Right. They should hear this too, even if they don’t understand it, because they should know who they are dealing with. “I made a choice,” says Sarya. “I made a lot of choices. And a lot of them were the wrong choice. I broke the Network…and that’s not something I can fix. But things can get a lot worse if I don’t do something right now. If we don’t do something.” Without breaking eye contact, she gestures toward the fiery sky with her head. “In eight hundred star systems, this kind of chaos is happening. Because of me. And even when this is over, when those systems have figured out how to deal without the Network, they’re going to be alone for a long time. Generations. Centuries. Maybe even—maybe even millennia.” She draws a breath, waiting for someone to interrupt, but no one does. “And that would be bad enough,” she continues, “but Observer’s got a species ready to go on a rampage. To build the whole sector into an empire, then turn it on the rest of the Network. The last time, they had ships that could destroy solar systems, they had technology beyond anything that Network has ever allowed. If they get a foothold here—” She stops, allowing them to fill in the blanks with their imaginations.
“What species?” rumbles Mer.
Still she doesn’t allow her gaze to drop. “Mine,” she says.
She could go on. She could tell Mer what she’s seen, what it looks like when a solar system is at the mercy of those with no mercy. She wants to describe gas giants turning into nanomachines, ice ships hundreds of kilometers long sliding into planets like blades into flesh, distortions in reality when unstoppable projectiles come hurtling out of unseeable dimensions—
“Then I should kill you,” says Mer.
Sarya swallows. “You could,” she says. “And I know you have the…freedom to do so.” The word hurts, coming out. Freedom. The word she used to justify her actions. Freedom to act without consequence. Freedom to do…to do anything at all. “It might be the right thing to do,” she says. “It might be just—whatever that means. But justice doesn’t help those intelligences up there, out there in those dark systems. It doesn’t make it better. So I was thinking that maybe instead of…instead of doing justice, you could—” She takes a breath. “Maybe you could help me.”
“Oh, this is good,” says Roche. “This is so much better than I expected.”
“Help you what?” rumbles Mer. “Run away?”
“No,” she says instantly. “I’m not going to run away. I’m going to do something about the—about this.” She waves upward at the storm of light in the sky, at the death count in the trillions, at the mind Who sees this as a good start. “And this is my only chance.”
She watches Mer shift his gaze from her face to the clearing beyond the firelight. Observer is everywhere. His bodies lie across each other, under each other, their small faces in their own filth. Some lie halfway out of fires or with meat sticks plunged through them from some drunken game or other, eyes staring at the sky. It may have begun as a feast, but now it looks like a massacre.
And now Roche begins screeching, softly and rhythmically.
“That’s a laugh,” whispers Ace in her ear. “I’m almost sure he’s laughing.”
“We are a handful of twos and a three,” says Roche, somehow laughing and speaking at the same time. “We are lost in a mind the size of several thousand minor planets—drunk though He may be at the moment. If we are here, you can bet your life He wants us to be here. We are no threat to His plans. We have likely fulfilled His will every step of our various journeys here. How far back?” He laughs again. “I don’t know! You don’t know! You can’t know, you arrogant—” He breaks off and shakes his head. “Humans,” he says.
Sarya waits until his screeching has faded to silence. “I don’t think it matters,” she says slowly. “I mean, we could sit around and talk about how everything’s impossible. How the galaxy’s too big for us low-tiers, how we should just let the big minds worry about it. But I think—I think that can’t be true. I’m a two, Roche, and I broke the Network. I changed reality, forever. I killed—” She stops and looks away, eyes blurring. “I learned that the galaxy has to want to work,” she says softly. “If it doesn’t—”