MACROSS DYNAMITE
Five: Cast in Stone and Autumn Shade

Varauta System, Third Planet, Varauta City, Macross Intergalactic Spaceport

          The Varautan spaceport was so crowded that by the time Mylene had fished her passport out of her bag and looked back up, her fellow passengers had disappeared and she was alone again, wondering exactly which way immigration control was. The spaceport was big, too, big and glaringly new. She clutched her passport and looked around nervously, hoping to spot someone who could tell her where to go, and then realized there were lighted signs hanging from the ceiling. IMMIGRATION, read one in big white letters, and she adjusted the shoulder strap of her bag and set off resolutely down the hall, following the mass of people streaming around her.
          It was her first time away from home. She had cheated the system just a little bit, she knew, by staying within the fleet for university, and this was not the first time she had wished she'd been a little more adventurous, struck out a little farther. As it was, she had never been in a spaceport other than the spaceports around the ships in the fleet, and those spaceports were all small and homey and their layouts were all exactly the same.
          Not like Varauta.
          She found the immigration lines without a problem, and hoping that she was in the right line, she chewed on her lip and waited nervously as the queue of people shuffled slowly forward, and then she was at the glass barrier between the crowd and the immigration official, and she positioned her toes on the thick white line painted on the carpet that said PLEASE WAIT HERE.
          "Next," called the man behind the counter in a bored voice, and she swallowed, stepped up, handed him her passport, and hoped.
          He hardly even glanced at it, and she knew he did not glance once at her, simply stamped something on the inside pages, gave it a cursory ruffle-through, and slid it back through the opening in the station.
          "Next."
          Mylene hurried past before something unfortunate happened; knowing her luck, if she dawdled, the ceiling would fall on her or something and forever ruin her chances of even getting out of the airport, never mind of getting into the actual city.
          A real planet. A real city. It was a foreign concept to her; Planet Lux had not been much of a planetary experience, and her only other time on-planet had been on the fourth planet of Varauta, only a few hours away, and that had not been pleasant either.
          Hopefully this time, the third time, was something of good-luck number. How did that old English saying go? Third time's the charm? Her English was decent but a little rusty; she did not speak it around school at all, and though her parents were both fluent, they preferred to use Japanese with her. But as the Macross 5 had been an English-speaking fleet, the official language of Varauta was English. That could prove to be interesting. She'd packed her Japanese-English dictionary, but hopefully she wouldn't have to use it all that much.
          The baggage claim was slow, and by the time she had collected all her luggage, half an hour had gone by and she stumbled slowly out of the main terminal, hoping that her sponsor had not grown tired of waiting and left.
          "Mylene Jenius? Over here!"
          She looked around, and the voice shouted her name again, a little closer, to her left. There he was, holding up a sign with her name on it, and she dragged her bags over, hoping that through the seventeen-hour flight and the long wait at the baggage claim and her mounds of suitcases, that she looked at least presentable.
          Her sponsor looked like he was in his early twenties, Asian, average height and build, but his face was eager and he had a ready smile as he stuck out his hand enthusiastically. "Mylene?"
          "That's me," she said, shaking his hand a little warily. She was not used to this custom of shaking hands – they never did it back home, and she had been raised the traditional Japanese way of bowing to people as she was introduced.
          The man did not seem to notice her slight hesitation. "Nice to meet you, welcome to Varauta. I'm going to be your sponsor for the next four months or so on the dig…" He trailed off. "It is rather an honor for us to have a living legend in our midst."
          "Um…" she said, sighing inwardly. She had known something like that would come up sooner or later, but she had been hoping to avoid it until she actually got out of the airport. "Thanks?"
          He grinned again. "No problem. I’m Ching Lian Lao. Call me Lao. Archaeology student at the University here, student worker on the Protoculture dig. Here, lemme take some of your bags, and we'll get going on our way."
          "Thanks," Mylene said again, a little more sincerely this time, because she had a lot of bags and they were all heavy. He grabbed three of them, hefting them up and looking surprised.
          "Wow. You sure don't pack light."
          "Well, it's four months," she said defensively, and he burst into laughter.
          "I was just joking." Turning his head. "Sorry. I have a really bad sense of humor, and a lot of people don't appreciate it. If you ever feel offended, just tell me to shut up."
          Mylene blinked at him as they made their way slowly through the crowd. Definitely not the type of person she'd been expecting. As if he could hear her thoughts, Lao looked back at her ruefully.
          "Yeah, they tell me that if I wasn't so suited for archaeology, they'd have kicked me out of the department a long time ago for general misconduct and rudeness. I seem to open my mouth at the wrong times."
          "It's ok," Mylene said, resisting the urge to smile suddenly. "You remind me of someone I used to know, that's all. He opened his mouth at the wrong time a lot too."
          He's been gone a long time, though, and I don't know if he's ever coming back…
          "Ah," Lao said, sounding a little relieved. "Good friend of yours?"
          "You could say that."
          Lao's ride was an old, rattling van with a government license plate parked two parking lots over. She had doubts about the thing after they'd loaded all her suitcases onto it – was it her, or did the old van seem to sag? But it held up as Lao eased it out of the parking lot and sped off down the road towards the distant city.
          "Been to Varauta before?" he said.
          Mylene shook her head. "It's actually my first real time on-planet," she confessed. "I've never really seen a city…"
          Lao whistled. "Well. Varauta isn't really that much of a city, I suppose, if you compare it to say…any of the old cities on Earth. But we're young and we're growing, and you'll find plenty to do here if you know where to look. What do you do in your free time?"
          Mylene laughed. "I'm usually found in the library, actually. I read a lot. Take long walks…"
          "Really?" He sounded surprised. "I would have thought you liked to play music or something, considering."
          "I'm not a musician anymore," Mylene said tightly, trying not to sound angry, though something inside of her twisted as he said that, and she wanted to snap at him that it was none of his business.
          Again, he seemed to realize that without her speaking, and sighed. "That was one of my open mouth, insert foot moments. Sorry again."
          Her brain mulled over the English metaphor for a few minutes. "Say again?"
          "Huh?"
          "Open mouth….what?"
          The outskirts of the city were all low-rise buildings, carefully built into geometric shapes and planned city patterns amidst beautiful flowering gardens and parks, and Lao eased the van to a stop at a traffic light. "Open mouth, insert foot. You've never – oh. Right. You're not a native English speaker." Hitting himself on the side of the head. "I'm especially bad today. Feel free to beat me if you'd like."
          It was impossible to stay angry at him, this quirky young man. He had a comfortable air, something like a well-lived-in room would have, as if saying, relax, kick back, have some coffee. That, more than anything, probably attracted people, and Mylene was willing to bet that everyone liked Lao.
          The light turned green and the old van creaked forward. The streets grew wider, and she stared up at the great glass buildings, taller than anything the Macross 7 had to offer, at the wide courtyards and sculpted fountains everywhere, streams of water crystal rainbows in the mid-afternoon sun. In the distance, she could see snow-capped mountains rising through wispy clouds. A flock of some type of bird passed faintly through the mist.
          "You like it?" Lao asked, obviously pleased.
          "It's beautiful," she breathed. "Wow."
          "Definitely better than anything a colony ship could offer," Lao said. The van turned a corner and there were suddenly people everywhere, a moving, swaying mass of pedestrians moving like waves over the sidewalks, through the crosswalks and in and out of doorways, neon lights and enormous outdoor television screens inset into the metal and glass of what were obviously upper-class department stores and shopping arenas. Her nose caught a whiff of something roasting, and her stomach growled, reminding her that she had slept through the last meal on the shuttle and hadn't eaten anything in twelve hours.
          "We're almost there," Lao promised, seeming again to sense her distress. She wondered how he kept doing that. "This is Arka, the shopping district, obviously. A few more blocks and you'll see the University. Things are a lot less hectic there."
          "I've never seen so many people in one spot," she said.
          Lao nodded. "It is a lot of people. There weren't that many on the Macross 5, but after the city started growing and they opened the University, we've had a huge influx of immigrants, usually coming from Eden or Startos or any of the planets over in Quadrant 5. But we've had some Earth immigrants too, and others from the old solar system back home and neighboring solar systems. I don't envy them the trip, though…it would take a lot of willpower and courage to step on one of those shuttles, knowing you were going to be in fold for almost a month to get here."
          "That's why I didn't go back to Earth for school," she said. "The thought of the trip was just too much."
          Lao was quiet for a few minutes as they left Arka and the crowds behind, passing into a district that was most definitely one that would be found outside a university campus. She'd never been to a campus other than the Einstein's, but she'd read books and seen movies, and the Varautan campus outskirts were exactly what she'd expected – green parks and tall, shady trees, coffee shops and art galleries and bookstores.
          "I assume," Lao said at last, breaking the silence, "that you've heard about what happened here about two weeks ago."
          She was wondering if he was going to bring that up. "I have," she said simply. "It was all over the news. My fath – Captain Jenius got the full report."
          Lao sounded grim. "My instructor, Professor Dyson, was one of the two people injured in that incident. We had it all set up to have you students spend about two weeks with her, but that plan has obviously been nixed, and we don't even know how many of the caverns you'll be allowed access to."
          "I don't know if I just didn't read it," Mylene said, "or if it wasn't in the report. But what exactly happened?"
          "That's the mystery. No one knows. Professor Dyson and her assistant were the only two there, and some of us heard the explosion, but we have no idea what caused it. It might have been a faulty reader, but still, that doesn't explain everything."
          Mylene waited to hear what "everything" was, but Lao didn't seem to want to give a further explanation, so she simply sat and watched him drive, gazed at the scenery outside the window and feeling slightly disappointed that she was going to restricted on this dig. But she had expected that, after all – security would be tight here anyway, even without the accident.
          "She's still in the hospital," Lao said finally, and Mylene realized he was talking about his professor. "They're both in a coma, and the doctors don't know when they'll wake up."
          Mylene shivered, her mind flashing the images of an unconscious Basara, spiritia drained dry by Sivil, lying there in the room with his life support system on as the last desperate hours of the battle ticked by, as the people called for him and he could not hear them.
          "That's terrible," she whispered, her arms snaking around her body, and she hugged herself, remembering the terror and the despair she had felt that night as all of them had gathered around the bed that looked too much like a coffin.
          Basara had woken up, finally, and gone out and done what needed to be done, and saved them all just like she knew he would. How many years ago had that been? It seemed like forever, and now life had gone back to being life again, just plain, every day life, seconds and minutes and hours and days crawling by, and somehow they'd all grown up and she hadn't realized it.
          It was very selfish of her to want the days of the war back, but now she realized she had been truly happy during those days, happier than she had been in her entire life.
          Lao sighed. "There's no reason she shouldn't get better. We just have to hope and pray, I guess…she's a strong woman." He stopped at a stop sign, then gave the wheel a spin to the left. "Anyhow, we're here,"
          The van bumped up a short curb and through a set of massive white and iron gates, and there was the main campus, sprawled out before her like a city out of fantasy. There were wide paths everywhere, huge stone buildings that were low and wide and looked very comfortable, and everything was green.
          "I love it," she said, pressing her face to the glass.
          "I'm glad," he returned, and she could hear the satisfaction in his voice and the pride he had in this school. He seemed to have put his professor's accident out of his mind, and she had no desire to bring that topic up again. "You'll be staying at the main dorm, right next to the archaeology building, so you don't have to wake up early to go to class. I'll have your schedule ready first thing tomorrow morning. I'd give it to you now, but I think all you really want now is some sleep."
          She opened her mouth to protest and decided it would be a bad idea when a huge yawn escaped. Seventeen-hour flights did tend to have that effect on one's system. "I guess you're right," she said. The idea of exploring campus was inviting, but the idea of bed even more so. And besides, she had four months.
          Lao turned the corner onto a smaller side road, and she could see a building approaching that was most likely the dorm. "Of course I'm right," he said with a grin. "We're here. Let's take your things upstairs and get you checked in."

Eden, UN Spacy Planetary Command, New Edwards Test Flight Center

          Millard Johnson, Colonel, UN Spacy Eden Command, New Edwards Test Flight Center, was sipping his morning coffee when the final news came down through SpacyNet, and he simply looked at the notice, closed it, and went back to his coffee.
          Of course there would be no more funds. Those who had been holding out on the thin thread of hope that somehow, someway, Admiral Britai would get an extra few billion on the budget pushed through the UN had been deluding themselves. Millard had been saying it for weeks now, and the latest notice had simply proved him right.
          He did that a lot, though – stated his opinions, was ignored, and then when he had turned out to be right, no one seemed to remember that he had been right in the first place.
          "Sir?" The comm buzzed, and he slapped it.
          "What?"
          "Your oh seven hundred appointment is here, waiting in Hangar 213."
          "I'll be down in a minute," he said, setting his mug aside and making sure his computer was password locked before stepping out of the office. The main command building hadn't changed in years, and the elevator was as silent and swift as ever, taking him down to the first floor, where he walked out the door and past the carefully sculpted shrubs at the front of the command building, down the sidewalk to the crosswalk. His executive officer did not understand Millard's apparent obsession with walking everywhere, especially since Eden was a hot planet to begin with, and walking around base in the heat was not exactly everyone's idea of taking a pleasant stroll.
          Millard firmly believed in walking. Cars were a necessary evil, designed to get you from one place to another when it absolutely positively required that you be somewhere in the next minute, or if the weather was so foul that it would be certain death to try and walk from one building to the next. Nature, he had told his exec, was to be enjoyed, and how could one enjoy it from the inside of a car?
          "But you like planes, sir," the exec had responded, and Millard had shook his head in amusement, told the young man he didn't understand. Most people didn't. Aircraft were different – a testimony to man's leap in science, a statement of freedom and joy and the sheer will of the human spirit.
          The airplane was the closest one could come to being an angel.
          He arrived at Hangar 213 slightly ahead of schedule, and he could see his contact standing there, a burly, green-haired Zentradi man dressed in elegant, yet casual outerwear, holding a briefcase. Behind him, an incomplete VF-19 squatted on jacks, missing one of its engines, with the forward wheel well torn open.
          They wouldn't see much of that around here for much longer. Not with the budget cuts for next year.
          "Good morning, Colonel," the Zentradi said, spotting him, and Millard nodded his head in acknowledgement, putting out his hand when he was close enough to note the sharp, elegant planes of the Zentradi's face, the broad shoulders and the silver tie pin in the shape of the UN Spacy symbol. Millard disliked him instantly.
          "It's a pleasure," he said. "Inspector Vhoy?"
          "One and the same." The handshake was brief, cordial, and then the Zentradi mask snapped on. "I suppose I don't need to tell you why I've come."
          Millard stepped back. "I've heard the sketchy details. I was hoping to get the full story from your own mouth, sir."
          "I'd be delighted," Vhoy said, sounding anything but. "Shall we converse here, or shall we take a walk? I'd dearly like to see more of your aircraft."
          I bet you would, Millard thought, but simply nodded politely. "A walk would suit me as well." Turning so that his back wasn't quite to the inspector, he waited for Vhoy to gather his hat and his briefcase, and they paced through the hangar together, passing the VF-19 and crossing over to the tool kits on the opposite side of the bay.
          "Obviously you know that I was sent from the Varautan investigative council," Vhoy said. "We're a remote part of the UN Spacy main legal office in London, but since Earth has got budget issues to counter at the moment, I'm here in their stead. I have a letter, if you would like to read it."
          "That's fine," Millard said calmly. "If I need it, I will let you know."
          "It came to the attention of a few members of the UN Spacy air and spacecraft design and research team a few years ago that the Project SuperNova files had never been completed, since the YF-19 had won the contest by such…unusual circumstances. The files were being sorted, when some very interesting information came to light."
          "And what would that be?" Millard wondered out loud, asking the obvious questions for the inspector's benefit, giving him what he wanted to hear. He hated this political game, but he had to play it.
          "There is now some controversy," the inspector said, giving Millard a long, hard look, "that the circumstances of the YF-19's victory during Project SuperNova involved, among other things, sabotage, illegal funds transactions, and a few suspicious transmissions between key players on the Shinsei Industries team."
          Millard kept his expression calm. "In other words, cheating."
          "In not quite so legal terms, yes, Colonel. Cheating. However, the UN and the UN Spacy are extremely fair organizations, and they wanted to get to the bottom of the matter before naming names. Thus why I am here, today, on Eden. I've been authorized by the UN Spacy Judge Advocate General to begin an investigation into the events of Project SuperNova. I have a-"
          "-letter if I want to see it," Millard interjected. "Yes, I know." They were exiting the hangar now, stepping into the bright Eden sun, but its rays did not seem to warm him this morning. "I'll have you know right now, Inspector, that I will vouch for Lieutenant Dyson and Mr. Newman and the rest of the members on the Shinsei team, and that nothing that they did for this project was ever illegal."
          Vhoy simply looked at him, and Millard stared back with a confidence he did not feel.
          "Would you like that to go on the official record, Colonel?" Vhoy said, at last, and Millard felt like strangling the superior little voice that came out of the man's throat. The inspector's eyes were shrewd, calculating. He hated lawyers.
          "I'd prefer not to be quoted as saying anything official until we have all the facts laid out before us on the table, Inspector. As you must well know, one statement may be interpreted many different ways."
          "Very true," Vhoy said, nodding sagely as if Millard had just made the most profound statement he'd ever heard. Millard held the door open for him as they entered the next hangar, wondering if it would be all right for him to slam the door shut on the Zentradi's fingers while he was at it.
          Petty revenge could be so gratifying sometimes.
          "I would like to start by questioning some of the technicians that assisted both teams on the project," Vhoy began, stopping by one of the tables and opening his briefcase. "This is Hangar 214, is it not? I believe that the YF-19 was formerly kept in here?"
          Millard gritted his teeth. "This was one of its primary repair docks, yes."
          "Well then." The smooth handshake again, an almost imperceptible adjustment of the tie. "I shall start here. May I come meet with you in your office later in the day to discuss this in more detail?"
          "Only if you make an appointment with my secretary," Millard said, wanting to wipe the insolent little smirk off the Zentradi's face. "She can be reached by phone."
          "I'll do that, Colonel. Have a good day."
          Millard watched the lawyer's retreating back, watched him enter the hangar office through one of the side doors. The door slammed shut and there was movement behind the blinds as whoever was manning the desk rose to greet him. Sighing, he leaned back against the hangar wall and let his eyes travel up the great, echoing space, up to the metal-beamed ceiling, back down to the oil and grease and dirt and blood-stained floor of the room that had once housed the latest in state-of-the-art technology.
          Even the VF-19 could be called outdated now, outdated and outdone in the end by the YF-21, which, even though its pilot had died and its systems had been removed, still outshone the VF-19 now in the form of the beautiful and deadly VF-22. Life was like that too, Millard reflected. Sometimes you won and sometimes you lost, but in the end, it would be the circumstances that determined who was the true victor.
          He had known that this day would come, known that what had happened on SuperNova would not stay secret indefinitely. It had not been cheating as he knew other members, others of his colleagues, had cheated on pet projects of their own. Millard had not killed anyone. He had not embezzled millions of dollars in funds. He had not manipulated anyone for any reason.
          All he had simply done was to give the human race a fair chance. And for that, the UN would punish him.
          Isamu had not cheated. Millard knew that. No matter what happened, he would make sure that Isamu was cleared, because Isamu was so bold and so bright and had such a great career ahead of him, and Isamu had never known what was going on behind his back, in the dark offices and corners and crevices of New Edwards that were so different from the sunlit flightline. He was glad for that. Isamu was still young, still untainted by the backstabbing and power struggles that characterized the rest of the military these days, and he hoped Isamu would remain that way for a long time yet.
          His own time was fading, and in a few years, he would perhaps be retired, perhaps be court-martialed, perhaps be dead. It did not matter what happened to him. What mattered were men and women like Isamu, the next generation of the UN Spacy.
          The inspector had sat down, Millard noted, seeing the shadows behind the blinds quite still except for the occasional gesture of hands, and the hangar was very empty and very dark, and it was time for him to get back to his office, because the budget crisis might have taken a new turn, and there would probably be commanders squabbling for the Fleet Admiral's attention, demanding funds that were not there.

Zola

          "Oh, so it was your Valkyrie that they stole."
          Basara tried to keep from reaching out and shaking the little man behind the counter as Elma shuffled around the store behind him, putting things into her shopping basket. "It probably was," he said instead. "VF-19, red?"
          "Seems to match," the man said, glancing around as if afraid someone was listening. "Listen, I really don't think talking about it here is the best thing to do. And I don't have complete information. Let me get with a few people and I'll stop by tomorrow. You staying with Elma?"
          Basara nodded. "You do that. I'll be waiting."
          If the old man heard the threat in his voice, he didn't show it. "There definitely was a sighting, and I'm almost positive that someone spotted a trailer tug that would be about the right size for a spacecraft of your specs."
          He ground his teeth. "Dammit."
          Elma appeared at his elbow just then, dropping a folded bill on the counter and waiting patiently for the man to ring up her purchases. "Did you need anything, Basara? Socks, toothbrush, anything?"
          "Guitar strings," he said automatically, and she frowned.
          "They don't sell those here."
          He tried to crack a laugh, realized that he was so upset that he couldn't even think about smiling right now. "Right."
          "Bad news, huh?" she said as they left the store, and he ground his teeth again.
          "Of all the lowdown, dirty things to-"
          "Shh!" she warned, and he stopped walking, startled. She beckoned to him. "Get in the car. We can talk on the way."
          It wasn't till they were safely in the car and a few minutes from the town that she turned to him. "You can't really mention stuff about the poachers in public," she explained, the green tuft of her hair bobbing along with the beat of the song on the radio. "They've got spies and networks everywhere, and if you mention anything to do with them, they'll find some way to get back at you."
          Basara frowned. "Like what? Murder?"
          "Oh, no way," Elma said. "But they'll get one of their contacts to steal money out of your bank account. Break your car…make sure people don't sell you parts you need. Stuff like that. It's really nasty and kind of dumb, but those are the kinds of people poachers are."
          She sounded like she was reciting something, and he looked curiously at her, but she just kept driving. "Where do these poacher people come from?"
          Elma shook her head. "I dunno. My sister, she's in the police, and she told me once that they're just a bunch of no-good people who want to get rich quick and don't care how they go about doing it. The worse part of it is that they've got to hurt other people by doing it. Hunting whales is bad enough, I think, but they've got a lot of the Zolan government and people under their control. Doing bad things. Illegal things."
          "What kind of things?" he wanted to know, and she shrugged.
          "I dunno. That's what my sister told me."
          He leaned back in his seat and sighed. "Well, this is just wonderful."
          "Maybe you should just give up on your Valkyrie," Elma began, and he gave her an incredulous look.
          "Are you nuts? That ship means the world to me – there's no way I’m gonna leave her in the hands of poachers!"
          "It might be the best option," she said, but left it at that as he shook his head violently.
          "It's not an option, Elma. I CAN'T let them have it!"
          He sensed her watching him but didn't turn his head, just stared fiercely out the window, not wanting her to see the anguish that he knew was portrayed on his face. Mylene, and Ray, had always said that he had such a transparent face.
          It was trivial to some people to be so upset over a machine, he knew. But the Fire Valkyrie was not simply a machine.
          "I might have a suggestion," Elma said softly. "Basara?"
          "What."
          The road forked, and he knew that they were going to take the right-hand road to go home, but as he watched, the car moved into the left lane, and they were leaving the main road and the houses grew sparse and he could see a forest in the distance. He tore his gaze away from the window. "Elma?"
          "I know someone else who might be able to help you," she said. "But."
          Her eyes were big and haunted, and he reached out, touched her tiny shoulder. "Look, Elma…the old guy at the shop said that he'd find out for me. You don't have to-"
          "You won't get answers unless you go to him," Elma whispered. "He'll know."
          Basara felt a slight chill go through him. "What are you talking about?"
          "Promise me you won't tell my father. Ok? You can't tell him that we went this way."
          The chill grew colder, and he rubbed his hands together. "Elma, it's all right if-"
          She didn't even seem to hear him, only pushed her foot down on the gas pedal, and the car puttered forward. The trees were a lot closer now. He hadn't realized there was a forest so close to the house, and for a moment he thought he saw eyes in the trees, watching them. Silly, of course, it was just a forest, and trees had no eyes.
          Did they?
          "He'll know," Elma repeated, a note of quivering certainty in her voice. "We should have come here in the first place."

The First Space, Blue

          "What's wrong, my lady?"
          She opened her eyes, looking down at her hands, white and ghostly in the light of the firelamps, and took a deep breath.
          "Something to drink, please."
          There was a tinkle of glass and the pouring of something liquid, and that something was handed to her. It tasted like honey and was cool on her tongue and her throat, and she let it flow down in a single gulp.
          "Lady?"
          "Leave me," she said quietly, and she knew the serving woman bowed, even though she did not look up to see the woman straighten and vanish through the gilded double-doors of the meditation room. There was no need, because if she wanted to, she could reach out with her mind and feel the consciousnesses of every living being in this place, this palace, though it was not so much a palace as a dungeon.
          She did so now, stretching out, feeling the minds of those asleep and awake, joyful and sorrowing, angry and calm, touching those bubbles of isolated emotion curiously, because she was not sure what it was like to feel.
          She had had that too once, she believed. She still remembered faintly what it was like to smile, to laugh, to cry, but the Teachers had said that was all past now, that it was not necessary in a future Priestess, and so they had trained it out of her. She was glad for that, because Priestesses had no need for the paltry human things called laughter or tears.
          There was only the Void, only the Song.
          She stretched out a little on her seat, letting the last of the honeyed liquid trickle down her throat, and breathed a single, pure note, seeing it sparkle there on the tip of her tongue before floating tremblingly up into the darkness of the meditation room's vast arched ceiling, spiraling upward, up and up, before a tendril of air caught it and squeezed it a little too hard, and it tensed, broke, vanishing in a shower of golden sparks.
          She had not always been able to see the music, either, but somehow that had come to her, too. The memory of how it had was unclear, but all Priestesses were able to do so, and when she had begun to see the colors around the notes she sang, realizing how the intricacies of the harmonies were interwoven into visual layers, it was like her eyes were opened from the blind, static world she had been living in before.
          All of them were like that, one of the other novices had confided to her later. Breaking through that barrier was one of the signs of a born Priestess.
          She did not really know if she was born to be one, but she was one now, and so she supposed that she did believe that was true. That did not matter, anyway – all that mattered were the ships that she saw in her mind whenever they asked her to sing, the beautiful, deadly formations of killing machines that answered to her call, guided by her song. That was what music was – visions of blood among the stars, combining with the sparkling colors of each note that she sang, called forth by her voice to march forward and rain down death.
          The meditation room was cool and so were the tiles under her feet, and she arranged herself carefully in her chair, clasping her hands in front of her and visualizing the notes in her mind, the next formation. There was no battle now, but it was good to keep vigilant, because there had been an anomaly in the patterns as of late, something she could not quite identify, but something she knew was there and was not right. The others felt it too, she knew.
          None of them liked it. It was a disruption in their world, a foreign threat, shadowy and yet present, a feeling of something coming.
          She saw visions sometimes that were not of the music – a strange starship, warriors that were not her warriors, explosions and fire on the surface of a planet she should not have known but yet was familiar. A man, his features obscured by a thick fog, but again, familiar.
          The others did not have these visions. Or at least, if they had them, they had never mentioned them.
          She had tried to voice her concerns once, and the Teachers had stopped her, because it was disorderly to disrupt the continuum and the flow of the patterns, and so she had never mentioned them again. But still, they were there, and she suffered them in silence.
          Something coming.
          It would be useless for a new enemy to attack, she knew, because their forces were strong and the might of the Priestesses combined was mightier than any foreign attack. But yet that was not enough, because she knew that sometimes an enemy might not advance in the shape of armored might or projectile weaponry, but through something deadlier, hidden. She did not know how she knew that, and she had never told the Teachers, because she was quite sure it was forbidden thought.
          But yet, what was the value of existence, if there could not be some thoughts that were forbidden, hidden from everything and everyone but the inner soul? She was quite sure she was not the only one who felt this way, and though she respected the Teachers, admired them, loved them as much as she, a Priestess could love, that was not enough.
          Sometimes she seemed to remember that the music was more than simply a weapon, more than individual notes. Sometimes it was a rainbow, sometimes a dewdrop sparkling on unopened flowers, sometimes a spiral of crystals in empty air. And then sometimes it was the faint memory of a touch, a breath of wind upon her lips.
          Sometimes it was a voice.
          Hikaru…

 
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