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No. No connection.Home was certain, which meant I was too. Home wouldn’t make a mistake about that.
But my frills twitched with the thrill of contact, of connection to a mate. If her species wasn’t part of the Hive, how was that possible?
It didn’t matter. She was mine, I was hers, and what more could the universe offer? Stroking her warm, soft skin, I marveled at how vulnerable she was without her suit. I both admired her bravery and despaired of her foolishness at venturing into space with so little protection.
I will keep her safe,I promised myself. Watching her chest rise and fall, I swore I would never let her come to harm. I just didn’t knowhow.
The human could not share Home with me, because Home was dying. Her mindsong faded and stuttered, and in it I heard the truth I’d been avoiding. Home burned carefully gathered resources with reckless abandon to keep the Garden alive for me and Myra. Long-hoarded energy radiated out into nothingness, and ice crept up her veins.
Home’s life faded faster than I’d imagined as she threw everything into keeping Myra alive. A deep urgency crept intoher thoughts, pushing me to get her to her ship, but I hesitated. How could I abandon Home?
“What’s wrong?” Myra’s words vibrated in the air, and I plucked their meaning from her mind. Our mating had sealed us closer together, close enough that she felt my distress and I understood her speech without effort.
Home is dying. She is sacrificing herself for me.Myra tensed against me, holding me close, and the warm vibrations of her breathing soothed the pain. She cared. She didn’t understand, but she still cared.
“That’s awful,” she said. Pausing, she looked around the garden. I wondered what she saw with her human eyes. “Is there anything we can do?”
The question hung in the air for a moment as I thought. The problem was too big, and Home was no help. She sank back into her fading song, content that she had saved me.
“There has to be something,” Myra insisted as the silence stretched. “Home… you mean the ship’s AI, right? We can save that, pull out the computer and bring it somewhere else?”
The strange concepts battered my brain, giving me a headache as I forced them into my frame of reference.Home is the ship. Home is everything here. I am Home, this tree is Home. No one part is more Home than any other.
Myra sat up, her mind churning through ideas that I could not grasp. I stroked her back and waited, hoping her alien mind would find some possibility I’d overlooked.
“There has to be something. If not Home, then a part of her. This ship is biotech, right? Is there, I don’t know, a seed? A cutting we can plant somewhere?”
Fierce, angry at the injustice of the universe, unwilling to allow entropy to triumph. Given the choice, Myra would stay here until she solved the problem—or died trying.
No.I responded without thinking. We had little enough time, and wasting it on forlorn hopes would save no one. But I could not keep the truth from Myra. A moment later, I amended my answer.I do not know. Home has always been. How she grew is a mystery.
Myra’s mind flickered, fast and beautiful, her breath frosting in the cooling air. “You said every part of Home is Home, right? And you’re part of Home? So… you’re a cutting. Sort of. In a way. We can try to regrow her from you, anyway.”
The idea tasted bizarre and seemed unlikely. But it wasn’t impossible, and that put it above any other options I had. Perhaps it was a foolish hope, but it was all I had—and to grasp it, we had to survive.
Home was failing. I felt it all around us—air leaking out into space, lights dimming, water reservoirs freezing over. The light from the human’s spacecraft had never been enough to sustain Home, and soon she’d be back to drifting in the endless night. Only this time, she wouldn’t wake up.
Ignoring my human mate’s protests, I threw her over my shoulder and leaped into motion. As I carried her through the Garden, I saw frost forming on the leaves and flowers, and Myra shivered violently in my arms. The temperature dropped fast, already below the freezing point of water, heading for the freezing point of carbon dioxide. I didn’t know what temperature would kill a human, but we were obviously plunging below it.
Ahead, the wall vines uncurled from each other, letting in bright light from Myra’s ship. The path to the human vessel was open, but the crossing was airless and frozen. Home had concentrated on giving us time in our garden idyll and sacrificed everything else.
Locked in Myra’s embrace, lost in claiming my mate, I hadn’t noticed how far things had gone. Now we had an abyss ofvacuum to cross, one that would kill my fragile mate if I made a single misstep.
Chapter 11
Myra
The lights faded around us as Tyr carried me through his dying ship. I clung to him for dear life, my eyes squeezed shut and curses falling from my lips. The speed a Tyradyn warrior could manage on four legs was terrifying.
Closing my eyes also spared me the sight of the ship dying around us. Part of me insisted that there had to be a way to save it, but that was stupid. It was far more advanced than anything I’d worked on, and thousands of years old. If a Tyradyn didn’t know how to save it, and it didn’t know how to save itself, then what use would I be?
Saving Tyr would have to do. Together, we could try to grow a new ship, and even if we failed, we’d have each other. Better that than dying here in a futile attempt at saving this ship.
I was still trying to convince myself of that when Tyr slammed to a stop. Opening my eyes, I was half-blinded by the shaft of light we stood in. Overhead,Myra’s Joyhung in the darkness, her spotlight illuminating the surface of the Tyradyn ship and shining through the breach in the inner hull. All that separated us from the safety of my ship was about twenty yards of hard vacuum.
“Now don’t you wish you’d given me a chance to undress rather than tearing my suit off?”
No. Take too long. Needed you naked.The voice in my head sounded smug, but I felt worry leaking around that.New problem, new solution. You are safe.
