light years

Your regularly scheduled sky full of smoke-related programming will return.

It's not true that light years only measure distance. They measure time, too, just like miles and train stops and cab rides. It doesn't matter how far you are from home. It matters how long it will be until you're back, how long it took you to get there.

I'm seventeen light years from Earth. That's farther, according to my orders, than anyone's ever been. Somewhere back there, seventeen light years removed from who I am right now, there's a corporate executive with a complete dossier on the woman Elysian Enterprises thinks I am. Medical and psychological evaluations. Detailed records of everything I've ever done, from that time I got in a fistfight with a girl in class who made fun of me for having poor parents onwards. It's all classified, of course--they can read the future in my DNA and they probably know how many times I smoked weed at university and what happened that night I blacked out, but that information's not for me.

It's not for Tori, either, but sometimes I feel like she knows me just as well as the corporation--that is to say, better than me. She's brought me tea again. Everyone on board was given an alotment of twenty kilograms for "personal supplies" and she brought two kilos of tea.

Earl grey, with lavender. It smells so fucking good.

She puts a mug on the desk and kisses my neck. It still sends a thrill down my spine, breaking company policy like that. But a few days back--Earth days, since this planet's tidally locked with its star--the captain lost it and left with the ship. Now it's just me and Tori and the surveying equipment.

"You're going to run out of tea eventually," I tell her. "You should save it for yourself."

She doesn't answer, just smiles. Tori's too nice to be on this mission. I figured out on those seventeen long light years, this was a job for fuck-ups. The doctor tried to mutiny as soon as we made landfall. And the captain, who panicked every time she had to make a choice, panicked and left. I haven't dared to ask why Tori's here.

She drags me outside and we sit down and watch the eternal sunset. Later on, there will be work to do--Tori's numbers say we can probably plant some crops here, hopefully enough to live on. But the air is so perfect, the alien sun so strange and wonderful, the sounds of the ocean so soothing, it's hard to care about much else--there's still tea left, still a chance we won't have to go back home.

Seventeen light years isn't long enough.

a sky full of smoke, pt. 7

The peace holds past the major general's departure, and for a few days the rains come in and drive away the smoke--a sad, sprinkling rain, but a welcome relief from the heat and haze. The calm makes Kanna happy, but I'm worried it's just a deep breath before the fighting starts again, worse than before.

She doesn't like when I tell her that.

Yannig's men aren't happy, either--coin and drink alike have dried up and they've decided to solve the problem by spending all the coin they have left on Kanna's liquor. It's a few nights in when I catch a pari of them complaining that they murdered a magistrate and they've already burned through their pay for that--a couple silver a piece, by the sound of it.

They're too drunk to put up a fight when I ambush them in the alley later on, tie them up and drag them to Briac--he gives me a gold piece for my trouble. Then it's a brisk jog to Yannig's to make sure the fighting picks up again.

He's all smug dismissal when he sees me, but I cut him off. "Your assassins got captured. Briac's holding them."

For a moment, real fear enters his eyes, but he's too composed to let it show. "Have you considered my offer? Thirty gold pieces still stands. You'd be a real asset."

"Fighting's about to break out again, is it?"

"It is," he tells me. "And I intend to win."