by TJ Berry
“Mary, can you put the gravity back on,” Jenny called.
“Your spare chair is in the cargo hold. You’ll be limited in your mobility,” said Mary
“I just want about twenty minutes worth.”
“All right. All crew, prepare for gravity turn on.”
Jenny was the only living thing on board, but Mary liked to shout all over the ship anyway. Jenny indulged her.
In the medbay, Jenny locked herself in the shower pod and turned the water on hot. The gravity came on slowly. Mary gave her time to drift down onto the shower bench and get oriented properly before she was at a full eight-tenths of a G. It wasn’t exactly Earth’s gravity, but close enough to mimic home. Floating around as water blobbed dodged and splattered around you was no substitute for a dripping hot shower.
Jenny stripped off her filthy bra and wet knickers, taking care not to slide them down her raw skin. She let hot steam build in the pod, sweating the disgusting corpse-juice out of her pores. She turned the heat down to just above lukewarm and pushed the hinged bench forward. The force of the jets against her burns caused her to gasp. She rinsed the burns for as long as she could stand it, then turned her face to the sprayer and let the hot water ease her cramped muscles. She could feel her blood pressure dropping and the ringing in her ears getting softer. She relaxed into the water and closed her eyes.
“Don’t fall asleep in there and drown,” warned Mary.
“I just need a minute,” said Jenny, leaning her arm against the wall and resting her forehead on it. She turned off the tap and sat there, letting the water drip away before Mary turned the gravity back off.
A shadow flitted past behind the steamy plexiglass. A big one. Jenny froze and listened. No footsteps.
“Mary, am I the only one on board?” she whispered, raising one hand to wipe the condensation off the glass. The medbay was empty.
“Of course. Are you expecting someone?” asked Mary.
“I just saw… a shadow.”
“Your vitreous humor was electrified, boiled, and frozen today. It stands to reason that you’ll experience a few visual artifacts until they’ve fully healed,” said Mary.
“This didn’t look like a floater,” said Jenny. It had a humanoid shape and moved as if it walked on two legs.
“I’m going to run some post-decompression brain scans,” said Mary. “You might have clusters of injured brain tissue from the subzero temperature or the oxygen deprivation. I’m here to take control of the ship in times like this.”
“Probably just visual artifacts,” said Jenny. She most certainly did not want to turn over control of the ship to… well, the ship.
AIs were not good in ethically convoluted situations. And those seemed to be all that Jenny found herself in these days.
“You can turn the gravity back off,” said Jenny.
The weight on her bones gradually decreased, taking pressure off the injured areas. She grabbed a towel and carefully dabbed herself dry, keeping watch for more shadows in her peripheral vision. She rifled through drawers until she found the burn kit. Inside was a tube of ointment marked with a single blue circle. The box next to it was marked with two blue circles. A spray can had three blue circles. In a rare show of accessible design, the kit had been packed with both humans and aliens in mind. Blue was the Bala color of authority. With so many species and languages in openspace, even simple numbers would have been unintelligible to someone.
She leaned the top half of her body over a clean gurney and squeezed a long line of ointment down the back of her leg, nearly losing her grip on the gurney when it began to sting and sizzle.
“Bloody Reason meds,” she muttered.
“You prefer Bala remedies?” asked Mary.
“They hurt a lot less than this,” said Jenny, twisting around to apply the second line. Getting the ointment down the back of her arms was a trick, but she managed it by coming at it from a couple of different angles. All of the burns hurt more than before, but the ointment at least kept fluids from weeping out.
She pulled out the package marked with two circles and tore it open. It was a stack of gauze folded into neat squares. The pictograph on the box lid showed a bipedal being unfolding the squares to one thickness and laying them on top of the ointment. She reached as well as she could, covering the burned back half of herself with the gauze. It itched, and seeped into the ointment to form a mesh-like layer.
The final package contained a spray that was supposed to go over the gauze. She held it awkwardly behind herself and sprayed everything she could reach. These were the times when she wished for a crew. Whatever chemical was in the can bonded to the gauzy mesh and created a hard but flexible layer over the top, like a lacquer that moved with her. Her skin still throbbed but now it was sealed off. She suspected the ointment contained a numbing agent. She held onto the gurney as an persistent flutter caught her in the chest. She coughed and sucked air in.
A shadow flitted past the window in the medbay door. Jenny froze. That was no fucking floater. She pulled a generic jumpsuit out of a cabinet. With shaking hands, she shook the jumpsuit open, floated it in front of her, then pushed off from the gurney and swung her legs into it. She bent over with a grunt, pulled the jumpsuit up and zipped it. She could do this better with an extension grabber or by herself while sitting on a bed, but it didn’t seem prudent to be naked right now.
She grabbed a pair of adjustable slippers from the cabinet as well. They started out far too big for her feet, but as her body heat warmed the plastic, the soles and uppers retracted to fit her snugly. She floated over to the medbay window and craned her neck to see down the hallway in both directions. Completely empty. With any luck, whoever, whatever, she was seeing out there was unlikely to be as agile in weightlessness as she was.
“How are you feeling?” asked Mary. “Should we run a vision and hearing diagnostic?”
Jenny knew full well that Mary had probaby already run the scans without her permission and saw something internally that alarmed her.
“Nope. I’m a little fuzzy and tingly, but overall not terrible,” Jenny lied, feeling woozy every time her heart skipped a beat.
“Besides, I don’t anticipate much more excitement on this trip.”
“I’m sorry you had to put your life at risk multiple times. I suggest we adjust my crew risk profile to be more conservative,” said Mary.
“Leave it,” said Jenny. “There’s an old Kiwi proverb: every worthwhile journey begins with an emergency spacewalk in your knickers. I’m just floored that you and the Well Actually were able to bring me back from the dead using only water and a wire from the door.”
“I wouldn’t be that impressed. Your heart had slowed to approximately four beats per minute but hadn’t entirely stopped. The warming action of the water and the pain of the electrical current were sufficient to revive you from your stupor – not enough to bring you back from a fully deceased state.”
“So I wasn’t quite dead?” asked Jenny.
“Did you feel dead?”
Jenny considered.
“I just felt gone. Time missing. No tunnel of light.”
“Were you expecting a tunnel of light?” asked Mary.
“Probably not,” said Jenny, opening the medbay door. “I bet it’s pretty dark where I’m going anyway.”
Jenny peered down the hallway. It was empty. Not even a shadow. She pushed off and floated to the cockpit.
“Mary, play the security footage from outside of the medbay over the last half hour,” she said. Mary projected the security footage on the viewscreen.
The hallway was quiet and empty. Behind the glass of the medbay door, Jenny saw herself of thirty minutes ago stripping off her wet knickers. The Jenny in the footage moved with a labored slowness that made her present self cringe.
“Triple speed,” she said.
The footage sped up, but the hallway stayed empty. Until it wasn’t. A human-shaped figure flickered across the screen for a fraction of a sec
ond.
“Go back to that. The shadow,” said Jenny.
The footage backed up and played at regular speed. A shadow, walking upright, walked down the hallway, peering in rooms as if looking for something. It paused at the medbay door, watching Jenny inside the shower pod, then stepped through the wall.
“Oh that’s not good,” said Jenny. “What is that?”
“The figure in the footage has no corporeal form. I can’t see a heat signature or a heartbeat,” said Mary. “A ghost.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said Jenny.
“Actually, within the bulk of human and Bala history, there is ample evidence for the existence of an after–”
“There,” interrupted Jenny, floating closer to the screen. “Freeze it.”
The image paused on a still of the shadow walking past the medbay door after Jenny had finished her shower. On the screen, the shadow had coalesced into a transparent figure with readable features.
“Well look who it is,” said Jenny.
“Kamis,” said Mary.
“Is his body still strapped into the cargo hold?” asked Jenny.
“Yes,” said Mary, pulling up a secondary picture of Kamis’ gaping corpse still tethered to the wall by the harness.
“And where’s his shadow now?” asked Jenny.
“Give me a minute,” said Mary. “I can’t scan for him with regular sensors. I have to… oh, I found him.”
“Where?” asked Jenny.
“He’s behind you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nothing for You, Foxy
Gary woke with a bird standing on his face and the sound of giggles coming from the front of the raft.
“Shoo,” said the ferryman, making a halfhearted kick at the bird. It hopped from Gary’s face and sat down primly on the dry logs.
“How long was I asleep?” he asked, sitting up. He was embarrassed at having let her push alone while he slept.
“Almost an hour. You looked like you needed it. Stressful day?” “Stressful life. I can push for a while,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t need rest or sleep,” she said. Gary realized what type of Bala she was.
“You’re part angel,” he said. She shot him an amused look.
“Took you long enough,” she said. “I didn’t inherit the flying, but I’m very, very lucky and I always have great hair.” She tossed her long silver dreadlocks over her shoulder. They glinted in the sunlight like true metal.
She was beautiful by human standards and had probably survived her Bala parentage because of it. Humans were always willing to overlook the faults of very attractive people.
“Are your parents here?” he asked.
“My father was murdered by the Reason and my mother is human, so she stayed behind,” she said.
“An angel in love with a mortal,” he mused.
“I know. The subject of so many earth fantasies, but in reality they fought constantly and dad was always really disappointed with mom’s preoccupation with the mundanities of life. You know, excruciatingly boring things like eating and breathing.”
“Angels aren’t known for their empathy,” said Gary.
“I know, right? One time I brought home a C in chemistry and he didn’t understand why I couldn’t just peer into the heart of the chemical solution and see all its constituent parts. It took me two hours to get him to understand that humans couldn’t see objects in that much detail. He just assumed everyone was seeing the molecular structure of everything.”
“Angels are the worst,” said Gary.
“The worst,” agreed the woman. “Well, centaurs are the worst. But angels are pretty close.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t ask your name earlier,” said Gary.
“Kaapo,” she said.
“Gary,” he replied. “Did you grow up on Earth?”
“A few different planets, both Reason and Bala. We had to move as the laws changed and the Reason started collecting Bala. Then they went for the humans who married them, and then their kids,” she said.
“It must have been dangerous for you.”
“You know, even though they’d been at each other’s throats for my whole life, I’ve never seen my mom more lost then when he was gone. She just stared at everything with this blank look, like she wasn’t even in there any more. You look like that when you’re not talking. There comes a point where you lose so much that you kind of lose yourself too.”
Gary couldn’t think of anything to say. They sat in silence until Kaapo spoke again.
“I probably overstepped propriety with the prince of the unicorns, but I don’t think anyone else is going to tell you this. You need to keep fighting. For yourself, if not for them,” she said.
“Are you going to lecture me about my duty to protect the Bala?” he asked.
“Hell no. You don’t owe us anything. But you have an obligation to be kind to yourself, after everything you survived to get here. Honor all that you fought through by living your best life.”
“I’m tired,” he said with a shrug.
“We’re all tired,” she laughed. “And it’ll probably get worse before it gets better. But you keep putting one foot in front of the other and some days are all right. Good, even.”
“You give a lovely pep talk,” he said.
“It’s the angel in me. I’m inspiring,” she dug the pole into the mud and struck a pose like a heavenly being raising her hands to the firmament above. Even though she was joking, for a brief moment he could see her father’s likeness in her; a certain intensity in her eyes and peaceful reverence in the slackness of her face. She frowned at him.
“What?” she asked.
“When you do that, you really do look like an angel,” he said.
“Well, I’m not one. I’ve already been visited by three of them who wanted to hear about my father. They did not hesitate to remind me that I am nowhere near divine,” she said.
Kaapo grabbed the pole before it was too far to reach and pushed them forward again.
“Can you invoke a divine intervention?” asked Gary.
“Like from Unamip or the Pymmie?” she asked. “I have chats with Unamip all the time – he’s one of the only other creatures awake when I am. Good guy. He and I have the same taste in books. I’ve tried to call the Pymmie multiple times in my life and they’ve never answered.”
“The Pymmie are mercurial,” said Gary.
“The Pymmie are assholes,” said Kaapo, much less tactfully. For the first time all night, she seemed less than happy.
“You don’t have much regard for them,” said Gary.
“They could have stopped all of this with half a thought, but they didn’t care to,” she said.
“The Pymmie work in service to a greater plan.”
“Bullshit. They play with us like a child’s ant farm. They put obstacles in our paths just to see what we’ll do. They stay out of our tragedies to see how far they can push us. They want to see us at our worst.”
“And at our best,” said Gary. “They want to see what we’re capable of handling. They delight in the grace that surfaces when all hope is lost.”
“That’s poetic. I wish you had been there to say that over the bits of my father that were left in a pile inside his kitchen when the Reason came and tore him to pieces for usable parts. In the kitchen that he never used because he never fucking ate anything.” Her voice was tight with anger and she pushed the raft in jerking shoves that bumped Gary back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not defending them. I think they mean well but the pain of others is not high on their priority list. They see pain and suffering as part of the crucible from which a diamond emerges.”
“Right, but sometimes you just get a charred piece of nothing,” she said quietly, though her strokes through the water became more calm.
“None of us are nothing,” said Gary. He was about to make the argument that since they survived, they had an ob
ligation to make new lives here. Before he said it, he realized these were the same words she had said to him only a moment ago. He had picked up the argument that had just been used against him. He snorted.
“What?” she asked, still annoyed.
“I almost told you that the point was the surviving, making full lives for ourselves where we can. And then I realized that was where we started this conversation, but on opposite sides.”
“It’s complicated, isn’t it?” she asked, pursing her lips and shaking her head.
“It is.”
“I’m qualified as a biologist, you know. That’s what I trained for. Certified and everything. But I work here because I like being this close to the water. I know that if that urge to give up comes back again, all I have to do is take one step forward off this raft and I’m gone. No resurrections. No second chances. It comforts me, knowing that the end is always one step away,” she said, looking down at him warily, waiting for him to chide her for her grim thoughts.
“I understand,” he said gravely. “There were times when my burdens were almost too much for a mind to bear. There were days, more than I’m comfortable admitting, that I also wished for death.”
She made a sound of agreement and paddled in silence for a while. The marsh was narrowing on either side of them and the foliage poking up out of the water was getting thicker. It felt like they were coming to the far shore.
Kaapo used the pole to push them into the weeds until the edge of the raft hit solid land. There was no grain planted out here. The fields hadn’t made it this far yet, but he could imagine that by the end of the growing season they would. There needed to be a reliable and safe way to cross this acid – one that didn’t involve leaning far over the water to drag rafts in and out of the marsh.
She looped a rope around the pole and pulled to lever the raft up onto the shore. Acid water flicked dangerously out of the marsh. Kaapo leaned back to avoid being splashed. Her upper arms were thickly muscled – more so than even Gary’s. She wrenched the raft up until it was on solid ground, then swept her arm wide to indicate the shore.
“We have arrived, your highness,” she grinned. There was a time when a bevy of domestic workers used to speak to all unicorns that way. It only made him uncomfortable. The grass he stepped onto was wet, but the foliage had already filtered most of the acid out of the water and it was safe to walk on. Especially with hooves.