Epilogue
- Nora -
Apollo has grown enough in three days that I almost don't recognize the stall when Sophia and I duck inside it.
His hide has darkened from pale newborn beige to something closer to the Beast's own deep, mottled brown, and the propulsion buds along his flanks look sturdier already, less like potential and more like function.
"He's bigger," Sophia says, running a hand along his side with the careful, assessing touch of someone who's spent her whole career evaluating unfamiliar hardware. "How fast does he grow?"
"Krix'vorr says once he's out of the mother, it will be weeks, not years.
He'll be fully mature faster than anything on Earth ever would be.
" I press my palm flat against his hide, and he presses back, gentle and eager, the way he always does.
“So he has to grow fast. I actually don't want him as huge as his mother, but I don't think I have a choice.”
"We were trained on spaceships much smaller than her," Sophia says. “But imagine the looks when you show up at Scout Station Six with that thing!”
I grin. "All Earth's spacefaring problems solved. Until he decides to leave." I glance sideways at Sophia. "How are you feeling? Really. Not the version you gave the medical creature."
Sophia's mouth twitches. "Honestly? Better than I have any right to. Whatever that thing is, the tentacled one, with all the eyes, it did something to my shoulder that three different Space Force medics couldn't fix in a year. I don't understand the biology at all, and I've stopped trying."
"They don't trust machines out here," I tell her.
"Not for anything living. Krix'vorr says the whole Brood considers medical technology a kind of affront.
Like you're insulting a body by assuming it needs correcting instead of healing.
So they use the Mirex." I gesture vaguely. "And that was that creature."
"A very calm, very patient octopus," Sophia says, "with unsettlingly gentle tendrils. I'm not complaining. I just wasn't prepared for it."
“Uh-huh. They have another healing process, too, when things are getting really serious. One day I’ll tell you about it.”
“Oh? You can’t tell me now?”
“I’m not drunk enough,” I explain. “This is a three-drink minimum story. Bordering on four.”
Sophia looks around, tapping her lip. “Well, there’s gotta be a bar in this place. It’s basically a royal palace. Don't royals drink a lot of champagne?”
I chuckle, and then we both go quiet for a moment.
I feel the thing I've known since yesterday afternoon rise up in my chest again, insistent, refusing to wait any longer. "Sophia. There's something I have to tell you."
Something in my tone must give it away, because her whole posture changes, wary. "Yeah, that's always a good start. Okay, girl. Go."
"It's not bad," I say quickly. "I don't think it's bad. It's just… big." I take a breath. "I'm pregnant."
For a long moment Sophia just stares at me, and I watch about six different reactions cross her face in quick succession before any of them settle into words.
"You're—" She stops. “From before? From Earth?”
I just look her in the eye and slowly shake my head. My eyes well up.
Sophia's hand goes to her forehead. "Nora. He's not even the same species."
I quickly wipe my eyes. "Not even close."
"I mean that as a completely serious medical question, not a joke.
Is that even—" She gestures helplessly at the calf beside us, at the whole living ship around us, at the entire impossible scope of everything we've both seen in the last few weeks.
"Is that biologically possible? Did the octopus creature confirm this, or—"
"I didn't tell it, because I didn't know.
It told me. I don't fully understand how, and neither does Krix'vorr, honestly.
But it's real." I press a hand flat against my own stomach, still mostly just startled by the gesture itself, still getting used to it being true. "I have a theory, for what it's worth."
She steadies herself on Apollo's finely furred side. "I'd love to hear it, because right now my working theory is that the universe has stopped making sense entirely."
"Marankz," I say. "The bonding thing. The lightning.
" I watch her expression change from alarm toward something more careful, more listening.
"Krix'vorr told me that when it happens, between a locust and an outsider, the pairs that survive it eventually have children.
Strong ones. It's part of the old mythology.
I think the bond isn't just... romantic, or symbolic.
I think it actually does something. Prepares the ground, somehow, between two bodies that shouldn't be able to make this work at all. "
Sophia is quiet for a long moment, processing that with the same careful, methodical attention she's clearly always brought to impossible problems. "So it's not universal. It's not that any human and any locust could…"
"I don't think so, no. I think it needs whatever this is. The bond. Whatever the lightning actually means. But I can't be sure."
"That's..." She shakes her head slowly. "That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard, or the single most terrifying piece of alien biology anyone's ever tried to explain to me, and I genuinely can't tell which. Sorry, Nora. I should be more supportive. Just let me get over the first surprise.” She takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “Okay, that should do it."
"It's cool," I say, and find myself laughing, unsteady and relieved, because saying it out loud to her, finally, was a real relief. "It's a weird thing to have happen."
She reaches out and takes my hand, the marked one, still faintly strange against my own skin even now, and holds it for a moment without saying anything at all. "Are you scared?"
"I am," I admit. "Of the pregnancy. Of what it means for Earth, if the Brood ever learns what's possible now, what a hybrid child might mean to them." I squeeze her hand back. "But I'm not scared of him. Or of this. Not really. Not since the lightning."
Sophia studies my face for a while, and something behind her eyes goes carefully, deliberately still.
“I think this can actually be really good.
For Earth, I mean. Don't ask me how. But I feel like this could have been much worse, once Earth made contact with the locusts anyway. I mean, one of the other Space Force scouts would have made contact, and it would almost certainly not have ended with a wedding and friends in the highest locust places.”
"Sophia," I say. "How did you actually end up out there? Past the minefield. What was your mission?"
"Same as yours, more or less." She says it easily. Too easily, already turning her attention back to the calf beside us, running a hand along its flank. "Scout, survey, report back if I found anything worth reporting. Standard recon that took months."
"Standard recon," I echo. "Sophia, I flew a standard recon profile. I know what one looks like. I got clipped by a stray mine because I wandered somewhere I wasn't supposed to be curious about. You went missing for months, before you hit that minefield, too."
She shrugs. "Recon can go wrong in a lot of ways. Those were some nasty mines."
I hadn't thought about this before, but now I do, and it doesn't quite add up. "Sure. But you're not answering the question. You're answering a version of it that doesn't actually say anything." I watch her carefully. "What were you looking for?"
She thinks about it. "Whatever Command sends any of us to look for. You know how vague the taskings get."
I don't believe her. I'm almost certain, watching her now, that she knows I don't believe her either, and that she's decided to let me not believe her rather than tell me the truth.
"You're not actually going to tell me." I say it plainly, without accusation, because I recognize the shape of it now that I'm looking straight at it. "This isn't nothing, is it? Whatever you were really doing out here."
She doesn't answer that directly either, which is its own kind of answer.
"Nora." Her voice softens, but doesn't waver.
"If our positions were reversed, if I asked you exactly what Command briefed you on before that minefield, would you tell me everything?
All of it? Or would some of it still be yours to keep, mission or no mission? "
I think about that. I think about classified taskings and standing orders and the weight of things you don't get to share just because you're close with someone.
"It depends. For me, now, with all that's happened, my recon mission is clearly done.
Hey, Space Force thinks I'm dead. But your situation is different.
You had a bigger mission than me. Much bigger, I think.
So big it's still secret. And yours isn't over. "
She strokes Apollo’s side. "Thank you for understanding."
I do. That's the maddening part. I know exactly what it looks like when an officer is holding a line, because I've held enough of my own. The need-to-know thing is strong in the military.
So I let it go. "Okay. When you can tell me, I'm here. If and when."
"If and when." She squeezes my hand once.
We let the silence settle for a while after that, both of us watching the calf nose curiously at a coil of something along the stall wall, neither of us quite ready to talk about anything else yet.
"What happens now?" Sophia asks eventually. "With Earth, I mean. Really? Not the diplomatic version."
"The Queen didn't promise anything," I tell her.
"She made that very clear, right at the end.
No concessions. Earth stays exactly what it's always been to them.
A rumor, unconfirmed, unlocated. She said it stays that way only as long as it's useful to her, or to whoever comes after her.
" I shrug, though it doesn't feel as light as the gesture suggests.
"So. Nothing's actually safe. It's just quiet, for now. "
"Quiet is good, in this case."
"It's good," I agree. "While it lasts."