by Ursula Whitcher
I met the khanym when I tried to kill her. I broke into her office at the core of the hundredship, my sword shining white in my hand.
Yes, I had a glowing sword. Kids who grew up on the plains think a rifle is a warrior’s weapon. But you never fire a gun if you’re not willing to hit whatever lies behind the target. On a hundredship, that might be the engine’s blood, or a bystander in another compartment, or the stretched metal skin between the ship and the Deep. I was an assassin, not a psychopath. I used a sword.
The khanym had two guards. I stabbed the first as I came through the door. By the time I pulled my blade out of her body, the second guard had activated his own sword. He was taller than me; that wasn’t a surprise. I stepped toward him with a hanging parry, crystal chiming as our blades met. That brought my left hand near his hilt. I pressed his wrist back just long enough to raise my sword and strike his face. My arm absorbed the shock of cutting bone. He slumped and fell. No longer my opponent; no longer caught in the current of our dance. The golden ribbon in his hair was streaked with blood.
I turned toward the back of the room, in search of my quarry, and realized a dart was stuck in my right hand. It glittered like a splinter from my blade. I wore no gloves.
There was another dart in the guard’s cheek, but he was dead. The points must have been poisoned, because everything was very slow.
“If I die, you die,” the khanym said. She was wearing an amber coat, real silk, that shone like the warning light above a door you shouldn’t enter. Her unbound hair hung past her waist. The dart gun in her hand was tiny.
I needed to charge her. It would take five steps. I envisioned myself lifting my sword arm, moving. The whole action would be complete between one pulse and the next of the engine’s heart.
The khanym’s chest rose and fell. She was breathing fast, a pulse entirely different from the engine hum. I hadn’t moved. I watched myself ask, “How so?”, forming my lips into a circle round the question.
“The dart tips break into shards,” the khanym said. “Microscopic; keyed to me. They are already floating through your bloodstream. They will assemble in the artery beside your kidney. If the signal is lost, they’ll cut. You’ll bleed out fast.”
I couldn’t map the details of the biotech, not in this state and perhaps not ever, but I knew what blood loss looked like. The gush, muscles sliding, slow collapse. But there was an obvious catch: the khanym would have alarms. “If you do not die, I also die.”
“You have a choice. I can kill your body, or I can kill your former self.” The khanym’s smile was small, and certain. “I do need new guards.”
I watched her for another strange, stretched moment, her sleeve fluttering in some overactive ventilation current. In one sense, her threat came too late: I had failed to kill her. What good was I, as Ibex Company’s blade? My old self was already dead.
I dropped to my knees and thumbed the button hidden in my sword’s hilt. The shining blade retracted with a faint smell of burning blood. Its hilt clunked, dead metal, as I set it on the floor.
“Look at me,” the khanym said, which was stupid, since I had not been able to stop looking at her. “Do you renounce your former Company?”
I nodded, and when that did not seem to be enough, I said the words: “I, Tashnur, a daughter of Ibex Company, give up all shares and claim upon its resources. Having failed irretrievably in my duties and obligations. With the khanym Orazet as witness.”
She stepped toward me then, placing the dart gun in a pocket. Unlike the guards, whose sole allegiance had been to the khanym, I wore my hair covered. She found the pins that held my scarf to my black cap and lifted away both layers, tossing the fabric behind her. She ran her fingers along the ribbons that bound my braids to my head. They were mostly pewter-colored, the hull-gray of the Company, but there was a narrow golden lace for the Academy history club—I’d loved the sweep and flow of ancient battles—and a green rayon cord.
“A lover?” she asked.
“Once. We make much better friends.” Beylik was a pleasant person. He liked battles in theory. In practice he was content to do his job, modeling the currents of the Deep around star systems we might never even visit, and wait for minor recognitions. He would raise whatever child the Company gave to him, in time.
I had wanted posterity, a lineage, a daughter whose name would be followed by my own. Instead I knelt before the khanym as she cut away every symbol of achievement I had earned. Her knife was small, its blade crystal-sharp. I felt the tickle of lost strands against my neck. My head was far too light.
When all my braids had fallen to the floor, the khanym tilted my face toward hers. Her brows were long and slightly arched, like the rings of a striped planet, but her eyes narrowed in thought. She considered me; I balanced against the light touch of her hand. At last she asked, “Why were you sent to kill me?”
I told her, “I don’t know.”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know. The statement reverberated through my head, the next few days, while I practiced my sword-forms and was measured for new clothes, and tried to figure out who I had become.
With the old Head of Ibex Company, I would have known. Not directly—I wasn’t a diplomat or a financial analyst—but because I had been trained to infer his wishes. I could stand behind his right shoulder, at a meeting with representatives of another Company or planetary merchants, and mark who needed a show of force and who might strike to kill. But the old Head had retired on the Ibex ship along with his favorite wife. He was writing memoirs, now, or designing a better horse-embryo, or whatever retired Heads did with their newfound time.
The new Head—my new boss—was young. Perhaps four years younger than me. We had just missed each other, at the Academy. He was clean-shaven and affected an enthusiasm for algorithmic planning. I had done my level best not to admit I didn’t trust him.
I knew that the new Head was angry about something, and that it involved the hundredships. But everything we did involved the hundredships; it was who we were. We traveled with the fleet, between star and star. We traded information, gene designs, the finest scrolls, the lightest tapestries. But the bulk of my life—the bulk of all our lives—was spent in transit, wrapped inside a ship. The engine’s blood, half supercooled and half alive, maintained the ship’s sense of itself. We were coherent, cradled against the unreality that was the Deep.
I was a professional, a useful blade. Thus, when the Head first proposed transferring his operations base to the khanym’s hundredship, I memorized layouts and personnel. I learned a literal hundred engineers and pilots, and all the khanym’s guards. When the Head chose a date to move, I crammed into the ferryship with my single bag of gear. When he chose someone taller and more conventionally broad-shouldered to stand behind him in meetings, I did not protest.
When he sent me to kill the khanym—I didn’t protest then, either. With the old Head, I might have proffered a diplomatic suggestion. In the work of an assassin, eleven parts out of every dozen are understanding when not to kill. But I was so desperate to be recognized, to have my work found worthy, that I clutched at the mission the moment it was offered.
Two of my counterparts’ lives were wasted, and still I failed.
I did not spend all my newfound time at the core of the hundredship. I visited gardens, jogged along corridors, and drank sap-sweetened tea in tulip-shaped glasses. But everywhere I went I was marked, my head naked without a Company scarf, my hair too short for even the soldier’s braid. This wasn’t my home ship, so I knew few people outside Ibex Company. I had no desire to debrief with the Head’s staff, and I certainly wasn’t going to call Beylik.
It was easier to lounge at the khanym’s feet, while she ran economic projections. I paid minimal attention to the projections, though even I noticed they went up and then down. I thought a lot about doors, monitors, and where a guard should stand. (Sometimes, naturally, I was one of those guards. When lounging, I was only half on duty.) I thought more about the khanym: the way her hair fell over her left shoulder, the way she always asked for fruit with tea. When she was thinking hard, she would pause as if to bite her lower lip, and make a tiny puffing noise instead. Sometimes her projections used color instead of lines. Then they glowed orange, like her favorite coat.
I recognized what was happening to me. I had been warned against it, when I studied to be a Company blade: sometimes, when you are protecting someone, the ideas of care get muddled in your mind, and you think they matter in ways that they do not. With the old Head, I had been safeguarded by his age; with the new Head, by his personality. I had no defense from the khanym. Her edged knives were inside my blood.
There was no use in speaking, and no possible reward. My over-honed attention would dull and change, the way all good things changed. I just had to wait.
I was telling myself so one evening, for the ten-millionth time, when the khanym said, “I have been arguing that we should sell the hundredships.”
I straightened and asked, “Is this a test?”
The khanym’s eyes crinkled in acknowledgment. She struck a couple of keys, and a schematic appeared on the large screen she kept to impress visitors. It showed a tracery of silver, its general form a teardrop, but with quills curved like ribs around a heart. I thought it was a drug at first, a framework for some protein. Then the view rotated and I read the scale.
“A satellite?”
“It’s a ship, Tashnur. A ship without blood.”
“How do you make a ship without blood?”
“You spin bone out of the weak places between the Deep and normal space.”
I made a noise somewhere between confusion and disbelief, and she began telling me about energy differentials. Potential imbued the interface between space and the Deep. New techniques could channel that energy into a swiftly hardening matrix, without breaking its entanglements with itself. The khanym was no engineer: her skill was to hear what others said to her, to find the inner core of their intentions, and to channel that knowledge through her own conviction.
I admired the khanym’s dedication to understanding. It was like my own practice with the sword, and yet unlike. But the conversation was already too abstract for me, so I offered a simpler observation: “This boneship is so little.” It was an odd size, perhaps half the length of a hundredship: too small to hold a Company, too big to make a ferry.
“It’s fast. The boneships can sink further, without being crushed.”
The further you went into the Deep, the more you left behind the ordinary rules, effect and cause, the shape of light. We were scudding just under the surface, here, in our bubble of seeming reality. A ship that fell deeper could skip the usual comparisons of distance. “How much faster?”
“Twice as fast, now. In eighty years, as the planet-dwellers measure? Perhaps ten times.”
Eighty years on a planet might mean twenty years for us: time crumpled, when you were slipping between stars. That was enough time for a child to grow to adulthood. It was enough time for our entire business to collapse. I understood the red and amber now, in the khanym’s models.
“You think we should buy a boneship?” I spoke to confirm that I had listened. But this was why the khanish office existed in the first place: someone had to make the long-term, strange decisions that involved all the ships and all the Companies. I didn’t need to approve the reasoning. My job was to make sure the khanym survived long enough to enforce her decisions.
“I think we should build boneships for ourselves.”
It would mean pausing, at some star. Being stuck in someone else’s gravity, someone else’s time. Every person training for some planetary skill. But the alternative was a cautious, slow collapse. I nodded, showing the weight of understanding.
We were silent for a while, the bone tracery revolving on the screen. At last the khanym said, “It is almost tomorrow. I suppose I will retire.”
She reached out to help me rise, as if we were two friends sharing sesame cakes. Our hands were nearly the same size, though my nails were cut as short as I could manage, and hers were treated with a shimmering gloss. She tipped her head up very slightly, strands of her shining hair sliding across her shoulders and falling down her back. I realized I had held her hand too long, and that she knew it.
I stepped back, reciting an old lesson: “Khanym, I regret my impropriety. Please, let it mean nothing.”
Her smiles were slightly too wide for her face, even the bitter ones. “Tell me, whom is it appropriate for a khanym to love?”
A person of no Company, and no other allegiances. A scholar, perhaps, if they cared for no secular advantage. A planet-dweller, if they would leave their planet. In other words, an impossible person.
I did not flee my enemies, but I fled the khanym’s question, as decorously as I could manage.
Beylik messaged the next day, to ask if I would meet him. No conversation could be more uncomfortable than the one I’d just survived, so I agreed. We walked in one of the hundredship’s gardens, between latticed trellises covered in pea vines. On the coreward side of each narrow passageway, the vines had pale pink flowers; on the hullward side, pods dangled, plump with lines of fruit.
Beylik and I traded bits of news about mutual acquaintances, the way you do when meeting somebody you once held close. He kept track of more people than I did. We walked all the way to the garden’s hullward edge before he said, “Tashnur, you don’t have to do this.”
“I think I do.”
“I know it hurts, Tashnur. You’ve always been the very best. But—you’re alive. You’re still one of the best. You could come back to Ibex Company.” The full-spectrum lights left dappled shadows on Beylik’s turban. I had known all his braids and obligations, once, but now they were hidden from me.
“Did the Head tell you to talk to me?”
He stared at one of the laden pea-pods as if it held a rolled-up message, but at last said, “No.”
Beylik tensed at even mild prevarication; he wouldn’t tell an outright lie. Perhaps the Head had asked him to report contacts with me, after the fact.
I couldn’t tell Beylik about the ships of bone, so I shoved my hands in the pockets of my new brown coat and explained the crystal shards floating in my blood. There was an old oath, when you swore to guard someone, or to love them: I will stand behind you, as close as your own kidneys.I made a joke of it, referencing the khanym’s tiny knives. It was safer than telling him about the way the khanym stayed up late, turning her graphs and projections to find the whole fleet’s benefit. It was definitely safer than explaining that she pushed her hair out of her face with both hands when she found a better way to present some information, or that her favorite slippers were striped with golden thread.
Beylik listened and was horrified, then quiet. I felt twisted up, guilty for confronting him with imagined pain. He was a tender person: a friend, but not the sort of friend who should see all of me. We walked back to the coreward edge of the pea trellises. Finally I asked, “Why did you message me?”
I expected a fumbling evasion, but Beylik shrugged and smiled. “Tashnur, I don’t want to fuss, it’s so small beside the changes in your life. But—I’ve been approved to raise a child. I’m transferring back to the Ibex hundredship on the next ferry.”
I forced my own smile. “That is an honor. I’m delighted for you.” Only three of our old friends had been approved for children; we had worked through the list, while catching up.
“Thank you.” He shared with me a wealth of logistical detail: the ratings of the nursery co-op he’d attended as a toddler, the latest research on synthesizing milk, the farewells he would make in the ten days before the ferryship left. We walked around the trellises again.
We were nearly leaving when Beylik said, “It’s a shame to leave work now. I had identified the most interesting star system.”
“Interesting how?” I asked, already worried.
“Oh, there’s not much in the way of people to trade with. One station, a handful of scientists monitoring a terraforming project. But the currents of the Deep run close to the surface there, and it’s had some fascinating effects on planetary formation. There are two separate carbon planets of about the same mass as the silicate one, and in very tight orbits.”
A carbon planet would mean deserts made of diamonds. Beylik had always had a taste for the romantic. But human access mattered more, here. “This shallow place—is it close to the terraformed planet?”
“Very. If you don’t mind in-system drives.”
It was the kind of place the khanym wanted, a system where we could settle, a system where we could grow ships. But that was a course the new Head of Ibex Company did not wish to take. No wonder he was packing my friend onto the ferryship.
I looked up at Beylik, my fear turning to sternness. “For the sake of the green ribbon that once bound us: if the Head asks about our conversation, do not mention that you told me of this system.”
“I don’t see why it matters.” He looked like I had given him the wrong mark on an exam.
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.” Beylik ran his thumb along the edge of his beard. I could tell he wanted to trace the green cord he still wore.
In turn, I traced a vein down my neck to my collarbone. Then I turned the conversation back to smaller things, the mementoes he would pack, messages for friends. We walked out of the garden together, leaving behind the dappled light.
I wanted Beylik to focus on the khanym’s knives. He didn’t see the danger that the Head posed to him. But the danger would be there, the flip side of that so-convenient reproduction permit, as long as the Head believed the link between us held. I needed to clarify my position.
My opportunity arrived the next day, when the khanym met with the Head of Ibex Company. They had agreed on a neutral conference room, its carpet shades of blue, its cushions moonlight-pale. I stood behind the khanym, to her right. I recognized the guard at the Head’s shoulder. His name was Eshtanek; he thought too long when sparring, but used his reach to compensate. We watched each other while the khanym and the Head drank yogurt with mint—we called it yogurt, though on the hundredships it was mostly made of beans—and discussed the merits of a long-dead poet. It was not our turn to speak.
When the third cup was poured, the usual signal that business was at hand, the Head raised his eyes to me. “Tashnur. You would be welcome, on this side of the table.”
“I cannot.” I bowed, stiff-necked, the shallow side of rudeness. Eshtanek was glaring; I did not think he had anticipated this development.
“The crystal dart?” The Head’s voice was gentle, in a way that might have been appropriate if he had been twice my age. “Tashnur, the khanym lied to you. There is no such technology.”
I read, in the sudden perfection of the khanym’s posture, the fact that he was right. My sword-hilt was on the sash at my waist; I grasped it, not trying to be subtle.
The Head smiled. “Tashnur. Welcome home.”
He wanted me to kill her. He was offering me the option to undo my failure, to begin again. To serve a thriving Company for twenty years; and to be part of the long slide toward bankruptcy, after.
The khanym’s hair, never braided, fell straight down her back and puddled behind her on the moonlight cushion. Not a strand of it moved.
I said, “I am already home.” I put scorn into it, all the arrogance of an Academy senior; I wanted the Head to feel his relative youth. But I wanted the khanym to believe me, too.
She took a sip from her third cup.
Eshtanek’s smile was mocking. The Head’s seemed genuine; he was very good at selling things. “Of course.” He took a document case from the floor beside him and laid it on the table, snapping the latches open.
I thought I hadn’t pushed him hard enough. I needed him to hate me, not maneuver to wield me.
The Head continued, “You will find this proposal interesting.”
I saw Eshtanek’s horror first, and then the pistol. The Head gripped it two-handed, aiming at me, and released the safety. He had not lost his temper: it had evaporated in the bitter vacuum of his arrogance.
I could have thrown myself across the khanym. Knocked her down. Tried to soak up the momentum of a bullet, before it cut through her skin or through the skin of her ship.
I activated my blade.
In the fraction of a second where the Head believed I might obey, I extended my arm and lunged. My blade went through his throat. The pistol’s muzzle rotated hullwards as it fell. It did not go off.
When your enemy is across the table, a pistol is a stupid weapon.
I said, “Eshtanek, I think you should leave.” He had a stunned look that I recognized; he did as he was told.
That left me alone with the khanym. She flipped the pistol’s safety back again and set it down, careful to keep its point away from anyone alive. Because I am not a psychopath, I retracted my own blade and checked the pistol, removing the magazine and making sure the barrel was empty. I restored it to its case and offered the khanym my hand. She was very close to me, when she stood.
“I held you with a lie.” The khanym’s voice was soft, but not apologetic. Her lashes were thick, but a shade lighter than her hair, almost the color of my coat.
“The strength of a braid is not in its first crossing.” I cupped my left hand against the khanym’s cheek. It was a stupid thing to do, reckless, out of order. But my blood hummed with the knowledge that we were still alive. I had left myself no other place to stand.
Her kiss tasted like mint and sharpness and the beginning of a star.
© Copyright 2023 Ursula Whitcher
About the Author
Ursula Whitcher is a writer, poet, and mathematician whose may be found on Twitter (@superyarn) or at http://yarntheory.net/ .