that, but she was too damned brilliant to die in battle. Because she was the Hawk, and when it came to her duty, she never hesitated.
5.47 minutes and three sentences.
I came upon Rachel deep in the ship’s hold, in an area closed off for tomorrow’s repairs. Her eyes, when she raised them to me, were the wild grey of a winter sky, unlike the carbon-scored grey of the torn bulkheads behind her. These days our world was defined by shades of grey and the reflections therein.
Soon we would be forced to leave the colorless haven of q-space, since the last few stations could barely sustain themselves or the remaining ships. For a while, the Network and the Independence Movement had cannibalized any new ships who entered q-space despite the perils of merging q-waves, gutting them of supplies, people, and news. Once a ship exited into realspace, our own fluctuating history would collapse into a single outcome, and nobody was willing to plunge the realspace world into war, especially one in the enemy’s favor. New ships no longer showed up, and God knew what we’d done to realspace transportation and logistics.
A few weary souls had tried to force the issue. Rachel shot them down. She was determined to win or stop the war in every life, every timeline, and she might even succeed.
She noticed my presence and, for once, spoke before I could. “Edgar. While I’m here, more people are dying.” Her voice was restless, like the beating feathers of a bird in a snowstorm.
“We’ll find out about it on relay,” I said, wishing I could say something to comfort her, to gentle those eyes, that voice, but Rachel had never much believed in words, even mine.
“Do you think angels fly between probability-spaces to harvest our souls?”
I closed my eyes and saw the afterimages of a ship’s waveform disintegration, translated into images the human mind could interpret. “I wish I knew.” I was tired of fighting and forcing myself to remember that the bright, undulating ribbons on the tactical display represented people and what had carried people. I wanted her to say that we would leave and let the multiplicity of battles end, but I knew she wouldn’t.
For a long time Rachel said nothing, lacing and unlacing her fingers together. Then her hands relaxed and she said, “How did you know to find me here?”
Nothing but curiosity from a woman who had killed civilians, whom I had always followed. Her duty and her ruthlessness were a greater weapon than any battleship the Network had left. My angel, an angel of death.
My hands were a weapon and her trust, a weakness.
“I’ll always find you, my dear,” I said, reaching out as though to massage her shoulders, and interrupted the balance of her breath and brain and heartbeat. She did not fight; perhaps she knew that in other probability-spaces, I was still hers. I thought of Red Lantern. My memories held lights and lines in red or amber, autumn colors; tactical screens, terse voices. My own voice, saying Aye aye, sir.
After she stopped moving, I laid her down. I was shaking. Such an easy thing, to kill. Escape was the hard part, and I no longer cared.
The Darkest Game
Schrödinger’s cat has far more than nine lives, and far fewer. All of us are unknowing cats, alive and dead at once, and of all the might-have-beens in between, we record only one.
We had the catch-me catch-me-not of quantum physics, then quantum computers, oracles that scanned possibilities. When we discovered a stardrive that turned ships into waves in a sea of their own—q-space—we thought we understood it. We even untangled navigation in that sea and built our stations there.
Then, the echoes. Ghosts in probability-space, waveforms strung taut from waypoint to waypoint, snapshot to snapshot. Enter q-space and you throw a shard of the universe into flux. Exit it, and the shard crystallizes, fixing history over the realspace interval. Shinaai Rei—philosopher, physicist, and sociologist—saw it first.
Before the Boomerang, there had neither been a war nor ships that interrupted the night with their flashfire battles. Then she destroyed a civilian station, and the world shifted into a grand game of chess, probabilities played one on the other, ships that winged into q-space never to return. Why take risks in war when you can try everything at once and find out who will win?
White: Candles
Theirs had been one of many patrolships guarding the satellite network. Sometimes threats breathed through the relays, but nobody was willing to disrupt the