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The angel appeared with a great ruddy clash inside a building emblazoned with figures who looked almost like her, and the people fell to their knees at the sight. Somewhere in the distance, there were bombs going off, punctuated with gunshots from old Earth guns.
Do not be afraid, she told the people, because that was what all angels said.
The people were very afraid.
The angel reached out into the air and yanked. The red of her turned to an impossible silver, and when the people next opened their eyes, the sound of the bombs was no more.
-----
“Captain, there’s a ship down there,” the operations lieutenant calls from helm.
“A ship? What kind of ship would be down on that asteroid?”
“I don’t know—I’m trying to get close imaging of the hull markers now, but the gravitational instability is tampering with our sensors—” there are scattered gasps as the Discovery lurches, and all of the bridge crew are thrown from their stations.
Michael grunts as she’s tossed into her console, the hull of the Discovery groaning under the onslaught of the increased gravity field outside. “Lieutenant Owosekun, I’m going to run secondary visual amplification for the targeted area now,” she calls over to the operations station.
“Keep her steady, Detmer!” Captain Pike shouts to the navigator. He turns back to Michael. “Burnham, run the program as fast as you can; we need to determine the status of that ship. Ensign Tilly,” he calls over to the science station, “what’s happening with our shields?”
“Shield integrity at 60% and dropping, Captain, hull integrity at the same level. We have about—an hour left, until the ship is compromised.” Tilly’s hands tremble as she braces them on the console, her red curls bouncing with every lurch of the bridge.
Michael nods, watching the progress bar on her program. An hour is plenty of time. The ‘Fleet had put Pike in charge of the Discovery to find the origins of the seven signals that flared into existence around the galaxy. Are they a cry for help? he asked when he first showed them a map of the signals. A declaration of malice? Some temporal anomaly? We don’t know. Six of them vanished as suddenly as they appeared; the Discovery followed the last one to the Algol IV star system. When they dropped out of warp, their windows were flooded with a brilliant field of gold and white. The ship and the asteroid are lurching around each other like seagulls, caught in the gravity well of a sun in its death-throes. What remains of the star is singing in the distance, sparking against the velvet black of space and gilding all they could see.
Michael’s console pings as her program finishes. “Putting enhanced image on the main viewscreen now,” she calls. They turn to look at the ship where it lies, half crumpled like an old Earth soda can from its fall. “The hull markings are N-C-C dash 8-1-5—” she pauses. “Impossible. The USS Hiawatha was among the first casualties of the war.”
The Hiawatha. The Yaeger, the Buran, the Shenzhou. She knows the names of all the ships that went down in the war, their registry numbers and the souls who went down with them, ground the syllables of the dead into her memory with the grit of her guilt until they slipped smoothly from her tongue like polished river stones. While she was in prison, she had curled up in her bunk every night and recited names until she fell asleep, the same way she had recited physics theorems as a child. At the end of the list, where she would have included the reverend laws of gravitation and energy, she reminded herself that all of these casualties were caused by former Commander Michael Burnham, who committed mutiny on the Shenzhou, leading Captain Philippa Georgiou to her death and the Federation into war.
Starfleet pardoned her after the war ended. She is once again a full Commander, only a former mutineer, but there are still nights when she cannot sleep from the falling of the names. The Hiawatha, the Yaeger, the Buran, the Shenzhou, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost because she thought she knew best how to confront the Klingons when the Shenzhou accidentally activated one of the sentry beacons belonging to the Empire. Because she tried to save her captain’s life by taking over the ship and ended up killing her instead.
Philippa had trusted her until the end. Michael couldn’t even bring back her body.
“Our life sign sensors are malfunctioning, but I am getting emissions from the surface,” Owosekun is saying. “Parts of the ship might still be operational.”
“There’s a possibility that there are still people alive on that ship.” Pike stands up from his chair. “We need to try to—”
Detmer turns around in alarm. “Sir, if you carry transporter beacons on the surface, we can get enough of a lock to beam you back up, but we can’t fly any closer to the asteroid without damaging our shields. Flying through the field in the pods is going to be next to impossible—”
“I’ll go, Captain,” Michael says. He turns to her, raising his eyebrows, and Michael informs him, “On the Shenzhou, I was a test pilot for the pods. I flew them for eleven minutes at 5G. I can handle them in a fluctuating gravity well.”
And if she can’t—better her than another officer.
Pike laughs. “Well, if you’re so confident, Commander—after you.”
There are survivors on the Hiawatha—eleven war-wounded in comas, kept alive for months by the chief engineer of the ship. “One minute, we were being pulverized by a batter cruiser,” she tells them. “The next, there’s a flash of red light, and we crashed onto this rock for—how long has it been? Where were y’all months ago? I could have used some company. Doug—” she pats the nearest body on the shoulder, “—isn’t the best conversational partner.”
Michael activates the Discovery’s transporter beacons. The last thing she can see before her world turns to gold is a dark shape wavering, separate from the shadows of the ship’s skeleton. It opens up in the dim orange glow, like the slit pupil of some great beast surrounded by the tiger-eye striations of an iris, or—if she squints—like the turning of shoulders and hips, and the slow spread of wings.
-----
The angel appeared in the sky with a thunderous red blaze, and the shadows skittered along the ground at the hasty unrolling of the clouds before her brightness. The light streamed around her wings and fell to the earth, shard-like. When she spoke, her voice was hollow.
Do not be afraid, she told the people before her. Her mask turned it into sounds never before made by her tongue, her words shifting into commandments.
She held out her hands and pulled. The people before her started to scream.
-----
The Discovery chases the next red signal to appear until it vanishes at the edge of a hydrogen nebula. Another signal flares to life in the Beta quadrant, leading them to Cerna Alpha II, a blue-green smear against the black. Save for the silver rings encircling the planet, it looks like Sol III. Michael has seen Earth only a handful of times before, but she still knows from her textbooks the snapshot of humanity’s first glimpse of their home from afar, their blue marble of a planet.
“Scans indicate over a thousand human life signs, Captain,” Owosekun announces.
“There isn’t any record of a human settlement in this part of the quadrant—”
“That’s not the only problem, Captain,” Tilly says. She winces as she cuts across Pike but forges on. “The settlement is displaying only pre-World War III tech.” The ensign puts a close-up of the planet’s surface on the viewscreen. White buildings line gray streets, their tooth-like rows unbroken by titanium scaffolding. No aircars. No holograms. Not even—
“This town is pre-warp,” Michael realizes. “How did they get into the Beta quadrant without warp travel?”
“Well, we’ll find out soon,” Pike says. “Burnham, your record says that you’re trained as a xenoanthropologist? I want you to talk with the locals, see if they’ve seen the flares.”
“Copied, sir.” Michael goes to prepare for the beam-down. Her mother had smiled when Michael first told her about her degree. I don’t know if I should be proud of you or ashamed of myself and your father, she said, laying a cool hand against Michael’s cheek.
Proud, Michael guessed, because her adoptive daughter managed to make something from her shortcomings. Ashamed—Michael did not understand Amanda’s assumption of shame. When she was ten, she came to live with Amanda and her family on 40 Eridani II. Alpha Doctari, the station where Michael was born, was in ruins from a Klingon raid, and her parents were dead from the avarice of her curiosity. There was nothing left for her on Earth or in the things of Earth.
Amanda was human, like Michael, but married to an ambassador from Eridani, and she tread the mirror-sharp edge between the worlds with grace. She taught Michael and her son to hold themselves proud and distant in front of others, but gathered them close and read them impossible tales of magic before she tucked them in at night. When she took them shopping for gespar in the open markets, where red sand dusted the roadways like flour, she sometimes laughed aloud beneath the crimson sky, and the vendors, unused to human emotiveness, turned towards her in bemused wonderment at the sound. Michael didn’t have that grace. She straightened her hair to hide her curved eyebrows and rounded ears, begged for makeup to bring an olive tint to the brown of her cheeks, tried and tried to dig the human from her—
—and it never worked. The children of Eridani pushed her away, disdaining her face and her clumsy pronunciation of their language, too inflected by her human heart, and when she was older, she turned to xenoanthropology as a means of studying herself, a stranger to two worlds. Amanda should not be ashamed when it was Michael’s own failure to adapt to their world which forced her to such lengths. At least her degree proves useful in her service in Starfleet.
Discovery’s landing party meets with the leaders of the settlement. One of settlers tells them the story of how her parents’ parents were brought to the planet by an angel. Michael pulls Pike aside. “It’s useless, Captain,” she whispers. “All they have is folktales—”
“How do you know it’s useless, Burnham? What other explanation do you have—”
“I might not have any other explanations, but an angel is entirely illogical.”
Far above the ship, the ring above the planet begins to dissolve into glittering dust.
The Discovery frantically beams up the landing party—the particles are radioactive, and would wipe out the settlement should they enter the atmosphere. The captain directs Lieutenant Detmer to whip the ship between the planet and the ring, throwing the particles into higher orbit before they could come too close. The settlers give them an old helmet in thanks.
“It is the last thing we have,” they say, “from when the angel was here.”
The captain and Michael return to the ship. “We were brought here to save them,” he tells her. “I know you don’t believe in these things, Burnham, but we were lead here for a reason.”
“That reason could just as easily be to try and kill us, Captain,” Michael responds.
She ducks into one of the science labs before he can respond. Tilly’s there, running analysis on the radioactive debris from the ring. Michael sets the helmet down on Tilly’s station with a thunk, rubbing at the back of her head. “Is that old Earth steel?” Tilly asks, looking up from her screen.
“Yes, and it’s all yours for testing. See if you can get any footage from the front camera, before the captain asks for it back. He probably wants it for his ready room.”
“Wait—if the captain wants it, then he should—”
“Run all the tests you want, Ensign.” Michael winks. “Consider it an order from your commander.”
Tilly reaches for the table behind her, fumbling for her tricorder. “This is so cool,” she exclaims, leaning in close. “I’ve never actually seen Terran steel outside of my classes. I love old-fashioned rust; everything’s duranium nowadays, it always stays the same—”
Hours later, she plays back the final ten seconds of recording on the camera before its system went out. Faint screaming can be heard, fading ghost-like in and out from background static noise. Do you see that? someone shouts. Is anyone else seeing that—oh my God—the screen goes white, and the audio cuts out to a high, screeching drone. Michael pauses the video at its final frame. She can just see a red silhouette emerging from the white, crowned with wings.
-----
The angel appeared with a clap, sudden lightning in the cloudless noon of deep space, before a ship whose engines had been shattered by the blasts from a Klingon bird-of-prey. The bridge crew stood hand in hand, facing the brightness outside their windows with chins held high. They swayed as they sang in unison, for auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne—
Do not be afraid, the angel said.
This is Captain Okamoto of the USS Yaeger, the captain called. We have activated our self-destruct sequence. You will never get our ship. You will never get our crew. Go to hell.
The angel took the ship into her hands and twisted, and they emerged in a field of colors, the final remnants of a supernova suspended in space. Thousands of years ago, a star died, scattering itself across space; a thousand years from then, stars would be born in this nebula, small and precious like grains of salt. She reached into the ship and turned off the self-destruct sequence. Open your eyes, she bade them. Look.
She faded into the dark, and behind her, the people gasped, and sang the louder.
-----
“The Red Angel has lead us on missions of rescue for people we thought lost,” the captain says in his meeting with the bridge crew. “What does it want with us?”
“I don’t think it’s wise to attribute intentions to the entity yet,” Michael cautions him, studying an image of the angel. “Whether favorable or antagonistic.”
“Where’s your faith, Commander?”
“I prefer to base my conclusions on logic and deduction.”
He snorts. “You and your brother. Cut from the same cloth.”
“He might be offended if he hears you say that,” Michael mutters. Her brother is a science lieutenant posted on Pike’s previous ship. His service record is already better than hers. “There’s nothing easily traceable from the signals, just bits of atron and tacheon radiation—”
“Tacheon radiation? Isn’t that evidence of time travel?”
“It could be from time manipulation devices,” Michael concedes. “Or newer models of transporters.”
“Or plasma blast rays,” Owosekun adds.
“Even going to warp can sometimes discharge tacheon particles,” Detmer chimes in.
Pike holds up his hands. “Fine. Fine—it can be any one of a number of things, including time travel.” A notice pings on his screen. “Let’s table this discussion for now. There’s a shuttle hailing our ship.” He glances at her. “Speak of the devil and he appears—right, Burnham?”
Michael doesn’t say anything as she trails the captain to the shuttle bay to meet her brother. “Lieutenant, what’re you doing here?” the captain asks. “I thought you were on leave.”
“I have information concerning the search for the entity you are calling the Red Angel.”
Michael stares at him. It has been a long time since they spoke face-to-face, but even now, they mirror each other as they always have—shoulders squared, chins high, hands clasped behind their backs so they cannot intrude on the spaces of others.
She knows that it was as hard for him as it was for her growing up. His conception was carefully documented, as one of the first human hybrids in the Federation to survive past birth. Amanda tried to raise him to be proud of both sides of his heritage. Michael did too. For his sake, she remembered Earth. She told him stories about what she little she knew of the planet—the sky, vibrant as the flowers of desert pears; the candies her auntie bought her, sticky-sweet on her palm; the ocean, wide and endless and blue. He laughed then, because to him, the sky was red and the oceans filled with sand incarnadine.
He used to laugh a lot, when his cheeks were moon-round and soft. Michael laughed with him, at the strangeness of a blue sky, at the clumsiness of their pet selhat, at her fingers’ fumbling on the lai’hur’s strings. He loved music, was better at it than she could ever be. Music was to him what her studies were to her—a way to order the world, to make sense of chaos.
But then came that day when she was twelve and he was between six and seven, and her school was bombed. Logic extremists claimed responsibility for the attack, citing her presence as a violation of the culture of Eridani. Michael was legally dead for seven minutes before she was resuscitated. She knew he was in danger—her little brother, her shadow, who wanted to go with her to Earth when he was grown up so he could see the blue sky—they would hurt him, and he was so small, he might not wake up again. She ran away from home, and when he tried to follow her, she turned around and hurt him like others have—freak. Half-breed. Get away from me.
He knew even then that she was trying to protect him, but he never played music for her again. It was for the best; she carried with her a thinning of the world. Her parents died. Her little brother nearly died. And when she had the temerity to find a home with Philippa—
“What information do you have about the angel?” she asks her brother.
He raises an eyebrow at the sharpness of her voice. “I have a connection to the entity.” The captain shepherds them into a conference room, and Michael stands by as her brother plugs a datachip into the holotable, pulling up a drawing of the initial seven signals. “When I was a child, my sister ran away from home. That night, I had a vision of sorts. A red being stood over me, telling me she was in danger. I roused our parents and convinced them to search, and they found her where the entity said she would be, struck unconscious by falling debris.”
Michael’s breath catches in her throat. She remembers running through the trees of T’Par’s Forge, a rumbling, the dark. She had woken up in the hospital. Amanda was worried. Her father was furious. “That was you? You found me in the Forge?”
“The entity did,” he says, dismissing the notion with a flick of his head. “Ever since then, I have found myself drawing these signals in my personal notes. I dismissed it as a nervous habit stemming from my human heritage, and the vision as a mere dream. I took leave from my posting because I felt a pull to the site of the former Alpha Doctari station. I ventured there, and to my surprise, the entity was present. It tried to communicate psychically with me.”
Pike looks troubled. “Did it hurt you, Lieutenant?”
“Not—intentionally,” her brother says slowly. “But it was a difficult process. I could only get impressions from its mind of its intentions. It showed me loneliness. Guilt. Desperation.”
“Desperation?” the captain echoes. He looks at Michael. “Maybe you were right, Commander. None of that sounds good.”
Her brother commandeers a science station, and Michael helps him look for correlation in data from the signals. They work in silence until they come up with a point in the Gamma Lyrae system, in a contested area of Federation space. Before they can decide to go, a signal appears above 22 Epsilon V. It was Kaminar, the native planet to one of the officers on the Discovery.
They warp to Kaminar. They beam down in the middle of a war.
Michael calls for a beam-up, but not before two lieutenants in the landing party were killed. Commander Saru tells them about the two peoples on the surface—the Kelpien, who spend their lives in terror until vahar’ai comes, and the ba’ul, who hunt down Kelpien before the time of vahar’ai. Saru ran from the ba’ul’s harvest. Before today, he was the only Kelpien who succeeded. “The Red Angel must have triggered vahar’ai in the entire Kelpien population,” Saru says, looking down at his planet. “I am grateful my people are now rebelling against the ba’ul, but two of our crew died. We must consider the chance that the Red Angel is hostile.”
“Do you agree, Burnham?” the captain asks, turning to Michael.
“I’m still withholding my judgement about the entity’s motivations, but the effects of following the flare on this ship cannot be denied,” Michael says slowly.
Pike nods and hits the intercom on his chair. “Discovery, this is your captain speaking,” he announces. “For the last week and a half, we have been in pursuit of an entity dubbed the Red Angel. Recent evidence has lead us to think that this entity is a danger to the Federation. We are now seeking to apprehend the Red Angel, in the name of Federation security. Stay on alert.”
He ends the announcement and turns back to the bridge crew. “Detmer, set a course for the Gamma Lyrae system. Maximum warp.”
-----
The angel appeared in the dust, her face upturned to the black of space. Between the mountains of the moon and the fixed stars, metal debris lingered, batted about by the wind of the sun. There was no air for the steel to rust in space. The shuttle landed behind her. You—you are real, the young man called when he saw her. I thought you were a dream.
Do not be afraid, she told him. She was shaking.
He was afraid, but she had to convince him, show him, be absolved. She reached out with her light and pushed and showed him the people she had saved, and all the people she could not, and time was running out, they had no time, she had too much and it was fraying her—
He stumbled back to his shuttle, and she fell to her knees, blazing in vain.
-----
They drop from warp to the sight of a planet cloaked in dust so thick that from space, the clouds appear gold. Pike hails the planet and is given permission to enter low orbit. Their greeters request that they beam down to the surface, to talk about their mission in person. Michael stops the captain before he enters the transporter room. “We have no idea what is down there, and we cannot endanger the command of this vessel,” she says intently. “I am capable of relaying our mission to the people on the surface.”
He looks down at her, the double blasters strapped to her legs and the tactical jacket donned over her uniform. “So you’re volunteering yourself instead, Burnham?”
“It is the logical alternative.”
“I will be accompanying my sister, Captain,” her brother adds over her shoulder. At her glare, he adds, “I realize that we rarely socialize, Michael, but I am not a toddler who needs coddling. I have a connection to the entity and therefore might have insights you would not.”
Michael glares at him wordlessly. They step onto the transporter pads in unison and turn into light, and when they materialize, she starts coughing, the metallic dust in the air crawling into her lungs. There are three cloaked figures waiting for them on the surface, and they remove their tawny hoods to reveal luminous eyes. They speak like the susurration of wind in fall leaves, and Michael’s translator says in its mechanical tones, “Welcome, Federation.”
“Thank you for receiving us,” Michael manages to say, and her translator turns it into the papery whispers of the planet’s language.
“What brings you to us? No Federation have come in two of your centuries.”
“We are looking for an entity we call the Red Angel. It has the power to spontaneously appear anywhere in the galaxy at its will—”
One of the people from the planet makes a chirruping noise. Her translator does not render it into Standard, but Michael has the impression that they are laughing at her. “An angel, you say? A traveler between worlds? Look around, Federation.”
The wind dies down, letting her clear her throat. Michael squints through the settling dust at the shapes surrounding them. Large, cragged, too metallic to be stones, almost like houses—
“These are ships,” her brother realizes. “Ships, from past renegade travelers—”
Not just ships. The three break apart, pulling out chunks of metal from the dust-covered pile behind them—a temporal vortex armband, a personal handheld transporter, boots which blink, a carapace of glittering points, items she only half recognizes, items which are entirely foreign to her. “They all come through here, on their way to the past and the future. When their ships and their boots and their engines give out, they leave them here.” One of them squints up at the sky. “Hurry, Federation. We have one of your hours until we will move to a different stream. That is what happens, when there is too much transgression of time.”
“Look,” Michael breathes, nudging at her brother’s arm. She points to a glint of metal she can make out in the distance. Wings. Metal wings, sharp even beneath the dust.
“The angel has been through here,” he murmurs. His hand falls to his communicator. “Michael, I’m going to relay this information to the ship. Run scans on the wings, and see if there’s anything else that potentially can be part of the angel’s apparatus.”
The three from the planet lead her over to the wings, and she crouches down, running her fingers over the sharp lines of the silver feathers. “Do you know where these came from?”
“The far, far future, placed in the far, far past. They have been on the planet since the time of my mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother.” One leans in close, running a twig-like finger over a knife-like edge and shuddering. “There are legends, Federation. Folktales. They say these can only be used by one who has an affinity for slipping between the worlds. They say that whoever bears these can sing time into obedience, even cajole the Beyond into giving up what was taken. Reverse the order of existence. Bring the dead back into life.”
Michael swallows. “I never much believed in folktales.”
It had been a point of playful contention between her and Philippa. So little of our universe has been explored, Number One, Philippa liked to remind her. Who is to say that there are no dragons beyond the edges of our world?
I prefer to base my conclusions on logic and deduction, Captain, she would say, making a face, but she often found herself smiling when Philippa smiled, so her frown did not last.
Philippa was one of the greatest tactical minds of their day. Michael was fairly sure that she didn’t actually believe in monsters in the spaces between the stars, but she did keep a little shrine in her quarters, and lit incense and offered grapes and little cookies to the holo of her grandparents propped up in a wooden frame. Replicated grapes, she told Michael with a snort after the incense burned down to snowy ash. Space food. They’re aghast right now.
Once, when the Shenzhou was scheduled a weekend for maintenance at the Earth spacedock, Michael asked for a day off. Philippa granted it. But there must have been something amiss in the tenor of her voice, because after she sat with stinging eyes by two gravestones for hours, she heard a softly cleared throat and looked up to see her captain. My grandmother believed in angels. Michael told Philippa. She said my parents were with the angels now.
And what did you say to her?
I told her that Heaven and Hell didn’t exist. Michael rubbed at her eyes. I haven’t seen her in years, she said tiredly. When I was younger, I was afraid that she’d tell me that I was going to Hell.
Why, Number One? Philippa sits down next to her in the wet grass. Why would she—
—because it’s my fault, Philippa, I was the one who begged to see the supernova, I was the one who made my parents wait a day before we left for Mars, if it hadn’t been for me, we would have left Alpha Doctari before the raid ever happened—
No. Philippa wrapped her arms around. No, it’s not your fault, you should not blame yourself for your parents’ passing. Never say that. It’s not your fault, Michael.
Her captain was the first person who held her since she tried to run away from home, the first person who tried to convince her that there was something left for her in the things of Earth. The first to say that it wasn’t her fault. Philippa would have adored this mission, Michael thinks, her eyes stinging from the bite of the wind and dust. Angels and time travel, resurrection and wonder. She would have adored it.
“I think I’ve gathered all the parts of the angel I can identify,” Michael calls over to her brother. “Let’s head back to the ship.”
-----
The angel appeared as softly as she could, in a room too small for the spread of her wings. The little boy in the bed jolted awake at her light.
Do not be afraid, she told him, as gently as she could.
She showed him where his sister was lying, in a forest teeming with shadows, and he started to cry. Michael doesn’t love me, he sobbed. She doesn’t want me to help her—
She loves you, the angel told him. She loves you so, so much.
Are you sure?
She smiled behind her mask. I am certain.
-----
“These wings. Are. Incredible,” Tilly gushes, poring over them with her tricorder. “I’ve never even heard of technology like this, it’ll cut like—like—like a hot knife through the butter of spacetime. And it doesn’t just bring you into different locations and different times—the combination of the wings and everything else would phase you out of spacetime enough for you to break physical laws. You could pick up a decently-sized moon in this suit and hurl it into a different dimension, if you wanted. It leaves residual emissions like a Tellarite in Risa, though.” She frowns down at the numbers on her screen. “It also probably hurts like crazy to use.”
“The residual radiation was what caused the flares we were tracking,” Michael realizes, looking up from her analysis of the circuitry in the carapace.
Pike steps into the science lab. “I just got word back from Starfleet. They want us to take the armor back to Starbase 9; the science teams there’ll get to the bottom of the tech. The Red Angel’s now a priority risk—everything has to go through the admiralty.”
The corners of Tilly’s mouth twitch down. “But—sir—we’ve barely gotten started—”
“The orders are from the admiralty, Ensign, not me.” He nods at all of them “Pack this up into the crates. I’ll see you all in the morning.”
That night, Michael lies in bed, cradling her elbows in her cupped palms. They say that whoever bears these can sing time into obedience, even cajole the Beyond into giving up what was taken. Reverse the order of existence. Bring the dead back into life. She goes into the lab and freezes when she sees her brother standing at a console, his face bathed in the pale blue lights.
“What are you doing here?” she demands.
“I knew you would try to do this.” He turns to face her. “Ever since you were a child, you have shouldered the blame for every misfortune that happens to transpire around you.”
“It has to be me.” She kneels down to open up the crates they’d just packed, revealing the sharp scales of the carapace. It is heavy on her chest, pressing down on her lungs like a living stone. “I can use these. I can make up for what I did during the war, for all those people who died because of me—”
“You need to stop blaming yourself, Michael; you are not to blame—”
“It has to be me,” she repeats.
“Michael—” he trails off, his eyes as wide as they were when they were both young and frightened. “It will hurt,” he says helplessly. “You will be hurt.”
“I need to try.”
He swallows hard and nods once, squares his shoulders, tilts his chin up high and proud. “What do you need me to do?”
“No—Pike trusts you, I can’t ask you to help me.”
“You need not ask.” He hurries over to the control panel and the door and jabs at the dials. “I can cut the security recordings for this lab for an hour before the security protocols in the ship’s computer will notice.” He looks over his shoulder at her. “Go, Michael.”
She puts the mask on over her head. The metal is cold, clammy. The wings fit into the mount at the back of the carapace, and the gauntlets mold to her hands like skin and clack against each other like bone. Michael closes her eyes and pictures the lab around her, the duranium walls and sleek holotables, her brother standing steadily by the door. She will go into this unknown to sing for the release of those beyond, and she will come back to this small world of metal and glass. Before she can hesitate, she activates the suit.
The air is still. And then—
—a pain, tearing underneath her skin—
—her tongue, turned metal and incomprehensible even to her own ears, because she thinks she is screaming, can feel it, cannot hear it through the light, and she is inside a church and is the church and three hundred people kneel before her, do not be afraid, she is afraid because she’s gone too far, centuries peeling away paper-like, but the bombs are too close and the church was going to be blown up three hours ago and a minute from now, so she takes them all, and she starts to hear it now, her own screaming, her own skin tearing from the light—
“—Michael, you must come back, you have to come back—”
Michael yanks her mask off and vomits. Her brother calls for the lab to begin its automated cleaning and keeps holding her as she shakes. His hands are white-knuckled, trembling. “You cannot do this to yourself.”
“I have to,” she pants. She wipes at her mouth with a metal hand. “I saved the church from World War III. I’m the Red Angel. It’s in our timeline. I have to go to all seven sites—”
“No. I will use this device.” He reaches for the helmet. “The timeline will not be affected by the identity of the person in the suit; I can follow the patterns of the signals as you have been doing—”
“I can’t let you do that,” Michael says sharply. “You can’t—what if it hurts you, scrambles your mind? What if it kills you?”
He stares at her, eyes wide in what seems to be disbelief. “What if it kills you, Michael?”
“That doesn’t matter. I have to do this. You don’t understand—”
“You are correct,” he bites out. “I do not understand why you insist on endangering yourself. You have nothing to atone for.”
She wants to laugh, but her throat aches too much. “I have a whole war to atone for.”
“You were not the cause of the war—”
“—but if I wasn’t the cause of the war, then why was I convicted of mutiny? Why was I sentenced to life in prison? If I wasn’t the cause of the war—” she realizes that her voice has risen to a hoarse half-scream, “—then why did you all blame me?”
“Starfleet held you up as the mutineer because it was convenient,” her brother says hotly. “You no more killed Captain Georgiou than I did—”
“—but I did kill her,” Michael shouts. Her brother falls quiet. She wants to throw up again. “I killed her when I convinced her to go with me on the Empire’s ship, I killed Philippa and I started the war and now she’s dead because of me and I was the one who killed them all—”
“No, Michael.” Her brother works his jaw in silence for a moment, his eyes too bright. “You did not kill your captain. Just as did not kill your parents for wanting to see the stars for one more day.” His throat makes a clicking noise as he swallows. “Just as you did not inflict danger on me when we were children.”
Michael turns away at his words. She dry heaves, and feels him wince.
“You are not to blame,” he continues. His voice is soft now, shaky. “You never were. And you were not to blame for trying to protect me the only way you knew how.” He’s looking down at her like he’s afraid, and his fingers tremble where they support the back of her head. “I am sorry. That I blamed you.”
“It’s too late for that,” Michael says gently. “But thank you.”
The mask feels heavier than it did before as she lifts it to her face. She tries to brace for the pain but then—
—the light, lancing like a nail through the doorhinge of her skull—
—her voice, turned into a scream of tigers and boars and le-matya and selhats, the rightness of the time and the wrongness of the place, and the Kelpien are screaming back at her with the screaming of old stairs, and she reaches a hand into them one at a time all at once and pulls their fear out, and her own terror ricochets when she can’t move forward in time, watches their war end and cities grow with dandelions’ backbones in spring and fade in a summer hundreds of summers from the spring and their sun blinks like an eye on the verge of sleep—
“—Oh my God. Michael. Michael, wake up. You have to snap out of it, now—”
Two pairs of hands are supporting her, taking off the mask to let her take heaving breaths. “Tilly?” she asks muzzily. Her mouth is sour, wooly. “What—what’re—”
“Your brother woke me up. Said it was an emergency.” Tilly brings a cup of water to her lips. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
Michael’s chest feels like it has been crushed by a great hand. “I’m okay, Tilly,” she says.
Tilly fiddles with her life sign monitor. “How many trips do you have left?”
“Five. But the—seventh signal—hasn’t reappeared yet. I’m—not sure—”
“Do not worry about that,” her brother tells her, brushing her hair from her forehead. “Only keep coming back to us.” His voice breaks. “Please, Michael. Keep coming back home.”
They put the mask back on her head, and she closes her eyes, and then she is—
—swimming among the stars, the Yaeger in her palms, as big as a toaster oven—
—seeing the world end, she shatters herself with her screaming and goes to where her world first ended, and she is too early and too late to save them—
—I love you, I love you so, so much—
-----
The angel appeared, splintering the sky with the rustling of bells, and the ship’s engineer was waiting for her. The woman was covered in blood, gritting her teeth as she tried to keep a man’s guts from spilling out.
Well. Looks like I’m gonna see the pearly gates after all, she said.
The angel reached out. Do not be afraid.
She took the ship into her hands and turned, and set it on the surface of an asteroid dancing with an elder star. You hang in there, Doug, she heard the engineer say, patting the injured man’s back. You’ll see your wife again. I’ll see mine. We’ll make it back to them.
-----
“I just—rescued—the Hiawatha—” Michael gasps. She bares her teeth in an unvoiced scream as her whole body seizes.
Tilly’s eyes are watery as she wipes the sweat from Michael’s forehead with a soft cloth. “You can’t do this for much longer. You really can’t. Your vitals are off the charts. You can probably take one or two more trips, before your body starts to fall apart.”
“I only need—to make one more. But—I don’t—know where—”
“Michael.” Her brother’s voice is quiet. “There is one instance where you might—”
“No,” she stops him before he finishes his sentence. The pain has stopped, but her breathing still is coming fast and shallow. “The Shenzhou was evacuated. There’s no one—”
“There is someone.” Michael can only shake her head, and her brother forges on, “I cannot understand your refusal when her death is the one which weighs most heavily on your mind. Is this all not self-flagellation enough?”
“No. No. I can’t save her; it would be selfish—”
“Why is it selfish?”
She licks at her cracked lips, tasting blood. “Because—because—”
Because it would be for her own benefit, as even saving her own life was not. Because saving Philippa would be nothing short of greed for the chance to witness starshine in her captain’s eyes, and it frightens her, it sickens her, how her blood and brain are clamoring at her to do it, to rescue Philippa in place of a stranded ship or a planet of millions—
“—because—I love her—” Michael closes her eyes as the words fall from her throat.
“You love her,” her brother repeats. “It is not selfish to love.”
Tilly’s hand is warm through the metal of her carapace, her brother’s steady at the back of her head. Her cheeks are wet, but she doesn’t dry them. She never told her. She never had the chance. The closest she came was when the Shenzhou was stationed to measure the gravimetric activity in the Andromeda nebula. Philippa had lead Michael into one of the observation rooms on the starboard side of the ship, and they watched the newborn stars in the nebula, sparking against the gas clouds which feathered through the dark of space like luminescent ink in water. They looked close enough for Michael to reach out and cup them in her hands.
Philippa rested a hand on the glass. I planned this mission so we would get to see this.
Michael wanted to speak. She half-wanted to turn away but fully could not, caught by the brilliance which was spangled in the honey of Philippa’s hair, glancing in her eyes, and she wanted to tangle herself in it until her disparate pieces could not be unraveled from its glory.
Thank you, Philippa, she managed to say.
My pleasure, Number One. Philippa turned to her and grinned, and the light glinted from her smile, bright enough to move the sun and the other stars.
Michael cradles the memory of that brightness in her mind and dons the mask again.
-----
The angel appears in the depths of the ship with a sound much like music. She runs over to the body lying prone on the ground. Captain, she says, her voice frantic even through the dulling mask. Captain—Philippa—don’t be afraid, Philippa, I’m here—
Philippa stirs. Michael? she slurs. What—I thought you were safe—back on the ship—
I’m here, Philippa. I’m here for you.
She cradles Philippa in her arms and jumps, soaring into light. She never once looks back.