Solaris Rising 1.5 by Ian Whates Read Free Book Online Page B

“What would we do with your life?”
    Take it as a peace offering, Dong Huong thought, biting her tongue. She couldn’t say it; she’d been forbidden. Never admit what you’d come from; say just what was needed. Admit your guilt but say nothing about your hopes, lest they betray you as everything in life was bound to do.
    “Did you know her?” she asked.
    Anh did not move. At long last, still not looking at Dong Huong, she said, “She was of my lineage.”
    “Kin to you,” Dong Huong said, unsure of the implications. Minds were borne within a human womb before being implanted in their ships: this made them part of a lineage, as much as human children.
    “Yes,” Anh said. “I’ve known her since I was a child.” Her hand had clenched on the wall; but she walked away without saying anything more.
     
     
    A FTER A NH HAD gone, Dong Huong opened her usual book of poetry, one of the few treasures she’d brought on board the ship. But the words blurred in her eyesight, slid away from her comprehension like raindrops on polished jade; and rather than bringing her peace, as they always did, the poems only frustrated her.
    Instead, she turned off the lights, and lay back in the darkness, thinking of Xuan and Hai—of their faces, frozen in the instant before she ordered The Tortoise in the Lake to fire, and transfixed them as surely as their ships had transfixed The Two Sisters in Exile— she saw them, falling, fading from her ship’s views—leaving nothing but the memory of their shocked gazes, weighing her, accusing her.
    She’d had to do it. Quickly, decisively, as she’d done everything in life; as she’d parted from her husband when he failed to uphold the family’s honour; as she’d forged her path in the military, never looking back, never regretting. And, as she’d told Anh, the matter had been closed: the perpetrators punished, order and law upheld, justice dealt out.
    But still...
    “You’re brooding,” The Tortoise in the Lake said.
    Dong Huong said nothing. She felt the weight of her armour on her body; the cold touch of metal on her skin; the solidity of everything around her, from the poetry on the wall to the folded clothes besides her bed. The present, which was the only thing that mattered. “I’m the officer whose crew shot the ship in the first place. By my presence here, I endanger everything,” she said.
    “Nonsense.” The room seemed to contract, become warmer and more welcoming, down to the words palpitating on the walls; the ship’s voice grew less distant. “Have you not seen their ships?”
    “I have. They’re huge.”
    “They’re weaponless.” There was a tinge of contempt in The Tortoise in the Lake ’s voice. “Cargo transport, with a little reserve against pirates; but even less well-armed than the smoke-children.”
    Dong Huong shivered, in the darkness. “Did you have to pick that example?”
    “No,” the ship said, after a while. “You’re right, I didn’t think.”
    “I saw her face,” Dong Huong said at last. “She looks young, but doesn’t act like it.”
    “Rejuvenation treatments?”
    “Among other things.” Dong Huong shivered. The Nam were a small, fractured empire, beset on all sides by enemies. The Northerners, on the other hand... They were large; they hadn’t fought a large-scale war in centuries; and they had had time to develop everything from medical cures to advanced machinery. If they wanted war, the South, for all its warrior heritage, would be badly outgunned and outnumbered.
    “They love their peace,” the ship said. “Go to sleep, younger sister. There will be plenty of time in the morning.”
    Younger sister. Nothing more than convention by now; though the Mind of her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail , had shared blood with her: the mother that had borne it in her womb had been a cousin of Dong Huong’s own father.
    She did sleep, in the end. In her dreams, she walked in the lineage house again: on ochre ground,