And This Is How You Can Be Walking and Falling at the Same Time
On the way out of the Iserlohn corridor, chasing away the Imperial fleet that had come to rescue the survivors from Geiersburg, Dusty hadn’t noticed the scope of the destruction that littered the corridor. He had been too busy to look, and they had been moving fast enough that the ruins of Geiersburg barely had time to appear on the big display on the front of the bridge, before they passed it and it vanished into the distance behind them. On the way back, however, it was a different story.
Their ships moved slowly, coming back to Iserlohn, carefully maneuvering around the debris, and the destroyed fortress grew from a speck into a mountain. The hulk of Geiersburg was like a cracked egg, torn apart. Some parts of it still glowed red— dissipating heat in the only way possible in space: radiating it away. On the bridge of his ship, there wasn’t much talk. Even people who hours before had been celebratory about the return of Admiral Yang and their victory over the Imperial forces, couldn’t help but look at the mass grave with horror, if not all of them could react with sadness.
Dusty wasn’t sure what he felt, but he hated looking at it, especially when they had returned all the way to Iserlohn, and he found it displayed on the main screens of Iserlohn’s bridge, as well.
He had thought Yang would also come to the bridge, to say hello to Cazerne, but Yang was nowhere to be found. So Dusty leaned his elbows on Cazerne’s console and jerked his thumb at the image of Geiersburg on the main screen behind him.
“Why do we have to look at that?” he asked.
“Isn’t it exciting to have some scenery?” Cazerne asked, his voice dry. He wasn’t looking up at the image of Geiersburg either, but was instead scribbling some notes on a piece of paper, which he passed off to a nearby aide before looking back up at Dusty. “Is this you volunteering to get rid of it?” he asked.
“Can we get rid of it?”
“We can’t leave it in the corridor,” Cazerne said. “Aside from the navigational clutter, the gravitational forces aren’t nothing, and it’ll cause us problems if we leave it here. We moved it out of the way enough that it isn’t going to hurt us immediately, but Iserlohn isn’t designed to have this kind of strain on her gravity engine.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
“Cut it into pieces and haul it away.”
“Nice.” Dusty craned his neck to look behind himself at the ruined fortress. “It’s kinda like a ghost, isn’t it?” he said. “Haunting us.”
“I don’t think you even make a convincing enough horror narrator to scare my daughters.”
“Ouch.” Dusty hadn’t really meant it as a horror story, just as an observation. Maybe he should have phrased it better— Geiersburg looked like Iserlohn’s ruined mirror. He stood up straight. “Yeah, you know what, I will volunteer,” he said.
Cazerne raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
Dusty shrugged. “Why not?”
“All yours, then,” Cazerne said.
The first priority was searching the wreck of Geiersburg for any survivors. This was a grim task: it soon became clear that there were no survivors. Although Dusty had volunteered for the job, he began to regret this before they were even halfway through.
For humanitarian reasons, it was longstanding Alliance policy to record and publish (on Phezzan) lists of Imperial dead that they recovered from the wreckage of any battle. This meant that there was a long procession of bodies (mangled, burned, suffocated) that needed to be carried through the staging areas in the ships docked to the wreckage of the fortress. They laid them all out in the empty cargo bays, and, one by one, soldiers went down the line and scanned the Imperial dogtags to record the names on the ever-growing list. The bays of their ships weren’t pressurized— there was no atmosphere left in the wreckage of Geiersburg, and it would have been too logistically difficult to enforce an airlock system— so when Dusty walked among the dead, the endless rows of Joachims and Hanses and Karls, the vacuum and his exosuit helmet at least protected him from any smell. When the bodies were processed, they were loaded onto carts and taken to be cremated, which Dusty figured was more dignified than being left to drift in space.
The ships rotated in and out of this duty every six hours— there was only so long anyone could be ordered to bear it. On the first day of this job, Dusty, as the commander, had stayed a double shift, taken a few hours in a tank bed, and then come back for more. Things stalled when there wasn’t someone willing to make decisions, and Dusty didn’t want his sleep to be the thing that stretched this task out for a second longer than it had to last. And they were making good time: as their crews cleared each progressive section of Geiersburg’s wreck, they used a ship’s focused beam to cut it from the main structure of the fortress, then attached tow lines to haul it away. Hour by hour, the fortress was being stripped down to nothing, like the carcass of a whale that had fallen to the bottom of the ocean.
But despite his men’s rapid progress, by the third day, the whole thing had worn him down. He was distracted, lost focus when trying to answer his subordinate’s questions, and the faces of the dead seemed to be warping and shifting when he saw them out of the corner of his eye. He would have sworn that he saw the same dead man in several different rows of bodies, and often did a double-take when he thought he recognized someone he knew, despite how impossible that was. If he was walking to get somewhere, he would halt in the middle of the narrow aisle, frozen against his own will, arrested by the face until he could get a good look at it and confirm that the features remained those of some poor stranger. More than once, this caused whoever was walking behind him to crash into his back at full speed, nearly sending them both tumbling down to join the corpses.
Someone among his subordinates, completely against his wishes, had clearly been gossiping about his distraction during their off hours, because when the next group of ships rotated in during shift change, riding on one of them, jocular and hollering over the shared radio frequencies, were a whole barrage of Rosenritters. When the ship docked and unloaded, they all rushed past Dusty in the temporary docking area, heading into the wreck of Geiersburg like it was an oversized playground. Schenkopp strolled out after his dogs at a much more leisurely pace.
The current docking area was exposed to the starry sky: Iserlohn hung off in the distance like an unnaturally smooth moon, peeking between the huge overhead ribcage of the partially disassembled Geiersburg. One of the ships was near enough that its gravity engine could expand its field to cover the staging area, if only weakly. Schenkopp controlled his bounces, and he gave Dusty a hand signal— six numbers indicating his personal radio frequency— so that they could talk.
“I don’t remember giving you permission to be here,” Dusty said to him, as soon as he had keyed the number in to the controller on the arm of his suit.
“Oh, you don’t have to give me permission,” Schenkopp said. “I’m here to relieve you.”
“Says who?”
“Cazerne.”
“He doesn’t have that authority.”
“Fischer, then.”
“And why don’t you lie and say Admiral Yang? You seem to have no trouble making up fake orders from everyone else.”
“I’ve been looking for our esteemed fortress commander for days and can’t find him. I believe he’s avoiding me.”
“And why would he be doing that?”
“Presumably the same reasons he wouldn’t let me go to Heinessen with him.”
Dusty frowned, but before he could open his mouth to say anything, Schenkopp whacked his shoulder so hard that he stumbled forward a step.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m relieving you, for at least the next twelve hours. Go find something to entertain yourself with, if you won’t sleep.”
“Why should I?”
“And why shouldn’t you?”
“Fine— if you want the job so much, you can have it.”
“And if you should happen to see the fortress commander—”
“I’ll tell him his scorned lover is waiting for him, yeah,” Dusty said, walking off.
Through the radio link between them, he could hear Schenkopp give a single bark of laughter before cutting his mic.
Dusty hitched a ride back to Iserlohn on one of the departing shift’s ships. When he stumbled into his quarters, and then into the shower, he realized that he hadn’t shaved in several days, and that wasn’t doing anything good to his mood. As he stood in the torrent of water, his tiny bathroom so steamy that he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face, he wondered where Yang had gone, to hide from Schenkopp. When he eventually got out, he sent a message to Julian— the one person who was sure to know Yang’s whereabouts.
Although he had been intending to go to bed, his shower made him feel more alive than dead, and more awake than asleep. Julian responded quickly to his message, saying that Yang was out inspecting the damage to Iserlohn’s outer walls in a certain section. This was the very definition of hiding: Dusty had never once seen Yang volunteer to go out and do that kind of field work, and no one in their right minds would think of looking for him there. He texted Julian back with one hand as he toweled off his hair with the other.
Dusty: and does anyone else know that’s where the admiral is?
Julian: Of course. Rear Admiral Cazerne knows, sir.
Dusty thought about asking if Julian had been given explicit instructions to relay Yang’s location to specific people if they asked, but decided he didn’t want to know. He just thanked Julian and got dressed, then headed for the damaged part of Iserlohn that Yang was apparently haunting. There were plenty of ways to get there, but the fastest was to take Iserlohn’s internal shuttle to the correct block, then ride an elevator all the way to the “surface” of the fortress. Dusty had not yet had any reason to go out this far, though that wasn’t surprising— in a fortress the size of Iserlohn, it would take a lifetime to explore all of it.
The hallways in this area of Iserlohn were completely empty, and his footsteps echoed. In the elevator, he leaned against the wall during the long ascent, feeling the faint loosening of the shackles of gravity as it went up. Although Iserlohn’s powerful internal engines kept gravity inside the fortress relatively even in the most inhabited areas, at the uppermost layer, there was a sharp drop off. The gravity engines focused their energy, like a lens, on keeping the liquid metal shell of Iserlohn in place, leaving the upper floors much lighter-feeling.
There was still an atmosphere inside the liquid metal layer, though a thin one, at least right now. It made it easier for construction crews to work, not having to be in exosuits. But it wasn’t heated except by what radiated from the fortress’s walls itself, and the differing patches of warmth on the solid metal surface made a convection current form, a wind that was strong despite the thinness of the atmosphere. Dusty wheezed for breath as he got used to it, and wrapped his arms around himself, wishing he had thought to bring a jacket.
Standing on the outer surface of Iserlohn was a strange experience. Aside from the protrusions off in the distance of elevator exits, storage boxes, power transformers, and the like, the whole surface was a featureless plane. Iserlohn was small enough that he could see the curvature of it, the curl of the uncomfortably-close horizon.
And the sky was odd. It was bright enough to see by, but the light came from the rippling reflections on the underside of the liquid metal layer. Flashing light alerts and running lights on the fortress’s surface shone up the hundred or so meters, and the liquid metal swallowed their illumination and spat it back out scattered. Like the movement of clouds, the wind pushed ripples in the underside of the metal, and the occasional passage of a ship up or down provided an even larger disruption, along with a searchlight-flash of light across where Dusty was standing.
“Hey! Senior Yang!” he called. His own voice echoed back to him several times before fading away. “Where are you?”
The elevator Dusty had taken to the top was still some ways off from the damaged sections of the fortress exterior— the closer elevators had all been shut down until their safety could be evaluated— so he moved across the surface of Iserlohn, adopting the funny leaping gait that low gravity required. He occasionally called out for Yang, but heard only his own voice echo back to him.
The damaged area of Iserlohn wasn’t obvious until Dusty came right up to it, and he smelled it before he saw it: a strange tang of vaporized metal still lingered in the air. The damage was preternaturally neat, as far as holes in the ground went. Geiersburg’s laser weapon had cauterized the wound, at least through the first few layers of the fortress’s skin. Although, the edges of the hole were crisp cuts on the surface, down below the metal had melted and boiled. Even though it was cooled completely now, it retained the evidence of the violence of the blow, frozen in once-seething ripples.
“Senior Yang!” Dusty called again.
“Did Cazerne tell you to hunt me down?” Yang called out.
The voice came from almost directly beneath Dusty’s feet, though it was hard to pinpoint due to the way everything echoed. He laid down on the cold metal surface and dangled his upper body down into the hole, his hair flopping around his head as he viewed the slice of Iserlohn upside down. Yang was wrapped in one of the rough green emergency blankets, sitting cross legged on the floor of the next level down. He had a thermos next to him and a tablet on his lap, and he looked up at Dusty with an inscrutable expression that turned into a resigned smile.
“Hey, Attenborough,” Yang said.
“How did you even get down there?” Dusty asked. “I don’t think your trip to Heinessen made you athletic all of a sudden.”
Yang pointed behind himself to a doorway that looked relatively undamaged. The emergency exit map on the wall indicated a stairwell down the hallway.
Dusty rearranged himself so that he could make the ungainly drop down into where Yang was sitting. He wasn’t supremely athletic either, but the lower gravity made it easier, and he landed safely on his feet in Yang’s little alcove, even if he didn’t do it with any real grace.
“Some real inspecting going on,” Dusty said as he sat down next to Yang.
“I’ve looked at it.”
“Not much of a view.”
“No,” Yang said. “But you can’t see Geiersburg from here.”
This was true: the liquid metal shell blocked the view of the stars completely, despite the outdoor feeling of the place. Dusty looked out at the revealed cross section of Iserlohn on the other side of the hole. There were no bodies there—people had cleaned them up days ago, as soon as the fighting had ended.
“It’s pretty bad over there,” Dusty agreed.
“Is the cleanup done?”
“No. It’ll be done soon though. A couple more days and it’ll all be gone.”
“I wonder how long it took to build,” Yang muttered. “Definitely a lot longer than three days.”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
“What are you doing over here?” Yang asked after a second.
“Schenkopp relieved me of my duty.”
“He doesn’t really have that authority.”
“Don’t trust the Rosenritter to take care of it?”
Yang shrugged.
“He was right that I needed a break,” Dusty said. “But he implied that I should find you. He thinks you’re hiding from him.”
“I’m not,” Yang said.
“At least not more than you’re hiding from everybody.”
“Right. Did Cazerne tell you where I was?” Yang asked again.
“No, Julian.”
Yang sighed and looked down at the tablet on his lap. It was displaying some kind of academic monograph about the Earth-Sirius War. He turned it off, leaving just the cover image on the screen, then pulled his blanket more tightly around his shoulders.
“You’ll have to tell your ward about what loose lips do to ships, if he’s going to be a soldier.”
“He’s well aware,” Yang said. “But he likes to think he has a good sense of who I want to talk to.”
“And is he right?”
“You’re here and Schenkopp isn’t,” Yang said, as if that answered the question.
“It’s good to know that I’m on the list of those allowed to bother my betters, and not just Cazerne.”
Yang laughed a little. “Why was Schenkopp looking for me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think he’s still unhappy that you didn’t take him to Heinessen.”
“He was more useful here, wasn’t he?”
“Sure, I guess. You came back fine, anyway, so it’s not like he could have improved things there.”
“Yeah,” Yang said.
“I haven’t had a chance to ask about how your inquiry went.”
“Badly.”
“Ah.”
There was silence for a moment as Dusty waited for Yang to elaborate. Only the whistling and creaking of the strange indoor wind moving through the ruin of this section of Iserlohn filled the space between them.
“They accused me of having ambitions to take control of the Alliance.”
“Well, that’s fucking idiotic,” Dusty said derisively. “They hauled you all the way to Heinessen for that?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone who’s ever known you could say that isn’t true.” He let himself get worked up, hoping that his active agreement would make Yang smile. It didn’t work— Yang just kept looking out across the grim vista in front of them, the chasm and the walls melted to slag.
“Walter would say that if this is the way the Alliance is going to treat me, maybe I should.”
Dusty’s expression might not have changed outwardly, but his smile now felt stiff and wooden. “Then maybe he doesn’t know you either.”
“He knows me,” Yang said. “He just wants something from me.”
“I somehow doubt you’re planning to let him get it.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah.” Dusty shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets. It was freezing out here, and the metal floor was leeching the warmth from his body. “How long have you been out here?” he asked Yang.
“I don’t know, a couple hours.”
“How are you not freezing to death?”
“I have a blanket. It’s warmer than it looks.” He unwrapped it from around himself and handed part of it to Dusty so that they could share. “Here.”
Dusty scooted close to Yang and tugged the blanket around his shoulders. It was pleasantly warm from Yang’s body, but not large enough for both of them, so the wind scoured their exposed fronts. This close to Yang, Dusty could hear that his breath was wheezy in the thin atmosphere, and see that he had a runny nose.
“Julian is going to kill you for catching a cold out here for no reason. You’ve tricked him into thinking you’re being a responsible fortress commander, getting a cold in the line of duty.”
“I won’t tell him I was slacking off if you don’t.”
“I’ll keep your secrets, Senior Yang,” Dusty said. “If only as payment for letting me sneak back to campus after curfew.”
Yang laughed. “I think you’ve paid me back for that one plenty of times already.”
“It was an outstanding favor you did me,” Dusty said. “I’ll be in your debt for the rest of my life.”
“I wish people would stop saying things like that to me.”
Dusty nudged him with his elbow. “Well, lucky for you, I’m the only one it’s true for.”
Yang smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Did you just come looking for me because Schenkopp wanted you to?” Yang asked.
“Am I not allowed to hunt you down of my own volition?” Dusty looked away. “I was told to find something to entertain myself with for the next couple hours. Bothering my senior has always worked for that just fine.”
“I’m sorry for not being very entertaining.”
“Luckily, that’s not your job.” Dusty smiled. “But even if it’s not, I’m entertained anyway.”
“If you say so.”
“You know, if you’re trying to get me to fuck off, I will. But I promise I’m not here for any reason other than company.”
Yang relaxed— this had been the right thing to say, and Dusty had delivered it in an honest enough tone, even if it wasn’t entirely true.
“No, that’s fine. I don’t mind,” Yang said. His arm, which had been tense pressed against Dusty’s, went limp, and Dusty took the opportunity to pull himself closer. Yang didn’t protest, and indeed leaned into Dusty’s side.
“What are you reading?” Dusty asked, nodding at the tablet in Yang’s lap, though he could read the title clearly enough.
Yang answered in detail, telling him about some obscure political figures from Earth hundreds of years ago. Dusty listened and nodded along, asking occasional questions to prove that Yang wasn’t boring him to death with the subject.
It was easy to listen to Yang, and very pleasant to have him all to himself in this unguarded way, at least for an hour or so. It was a privilege that no one but Dusty had, and it was a fragile thing, easy to lose. If Yang ever began to think that Dusty wanted him to be anything more than “Senior Yang”, there would be no more of this. He’d be as much of a scorned lover as Schenkopp, and summarily removed from Julian’s mental list of safe persons.
It was difficult to keep that balance. There was a part of him that was jealous of Schenkopp for his honesty, even if it got him nowhere. After all, even if Dusty had the excuse of knowing Yang for years, and therefore the ability to stay in the same niche they had inhabited in each other’s lives since their days at the academy, it was impossible to not see Yang as something else. There was the flesh and blood Yang, shivering against Dusty’s shoulder, and then there was the idea of Yang, whom everyone loved. It was unfortunate— for Yang, and for Dusty— that they were one and the same.
It was very funny, the kind of darkly funny that everything was these days, that Dusty could have exactly what he wanted, just as long as he made it clear that he did not want it.
They were both shivering by the time that Yang finished describing his reading. The blanket only covered their backs, and even huddled close together, their shared body warmth was swept away by the wind. In the silence, that suddenly fell between them, Dusty should have proposed going back in, but he didn’t want to end this moment— these were rare, and it wouldn’t come again.
“I missed you, while you were off on Heinessen,” Dusty said, breaking the momentary silence.
“Yeah, well, it seems like everyone had everything well under control without me,” Yang said.
That objectively was not true— if Yang hadn’t returned, Iserlohn might have eventually fallen— but Yang didn’t want to hear that, and Dusty didn’t want to say it. “Not what I meant,” he said
Yang nodded, his hair brushing across Dusty’s shoulder.
“Are you going to keep hiding out here?”
“I’ll find someplace warmer,” Yang said.
“Good luck with that,” he said.
“Are you asking because you want to hunt me down?”
“I have to get back to work, unlike some people. I don’t trust the Rosenritter to run the Geiersburg operation for more than six hours.”
“I’d give them eighteen,” Yang mumbled.
“Sure, we can be generous.” He paused. “But you know other people want to see you, too. Not just me.”
“I know,” Yang said. The resignation was heavy in his voice.
“Then are you planning to leave your self-imposed exile?”
Yang was quiet for a moment, and Dusty let the silence drag on. “How long will it take for you to finish clearing up the wreckage?” Yang asked.
Dusty took a moment to compose his thoughts, and he decided that what Yang needed was something he could give, even if it cost him. “You know,” Dusty said, “it’s not like I’m your only friend.”
“Not sure what you mean by that.”
“People don’t look at you and think you’re the man who destroyed Geiersburg for them, or won Iserlohn, or whatever,” he said. “They see— you, I guess. Or they would, if you’d let them.”
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Yang said with a dry voice. He certainly knew that Dusty was lying, but to what extent he knew, Dusty couldn’t tell.
Dusty was about to say they should go back inside, but then Yang said, “It doesn’t really matter what people think.”
“In what way?”
“I am the person who destroyed Geiersburg,” Yang said. “I appreciate that you don’t think about that, but I have to.”
Dusty looked down at his hands. They were starting to go numb with the cold, despite his attempts to tuck them in between his knees to keep them warm.
“A few more days,” Dusty said. “I’ll get it out of the corridor as soon as I can.” And he would— he would go sleep in a tank bed, and then he would get back to work. If that was what Yang needed from him, he would give it, as much as he could.
“Thank you,” Yang said, and he meant it. The sincerity in his voice bolstered Dusty, and he rubbed his hands together.
“We should go inside,” Dusty said. “Get warmed up before you go back to Julian to get yelled at.”
“Yeah,” Yang said through a jaw that was now stiff with cold. “Okay.”
He was clearly still reluctant to move, and made no effort to get up until Dusty stood and offered his hand to haul Yang to his feet. “Come on, old man,” Dusty said.
“I’m only a year older than you are,” Yang complained, but took his hand and let Dusty pull him up. Dusty had forgotten about the lessened gravity, and the ease at which Yang lifted to his feet almost sent him stumbling back into the pit behind them. He caught his footing, and instead just ended up with Yang’s face uncomfortably close to his own.
Dusty’s expression of surprise was so genuine that it made Yang smile— maybe Yang had gotten up quickly with exactly the intent of surprising him. The idea made Dusty’s head feel light and completely empty, and his heart quickened its pace. Maybe Dusty had been wrong about what he wanted. Maybe he wanted the other impossible thing.