Star's End

  But would that even be possible? Would I get lost inside this organic maze of a building? Could I disown the violence of my father this far into my career?

  “Ms. Coromina?” Flor said. “I know I’ve dumped a lot of overwhelming information on you, but you really will want to see this. It’s one of the Coromina Group’s greatest achievements.”

  I didn’t want to see it.

  I stepped through the threshold anyway.

  The sensor washed over my skin. It didn’t find me lacking. I still wondered what would happen if it did. In a building like this, all ends were tied up. Dad might have terraformed mazes and puzzles to keep out intruders, but he would have installed weapons, too.

  I imagined my cells rupturing beneath the light of the sensor. Imagined my body turning to a smear of blood. Or maybe the sensor would just incapacitate me enough that the company could pack me up on an exile ship. That would certainly be the official story.

  The vats bubbled on either side of us. My stomach churned. Flor started to chatter again, explaining the engineering process, how they drew out the alien strands of DNA from the material they collected from Isabel and isolated them and converted them for use in a typical genetic embryo. She was so casual about it, and I kept thinking about that day in the garden, me telling Isabel everything would be fine.

  “That was when the really cool stuff started happening,” Flor said. “The DNA just attached itself and did all the work for us! All we did was kick back and watch the infographics on the holos. It was amazing.”

  I looked at the embryos in the vats. Holograms flickered across the side of the glass. I’d learned enough about genetics these past few years to know that they were tracking the changes in the embryos’ DNA. I walked up to the first one and stared at it through the murky liquid. It was a fetus. They always arranged them that way, the newest at the beginning, the oldest at the end. That way, when they were finally born, they wouldn’t have to walk past rows of themselves.

  “We have a squad of full-grown R-Company soldiers,” Flor said. I jumped; her voice was closer to me than I expected. When I turned around, she was smiling at me. “They’re really quite remarkable. I don’t get a chance to show them off that often, and they’re probably itching to see someone other than me or the rest of the crew. There are only five Ninety-Nines in the company, you know. Six, including you.” She smiled. “Any answers to any questions, you can have them now.”

  I glanced at the fetus one last time. The DNA codes flickered against the water. The fetus floated there, suspended, not moving. It was hard to believe it was something living.

  “All right. Show me the soldiers,” I said, even though I didn’t want to see them. But I was there; I hadn’t fled. I’d made my choice.

  Flor led me through the dim reddish light. It reminded me of the light of the planet. Everything on the Four Sisters was stained by the color of Coromina I. Even this laboratory in the middle of the jungle.

  We went through a doorway—I was shocked there was no sensor—and into a narrow hallway that led down to a door marked TRAINING. Flor took me through. It was like stepping into a completely different building. The light was soft and warm, and there was a woman sitting at a desk, moving files around on a holo screen. She glanced up at us and smiled.

  “Is this the new Ninety-Nine?” She stood up and smoothed down her blue Coromina Group suit jacket. “I’d heard there was a new one. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m Gabriella Lewen.” She held her hand across the desk and I shook it, feeling dazed.

  “Esme Coromina,” I said.

  “I know! I looked you up when I got word that Phillip had made the upgrade. I’m in charge of Interpersonal Development,” she said. “For the R-Company. It’s so nice to have someone join us from the outside! The R-Company will be delighted to have a new person to show off to.” She laughed. I forced out my businesswoman’s smile and thought of Isabel the day she had come home from Catequil, her hair lank, her eyes shadowed.

  “We train them with stations,” she went on. “So, we have a handful resting in the barracks right now, on their break.” She touched her holo and said, “Attention, Squad Alpha! You have a visitor.”

  She beamed up at me. “I think you’ll be very impressed, Ms. Coromina.” Gabriella bustled out from behind her desk. She pressed her hand against the lock on the door at the back of the room. We filed in, one at a time. Another hall. More closed doors. These were marked with holographic signs: WEAPONS. ESPIE. MESS HALL. HISTORY. FLIGHT. I couldn’t see any logical pattern to the signs. Maybe this wasn’t the place to look for logic.

  The barracks were at the end of the hall, the only double doors there. Gabriella hit a chime before she pulled the doors open.

  “Attention!” someone shouted inside the room, and there was the stomping lockstep of soldiers moving into place. I’d seen it plenty of times before.

  I crept cautiously into the room, staring at them. The Radiance soldiers stared back, waiting beside their neatly made beds. They weren’t all dressed the same—some had on full Coromina Group uniforms, some were in lounge clothes, a few were shirtless—but all of them wore the same face. I recognized it as one of our prototypical soldier models.

  “Squad Alpha,” Flor said proudly. “I’d like to introduce you to Esme Coromina, the newest addition to the Radiance Project. She’s very excited to meet you.”

  I couldn’t stop staring at them.

  “At ease,” I finally said. The words were dry and scratchy at the back of my throat. There was a sense of loosening, like air going out of a balloon.

  “It’s very nice to meet you all,” I said. “I look forward to seeing what you’re capable of.”

  The Radiance soldiers didn’t move.

  “Do you have any questions?” Gabriella asked. “Would you like to see what they can do?”

  “Aren’t they on their break?” I glanced around at them. “I hate to make you work when you don’t want to.”

  One of them seemed to smile. Maybe it was my imagination.

  “Well, aren’t you in luck, boys.” Gabriella laughed.

  One spoke. His voice was familiar. How many soldiers had I spoken to, soldiers that looked like him, that shared parts of his DNA?

  “Sergeant Michael Woods speaking,” he said. “It’s very generous of you, Ms. Coromina. But we don’t mind.”

  The others nodded in agreement.

  “We discussed it,” he added. “Without saying anything. It’s something we can do.”

  Gabriella and Flor looked as delighted as parents, but I felt only a cold shakiness in my core. Telepathy? They had telepathy?

  Did Isabel?

  “Can you discuss things with—with me?” I said. “Without saying anything?’

  The Radiance soldiers shuffled, looked at each other. Sergeant Michael Woods smiled. “Sadly, we can’t. Only with those who share our DNA.”

  I wondered if they could speak with Isabel. If I could bring one of those soldiers back to Star’s End and give him to her as a protector, as a friend. Someone she could talk to about what had happened.

  “What would you like to demonstrate?” Gabriella asked Sergeant Michael Woods. “The flight simulators would be impressive, I think.”

  Sergeant Michael Woods nodded. “Yes, that’s what we were thinking.”

  The other soldiers nodded in agreement, their heads bobbing up and down in unison. I shivered.

  “And they’re available,” Sergeant Michael Woods went on. “Squad Gamma has finished their training.”

  “Even I didn’t know that.” Gabriella looked over at me. “It’s just astonishing, isn’t it? They’re all connected on an energy level that we can’t experience. Works a bit like the lightbox linking but completely natural. No mechanical augmentation required.”

  “It’s simply brilliant,” Flor said. “Phillip is simply brilliant.”

  Squad Alpha were already changing their clothes in front of us, wriggling into flight suits, flashes of lean bodi
es snapping on the edge of my vision. I wrapped my arms around my chest and squeezed. I kept thinking about Isabel. I couldn’t see any connection between her and these soldiers, but I knew it was there.

  “Let’s take you up to the observation deck,” Flor said. “Let the squad get ready.”

  We left the barracks. My thoughts hummed when we stepped back out into the hallway, as if the sound of the air had been muffled when I was standing in front of the Radiance soldiers. Maybe it had. That wave of energy Gabriella had talked about, the one keeping them all linked together. Maybe we ordinary humans could notice it if we tried hard enough.

  I followed Flor and Gabriella into the elevator. That humming in my head didn’t stop. Maybe it wasn’t the wave of energy after all; maybe it was something about this cold, labyrinthine building.

  The observation deck was a small round room shielded with glass windows and veils of transparent energy. It was elegantly furnished with expensive brocade furniture, and a flat paper painting of a jacaranda tree, no doubt unimaginably expensive, hung on one wall like a centerpiece.

  “Watercolor,” Flor said. The word had no meaning to me. “One of Phillip’s favorites. He bought it from a dealer on Ryta. Lovely, isn’t it?”

  To my eyes, accustomed to light paintings and holos, it looked flat and lifeless. Which explained why my father would have wanted it so badly.

  “Usually, we set out a buffet,” Gabriella said, “But Mr. Coromina announced your visit at the last minute—”

  “It’s fine. I’m not hungry.” I walked over to the window, close enough to feel the prickle of the energy shield. The flight simulator waited down below, its lights glowing steadily. I’d seen plenty of flight simulators since joining the company, but I didn’t recognize this one. They generally used actual starships that had been grounded, but this didn’t even look like a starship command deck. It could have been a living room in a stylish house. Twenty chairs arranged in two concentric circles, all padded and covered in shiny fabric that reflected the overhead lights. No lightboxes. No holos. Just those twenty chairs.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Gabriella sided up alongside me.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” My voice came out flat and uninterested. I wasn’t interested; I was horrified. I just didn’t know why.

  “That’s because only Ninety-Nines get to see it. These are the newest model of starships, our secret weapon against OCI. We’ll unveil them during the war, and once the rest of the systems see what we’ve been working on—well, let’s just say this war’s going to be profitable.” Gabriella nodded, her gaze fixed on the chairs waiting down below.

  A green light switched on.

  “Here they come!” she cried, and leaned forward, close to the glass. Flor rushed over to join us. The walls parted like curtains, velvety and unsettling to watch, and Squad Alpha marched in, divided into two equal lines. They sat down on the chairs in movements as choreographed as those in a dance troupe.

  “The ships and the soldiers go together, all part of Project Radiance. When we start selling them, we have a whole show planned out for how to prove that the R-Company are doing this all on their own.” Flor’s eyes shone with the shiplights. “Holos showing the live ship engines and all that. Unfortunately, we don’t have it set up completely yet.”

  “You’ll have to take our word for it.” Gabriella laughed.

  I didn’t answer, just watched the Radiance soldiers. They sank deep into their seats, and the dark shiny fabric oozed up between the legs, around their waists. My stomach twisted but I couldn’t look away.

  The ship lights dimmed, flared, and then the flight simulator began to shake and tremble. The Radiance soldiers kept sinking into the oily darkness of their seats. They didn’t seem bothered by it, just kept staring straight ahead with their eyes open. Staring at each other? It was impossible for me tell.

  The flight simulator lights blinked off. A beam of blue light shot out of the middle of the circle of chairs. The Radiance soldiers didn’t even move. That blue light filled up the flight simulator. It rattled harder and harder, then went still. My eyes burned, and I lifted one hand to my brow to try to shield them from the light. It didn’t work.

  “The light’s a kind of radiation,” Flor said. “We don’t fully understand it yet, although it does affect humans. Not the R-Company, though.”

  “That’s why we have the shields over the glass,” Gabriella added. “You’re perfectly safe.”

  My eyes watered, tears streaking out of my eyes. I turned down to the floor and tried to blink the burning away. When I looked back up, the Radiance soldiers had been completely subsumed into their seats. Only their faces remained, those faces that were also the faces of hundreds of other soldiers, all washed out with the blue light.

  My stomach twisted. I gasped and stumbled backward, my breath strangling in my throat.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “This—this is inhumane.”

  Gabriella and Flor looked at each other, then roared with laughter.

  I stared at them, stricken, terrified, angry. This was what they tortured my sister for?

  Gabriella strode over to the opposite wall and activated the building’s Connectivity. “That’s enough,” she said. “Ms. Coromina’s finding your flight system upsetting.”

  The blue light vanished. The seats receded and I let out a sign of relief. The soldiers were all still there.

  Sergeant Michael Woods stood up. “Nothing to worry about, Ms. Coromina,” he said, his voice distorted through the speaker. “It’s as natural to us as swimming is to you. Or running, walking. Take your pick.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  Gabriella dismissed the soldiers and they stood up from their seats as if nothing had happened and filed one after another out of the flight simulator. I collapsed on one of the brocaded sofas. My body sank in deep. Just like the soldiers. A faint hint of my reflection appeared in the glass, shimmering with the energy shield.

  Gabriella and Flor sat across from me.

  “Spectacular, wasn’t it?” Flor said. “All bioengineered.”

  “Even the ship,” Gabriella added.

  Spectacular wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. “They were being consumed.”

  Flor laughed. “Well, yes, we designed it that way. The new ships are completely organic, designed like a machine but grown and cultured like the soldiers themselves. It’s the next step in operator-machine linking.”

  “Organic?” I stared out at the flight simulator. “I didn’t think the terraforming system worked for machines. Just static buildings.”

  “It wasn’t created through the same process as the orgobuildings,” Gabriella said. “And we use different starting material. We actually extrapolated out from the alien DNA in the sample.”

  “The sample you forced from my sister.” I was still looking down at the flight simulator. It didn’t look organic, with its overhead lights and cushiony chairs. Although the lights did cast a strange, phosphorescent glow, like a firefly. I hadn’t noticed that until now.

  “The ship is jump-capable,” Flor went on, and I noticed that neither of them acknowledged my comment. “We had to augment it with a few computer parts. But we wanted to have all our bases covered once we go public with these. Militaries are always looking for jump-capable fighter ships.”

  Gabriella nodded like she hadn’t heard this before.

  “You’re lucky you got to see them when you did,” Flor added. “They’re about to be deployed.”

  “What?” I whipped my head over to her. “Deployed? Sent off to war?”

  “Well, yes, that’s why we made them.” She laughed.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I snapped. “We haven’t gone to war yet.”

  Flor and Gabriella exchanged glances. They both looked amused. There was a streak of cruelty in Flor’s expression that I didn’t like.

  “What?” I hissed.

  “You were only just promoted,” Gabriella sa
id. “So, you wouldn’t know. But the start date for the war has been decided. Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” I whispered, and I thought about my mother stepping off the shuttle. The way she smiled at me like I was everything. Tomorrow and she’d be up in the black, gone from me again.

  “The first battle of a war is perfect for bringing out the R-Company.” Gabriella smiled again. “We’ll get the attention of every military in the galaxy.”

  “That’s the hope, anyway,” Flor said.

  I listened to this with a dull throbbing ache in my chest. It was all happening at once. War. My sister’s alien DNA. My mother leaving me at Star’s End for the second time in my life.

  I stared at the organic lights of the flight simulator and I was empty.

  • • •

  When I left the Radiance lab, the sky was heavy with rainclouds. It fit my mood. I told my driver to take me to the Starfish Lounge, down on the beach. The tourist roads were empty, but whether that was because of the impending war or the impending storm, I didn’t know.

  Less than a day of peace. The thought made me numb.

  I contacted my mother on the drive to the beach. Her face flickered in the light of my portable holo, and she smiled grimly at me. “I guess you heard,” she said.

  Of course. The soldiers would know they were shipping out. I nodded.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

  “I know. I just—” My eyes were heavy. I didn’t want to cry in front of her. “I just wanted to wish you good luck.”

  I cringed when I said it, because I knew it wasn’t a military thing to say. But she smiled, and I thought she looked too sad for a soldier. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

  A light blinked in the corner; she had to disconnect. I wanted to scream that I was a Ninety-Nine, that she had to stay on the line with me, but was the point? She was going out to fight regardless.

  “I’ll contact you when we get back,” she said, and then she was gone, and I slumped back in my seat, the holo resting in my lap. The privacy barrier glittered between me and the driver. I took a deep breath, like the air didn’t have enough oxygen.