by Lauren Esker
"Remember that Galatean military cruiser on the dark side of the moon? There it is."
Skara zoomed in on it, and she got a better look. It was less a ship than a flying city. The blocky, modular design was clearly not meant to be flown in an atmosphere, and it wasn't designed for looks, either. It looked like it had been put together out of kids' blocks, a great mobile platform of a ship, sinking slowly into the atmosphere of the planet. Something silver glimmered beneath it in the light of the setting sun.
"What are those?"
"They just deployed chaser ships, about the size of the one we're in. Son of a bitch. We get away clean, and then these dinguses got them on our tail."
Claudia decided not to point out that they didn't know that for sure; it could just as easily have been the Discordia that had caught the big ship's attention. "What are we going to do?"
Skara's gaze went unfocused as he concentrated on the ship. "I'm going to jump us out. I have to. The alternative is getting caught here."
"But your ship—"
"I'm taking it along."
"Can you do that?"
"As long as it's grappled to us, sure. It'll put extra stress on the engines, that's all. There's only a very slight chance of things going wrong."
"What happens if things go wrong?"
Skara flashed a quick grin at her. There was a manic glint in his eye, and she wondered all over again just what exactly had been in that injector. "We explode."
"Wait—"
They sank below the cloud layer, into the sepia-tinted dusk. "This is going to be tricky," Skara said, his voice going distant again. "I can't jump from a gravity well. I need to get out, preferably without the Galateans seeing my jump vector. I'm gonna try to put the planet between us—"
"Can we talk more about the exploding part?"
"It's not likely."
"Any chance of exploding is too much!"
"There's always a chance of exploding when you go through jump."
"Not helping!"
"Shhh, I need to concentrate."
Claudia finally managed to get the restraint thingie to do its thing, just as Skara did something to the ship and the clouds seemed to boil around them. That was motion, she realized a moment later—they were whipping through the clouds at a terrifying speed.
"Yeah, yeah," Skara muttered. "Looks like your Mrs. Potato Head—"
"She's not mine!"
"—is getting around my security protocols faster than I thought she would. I can't keep blocking her calls. You talk to her for a minute. Explain to her what's happening. Be sure and mention that she's an idiot."
"I, uh—" Claudia began, but snapped her mouth shut when a tiny hologram of the furious purple woman popped up above the console in front of her.
"What are you idiots doing?!"
"So apparently there are Galateans here, whatever those are, and I think we're going to, uh ... jump?" Claudia glanced at Skara. "Whatever that means."
"We're still grappled together! You'll kill us all!"
"Oh come on," Skara said without looking at her. "You can't tell me a couple of accomplished bounty hunters like yourselves haven't done a jump while towing cargo."
"No we haven't! Because it's ill-advised and stupid!"
"Well, then you're in for a new experience. I suggest you sit down and strap in, not that I wouldn't enjoy watching you tumble all over my ship."
"Are you the reasonable one?" the purple woman appealed to Claudia. "Is either of you the reasonable one? Can you talk him out of this? We are going to die."
"Skara made it sound like there wasn't much chance of things going wrong." Claudia gave him a longer and more critical look. "Skara, how likely is us blowing up. exactly?"
"Very likely!" said the purple woman.
"Not at all likely, for a pilot who knows what they're doing," Skara said. His voice was a sleepwalker's now, the words addressed to the console in front of him instead of either of them. "It's just like ... running down a hill ... the only dangerous part is if you lose your nerve and try to stop."
"It's nothing like that!" the purple woman said.
"Claudia, mute her, please."
Claudia fumbled with the controls until she figured out how. The purple woman launched into a silent rant, gesturing wildly at them.
"We're about to break atmosphere and jump," Skara said in that same sleepwalker's voice. "Have you been through a hyperspace jump before?"
"What do you think?" She clutched at the sides of her seat.
"Fair point. Just relax. It'll be over in a minute."
One way or another! she wanted to say, but just then the ship broke free of the clouds. They were on the night side of the planet, faced with a sky full of impossibly bright stars.
"On my mark, as soon as we get clear of the planet's gravity," Skara muttered. "And ... mark."
Claudia had no idea what she thought was going to happen—long smearing trails of stars like in Star Wars, maybe. What actually happened was a moment of incredible disorientation. Up was down, inside was out, colors and shapes were suddenly and entirely wrong in a way she couldn't even explain. She would have screamed if she'd been able to figure out how.
And then everything snapped back to normal. Her lungs figured out how to scream again, but all that emerged was a tiny, breathless "Eep!"
"You okay?" Skara asked without looking at her.
"I, um, yeah? I think?" She patted at her chest as if that could tell her anything useful. The only thing she managed to do was accidentally disengage her seat restraints.
Skara rotated the ship. The sun came into view, and she was just about to ask if they'd actually gone anywhere at all when he rotated still further and the curve of a planet appeared.
It wasn't Venus. It wasn't any planet she'd learned about in school. It was swirled orange and violet and brown and white, and there was a thin band of rings around it.
"Where are we?"
"It's a planet called Haven." Skara sounded weary. Claudia gave him a quick, worried look. His face had broken out in sweat again; his dark red hair was soaked and nearly black with it. "I didn't want to bring them here, but I didn't really have a choice. Dragging the Discordia's fully loaded mass, I could only get one reliable jump out of these engines, and this is just about the only one-jump destination from Earth that's not going to be crawling with Galateans. At least the only one that I already have the coordinates for."
"I didn't understand any of—Skara!"
The alarm in her voice pulled him out of his lethargy. "What?"
"Your nose is bleeding."
"Crap." He rubbed a hand across his upper lip. His blood was the bright purple of plums. "I better set this ship down."
"Something is really wrong with you, isn't it?"
"None of your business." His voice was sharp; he turned his attention back to the ship. "Put your restraints back on. Landings are where things can get rough."
"It's my business if you pass out, because I can't fly this thing!"
"I'm not going to pass out. Shut up and let me concentrate."
"Fine," Claudia said, because she wasn't about to let him have the last word, and then she was too distracted by the view on the screens to even be annoyed.
The planet was stunning. It could never have been mistaken for any planet in Earth's solar system. Between the rings and the violet-and-tan color scheme, swirled with white clouds and blue oceans, it was very clearly nothing she'd ever seen in an astronomy textbook or on the news.
Going to Venus had been amazing, but at least she'd seen pictures of Venus. NASA had sent probes to Venus. This was an entire alien world, in another solar system. She was the first human to ever lay eyes on it.
The first Earth human, she amended, with a fast sideways glance at Skara. Assuming what he'd told her about his people's origins was true. How much could she really trust any of what he'd told her? He was a greedy pirate, concerned only with however much money he could sell his cargo for. Maybe none of what he'd said was t
rue.
But right now, they were in this together. Skara's eyes were fixed straight ahead, all his attention focused on flying the ship. His arms trembled with the strain. Sweat glistened on his neck, and there was a fresh trickle of blood on his upper lip.
Nothing she could do would help, so she looked back at the view. The ship was starting to shudder under them as they entered the upper atmosphere, flying through streamers of clouds. Beneath them, the world was a patchwork quilt of tan and violet, gold and blue and green. White crowned its poles and capped the chains of mountain ranges. It was beautiful and incredibly alien.
And also, as far as she could tell, completely uninhabited. They were still high, but jet-plane high, not satellite-orbit high. From here, she should have been able to see roads and cities, if there were any. She saw none. Only a vast and colorful wilderness, tan deserts unfolding into endless fields of violet and golden-green that might be ... flowers? Weird-colored alien plants? From this altitude, she couldn't tell.
Skara banked suddenly and flew along a vast mountain range. On its far side, she glimpsed the sparkle of a great ocean before they descended and the view of the ocean was blocked by mountains.
She had no idea what he was aiming for. It was just as much of a wilderness here as elsewhere, a huge plateau dotted with lakes and patchy forest. She didn't actually see it until they were almost on top of it, and it wasn't at all what she was expecting. It was a little town on the edge of a lake, not much more than a scattering of houses with smoke curling up, a couple of bigger structures, and something large and silver at the edge of town that she thought, before the trees hid it, might be another ship.
Skara set down with a jarring thump. There was nothing now visible through the screen but vaguely purplish trees.
"Where are we?" she asked, turning to him. "Is this a secret smuggler hideout?"
Skara didn't answer. He stared straight ahead for a moment, then slowly extracted first one of his hands, then the other.
"Skara?"
He rotated his seat and started to stand up. Swayed. Then his body jerked, his legs folded, and he crumpled to the deck and began to seize.
Twelve
"Skara!"
Claudia knelt beside him. She'd never seen anyone have a seizure before, and it was terrifying. She had always vaguely imagined thrashing and flailing. This was worse. His eyes were half open, rolled back in his head; his body arched like a taut bow, his limbs rigid and trembling. His heels drummed against the floor.
It was over in moments, while she was still desperately trying to remember if you were supposed to loosen their clothing or put something in their mouth or just do nothing. With a final twitch, Skara relaxed and went limp. His rolled-back eyes closed and he wilted against the floor. His face had paled to a color more like bluish lavender than purple, and plum-colored blood smeared his cheek and lips.
First aid, first aid. She tried to think back to those Red Cross courses so long ago. Roll him to the side? Yes, you were supposed to do that. Claudia hesitantly laid hands on him and pushed at him, finding him unexpectedly heavy, a floppy deadweight with too many limbs. Literally too many limbs. He now had an extra set of arms that had apparently grown during the seizure; she'd been too horrified by everything else to notice. Nervously she nudged and rearranged all four of the arms he now had.
He was cool to the touch, and it occurred to her that she hadn't even checked if he was breathing. She held the back of her hand against his lips. It came away smudged with deep purple blood.
"Skara." She was getting scared now. "Skara!" She shook him gently. There was no response. Finally, belatedly, she remembered to check his pulse, and found it light and rapid.
"I wish you'd stop passing out. This is getting really inconvenient."
She curled his hand over one of his, and crouched beside him on the floor until finally deciding that she couldn't just stay here. She was on a bounty hunter ship with at least one and possibly more bounty hunters around, and she needed to get out of here, and go for help.
Problem one: the door to the bridge was shut, and she couldn't open it.
"Oh, come on," she murmured. She pressed her hands to it, beat a fist against it, felt the walls for something to open it with, then directed a glare over her shoulder at Skara's limp form. "Really? Couldn't you at least unlock the door before passing out?"
Okay. There was more than one way to get out of here, for her, at least.
She stood on tiptoe to get a better view out of the screens showing the forest around the ship. It looked like they'd set down in a clearing. There was moss under the trees, curly and golden green; the leaves were violet with hints of blue and green. Claudia stared at them until her eyes watered and tried to imagine herself under them, her feet sinking into the soft moss ...
The air unzipped in front of her. She stepped through into the woods of an alien world.
Her knees wobbled. She reached into her pocket for another of the energy bars Skara had given her and took a large bite. She didn't feel as crappy this time. Either her body was getting used to this, or short hops didn't use as much energy.
Though it seemed she'd overshot her target a bit. At first she saw only trees as she looked wildly around, thinking she'd lost the ship; then, turning, she glimpsed it through the trees' faintly greenish trunks. Relief washed over her. The ship might not be home, but it was the closest thing to home on an entire alien planet, not to mention her only way off this world and back to Earth. And it was where Skara was.
She picked her way through the woods back to the ship—ships, actually. She had temporarily forgotten that Skara's ship was hooked to the other one. Now, from the outside, she saw them both side by side.
The bounty hunters' ship was bigger, a tapered silver teardrop that still made her think of a UFO. Skara's ship, from the outside, was ... really something. It was, if anything, even more colorful on the outside than the inside. Some might say garish, but Claudia liked bright colors, so she wasn't going to complain. And it had a dazzling array of ... well ... stuff on it. The other ship was sleek and aerodynamic-looking. Skara's ship looked like he'd added anything he thought he might want or need. Antennae bristled every which way, and extra wings, and extra engines.
She ate another energy bar while she stared up at the conjoined ships and tried to figure out what to do. She didn't have the first clue which way to start walking to get to that little town she'd seen. For that matter, she wasn't sure if they were even within walking distance, as fast as their ship had been moving when they'd flown over it.
Could she teleport to the village after having only seen it once?
She concentrated, trying to remember exactly what it had looked like. As a graphic artist, she had a pretty good visual memory; she was used to exercising that part of her brain. There had been a collection of small wooden houses with colorfully painted walls, arranged in a kind of semicircle. Two bigger structures—or maybe three?—were probably the local school, community center, health clinic, or whatever a town that size would have. And then there was the ship beside the town, gleaming silvery in the sun.
She thought she might be getting it. Concentrating so hard that her temples began to throb, she was vaguely aware of a faint blue-violet glow starting to materialize in the air in front of her—
A shadow swept over her. Claudia's concentration shattered. She spun around just as something, no—someone thumped to the ground behind her. Claudia's first, startled thought was that the other person, a young woman, had jumped out of a flying vehicle. But then she saw the wings.
The other girl was a few years younger than Claudia, with faint purplish undertones to her dark skin, and she had hair like feathers, fluffy and barred white and gray and brown. The hair matched her wings. They were gray-barred like those of a hawk or owl, mantled above her shoulders with the feathers bristling like hackles. She wore a loose yellow sarong-type blouse, draped in a way that avoided interfering with the motion of her wings, over brown pants and
boots. On each of her wrists, one silver cuff and one gold gleamed, one above the other, and she was pointing both fists at Claudia.
Claudia had enough experience with those wrist-weapons by now to know that they were nothing to mess around with. "I'm not your enemy," she said, hold her hands in the air.
The hawk-woman's wings bristled even more aggressively, and Claudia realized that with the gold cuffs on her own wrists, holding up her hands wasn't exactly the gesture of surrender that it was on Earth. She put her hands down instead and then tried putting them behind her back.
"Who are you?" the hawk-woman demanded, in what sounded to Claudia like faintly accented English, but from what Skara had said about translators, was probably some other language entirely. "Where is Skara?"
"Oh! You know Skara!"
"Don't play games! How did you get here in his ship? Whose ship is that? How did you find this place? And where is he?"
"He's on that ship." Claudia pointed to it before realizing from the hawk-woman's alarmed reaction that pointing was a threat gesture for people who wore their weapons on their wrists. "Sorry." She clasped one hand over the other and put them down. "He's hurt. We need help. I'm Claudia. Who are you?"
"I'm Kite." That wasn't exactly what she said, but it was a name that suggested a wide-winged bird of prey. "What happened to Skara? Did you do something to him?"
"No!" Claudia said quickly, as an ominous green glow coalesced around Kite's cuffs. "I'm a—I'm his—" Friend? Lover? Captive? Passenger? Nothing really quite seemed to fit. "I want to help him," was what came out, and it must have come out sincerely enough to defuse some of Kite's suspicion, because the green glow faded and the hawk-woman lowered her hands. "As for who the other ship is, it belongs to couple of bounty hunters, and they're still on board. Er, more accurately, one of them is trapped on Skara's ship and one of them is locked into a cabin on theirs."
Kite gave a sharp laugh that seemed to startle her as much as it did Claudia. "That sounds like something Skara would do. Where is he right now?"
Claudia pointed up at the silver curve of the bounty hunters' ship, remembering too late that it would look to Kite like she was lining up a shot, but this time Kite seemed to understand that she didn't mean anything by it. "He's on the bridge of that ship. He collapsed and ... had a seizure." It still twisted her stomach into miserable knots, thinking about it. Especially for someone like Skara, who was so prickly and defensive. He would have hated having anyone see him like that. She regretted that she'd had to, and at the same time, she was suddenly glad it had only been her. "What's wrong with him, anyway? Does he have some kind of medical condition?"