Ohre (Heaven's Edge) (5 page)

“We?”
I heard myself stupidly asking. She jerked up her chin to meet my gaze again, this time curiously. I hated the fact that around her, I was still acting like the uncivilized, undisciplined boy that Brien found.

Something like resignation filled her round eyes, something that looked too much like weariness. “I don’t plan on staying here long, miner. We spent too long on the edge. Now that our parents are dead, it’s time Arvex and I went back to
Datura
.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it really, not when she sounded so leaking determined, not when
Datura
was on the other side of the blowing heavens. Not when her family had been considering settling on this rock long before we crashed, apparently.

“What?” she said as she bowed her head with a glare.

“You really think, after all the time we sailed those heavens, the Navigator had any intention of going back?” I avoided mentioning the recording. “Think about it, Qeya. They made all of you train and learn, drilled those lessons into your water-logged heads, just so you
wouldn’t
ask too many questions. They kept you separate so you couldn’t see just how lost and scared they really were.”

She moved across the fire so quickly I only saw a blur of motion before she was on top of me, pinning me down, her retractable scythe blade against my neck and her eyes glowing as she hissed against my face. “You know nothing, miner! I have their memories in my head. Don’t you think I know what they were trying to do? I knew before I was forced to Ascend!”

She didn’t seem aware of my broad knife poking against her biosuit, just above the place where her second heart should be. But I had only ever heard rumors of what happened when a Royal ascended. I knew it was some kind of initiation into adulthood. But what Qeya described sounded a lot worse. If what she was implying was true, then she might have more than a few voices running around in her head. My eyes widened when I realized they
all
did.

Royals were given their parents’ memories usually by the adults’ choice. Every generation, since the beginning of their species, was able to transfer their thoughts to their children, to make them immortal and give them a way to become better rulers. There were ceremonies attached to the whole thing and a grand celebration afterwards. The children were prepared for this moment from birth, but if the line before them died too soon, the memories were forced on them. Old Brien once told me that lesser Royals couldn’t handle such a harsh transition. It could easily fry their minds.

“You all ascended when the ship blew,” I murmured, realizing.

Qeya flinched and her blade eased against my neck, not quite as biting as before. And then she collapsed on top of me, just as I shifted the knife to lay flat between our biosuits. Whatever fury had been holding her up was gone and she was once again an innocent Royal.

Her voice came much softer then. “I wasn’t ready for this. But the children… I should have celebrated my birth year by now. Sixteen is not as big a year, but it is big enough. I shouldn’t have ascended for another two star years, Ohre. Now they’re in my head, always reminding me what we left behind, every time I try to think of this place as home.” She started trembling, shaking from more than cold and I held her reluctantly.

“They never stop reminding me of
Datura
. It wasn’t so bad when the
Orona
died. I could almost ignore her voice, but now with mother’s voice, and all the females from her line… Ohre, I think I’m going mad!”

She propped against my upper chest, so I could look into her eyes again. I had seen hints of this conflict in her before last season. Now I knew the reason why.

“For the others it’s not as bad. Even Arvex doesn’t have to listen if he doesn’t want to. He’s always been better about relying on his instincts. But everything I was taught makes me reach inside myself and they’re always there, waiting for me.”

My wild ideas about abandoning all of this and making a new home in this alien sea, returned tenfold. I wanted to take her there so we could both escape. Maybe the deeper she dwelled, the harder it would be for the memories of her ancestors to get through.

I wanted to reassure her, but everything that came to mind only sounded like
filsh
wastes. So instead I held her tighter, with a scythe pressing against my side and a knife between our suits and the fire too hot against my thigh.

Adi’s tinkering had stopped long ago, but I ignored the scathing look she was sending me from the other side of the flames. She could go shove her opinions up a leviathan’s tail for all I cared. And if she made any more jokes about the Royal in my arms after this, I swore to myself, I was going to make her pay in blood.

While Qeya slept, I returned to the gaping hole that had been the deck’s hull. I dragged my thumb over my gauntlet and watched as a soft light emitted from between my webbed fingers and illuminated the wreckage inside. Qeya had avoided coming on deck two since she came to us. When I looked at it, I tried only seeing parts and plates hiding the gears inside. The projected images of home world no longer flickered against the walls. Adi had tasked me with draining as much excess power as I could transfer to the
Pioneer
.

I knew if I didn’t busy myself, after what Qeya had told me, I would start to lose it again. I would be unable to resist the urge to kiss her or grab her and drag her into the sea. But now that I knew about the others and their memories, I knew she would never come willingly. Stealing her from them without her consent would make me the beast. And this time there weren’t any monsters waiting to be slain out in the wet forest. I would have to focus my inner savage nature in ways other than fighting. I approached the power grid that I had grabbed hold of the moment second deck split from the main ship and began to fall into Nukvar’s outer sphere. Clenching my jaw, I pushed past the memory of the children screaming and gripped the edge of a closed section. The rip of metal echoed through the hollow hull. After tossing the metal aside, I lifted my gauntlet to look at the pulse of blue energy traveling through wire coils and circuits.

I had always had affection for metal and inventing things, always known where the wires went, how they came together like a nebulous web. Never could stand to mine dust and gasses like the others. Fixing things was something I understood. I couldn’t fix
her
. I couldn’t fix any of the others. But the ship I stood a chance with.

As I connected the cable to my gauntlet, Adi appeared.

“Don’t speak of Qeya,” I warned as she came to crouch down beside me. Her eyes gleamed like tiny twin leaves as they met mine.

“Good to see you working for a change,” she gruffly replied.

I ignored her and hoped she would leave me be. Any other sane miner knew to leave me to get rid of the darkness in my own way, or send me away. Adi had been living with Royals for too long. She might skin me for telling her so, but she was a lot softer than I remembered, before she joined the shuttle crew.

“Ohre, you know we must send her back. She doesn’t belong here with us out here, away from her kind. And from what I heard tonight, she sounds a stone’s throw shy from going mad…”

“Told you not to say anything,” I grunted low as I twisted the cable free and clenched my fist. More energy was in my gauntlet than there should be and the pressure gave my skin a faint buzz. If she kept talking I might plant it in her chest.

“They all sound cracked,” she said. “I noticed it when the ship crashed. Captain, Remin and Kall seemed hale enough, aside from their shock. But Min, Qori and Tamn were…off somehow, worse than water-logged.”

The lights from the console faded and I ripped another panel free, and then threw it so it barely missed her leg. Adi was silent until I started to drain the last power cell. Her hand on my arm startled me. She had never touched me before unless necessary, or to maim me. If I weren’t the mistrusting miner I claimed to be, I’d have said she was trying to be gentle with me.

“You’ll fry your gears if you don’t get rid of the last batch.” Her grip tightened for an indeterminable moment.

I nodded and stood, then braced my hands on the edge of the consol. A fine layer of dust and grime already coated the once pristine screens and buttons and levers. I stared at Adi’s reflection beside mine.

“We have to let her go, Ohre.”

“I don’t want her to go alone.”

After another pause, she motioned to an even darker corner of the tilted deck. “Come, let me show you something.” We walked over old training equipment and avoided the empty barracks, in favor of gray and white checkered panels. Here was where the projections of home world had constantly played, a leaking reminder of what they would never return to reclaim.

Adi shared a secret grin with me before she placed her fingertips over the panels, reached for the creases. “You never cared much for how
Datura 3
was made. You came to us after and for so long you were nothing more than a wild sea urchin,” she laughed roughly at her own joke.

I rolled my eyes and studied her movements, waiting for her to tell me something useful.

“Royals took over our ship, Ohre, but they couldn’t take our imprint. We were the ones who made it, savvy? Don’t you be forgetting that.” A light emitted from the cracks in the paneling. I stepped back when the gray ones pushed out from the hull and watched as Adi pried a square metal sheet from an illuminated box.

“What did you do?” I asked her, frowning and gaping at the stash of gasses,
chole
dust reserves, data pads and weaponry waiting inside.

Adi snatched a compressor and grinned at me. “We hid these here before the Royals came on board, back when this was our quarters.” She passed me several more reserves and I shoved them into the various pockets in my tool belt. There was enough power in one of these tiny vials to travel 80K leagues in the heavens. And then I looked up, realizing just how many more storage units there were.

“What else have you hidden?” I thought of the transmission against my wishes, heard the panic in their voices once more. What bothered me most was the fact our scanners picked up
chole
dust on a solid world, when usually they were only found on gas worlds. It made me wonder if my adoptive clan had other reasons for planting the Royals on this hostile alien planet. What if they wanted to manipulate the Royals into colonizing so they could take back control of the ship and leave them behind?

Adi twirled a blaster between her fingers. “Something’s been on my mind that I kept from you, mate.”

“Besides all this?” I asked dryly and motioned to the rest of the units. Her grin made her slanted eyes even narrower and reminded me why I had stayed away from the females of my kind in the past. All of them tended to be too conniving anyway, more likely to bite your head off than kiss you.

“I told you to forget about the Royals, but if we want to get
Pioneer
off the ground, we’re going to need Remin.” Before I could question her further, she turned her back on me and began to shove more supplies into the sack she had brought in with her.

Remin was the other miner on
the Pioneer
and had not only designed the shuttle, but all of
Datura 3
. He was so brilliant the Royals took him from his clan and made him build more ships, more weapons, and more technology they could steal from us. He was also the miner I watched get speared by the Var, the same day we found the shuttle crew and lost half of them.

“You’re the one who’s leaking in the brain,” I finally said.

Her voice hardened and her shoulders stiffened but she didn’t look at me. This was a bad sign. “There are things about ship crafting I have no knowledge of. No way a miner couldn’t survive a splinter wound like that.”

“He didn’t show with Tamn, Adi.”

“Tamn’s weak!” she hissed, rounding on me and snatching me by the metal collar of my suit. “He blacks out and wakes up alive, means he’s lucky. Don’t mean the others are dead. And fact is, unless you want to spend the rest of our lives trying to make a bird fly that can’t, we’re going to solve both our problems. We’ll escort
her royal highness
back into that valley and once we send her on her way, we’re going after Remin.”

IV

Return

As a boy, I used to have what Old Brien called “night terrors.” Most miner younglings dreamed about mining and adventure in the heavens, anything to get them off the clustered caves the Royals assigned us to. Their bad dreams might carry them to the Royal palace or strip them of their clan so they were totally alone.

My terrors were darker in nature. I dreamed of leviathans deep in the darkest reaches of the sea, of blood smoking the water and explosions of white hot heat seeping from the core. In my dreams I could never swim fast enough to escape that bone-melting fire. And when it did swallow me whole, after the pain, I found only blackness.

I learned how to live without sleep quickly. Still, I would lay in rest, but never let my mind drift totally. That had worked for years. I thought I was free from night terrors until our ship was attacked and we crash-landed on a hostile world.