Chapter 48
This is the gamble that Yeh’haim – the Nitashi resistance – must take:
For every attack they launch against Shine forces, there is retaliation.
Civilians are murdered, infrastructure destroyed.
Some people are outraged by this; some people flood to join the resistance.
Others are mortified, horrified, proclaim that the pain the Shine bring is no worse than the horrors of those who fight against it.
The Shine, for their part, can only destroy so much.
They need Nitashi to be intact, a planet to which to relocate their Executorium, their Executives and senior Managers, to evacuate those who can pay for the trip.
They cannot nuke it; cannot plunge it into a radioactive winter.
They can level its cities, of course, but then they’ll only have to rebuild them, and so a balance must be struck between extraordinary retribution and quiet toleration of constant low-level savagery.
Some parts of the resistance – for it was a fragmented, scattered thing – specialised in provoking this kind of bloodshed, knew that the retaliation brought against them would only bring more traumatised, angry fighters to their cause.
Others advocated moderation, military targets only, and died more often, and struggled to be heard over the fire and the flame.
Thus, there was no corner of the planet that was not steeped in blood.
Meanwhile, the Accord watched in silence.
I had been serving as a courier for the Xi when Pitt recruited me, carrying messages between deep-space vessels where no other secure means of communication was available.
No arcspace comms, no tanglecomm. I was not told what was in the packets I carried, or why.
The Xi told me it was useful, that it did some good.
Sometimes I dropped out of arcspace to find myself in front of a whole flotilla of battleships, just drifting in the dark, light years from the nearest star.
They didn’t even need blackshields to cloak them from detection; their safety was the size of space, and how tiny they were in it.
Then I briefly hoped that the Accord was going to do something – anything – to stop the Shine.
After five years, the hope receded; after seventeen, it was gone.
Sometimes I was sent to quanmech mainframes, hidden in asteroid belts or the magnetic shadow of a spinning gas giant.
Away from organics, the quans didn’t bother with the anthropomorphic charms of Hulder, made no pretence of their physical embodiments being anything more or less than tools, thanked me politely for my work, sent me on my way.
I flew the Emni, and I flew alone. Everyone seemed to have decided that it was better that way. They even let me land him in the waters next to my island, come and go as I pleased. Safer, someone had decided – safer – to just let me do my thing.
We are the seeds of the forest, whispered Gebre in my dreams.
So live, added Cuxil. Before all is dust: live.
The Emni bloomed and withered, ticking through the seasons.
When he was in his winter phase, we returned to Xihana and I tended my garden.
In spring, I planted his internal systems with compost mulched from behind my cottage; in summer I watched the seeds I had grown blossom in his corridors, and with halls smelling of home, we went back into the stars.
So I continued, for nearly fifteen years, until Pitt found me.
I don’t know which of the loose network of refugee Unionists I had come to know gave him my details, but he was waiting for me and the Emni when we returned to my island. Clearly someone in Xi security had let him through, shown him to the boat, given him the usual warnings.
You venture there at your own peril. We take no liability for what may happen to you, once you cross those waters, etc. etc. etc.
He found the pollen of Xihana almost as brutal as I found the flowers of Nitashi, snot streaming and eyes watering even in the bright sea breeze that bent the petals of my garden and tugged at the fresh leaves in the trees.
Nevertheless, he did his best to present a stiff, upright bearing as I approached, clapping his hands twice in formal greeting and proclaiming in heavy, lilting Normspeak: “I hope you do not mind my being on your island. You have a beautiful garden here.”
I let him into my cottage, offered him a drink.
He declined politely, informing me that he had tried a few delicacies of the archipelago while waiting, and practically everything gave him the squits. “It’s boiled water and polished grains,” he sighed. “Until the gut adapts.”
“What brings you here, gastric distress and all?” I’d asked.
“I need a Pilot. One who can fly with a reliability and accuracy that others cannot.”
“I can do these things,” I’d replied. “But I do them alone.”
“I heard. But I am from Nitashi. My people are dying. We are dying. Even those who live, they are dying; their land, their language, their children – everything taken from them. They are dying because they are becoming Shine. That is also a kind of death. Even the planet – our forests, our fields. They are uprooting them, replacing them with crops that are more suitable for the peoples of the Shine. They are starving us. They do not need to keep us alive, because there are millions of them coming to our world every week, expecting something better, expecting to be given all that we had. So I have decided that what I do is important. I have decided to fight. And I have decided that I am going to persuade you to join me.”
“I am very sorry to hear all of this. But I think you should understand, I find it hard to imagine that anything I do matters very much any more.”
“I don’t believe you,” he’d retorted, with absolute self-confidence.
“I think if that was true, you’d be trying much harder to kill yourself.
Even one such as you – there are many ways to live more dangerously.
Thankfully, what I am proposing is so reckless that if you really are convinced of the pointlessness of your actions, you’ll run a far higher chance of dying with me than almost any other captain out there.
I really will not take no for an answer, you see. ”
And in fairness to him, he really would not.