Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 559: Chapter 554: Nine

Location:The Pavilion workshop, then a shelf of bare rock on the northern margin of the Scorch

Date/Time:3 Ashbloom 9943 AZI, Temperday, before dawn

Realm:Lower Realm

It stood on the rock in the dark, and it did not look like anything.

That was the difficulty. Every soul on that shelf had come out expecting a thing, and had spent the walk up from the Pavilion entrance constructing one privately, and what they had arrived at was a long dark shape on three legs that refused to be any of the shapes they had brought with them.

It had no wings. That was the first objection, and Hulong made it out loud before they had got within thirty paces. Nothing on Doha goes up without wings or a working, and this had neither — no sail, no fin, no vane, nothing held out into the air at all. It was a wedge. A long soft-edged wedge lying on its belly with its nose slightly up, wider at the back than the front, standing on three legs that had come out of its underside and gone into the ash without disturbing much of it.

It was dark, and not painted. Doha paints things. Doha carves things and lacquers things and beats a pattern into things because a made object that carries no mark is an unfinished object, and this had not one mark anywhere on it, and no rivet, and no seam, and no join, and no plate edge, and nothing to say whether it had been assembled or grown.

It made no sound. It gave off no heat. It did not smell of anything.

”It is the size of the long hall at Thornhaven,” said Xingteng.

”It is longer,” said Huifu, who had walked the length of it while the rest of them were still deciding how to look at it.

And Yinglong, who had asked to come once, badly, and had gone red about it, stopped at the foot of the legs and looked up the whole length of it and said, with complete sincerity:

”You are certain this metal box can fly.”

Nobody laughed, because it was a real question and because everybody standing there had been about to ask it.

Jayde put her hand flat on the underside of the hull, which was a thing she had done every day for a year and did not notice herself doing, and something in the belly of it answered — a single low note, felt in the bone rather than heard — and a section of the hull that nobody had been able to see the edges of came away and unfolded downward and became a stair.

There were no hinges in it. It arrived out of a surface that had been continuous a second before and put its foot on the ash without a sound, and it was lit along both sides from underneath, and the light was warm.

Yinglong took a step backward.

”It can fly,” said Jayde.

***

And that was when they saw the two of them properly, standing in the light at the bottom of the stairs.

Yinxin had come out of the Pavilion first and had stopped inside three paces and had not moved since.

Federation service rig. Ship dress, not parade — the dark one, with the standing collar that closes at the throat and the long cuffs and the row of loops down the left forearm. There was nothing ornamental on either of them. There was nothing soft on either of them. They had not been altered, because a Federation rig does not require altering; it had come off a rack in the Resolute’s crew stores and had taken three seconds to work out what shape it was now on and had then been that shape, and it would keep whoever was inside it at one temperature from a furnace to a vacuum and had been doing that for people for eleven centuries without anybody finding it remarkable.

They had each taken four of them out of the Vel’thari. Not for a reason. Neither of them had been able to give one at the time, and neither had tried, and the eight rigs had sat folded in a ring for a year and a half, being the most sentimental objects on the continent.

Jayde had put hers on at the fourth bell without making any decision about it at all.

She had come into the workshop still fastening the left cuff, entirely unprepared for company, and had found Eden at the bench in hers with her collar already closed, and the two of them had stood and looked at each other for about two seconds.

Then they had both started laughing, at the same moment, for exactly the same reason, and had gone on doing it far longer than it was worth, in a workshop under a mountain, in the dark, on a morning neither of them had been sure they would live through.

Yinxin was still standing three paces out of the Pavilion.

”I have known you four years,” she said.

”Yes.”

”I have never really seen you.”

***

The two of them went up the stairs first, and stopped at the top of it, and the ship smelled of a room nobody had opened in a long time.

Not decay. There is nothing in a hull like that to rot. It was the flat manufactured smell of sealed air that has been sitting on its own, faintly warm along the line where the deck plates ran over the cells, and under it, so thin she thought she had invented it, the ghost of somebody’s coffee from a morning on a different world.

Jayde stood in the hatch with her hand on the frame and did not go in.

Eden stopped beside her with the datapad under one arm, which was how Jayde knew it was not only her.

”It is going to smell like that for about ninety seconds,” Eden said, ”and then we will stop being able to smell it, and by the fourth hour neither of us will remember standing here.”

”I know.”

”I am saying it so we both know.”

They went in.

***

They had not brought this ship out of the Vel’thari. There was no road out of the Vel’thari that a hull goes down.

They had taken it apart where it stood.

Four weeks of it, in a dead spot under a mountain, with two people and a fabricator and no cultivation between them — panel off, catalogue, into the ring; frame member cut at the joint, catalogue, into the ring; every fastener in a labelled sleeve because a fastener you cannot identify is a fastener you will guess about at three in the morning eighteen months later. Eden had done the catalogue. Jayde had done the cutting. Neither of them had said out loud that they were doing it on the assumption of a future in which they were alive and somewhere with room, because saying it would have been unlucky.

Then the Pavilion, and a workshop with Isha’s wards over it, and the whole of it going back together the other way round.

Which is the argument, and Jayde had made it once in Voidmarch and had refused to make it twice: every single piece of that ship has been through her hands. Not inspected. Handled. Taken off, carried, named, and put back by the two people sitting in the front of it. There is no assumption anywhere in that hull, because there is nothing in it that either of them has not personally had in their fingers.

She had built worse than this and flown it.

That was the thing nobody in the Pavilion knew how to weigh, and she had stopped trying to explain it after the first evening in Voidmarch. Sixty years in the Federation, and a war at the end of it, and the last eleven of those years spent on the wrong side of a line where nothing came out of a yard with a serial number on it. You learn a particular trade doing that. You learn that a good machine is not one that has never been broken; it is one whose failures you have personally been inside of and can name in the dark. She had flown a transport out of the Kelsaine orbitals with a reactor housing held on by strapping and the honest opinion of a man who had died four days later, and it had held, because she had known exactly which sixteen things could kill her and had spent her whole attention on those.

Here she had a year, a mountain, a workshop in her own soul with Isha’s wards over it, and a doctor who had run a Federation medical bay and understood atmosphere as a system rather than as a convenience.

Eden had taken the cells and the scrubbers and the whole business of keeping a dozen bodies breathing and had done nothing else for four months. Every seal on that ship came out. The ones she did not like did not go back, and when the ones she did like were in, she shut herself inside a sealed hull overnight with the datapad and no company, watching a number that was supposed to not move, to satisfy herself that it did not.

It was not a rebellion ship dragged together in a bad week.

It was the best thing either of them had built in two lifetimes, and Jayde had run the numbers until there was nothing left in them to run and had brought the people she loved most in the world onto it, which was the only endorsement that had ever meant anything to her.

***

It had been two people.

That was the plan for eleven months, and it was not a plan anybody argued with, because it was not a plan; it was arithmetic. Two people can fly this. Two people have flown things like this. Everybody else stays on the ground where the ground is, and if it goes wrong, the corps loses two and not a dozen.

Jayde had written the manifest out in Voidmarch. Centauri. Shishido. Two lines, and a third for Reiko that she had put down without thinking about it and had never once considered removing.

Then she had made the mistake of saying it out loud in the Pavilion.

Yinxin asked once. She did it properly and quietly, at the end of a working day, and when Jayde said no, she said very well and went and sat in her chair, and did not ask again, and was still not asking three weeks later in a manner that took up the entire room.

Xinglong made a case. It was a good case, argued in order, with the risk laid out first because he is not a man who hides the weak part, and the whole of it came down to the fact that if the two of them did not come back, there would be nobody left alive who had seen what was up there, and nobody would ever build another one.

Heiteng did not ask at all. He simply began, some time in late Sparkfall, to be wherever the ship was.

Hulong asked four separate times in four separate ways. Yinglong asked once, badly, and went red. Xingteng never said a word about it and was the first one packed. White came into the workshop, stood there for a while, said ”I’ll come,” and left before anybody could respond to it, which is the longest conversation White had initiated lately.

Green did not ask either. Green simply started leaving things on the ship, in places on it that would have been hers if she had been coming.

And Jayde had said no, and no, and no, and had meant it every time, right up until the evening Eden put the numbers down on the workbench and said: the hull is sound, the cells are sound, I have sat in it for nineteen hours and I would put my mother in it. You are not saying no because it is dangerous. You are saying no because you are frightened, and being frightened is not a reason; it is a feeling, and you taught me the difference.

So the manifest had twelve lines on it by the end of Sparkfall, and a thirteenth that was never written down.

Jayde had looked at it for a long time the night before and had not been able to decide whether she had been talked into something or had been given something, and had eventually concluded that those are frequently the same event.

***

The Resolute was still in there.

That was the other thing about coming out of the Vel’thari with a hull in a ring: she had left a whole ship behind her to do it. RFS-217 was never going to fly again, and both of them had known it inside ten minutes — dimensional transit had taken the crew and had taken the spine of the ship with them, and no amount of four weeks and a fabricator was going to change what that hull was, which was a grave with corridors in it.

Marcus Aldridge. Marc, who had come over to her side in the second year and pulled her out of a burning corridor in the third, who had kept paper logs like a man from a century he had never lived in, and whose last entry had said he still owed her a drink. She had signed the modification orders on that hull class herself. Her own hand, on a form, on a world that does not exist.

So she had taken him apart instead.

Conduit and circuitry panels and structural alloy off his walls. The contents of a medical bay whose layout Eden’s hands already knew. Every meter of wire in him that was not load-bearing, and some that was. Marc’s ship had been stripped to keep a smaller one flying, and Jayde had done most of the stripping herself and had not let anybody else do the bridge, and it was the only funeral available on that side of a mountain and she thought it was roughly the one he would have picked.

His knife was in the ring. So was the holo-frame, and the book, and the mints, which had gone soft.

She would put the knife somewhere in this cabin before the year was out. She had not decided where.

***

The fore section was two seats and a great deal of nothing.

That is the thing nobody on Doha ever believes, and Jayde had given up trying to explain it. There are no levers. There are no dials, no cranks, no brass, no glass tubes with things in them. The fore section of a Federation transport is a pair of seats, a curved run of matte gray surface in front of them that is not anything, and a volume of empty air between the seats where the ship puts whatever you need to be looking at.

Her boots came back at her, and she had braced for it this time.

Hard soles on structural alloy — that flat bright ring that no stone floor on Doha has ever made and never will, because Doha has no reason to build a floor out of a material that thin and that strong. Nine paces of it, forward, and every one of them a sound she had walked on for sixty years in a life that had ended.

She had heard it once already, in the Vel’thari, in the dark, with no cultivation in her and Zhi’s light on the bulkheads, and it had taken her legs out from under her at the second step, and she had sat down on a dead man’s deck and been no use to anybody for some minutes. Eden had waited. Eden had not said one word about it then and had not said one since.

This was the other kind. The floor was the same, and the sound was the same, and the difference was that it was hers now, and it was going to fly.

She sat down, and the seat took her.

That is the correct verb. It read her weight and her length and the angle nearly two years of riding a charling had put into her spine, and it moved, slowly, over about three seconds, until it was holding her in the shape it had been built to hold a person in. She had sat in ten thousand of them. She had never once thought about it.

She put her palm flat on the plate beside the right armrest.

The ship came up the way it had come up two hundred times since Emberwane, which is to say without any ceremony whatsoever. Light rose in the gray surfaces — not switching on, rising, as water comes up a channel — and ran away down the cabin behind her in a long unhurried wave, and a hologram bloomed in the empty space between the seats, amber and pale blue and a scatter of small white type, and began to turn.

There was nothing new in any of it. She had brought this ship up on a workshop floor in Emberwane and again the same night and about twice a week ever since. Every system on it had been run to its limits and then run past them with nobody aboard; the drive had been lit four times against a mountain with the whole of the Pavilion’s far wall taking the thrust; the cells had been cycled until Eden stopped being interesting about them. There is no version of Jayde Centauri that puts a dozen people into a hull she has not already tried to break.

What was different this morning was one line in the configuration, and she had left it until last on purpose.

”Nine,” she said. ”Voice on.”

***

”Good morning, Commander Centauri.”

The voice came from nowhere in particular and from the whole fore section at once. Warm. Unhurried. Pitched about where a person’s voice sits when they are pleased to see you and are not going to make a performance of it.

Jayde sat with her hands on the armrests and did not say anything for slightly too long.

She had heard it exactly once before, on the first night, on a workshop floor, when she had brought the systems up not knowing what was still in them — and it had said good morning to her and then read her out of the fleet register, because she was not in the crew register and never had been, and there was her rank and her authority and a note appended by a Captain M. Aldridge that was not in the standard format and that Nine had never been able to file correctly.

And a status line, which read killed in action.

She had sat on the floor of her own soul that night for rather a long time, and then she had told it to correct the register and be quiet, and it had said corrected and had been quiet for a year, and had done everything asked of it through a board and a datapad without once complaining about the arrangement, because complaining is not among the things it is.

”Hello, Nine,” she said.

***

Its designation ran to a dozen characters, and Jayde had never in her life heard anybody use more than the last one. Series Nine shipboard attendant. Every transport in the fleet had one; they were all identical, and every crew on every ship in six hundred systems called it Nine and then spent the rest of the voyage arguing with it about the maintenance schedule.

”Good morning, Dr. Shishido Eba,” said Nine, as Eden came forward.

Eden stopped in the hatchway with one hand on the frame.

”You turned it on,” she said.

”I turned it on.”

”You could have warned me.”

”I could have.”

Eden stood there a moment longer. She had been on the workshop floor that first night too, and she had been the one who got Jayde up off it, and she had never once asked to hear it again.

”Good morning, Nine,” she said.

”It is good to have you both aboard,” said Nine, and did not make anything of it, which was the single kindest thing that happened to either of them that morning.

She sat down in the right-hand seat, and the seat took her, and she put both hands over her face for about four seconds and then took them down again and picked up the datapad, and neither of them said anything about it.

”There are nine people standing at the foot of my stairs who are not in the crew register,” Nine said pleasantly. ”Shall I log them as guests?”

”Log them as guests.”

”I have no species classification for four of them.”

”I know.”

”Would you like me to create one?”

”Not today, Nine.”

”Of course.”

***

Getting dragons into a Federation transport is a thing that has never had to be thought about before.

They came up the stairs in human form, because human form is what fits, and every one of them stopped at exactly the same place, which was the top step, where the ash stopped and the deck started.

Xinglong came up first, because he goes first. Dark hair, and that orange in his eyes that never entirely settles, and he put one hand flat on the bulkhead and left it there for a long moment.

”This is one piece,” he said.

”Most of it.”

”No. I mean it is one piece. There is no joint in it.” He ran his hand along the frame and back. ”You made this.”

”Not this. People a long way from here made this. I made it work.”

The rest of the quintet came after him — Huifu, and Hulong, and Yinglong, and Xingteng — and the five of them distributed themselves through a cabin built for a species that sits down, and none of them sat down.

Heiteng ducked the hatch and straightened and looked around the inside of it once, with the mercury silver going over everything, and said nothing at all. He had been a king for longer than the Federation had existed as a word. He had walked into rooms built to intimidate him on three worlds. Jayde watched him take in a cargo cabin with a scuffed deck and a bad light panel and be, unmistakably, out of his depth for the first time in four years, and have the grace not to pretend otherwise.

Yinxin came last of the walking ones, and stood in the middle of the deck with her arms folded into her sleeves, and said, ”It is very small.”

”It is.”

”You are going to put it outside the world.”

”Yes.”

”And the outside of the world is nothing.”

”It is.”

Yinxin considered that with the golden eyes very steady, in the manner of a woman who has spent three thousand years being the most dangerous thing in any room she is standing in and has just been handed a new category of fact.

”Then I would like to sit near the front,” she said.

”Good morning, Yinxin,” said Nine.

The cabin stopped.

It stopped completely, as a room does when nine extremely dangerous people all decide at the same instant not to move, and Jayde turned round in her seat to watch it happen because she had been waiting for this since the manifest went to twelve and was not going to pretend otherwise.

”Who is speaking?” said Heiteng.

”That is Nine. It is part of the ship.”

”The ship is speaking.”

”Yes.”

Heiteng’s chin came round about ten degrees, which on Heiteng is a shout.

”Is it alive?”

”No.”

”It said her name.”

”It says everybody’s name. That is most of what it does.”

”Good morning, Heiteng,” said Nine. ”I am sorry — I have your name from Commander Centauri’s log and no pronunciation reference. Please correct me if I have it wrong.”

Heiteng did not correct it.

Heiteng did not say anything at all for some considerable time, and Jayde, who had known him for four years and had seen him negotiate with a man while holding a knife out of the man’s sight, watched the Black Dragon King be comprehensively defeated by a polite voice in a ceiling.

”It is not alive,” Xinglong said. It was not a question.

”No.”

”Then what is it doing?”

”Being helpful.”

”Why?”

”Because that is the entire thing it is,” Jayde said. ”Nine has no wants. It has never had one. It would like you to be comfortable, and it would like the maintenance schedule adhered to, and if we all died on this deck it would go on saying good morning to the bodies until the cells ran out.”

”That is horrifying,” said Green, with enormous interest.

”Thank you,” said Nine.

Xingteng, who had been standing well back from all of it, sat down on the nearest seat.

The seat took her.

She was off it and across the cabin and in a low ready stance with one hand out before the thing had finished its second second of travel, and the seat, having lost her, went smoothly back to neutral and waited to be sat in again.

”I apologize,” said Nine. ”Would you prefer the seat not to do that?”

”YES.”

”Of course. I have disabled contour on that seat. Please let me know if you change your mind.”

Hulong turned away and put his hand over the lower half of his face and held it there until it had passed.

White had come aboard without a word and put himself against the aft bulkhead where he could see the whole cabin, which is where White goes, and Green had walked the length of the cabin once, touching nothing, and had come back knowing where every door in it was.

And Reiko was on the deck between the two forward seats at the size he used when he intended to be underfoot.

[I am coming.]

”I know.”

[I am saying it so we both know,] said Reiko, and Eden made a sound she turned into a cough.