by TJ Berry
“Only, the places that we bounce aren’t really random. I mean, they look like it if you take the collection of them from this trip, but you can also see that we are moving in a generally forward direction. You can’t see it easily until you assemble all the data from all the FTL jumps from all over the Reason, but then you start to see that there are actually fixed points in the null that act like pathways. Not exactly tunnels, but more like nodes through which we slip into a new, predetermined location. It’s not as chaotic as it looks when you first see it. It’s actually a predetermined network of nodes that you can map out like a highway.”
“How does the Reason not know about this?” asked Bào. “Because no one ship had a computer powerful enough to compile the data. If they had daisy-chained a few ships AIs together, it would have been easy, but the Reason Space Force isn’t in the habit of allowing ships to exchange data,” said Rhian.
“Bit of a competition problem between the ships,” agreed Bào.
“Yeah. They’re not encouraged to share anything, let alone sensitive data about the null,” said Rhian.
Bào noted his use of “their” instead of “our” when he spoke about the Reason ships. It was odd phrasing for someone who was ostensibly born and raised in the jingoistic confines of Resonspace.
“Is this your first post?” Bào asked.
“Yeah, you?”
“No, I–” said Bào, before realizing he’d slipped. He laughed to cover. “Just kidding. Of course. I’m barely out of training.” He was glad they were walking side by side so Rhian couldn’t see the consternation on his face from nearly slipping up and mentioning his previous positions. Not to mention the fact that most of those ships had been Bala and not Reason. Bào felt as if he was hiding a lot these days. It was becoming difficult to keep his two lives separated.
“The Kilonova has enough processing power to load all the data and crunch the numbers. There are major nodes and minor nodes. It seems to be a hub-and-spoke network of systems that interconnect,” said Rhian, showing him a small portion of their current quadrant mapped to an overlapping set of nullspace nodes.
“Like the way we do with aeronautical flight paths within a planet’s atmosphere,” said Bào.
“Exactly. We jump to the nearest major node, then take a few of the smaller nodes to the closest big hub,” said Rhian, looking pleased that Bào understood.
“Why not just jump major hub to major hub? The null isn’t distance-dependent,” asked Bào.
“I’m not sure. I have a theory that it’s a traffic flow control, but I’m not sure who’s controlling it. The Pymmie or the null itself. I can’t tell yet,” said Rhian.
“Wait. How are you getting computer time? Don’t you work in sanitation?” asked Bào.
Rhian blushed and scratched his chin, where just a handful of soft hairs grew.
“I’m cleaning the trash after the labs are empty for the night. People tuck notes with their passwords into their tablet cases.”
“You’re wasting your talents down in sanitation,” said Bào. “You should apply to officer training school.”
“I’m smart enough to be an officer,” said Rhian. “My family… they just have…”
There was only one reason a capable young student would be denied entry into the officer training program. Someone in the family had married into Bala blood. It didn’t even have to be in your actual bloodline. If your aunt married a Bala it would be enough to taint her brother’s entire line down at least three generations.
“I get it. You don’t have to say,” said Bào. Even though they weren’t near anyone in the hallway who could hear, the ship’s AI retained records of all conversations in public areas. Bào wasn’t even sure that what went on in his quarters was entirely private, but the AI hadn’t alerted the captain to a stowaway, so if he was being recorded it was simply being logged to a background file for later use in any investigations or court martial proceedings.
“Do you have anyone in your family that…” asked Rhian, leaving the sentence unfinished out of the same paranoia that Bào had. “Is that how you got your necromancer abilities?”
“Nope, we’re human all the way back,” said Bào. Though he’d always felt more comfortable among the Bala who treated his ability with joy and wonder instead of mistrust and fear.
Even though the Siege of Copernica Citadel was one of the most devastating battles of the war, he recalled the time living in the citadel among the Bala as one of the fondest of his life. They were kind enough to offer him a safe haven when his necromancer abilities began to manifest as a teen. The humans near him had, at best, avoided him when purple lightning began to twinkle into existence around Bào. Some had threatened to turn him in to the authorities if he didn’t stop making strange things happen. For Bào’s part, he would have given anything to be normal, but magic seeped out of him like sweat. His savior was a kind member of the kitchen staff at school – a part-Bala man who gave Bào the number of someone who could get him out of Reasonspace before he ended up conscripted… or worse, dissected.
The Bala who had smuggled Bào out had been rightfully cautious. They told him nothing about where they were going or who he was meeting. There were times when he doubted leaving the Reason was the safest course of action. When he finally arrived on Copernica – the seat of Bala power – he was stunned to be given a room in the fortress where most of the Bala heads of state lived. He’d expected a holding cell or at most a dormitory, not a palace.
The Bala had never once mentioned his human ancestry. They assigned him a tutor, who showed him how to control his burgeoning powers, and taught him the Bala history that had never been shared in Reason schools. They showed him what a cooperative society could look like – no one exploited and everyone’s contribution valued.
Not like here on the Reason ships. Here it was every man for himself. This kid next to him was so eager to make a connection with him. Bào felt bad pushing him away. The next guy would probably use him then break his heart. He felt bad for the kid, growing up Reason.
“How do you do that,” asked Rhian. “If you’re not one of them.”
“Necromancers are human,” said Bào. “Just like you.”
Rhian scoffed. “Not like me at all.”
“I’m just saying, we’re ordinary people who happen to be able to use nullspace energy. There’s a theory that anyone can do it with a little practice.”
They walked past three munitions storage holds before Rhian spoke again. The hallway was empty except for them.
“My great grandma. She was a… a… she was a good singer. When she sang, people listened. Sometimes, they forgot what else they were doing to come listen. I think they call that a siren.”
Bào’s face flushed under the Kevin Chen disguise. The information this kid was entrusting him with could send him to prison for the rest of his life.
“Yeah. That’s a good skill to have,” said Bào noncommittally, letting Rhian choose how much more he felt comfortable sharing.
“I’ve got it too. A little bit. I’m a really good singer. People listen. They give me their attention and they don’t leave.”
Bào felt for the kid. Here he was working in the sewers, cleaning up the waste of eight thousand people when he should have been performing in concert halls to sold out audiences. The damned Reason was always reducing people to their lowest common denominators.
“You’re still pretty young. You could still be a singer,” ventured Bào.
“Nah,” said Rhian. “If they got wind of how I was filling the seats, it’d be over for me. But maybe sometime… I could sing for you.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Bào felt like it was the least he could do. Rhian fell into that strange category of Bala who were human enough to have been left behind when the Pymmie moved everyone, but magical enough that they could never be their true selves in Reason society. Bào understood living this kind of inbetween life. He was fully human but he’d always felt the most at home in Bala socie
ty. His time in Copernica Citadel had been the best of his life.
The Citadel had been a self-sufficient Bala stronghold longer than humans had been walking upright. Carved into the mountain, it was originally a maze of caverns home to a peaceful settlement of thousands. They ate pale fish from the underground streams and farmed mushrooms in their crystal-lined caves.
Later generations built onto the citadel, adding layers of rooms perched on the side of the precipice and trussed into place by magic. It was the perfect place for the surviving Bala to ride out the Reason patrols that swung by Copernica every few days.
The patrols ensured that no Bala resupply ships ever got to the planet. Once a month, the three patrolling Reason ships gathered in the skies above Copernica for their monthly check-in. They exchanged data, resupplied, and often drank themselves into a stupor for a few days until resuming their orbits around the far planets.
It was a poorly-designed attempt to choke the life out of Copernica Citadel. The Reason hadn’t planned for the utter and complete self-sufficiency of the Bala. They’d lived on many planets over their long history and had learned how to work within the natural ecosystems of each one, carefully conserving and sustaining resources in order to allow each planet to subsist without outside intervention.
“I would never… you know… make you like me with a song, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Rhian.
This kid. Bào wanted to kiss him just for being so damn earnest. He wanted to share some of the wisdom he’d learned from decades of navigating the world, but Kevin Chen didn’t have any of that to offer.
“I know. You’re cool,” he replied.
He and Rhian passed one of the ship’s food storage areas. Reason ships weren’t self-sufficient in the least. They got all of their supplies on Jaisalmer, which got all of its supplies from the surrounding planets. Now that the FTL routes were down indefinitely there wouldn’t be much space exploration by humans. That was probably a good thing.
The Reason wanted an outpost on Copernica; several rare heavy metals used in electronics manufacturing were buried under the fortress. They attempted to starve out the Bala to get their hands on it, but the citadel was too tough. Bào recalled a Gary Cobalt – fifteen years younger – pounding the tables and demanding that they strike the humans first. He’d said it was only a matter of time before the Reason realized the siege was ineffective. They had to strike first and preserve the element of surprise. It was a far cry from the somber and thoughtful Gary whom Bào knew in later years.
After several fraught weeks of negotiation, the council finally voted in favor of attack. They waited until all five Reason ships were gathered. They sent necromancers into orbit around Copernica on the backs of hippogriffs, breathing in pressure bubbles created by mermaids seated behind them. Depending on who was telling the story, it was either an elegant and brilliant solution to the limitations of spaceflight or a ridiculous gambit tried by a desperate pocket of free Bala.
It had worked at first. The necromancers, poised to strike the moment they were in range of the Reason ships, fired fast and devastating blows as they cleared Copernica’s atmosphere. The ships’ sensors, looking for big energy signatures like skimmers and stoneships, couldn’t even see the tiny trios against the blackness of space. Even when their purple lightning strikes gave away their location, the Reason projectiles and laser weapons were too slow to catch the agile hippogriffs zig-zagging in openspace.
The Bala had devastated three of the five Reason ships before Captain Jenny Perata of the RSF Pandey had the idea to load the cannons with as many screws, nuts, and bolts as the maintenance departments could spare. She shot a spray of spare parts at the origin of the lightning strikes, blasting shrapnel into the bodies of necromancers, mermaids, and hippogriffs. The brilliant part of her plan was that she didn’t even have to inflict fatal wounds in order to stop the attacks. The hardware only needed to knock a hippogriff out from under the other two or distract a mermaid with enough pain that they dropped their pressure bubble and killed the others in the vacuum of space.
Bào remembered the searing pain of being hit with a barrage of screws and washers. It was like getting shot a dozen times at once. It knocked him off his hippogriff. The mermaid who had been tucked behind his body was spared the worst. She grabbed his leg and held on. His hippogriff didn’t fare quite so well. She twisted and writhed, bucking off both Bào and the mermaid. As she left the pressure bubble, the drops of her blood froze, forming little satellites that orbited her body as it twisted and arched, then went cold and still.
Out in openspace, Bào thought he was going to die. And if he was going down, he was going to get off one last shot at the Pandey. He took aim at the ship, extending invisible arms of energy around its hull. When he had fully enveloped it with tendrils of nullspace energy, he twisted. The ship torqued like a wet sheet in the laundry. The force of air venting from the gashes in the Pandey’s hull knocked Bào and the mermaid out of orbit. In their pressure bubble, they careened out of the sky back down toward Copernica’s sea. Bào learned later that the Reason had stormed the citadel and taken everyone prisoner. Even Gary Cobalt, their beloved leader, had been shackled and caged.
“What does it feel like… to make that lightning?” asked Rhian as they rounded the corner toward the mess hall. Bào smelled the brown gravy that seemed to cover every type of Reason foodstuff. It had the odor of cheap beef and subjugation.
“It feels like you’re floating in a raging river that’s trying to drown you and you have to stay submerged for as long as you can before it drags you to your death,” said Bào.
“Whoa,” said Rhian. “Intense.”
Intense wasn’t the half of it. There was so much nullspace energy out there in the void that Bào spent half his effort trying not to crush planets and explode suns into a billion pieces. Using his powers was easy, not using them was torture.
He hadn’t been able to use them for most of the years he lived on the shuddering wreck of Beywey Station, pretending to be an ordinary human selling exotic Bala pets to wealthy black market buyers. Every once in a while he could conjure something or zap a customer who ticked him off, but mostly he kept to his routine of feeding his animals and watching his shows.
It was a quiet life, until fifteen years later, when Gary Cobalt arrived on Beywey Station accompanied by Captain Jenny Perata. Gary seemed just as surprised to see Bào as the necromancer had been to see the former prince. Gary had narrowed his eyes in warning, which Bào had understood immediately. He wondered if Gary was pretending to be Captain Perata’s ally in order to gain her trust and betray her.
Bào had concealed his identity from Captain Perata on many occasions. She knew him only as a disabled animal dealer. She had no idea that he was the necromancer who had twisted her ship in half, or that it was her attack that had torn through Bào’s body and knocked him out of the sky. He still had pieces of screws in his muscles that bore the Pandey’s serial number. He had thought about exacting his vengeance on her on Beywey, but life on the failing station was so perilous that he was never quite in a position to do so safely.
It wasn’t until her third or fourth visit to Beywey – one of the few times when the gravity generator was actually online – that he learned of the price that the battle had extracted from her body. She dragged a wheelchair into the station and crawled into it as everyone watched. Disabled people were rare among the Reason. They were often hidden away or disposed of quietly. But here she was, a war hero wheeling herself among the stalls, shoving her heavy chair over the uneven grating and cursing at people to get out of her way. In cases where they didn’t move fast enough, she would slam into their shins with her footrests to get them to move.
With her EVA suit tied around her waist Bào saw her upper arms, cut deep with muscles that spoke of years of pushing the weight of herself and that ancient, rusty chair. She’d stopped at his booth and offered to sell two jars of kappa water that she’d skimmed off a shipment she�
��d been hired to deliver. While he negotiated, he slipped casual questions into the conversation.
“I can do six for both. There’s not much demand. War wound?” he asked casually.
“Yeah,” she said, not elaborating. “You can’t tell me they’re not worth six. I can go to Soliloquy and get nine apiece,” she countered.
“Then go to Soliloquy Station,” he said, raising his twisted left hand, knowing that there were too many Reason grunts poking their noses into incoming shipments on Soliloquy. They would quickly determine these were stolen goods.
Captain Jenny sighed and pondered her options.
“Which ship?” asked Bào, busying himself with a breeding pair of trisicles so he didn’t have to look her directly in the eye.
“The Pandey,” she said, tapping her teeth with her fingernail. That was her tell – she was about to make one last offer, then capitulate.
“At Copernica Citadel,” finished Bào, less of a question than a statement.
“Mmm,” she agreed. “Ten for both. You know that’s fair.”
On an ordinary day, he would have agreed just to get her out of his tent, but today he wanted to keep her talking and find out a few more details. He stalled.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think. I heard the necromancers at Copernica tore the ships in two like they were rice paper. Did they tear you in two as well?” he asked. It was a bit too forward, but he was hoping she would take the opportunity to correct him.
“No, the blast door came down on me when the ship separated,” she said. “I can do eight for both.”
“You lost people,” he said, unwrapping his wad of cash. “Both sides lost people. It was a bad day all around,” she said.
There was sadness in her voice. Bào’s anger ebbed like the tide. She was always a fair negotiator whose wares were never compromised. Some of the pirates came in and tried to cheat him by smearing items with elf semen to disguise their true nature. He couldn’t say that he exactly liked her, but he agreed that Copernica had been terrible for both of them.