Five Unicorn Flush

by TJ Berry

  “If they aren’t extinct by then,” said Findae grimly.

  “Never doubt the tenacity of human beings,” said Gary.

  The Jaggery zoomed closer until the Reason ship filled the entire viewscreen. It was stunning, yet at the same time slightly unfinished. The detailing on the painted flags looked hastily done. There were no highlights or shadows in the stylized way the Reason liked to outfit their ships. They’d gotten this one out the door fast.

  Not to mention the fact that this ship had a tremendous amount of battle damage. In fact, one whole lower deck had been ripped away. The breaches had been sealed, but Gary saw the remnants of interior walls and dangling cables. This devastation had happened fairly recently.

  “Look at the lower decks,” he said. “They’ve already sustained heavy damage and probably a significant number of casualties. What kind of weapon could tear off a deck like that?”

  “That’s the work of a necromancer,” said Findae. “There are no scuff marks along the breach. They didn’t hit anything and shear it off. The metal edges are bent inward, not outward like an explosion. And there are no burn marks from a missile.”

  “Or pockmarks from smaller projectiles,” added Gary, thinking back to the shrapnel used during the Siege of Copernica Citadel.

  “That damage is from the invisible hand of a necromancer.

  Someone tore off the bottom floor of that ship with nullspace energy.” Findae flicked his mane. “A person with a tremendous amount of power and no idea how to use it.” There was wonder and a touch of fear in his voice.

  “Bào Zhú is on board. He would be capable of that,” said Gary.

  “No, no,” said Findae. “Bào is far more circumspect with his abilities. This must be one of the newer recruits. There were two other necromancers in the nearby null. It must be one of them.

  “Look again,” said Gary. “Now there are three.”

  Findae went quiet as he looked into the null.

  “By Unamip, who is that?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” said Gary.

  “My gods, it’s your little friend Jenny,” said Findae.

  “Not so little any more, I think,” said Gary. “I think she shredded the lower decks. I will reiterate that we have allies on that ship. Will you let me talk to them?”

  “A handful of friends will not be able to mitigate the damage the Reason can do to our settlement,” said Findae. “If we hesitate even for a few minutes, we’ll doom our civilization to extinction.”

  Gary ran a hand over his face in frustration. Bào and Jenny were going to die at his father’s hands. He didn’t even know how Findae’s weapon worked in order to stop it. All he’d been able to determine was that all five stoneships were involved.

  “I know you don’t want to concede the point, but the evidence is clear, they are coming here to wage war,” said Findae. “Look at the guns recessed into the hull. The wide cargo doors are for launching troop carriers with their invading army. I would wager their holds are full of cages for the Bala they intend to steal. Gary, if nothing else, read the name of the damn ship.”

  It was rare that Findae swore, even more so in English. Gary took notice. As the ship moved closer, the name painted on the side became clear. The letters shifted and morphed in the null, but they kept coming back into the shape of a single visible name.

  The FTL Kilonova. In scientific parlance, a kilonova was the marriage of two neutron stars. In Bala lore, they were where unicorn souls came from and where they returned after their eventual deaths. The Reason had basically named their ship after unicorn heaven.

  “Human beings never cease to horrify me,” said Findae. One of the liquids in an instrument vial blorped audibly. “We have an obligation to blast them out of the sky the moment they arrive.” He nudged the wall with his nose and spoke through the ship’s intercom.

  “Boges, on my mark.”

  The dwarf didn’t answer.

  “Boges?” called Findae.

  Silence.

  “Is she still on board?” asked Findae.

  There were still the same number of pebbles in the crew count.

  “Yes,” said Gary.

  Boges emerged from the dwarf door, her arms piled high with fabric and helmets.

  “You’re going to want to put these on,” she said, dropping two EVA suits onto the floor.

  “No one is spacewalking right now. Get back to your station and activate the weapon,” said Findae.

  Boges twisted one beard braid around her finger nervously and delivered the longest speech that Gary had heard from her in weeks.

  “My kinfolk and I have dismantled the weapon that you created. Stoneships were never meant to be warships and, in present circumstances, it’s vitally important that they are not armed. The three of us will be exiting the Jaggery and my kin will bring the stoneships a safe distance away from both the approaching human ship and the planet. We cannot risk one of them becoming infected.”

  “Infected with what?” asked Gary. He was both relieved that the Jaggery was disarmed and concerned that Boges felt this other threat was so great that she would defy the king of the unicorns.

  “I will explain later. But trust that the threat of humans arriving is nothing compared to the disaster that will befall us if the stoneships become compromised,” she said, picking up one of the suits.

  “This is madness. I refuse to leave the ship without a proper explanation,” said Findae, raising his voice to fearless leader volume in the tiny confines of the cockpit. “Unprotected in openspace we’ll be vulnerable targets.”

  “The Kilonova’s weapons can’t lock onto anything smaller than a two-person skimmer,” said Boges, holding the unicorn-shaped EVA suit open for him. The Jaggery originally belonged to the House of Cobalt and the custom suits for every family member were still on board.

  “Boges,” breathed Gary. “Thank you.” He picked up a suit that used to be his long ago.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Boges said grimly, locking her helmet into place.

  Findae was still unconvinced. He touched a spot on the Jaggery’s wall with his nose. For a moment, the ship didn’t seem to understand what he was asking for, then it opened a channel to the other stoneships.

  “Bala stoneships, can you read me?” asked Findae. There was no answer.

  “They’re empty,” said Boges. “No one on board except the dwarves, who won’t answer unless I tell them to.”

  “But the Bala crews…” said Findae.

  “We forced them off on the islands after you boarded. There are only the dwarves and the three of us,” she said.

  Findae snorted and stomped, still refusing to put on his suit. Gary was just as confused but it was never a bad idea to be suited up for a spacewalk.

  “Everything will unfold the way it was intended,” Boges said through her suit’s microphone. Gary had heard a phrase like that before. The skin on his arms prickled.

  He helped his father into the suit. The whole not having thumbs thing had been a bottleneck for unicorns since the beginning of time.

  “I didn’t realize you had spoken with the Pymmie,” he said, clipping Findae’s helmet into place.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she said, in a way that made his stomach drop.

  “Apparently. I’m going to trust you for the moment, but at some point I’ll need a full explanation,” said Gary. He didn’t hide the fact that he was pleased she had sabotaged the weapon. He wondered if it had even worked in the first place. But if the Pymmie were involved, even peripherally, they were all in trouble.

  An instrument on the wall clicked like a cicada in summer, warning of the Kilonova’s approach.

  “Gods,” said Findae, slamming his front hooves onto the floor in frustration. Clearly, he had not considered the possibility of losing. He definitely hadn’t accounted for the betrayal by the dwarves.

  “Cargo hold… now,” said Boges urgently. They ran for the hold. At the door, Boge
s hit a spot on the wall, worn smooth by centuries of contact. The air hissed out of the room and the cargo door opened. The unicorn banners floated upward, then detached form the wall and headed for openspace.

  The House of Azure rippled away in the vacuum. The House of Periwinkle got caught up on the cargo bay doors and ended up jammed into the door track. The House of Cobalt floated down toward the surface.

  Findae, Boges, and Gary pushed off and floated away from the Jaggery, out among the stoneships. It was like floating among huge, dark planets. Gary hoped they wouldn’t start frolicking and crush the three of them.

  The space above the stoneships, just above orbit, shimmered like the air on a hot day. It rippled then collapsed in on itself, reminding Gary of a whirlpool of water going down the drain. The Kilonova rode the spiral up into openspace, appearing above the stoneships.

  Gary opened his comm.

  “FTL Kilonova, this is Captain Gary Cobalt of the FTL Jaggery.

  Stand down and do not arm your weapons systems. We would like to open a dialogue,” said Gary.

  “You’re ridiculous,” said Findae, hooves flailing in openspace. Unicorns were not graceful without gravity.

  The Kilonova fired maneuvering thrusters with a burst of gas on either side of its massive hull, pointing itself down at the stoneships. This was a ship of conquest and dominion. Every line was sharp and menacing; calculated to inspire a natural revulsion like from a venomous insect.

  Gary’s comm pinged.

  “FTL Jaggery, this is Captain Lakshmi Singh of the FTL Kilonova. We demand your immediate surrender and the surrender of those planetside.”

  Lakshmi Singh. The woman who’d helped him get him and Kaila out of the Reason Harvesting Center on Jaisalmer. Gary hadn’t thought about her since that day. She’d told him about her recurring nightmare that he was killing her and asked for help in making it stop. The Sisters had asked her to wait until the events in the dream came to pass. Was this the day? Was the dream symbolic or a literal foretelling of future events? It seemed like a bad omen that she was here at all. It brought them both one step closer to that terrible vision.

  “No Bala will be surrendering today,” said Gary. If Lakshmi was here, she was definitely as big a player in their future as the Sisters had indicated. “I’d like to talk. We can meet in a neutral location like the third moon.”

  Captain Singh laughed on the open comm. “You’re three Bala in EVA suits facing the largest warship in the Reason. This is not a negotiation. I would venture to say you’re definitely coming aboard. And you might not be leaving.”

  The comm clicked off and the Kilonova’s grappling arm extended toward them. Findae kicked ineffectually toward the Bala planet as the claw end of the arm circled his midsection.

  “I hate humans,” he muttered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A “Jenny Perata” Sort of Rescue

  Bào and Ricky collapsed onto the floor on the observation deck, laughing. Their plan to sabotage sanitation had been a literal shitshow. They’d tossed a bunch of sealing-foam pellets into the pipes and made a run for it. Sloppy work, and they would have been caught if Rhian hadn’t shown up and distracted the officers on duty while they slipped away.

  “Well, that nearly went terribly,” said Ricky.

  “I think it did go terribly, but we were lucky Rhian was there to cover for us,” said Bào.

  “You know he likes you, right?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye.

  “How could you know that from two minutes of conversation?” asked Bào.

  “It is my business to know exactly how everyone around me is feeling at all times. Otherwise I could end up dead.” It was the most serious he had seen her all night. There was a story there, one that he was interested in hearing. Ricky shook her head as if to clear the air. “Anyway, do you like him back?” she asked.

  “Not like that,” he said.

  “Did you tell him?” she asked.

  “I did,” said Bào.

  “That’s good, because I like you too,” said Ricky.

  Bào blanched on the inside, even though Kevin Chen’s smile did not falter.

  “I’m sorry. You’re like twenty years younger than me. I didn’t mean to make it weird,” said Ricky.

  “No, that’s not it,” said Bào. “I’m just… not the person you think I am.”

  Ricky paused and bit her lip. “Yeah. We should talk, but this is like a third date conversation. Can we just continue to have a lovely evening of sabotaging a few hundred billion worth of Reason equipment?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said Bào.

  “How’s your hand?” asked Ricky.

  “The anesthetic wore off a while ago. It aches, but I’m not feeling too poorly,” said Bào.

  “Too poorly? Kid, sometimes you sound like my yéye – and he’s about a hundred years old,” said Ricky.

  Bào’s face flushed both under and over his disguise.

  “Sorry,” said Bào.

  “Never mind. Just come with me to the medbay. They keep the good drugs locked up, but…” she held up her badge, “I happen to know a doctor!”

  The medbay was quiet at this time of night. The third shift staff doctor looked up from the intake desk.

  “Doctor Tang, I have to object to the manner in which you continually leave the medbay after your shift. Tonight, I found bourbon-filled syringes in the surgery, urine sample cups in the refrigerator full of some sort of gelatin concoction, and I can’t even hazard a guess at what’s in this enema bag.” He held up a plastic pouch filled with purple liquid.

  “Larval eggwine,” muttered Ricky, taking the pouch from him. “Not cheap, so I’ll take that.”

  The doctor gave her a withering look.

  “I have a patient here who needs pain management,” she said brightly, grabbing Bào by the shoulders and thrusting him forward between her and the shift doctor.

  “The pharmacy isn’t your own personal drug stash,” he admonished.

  Ricky lifted Bào’s stitched finger and showed it to the doctor.

  “He has a legitimate injury, Doctor Bear. It’s not as if we’re here to get high.”

  Two hours later, tucked into the scrub room, Ricky and Bào were incredibly high. They’d shut off the main lights so the undercabinet lighting suffused the room with a soft blue glow. The room was cozy and windowless – the real world felt far away. It was so quiet that Bào started dozing against a scrub sink before Ricky nudged him with her boot.

  “I told you the second set of pills was a mistake,” said Ricky, sucking down a urine cup full of lemon gelatin and vodka left over from the club.

  “And if by mistake you mean a very good idea then I’m in complete agreement,” said Bào, grinning back at her and feeling incredibly wonderful.

  The door to the scrub room opened. Light and sound streamed inside. Both Ricky and Bào cringed. A Reason officer poked his head into the room. “I’m looking for Kevin Chen. I heard he came in here,” said the officer, looking down at them propped against the large sinks. Behind him, the medbay was filled with shouting people and screaming alarms. It almost looked like the bar, except the lights were on full blast and way more people were covered in blood.

  “Sometimes I’m Kevin Chen,” said Bào, giggling. “And sometimes I’m not.”

  “Uh,” said the officer.

  “This is Chen. He’s having some pain management therapy under the supervision of a trained medical professional right now. What do you want with him?” asked Ricky.

  “He’s needed on the bridge immediately,” said the officer.

  Bào tried to get to standing. He stopped halfway up, resting on his knees. His joints had stuck in that position. He hoped that Ricky would think it was from the excess of meds. She got to her feet, then put her hands under his arms and lifted.

  “You’re lighter than you look,” she said, holding him for a moment as his knees crackled to life. They shuffled out through the medbay, arm in arm. Bào hoped i
t looked chummy and not like his legs were about to give out. Then again, no one was paying attention to them. Crew members moaned on gurneys and slouched in chairs because they’d run out of room.

  “Did we do this?” Bào asked Ricky.

  “I hope not,” she replied.

  The shift doctor waved Ricky over. He stood over a patient moaning on the surgery table, a piece of metal the size of a cricket bat sticking out of his abdomen. Something terrible had happened while they’d been locked in the scrub room.

  “Doctor Tang, jump in on one of the critical ones,” said the shift doctor, trying to determine how to remove the metal from the man without killing him. Ricky looked around at the pools of blood and parts of people that were barely attached to their owners.

  “I’m going to head to the bridge and see if they need help,” said Ricky, backing away from the carnage. “Happy to help out my buddy Kevin.”

  “No – that’s not where we need–” began the shift doctor. The patient in front of him began to shake violently, spraying a fine mist of red blood over his scrubs. While he was distracted, Ricky pushed Bào toward the door.

  “Not my area of expertise,” she muttered.

  In the elevator the officer eyed them both warily from across the car.

  “You’re not supposed to be intoxicated or impaired while on duty,” he said.

  “He said duty,” bubbled Ricky, barely holding it together.

  Bào tried to keep a straight face, but nothing about him was straight. “I perform my duty every day with honor,” he said, raising his arm in the Reason salute.

  Ricky nearly fell down laughing; she stayed bent over for six floors before leaning on Bào to pull herself upright again. The officer was not amused.

  “This is no time for jokes,” he admonished. “We’re under attack.”

  “I don’t believe he likes us,” said Ricky in a whisper that echoed throughout the elevator car.