold water. With both hands free, she levered her groaning patient back into a half-sitting position and rubbed her bare shoulders encouragingly.
“You’re not doing any of this alone,” Xia said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. “I’m here with you. And Vyron will be here soon, too.”
“Vyron doesn’t know! What if he’s angry?” Kessa panted.
“What? He’ll be so happy for you both,” Xia said. What male wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that his genetics had been propagated? “Now push, Kessa! This child won’t be born on its own. He needs your help.”
“He? Is it a boy?”
“It’s a good thing you ran from the Sisterhood,” Xia told her. “This little man wouldn’t have been safe with them.”
Kessa smiled weakly.
“I did something right,” she said. “Just once.”
Xia hadn’t thought to close the door behind her after bringing Kessa to the medical bay. Through the open hatchway, she heard footsteps rapidly approaching. Xia grabbed her laser pistol, the weapon left over from her involuntary service on the Caitiff. Xia hadn’t stopped carrying it since Coldhand’s incarceration on board the Blue Phoenix. Kessa leaned heavily against Xia and was holding breathlessly still.
“Breathe, girl!” Xia hissed. Depriving the baby of oxygen would only put him in further danger. “I’ll take care of this. You just breathe and push.”
Xia almost shot Maeve as the fairy came running through the door. Xia barely recognized the princess. Duaal had warned her about the blonde hair, but Xia had no idea the change would be so drastic. Kessa let out an explosive breath and sobbed with relief.
Maeve didn’t seem to notice Xia’s gun. She dropped to one knee at Kessa’s side with her head bowed and took the girl’s sapphire hand in her tiny white ones. Xia blinked at the strange scene. She had never seen Maeve act like this.
“I humbly beg for your permission to be present at this sacred moment,” the Arcadian said.
Maeve actually sounded as though she meant it. If Kessa said no, Xia had little doubt that she would leave without another word. Kessa hesitated, but she smiled and nodded.
“Of course,” she said. “If it weren’t for you, I would still be back on Axis with the Sisterhood. I… I’m really glad you’re here.”
“You need to clean up first, Maeve,” Xia told the fairy. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “I won’t have you dragging infections in here.”
Maeve looked as though she wanted to argue with both women, but she nodded once and rose, already stepping from her ruined dress. She wadded up the cloth and shoved it down a disposal chute. Maeve strode naked out the door, presumably down to the showers. Kessa stared, wide-eyed and startled at the Arcadian’s immodesty. Xia only chuckled, long since accustomed to it.
She put her gun away in its holster. Maeve wanted to help? That was a first. But it seemed to soothe Kessa, so how could Xia refuse? Finally, something was going right.
The Raptor dropped out of superluminal flight at the edge of the Bannon system, just outside the orbit of the fourteenth planet. The blue-white little ball of ice was on the near side of the system’s aging sun, represented by a green sphere of glowing lines on the navigational computer’s screen.
Coldhand had flipped a pair of switches to engage the sublight engines. Alerted by the change in the SL drive humming through the hull, Vyron stirred from his half-doze as the higher-pitched Raptor systems fired up. He blinked his black eyes and yawned.
“So this is it,” Vyron said. The Dailon heard his own voice still raspy and thick from slumber. “The Stray system.”
“Bannon system,” Coldhand told him. “Stray is just the third planet.”
“Great. Bannon, Stray… whatever. It’s all just a graveyard to me.” Vyron leaned forward, handcuffs clinking. He squinted at the navigation computer readout. “Third planet? We’re still a ways off, then. Maybe I can pray for a comet to smash into us or something.”
“Unlikely.”
Vyron looked up from the display at Coldhand. The blond human wasn’t watching him. His mismatched hands were on the yoke of the fighter as he guided the Raptor past the outermost planetary orbit of the Bannon system. Maybe Vyron could use the handcuffs to choke Coldhand out and fly away. But Vyron sighed and slumped in the cramped confines of the cockpit. There was no way he could fight a trained bounty hunter like Coldhand. The Prian had made short work of the other Steelskins back on Axis.
A twitch, that’s all it would take for Coldhand to kill Vyron. He had gotten half of his bounty, after all. If Vyron tried anything, the hunter might well just kill him and forget the rest. Even if Vyron somehow incapacitated the Raptor’s pilot, he would only condemn himself to a slow death, suffocating when the air ran out. Vyron had no idea how to fly a ship.
He couldn’t escape Coldhand… No one ever had. It was impossible.
“So, how long until we land?” Vyron asked.
“A few hours,” Coldhand said.
“Where on that dirtball am I going? Are you dropping me in a city, or just the middle of the desert so whoever it is that wants me can kill me away from prying eyes?”
“I’m delivering you to Gharib.”
There was a subtle edge to Coldhand’s voice at that. If Vyron had been Lyran, his ears would have visibly pricked, but his black Dailon eyes only widened. What was going on? Was Coldhand actually annoyed about something?
“What’s wrong with Gharib?” Vyron asked him. “Is that a city or what?”
The bounty hunter said nothing, leaving his prisoner to worry. The two men flew on in silence.
Vyron wasn’t sure how long he had been staring out the canopy at a tiny speck of orange. It radiated no light, but was distinctly visible. It had to be close, a planet growing rapidly larger as the Raptor approached. On closer inspection, the world below wasn’t actually the amber color it had first appeared, but a uniform sandy yellow. Even the red light of the sun could not disguise the dismal, drab beige of Stray.
An ugly little place to end Vyron’s ugly little life. They were approaching rapidly, the planet filling the canopy. Coldhand adjusted his grip on the controls and skimmed the fighter through the thin film of Stray’s atmosphere. The ground below darkened to a chocolate color, then into black as the hunter circled around to the night side of Stray. He pulled up another map on the navigational computer display and verified his coordinates. Coldhand toggled a few more switches, firing reverse thrusters to slow the fighter’s descent. Entering the atmosphere at the speeds needed to travel across the stellar system would rip his ship apart, Vyron supposed.
A green light blinked on the controls, accompanied by an insistent chirp. Coldhand pressed a few buttons and a previously blank monitor lit up. It displayed the staticky image of a frowning Ixthian woman surrounded by instrument panels much like those in the Raptor, but far more modern and expensive-looking.
She had to be young, not long into maturity. Her silver face was still rounded and had a distinctive pale sheen to it, not yet with the sharp features and darker silver-gray skin tone of a mature Ixthian. Despite her apparent youth, one of her short antennae was gone, leaving only a puckered scar above her right eye. The other pale stalk thrust up through white hair pulled tightly back away from her face.
“Coldhand?” Her voice was firm and ringing. Whether she was asking a question or just confirming his identity wasn’t clear. “I’ve got my guns trained on your ship. Power down and prepare to hand over Fethru.”
“What? Who is that?” Vyron asked.
Apparently, the Ixthian heard him.
“My name is Xoe,” she said. “I’m a bounty hunter, too. You might have heard the name.”
“No,” Coldhand replied.
Xoe looked a bit crestfallen, but her compound eyes were a determined blue color. “I’m taking Fethru.”
“Why?” Coldhand asked her. “I’ve already collected half of the bounty. There’s only four hundred cenmarks left. Hardly worth dying for.”
“Half the bounty for less than half the work. Four hundred cen will keep me going for weeks. Well worth fighting for, I think,” Xoe said with a smirk.
Vyron knew that over-confident smile all too well. He practiced it in the mirror every morning. Or had until Coldhand caught him and threw him in the back of his Raptor.
“A few weeks?” Coldhand asked flatly. “Four hundred cenmarks should keep a bird in the air for months.”
“I must be used to a more lavish lifestyle than you,” Xoe said. “It comes with success, I suppose.”
Vyron had worked the streets of Axis long enough to recognize the verbal swagger of someone just trying to make a name for herself. He had watched the other Steelskins do it a hundred times — pick a fight with some other street tough that already had a reputation. If you can win, suddenly you have one of your own.
Xoe had probably cut off her own antenna to give herself the look of a battle-hardened veteran.
Great, I’m in the middle of two bounty hunters’ pissing match.
Coldhand looked away from the Ixthian huntress and tapped at the keyboard of another panel. Sensors, Vyron guessed, as a grid of the nearby planet lit up. It was too dark in Stray’s shadow for him to see much, but the Raptor’s sensors were far better than Vyron’s eyes. Coldhand highlighted a point on the screen and the view magnified to display a sleek, top-of-the-line starfighter with hooked wings and all of the latest weaponry. Coldhand glanced over a list of numbers and abbreviations that scrolled across the monitor beside the image of Xoe’s ship.
“A Starstalker, model C. Expensive,” Coldhand said. “But your registry is still out of Narsus Shipyards.”
Xoe flushed. “The ship is new. I haven’t had a chance to change it yet. But you should be worrying about the missiles I’ve got trained on you, not reading my data.”
Vyron almost bumped into Coldhand as he stared at the nearly incomprehensible jumble of instruments. Xoe had to be bluffing, right? Coldhand’s entire demeanor was uncaring and casually dismissive. Surely the hunter would be panicking — or at least mildly concerned — if some hotshot hopeful had a weapons lock on the Raptor.
Coldhand brought up another screen on his display, replacing the scan of Xoe’s ship. It was full of blinking red warnings. Vyron stared in horror.
“God, she’s serious?” he gasped.
Coldhand ignored Vyron entirely, but the Ixthian huntress was still listening.
“Very,” Xoe said. “Hand over the bounty or hand over your life. I’ll burn you out of the sky, Coldhand.”
The ultimatum sounded like something out of a bad show. If the circumstances had been less dire, Vyron would have laughed. He wondered how she would turn in the bounty if she shot the Raptor down and killed both pilot and passenger, but the color was doubtlessly secondary to making a name for herself. If Xoe could kill Coldhand — or at least bloody his nose — she would certainly have that.
The hunter turned back to Xoe. His eyes were like ice. Vyron was glad that look wasn’t leveled at him.
“Are you threatening my bird?” Coldhand asked.
Did that mean that Coldhand was going to give him to Xoe? Vyron felt like a color chip, traded from hand to hand at a whim, with no control over his own fate. At least he was a high mark one, expensive enough to buy off Xoe’s missile locks. Vyron was a career move for the Ixthian huntress, if only because of the infamous hunter who had caught him first.
But what was he worth to Coldhand? Probably not much.
Xia didn’t waste time on exasperated guesses at how Maeve had gotten her hands on a set of scrubs. They were thin, disposable and the same antiseptic green as the surgical sheet draped across Kessa. The top was tied above her wings, leaving her entire back bare, and the pants were so loose that they threatened to fall off the fairy’s narrow hips at any moment. Maeve had picked up the skills of a thief at some point during the century since her homeworld’s fall and Xia didn’t want to reflect on her friend’s less savory pastimes.
Maeve’s currently blonde hair was damp from the shower, all of her exposed skin scrubbed pink. Xia was surprised. The Arcadian never worried about her personal hygiene. Xia had expected Maeve to wash her hands, maybe her face. Two showers in as many days was practically unheard of.
Maeve stood next to the examination table, her hands clasped through Kessa’s. The Dailon was clinging to her with the iron grip of someone drowning and her short, ragged gasps did nothing to dispel the illusion.
“Pain is but a messenger,” Maeve told Kessa in a soothing tone that Xia had never heard her use before. “It is only your body reminding your spirit that something important is happening. Let this pain move through you, scream out its message, but then let it pass.”
Xia really wished Maeve wouldn’t encourage Kessa to scream. Her ears already ached. But when Kessa did cry out, her nails biting hard enough into Maeve’s hand to draw crescents of blood, there was release in the sound. Kessa sagged against Maeve, panting, but some of the tightness had drained from her face. If it helped, Xia couldn’t really fault Maeve’s methods.
“Push,” Xia reminded the girl.
Kessa nodded, gritted her teeth and obeyed. She wailed again. She was still in pain. Maeve bowed her head and sang softly.
“Aes eru nai’i illitha vernae isha,
Cerra nai esha arae ilvae loe,
Shie’i junno sen.”
Maeve’s short song seemed to sever whatever bound Kessa to her pain and she relaxed visibly, staring down with an expression of wonderment.
“There’s so much blood,” Kessa said. There was worry in her voice, but no pain.
“That’s normal for your physiology,” Xia assured her.
Maeve nodded with a smile. “You are in no danger, Kessa. This dance is sacred and natural, and you move through it with grace. Xia will protect you and your baby.”
Xia could hardly believe that this was the same woman she had been flying with for the last three years, but she didn’t have time to wonder about it.
“Push, Kessa,” Xia urged. “I can see his head. It won’t be much longer now. Push!”
Kessa pushed.
Vyron caught a glimpse of rage on Xoe’s face before the screen went black as Coldhand cut the transmission. The bounty hunter ran his cybernetic fingers over a row of switches. Each one clacked loudly as he toggled them and the panel lit up with blinking red indicators. He grabbed a brightly painted handle marked LWAP Release, yanking down hard. The entire Raptor shuddered. Vyron’s stomach rose into his throat.
“What are you doing?” he choked.
For a horrible moment, Vyron wondered if the label on the lever somehow meant it would release him into space for Xoe to pick up at her leisure. That was impossible, of course, but the realization did little to dispel his fear.
Coldhand was paying no attention at all to his prisoner. His eyes moved between half a dozen displays, each flashing with readouts all in urgent-looking red and orange. Vyron craned his neck to look around and got his answer. The Long Wings pods had detached, becoming a pair of rapidly dwindling silhouettes against the stars. There was no reason to drag heavy superluminal engines into a firefight, Vyron supposed. Coldhand flicked a toggle next to the release handle and a yellow light flashed. Vyron could just make out a matching emerald spark on the Long Wings — a transponder to find the pods again when this was all over.
In the emptiness of space, there was no sound as Xoe’s fighter descended on the Raptor. Vyron was still staring at the Long Wings when her silver ship eclipsed the view. He barely had time for a startled breath before Coldhand slammed the Raptor into motion and the air came wheezing right back out of Vyron’s chest, unused. The artificial gravity, localized in the flooring of the Raptor, lessened the sickening sense of motion, but the inertia of his own mass hurled Vyron back into his seat.
Coldhand shot the starfighter forward, skimming the nebulous haze of Stray’s outer atmosphere. Behind them, Xoe responded almost too late, vanishing momentarily from sight. But then she gunned her engines and hurtled after the Raptor. Coldhand pulled back with a feather light touch, firing reverse thrusters so gently that they barely glowed. He was subtly slowing, letting her catch up. Xoe swooped in on his tail, taking the bait.
But the Prian’s metal cybernetic hand slipped, jerking too hard and sending the Raptor into a dizzying roll. Lips pressed together into a tight line, Coldhand wrestled his ship back under control. He flipped the fighter over, reversing direction. For a hammering heartbeat, Vyron stared through the canopy of the Raptor and into Xoe’s Starstalker as it flew past. The Ixthian huntress stared back, eyes an angry ruby while she struggled with her controls.
Xoe wasn’t fast enough. Coldhand fired maneuvering jets again and dropped in on Xoe’s tail. He flipped up the cover on his right control stick and pressed the red button underneath. Molten light bloomed from the nose of the Raptor as the twin-barreled lasers fired, burning deep black lines along the Starstalker’s shiny hull. One of Xoe’s engines sparked and went dark. The silver fighter dipped toward Stray, wavered and recovered. Xoe wheeled the Starstalker sharply, zigzagging wildly as she tried to shake Coldhand. He tightened his grip on the yoke and matched her move for frenzied move.
Vyron groaned and closed his eyes, fighting the urge to vomit all over the cockpit. The press of a body’s own inertia was hard on all races and was one of many reasons for the great popularity of null-fields. But when those generators were in use, a single bullet or meteor could tear a ship to pieces, making them infeasible for use inside a stellar system or in combat.
How was Coldhand keeping his protein paste lunch down? Xoe was probably faring better… The Ixthians’ insect heritage didn’t quite give them an exoskeleton, but silvery skin that was reinforced with a rigid collagen mesh. The same stiff fibers ran through their entire bodies, strengthening organs and blood vessels. Their biology made Ixthians more resilient fighter pilots than any other species, capable of executing maneuvers that would cause hemorrhaging in humans, Lyrans or Dailons.
When Vyron cracked his eyes open, Xoe had stopped fishtailing wildly. Her Starstalker climbed out, away from Stray. Coldhand was still close behind her. He fired a volley of the Raptor’s missiles and four long bullet-shapes spiraled toward the other fighter, their stabilized acylium propellant freezing instantly in the vacuum and leaving an icy vapor trail in their wake.
Xoe pulled her Starstalker up, nosing at a sharp right angle that would have been impossible in atmosphere, but the missiles stayed on her tail. She fired off several bright flares from small bays on either side of the darkened engine that Coldhand had shot out moments before. They erupted into yellow and white light, then balls of crimson and orange fire as the missiles homed in on the decoys and impacted. With no fuel to consume, the flames vanished as quickly as they had kindled.
Coldhand was already moving in again. He had hung momentarily back in anticipation of his missiles explosive radius, but now he fired the Raptor’s engines to close in on the Starstalker’s tail once again. Xoe was ready, armed with the best and most expensive armaments offered by Narsus Shipyards.
The flare bays closed, but an under-wing carrier snapped open, dropping a scattering of hemispherical metallic objects. Coldhand grunted and pulled back on the controls. The hunter’s blond hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and the knuckles of his right hand were bloodless and pale. He shot up and over most of whatever Xoe had just unleashed, but one of the things clipped the Raptor’s wing and flashed with green light. It was a mine, Vyron realized, and cringed as he waited for the explosion.
But it never came. The glow faded silently, though the Raptor shuddered around him. Vyron looked over Coldhand’s shoulder. His control panels flickered, went black, then flared back to life. Xoe’s weapon must have been an EMP mine, made to take out an enemy’s electrical systems. The pulse should have shut down everything in the Raptor.
“You have phenno on your systems?” Vyron gasped. “But you work for the Alliance!”
The black market Nnyth protein coating — favored by pirates and smugglers the galaxy over — was the only thing he knew of that could protect against an electromagnetic pulse, but it was expensive and illegal.
Coldhand didn’t answer. Xoe fired her engines, spun and then charge toward them again, sharp and shiny needle-nose first. No longer forced to use her few rear-mounted defenses, Xoe’s superior weaponry gave her a clear advantage over the worn old Raptor. Coldhand tried to get back onto the Ixthian’s tail, but had to swerve to avoid a heavy scatter of laserfire from the Starstalker.
Coldhand spun the Raptor at the same time Xoe came around for another pass. She fired again, but it was not the glowing red of lasers. Coldhand consulted his instruments in a split second and gripped the controls with his cybernetic hand, tensed to swerve out of the way, but seemed to reconsider.
Instead, the human bounty hunter turned his tail to Xoe. Coldhand was stiff and still, waiting. A short cannon fired a mute pulse of dim green light. Another EMP, exactly like those carried by Axial police vessels. The Raptor’s phenno-protected electronics flickered and then surged again, but Coldhand made no move to evade Xoe’s next shot. Vyron watched in stunned horror as the Prian hunter swiftly powered down his fighter.
“What are you doing? She’s going to get us!” Vyron shouted.
“Quiet,” Coldhand panted.
Sure enough, the Raptor shook as Xoe launched a pair of grappling harpoons, attached to her ship by long metal cables. The spars buried themselves deeply in the fighter’s illonium plating and then began to pull them in toward the Starstalker.
“Do something!” Vyron cried.
Coldhand powered the Raptor back to roaring life and gunned the engines. The harpoons squealed and grated against the hull, but did not release. With the Starstalker in tow, the Raptor leapt forward. Xoe fought, but with only one remaining engine, she couldn’t match the Raptor’s pull. Coldhand scanned the dark void until he found what he needed and began dragging her toward a patch of faint stars.
No, not stars, Vyron realized, but something much closer: Xoe’s EMP mines, the ones that had failed to disable the Raptor. As they closed, the mines flared with a flash of jade-colored light. Coldhand turned his fighter, slicing between most of them. One or two bounced off his illonium shielding, making the cockpit displays waver. Towed by her own cables, Xoe slammed full into the minefield. The Starstalker’s fashionable silver hull sizzled and sparked with green light, then the whole thing went dark.
Coldhand regained control of his Raptor, reversed to create a little slack in the harpoon cables and turned. He sheared through the tethers with a couple of laser shots and left Xoe spinning slowly, helplessly alone among the spent remains of her mines. Coldhand wheeled the Raptor back toward Stray.
“How… how did you know that she wouldn’t be able to fly right through those mines?” Vyron asked, shaky but curious. “You did.”
Coldhand pushed his damp hair out of his eyes and ran a diagnostic to gauge the damage done to his ship in the fight.
“Xoe said her Starstalker was brand new,” he answered. “If she’d ever stopped at a shop for phenno, she would have been able to change the registry.”
“Oh,” Vyron said. He guessed that made sense, but it seemed like a leap. Not much more than a hunch and Coldhand had risked both of their lives on it. “Are you just going to leave her out there?”
“Yes.”
“Will someone come up from Stray to find her?” Vyron asked.
“Probably not.”
“But she’ll die! She’ll run out of food or water or air! Or she’ll burn up in the atmosphere!”
Vyron certainly didn’t like the huntress, but he didn’t particularly want her to die. She was just trying to make a living, like Vyron had been back on Axis. But in the pilot’s chair, Coldhand shrugged, unconcerned.
“No one’s going to cry over a dead bounty hunter,” he said.
Coldhand doubled back to retrieve the Long Wings pods. Vyron slumped and wondered if he was really better off with Coldhand than he would have been with Xoe.
Kessa collapsed back against Maeve, pale and sweating. Xia lifted her wet, crying son for her to see. Kessa sobbed as she reached out to hold her baby. Xia swiftly cut and tied his umbilicus, then deposited the baby Dailon into his mother’s waiting arms.
Maeve and Xia were nearly as bloody and sweaty as Kessa, but both women wore satisfied smiles. Xia pulled the Arcadian off into a corner of the medical bay as Kessa and her new baby fell asleep together.
“Thank you for the help, Maeve,” she said. “What was that song you sang?”
“It was a simple battlefield charm that Orthain taught me when I was a squire.”
“Magic, hm? Would there be a point in asking how it works? Or is the answer just… magic?”
Maeve gave Xia a strange look. “You are a doctor. The spell functions merely to stimulate the production of endorphins. There are charms to deaden the nerves entirely, but those are beyond my skill. I was a knight and taught only a few basic spells.”
“What?” Xia asked, blinking. The fairy’s explanation seemed so… ordinary. There were thousands of medications that did exactly that. “But it’s magic!”
“It is the same as the science you studied,” Maeve told her. “The manipulation of biology and physical forces. Our tools are different, but the effects are the same. The rules of the universe cannot be broken.”
Xia shook her head. She didn’t understand. But both women fell silent to let Kessa sleep in peace.
