“Maybe not.”
“Will you extend your life with telomerase tanks?”
“I have not decided yet,” he says, reflective. “I know it will be lonely. Matteo and I are prepared for that. But what god isn’t lonely? I really don’t think it is bad to think of myself as that. Gods are manmade after all.”
I consider his face, so exhausted from bellicosity, so lined with the grooves of struggle it might as well be the prow of a battleship. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Yours might be the only opinion I value,” he says. He pauses, and I sense why. He made me, in a way. His first child after those who died. “After all, you’re the only person I care to say farewell to.”
“I think when you catch up with the Gold who wronged you, you should show him mercy. Resist the temptation to face him again. Destroy the ship as you pass.” He closes his eyes. “You asked me what I learned on the Marcher. It’s that. Chains might be made by others, but we tend them. End his pain. End your own. Who knows. Maybe you’ll find more joy in being a father than playing god.”
He thinks on that. After he does, he sounds different, like a man speaking an unfamiliar tongue and surprised to hear it coming from his own mouth. Affection is not natural for Quicksilver. “You know, I always called you the best investment I ever made, Darrow. But for a long time now, you’ve been more than that.” He looks away, estranged from his own vulnerability. “For many years, I’ve thought of you as a son.”
As I thought. He let me come all this way just to not hand me the miracle I need. He is not like Odysseus’s wise, gray-eyed god. He is like the other gods who tormented Odysseus. The selfish gods. He wanted me to see him. Not to understand him, but to forgive him for running away. And though I’m angry, I truly do.
I reach for his hand. He flinches, but allows me to hold it and take the eyeball ring from his finger. “Your war is over, Quick. I’ll take it from here. But any help you could lend me that doesn’t risk this ship would be more than welcome.”
“I can’t give you enough to change your destination.”
I smirk. “The Vale?”
He nods. “There was a moment where we could win, but we let it slip through our fingers. That moment is gone.”
“Have I ever given you business advice?” I ask with a smile. “Then do me a favor, don’t advise me on war.”
He laughs. “What do you need? Aside from ships. Most of mine were decommissioned and used as materials to finish the Rasa. The few that remain are needed to defend the station until we’re free of this infernal system.”
“Repairs, provisions, weapons, armor, and my wife’s agent. But more than anything, I need information. Since this wandering world is meant to find a new home, and you watched me on my way here, I’m betting it has one bloodydamn good telescope.”
* * *
—
The main telescopic array of the Tabula Rasa looks like a tornado made of metal and glass. It is constructed in several parts and so can extend out from a crater to change its view. The array tapers to a spherical viewing chamber suspended in darkness. Eight less powerful short-range telescopes are distributed along the asteroid’s surface so that with a tilt of its axis the array can bring any one of them to bear without having to completely realign itself. The system is meant to be usable even by an astral novice like Quicksilver, and is run by an AI.
“Show me the system,” I say.
I see the galaxy form beyond me in the blackness beyond the chamber. A second three-dimensional image appears on a central pedestal. It is not a true view of reality. Where there is no visual information to be gathered, the AI has filled in the unseen elements of the celestial bodies. I cup the system in my hands, astounded.
The telescope lends me the flawed omniscience of Zeus. Its only limitation is that it looks out from one perspective—the Tabula Rasa’s. On closer inspection there are blindspots from asteroids in the way of its view, but the experience of peering at the images it gathers is no less affecting. I see the planets turn on their axes, revealing little secrets as they dance around the sun. So long as the telescopes are open and watching, the AI is recording, so I can rewind time on demand.
Matteo was right, I do have more time than I thought.
Mars floats before me. The moons of Phobos and Deimos are in the hands of the enemy still, but the siege of Mars has not progressed as I feared it would. The Iron Rain has not yet fallen. Far from it. Nearly half the enemy fleet is missing. I rewind time from the telescope’s old, recorded imagery to see if maybe they are hiding behind the planet. They are not.
I watch in puzzlement as, twenty days ago, the combined Dust and Dragon armadas stream away from Phobos. The telescope’s artificial intelligence tracked the ships with one of its smaller telescopes. If it hadn’t, there would be no way to find the Rim Armada again, with their cold-running engines and in all the billions of radial kilometers peppered with millions of asteroids and the war’s debris. I watch the gloomy image of the Dustmaker leading the armada into the asteroid belt. I spot them again two days ago, already a third of the way through the Belt. Now they are a hundred and eighty million kilometers from the Tabula Rasa, but their course doesn’t look like it will bring them any closer. They’re on a straight shot to intercept Jupiter, and moving fast.
A second fleet follows from Phobos ten days after the first.
It is led by the Lightbringer née Morning Star.
Two fleets headed for Jupiter. But why?
Knowing the answer lies in their destination, I tell the AI I want a view of Jupiter and wait as the telescopes align. When they have, the planet floats over the pedestal. It dwarfs me in size. Of the one hundred and twenty-one moons that surround the Gas Giant, thirty-two are visible. The others are hidden by the planet’s mass.
For several hours I magnify the image and shift between spectrums of light. What I see over those hours causes me to sink to a knee in disbelief. It’s been so long since I’ve had good news, I don’t believe my eyes. But it is there in front of me. Good news.
And a path, waiting for me.
* * *
—
Ten hours later, with repairs on the Archimedes already underway, I gather Aurae, Cassius, and Sevro in the chamber of the telescope. Sevro cradles a coffee, while Cassius nips at a tiny, seemingly bottomless flask of brandy—a habit I thought he’d kicked on our journey to the Belt.
“We now know Quicksilver is not coming back to the war. As I understand it, most of his fleet was decommissioned and recycled into the materials from which this station was built,” I say.
“So you’re just gonna let that arrogant piece of shit waddle off to the ass-end of space,” Sevro mutters. “He shouldn’t get a happy ending.”
“So you suggest what?” I ask.
“We dropped that coms buoy for a reason,” he says.
“Yes, to blast out his location to the system if he wouldn’t give us his ships. A gun to his head. But if a man has no cash in his pockets why mug him at all?” I ask.
Sevro relents with a sigh. “I don’t even think he likes those Homo sapiens. His children. More like human pity shields.” His initial anger has faded, and he’s grown lighter now that he knows as soon as the repairs on the Archi are made he’ll be going home. He glances up at the telescope. “So, what. You found our route back to Mars?”