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Your people must have, once.
He spread his hands apart, his palms to the ceiling.
Roca gathered he was indicating confusion. Have the people here no legends of great machines in times
long past?
Our myths are of gods and goddesses.
From the sky?
Sky. Moons. Suns. Stars.
She motioned upward. Your ancestors came down from the sky just like my people do.
He smiled wryly. Brad does. He tries not to, though.
Not to? Roca wasn t sure what he meant.
Garlin sighed. Not to come down from the sky. Always this flyer of his has problems. He has to send
for parts.
Roca didn t like the sound of it. How long does that take?
He tells the supply ship what he needs. The next one brings his supplies.
How long between supply ships?
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Garlin thought for a moment. My friend s son was just born when the last one came. The boy walks
now.
She stared at him, aghast. That could bemonths.
Can you send a message for someone to come sooner?
If only.She could do nothing without access to the webs. Two ways existed to communicate across
space: by starship, which could take days, even months for a remote outpost like this; and through the
Kyle web, which was almost instantaneous. But the Allieds had no access to the web; they used it only
by arrangement with Imperial Space Command. Brad couldn t swing an arrangement like that on such
short notice. Eventually the Allieds would probably petition for access here to the Kyle web, but for now,
the supply ship was Brad s lifeline to other worlds. Roca didn t miss the irony, that her family created and
maintained the Kyle web, yet she had no entry into it when she needed it most. She couldn t even contact
the port because she had ditched her wrist comm on Irendela to make it harder for Kurj to find her.
The ship is my only way to send a message, she said.
He tilted his head toward the window. It snows again.
No. Roca felt as if walls were closing around her. Snow drifted down from the sky, turning the world
blue, making it hard to distinguish where the land ended and the air began.
Even if it stopped this moment, Garlin said, the path down the mountain wouldn t be safe for several
days. The regret in his mind was genuine. And I have seen weather such as this before. It will not stop
snowing, I don t think, for many days.
Roca held her hand up to the window, letting flakes gather on her palm. They dusted across the bench
and Garlin s legs, light blue powder, so beautiful, so bitter.
Her voice caught. I have to try.
If you leave here, you will die. In an unusually gentle voice, he added, You must stay. I am sorry.
Roca stared out at the snow. So am I.
8
Legacy
In the observation sphere, Kurj felt as if he touched a piece of his soul, a part he had never truly
understood. The sphere curved out from the hull of the Orbiter space station like a transparent bubble.
Space surrounded him in its infinite beauty, the fire of stars, the spumes of nebula, and the mystery of
secrets known only to the cosmos. He stood with his hands resting on a clear railing and gazed at the
great void. Despite what many people believed, space was no more empty than his heart: void was a
label others used to define what they couldn t see.
The view stirred his memories of flying a Jag, the exhilaration of joining his mind to the EI brain of his
ship, plunging into the magnificent reaches of the Kyle web in another universe. When he accessed that
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web, he could contact any place in human space that also linked into it, letting his mind expand
throughout the far-flung settlements of humanity.
A memory stabbed him: hurtling through space with his squadron, his mind submerged in the web, he
had sensed another squad. Eight enemy fighters were headed their way. Traders. Six of the pilots were
slaves, but with so much Aristo blood, they were hardly less cruel than their owners. One was an Aristo,
his insatiable mind thirsting for the agony of psions. Kurj hadfelthis cruelty, his pleasure in killing, his
desire to inflict pain, until finally Kurj vomited. To this day, it made him ill to hear the whir of the
miniaturized droids that cleaned a pilot during battle.
But what had horrified him most had been the eighth pilot. The man was a psion, a slave, a provider.
The Traders had bound him into his ship, with two Aristo copilots in control. They used him to locate the
telepathic Jag pilots, torturing him to force his compliance. With no training to defend his mind and no
natural protections, the provider had been in agony. His screams had reverberated in Kurj s mind,
drawing him into a link so intense, Kurj had lost his identity, becoming that anguished pilot. Tears had
poured down his face. Pulling free of the link had taken a mental wrench so severe, it had forever scarred
Kurj s mind.
When Kurj s squad engaged the Traders, he destroyed the ship with the provider first. In that instant he
wasn t fighting an enemy, he was freeing a human being from a torment that would have otherwise killed
him in a pain greater than Kurj could have imagined if he hadn t lived it. His squad defeated the Traders
that day, but in his mind he had kept fighting that battle, along with the hundreds of others like it, ever
since.
Kurj pushed away the memories. He became aware he was no longer alone in the observation sphere.
His grandmother had come. Still shaken, he turned to see her several hundred meters distant, sitting in a
transparent chair across the rounded chamber, gazing out at space, a raven-haired sovereign on a crystal
throne.
Kurj walked across the sphere, using a transparent path that ran through its center. Lahaylia Selei, the
Ruby Pharaoh, wore her hair down today, letting it loop over her chair, arms, torso, and legs, as black as
space but liberally streaked with white. It had grown a long time, over three hundred years; his
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