A delicate truce was formed, on the warring shores between the Empress and her Heart Brother, understanding grown to bear the fruit of knowing. Through deceit and violence she was captured, held, and tortured. In this time she made her first acquaintance with the definition of the human word: Learn.

  —Abalone Shell on the White Beach, A New History Of Theta Mars

  The emissaries left their chambers. In the wash of the reptilian heat behind them, a crew member on the janitorial staff ducked into the suite. It had been requested by their guests, relayed to the janitorial staff through the captain, that the emissaries did not want their rooms disinfected. They were purposely harbouring the microbes of Theta Mars as a deterrent to scorched earth sickness, as many star travelers experienced, if not cultured all their lives in spaceport biofilm. The janitor’s duties then consisted of light tidying, the exchange of used ceramics, and spying.

  The third was the most difficult of her tasks. The emissary’s book was written in inscrutable characters, a shame she could not record them in any form. Evidence of tampering would land her a tour in the brig. The captain was not aware of her third role.

  As she packed the tea set and cleared meal ware into a case, she wiped the lip of a cup with a swatch of treated gauze, and bagged it.

  Upon her return journey to the kitchen, she passed the medical wing, and left the gauze with a nurse. The nurse ran the gauze through a DNA scan, containing one hundred and ninety nine genetic signatures, to search it for matching components. She found, as expected, two.

  The nurse gave the read out to a crew member on the engineering team, who carried it up to a friend in navigation, who passed it on to communications. From there, a brief message was written up, and directed across space to be picked up by an orbital colony near to where they had begun their journey.

  It was not a pleasant colony, overcrowding still plagued it, from the sudden influx of refugees it had received in the last generation. The secondary leadership, those who still considered those refugees, of which they were counted, entitled to self governance, was listed as the intended recipient. The message read only: SHE IS THE CAPSTONE.

  The Observation deck was not, by intention, a luxury, though aboard Divine Messenger, there was little that could be called utilitarian in execution. Sequestered against the outer edge of the hull, with a viewport the width and breadth of the hall’s ceiling, it served no function for navigation or threat detection. It was simply a place where men and women could see the stars. This necessity, once discovered in the immutable past of humanity’s first space flights, prevented a type of madness referred to colloquially as Caged Spirits, or Tiger Mania.

  Even born in the void, on ships or orbital colonies, children with no past experiences craved a freedom that was impossible in the confines necessitated by space. How a window kept them sane was one of the mysteries.

  The second lieutenant had long outgrown his questioning of it, and now knew simply when that jittering unwellness came upon him, to seek out something that would have once been called a sky.

  The Observation deck was peaceful, crew lay on the flooring and gazed at the wonders of space, as they slid past the view port ceiling, creeping along as though at the rate of a planet’s turning. These stars were of course so distant, the ship may as well have been crawling along at a planet’s pace. The bright swathe of the galaxy arm they traveled inwards along shone light bright enough to cast faint shadows in the dim hall, nearby star systems blazing in eternal/finite glory.

  He lay down on the flooring, folding his hands behind his head, and let his eyes skip from star to star. How many hours had he spent at the academy, bent over charts and carefully plotting 3D models for theoretical voyages? The second lieutenant knew space as the old sailors once thought they knew the sea. The very surface of it, and the wind over the water, a glimpse of the sky, nothing more.

  He heard the hush first, found that he had closed his eyes, and was counting the points of brightness left on his retinas. He opened them, turned his head and saw the emissaries in the hall’s entrance, both with heads tipped up. There was a similarity, vague and impressionistic, between the underside of their jaws, both the woman and the wyrm. A star-filled wonder in their eyes.

  “Greetings, Abalone Shell on the White Beach,” he said, standing. Their gaze dropped back down to him, full of heat. “Is this your first visit to the Observation deck?”

  “Yes,” replied the woman, stepping forward as the second lieutenant beckoned them.

  “Welcome, please, join me here, the view is better than from the margins,” he invited, noting as the wyrm cleared the entrance that many of the crew who had been star bathing made quiet exit.

  “What is this?” she asked, sitting cross legged on the flooring.

  The second lieutenant sat as well, farther away than he would have a friend, though still he felt he could feel the dry breath of the wyrm warming the air. “A place to see the stars.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “There is nothing more for it to be.”

  She smiled, a hum ringing from her throat, as she turned her head, eyes dancing with the blossoming galaxy. “At last we find one sensible thing upon this vessel.” The wyrm trilled, head laid along the flooring, pupils shut to slits against the star gleam. Her body shone, in the faint light, tiny fires dancing across each scale. In a dangerous instant, the second lieutenant felt his hand twitch to reach out to her, longing to touch that starlight in her flesh. He stopped before the impulse could become movement.

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  “You watch the stars on your planet?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Does it ever become boring? To see the same ones, night after night, year after year?”

  “No, second lieutenant Christoph Grenlivt.”

  “Just Christoph is acceptable.”

  “Christoph,” she said, his name sharp and brittle in her accent. She dipped her head, “you may call us Abalone.”

  “Abalone,” he whispered. “Your name is beautiful, who gave it to you?”

  “We found it ourself, when we became fyre for the first time.”

  “Oh, when was that?”

  “At the time when we became alive in knowing, of ourself and the world.”

  “Ah… my mother gave me my name, it was her father’s, and his father’s before that.”

  “Our sire would have given us the histories, alas, but we have none.”

  “No father?”

  “His true children were murdered, his widow left grieving. The line of the East severed. The Empress adopted us as her own, but the histories went to death with the last brood. Their blood carried the histories, and was spilt across the nest sands to no purpose.” She curled her legs up to her chest, bare feet splayed on the paneling, she wrapped her arms around her knees. She didn’t look at him while she spoke, eyes drinking the starlight.

  “That’s awful, I’m sorry,” the second lieutenant said.

  “You did not kill them, the guilt is not yours.”

  “No, but still… I feel sorrow for your mother, I didn’t know the colony had such a…problem.”

  “If you had known, would you have stopped it?”

  “Well I don’t know if I have the authority to—”

  “It is a fruitless quandary. You did not know. None of the starborn did, least of all your Empress. We are told it would not have happened if she had been enlightened. We are inclined to doubt this.”

  Silence dropped over them, heavy and carrying something the second lieutenant had no name for. He noticed the Observation deck was empty, all the crew retreated to other haunts, places with fewer wyrms.

  “Do you know these stars?”

  “Yes, I studied them at the academy. I am a navigation officer.”

  “Would you tell me their stories?”

  “Stories? I… I don’t know their stories. I know their names, and how to fly around them, which ones have suitable gravity for slingshot maneuvers, which ones are prone to violent flares.”

  “We understand. They are tools to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “On Theta Mars, they tell us the past, and hold on to our secrets.”

  “Well… sometimes I give my secrets to stars also, when there is no one else to whom I can trust them.”

  “They seem… odd.”

  “You’ve never seen stars without an atmosphere before, that is the difference. They are steady, and don’t flicker.”

  “Dance.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  Silence lapsed again. The second lieutenant found himself staring longer at the woman than the stars. He had seen the uncountable suns every waking cycle of his life, and believed that he would again. But she, he harboured a doubt that he would look away and she would vanish. Go as silently and suddenly as she had come. A shadow out of the sun. A spectre swathed in white, followed by a little star made flesh.

  “The stars are sacred to me, are they to you?” he asked.

  She let her eyes fall to look at him. “Yes. They are fyre, as are we.”

  “In my faith, at the end of their time they will become dust, as will I.”

  “Until death you are different from them, this is a sorrow.”

  “Yes, I guess it is a little bit sad. I do not mind. In life I can know them, and they know me, in their way.”

  She unfolded from her bundled position, and leaned towards him. “Christoph, do you want to know the stars as we know them? To know our stars?”

  He laughed, uncomfortable under her scrutiny, “I don’t know that I can.”

  “You can, if you trust us,” she said, the wyrm lifted her head, star filled eyes boring into him with the heat of a mining laser. “We swear to you that we will give you only the stars as they are known to Theta Mars.”

  There was a purposeful stillness, a measured weight in the offer. He could feel the importance of it, though he did not understand. He nodded. “I do, please show me.”

  The woman and the wyrm moved with their uncannily synchrony, a sharp spur of polished black bone gleaming in the starlight was suddenly in her hand. He flinched. “You need not fear, Christoph, this knowing will not harm you,” said the woman, as she pricked the wyrm’s flesh at the hollow of her collar bone, wetness as black as the bone spur shone in the lights of the eternal/finite void. “Drink and know us, we give you our stars,” said the emissary, holding the bone to his lips. He didn’t know why, but he opened his mouth, staring into the burning eyes of the woman, as she dripped black ichor onto his tongue.

  It burned as acid, eating into his flesh. He swallowed, to try and rid himself of the sting, reeling back on the floor, he would ask her what she meant by this, some Theta Martian ritual he did not understand. He should have refused, colonies in isolation always went strange, and she wasn’t even raised by human beings—

  He was flying. Cool wind brushed over his scales and billowed under the span of his wings. The blue black night swam with colours, as dancing stars played in their multitudes beyond the sky. They were red-stained by the horizon, incandescent and alive. They were fyre in the distance and he was fyre in his heart. Below, their reflections in the stillness of a lake were as the tears of creation fallen. His form a black shadow, sleek and deadly, he was wyrm in a sky of singing stars. He knew them.

  —He gasped a breath deeply into human lungs, laying on the floor of the Observation deck, with his familiar void stretching endlessly above the viewport. The emissaries crouched beside him, burning eyes devouring secrets before they would share them. A woman and a wyrm from a little planet far away. A planet from which he had seen the night and known its shining immortals.

  “You know them now,” she said simply, his face plainly to be read.

  “How?” he croaked, the burn of ichor still on his tongue. “Why?”

  “We are an emissary,” was her reply. She stood, and with the wyrm padded silently towards the entrance.

  He scrambled to his feet, dizzy as though coming out of zero-grav, “wait,” he called, and in desperation said in the wyrm speak Felsdam had shared with him. “Please tell me more.”

  She turned, a smile flashing, and dipped her head. She hissed a message in wyrm speak to him, a lack of vocabulary rendering it nothing but the growling of an animal. “In time, second lieutenant, we will,” she said in trade pidgin. The door hissed open, and then shut. They were gone.

  When the dizzy spell passed, the second lieutenant tried to take himself to the ship’s medic, to see about the burning lesion on his tongue. He made it only as far as his quarters, where he fell into his bunk in his uniform, curling in a tightly shivering ball, and dreamed of stars as seen through an atmosphere.