Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,111
Her cadet’s uniform was creased where she had bent over the keyboard, and even now her hands shook. I did what I could, she thought, and set her mind on other things: the spindles of growing plants, the taste of thrice-recycled water, the cold texture of metal . . . the sea, from her one visit to Earth, with its rush of foam and salt-sprinkled breezes.
She went to hydroponics, where water warbled through the pipes and the station’s crops grew in identical green rows, a spring without end. In a corner of the garden she picked out a bench and sat with her legs drawn up, her hands on her knees. Nearby was a viewport—a viewscreen, actually, filtering the stars’ radiation into intensities kinder to human eyes.
After a while her hands stopped trembling, and only then did she notice the other cadet. He had dark hair and darker eyes, and where her uniform was rumpled, his was damp with sweat. “Do you believe in angels?” he asked her.
Rachel blinked. “Not yet. Why?”
He gestured at the viewscreen, tracing unnamed constellations and the pale flash of an incoming ship’s q-wave. “It must be a cold thing to die in space. I like to think there are angels who watch over the ships.” The boy looked away and flushed.
She gazed at the fingerprints he had left on the screen. “Angels’ wings.”
It was his turn to blink. “Pardon?”
“The q-waves,” she said. “Like wings.”
He might have laughed; others often did, when Rachel with her quicksilver thoughts and quiet speech couldn’t find the right words. She was startled when he rubbed his chin, then nodded. “Never thought of it that way.” He smiled at her. “I’m Edgar Kerzen. And you?”
She returned his smile with one of her own. “Rachel.”
Dawning realization: “You’re the Hawk. No one else would’ve torn through the exam like that.”
“But so did you.”
Edgar shrugged. “I aced math and physics, but they killed me on ethics.”
She heard the unsaid words: Let’s talk about something else. Being Rachel, she was silent. And found herself startled again when he accepted the silence rather than filling it with words. She would come to treasure that acceptance.
Black: Knight’s Sacrifice
The first life, first time I killed Rachel, it was too late. She had already given her three-sentence answer to the Pandect’s exam; won command of the starhiker Curtana, one of 26 ever built; and swept from the Battle of Red Lantern to the Siege of Gloria on the shredded wings of a q-wave. After Gloria, her name passed across the relays as both battle-cry (for the Network) and curse (for the Movement). In this probability-space, her triumphs were too great to erase, her influence too great to stop the inevitable blurring of murder and necessity.
After the siege, we had a few days to remember what sleep was, to forget the silence of battle. Space is silent, though we want thunder with our lightning, the scream of metal and roar of guns. I think this was true even for Rachel, because she believed in right silences and wrong silences.
By fortune or otherwise we had shared postings since we left academy, since that first meeting in hydroponics. Command was short on officers, but shorter still on ones who worked together like twin heartbeats. I stood beside her when she received the captain’s wing on her uniform and again when we learned, over the relays, that the scoutship Boomerang’s kamikaze destruction of a station had plunged one probability-space into war. I stood beside her and said nothing when she opened fire on Gloria Station, another of the few q-space stopovers. It harbored a Movement ship determined to return to realspace, and so it died in a ripple of incoherence.
One people, one law, said the Network. There were too many factions at a time when humanity’s defenses were scattered across the stars: conglomerates with their merchant fleets, colonies defending their autonomy, freetraders who resented the Network’s restrictions. Once the Pancommunications Network had only been responsible for routing transmissions between settlements and sorting out discrepancies due to time dilation. Someone had to maintain the satellite networks that knit everyone together and someone had to define a law, however, so the Network did.
In light of this, under what circumstances is war justified?
A ship’s captain has her privacy, but we were docked and awaiting repairs, and I knew Rachel’s thoughts better than my own. She had her duty, and if that duty demanded it, she would pay in blood. Including her own, if it came to