When We've Been Here Ten-Thousand Years

Despite the usual rationing of space on board starships and the typical sparseness of military décor, Aymon’s room on the Whitewater was well appointed. This made his long stay on board the ship much more bearable than it might have been otherwise. The best feature of the room was the heavy wooden desk that he sat at now, tracing his fingers over the unusually patterned wood grain. He could tell that it was wood from his own homeworld, Lonn. There weren’t any other places that produced wood this fine. It was a combination of genetically modified tree stock, heavier than standard gravity that made the wood dense, and long seasons— summer on Lonn lasted eight months, and by the end of it the trees were matchsticks.

Aymon had stared at the wood grain long enough to memorize its patterns, so his fingers could move across its swirls idly while he looked at something else. That something else was his computer, which was displaying a realistic depiction of the sensitive who had built the stardrive of the pirate ship that the Whitewater had hunted and destroyed. The image was made up from the DNA recovered from the stardrive’s brain, so it was bound to be mostly faithful.

Aymon had no way of knowing how old the sensitive was, but he had a slider to change the face from infant to ancient. The sensitive couldn’t have been younger than eighteen or so, and since he had only started building stardrives recently, within the past decade, probably wasn’t approaching middle age yet. Aymon set the slider to his own age, twenty-five, and contemplated the man he saw there.

The sensitive was exceedingly tall, as all pirates were, and broad shouldered. In the notes that had come with the reconstruction, the person who had analyzed the DNA had marked the clear places where there had been genetic modifications made, specifically for height and strength, as well as a few others to tweak the body’s ability to handle periods of low gravity and the general trials of life in space, like eyesight that was corrected to not cause near-sightedness even when not exposed to natural light or far distances. It was the usual suite of modifications that pirates made. Some spacers also made them, though much more subtly, and there was enough intermixing between the two groups (as little as any would like to admit it) that some of those traits snuck into the spacer gene pool naturally.

Apparently, the sensitive’s parents either hadn’t wanted, or hadn’t paid enough to modify his appearance much. He had a broad face, square chin, snub nose, and small, light colored eyes. His cheeks and upper back were a ruddy red on his otherwise pale skin, visible when Aymon spun the model around, inspecting him from all angles.

He wasn’t much to look at, Aymon had to say. But Aymon continued to stare at the model, just as he stared at the grain of the desk, because he had little else to occupy himself with as the Whitewater traveled through space to put the next part of their plan in motion.

The genetic material retrieved from the dead stardrive had been good for more than just an entertaining sketch of the man they were hunting. Although the Empire wasted few resources on hunting pirates, they did have agents (or, at least hacked computer systems) on most of the established black stations that littered Imperial space. Since pirates took themselves to these stations to genetically modify their offspring in the womb, it was a simple enough matter to collect the relevant genetic-lineage identifying information and figure out which ship the sensitive had originated from. He came from the good ship Bluebeetle .

There was no absolute guarantee that he was still with that ship, of course, but it was as good of a place as any to start. And once the name of a ship was known, it was easy to find out what stations they tended to frequent, and from there it was very, very easy to get on their tail. The Whitewater had been stalking the Bluebeetle for many days, now, and was very close. Only one jump away, in fact. They had picked up the ship’s trail at Calais station, and were ready to strike.

The thought of being so close to their mark excited Aymon. Perhaps it had been unwise, but he had told the mission coordinator, in a tone that made full use of his authority, that he would be accompanying the Fleet team to board the Bluebeetle . After all, it was their intention to encounter a sensitive, and the best person to deal with that would be Aymon. There had been some objections with concern for his safety, but Aymon himself was unconcerned.

He looked at the computer model of the other sensitive again, zooming in and out. Would this man be able to kill Aymon? He doubted it. But he pictured Jalena, who had been so quick on her feet the entire time he knew her, and he thought about how all it would take was one wrong decision to end up like her, pulled apart at the seams.

Aymon spun the model around again, and looked into the sensitive’s watery eyes. The skin in this model was so plasticky, unnervingly still. Jalena had died protecting strangers. So had this stardrive. Aymon touched the picture’s cheek, tracing it with his fingertip. Even if they were evenly matched in the power, Aymon would have the advantage. He wasn’t intent on protecting anyone.

Although they had found the name of the ship that the sensitive hailed from genetically, nobody had been able to produce a name for him. Aymon wished he knew what the man was called.

As the final jump approached, Aymon was in a shuttle in the hold of the Whitewater , sitting as primly as he could while in zero gravity and strapped into his seat. He hated the bulky spacesuit that he was required to wear. He would have much preferred to be in his usual uniform cassock, but since he would need to pass through unpressurized spaces when he boarded the pirate ship, he was wearing it for now. Although he could have used the power to provide himself with oxygen, he was willing to admit that he would rather not give himself additional distractions. He was intent on facing another sensitive, one he knew very little about.

Aymon closed his eyes so that he could more easily focus on using the power. He stretched out his awareness through the Whitewater ’s hull, watching the other fighters in the huge central bay, feeling the throb of their idling engines as they waited to move out. Over the radio, there was a steady countdown for the impending jump. Aymon’s heart was pounding, and his hands tightened on the straps that held him to his seat.

The jump was instantaneous and felt like nothing, especially without a view of the starfield changing, but the other shuttle and fighters waiting in the bay instantly launched, the great doors opening wide, pulling apart like the blades of a camera’s aperture.

He stretched out his vision to examine the other ship. The Bluebeetle was small, even for a pirate ship, and her rocky surface was pitted and marred with clear evidence that she had been involved in close combat in the past. This was somewhat unusual for pirate ships, who were usually attackers who could afford to keep their ships out of spitting distance of their target, only sending out their shuttles to do their bidding. This ship, then, had been a victim before, and she was about to be a victim again.

The Whitewater ’s fighters and shuttles were out and forming a swarm around the pirate ship now. The shuttle Aymon was in hung back. It was the one concession he had allowed for his own safety. There was no reason for him to be a passenger on a ship in the first wave, those who would need to breach the Bluebeetle ’s bay doors. He followed those ships in his mental view, and watched them blast open the doors and disable the Bluebeetle ’s defensive weaponry before the pirates were even fully aware that they were under attack. The exterior battle, if it could even be called that, was over before it truly began, and the shuttles carrying soldiers began to land inside the bays.

Aymon’s own shuttle launched, then, and he was pressed down and back into his seat as they sped towards their landing point, guided in by the ships that had gone before them. It was a journey of only a few minutes, but an excitement like Aymon had not felt in a long time made it stretch out into an eternity. Aymon didn’t mind: he liked the thrill. He pictured the face of his stardrive maker, his imagination turning over scenarios of stalking him through the ship and encountering him at last, each one more fragmented and incomprehensible than the last. He licked his lips.

His shuttle entered through a blasted hole, pinged by shards of debris as they flew in. The interior of the bay was pitch dark save for the lights of the Fleet shuttles that had landed already. It was eerie. The darkness and the lack of gravity made everything appear so still. People and objects moved like they would in a dreamscape, twirling and dancing in slow motion, despite the frantic nature of their invasion.

Aymon’s shuttle found purchase on one of the walls of the bay, the magnetic skids latching on. Orders were shouted that Aymon ignored, and he put on his helmet, disentangled himself from his seatbelt, and pulled himself towards the airlock, heading out into the bay with the team who would be forced to follow him.

Outside the shuttle, Aymon didn’t have to bother with the rest of his team’s clambering along the walls towards the airlock at the other end of the room. With the power, he pulled himself through the space, tugging on his suit to move, flying, pushing pieces of twisted rebar and chunks of rock that littered the bay out of his way with gentle mental nudges. Perhaps it was his excitement that made everything feel so heightened, but the airlock practically glowed in his vision, illuminated by the headlamps on the suits of the soldiers swarming around it, waiting their turns to enter the ship.

Aymon waited in the small crowd, his team finally catching up to him as the airlock was manually quick-cycled to let in the next group. Although they were pressed closely together in the dark and small space— probably twenty people in the airlock that was little more than a box of three meters on each side— the silence without an atmosphere, and the impenetrable darkness of the Fleet soldiers’ helmets made it feel like Aymon was the only person in the universe. Himself, and the stardrive maker he was meant to find.

It was unfortunate that by being on the ship, he had sacrificed some of his ability to see the broader picture. He couldn’t sit in a corner and meditate to get an awareness of the whole engagement; he needed to focus on what was right in front of himself in order to stay alive. He had no idea where on the ship the stardrive maker might be, and that thrilled him to the core.

One of the Fleet soldiers turned the heavy wheel that controlled the airlock doors, shutting them behind the group, then opening the doors in front, letting in a blast of air that knocked Aymon against the person floating behind him. As soon as the doors were open, they all pressed out into the corridors, clearing the airlock as fast as possible so that the next group could come in.

The corridors closest to the airlock had already been swept clean by a wave of Fleet soldiers by the time that Aymon arrived, so he could take a moment to stretch out his awareness through the ship, just to get a brief mental picture of the route towards the center. If his stardrive maker was anything like his stardrives, Aymon was relatively sure that he’d be guarding the saferoom with all his power. He headed in that direction.

The ship was labyrinthine in its construction. Aymon’s mental map did not prepare him for how twisting it was to physically navigate. The corridors doubled back on themselves and wrapped in three dimensions, curving in knots. One door he might need to pass through would be on his lefthand side, and then he would come to an intersection where he needed to climb directly upwards. To someone familiar with navigating without gravity, this must have felt natural, but to Aymon, some of his excitement began to twist into unease.

The corridors were ill-lit. The only illumination came from dim red emergency lights every ten or so meters, leaving pockets of darkness that Aymon swam through. He hated how limited his field of view was in his helmet, and its paltry headlamp did nothing to light his way. He took the helmet off.

The air of the Bluebeetle smelled strange, metallically tangy with a different ratio of air filtration than the Whitewater used. There was a distinctly human scent beneath it, one that not even the best filtration could remove from air that was years and years worth of recycled breath. With his helmet off, he could hear the creaking of the ship around him, the high whine of the emergency lights, the distant blaring of alarms, and what his imagination told him must be the far-off sounds of screaming.

Onward.

He and his team were moving faster than anyone else through the ship, because Aymon could open any door with just a thought. The rest of the Fleet teams would need to cut the doors open, a laborious process, considering just how many there were in every corridor.

Aymon came to another intersection, this one where he knew he had to turn right. He was getting closer. He placed his hand on the door, then used the power to look through it, checking to make sure there was nothing dangerous on the other side.

He held up his hand to stop the Fleet soldiers behind him, flicked a few finger signs. One person— he pointed above his head— hiding on the ceiling, I’ll take care of it, stay back.

He forced the lock on the door open. Even though he expected it, he was still surprised by the speed at which the ambusher lunged at him. She careened down from the ceiling with a wicked, gleaming knife in her hand, aiming straight for Aymon’s exposed head.

The power was already at Aymon’s fingertips, though, and it took less than a gruesome thought to slam her to the wall, her outstretched knife arm twisting, the blade finding purchase in her own gut.

She didn’t yell out or make any noise at all, except for the sick thud of a body on the metal wall and the involuntary rush of air from her lungs. Pirates were like that, though, and it didn’t surprise Aymon. What did surprise him was that she fought his power with all her strength, nearly bucking off his control of her body. This was practiced .

Curious, Aymon lifted her up and pinned her against the adjacent wall so that he could get a good look at her, under the dim red lights. Blood was welling out of her stomach, spreading in a flowering stain across the fabric of her jumpsuit. This wasn’t a fatal wound, if she got medical attention, but it was a painful one. Now that she was stood up, he could see how large she was— much larger than he was, despite her youthful face. She was barely more than a teenager. She glared at him out of small, pale eyes. Clearly related to the sensitive Aymon was hunting.

She continued to mentally struggle against his hold, but Aymon doubled down, fighting off his own nausea and headache that came from overcoming someone else’s resistance.

“Where’s your stardrive maker?” Aymon asked, coming up close to her. “It’s him I’m here for. You tell me, and I’ll let you go.”

He let her have use of her mouth. She smiled, baring her teeth.

“Na,” she said, and then spat on Aymon’s face. He startled back and vainly swiped at his face with his hand, but the gloves of his spacesuit made him clumsy, and he couldn’t get all the spit off. She was laughing at him, a cackling wheeze.

Aymon gathered the power and snapped her neck, ripping the vertebrae sideways. She fell silent immediately, her mouth falling open in horror and her eyes following Aymon as he pulled himself away down the corridor. She was dead before he reached the next intersection.

He went further and further into the ship. There was more resistance as he went, and he let the Fleet soldiers take care of some of it, watching dispassionately as they shot pirates down before they could leap with their knives. Aymon’s excitement had faded into a cold chill, and as they pressed on, it didn’t come back to what it had been.

The soldiers combed the ship, searching for the stardrive maker and finding nothing. From the radio reports, all through the ship, there was not a single group of soldiers who were encountering the resistance of a sensitive. And when Aymon made it to the center of the ship, ignoring the saferoom that the Fleet soldiers were easily able to break into, he floated in the dark heart of the Bluebeetle and found that the stardrive there was of Imperial make.

The stardrive maker had been here, and recently. He was told that brains for new drives were being grown in the medical bay, matching the DNA of the other one. There were other signs, too. When Aymon walked through the cleared out living areas of the ship, bouncing over bodies on the floor in the low gravity, he found tacked up photographs of the family in the dining hall. He looked them over, pulling them off the wall one by one to peer into the faces there, looking for his stardrive maker. He found one after a while that he was sure was right— the reconstruction from their seized DNA was accurate.

It was a posed photograph, the young man floating sheepishly in front of a shuttle in the bay of the ship, one hand steadying himself on the shuttle’s side, the other thrust into the pocket of his jumpsuit. He was smiling at the camera, but with a self-conscious expression. The date scrawled on the back was only a couple years ago, but the stardrive maker looked very young, maybe seventeen or eighteen. He was probably only around twenty, now, so a few years younger than Aymon.

Aymon couldn’t help but be impressed. After all, this pirate was a self-taught power user, one who was able to make enough stardrives to destabilize the whole underground economy. To make even one without getting killed was a feat. He had trained even his non-sensitive family members, at least one of them, to resist the power. And he had slipped out of Aymon’s grip. Somehow.

That fascinated him. Aymon folded the photograph and slipped into the zippered pocket of his spacesuit.

When Aymon and the Fleet soldiers left the ship at last, and Aymon reached his power out through its now-dark hallways, he felt not a single sign of life, and certainly not the sensitive he was searching for. He wasn’t hiding anywhere on the ship, and if he had been, when the Whitewater fired a single nuclear charge at the shell of the Bluebeetle , he certainly wouldn’t be any more.

Although Aymon had not managed to find his stardrive maker, and none of the data scraped from the Bluebeetle ’s computer revealed any hint of his location, the Whitewater returned to regular Imperial space, an orbit around the planet Galena, for resupply. This gave Aymon his first chance in months to read his mail and speak with Obra over the ansible. There was plenty of news to catch up on, as well. While on board the Whitewater , out of contact in the middle of nowhere, Aymon had been able to feel like he existed out of time, but now, looking at everything that had happened while he had been in exile made him feel the sting of impatience once again.

He sat down in his room after dinner to have the scheduled ansible conversation with Obra. It was a waste of military resources to use the limited ansible bandwidth for a personal real time video call, but no one would dare to yell at him for it.

Obra was in their room. It was early morning for them, and for once they had pulled back the heavy blinds from their windows to let the golden light touch their face as they sat cross-legged in bed, their computer on the sheets in front of them. The view was too tender by far.

“You just wake up?” Aymon asked.

Obra yawned and nodded, their motions appearing soupy and delayed over the ansible connection.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Fine,” they said. “It’s been business as usual around here. I’m sure you could tell from my letters.”

“I don’t know why you bothered sending them. I only got them all at once when we came into Galena yesterday.”

“I won’t write, then, if you don’t care.”

He said nothing to that, because Obra would write regardless of what he said. “Have you been alright with Herrault?”

“We don’t see that much of each other. We both have plenty of work to do.”

“What’s your definition of ‘that much’?”

“You know what I mean, Aymon.”

“I suppose. You’re doing the work of three of us while I’m trapped out here.”

Obra looked away. “I wish you were here.”

“Yeah. I’d trade places with you in a second if I could.”

“Not enjoying your vacation?”

“I can’t say that I am. Is there any chance that Herrault would relent if you plead on my behalf to let me come home?”

“Have you caught your stardrive maker?” Obra’s voice was wry.

“No. Not yet.” Obra already knew that, of course.

“Then no, she wouldn’t.”

“Then I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back. I’ve run out of leads. We found the ship that he came from, but he wasn’t on it, and they didn’t leave any nice little notes about where he might be. Without anything to go on, it could take years to catch him.” He scowled. “If Herrault doesn’t want me back, if she wants me to really stay out here forever, she should just terminate the apprenticeship and get rid of me.”

“She won’t do that,” Obra said.

“She should.”

“Do you want to get out of it that badly?”

“No.” It was Aymon’s turn to look away. “But if this is a permanent exile, then she might as well be honest about it. Her playing both hands has always ended with you or me getting the dead end, hasn’t it?”

“Try for a little while longer to find your stardrive maker.”

“How long, Obra? If I had found him on this ship, and killed him, would Herrault want me back?”

“She couldn’t say that you hadn’t paid off your debt to the Guild. She couldn’t object too much…” Obra’s voice was unsure.

“No. She would have found some other reason to keep me away. Maybe hunt down all the pirate ships that have his stardrives in them.” Aymon laughed. “So when I do catch him, what? How long is she going to keep doing this to me?”

“If you catch him, come home,” Obra said finally. “Don’t bother asking permission, just come home.”

“Home.”

“Every time she thinks about you, she gets mad,” Obra said. “But if she saw you in person, after you’ve done as you’re told, she’d forgive you. Catch your pirate and come home.”

“And beg for forgiveness.”

“You should have done that months ago.”

“It wouldn’t have helped.”

“No.” Obra frowned. “But it will now.”

“I don’t know what makes you think that.”

“She feels—”

“Oh, please don’t say something sentimental.”

“Fine.” Obra picked at a scab on their leg, their nightshirt pooled around their thighs. “I won’t say anything you don’t want to hear, Aymon.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s the one benefit of being out chasing ghosts. I can’t hear anything I don’t want to.”

“Are you bored out there?”

“What do you think?” He wondered what they were really asking, but it was impossible to tell from their expression. “Are you bored without me?”

“Aymon…” Ah.

“Then no,” he said. “I’ve been entertained quite handily on the Whitewater . They keep me distracted so I don’t start chewing on the furniture and pissing on the rug like a dog.”

“I’m glad.”

Aymon let out a bitter little laugh. “Of course.” He fished around for some other topic to talk about. “Before this last failure, I spent way too much time entertaining myself by imagining actually catching this pirate. I guess I was a little overconfident.”

“What did you imagine?”

“A heroic contest of wills,” Aymon said. “Here.” He sent Obra the picture of the stardrive maker. “What do you think of him?”

“Young,” they said, examining it. “How tall is he?”

“Over two meters,” Aymon said.

“Wild. He doesn’t look much like a pirate.”

“What did you think pirates looked like?”

“I don’t know. Angrier.”

“He’ll be angry with me now,” Aymon said.

“Do you have any plan to catch him?”

“We’ll probably just have to monitor stations, honestly,” Aymon said. “If he’s smart, he won’t show his face on any of them, but I don’t know if he knows he’s being hunted by sight.” Aymon looked down at the picture, the sheepishly smiling young man. “I would bet he’s out for revenge. If I could lure him into taking it, maybe that would speed things up. I don’t know, I’ll have to talk it over with the Whitewater ’s officers.”

“If you let a pirate kill you, I swear to God, Aymon.”

“Nice to know you still care.”

“Of course I care.”

There was a moment of silence. “I’ll let you know what my plan is before we head out.”

“Please.”

“You can tell Herrault that I’m doing my penance so well. Everything she wants from me. Hundreds of lashes. Wearing my hairshirt. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. And all the rest.”

“She knows.”

“How does she know?”

“You haven’t commandeered the ship and parked it right in orbit around Emerri so that you can beat down Stonecourt’s doors until she lets you back home.”

“Didn’t know that was an option.”

“It’s not.” Obra smiled. “I hope you do finish this quickly.”

“Yeah.” He looked at them for a second, then looked down at his picture of the pirate. “I’ll see you when I’m done with this.”

“Stay safe, Aymon.”

“You too.”