Derin Edala

10: The Ballad of Billie the Second Son

When I got up in the morning, the whole thing seemed a bit silly.

It didn’t really make sense for the treegrave to not be real. It would be a really silly lie to tell, just to kill off people who weren’t useful to the ship. And a silly way to do that, too; you had to apply to become a part of the treegrave. There were lots of old or sick people who never applied, or even just people who weren’t old or sick but just didn’t do a job on the ship. If the Administration was going to ...

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9: The Secret

On the last day of my break, I had a dream.

I was in one f the ship’s viewing ports again, alone. But Grandma’s wheelchair was there with me. Like last time, I couldn’t just see out of one wall; I could see all around. The Vanguard to ship-right, which was ‘behind’ from the outside of the ship, the direction we were travelling away from. The Dragonseye to ship-left, bright and hot, ‘ahead’ of us. I don’t normally think much about what ditection things are from outside th...

8: Seven

The number blocks were easy to use. There were little blocks that could be added together or taken away or sorted into groups to find out the answers to math questions. There were longer sticks, twelve blocks long, to represent twelve blocks so that we could work with big numbers without needing to count lots and lots of tiny blocks. There were big slabs of a hundred and forty four blocks, too, but we didn’t need those ones yet. After a few days of using the blocks, Ross showed us how to us...

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(Monthly bonus) The Void Behind 7: Round Numbers

Mum had her baby just as I was about to start Textiles, so she was gone for a few days, but came back fine. She was tired but okay; the baby was okay, safe in the orphanage. I never saw it.

Textiles was about what I expected, from talking to Hitan and from what I already knew. Fibres were turned into threads by big machines, and those threads were turned into fabric and rope and stuff. It was important but didn’t seem very interesting because it was just big machines doing it. We were...

The Void Behind 6: Mammals

We did the rest of Farming, and most of it was stuff I knew and didn’t have to pay much attention to. Arai wasn’t paying much attention either, except for the basic attention that she always paid everything; I didn’t think that she’d choose to do a second pass with Farming.

I might. I wasn’t sure yet.

We’d meet up with Hitan sometimes after our jaunt shifts (he really liked Textiles, to everyone’s surprise, because there were lots of big exciting machines) and climb ...

The Void Behind 5: The Sheep

We didn’t see any food making machines on the rest of the jaunt through the Kitchens, but that didn’t mean that I was wrong. They were probably just too dangerous to let kids our age close to. Maybe people who did a second pass in Kitchens got to see them.

After Kitchens was Farming, which I was looking forward to because I knew a lot about the biotanks, since Dad worked with them. I had seen some of the areas of Farming before when I’d gone there sometimes to see Dad, and I knew ...

The Void Behind 4: Change

I spend as much time as I can with Grandma over the next month, but it’s not easy. We have a big family, and she has old friends, so a lot of people want to spend time with her. And she has to spend lots and lots of time with the doctor, learning how to join the treegrave.

Also, I have to go on my jaunt every day. We learn how to recycle all kinds of things, one at a time. I learn how to pull the bulky rubber insulation off old drive units so they can be recycled as air monitoring uni...

The Void Behind 3: The Dream

When I went to sleep, I had a bad dream.

I stayed up late to spend more time with Grandma, and when I get to bed late I sometimes have nightmares. This time, I was standing in a viewing port, looking out at the stars, but it was like the rest of the ship was invisible; I could see the stars all around. I couldn’t see through the metal floor, but the transparent wall facing space was on all sides.

I didn’t know if the roof was transparent, too. When I tried to look up, I got hi...

The Void Behind 2: Closed System

I didn’t tell my friends about the treegrave thing at Rubbish & Recycling the next day. They wouldn’t have understood. They would’ve congratulated me, and when I explained why it was sad, they would’ve told me that I was wrong.

My friends don’t have grandmas. Hitan is growing up in the orphanage, like most kids; he doesn’t have any parents at all. Arai has a mum and a dad and a guv, a “nuclear family” with three parents, one of each of the genders, but none of her pa...

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The Void Behind 1: What Every Girl Wants

Right from the first day of my jaunt, I knew that every girl on the Courageous must want more than anything to work in Rubbish & Recycling.

Arai didn’t agree. She said that working in Records was going to be the best, once we got to that part of the jaunt. But that was just because she likes to sound smart and really likes reading, and she probably thought Records was going to be way more fun than it actually would be. And Hitan thought that Engineering would be the most ...

Wandering Star 63: One Year Later

“Did you hear what Lorna and Smon were talking about this morning?” Ketyk asks, landing on the large metal dish on the ground that Tyk is trying to inspect.

“What? No. You know I can’t hear enough of their sounds to understand their language. No woman can.”

“Yeah, most of the men can’t either, but that’s just because they can’t be bothered to learn.”

“Because they have more important things to do than eavesdrop on sky people all day, you mean?”

...

Wandering Star 62: Realignment

“I have never claimed to be – ”

“I didn’t say you claimed to be anything. But that’s how you think. Like you and your people dropped out of the sky, a nascent beginning that gets to dictate our future. You repeatedly talk about how this is my people’s Earth, but not once have you ever taken our opinions on its future seriously; it’s all about you nobly deciding to refrain from destroying things and us not disagreeing with your decisions because we can’t possibly know a...

Wandering Star 61: Regrets

“Maybe somebody took her,” Ketyk frets. “Or hurt her.”

“There’s nobody around,” Yar assures him. “If there was, the scouts would’ve seen them, or we would’ve seen evidence of their foraging.”

“It could’ve been someone in this group,” Ketyk says. He rounds on Kesal. “You -- ”

“Ketyk!” Tyk says sharply. She does not want to start a fight with the hiveheart of the hive that’s been generously sheltering them.

“He could have some secr...

Wandering Star 60: Sunseekers

The proposed Rayjo Tau site is very high above the ocean, but it’s not nearly as high as Tyk was expecting. Despite all of Smon’s talk about height being important, there’s still plenty of mountain above them as they walk out from between two sharp, steep peaks and onto a broad, mostly flat expanse of solid grey stone. Cracks and dips in the ground are filled with rubble and dirt, accumulated and packed down over time, which serve as small oases for tough mountain grasses to dig into in...

25: Two Years Later

Things move pretty fast when you have essentially unlimited labour and resources to get them done. The Lightsong Travel Agency was up before I knew it.

Word of our existence was spreading to every aljik nest we could contact. Very, very slowly. Aljik nests don’t communicate with each other a whole lot, but the great thing about a space station is that it stays in one place, so you only need to spread the word somewhere once.

The less great thing about our space station was the p...

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Wandering Star 59: To the Tower

Time moves on. Smon gets her metal purified and then forged, expands her farm, and starts stockpiling food. Ketyk grows very quickly into a surprisingly strong flyer, soon able to make it up and down the communication tower without needing to rest on the way (a good skill, Tyk notes to herself with dry amusement, for the truebrother of someone Wanderer-marked; had they become traders, he’d have made an excellent scout in a few years). One morning, as they sit in the sun together on a day wi...

24: Negotiation

“That’s our cue,” Kate said. “‘Should we meet up and talk’.”

I glanced at the boys. “This isn’t safe.”

“It was never going to be safe. This is as safe as it was ever going to be. This is as harmless as we can make ourselves and as much incentive as we can give her not to try to kill us.”

“It’s boring,” Keith said.

“Were you hoping to soot some bug aliens with a laser gun?” I asked.

“Yeah, actually. Except I wouldn’t want to k...

Wandering Star 58: Forging Ahead

Tyk is of course as excited about the wingsong stream as anyone. She’s desperate for news of home, and Kemia thoughtfully keeps abreast of the situation and the very morning after they start to get faint, fuzzy communication is able to tell her that the Redstone River Hive is facing no critical problems and that they sent messengers to neighbouring hives to warn them about the Green Hills Hive’s actions towards the sky people. Green Hills find themselves in a politically awkward position,...

23: Outmanoeuvre

The human wasn’t wrong. All three of the ships here were mine, part of my Empire; was it really more of a violation to transmit from the Red Four than to have stolen the Oval Nine? But I did need confirmation that she was indeed hacking the signal somehow. It was possible, albeit unlikely, that she’d captured the Red Four and compromised the crew there, including Hatta, and was merely pretending to be hacking the signal to hide the fact that she was on the Red Four instead of the Oval Nin...

Wandering Star 57: Red River Ramble

The hiveheart announce Smon’s true nature and the Rayjo Tau plan that very afternoon. Smon helps them frame the situation as better than playing temporary host to some baby stars, as them being the hive that will shape the entire future of the continent, possibly the Earth, the origin point for an eternal partnership between their two kinds of people. They do a big speech and have a big welcoming celebration where Smon and Tyk and Ketyk are swarmed with strangers who are now apparently allo...

22: Engagement

The Firedancer was beautiful.

Queen Tatik had never really acknowledged it as her flagship, not while the remnants of the Stardancer still existed as the heart of our nest, but necessity had demanded some sort of vessel fit for a Queen to travel her empire when needed, and she had conceded to giving it the -dancer epithet, so everybody knew that, in reality, it was the flagship. And it looked the part: pulling out of dash with no more than a whisper of light despite the distance with th...

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Wandering Star 56: Alone

“It’s a bold claim,” one of the hiveheart says, “for a handful of inexperienced children to make. That this new type of communication tower could reach all the way across the ocean.”

“Our star-travelling guest has demonstrated other powerful abilities,” another points out, “and the girl is Erlin-touched. I trust her extrapolative abilities.”

“Could your Rayjo Tau speak to other continents?” Kesal asks Smon.

Smon shrugs. “Hard to say. It depends on if ...

21: Last Stand

I didn’t have to check the hull to know that it wasn’t doing great. Which is good, because I wouldn’t have been able to check it anyway; most of our external sensors were gone, burned away into space, except the ones we’d removed and taken inside for safekeeping. It was hot out there. Very, very hot. And possibly very radioactive.

Some of it was unavoidable. Moon class ships have both blue and green dash capabilities, but they’re not designed to do it constantly. We’d had to...

Wandering Star 55: Diplomatic Potential

Tyk can’t help but be impressed by the restraint of the people of Glittergem Hive. Even as Smon, clean and well rested and adorned in her least tattered silks, strides through the entrance hall with Tyk and Mia and their truebrothers, nobody tries to approach her; they form a clear path and look on with varying levels of curiosity, reverence or fear. Of course, people were polite at the Green Hills Hive too, up until they tried to kill her, but they’d seen sky people before; here, Smon is...

20: Action

Bringing my rogue sister back to the Heart Planet is a very dangerous decision. Is it the wrong one? It might be. But I can’t risk killing her before I know which Queen her pack of traitors has taken the Crown Jewel to, I can’t stay away from the Heart Planet any longer knowing that war could break out any time (besides, the Princesses are getting older and impertinent and have probably filled my nest with eggs by now; if I don’t get back soon I could find that one of them has gained an...