A New Joy

The Xolt war machine isn’t a machine, as other civilizations understand it. The Warmaker is too vast, blotting out the sky like a dark sun come to roost on a planet. Alien energy weapons harvested from a thousand worlds carve into another conquest with their power. A hundred machines made to plunder dig deep into the crust of the world. It sings as it works, the song a grinding of metals and sundered dreams woven together. It is said that the Xolt tried to destroy it once, even to turn it off, and they failed.

Not that the Warmaker turned on them. It has simply moved on and forgot them. Left them to the mercies of their own victims, though it’s doubtful that was intended. The Warmaker needs energy to survive, and all it knows is hunger. I’ve gathered the last of the Fleet: everything we could beg, find, steal. It was on Hospitalia IV, last and most protected of all the hospital worlds. That meant nothing. We all knew people who had been saved that, and more who had peace in their final days.

“Captain. Ma’am.” I turn to Ensign Charlie. I have no idea if that’s their real name or not. “Camera system, ma’am.”

I walk over. Every camera has been trained onto one street. I want to ask about the misuse of resources, but the Warmaker has stopped. The entire thing. No weapons are firing, no energies burning or discharging. It looked smaller, held in place, but somehow more menacing. “Transit. Myself, Squad A. Now.”

The transit system is as unpleasant as ever, but we are on the world a moment later. The others have weapons, ready and primed for any foe. 12 people in the Squad, some of the deadliest fighters in the Fleet. I have no weapon save words.

I can’t find a single one.

A young man stands in front of the entire Warmaker. He is fifteen, a speck before it’s vastness, but somehow his voice carries. “I saw you pass through the Regi Nebula. Darkness and death and wild energies of life and chaos. And I thought: ‘I should tell Logan about this.’ That is what I thought. So I came here. Where I met him last. Where he died. And you came here, because the universe works like that sometimes. I’ve been away from this part of the universe for a while. I was a pirate, and then other things in different places far from here. Trying to see nothing familiar. To be away from faces I might know. It takes work sometimes to not be known, to hide from a universe that knows too many stories about you

“Hiding never took work when I was younger. It was what I was, but every story, every legend, every time I act chipped away at that talent over time. And often all I can do is act. I should have been aware of you sooner. But I’ve been – moping, you might call it, if a Warmaker can mope. Kept waiting for one of Logan’s jokes, for a smile, a shared – and he is gone, and there are none.”

He closes one hand. The boy – creature – closes a hand, and the Warmaker shrinks down. Squeezes down, impossibly small, and crushed. There is an explosion. Many of them, somehow contained by the same gesture. He is not hurt. He does not even look tired, at least not of that. There is no sign of the Warmaker at all. As if it has been crushed below the subatomic with that simple gesture.

I walk forward. I manage the steps on my third try. He turns. He looks fifteen still, and sad, but his smile is real and wan. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” I get out.

“I should have sensed it years ago and dealt with it. I was – doing other things. Evading memories. Not being jaysome.”

I stare. There are stories, but they are only stories. “You’re Jay? That Jay?”

He looks almost bashful when he nods.

“What about the people?” That’s Rusk, behind me, demanding. “The Warmaker killed thousands here!”

“And will kill no more.”

“You have power!”

“I do. I do have power. Logan once accused me of evading responsibility, but it’s never that at all. I’m not a god, not like you want, not with everything you’d give that name, Rusk Orisha. Any god worthy of the name gives up that power or runs away, you understand? Because if they do not, the people they ‘help’ will only remain children and never grow. I lost a friend I cared about deeply. If I was the kind of Power you wish me to be, he would be here today. He is not. Logan died.”

His voice does not crack on that word. He is old beyond easy understanding, a Power beyond any reckoning. I move forward, almost beside him. “Can we help you?”

He blinks. He laughs: small, soft, delighted and surprised. “I think you just did. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be like that.”

“You should. Joy is important,” I say softly.

He draws back. Something about him closes off. Rusk tenses.

“Hiding from joy is – dangerous, for you and for others. A friend died. A close friend, I believe, but that does not mean you have to deny yourself joy. Or their memory. Or the places you once knew. It can’t mean that.”

“I could tell him everything I want to,” and there is nothing in Jay’s voice save truth. “Time doesn’t bind me like it does others. I could go back, see him before – but there are things I don’t dare to do.” He turns to Rusk. “It is not hard, you understand, to bring the dead to life. Technologies do it often: pressure here, movement there. Elecricity and drugs. But when I bring the dead back, I do it from deeper places. They are gone, you understand, and to bring them back I would have to make the dead forget they had died, and then to make everyone else forget that as well. To change bindings on such a scale is not something I should do.”

He does not say it is something he cannot do. Rusk blinks, then nods and steps back. It’s the first time I’ve seen Rusk back down from anything, and he once faced a Hingari in single combat. Everyone else in Squad A is silent. No hands are on weapons. Some things you can’t face with weapons. Not even with words.

“Thank you,” I say. “You stopped the Warmaker. I don’t think we could have, not without too many more dying.” I take a deep breath. A captain bears responsibilities. “I am not your friend. But if you need someone to speak with, as if they were your friend, I could do that. Listen. Talk. It would not be the same – nothing could! - but joy is better than pain. We have tears, and then laughter, and we can transform our pain. If we can, can’t you?”

“Sometimes I feel it is all I should do.” He smiles, gently, and is gone a moment later. But the smile lingers behind. No one from Squad A touches a weapon as we do a scan of the planet. I’m not sure anyone of them will again. All I can hope is that Jay finds someone else to tell stories to before they can consume him.

*

It is four weeks before Rusk comes into my quarters. He looks dazed, eyes wide and scared. “Jay visited me last night. I thought he’d come to you.”

“He told you a story?”

“About an adventure.” And the last word has meanings I can’t parse. Rusk shares nothing.

“Thank you for letting me know.”

He nods. “Captain? Why me?”

“I have no idea. I’m not sure an entity like Jay is meant to be understood, Rusk.”

“Or we understand him far too well,” Rusk whispers, and I think I wasn’t meant to hear the words. He departs.

I have no idea if Jay will ever visit me. I don’t know what to make of that. I make a note of ‘jaysome’ in Rusk’s file, knowing Central will know what it means. I pour myself a drink.

I pretend I am not waiting for Jay.