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The Memory of Fangs, and the Face She Used to Wear
"...This is, I'll admit it — genuinely extraordinary. In the most inconvenient possible sense."
Ledea Mace stepped out of the high-performance simulator adjoining the Silver Anchor's cockpit, pressing the back of one precise hand to the faint sheen of perspiration at her temple. Her expression was the one she wore when confronted with something that demanded acknowledgment regardless of whether she wanted to give it.
"The control margins are calibrated to the millisecond. The thrusters respond faster than the inputs — it isn't imprecision on the pilot's part, it's excess in the machine itself, and the corrective forces work against you at every adjustment. That was the simulator." A pause. "The actual version of this machine applies several G of lethal acceleration directly to the body. Shutia — I genuinely don't believe anyone else in this star system could extract the full performance from it."
Shutia Mace was seated beside the simulator with her golden hair loose, and she made the small, slightly-too-casual laugh of someone receiving a compliment they weren't certain they had earned.
"Aha... ahaha... you're being very generous, sis..."
What Ledea had been attempting was not a standard training program. It was flight telemetry from the Luna Geist — the high-speed assault craft that had been Meil Noa's ship for years, and that was currently undergoing extensive repairs in the dock beside the Silver Anchor. The machine had begun its life as an aging attack vessel, but Shutia's sustained and quietly expensive program of modification had transformed it into something capable of meeting current-generation military hardware in direct engagement. The specialized armaments and high-output thruster modules destroyed in the battle were individually costly enough to purchase several Silver Anchors outright. Current repairs had replaced them with general-market components, reducing its effective specifications considerably.
Even so. Even at that reduced capacity. The simulator had taken Ledea — the finest pilot on the frontier — to the edges of her technical range.
Ledea regarded the controls for a moment longer. Then she set her jaw and looked at Shutia directly.
"Watch me. I intend to surpass your handling. Completely, not approximately. And in the meantime — the Silver Anchor. Upgrades. Then myself. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. In that order, without exception."
She said this while making a small fist, which at one hundred and forty centimeters produced a particular effect. Shutia looked at her and felt something warm and slightly catastrophic shift somewhere in her chest.
"Yes! Let's do it together, sis!"
"...By the way."
Ledea tilted her head, one finger at her chin, silver eyes moving to Shutia's face with an expression of mild curiosity.
"That woman you used to be. Meil Noa — the silver hair, the silver eyes, the precision stripped of everything else. She was genuinely impressive."
"—"
Shutia's response stalled entirely.
Meil Noa. The identity she had built and worn in the life that had come before — another layer of her history, the same as the Luna Geist, the kind that she had once feared Ledea would be unable to look at without flinching.
"I understand now that the person who came to collect me from the security office, all those years ago — who handled everything with that remarkable composure — was you. In that guise."
Ledea said this with the quiet satisfaction of a problem that had finally yielded its solution.
"And now it makes complete sense."
She looked at Shutia with the expression of someone about to ask a perfectly reasonable question.
"Though — I'm curious. Why that appearance specifically? In all honesty — Meil Noa's look reminded me of something. She reminded me of—"
"Ah — well — that's—"
Shutia's ears went red in an impressively comprehensive way. She pulled at a strand of her own golden hair, and her voice dropped toward something that was struggling to stay audible.
"...That was — I had an image, in my head, of what you'd look like. Grown up. What I thought you'd become, someday. I put that image into a face, and then it... became her."
"My goodness!"
The response was immediate and incandescent.
Ledea's face lit with the particular brightness she normally reserved for a difficult calculation that had come out exactly right.
"That extraordinary, polished, entirely capable adult woman — that was your image of what I'd grow into?!"
She straightened her spine as far as it would go.
"Then in a few years — naturally — I'll develop into something exactly like that. Poised, imposing, the kind of woman who stands beside someone like Asphi without any question of comparison. Shutia's imagination is genuinely accurate."
Shutia heard all of this.
Then she looked, very carefully, at Ledea.
At the hundred and forty centimeters. At the slim shoulders. At the face that had looked precisely like this since the day they had found each other again, and gave no indication of intending to change in any particular direction.
She looked for a long moment, with the full assessment of someone who had excellent spatial reasoning and complete knowledge of the relevant variables.
And then, gently, with the delicacy of someone wrapping something that could not be unwrapped:
"...No. Sis is completely wonderful exactly as sis is right now. There's genuinely no need to change anything at all."
The words were delivered with pure warmth. They were also, beneath the surface, a conclusion. An honest one. The specific proportions that Meil Noa had possessed, and the specific likelihood of the person currently standing across from her developing them — Shutia had weighed these privately, and arrived at a definitive answer, and selected this as the kindest available framing.
Ledea's processing required approximately three seconds.
"...SHUTIA."
The outrage echoed through the cockpit.
"I was being careful!" Shutia protested, already in motion. "Really, completely, genuinely careful with how I said that—! Come on, sis, we have a job to get to—!"
The Silver Anchor launched into the stars, as always. Its crew in something approximately resembling their usual order.