THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 7: Lights
“What we know is fragile defense against what we don’t.”
– Devros Vol, Dailon philosopher (52 MA)
Maeve sat silently next to Gripper while Duaal piloted the Blue Phoenix out of Sunjarrah’s secondary star. She didn’t know what to tell her friend. She had killed before and not always in self defense — as Gripper had today — but lives were gone, snuffed out like candle flames. The pain of that never dulled, Maeve knew. It honed itself against guilt and doubt to a razor edge.
They sat beside one another on Gripper’s workbench. Maeve rested her head on his broad shoulder. She wrapped a wing around the Arboran as he cried, but could do little more. Even if she knew what to say, Gripper could not have heard it. The engines in the room’s center thunked and ground unhealthily. The Oslain’ii had landed several shots before the Blue Phoenix could escape. The repairs would be expensive, but at least they were still flying. That was more than could be said for Xartasia’s ship.
Had Maeve’s cousin been onboard the Oslain’ii? Could Xartasia be dead?
Maeve doubted it. Why would Calathan make a speech on his queen’s behalf if she was on the ship? Xartasia — the White Queen — was somewhere else, with the rest of the Devourers… And with the Arcadians she had gathered from Mir and who knew how many other planets.
The intercom light flashed on and Maeve heard Duaal’s voice, but could not make out a word he said. She slid from the workbench, went to the speaker and held down the button.
“Please say that again. Louder.”
Maeve still had to lean in to hear over the noise of the laboring engine.
“We’re heading back to New Hennor to get Panna,” Duaal said, enunciating each word. “Should be there in about twenty minutes.”
Maeve promised to be in the cargo bay by then to help retrieve the other Arcadian and returned to Gripper.
“Do you wish to stay here?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Gripper said. He wiped his cheeks and nodded. “I… I should start on the repairs, I guess.”
Maeve embraced Gripper and made her way to the cargo bay. Logan and Xia were already there. Maeve’s stomach felt made of lead, heavy and toxic.
“How many do you think were on the Oslain’ii?” she asked.
“Probably just the pilot,” Xia said. “Why?”
“You do not think that any Arcadians recruited from Mir were on the ship?”
“No,” Logan answered. “The Oslain’ii wasn’t big enough. It was expensive, but meant for personal use. There’s only room for maybe ten or fifteen Arcadians, even if they crowded in. And that only works for a short flight. Calathan was only there to talk, I’d bet, to get them primed for the real pickup.”
Maeve hoped Logan was right.
“That means another larger ship must be nearby,” she said. “Not far from Sunjarrah.”
The Blue Phoenix landed hard and sent a jolt up Maeve’s spine. Black carbon scoring streaked the viewport, obscuring the view until Xia unsealed the airlock. Duaal had set down not far from where they had landed before. It was darker now, a deep blue-green twilight, but there were the dilapidated settlement houses, the collapsing common building and the withered cornfield.
But now there was something new. Several, Maeve saw when she stepped from the Blue Phoenix. Three banded police cars, with lights flashing on top, and a fourth vehicle that she didn’t immediately recognize. It was only when Logan paused and frowned that Maeve looked again and read the letters stenciled on the larger, darker vehicle’s side: CWAAF.
“They came,” Xia sighed in relief.
“Gripper’s call finally went through,” Logan said, but he didn’t sound pleased.
“Is this not precisely what we wanted?” Maeve asked him. “The authorities are here.”
But Logan’s gaze remained fixed ahead as he stalked toward the compound. Maeve and Xia hurried to keep up.
The police had rounded up what seemed to be every Arcadian living outside New Hennor. The winged fairies huddled together next to one of the broken-down gray houses, surrounded by armed and scowling officers. The Arcadians kept their heads down and murmured to one another. Maeve wasn’t close enough to make out the words.
Panna stood to one side, flushed in the flashing police lights and arguing with a tall Ixthian woman in a neat green Alliance uniform and a starkly white braid falling down her back. When Panna saw Maeve, she broke off and called out.
“Can you please talk to the lieutenant here?” she shouted. “Tell her what happened!”
The CWAAF officer turned to Maeve, but looked right over the small fairy’s head and nodded to Logan and Xia.
“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Lieutenant Xal. We came out on a disturbance alert, but the call was dropped before we arrived.”
“That was Gripper,” Xia told the other Ixthian. “We had to leave before he could talk to you.”
“We found an Arcadian body next to a scorch mark in that field there,” Xal said. “Are you telling me you left a murder scene before the police arrived?”
“That knight was not the only one here!” Maeve said.
“There was a Devourer, too, and another ship,” Panna told the lieutenant.
“A… Devourer?” Xal’s antennae arched up from her snow-white hair. “You’re shining, surely.”
“No,” Logan answered. “Panna’s right. It was working with the dead knight you found. We fought and killed the Devourer, too.”
“We found only one body — the Arcadian male whose murder you just confessed to.”
“That’s not a burn mark out there. That’s where the nanites consumed the body,” Logan said. His cybernetic hand ground at his side, clenched into a silver-gray fist.
The CWAAF lieutenant was not impressed.
“If we can verify that, you’re going to owe something colorful,” she said. “It’s a damned good thing for you that it wasn’t an Alliance citizen who attacked you.”
Rage boiled inside Maeve, painful and hot and erupting before she could stop herself.
“That man was an Arcadian,” she snarled. “That is what you are saying, yes? That it is a good thing he was just a fairy?”
Xia placed a restraining hand on Maeve’s shoulder and looked at Lieutenant Xal.
“What about the Devourer?” Xia asked. “You have plenty of witnesses here of the attack on us and the alien.”
“We’ve found no evidence of any monsters,” Xal said dismissively. “There have been some stories of another assailant from the three Arcadians here who speak any Aver, but nothing conclusive. What happened to this other ship?”
Maeve opened her mouth to answer, but Logan was quicker.
“We chased it, but their ship was too fast,” he said. “We lost it.”
Xal sighed. “Did you catch its name or transponder code? I’d like to speak with the pilot.”
“No,” Logan said.
“So what’s going to happen now?” Xia asked. “Are you going to report this to CWAAF?”
“Yes,” Lieutenant Xal said. “Don’t leave New Hennor. I’ll have a lot more questions for you.”
The Blue Phoenix was grounded on Sunjarrah for a week while the police questioned Logan, Xia, Gripper and Duaal about what had happened.
As a non-citizen, Maeve’s testimony wasn’t admissible in court and not deemed important in the investigation. Panna’s presence and reactions raised questions and it wasn’t long until a file sent from Tynerion revealed her Arcadian heritage.
The fine for falsifying her identity was five hundred cenmarks.
Fines for their illegal squatting in the old colony were less, but the Arcadians of New Hennor couldn’t pay them anyway. So many fairies were incarcerated for their various petty crimes, dropped into a prison populace of violent criminals that they didn’t know how to communicate with. The Arcadians would remain there for a month, but the numbers weren’t in their favor.
Statistically, only fifty percent would survive their prison time. Those who made it out again had nowhere else to go. They would return to the same place they were fined for living.
It was not the police who told Maeve about this, but Panna. She ranted every afternoon, when she and the princess were alone on the Blue Phoenix, while the rest were gone answering a new round of the same questions. Maeve agreed with her rage, but what could they do? Only the Lyceum could change Alliance law.
The Lyceum was far away on Axis and there were no Arcadians on that council. The conversation always ended the same way, with Maeve sitting in unhappy silence while a red-faced Panna fought for her composure and fled the room before she lost it.
Panna wasn’t the only one revealed as a fraud during the investigation. Logan’s identity, too, was the subject of many questions, and for invoking the powers of his lapsed license, Logan Coldhand’s fine was one thousand cenmarks.
As they suspected, the Oslain’ii hadn’t registered a flight plan or landing coordinates. Several companies had noted damage to their satellites in the autotraffic belt. The damages were split between insurance companies and the captains of the two involved ships: Duaal Sinnay and the mysteriously absent pilot of the Oslain’ii. Even so, the reparations cost every chip of color that Maeve, Duaal and the rest could scrape together.
And then the investigation was over. Any interest in the dead Devourer never made it past a few disregarded initial testimonies. Lieutenant Xal and CWAAF only involved themselves in the affair because the Arcadians didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the Sunjarra police. Once the bird-backs were dealt with, Xal quickly and efficiently completed her datawork, then never appeared again.
Four days later, the whole thing was over. Broke and frustrated, everyone was free to return to the Blue Phoenix.
The crew’s first dinner together in eight days was noodles and canned sauce from the back of the cupboard. Xia served the limp dinner to Duaal and Logan, then a larger bowl to Gripper. The Arboran sniffed at the sauce. His eyes were still rimmed in red. Xia offered some food to Panna, but the girl declined. Maeve accepted the bowl instead. They all ate in silence, heads down and shoulders slumped.
“Now what?” Duaal asked at last, finally breaking the monotonously mechanical sounds of chewing.
Eyes rose slowly to his — faceted red, forest green, glacial blue and stormy gray. Duaal seemed to realize too late that he asked his question aloud. He smoothed his dark hair and cleared his throat.
“Look, Maeve, I really want to help,” Duaal said. “I do. But we’ve tried everything to get the Alliance involved. They don’t believe us, even when we find a Devourer on one of our own planets. We know Xartasia is out there with them, but we don’t know where and we don’t know what the hells she’s doing.”
“I… I wish I could believe that all my cousin wants is to take our people home,” Maeve answered. “But if that was true, what need does she have for the Devourers?”
“I don’t know. We could fly after her to the end of the universe, Maeve,” Duaal told her unhappily, “and never find her or figure it out. We’re out of money and ideas.”
Logan pushed his bowl back and tapped illonium fingers on the stained tabletop.
“We do know a few things,” he corrected. “Xartasia is gathering Arcadians. Maeve’s right. If all she wants is to take them home, she just needs ships. Not Devourers. Xartasia’s got some sort of plan that involves the Arcadians she’s summoning.”
“But we don’t know what that is,” Duaal said again. “Or how to find out.”
Logan held Duaal’s gaze for a long moment, but it was the Prian who finally looked away. Gripper sniffled and Maeve wished she could tell him that all of his pain had been for something, to save the entire galaxy. But… it would be a lie. Maeve pushed her pasta around the bowl and couldn’t convince herself to eat another bite.
“No. We’re not out of the fight yet.”
It was Panna who had spoken. The wingless young Arcadian jumped to her feet and slammed her hands down on the tabletop, making the dishes jump.
“Coldhand’s right,” she said. “We know that Xartasia is after the Arcadians. That may be the only thing we know, but we can still do something about it.”
“What?” Gripper asked. His voice was raw and hoarse. “What are we supposed to do, Sprite?”
“We have to get to them first! We win the Arcadians to our side before Xartasia can,” Panna said. She turned to Maeve. “You are a knight and a princess of the White Kingdom. You should be our queen, not her! Call to our people, Highness, and they will flock to your side.”
“I am no queen,” Maeve objected. “We have discussed this–”
“But you could be a queen,” Duaal said. “Panna’s right, Maeve. It’s the only thing we can do against Xartasia. If we can make you into a queen, we might still be able to stop her. We don’t know what she needs the Arcadians for, but we might be able to stop her from getting them.”
“No.” Maeve’s fingernails were biting into her palms. “I cannot lead my people. I am unfit to be queen!”
“Then make yourself fit,” Duaal said. When Maeve looked up, there was a hardness in his eyes that she had never seen before. “If you really want to stop Xartasia and the Devourers, this is it. This is the only plan we have, Maeve.”
Her mouth was dry and felt like there was something thorny lodged inside. She turned to Logan.
“Tell them… tell me that this plan is insanity,” she begged. “That it will not work. We cannot do this!”
“I don’t know if it’ll work,” Logan said. His eyes were cold and unforgiving. “But Duaal’s right. We have nothing else.”
If she weren’t already sitting, Maeve would have fallen. She felt stabbed in the heart, betrayed… but it wasn’t Logan’s fault. It was the only idea they had. Did she expect Logan to side with her just because they were lovers…? No, her hunter was too smart and too practical. There was no other way. Maeve slumped in her seat.
“Very well,” she said almost inaudibly. “I will do it. I will… I will be queen.”
Panna slapped her hand on the tabletop again. Her expression was grim, but there was a tiny smile curling her lips. Xia shook her head, disbelieving but not disapproving. Even Gripper smirked just a little, as though he had always expected this. Duaal leaned back and arched one dark brow.
“Great,” he said. “Now how do we turn Maeve into a queen of Arcadia?”
“We can start now,” Panna answered. “Here in New Hennor.”
