Waking up on Selene was always an exciting experience, the freedom of being shackled on Earth vanished for but a few hours. The sixth morning of my stay in the BDEC, I hurled myself off of my bunk and immediately discovered a blue-clad soldier waiting for me. For a fraction of a second I was ready to fight, thinking that the Blueroser government had finally turned against me; but no, she wasn’t even holding on to her rifle.
“Miss Emma, I was waiting for you to wake up. Lady Halflance would like to see you.”
That gave me real, serious pause. When Lady Halflance wanted to talk to me about something, it was rarely good, especially ever since I’d returned from New Alderburg. Did I even have a choice, though? The tone in the soldier’s voice said no.
“Very well, then,” I said. “You can go. I need to go get ready. New clothes, bathing, things like that.”
The soldier seemed uncertain about whether I was allowed, but after a brief nonverbal standoff, she retreated, and I had a few minutes to think. Me being me, those thoughts turned naturally towards the anxious. Maybe Lady Halflance was about to put her foot down and try forbidding me from having a relationship with her daughter. Maybe she thought I was lying about something, or she thought I wasn’t doing enough to contribute to the camp and I was about to get assigned an additional four hours of inane busywork.
I soothed my anxious thoughts by listing off all the perfectly innocuous things it could be, like Halflance scouting for anything I might have learned about the Desolation over the weeks I’d spent there. So it was that, when I finished refreshing myself and headed over to Halflance’s office, I was cautiously optimistic. It’s funny in hindsight just how much I could not have possibly guessed what was actually going on.
I arrived in Lady Halflance’s office/quarters to find the noblewoman in a dour mood, as usual. She paced back and forth near the wall of the tent with that look about her like she’d recently been crying. That only made it more odd that this meeting was happening: usually Halflance was loath to let anyone near her when she was emotionally distressed. I pushed through the tent-flap, then stood stock-still, waiting for her to start asking questions or throwing accusations.
“Hello, Emma.”
She sounded… defeated. Like I’d already beaten her into the ground, and now I was back to kick her while she was down. Except, of course, we hadn’t spoken to each other more than a perfunctory couple of sentences since the day I arrived.
“What?”
“I said hello. Is it that surprising? Am I so cruel that even a simple greeting is an unexpected event?”
I had to think about my words very, very carefully. “You look like shit, Halflance. And normally when you’re doing this poorly you get snippy. So something else must be going on. What?”
She didn’t respond, at least not immediately. Instead she sighed, her shoulders slouching, before she slowly made her way over to the tiny writing desk. Once there, she paused for a moment to gather her strength or something before scooting the chair away from the desk and turning it to face me. We stared at one another for another several moments, my increasing curiosity and impatience against her absolute exhaustion.
“So. You love my daughter?”
Goddamnit. “As much as it’s possible for two people to love each other who’ve only known one another for… almost a year now, with an interruption.”
“How did you two meet?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” I replied.
“It is.” Halflance finally looked up from her own lap, a glare merely a fraction of her typical withering looks. “I want to understand.”
“Why? Why do you even care how two twenty-somethings got together?”
“Do you remember how old I am? How old I was when I had Laura?” Lady Halflance looked up at me with a strange amount of curiosity in her eyes, as though she legitimately didn’t know whether I would remember.
“I haven’t forgotten that you had Laura when you were seventeen, no.” I paused, brow furrowed. “Is that what this is about? You’re afraid Laura is going to repeat your same mistake? She’s twenty-two… no, twenty-three, now, isn’t she? Because I missed her birthday.”
Halflance nodded.
“Either way, we’ve been… as safe as it’s possible to be. I’m not giving you any granddaughters any time soon, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Would you please just humor me?” Halflance snapped, momentarily regaining some of her usual fire.
I relented. Telling the story of how Laura and I met without spilling the beans about the whole arson incident wasn’t easy, but I managed it, mostly by abridging heavily. As I did, Halflance sank further.
“Damn it, damn it all,” she moaned once I’d finished. “I just don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand what?”
Halflance looked up at me with an entirely new type of glare. Not disdain, but more like… hatred. With the slightest sensation of awe. Receiving the usual Halflance glare made me afraid that I was going to be swatted aside like an insect, but this new look? I was afraid that she was about to do something truly drastic. I’d never seen her so overcome with emotion, not in all the time we’d known each other, and with a woman as powerful and as controlled as Lady Halflance…
“She really loves you, you know that?”
Once again I was caught off-guard. “Of course I do. I love her too.”
Halflance shook her head. “She’s never loved like this before. Never. I would know, I raised her, and she wasn’t exactly temperate with her desires even as a girl. But nobody’s ever made her act the way you do.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Once again, Halflance refused to answer.
She grabbed at her hair, bent almost double in that seat, as though she were about to vomit into a bucket placed between her knees. Some of the sounds she made in that pause certainly contributed to the mental image.
“I have had to be strong for twenty years. Nulla captivis, nulla captivis! Twenty years I have been a force to reckon with in the RIC, I didn’t earn this post, or any of my others, through being weak!” She levered up, forcing herself to sit straight and bore holes into my face with the fierceness of those icy blue eyes. “But I have this image in my head that just won’t leave. I try to banish it, I try to force it down, but it just won’t go away. Six months and it won’t leave, and it’s all your fault, Emma.”
Was there something I could have, or should have, said? I don’t know. I was caught, frozen, a thousand miles beyond the boundaries of that which I knew how to respond to.
“What? Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember?” Halflance took a moment to compose herself, wiping at her ruddy, tear-stained face. “I had been away in Grantval for who even knows how many days, hunting down Tersine, dealing with the Blackbird’s inanities. Finally I had everything I needed, and to honor my promise, I returned home to bring you two along. And what do I find? Laura’s drawing. I look at her notebook and she’s been drawing flowers, drawing the household staff. And in my mind I think about what that must have looked like, my daughter with her sketchbook looking at the world around her. I’d never…”
Halflance choked, sobbing for a few moments. I started to understand, or at least I thought that I did.
“Did Laura not… draw? When she was younger? It seemed like she’d been doing that for a while.”
“If she did draw, I hadn’t seen it.” Halflance glanced away nervously. “Is she happy when I’m not around?”
I nodded. “I had noticed.”
“I’d always assumed it was in her nature. So grim, so argumentative. A wild child, at war with herself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snarled, the inner deadlock finally broken. “Laura hated you! She hated her entire family, but you especially! Why did you think she did everything in her power to get as far away from you as possible?”
Halflance slammed a fist into her thigh. “Discipline! She needed to understand, and I needed to teach her how to be just!”
“And how did you go about doing that, hm? You crushed her, Halflance, you crushed her under the weight of your personality until she had no choice but to flee where you couldn’t find her!”
“I did not crush her,” Halflance said. All the sadness, all the rage, it was gone. “The role of a mother is to teach her daughters how to live. It was a difficult lesson to teach, but I taught it as best as I could. My only mistake was assuming that it was possible to learn without making mistakes.”
And there you had it. All the walls were back up, the old Halflance returned. All the crying and rage had just been a brief gap in her defenses, exposed for a moment only to be hidden away. I’d never get through to her. I clenched my fists and went to leave… but stopped. For Laura’s sake, I had to try. Making Halflance see the light seemed like an impossible task, but making her break down at all had seemed impossible as well.
I glanced back at her over my shoulder; she was standing again, and standing strong. “Your only mistake?” I asked. “Then why were you crying earlier?”
Halflance’s strength curdled. She shriveled before me, face wrinkling with grief rising to the surface before she covered her face in her hands. “You! You, it’s always you! Who the hell are you?”
“Emma Farrier,” I said. “I’ve crossed the void under my own power, I’ve made allies with a stonewose captain and a blueroser noble, and I’ve made your daughter happier than she’s been in a long, long time.”
“I can’t stand it,” Halflance said, trying to stifle her tears. “It’s a bug that won’t go away. every time I think I’ve justified it to myself, I think back to that image, her sketching flowers in the side yard, and it starts all over again.”
I was making progress, I could feel it. If I could just get through to her, forge a real connection, I knew that I could create some actual change. So I went out on a limb and did something extremely rash. I crossed the room in a few quick steps and placed my hand, gently, on Lady Halflance’s shoulder.
“Lady Halflance… Sarah. May I call you Sarah?”
“Only in private,” she moaned. Still trying to keep up appearances.
“Sarah, you have to learn to let go. If Laura’s going to become the next Lady Halflance… you can prepare her as much as you want. Teach her lessons, teach her skills and knowledge and ways of acting, but you can’t teach her how to be.”
“And what if she fucks it all up?”
“Then it sure won’t be your fault for not preparing her. She’s making something of herself, you know that? You have no idea how much bravery, how much self-control, how much absolute heroism I saw from her when we were together in New Alderburg.”
Lady Halflance fell silent, her sniffling and tears gradually trailing off. Unexpectedly, she wrapped one of her arms around me: not quite a hug, but definitely an embrace of a sort.
“Emma Marcus Farrier. I am glad to welcome you as my daughter-in-law.”
I nearly choked on my own saliva. “Uh, erm, well. Future daughter-in-law. Maybe. I definitely don’t want to rush into anything, I mean, I’ve only known Laura for, what, eight months now? Nine?”
“Fair enough. I suppose if there is any lesson I need to learn, it is to stop overestimating your foolishness.” She looked down at me, eyes red but expression deathly serious. “Should you desire it, however. You have my blessing.”
“Um. Thank you.” I shut my eyes and shook my head, attempting to cast off my own issues like a wet dog getting rid of water. “No, that’s… thank you.”
“You’ll still have to have Sir Margaret’s blessing, of course. But I imagine she will be more lenient than I.”
I nodded. “Have you heard from her at all?”
Sir Margaret wasn’t with us in the BDEC; as a hero of the Second Secession War, it was only natural that she had been recruited back to fight in the Third. The last that anyone had heard from her, she was leading troops attempting a relief effort on the besieged Fanggard Fortress. But it had been days since any word.
“No,” Halflance said. “I have not. Now then, I have much to think about; please leave.”
I left in happiness. Whether or not Halflance would actually turn things around based on just one conversation, well, that remained to be seen: but I’d gotten through to her. She at least seemed to want to understand, and all indications were that she was dedicated to making some kind of change. If I could get that to stick…
Sadly, there wasn’t time to put Lady Halflance through a lengthy intervention, because we were still in the middle of the desert preparing to hunt down a mad scientist with an army of werewolves. That rendered everyone terribly busy, suffice it to say.
Each company of infantry was assigned two huge steam-powered halftracks, similar in design to the Ogre, for logistics and mobile defense. A huge part of daily life in the camp was making sure those halftracks didn’t get damaged by wind-blown dust. Each supply ship could only carry one halftrack, which meant that most of them were just sitting around breaking down while the quartermistresses stockpiled all of the food, medical supplies, ammunition, and spare parts that the troops would need to actually succeed in their grand lunge across the Desolation.
The other thing everyone was waiting for was to have a thorough enough map of the Desolation to not get immediately lost. This part of the Desolation was essentially unknown territory more than a few miles from the coast, so building up a map was hard work done by an entire team of expert cartographers. Normally mapping out an area of this size would take even such a team months, not to mention travel times; but that was where the captured airship came into play.
Even after more than a week of training, eating, and living in its shadow, the airship still felt like a total impossibility: captured Cassandran technology in Blueroser hands. I can’t say it made me feel proud of the country that had put Unity in a cell for not having a job, but it certainly made me feel some measure of pride for Selene as a planet, for what it was capable of, what it could become. Also the science was a bit of a rush, too. I have a bit of a thing for big machines, what else can I say?
Routine can be… lulling. Day after day, every one the same, is like the swaying of a hypnotist’s pocket watch, bringing you slowly under its spell. You get used to it. You start to like it. My routine was, admittedly, a little more complicated than everyone else’s: I alternated days, trading off between long hours at the lab in a disabled, fucked-up body with the brief windows of sparring and fucking and excitement on Selene. But even still, a routine was still a routine. I still found myself getting used to it. Even though that routine, or at least the Selenian half of it, was all in preparation for a single, specific day, it still came as a surprise when that day actually arrived.
The final resupply ship was a low-slung steamer, wood-hulled, with the name Determination painted in big red blocks on the side of its bow. It pulled up the river late in the morning, dropping a heavy plank to connect to the nearest bank, and before you knew it the area was swarming with linen-clad sailors hefting around huge crates of food and machinery. The space where the final halftrack was meant to go had been specifically set aside, and it felt like it only took a few minutes before the camp engineers were at work assembling it out of spare parts. The largest piece, the one that couldn’t be assembled, was the boiler, a huge cylinder of steel easily twelve feet long. That one had to be moved out using a crane, Determination loading itself up with sandbags to make sure the weight wouldn’t tip it over before it went to the ground.
Determination left the next morning, before dawn, only having stayed as long as it did to avoid having to do any more nighttime navigation. As soon as it left, the news spread like wildfire: we’d be packing up, with intent to leave for the Desolation in three more days. All hands on deck.
It wasn’t as though I really had anything to pack; everything I’d ever owned was back in Amrinval. I helped where I could, or continued my training with Rook while everything around me went smoothly as could be. The camp shrank, many of the structures reduced to empty shells so the canvas could be reused, and all of the warehouses emptied out into the halftracks, operation centers folding up into huge wooden trunks. On the final day by the bank of the river before leaving, there was one last thing left to check on: Amina’s machine.
The medical bay was one of the structures that wasn’t moving, seeing as there were still a couple of soldiers who couldn’t march, but it was definitely emptier than it had been, the supplies and tools reduced down to a skeleton. In the back was the table that Amina had been using for her machine, the convoluted set-up of electrical supplies and metal that was meant to replicate my EV field. It was gone.
Amina was there, though, packing up a few more tools into a leather doctor’s bag.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” I said. “Where’s the…?”
“On one of the halftracks.”
“What? Why?”
“This machine is… for all that it’s a hack job put together in a hurry, it’s also the culmination of my life’s work. I’m not leaving it behind here. And besides, who knows. It might be useful.”
“Does it work, then? What can it do?” I asked. “And, wait. What if it gets damaged? We’re going into combat.”
“I left behind enough notes here that someone else could re-build it if it gets destroyed, I’m not that stupid. As for what it does… I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.”
“But you’re sure that it’ll be able to help us on the expedition.”
Amina shook her head ruefully. “If we’re lucky, I won’t have to test it out at all.”