Chapter 13

Bone deep weariness suffused Vidya, from her toes to her bones. She had never felt quite so exhausted before in her life – even at the worst crunch during her training to join with the space survey. That had been several weeks of training on the Indian lunar colony. She had trained in both hard vac-suits and in mechanical counterpressure suits, and gone through every single drill of spacecraft maintenance and operation that she might have needed to follow through while being in detached service. Being a civilian science officer in the astronavy had meant she hadn’t needed most of the skills...

Until now.

She was currently clamped to the side of Ceres – the dwarf planet’s native gravity being so minute that she would have launched herself into escape velocity by jumping hard enough – and was following the hastily scrawled instructions handed to her by a harried Chinese engineer to inflate one of the many jerry rigged constructions that had been hastily packed into the Fleet. Officially called the United Nations Expeditionary Forces, the Fleet was all that was left of free humanity. With the fleets from Arcadia, it came out to only slightly less than the hundred or so ships that the Dark Lord had under his sway.

With the help of Arcadian mages, the Fleet had been able to convert a massive amount of their reaction mass tanks into storage units, containing fabric, connectors, and other raw materials. Most space based construction was modular, hammered out over the century and change of the second space race: Each colony, at the end of the day, was made of the same basic components, like massive, oversized Lego sets. Since the Ganymede colony had been midway through its construction when the Americans had captured it, it had the materials the Chinese had shipped there, and the materials the Americans had shipped when they had decided to make it even larger and more impressive. All those materials were now being put together on Ceres’ surface.

Connection struts.

Harnesses.

Sockets, sized up to fit everything from a laser-frigate to one of the bulkier drone carriers. The difficulty was in distributing the contact points: A single strut, normally used to tether a ship to an asteroid, would have been disastrous. Vidya didn’t need to be a spaceship engineer to see the problem with that, considering the purposes that the fleet was going to put their hundreds of thrusters to. A single contact point would act like a knife, plunging through the whipple shields and aluminum hulls and straight into the habitat sections of the ships. And so, each ship required a truss that would spread the kinetic force of their thrust throughout the entire spaceframe.

This was a construction effort that dwarfed anything accomplished in space since the first, halcyon days of the United Nations efforts to construct the solar mirrors that had bought the human race time to prepare for their climate disasters. And while the mirrors were larger, they had also had the support of the entire technological civilization beneath them. The Fleet had the crews of ninty seven ships, and the civilian population of Ganymede, Ceres, and Mars that could be brought over. Everyone who could fit into a vac-suit and connect struts, screw in components, and follow orders was tethered to the rock.

Which included her.

For the past three days, she had been working on the struts that would support the American frigate, the Constitution. She was one of their laser frigates, and working underneath the focusing lenses of several hundred megawatt X-ray lasers had gone from being intimidating to boring to tedious. The work she had been set to had been the low skill stuff, mostly screwing in struts and placing materials. Nothing that required using the WALDO or the exosuits. It had still meant hour on crushing hour in a vac-suit that had been rated for short term EVA, made safe only by the simple fact that they were operating with half the sky concealed by the bulk of Ceres.

And even when she got a break, Vidya had spent her time in sullen silence, eating mechanically, catching snatches of sleep. No conversation. Hell, no familiar faces: She was in with the rest of the menials, who were mostly the lower ranks of the Chinese crews.

And when she dreamed, it was of the horrible ritual the wizards of Arcadia had put her under – the dissonance between working with struts and screwdrivers by day and reliving black magic and ritual chanting by night felt like it was driving her crazy. But she couldn’t shake the memory, the feeling of the spells reaching into her, finding the connection between her and Sukhdeep and ... twisting it. Tugging on it. Then, when it was confirmed ... pushing through it.

A tapping on the back of her helmet made Vidya shake herself. She turned and saw one of the Chinese technicians waving to make sure he had gotten her attention, then pointing at the next marked out space. Above them, the Constitution loomed, like a sword of Damocles. Every instinct in Vidya’s head told her that the spaceship was about to come tumbling down on her head – slewing off the quarter of the struts they had finished to smash her into a pancake. She ignored those, and instead started to move along the edge of Ceres with the hideously slow clamp, unclamp, shuffle movement that was required to keep herself from herring off beyond the reach of rescue.

She came to the marked spot and saw one of the other menials coming forward, a massive load of light weight struts lashed together in a microgravity rigging, connected to their back by a tether. They moved even more cautiously than her – tugging the net forward, then pushing against it to stop it, braced against Ceres to provide the necessary counterpressure. Even with that caution, the net was not packed as tightly as it might have been and the components within were moving in a wild chaos, rebounding off one another and the net – and in eerie silence, Vidya saw one of the struts strike a weakened part of the net with enough force to tear it. The fabric spread open and one of the struts came out, given a spin by catching on the edge of the net. It was moving with glacial slowness – and it was light enough that she knew it’d cause almost no damage if it did strike anything – but it was still a loose piece of debris in an active construction zone containing the second largest fleet in human history and nearly a thousand vac-techs and menials.

“Debris!” Vidya tapped into the general com. “Debris in section 98-A!”

“Rodger,” a clipped, heavily accented voice – Russian, she thought – said.

In the illusory stateliness of microgravity, the strut continued to tumble. Tumbled ... towards her.

Vidya took a step backwards, instinctively, and felt the tether keeping her attached to Ceres grow taut. She guesstimated the speed, the kinetic energy, of the tumbling spar and decided to risk trying to dodge just by weaving and bobbing. If it hit her, she wanted to be securely attached. She just needed to make sure it didn’t-

The strut smashed into her faceplate. The twisting motion, the stark difference between light and shadow, her own fatigue, all of it made the movement hard to predict – and she had placed herself in exactly the wrong position, at the wrong time. Though lightweight and moving relatively slowly, the strut still had all the kinetic energy it had stored – and it transmitted all of it to the corner that struck her faceplate. Her head snapped backwards and the suit’s alarms blared as the tether turned into a pivot – drawing taught and smashing her, back first, against the rock of Ceres. Something fragile crunched and she heard more alerts – diagnostics tried to crawl across the cracked faceplate and she heard a low whistling.

Cracks spider webbed around the impact and blood wobbled in the air between her nose and the face plate. The vents sucked it away with a slurping noise, but more blood emerged from either her nose or her lip to join it.

“Vac-Tech 9081, stay calm,” a tired sounding American voice spoke in her ear.

“Uh...” Vidya groaned. Her head pounded.

The cracks spread further.

She fumbled, desperately, for the sealing package. But her fingers bumped only against rock, blindly groping around. She knew that she had been trained, repeatedly, to reach for it. Even blindfolded. But her head couldn’t quite call the memory into her thoughts.

The whole face-plate seemed to strain – and with an explosive, ear popping sigh, the weakened surface gave way under an atmosphere of pressure and exploded away from her face. Vidya blew out her own lungs, her eyes blurring. But then, as a roaring filled her ears – a sudden flash of light filled her eyes ... and she found herself looking at a sight so bizarre that it took her muddled head a good five seconds to fully piece it together. In an instant, the star-field had been replaced with an expanse of black, scaled leather. Tiny claws at the edge of the leather hooked onto the metal frame of her helmet, while the center of the rectangle of leather had a small neck, with a small draconic head mounted at the end of it.

Said draconic head said: “Hi!”

Vidya blinked a few more times.

“I saved your life!” the dragon said.

“Hua, right?” Vidya mumbled. “Celestial ... something or something?”

Hua nodded. “I’m really clever and wise and ... wow, my butt is cold. Also, this shape ... is very hard ... to hold!” He chuckled, nervously. But hands were already taking hold of her – awkwardly detaching her from the tether, aligning her with the rescue shuttle. A minute later, she felt the faint pressure of acceleration, then a hissing pop and Hua vanished from before her eyes as her helmet was tugged off. Two Russian cosmos were leaning over her, one of them holding a first aide kit. But before he could apply anything to her busted nose, Hua, who had appeared on her shoulder – reached out with his nose and bumped her cheek.

“Boop!” Hua said. Magic flared through Vidya’s face and she felt the exhaustion fade, the pain fade, her headache fade. She felt more refreshed than she had in weeks, and she had almost died twice. She shook her head, then muttered a thank you in the scanty Russian she had picked up. The two Russians were just gaping at Hua, who was enjoying microgravity by leaping into the air and twisting around, tumbling in a circle with his nose pressed up against his tail.

Vidya heard her com crackle, then a faintly familiar voice came over the coms – speaking English, with a heavy Chinese accent. “Dr. Vidya?”

“Yes? Who is this?” Vidya asked, shaking her head.

The long sigh that came over the line placed it almost before the name did: “Prince Qasim.”

“Is my chosen partner calling?” Hua asked. “Tell him I just saved another beautiful lady.” He paused. “That makes one beautiful lady, twelve regular ladies, and twenty kinda, uh, uggo dudes.” He flapped his wings once, leaning in and whispering to her. “Don’t tell them that.”

The two Russian astros, who had moved away upon seeing their first aid was no longer required, exchanged glances. Vidya wasn’t sure how much of Hua they understood – he sounded as if he was speaking Hindu without accent or inflection. In fact, he sounded alarmingly similar to her first boyfriend. The disastrous one. The one who had bought a motorcycle instead of paying rent and got his left arm ripped off in a drag race.

“Oh, do tell him that I think you need a break,” Hua said, nodding sagely. “My healing touch eased your fatigue, but I still detect a lot of fatigue toxins in your head. And I’m beginning to think that maybe, some of these accidents that we’ve been having are related to everyone working so hard.” He nodded again. “Also, you smell like you really need to get laid.”

Vidya gaped at the small dragon.

“I apologize in advance for whatever Hua has been saying,” Qasim said, long suffering. “Please, can you put him on. He teleported without his communicator. Again.”

The rescue shuttle docked with the Enterprise – the biggest ship with a spin section, the Enterprise remained a defacto command and control for the whole operation. The interior of the spin struts had been extended, using the same component sets that were being used for the struts. There was a limit to how far that could go, but they had managed to double the living quarters at the low cost of rendering the ship unusable as a fighting platform. But as the Enterprise wouldn’t be fighting until the project was complete, and could easily detatch the temporary quarters, it all worked out. Pushing out of the shuttle and following after Hua, who ping ponged off the walls cheerfully, Vidya was brought back to the familiarity of the spin sections. She could see all the places she had used to know, buried underneath the new configurations.

Hua led her, at last, to a doorway that opened up to reveal the Prince himself. He didn’t look like royalty. At least, not anymore: He was dressed in the sleek, skintight outfit of most astros. His facial features had never been particularly aristocratic, at least not to Vidya’s eyes: He had been brown and weathered and tough looking, with the flat, broad features of most Uyghurs. But he looked at Vidya with clear confusion, even as Hua leaped onto his shoulder.

Behind Qasim, Vidya could see a feminine lump in the bed. She felt her own body twinge with jealous need – Hua might have been a dragon, but he had been right. Her mind flashed, momentarily, to her first meeting with the dragon. He had said nearly the same thing. And she had just thrown herself at Mohammad. Ugh. She wanted to die just thinking of it.

“Threesome!” Hua said. Then, spotting the lump in the bed, he raised a clawed paw and waved at her. “Oh! Hey Ning! Foursome!”

“Mmm?” Ning, presumably, rolled over in her bed.

“Hua...” Qasim said, his voice filled with a frown. “Did you bring Dr. Vidya here purely to try and seduce her.”

“And you,” Hua said, cheerfully, his wings spreading, then settling on his back. “According to the legends of humans, if humans go without sex every single night, they begin to go mad with their pent up, rapacious lusts. Like how elves are weak to cold iron, dragons are weak to their infinite generosity and compassion, and they are sometimes so graceful that they engender jealousy in others, and we’re, of course, so beautiful that sometimes, we break hearts merely by entering into a room with others who are sexually attracted to dragons. Also, we’re far, far, far too humble for our own good!” He nodded his scaly head. “ ... what was I talking about again?”

Qasim, his face as stolid as if it was carved from granite, looked at Vidya. “My apologies for Hua. He’s ... him.”

Those two words seemed to cover quite a lot of ground.

Hua, meanwhile, leaped onto the bed, landing on the far side of the feminine lump. A squeal of surprise followed – then soft mewling in Chinese. Beyond the range of the translation spell. Or Hua simply was not using it. Either way, Vidya’s cheeks began to burn. Her nipples began to harden as Ning rolled onto her back. The blankets showed, clearly, that Hua had grown from his small, cat sized form to a humanoid one. A pale, pale hand reached up from under the blankets, playing long, nimble fingers along Ning’s lips. Qasim kept up his poker face as he stepped forward, then thumbed the door shut without looking behind himself.

“You were the one who the mages used for the, ah, the ritual, yes?” he asked, sounding curious rather than embaressed.

Vidya nodded, hurriedly.

“it seemed like an unpleasant task. I’ve learned enough about magic to know that being the foci for that kind of power is wearing. I’m impressed,” Qasim said. He paused. “Since it was to make my job easier, I do feel like I owe you.”

Vidya chuckled. “Well, uh. If ... uh, if Hua is going to be busy, maybe you can get me a coffee?”

Qasim bowed his head.

Together, they sat in the caff – completely packed with off duty crew. Most of them were still talking shop. Most of it was engineering skut work and the difficulties of the Fleetwide burn that would begin. They’d need to play it close, from what Vidya heard. It would, in the end, be a matter of a few hundred kilometers. Comfortably huge on the surface of a planet. Terrifyingly close in space. And if they fucked it up...

Vidya sighed as Qasim sat a small drink bulb before her. She looked at the clear water in it, then raised an eyebrow. Qasim, his face set, reached out and placed a single finger against it. Earth brown magic flared around his fingertip and the water darkened to the familiar, warm hue of well sugared, well creamed coffee. The bulb even warmed against her palms. She smirked, slightly, then sipped the coffee.

It tasted perfect.

“Magic is going to change everything, isn’t it?” she bit her lower lip.

Qasim nodded. “It made me a prince.” He made a face. “And our world a battleground.”

Vidya sighed. “Killed my husband...” She looked down at the coffee.

“What was the ritual, precisely?” Qasim asked. “I heard only that it would help. The elven mages are not exactly eager to share information with an Oni prince.” His voice remained as calm as if he was discussing the weather.

Vidya lifted her bulb, took a drink, then sighed. “Why, it turned him into a spy, Prince Qasim. And the only risk is that his immortal soul gets ripped to shreds by a Dark Lord out of ancient legend.” She looked at him – but she did not see him. She didn’t see anything but the distant, debris shrouded orb of Stark, and the millions of undead that walked its surface. And nestled in their midst, her Sukhdeep.

“He didn’t even hesitate...” She whispered. “When the connection was made and the power offered.”

Qasim nodded – but while his face may have remained stoic, he still reached out with his hand and gripped hers. Hard.

The Dark Lord of ancient legend kissed his way down Annie’s belly, making her giggle and squirm. “Ah ... we need ... to ... focus!” She squirmed and kicked up one of her ghostly blue thighs, shivering. “And I’m still so cold!” She squealed the last word as Dale closed his mouth around the hard nub of her clitty. His tongue circled around and around and around her, then thrust through her. She was semi-solid at the moment, but with enough effort, Dale could push every inch of his warm tongue through her ghostly clit and into her body. The feeling was delightful – as if he was licking every single nerve in her body, filling her with warm, warmth that felt more delicious than anything else she had ever felt in her life.

Annie bucked her hips, closed her thighs around Dale’s head, gripped his hair with her blue fingers, and threw her head back. This put her head through the wall and into the corridor beyond the factory they were in. She saw several passing humans, most of them with their backpacks on. They blinked at her and Annie gave them a shy little grin.

“Hello mistress,” one of the humans said, beaming at her.

One of her fellow humans. Annie forced herself to think those words. She might have died and become a banshee. But she was still human. Human human hum-

Dale’s tongue slid out of her. Her face screwed up, her mouth opening. She reached her arm through the wall to cup it over her mouth – causing the girl who had spoken to look at her with concern.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes, fine!” Annie said, nodding, her hand gently pushing against Dale’s head. But he kept tonguing her spectral cunny, sending warm pleasure through her. “How are you?” She choked out, then bit her lip, hard.

“Wonderful!” the woman beamed. “I used to work nine to five in the recycling plant – but now, I ... I started painting...” She blushed. “Since, I mean, I don’t need to pay for rent anymore, and t-that healing spell in the hospital cured my son’s diabetes without ... I mean, since I didn’t need to pay for it.” She blushed. “It’s like a dream come true, you know?” She paused. “S-Sorry about you, uh ... dying?” She sounded hesitant.

Annie bobbed her head hurriedly as Dale added a finger to his tongue. “S’Fine!” She squealed. “Glad! Bye!” She forced herself to sit up, tightening her belly muscles to do it. She looked down at Dale, who was grinning up at her, his insolent smirk visible through her faintly transparent body. Dale drew his head back, through one of her interlocked thighs, then murmured.

“Talking to our constituents?” he asked.

When she had returned from her deathbed to the world of the living, Annie and Dale had both been dragged into a meeting. Ancient NASA employees returned from the dead, specifically for the purposes of managing Dale’s new spacefleet, had been reading books and technical PDFs since the moment they had been imbued with self awareness. Now they had a basic grasp on the technical capacity of each spaceship that they had. It was a little bizarre to learn that the differences between the ships of the 1960s and the ships of the 2160s was less than Annie had expected. Yes, they used nuclear rockets instead of chemical, and yes, their computational power was several thousand magnitudes better. But the basic outline of spaceframe, thrust-to-mass ratio, even basic weapon designs, all of it had been mathed out and theorized by the same people who had put a brace of men on the moon.

It all came down, according to the most talkative ghost, to fusion power. Annie had grown up hearing that fusion power was about ten years in the future. The ghost from the 1970s said the same thing. And checking the historical records, the same thing had been true through the Collapse, the second Space Race, and right now. Fusion power had always struggled to break from theoretically doable to actually, practically functional. And so, the modern spaceship used essentially the same nuclear fission reactor that had been proposed in the 1960s and tested in the 1970s. The changes were all in the material they were built from – modern materials being lighter and stronger – and the fact that they had actually been built.

So, the old ghosts were more than up to the task of plotting out what their fleet and the rag-tag fleet of the old nations were going to do. The only problem was that what the old nationals were doing something that looked, to all the world, like complete insanity.

Dale stood with a grin. “We should focus,” he said, smugly, as if it hadn’t been him that had started to kiss her.

“You dick,” Annie said, grinning at him. “And, for that matter, yes. I think ... people are actually starting to believe us.” She bit her lip. “The free healthcare magic definitely did the trick.”

Dale nodded and began to incant. His fingers traced the patterns of force in the air and the factory they stood in – the tenth they had done today – started to strobe with raw force. Annie began to do her passes as well. Their power swirled around one another, growing closer and tighter, like two birds swooping in flight, pairing themselves. Annie forced herself to not giggle with delight. But the power never stopped feeling good. And there were some advantages to casting while dead. Her voice, properly modulated, could sing the spell components with a vibrant resonance that let them hang in the air for long, singing moments. Moments that Dale could then use, building the spell into a deeper, more firm complexity.

The end result came and Annie shivered as her whole body throbbed with the pleasure of casting. The factory began to move, the ghosts and unthinking undead that had been bound to the machines coming to life. Arms moved and drills whirred and Dale grinned as he saw the raw materials that had been stacking up at the entrance starting to float themselves into the machines.

“All right,” he said. “We’ve automated the entire west coast’s industrial capacity. This, with our liutenants, puts the planet at twelve percent automation...” He chewed his lower lip. “Remarkable time, honestly. But we do need to begin working out how to do the rural areas. There has to be a means more efficient than using mindless undead as field hands. Though, the farmers that are reporting in to us do seem happy...”

“We don’t need to remove all labor, you know?” Annie stretched her arms behind her, groaning. “Just make enough free labor that people don’t have to choose between slaving and dying.”

Dale nodded.

Annie looked aside. “Before we go on to the next project ... are you ... sure about Ceres?”

Dale sighed. “I have to believe that they’re not monsters. So, Ceres won’t be heading for Stark. It’d be worse than the dinosaur killer. Hell, it’d be almost as bad as the impact that formed the moon.” He shook his head. “So, that leaves one alternative. They’re bringing Ceres into a near pass, to serve as a laser and missile shield, until they can deploy. If I launch to hit Ceres while it remains in its current orbit, they get to fight defensively-”

“There has to be someway we can...” Annie paused.

“What?” Dale asked.

“I’m an idiot...” Annie put her hands on her face. “I am such an idiot!”

“What?” Dale asked again.

“Send me!” Annie said, beaming at him. She floated off the ground. “They can’t kill me. I’m a banshee – the worst they can do is turn me back. I can float ... that means I can get some permanent acceleration going, right?” She nodded, then made a quick twisting movement with her fingers. Her cellphone appeared, stolid next to her transparent hand. She started to tap into it. “What was my max speed? Ten meters in about ten seconds?” She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. “One MPS ... constant...” She tapped a few more buttons, bringing up the online acceleration calculators used by billions of people planning their stellar vacations... “It’ll take meeee...” She narrowed her eyes. “ ... fourteen days.”

She scowled. “Okay, that is a long ass time.”

“Considering until recently, you would take three months to get to Ceres, assuming you could afford the ticket,” Dale said. “I believe that flying there under your own power in two weeks is more than could be hoped for.”

Annie grinned. “And I’d be able to handle it if I brought some kind of entertainment. I could watch all those shows I was going to watch but never got around too.”

Dale stepped away from her. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “No,” he said.

Annie’s grin faded. “No?” She asked. “Those people out there, they’re not ultranationalists. They’re not fascists. They’re just regular astros, people who signed up back when there was just Earth. No Stark. No Arcadia. No magic. They don’t know that there’s a better choice. Hell, they don’t even know what we’re doing here. And yeah, they can ignore our transmissions. But they can’t ignore me.” She put her thumb to her chest. “If we can convince them to stand down – to help us, even. We can put all of this horrible, horrible stuff behind us and move on with the whole ... utopia thing.”

Dale shook his head again, his back still to her. “No. It’s too dangerous-”

“Dangerous?” Annie asked. “Dale, I’m already dead.”

“No, you’re undead,” Dale turned to her. “They’ll have Arcadian wizards there. People who could scatter your conciousness across space as if it was tissue paper.”

“It’ll save thousands of lives. Maybe millions, if they fuck up their insane plan,” Annie said, her eyes flashing. “It’s worth the risk.”

Dale reached out. His hand gripped her shoulder, squeezing so tightly that his fingers penetrated her ectoplasmic flesh. The pressure of his hot, trembling fingers in her spectral tissue felt distractedly good – throbbing points of warmth that spread through her body, radiating down to the tips of her breasts. Dale’s eyes were gleaming as he looked into hers. “It’s not,” he said, his voice a harsh croak. “I almost lost you once, Annie. Never again.”

Annie’s fingers slipped along his cheek. Goosebumps rose to meet her and Dale shivered convulsively. Her lips quirked, ever so slightly. “Dale, Dale, Dale. You’ve done terrible things for a good cause. W-We both have.” She looked aside. “This has already gotten scarier and more confusing than I thought it could be. But ... if we have a chance to make it better, a chance, we have to take it.” She whispered. “Please.”

Dale hung his head forward. Softly ... very softly ... he whispered: “It’ll take time to prepare your supplies. Time enough for one more night?”

Annie smiled. Her eyes brimmed with her own tears – tears of glowing, glimmering light. They tracked along her cheeks as she whispered. “Of course, you dummy...” She took his hands and together, they started out of the factory. Dale paused at the door to shroud himself in a shield. It was hardly needed. As they walked through the streets of Los Angeles, people waved at them. She saw a few murals going up – people painting and expressing themselves. Music played from courtyards where impromptu bands were starting up. She even as people who had set up a console that was playing movies that, until a few months ago, would have been trapped behind DRM and paywalls.

Annie floated casually beside her lover, grinning down at him. “So, Dark Lord, think it’s like this everywhere else?”

“I hope so,” he said. “The reports from the Chinese arcologies are promising – there were large sections of their population that, shall we say, were less than pleased with totalitarian communism.”