his thoughts plainly.
“You don’t need to be alone, Soldier. You separate yourself from us, from Mother. You needn’t.”
Not for the first time, Soldier wondered if Seer’s empathic sense surpassed that of the rest of the clones.
“I don’t feel alone,” Soldier lied. “I am one of you. I take care of you, protect you all.”
“You do so for the children’s sake. Not the rest of us.”
Once again, Seer had spoken truth. He had no children of his own, but cared for Grace, Gift, and Blessing as if they were his. If the clones had a purpose, the children embodied it. He wanted them to have a life different from the one he and the others had been forced to endure.
Unwilling to discuss it more with Seer, he changed the subject. “The coordinates for Fhost are in the navicomp and we’re clear of gravity wells. I’m winding up the hyperdrive.”
Seer stared at him, but he ignored her as he engaged the pre-jump sequence. He reached to engage the cockpit dimmer. His flight training in the facility’s simulators had taught him that staring at the hyperspace churn too often could lead to madness. Seer caught his hand and did not release it.
“I want to see it,” she said.
Her touch thrilled him, and he imagined she knew it. “All right.”
When the jump indicator showed green, he engaged the hyperdrive. Points of starlight stretched into lines, then the lines vanished into the blue swirl of hyperspace.
Seer gasped, her hand tight around his. “It’s beautiful.”
The swirls and whorls nauseated Soldier, but he said nothing. As he withdrew his hand, Seer seemed not to notice. Her excitement filled the cockpit.
“We’ll reach Fhost soon,” he said.
She nodded, staring wide-eyed at the blue.
“I’ll check on the others,” he said, and rose. Through their shared connection, he could feel the other clones’ emotional state. They were calmed by the medicine, but that would last only a short time. The madness cast a shadow over their minds, the illness a shadow over their failing bodies.
He hoped Seer was right. He hoped Mother would heal them. Especially the children.
SEER SAT IN THE COCKPIT, STARING OUT, DURING THEIR entire time in hyperspace. Her silence unnerved Soldier. She eyed the starstreaks, unblinking, as if they hid something revelatory in their glow. He occupied himself by running diagnostics on the ship’s systems while he waited for the computer to tell him they were nearing Fhost.
In time it did, and he said, “Coming out of hyperspace.”
Seer finally looked away from the view outside and fixed her gaze on him. He could not shake the feeling that she saw right through him. The zeal of a true believer filled her dark eyes. Or maybe it was madness; Soldier could not distinguish them.
“Well done, Soldier,” she said.
They came out of hyperspace, black overwrote blue, and the light of a nearby star painted the interior of the cockpit in orange. The ion engines engaged and they accelerated through the system.
Soldier had no idea what to expect on-planet.
“The data on Fhost show it to be sparsely populated, with only one large city—Farpoint. We’ll go in on the far side of the planet and circle around. There’s not much infrastructure. We should be able to avoid detection. I’ll set us down outside of the city and some of us can head in.”
Seer nodded, lost in thought, or maybe lost in another vision, as they closed on the planet.
Fhost floated in the space before them, a mostly brown ball dotted with intermittent spots of green and blue. Hazy clouds floated in long, thin strings above the arid world. Soldier guided the cloakshape around to the far side of the planet. He kept his eyes on the scanners, wondering if they’d be interdicted, wondering what he would do if they were, but either they passed into the atmosphere unnoticed or the planetary authorities saw them and did not care.
He took the cloakshape down and flew low and fast along Fhost’s surface. He could make out little detail, blurs of green and brown and blue. Still, he found it beautiful, a stark contrast to the frozen hell that had been their lives for so long. He wondered what it would be like to simply settle on such a world and just … live.
He imagined Grace and Blessing as adults, living in a normal dwelling, living normal lives. The thought made him smile. He cleared his throat, ventured a heretical thought.
“We could just … settle here,” he said. He wasn’t sure Seer heard him.
“She is