Sword and Star by Sunny Moraine

Author:Sunny Moraine [Moraine, Sunny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2016-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Nkiruka made it through the next morning with the aid of deep meditation. Not much else could have been any help to her.

Adisa had come to her, told her what Adam reported to him. A traitor. Likely highly placed. No idea how they might be discovered before the next plans were made. Someone in the Protectorate side of the fleet, but even that couldn’t be concluded with certainty. It was, in other words, a disaster. People had died. Probably, no matter what happened next, more people would.

Two things were unspoken—though clear—and Nkiruka was reasonably certain that neither Adam nor Adisa had made these suggestions to anyone else. Though Adisa would likely make one of them. If someone else didn’t suggest it first.

The first: Could she help? Could she send out feelers, touch minds, discover whatever she could discover? Any hint, any clue, no matter how small? She wasn’t certain; her powers were considerable, had been tested at the battle on Peris and revealed as much, but used like this, so deep and focused, wielded like a scalpel . . . She didn’t know. She would try.

And second—and terrible, but she had already thought of it: they could give up. Retreat permanently. Either dissolve the fleet and let everyone go where they would, or band together, depart for the furthest reaches of space, and try to find a new home. Raise families. Start their own colony. Be satisfied with saving these few members of the whole society they had been trying for. Live.

For some, it might seem like a far better choice. People with children. People who hoped to see those children again. See them grow, have children of their own. Who with children didn’t want that?

So much pain, and so much more to come.

She took refuge in the Halls now, kneeling before her fire and running a length of beads through her fingers. Ixchel’s. She had made such things—bracelets and anklets and necklaces and things to be woven through hair. She had given them as gifts, in accord with her own mysterious whims. Beautiful things of multicolored glass and multifaceted crystal. Things that seemed to have their own meaning, deep and ineffable, and their own secret purposes. Doubtless, they did. Ixchel had never done anything without meaning, without intent.

The piece Nkiruka was holding now had no obviously specific purpose. It was simply a braided length, a series of strands woven together, with no clasp or hook to suggest it was to be worn in any way. To someone who didn’t know Ixchel or her ways, it might look unfinished. It was one of the last items she had ever made. Woven on Takamagahara, perhaps completed mere hours before the battle and the wounds that eventually killed her.

She had known. In the end, as the wave functions collapsed, it had all become clear to her. So she had accepted it. She had gone to it with the grief anyone feels upon seeing loved ones die and with the sadness that accompanies leaving a world and a life one holds dear, but she had prepared.

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