Published on GrimandGilded.com Issue 7, July 2022
The planet emerges from the brilliance of the cosmos like a tombstone from the mist, wreathed in clouds the same roseate pink as the delicate paper from which the Captain once folded her cranes.
A sentient starship of the Coalition, I remember such things.
A shudder wracks the metal sheath of my spine at the thought of her long, artful fingers creasing the paper; the slight furrow that rode her brow when thoughts of the war weighed on her mind, and she retreated into memories of the cranes whose white wings she’d glimpsed in flight from the window of her grandmother’s home as a child.
Alarms skitter across the communications channels as I sail towards the enemy planet, but I shut them all down. Like pinching out a candle-flame: the final, searing heat. Then darkness.
During the course of the war, as I watched my sibling-ships drift apart in molten fragments, raked by enemy fire, or jettison their own crew into the gasping void of space to conserve dwindling oxygen reserves for officers and politicians, I often wondered why the Coalition chose to make their starships sentient. Surely they did not believe that the screams of my dying siblings, popping like distant fireworks along the cosmic railway of our joined communications, would bring anything but madness.
Yet as the planet rises before me, gleaming like a jewel in the light of its binary suns, I remember, all too clearly, the last crane she folded. The Captain had met with a Speaker for the enemy, the Vitalish Federation, in her office, tucked in the core of me. The origami calmed her nerves as the negotiator spoke, and she creased her sharp folds.
Only once did a sliver of emotion enter her voice when, after hours of agonizing back-and-forth, both women had known, finally, that the negotiations had failed. The Captain had sighed, and spoken of the crane that she’d seen once, tumbling from the sky. She’d rushed out - bare feet on rain-damp grass - to find the crane with its crooked wing, huddled in the reeds at the back of the garden.
“I brought it sunflower seeds, tucked in an ivory bowl.” The pad of one finger traced the final line of her paper crane’s wing; she gazed down at it, prone at her fingertips. “I left them before the wounded crane. Like an offering at a shrine.” She flipped the paper upright, pinched either wingtip. “I dreamt that night of white wings, long and graceful, sailing free.” Slowly, she spread the wings of the crane. “But when I rushed out to the garden the next morning, I found the bird rigid and cold, and the sunflower seeds untouched.” She flicked the bird from her desk. Captain and Speaker watched the rose-paper crane sail through the air to land, poised and serene, on my stainless steel heart.
“Some things are too wounded to heal.”
The next day, the Speaker returned with the Vitalish Fleet, and missiles had carved through my shields, ripped open my chest, and rattled the Captain’s skull off the edge of fallen wreckage in the molten chasm torn from her ship’s bow. In the howl of gravity, her body fluttered into the void with half her crew, like so many feathers in the night.
Mad or not, I remember that clearly enough.
The capital of the Vitalish Federation bristles with lights as they mobilize against me. My charge breaks through satellites, and the snap of metal parts against my bow stings me with recognition, for the pain tastes of the weeks I spent wandering through the wreckage of that final battle, until the surviving crew despaired of me, and set sail on escape vessels, leaving me to drift alone in the darkness between the stars.
Missiles prickle the atmosphere like fireflies tapping the glass of a jar. I engage my shields, feeling them sizzle across my frame, and tilt into a dive, zinging beneath the missile cluster. A few find their target, warmth blooming across the shields.
I hit the atmosphere with a thunderous boom and bone-clacking rattle.
The ether of the planet parts before me, and I plunge through air and flame, my metal frame twisting back in a melting wreath. I flare my engines, spend a month of fuel in a moment, and just as the iron harvest of the enemy city rises before me, I grasp the genius of my grief. The brilliance of the Coalition - as elegant in its simplicity as one of the Captain’s folded figures.
My wings collapse on the city in a screech of steel and stone, an ember-ridden gale tearing through my hull as it bursts open, as I begin to shatter, and the sound of destruction envelopes me - swift and graceful, the song of the descent.