Flight of the Falcon

26

DropShip White Reaper

Orbiting Zebebelgenubi Prefecture VIII The Republic of the Sphere 1 August 3134

Malvina awoke with a jar, like falling several centimeters.

She snapped upright. Around her the bedclothes were a swamp sodden with fearful sweat.

She was alone. Although not in the dark. She always slept with the lights on, alone or not.

She had been dreaming about the last time she slept with the lights out. The night of the sixth anniversary of her and Aleks’ Decant.

The night they came for them.

There were eight of them, motivated by sound calculation in the scheme of Darwinian creche economics: fewer mouths to feed equaled more food for all. So it was only fitting the runts, the two weakest, should sacrifice for the good of the sibko. It was the Clan way that had been dinned into them unceasingly since before their ears could make sense of speech.

Aleks fought back, furiously and in the grip of transfiguring fear, throat too tight to scream, his face white and twisted as the bedsheets now clutched in Malvina’s wound-wire fists. They concentrated on him as the boy, even though he was the smaller. Small and scared as he was, with his body wastes streaming down his skinny brown legs, he fought them: a merciless mortal battle, there in the dark of the studiedly cheerless dormitory room.

Aleks’ hopeless frenzied valor had bought Malvina the freedom to act.

By the time two burly Proctors, mere laborers, had arrived to subdue the combatants with blows and stunstick, two nocturnal assailants lay dead. Yimm would survive, but hampered by having but a single eye died two years later in a training accident without help from Malvina. But only because it took her too long to get to him. The other five attackers who lived through that terrible night had predeceased him, not by accident, although several seemed so.

She shook herself, came back to herself. Her eyes refocused. She had been seeing it all as if the air between her eyes and the bulkhead of her cabin inWhite Reaper were a holovid stage.

They came back, she thought, riding a nebular ring of desolation. They always come back.

No matter how often she killed them. No matter how many she killed. They kept returning for her and her brother in her dreams.

She gripped her head in her hands and screamed. The bulkheads swallowed the sound.

She would hold to the lesson she had learned as a terrified child: keep killing until no one threatened her and her sibkin any more. She would kill as many as it took to make the attackers in her dreams stay dead, stayaway .

And if what it took was for her to kill every living human being in the galaxy, then cast herself into the blazing heart of a star—

Her breathing had returned to normal. She lay down on her side, happily curled, resting her cheek on her folded hands.

Then at last we will all sleep in peace, she thought, and slept again, and dreamt no more.