The pilot Four Crocus did something with her cloudhook, her eyes moving very fast, shuddering in their sockets. Rapid-search.
“… He looks right,” she said. “And. And you don’t know what it’s been like, Thirteen Muon, in the Shard-sight these past few days. If he wants to see it—if the Minister sent him to see it—I have to get this message out, but I’ll show him a Shard.”
“It’s on your head,” said Thirteen Muon. “But you know I don’t stop you, I never stop you, we’d never have any fun if I did.”
“This way, Your Excellency,” said Four Crocus, and Eight Antidote followed her and her fellow soldier back into the maze of Nasturtium Terminal’s ships.
The Shard was smaller than he’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t inside a Fleet ship after all—Four Crocus was on mail-courier duty, some complex sort of punishment or possibly reward that Eight Antidote couldn’t understand from her conversations with Thirteen Muon while they walked, and thus she and her ship were right in the spaceport, not hanging in a Shard-berth inside her usual ship. That ship was the Exultation-class medium cruiser Mad With Horizons of the Second Legion, and it was waiting for her three jumpgate-trips away from the Jewel of the World, and from what it sounded like, she couldn’t wait to get back and was worried about going back at the same time.
But for now her Shard nestled in Nasturtium Terminal like a splinter of glass stuck in a palm, ready to be caught up in one of the spaceport’s skynets and launched orbitward. It was big enough for one grown person to fit in, if they didn’t move too much. Eight Antidote touched its side. The metal was cool and smooth. He knew that the little ship could orient itself in any direction, on any axis, and the pilot would hang in the center, in her capsule, gravityless and free.
“Wait with him,” said Four Crocus to Thirteen Muon. “Ten minutes, no more. I need to ask a favor from whoever else is on mail duty—this message is really urgent, and I don’t know how long His Excellency is going to want to experience Shard-sight—so the next ship in line can take it through the jumpgate.”
Eight Antidote was glad that Four Crocus took her job so seriously. He wished he could do something like—give her a commendation. Maybe he could, when he was Emperor, if she remembered him. That message—his order—needed to leave now. Even if it meant he had to spend an excruciating ten minutes under the supervision of Thirteen Muon, who clearly hadn’t encountered a child since they’d been one themselves, and thought all children were interested mostly in star handball players (Eight Antidote didn’t care) or star musicians that sold out enormous concert venues and made kids scream a lot (Eight Antidote really didn’t care).
Eventually, out of agonized frustration at waiting, sure that at any moment someone would either set off an incendiary device or come to collect him and throw him back into his rooms in the palace like they were a jail, he asked what Thirteen Muon did in the Second Legion. This seemed to be a relief to both of them: Thirteen Muon was an engineering specialist who spent most of their time working on better ways to repair starship hulls, and Eight Antidote knew absolutely nothing about handheld microthrusters for close navigation in zero gravity, which meant he could actually concentrate without vibrating out of his skin with impatience, because he had to pay attention if he wanted to understand anything Thirteen Muon was saying.
Even so, when Four Crocus finally came back, he cut Thirteen Muon off directly. “I need to go inside,” he said to her. “I need to be inside Shard-sight, Pilot Four Crocus.” And then, feeling himself blush with frustration at needing to ask for everything, “I need you to show me how.”
Four Crocus glanced at Thirteen Muon, and then back to him. “Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s a lot easier than you think. It’s a lot worse than you think.”
“He’s a kid, Four Crocus, even if he actually is who he says he is—you came down to the Jewel of the World on leave and called me up to go get smashed because of what you said happened to you the last time you were in Shard-sight, and you’re going to put a kid through that?” asked Thirteen Muon, and Eight Antidote really, really didn’t have time for some kind of adult argument about whether this would be good for him or not, or whatever else their argument was about. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t want to.
“Show me,” he repeated. “Now. It’s an order, Pilot.”
“You’ll need my cloudhook, Your Excellency,” Four Crocus said. “And you’ll need to be inside the Shard—Shard-sight works off of any cloudhook with the programming, but the Shard trick—I can’t believe they’re calling it that, it sounds like we’re doing it on purpose—the Shard trick takes too much processing power for a little thing like a cloudhook. Or a mind. You need the ship.” Her hand was on the hull of her Shard, stroking it like she would stroke a pet that needed to be quieted. “She’s a good ship,” she went on. “My Shard.”
Very seriously, Eight Antidote said, “I believe you,” because Four Crocus seemed to need to hear it.
She took a deep breath, like an orator about to begin a poem at court. “All right. Let’s—get this over with. Fuck, but I really hope you’re who you seem to be, because otherwise this is absolutely going to get me kicked out of the Shard corps—”
Inside, there was hardly space for one person, let alone two. Four Crocus showed him where to sit. Where to put his hands to call up the Shard’s engine and onboard targeting AI without actually triggering a takeoff sequence. And then she settled her cloudhook over his left eye. It was too big, of course—he had to tilt his head to keep it exactly settled—but it worked just like his own. The interface was the same, except overlaid with a hundred commands and programs he’d never seen. Fleet hardware with Fleet programming. It was terrifying. All of this was. But he’d left being scared somewhere outside the Shard, somewhere in the boredom of waiting for Four Crocus to come back. All he had left was being cold. He thought he might be shivering.
“It’s like a kaleidoscope,” Four Crocus murmured. “You might throw up at first. People do. I did. But you’ll see. You’ll see what’s happening to us. Ready?”
He nodded. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he had no idea what was about to happen to him.
“Wake up the ship, then,” Four Crocus said, “and when the programming comes up, say yes to everything.”
She got out of her Shard, and the shipglass hood of the pilot’s chamber clicked shut behind her. Eight Antidote was alone. His hands on the controls—
He executed the sequence. Felt the ship come awake under him, a thrum, an impatience. Half his vision went black with starfields—the cloudhook coming online, some version of Shard-sight—there was a flicker of a prompt in the corner of that field, a yes? And he said yes, one blink—
And fell into the void, tumbling, thrown from himself as far as he had ever been. Into the void, and into how it was screaming.
“What good would that do?” asked Nine Hibiscus. “Even if you lived through it, which fuck knows if you would—”
“It’s a system,” said the static-distorted voice of Twenty Cicada. “It’s a distributed system, and it’s out of balance because they don’t understand how we can be people and not be part of it. It’d do—a lot of good, Mallow. To have a—foreign graft.”