“Like a fucking ghost!” he exclaimed, beaming from ear to ear.
His enthusiasm was infectious, and though the idea was fundamentally dangerous to the extreme, the crew punched the air and hugged each other and said:This is how I want to die!
My opinion was not sought, and I felt too tired, too small, too old to argue.
We killed the destroyer that day.
It should be impossible for a Pilot to take a ship in and out of the dark so quickly; impossible for a vessel to pop in and out of existence with such accuracy, let alone while engaging in combat.
I listened to the dark, every time we entered it.
Called out – are you there? Are you with me? Are you proud of what I have become? Look at me. Look at me. I’m killing them. I am killing a ship of strangers – can you see me? Is this what you wanted?
Nothing answered.
Nothing ever did.
After, as we watched the destroyer come apart, leaking gas and frozen bodies to the dark, there was no orgy.
We had delivered weapons of death to the resistance on Nitashi, and no doubt those weapons had killed. But the crew of theDutyhad never quite imagined that we’d become killers ourselves. Never stopped to wonder how it might feel. Jahen tried to make a celebration of it, to whoop and dance and scream:fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!to the battered corpse of our enemy. But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t happiness, or joy, or ecstasy. It was mad, desperate, a heart being torn apart, a soul cut adrift that did not know itself any more.
After, Pitt said: “If you were Piloting a battleship, you would be unstoppable. You could kill so many. You could be a monster in this war.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I know.”
And I went to bed, and we never spoke of it again.
Chapter 50
We were not on Nitashi when the Shine came for Kyoborrekh.
They declared that the town had become infested with terrorists, fanatics, a hotbed of resistance. They sent a message beforehand giving the civilians one day to evacuate, but there was only one road in and one road out, and it was blockaded by the Shine, and the civilians who tried to leave were turned back, had nowhere to go.
Then they bombed the town, without precision, a simple straight-up levelling of everything there. Then, when the dust had settled and the fires burned out, they sent in Corpsec and a unit of Liberators, locals trained to serve alongside the Shine invaders, to kill anyone still living. There were tunnels, they explained. There were hidden places underground. If you were found down there, that was proof enough of your guilt, and you had to die. If you weren’t down there, of course, you died.
They didn’t publicise the massacre. They didn’t need to. Word spread and a few people wept, and a few people wailed, and perhaps a handful decided to join the Yeh’haim, and perhaps more were afraid. Mostly, everyone who watched from afar just felt very tired.
On theDuty, Pitt swore he was going to kill a Liberator.
He raged up and down in fury, and everyone else joined in, because raging felt like a kind of action, and people cursed and pulled their hair and wept. I had wondered if, over time, these emotional responses would grow flat, dulled by the unrelenting nature of what we did, of the world around us. They did not. If anything, they were growing bigger. It seemed to me that feeling strongly was a substitute for actually being able to do something. They couldn’t stop the massacres; they couldn’t save their friends. So instead they shouted and raged and swore they would, and stayed away all through night phase and drank too much and refused to eat, and that seemed to make them feel, if only slightly, better.
Alone in my room, I did a little maths on the Liberators – “collaborators”, as the Yeh’haim called them, traitors to their world.
The original Nitashi who had joined the Shine had been from all parts of society, of all ages and natures. They had joined because it was better than dying, and perhaps a few had even naively signed up in the hope that their presence among the attackers might help mitigate the brutality of their actions. We just wanted to keep our people safe, they would say. We just wanted to be helpful.
Now, however, a whole generation was coming of age who had been raised under Shine. Educated in Shine schools, taught Shine values, and perhaps some believed it – there certainly weren’t enough of the Mdo on Nitashi to conquer every classroom and syllabus, not yet – and perhaps others simply didn’t see that they had any other choice.
I tried to whisper this to Ceitdh, and xe turned to me with face flashing red and lips pulled back. “Don’t ever say that to Pitt,” xe barked. “Don’t ever say it to anyone on the crew. Do you understand me? Don’t ever say it!”
I did not fully understand, until much later, when it occurred to me that the thing that was forbidden – the thing that is always forbidden in all wars, especially the longest – is thinking of your enemy as people.
I don’t know if Pitt ever did kill a Liberator.
I know that on our next mission to the planet, he went away for longer than usual, Jahen and Krill by his side.
When they came back, no one asked anything, no one said anything at all. There were no obvious explosions of blood on their clothes, under their nails. I wondered if perhaps they had killed someone – someone accused of collaborating, someone blamed for all ills – and only afterwards realised that they had probably murdered an innocent, a stranger just trying to get by.
Maybe they hadn’t killed anyone at all. Maybe they felt like they were failures.
