Five Unicorn Flush

by TJ Berry

  “You know there’s nothing out here,” Kaapo called from the raft. “Just the forest with some uncatalogued plants and a bunch of things in there that will gladly gnaw on your bones. North takes you back around to the village by way of the plains, but that takes days, not hours. And south… well we haven’t gone south yet. Angels say there are habitable lands, but angels can be liars when it suits them.”

  “Honestly, I’d prefer to find nothing in the forest,” said Gary.

  “Did you want company?” Kaapo asked. She seemed unsure, like he might take the offer the wrong way.

  “No. I’m going to wander for a bit. See what I can find.”

  “Got it. I’m going to make a quick round trip run to bring back some cryberry seedlings. I’ll return for you just before sunset. You don’t want to be out here after dark,” she said.

  “Thank you for the ride,” he said.

  “It was nice to have someone with me. Satyrs and fauns aren’t as good company on the water as you are. Be careful in there,” she said, pushing the raft back onto the water. She wasn’t even going to stop for rest. It was that strength-infused angel muscle at work, not to mention her human tenacity. A formidable combination.

  Gary watched her sail back the way they had come for a few minutes. She looked back, once, and raised her hand to him. He did the same in return, then walked toward the edge of the forest. After living on worlds with green chlorophyll-producing flora for most of his life, it was still wondrous to see soft pink leaves rustling in the breeze. From far away they looked like swaying tufts of cotton candy towering as high as skyscrapers.

  He stepped into the forest on the least overgrown path. The light shifted from bright shining pink to a calm, rosy glow. Too few Bala had been through this way to make a path here yet and the undergrowth was thick. Some of the trees had bulbous white growths around the bottoms of their trunks that looked like mushrooms. He made a note to bring one back and taste it. As someone who would sicken – but not die – from poison, he’d become the unofficial taster for the community. It meant he ate lots of terribly disgusting things. He’d always wondered who the first human was that thought to try milk from a cow’s teat. Well, here on this new planet, he was that person.

  Something rustled on his right and Gary froze. It was footsteps, but pattering delicate ones – probably the little dog-like creatures the Bala called hatefoxes, because they seemed to hate everything. They came by the village at night, using a route from the forest that no one had yet been able to find. Some surmised it was underground, like the tunnels and caves discovered by the dwarves. The hatefoxes padded their way through the village quietly, presumably looking for food. You could hear their snuffling in the darkness, but no one had actually seen them in the light. A few brave Bala had left out handfuls of cryberries, attempting to lure them close. They had not only turned their noses up at the offering, they’d kicked the piles over and left tiny footprints in the dirt.

  The rustling stopped a couple of meters away. Gary called out to the hatefox.

  “Hello foxy. Nothing for you tonight.”

  “Hello foxy. Nothing for you tonight,” came a voice back to him, high and whispery and wrong. Like a creature copying the sounds he made and not understanding at all that they were a type of communication. “No thingfo ryout onight.” The words were broken in all the wrong places. Mimicry was not the domain of a hatefox. This was something else entirely. Gary’s heart sped up and he resisted the urge to run.

  The creature near him went quiet. Gary waited, then inched forward, trying to steer around anything that might make a sound. Thankfully, most of the forest was wet, not crunchy. He didn’t know if they’d arrived during the planet’s springtime or if it was always like this. When he had gone about twenty paces, a sound hissed out from behind him.

  “Hellofoxynothingforyoutonight.” The words slurred together urgently. “Nothingforyou… Nothingforyou… Nothingforyou…” It repeated the syllables, each iteration sounding less and less like words. Gary stepped toward the base of an umbrella tree – its wide, high canopy towering above him. Whatever was copying him was between him and the forest exit. He would have to go deeper in.

  The umbrella tree rose above the other trees in this part of the woods, covering them with a thick upper canopy of pink and salmon-colored leaves. They were translucent, so the light passed through the upper canopy down to the lower one where the smaller trees grew. The umbrella trees were as tall as a three-storey building.

  Gary continued to walk. The creature behind him went quiet. He hoped it was some kind of mockingbird-like native trying to impress him. Every few minutes he stopped and listened, but the forest was silent. No scampering vermin or flapping wings punctured the nothingness. His breaths were loud. He was the only creature making any noise at all.

  He walked through the underbrush, searching for any sign of the Bala who had disappeared. The reddish glow of the sun was fading as it slid under the horizon. It was clearly a dying sun, old and burned out. He wondered why the Pymmie would put them down on a planet that had, at best, a few million years left before its sun went supernova.

  Gary heard a rustling in the foliage about ten meters away. He slowed his pace and came up to the spot as quietly as he could. A being in a crimson flight suit knelt at the base of the large tree, digging into a pile of rotted leaves and flicking them away.

  The moment he saw the jumpsuit he knew that this was one of the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion. His face flushed. The Sisters were here. It made sense, now that he thought about it. A good portion of the Sisters were Bala. Of course they’d been transported to the new planet as well.

  The Sister scraped away the sandy soil in large handfuls until she uncovered a fat, white root. She skimmed away the sand on either side of it, easing it out of the ground without breaking it. She tugged the root out of its sandy bed. It came away with a tearing sound from the tiny hairs nestling into the soil. Gary could smell it from his partially concealed spot behind a tree. It smelled like meaty uncooked steak, but with a hint of vegetal spice, not unlike a peppery nasturtium leaf. She tucked it under her arm.

  Gary stepped forward to call out to her. He was a friend of the Sisters. They had always been kind to him. As he moved, something closed around his wrist. He instinctively wrenched his hand toward himself. A pale, bluish vine was wrapped around his new skin. The vine adjusted its grip and Gary realized it wasn’t a vine at all. It was a hand with three impossibly long fingers, curled gently around his wrist. The grip was not crushing, but it was insistent. It didn’t let go, even when he twisted his arm. The fingers simply came with it, twisting backward.

  Gary followed the arm to the creature that was attached to it. The purplish-black thing had a bulbous head, twice the size of a human. A voice whispered from the blank sphere, “Hellofoxynothingforyoutonight.”

  This was no hatefox. This creature had six long, spindly limbs, each ending in three slender fingers. Most of it looked alien and unfamiliar except the backbone – by Unamip, the spine looked exactly like angular human vertebrae under taut black skin. The most visceral and animal part of Gary’s brain bathed itself in a cocktail of fear, even as his blood tried to mitigate his fight-orflight instincts. He breathed to slow his pounding heart and slowly and deliberately twisted his arm to indicate to the creature that he wanted to be free.

  “Let me go,” he said softly, attempting to keep both of them calm.

  “Letmego,” said the creature, then threw its head back and screamed.

  The Sister looked up from her digging and raised something defensively. The creature yanked Gary’s arm upward, pulling him so hard that his feet left the ground. It stood up, towering above him and peering down from a gelatinous head that sloshed with liquid. There were no eyes or orifices as far as he could see. The creature ran, dragging Gary behind him. It bounced along the ground, repeating the phrase at him, but not letting go. It bounded deeper into the forest, stepping easily over thorny bushes that Gar
y was dragged through.

  Gary reached up to pry its fingers off his wrist. No sooner did he get one spindly limb unwound than it would flick back around his arm insistently.

  “Stop,” he cried as a small branch pierced his shoulder, weeping silver blood onto the ground behind them like a breadcrumb trail. The creature paused a moment to sniff the air, then continued forward.

  A voice called out in the darkness; a wordless call like one would sing out to livestock. The spider-thing bounded toward it on six hand-legs.

  “Letmego,” the creature repeated in a facsimile of Gary’s voice.

  The second voice, heavy and thick with consonants, demanded something of the creature. It mewled in response and dropped him.

  Gary sat up the short grass. The cuts from being dragged were already gone. Footsteps crunched through the grass. Lots of them. The spider thing nudged him with its bulbous head. An exclamation burst from the second voice. The spider thing moved away again.

  Gary looked up and found himself surrounded by a contingent of the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion. All of them had weapons trained on him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ghost of Elves Past

  Jenny spun in the air, using the captain’s chair as leverage. Kamis stood there, unmoving. His feet rested on the floor as if there was gravity in the room. Jenny’s heart pounded in her chest, then skipped in a couple of little misfires. She coughed.

  “Hey,” she said to the shadow. “What’s up?”

  Kamis did not react.

  “I think we need to drop out of FTL and dump the bodies,” said Jenny. Even as she said the words, she felt her skin crawl with the wrongness of it. If human death rituals were elaborate with the embalming, excessive flowers, and putting the rotting corpse into a box and praying around it for hours, the Bala had them beat hands down. Each belief system within the Bala races had their own inviolable laws about how to treat the dead. And none of them involved sucking them through openspace, bouncing them around a cargo hold, and dumping them out of an airlock.

  “The death customs of most of the dead beings on board require, at minimum, a wrapping of some sort before being jettisoned,” Mary informed her. Jenny rolled her eyes, which hurt her brain. Even back during the early days of the war, when they were taking heavy fire from the necromancers, they’d stopped to wrap pieces of torn uniform jackets around the eyes of their comrades. It was the minimum you had to do for your people.

  “I know.” Jenny bit her thumbnail while keeping an eye on Kamis.

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” said Mary.

  “Hey. What do you want?” asked Jenny.

  Kamis’ mouth dropped open and he formed a soundless word. Jenny’s stomach dropped as well.

  “Oh gods, he’s trying to say something,” said Jenny. Her chest fluttered again and she took a long, steadying breath. Mary set off a gentle alarm chime.

  “It appears you’re having arrhythmias. Likely due to heart trauma sustained during your electrocution. Or perhaps your freezing… one of your freezings,” said Mary.

  “This bloody day is trying to kill me,” said Jenny. Her voice came out high and quavering. She leaned closer to Kamis. “Try again. I can’t see what you said.”

  The shadow coalesced enough that the face became slightly more opaque. Kamis’ formed the word again and this time it was unmistakeable. Alive.

  “Oh good. Kamis’ ghost says he’s alive,” said Jenny, leaning so far back that she was lying down in midair. “This is fine.”

  “I hate to mention it,” said Mary. “But there’s something you should be aware of.”

  “Am I going to like it?” asked Jenny

  “Probably not,” said Mary.

  “Then don’t tell me,” said Jenny, floating closer to Kamis. He didn’t seem to be any kind of threat, just standing there with his hands at his sides. In all of the stories that she’d heard, ghosts did weird things like using up your good lipstick by writing on a mirror and opening your cabinets to rearrange things very quickly. How that was frightening was baffling to her.

  “No, I think I should tell you,” continued Mary, still on about whatever it was that bothered her.

  “Fine. Go.”

  “We are being trailed through nullspace by a Reason ship that tracked the Well Actually’s broadcast,” said Mary.

  “Super,” said Jenny, hitting a button on the captain’s chair to switch the viewscreen back to the live stream from outside. The wooly eye of Unamip hovered in front of them. Mary switched to the rear camera. Sure enough, a Reason warship appeared on the screen, making hops through the null and gaining on her position.

  “That’s a big boy,” said Jenny. Her heart spasmed again and this time the world slid around her as if Mary had done a barrel roll. She hung onto the back of the captain’s chair.

  “Hellion class,” replied Mary. “Just rolled off the line.”

  “Can they catch us in the null?” asked Jenny, a bit out of breath.

  “Definitely.”

  Easy as pie, Jenny told herself. Evading Reason ships was practically her second job. Even with a ghost in the cockpit. And a heart that was threatening to stop. She’d definitely been in worse situations than this. Probably.

  “Gravity,” she said, pausing for a split second in the center of the word to get a little extra air. No big deal. Just breathing. As the gravity increased, she eased down into the captain’s chair. Kamis stood behind her like a first officer at attention.

  She reached for her harness. She planning to drop back into openspace, speed forward, then drop back into nullspace in some other spot. Hopefully, far away from this behemoth of a ship that somehow had unicorn horn. She’d done this before plenty of times. She reached for her console when another wave of dizziness hit. This time, her vision clouded over with a fog of white before going clear again.

  “Uh oh,” she panted.

  “You need electrical cardioversion to correct that arrhythmia before your heart stops,” said Mary. “Get back to the medbay. I’ll keep us away from the Reason ship.”

  Jenny’s brain was still processing the words “electrical cardioversion” and “arrhythmia.” It seemed that she once knew what those things were, but their meaning was just outside of her grasp. A lot of things were feeling outside of her grasp at the moment.

  “Jenny?” called Mary, who sounded about three kilometers away. “Get to the medbay.”

  Jenny’s arm didn’t move off the console. She couldn’t decide between reaching for the straps or taking Mary’s advice. Both ideas slipped through her fuzzy brain like water. A waterfall.

  “Jenny, you’re falling.” Mary called to her from the other side of the universe.

  A cold, misty hand settled on Jenny’s shoulder. She looked up at Kamis before the world went white.

  Jenny awoke in a dark, cramped place. Sharp things dug into her back. There were sounds all around her, but mostly above. Booted feet stomped on metal. Mary whispered in her ear.

  “Don’t make a sound,” said Mary, speaking through the earpiece Jenny had forgotten she’d been wearing since the Well Actually. Which, by this point, felt about nine years ago. This fucking day. Mary continued: “You passed out and the Reason ship pulled us into their hold. But, before they scooped us up, I rolled you into the access panel below the cockpit floor.”

  That explained the wires and pipes all around her. She imagined Mary changing the ship’s pitch and yaw in order to get her into the hatch, like a little silver ball rolling through a child’s maze.

  “Also, Kamis followed you in there,” said Mary.

  And that explained the chill Jenny was feeling all over. She bit her lip to keep from making all of the sarcastic comments that filtered through her head. Lying down, she felt a little less dizzy. Above her, Reason officers scoured the cockpit, playing snippets of log files and opening every cabinet and door.

  “I cobbled together a false audio file of you
evacuating the ship before I was caught, but I can’t guarantee they won’t find you down there. They’re being very thorough,” said Mary.

  Jenny couldn’t see Kamis in the dark but she could feel his presence. The places where his shadow overlapped her body felt cold and foreign. Like an arm that fell asleep and doesn’t quite feel attached. Where the shadow intersected her head, his thoughts and feelings began to intersect with hers.

  Help, thought Kamis, intruding on her mental inventory of all the ways she could burst out of this access hole and take out a bunch of Reasoners. She tried to shut him out. There was no time to help him right now.

  Help, he insisted. The shadow moved so that he overlapped her head more fully. She tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go.

  “Stop,” she whispered. The boots above her froze.

  “Shhh,” hissed Mary in her ear.

  Jenny stifled the groan of disgust rose in her throat as Kamis’ consciousness became more prominent in her mind. She twisted away from him as far as she could. Her heart skipped a beat and her breath caught in her throat.

  Help, Kamis again told her, only this time she could feel more of his intention. He wasn’t requesting help, he was offering help. The coldness centered within the left side of her chest. Some part of him rested on her heart. He wanted to do something to it. Maybe fix the arrhythmia? He seemed to want to overlay her physical form with his non-corporeal form. Whatever he wanted to do, he was asking permission first and that was a positive sign.

  The boots above resumed their search and Jenny debated the pros and cons of having an elf ghost inside of her. On the plus side, he might be able to regulate her heart rhythm and keep her from passing out again. On the minus side, he might take over her body like a parasite and never give it back. Decisions, decisions.

  Inside of her head, Kamis laughed. It was a warm, pleasant feeling. She let herself sink into it like a bath. Maybe he had good intentions, but giving up her body without fully understanding the side effects was a fairly risky move. Even for Jenny.