“I’m saying,” Ayren continues, inexorable, and how the fuck did I ever think that it was Lydia who was the dangerous one, “that we will all die sometime. God created us to be mortal. But it is for you to decide if you will live like your parents did, or like the people who killed them.”
• • • •
The weak solar wind of Iota Empira washes over my tongue, subtly different from Corona Nine’s star. Main sequence blue versus yellow. Blue tastes more flowery, and a little like hot metal. We float along in the outer of the system’s two asteroid belts, just in case the Satrapy patrol boats are still looking for us. With any luck, they’ve assumed we bled out our atmosphere from the mass driver shot.
“What are we going to do now?” Ayren asks. He’d just come back up from a check through the starboard cargo pod. After he’d delivered his verbal payload earlier, he’d left me alone before I could manage more than another fuck you. My most pathetic one yet.
“I’d say what are you going to do now, but then you’ll just haul your fucking kid out again, won’t you.” Silence is agreement, there. “You fight dirty. Asshole.”
“You would too.”
“I know.” I sigh. I’ve been mulling over the reaction I saw from the Satrapy ships, the taste of the process I got from the outside, the precise gut punch Ayren landed on me. “I’ve got an idea, but you’re really not going to like it.”
“Can’t scare me any worse than the last one.”
I snort. “Should be glad I don’t have view screens.”
“I think I am.” He’s near my head now, holding on to the couch with one hand to steady himself. He smells like sweat and that damn synthetic strawberry. Not an appealing scent if he ever wants to get laid, but maybe that’s not how his religion works. “What is your plan?”
I outline it—nearby mining system, sneaky thoughts, everything.
“You’re right. I don’t like it.”
“If we all die of hemorrhagic brain cancer in ten years, at least it’s ten more years than any of you have right now,” I point out. “Though it’s a hell of a lot less than I plan to keep kicking.”
Silence. Then, “I’m sorry.”
“Not that sorry.”
“Not that sorry,” he agrees.
“Get your people settled. If you want you can be up here for go time, but it’s not going to be an exciting show.”
“I think I’d like to.”
“I can’t believe you’re fucking trusting me. I already tried to kill you.” I can’t help but point that out. Maybe if he’s suspicious, I can get pissed off again, talk myself out of this new piece of stupidity. I’m not that good of a person.
Ayren laughs. “I have faith, Nata. That you want to go home as badly as we do.” He pats the couch again, turns to go.
I laugh too , loud enough that it makes my Traveler shudder with alarm because it knows that laugh. The dumb AI asks if I have a problem. I ignore them both and plot in the new course, which will take us to Iota Augirae, where there’s a whole lot of asteroids—and a mining station.
• • • •
I feel the slight shiver of heat over my hands and feet as Ayren watches me do the delicate maneuvering through the asteroid belt, weaving to avoid space junk, mining drones, and security scan points to get in close to the enormous orbital smelting complex.
“Put your light away,” I say. “I need to concentrate.” I wait until I hear it click off. “And no talking.”
Silence. Good, he’s learning. My Traveler does its own nervous acrobatics that I feel through my jawbone, and I tell it to settle the fuck down too. This lack of faith in my piloting abilities would be really uncalled for if I wasn’t running in circles and screaming in the privacy of my own head.
I take my sweet damn time just listening to the symphony of pings and steady notes that indicate the structure of the smelting complex, the tiny tugs flitting in and out, the small personnel shuttles and in-system freighters—and the big, bass bell tones of the ore drones. I pick one that sounds right to me, so low it’s more of a subconscious growl than an actual sound.
Here’s the thing about ore drones: They’re fucking massive. So massive, in fact, that they don’t require a gate to skip across space. So massive that a little extra mass, like a small blockade-running freighter and 2,800 minus a few hundred kilos of human beings, won’t put even a shiver in their course calculations. We’re just another chunk of ore. And ore drones also have massive engines and power plants that might as well be captive stars, to push all that mass, to warp space into their own personal gate.
I lick the sensor probe, turn up its sensitivity to max, and move slowly through the wash of radiation. I want close to those engines and their masking radiation signatures. They could also potentially cook us on the spot if I don’t park just right, or someone’s let the maintenance on the engines slip a bit, but I’ve lived a life on the knife-edge . It’s kind of an exciting thought, gambling not just my life but 2,800 kilos worth of people . (Still don’t know how many that is and don’t care.) This is like running my tongue over a high-grit metal file that’s been sprayed with chili oil, searching for just the right flavor of agony.
There it is, like a hot rivet through my tongue. There’s the engines and their steady outgas of heat and radiation. There’s three in a triangle, I just need to find the edges of the exhaust and thread the cooler zone between them. Steady, steady. An alarm starts shrieking—radiation warning.
“Nata—”
“Shut up.” A second alarm—hull temperature. I’m too close to one exhaust port. Sweat rolls down the end of my nose, and it has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with internal pressure. I can park the Pearl on a dime. I can do this. Even with the wrecked port cargo pod dragging weirdly in the exhaust stream, trying to push us off course.
I tap the maneuvering jets, tongue working against the sensor pad to read the minute variations of radiation. The bounding pings from the targeting computer tell me that there’s a heat manifold close by that should shelter us from the drive wash. And hopefully won’t get hot enough to melt the nose off the Pearl. I just have to extend the magnetic clamps and—
CLUNK. A definitive vibration shudders through the ship. “There we are,” I say. I wipe more sweat away with the back of my hand and kill the hull temperature alarm. We’re either going to make it or we’re not, at this point. “Now we wait.”
“How long will it be?”
“You got a hair appointment you’re worried about missing?”
“We only have so much food . . .”
“We’ll skip before you run out of rat bars, trust me. I picked the highest mass drone I could safely reach.” High mass being an indication that it was filled, or close to it. “And they’re burning the engines to tune them. It’ll be soon.”
“But will it take us to the right place?”
“Ayren, this distrust is really hurting my feelings.”
He laughs. “I just . . . everything I know here is through you. I am the blind one, here.”
Har har. “It’s got a Satrapy registration. Not sure what system it’ll take us to, but you said you didn’t care as long as I got you into their territory. We’ll find out when I disengage and we drift away after we’re past any inspection points.”
“We really don’t care. We just need . . . land. Beneath our feet again. Once we’re there, they won’t be able to remove us. They won’t even notice us if we’re quiet enough.”
I don’t get this urge for dirt and gravity, but maybe it plays into the same part of the brain that sighs when I get a big, musty whiff of Corona Nine’s canned air. “Then everything will work out fine.” I still can’t fucking believe I’m doing this, and yet I can. They say you never pay your debt to your parents. Mine are beyond any collection, and Auntie’s never going to get the one payment she really wants—me taking my place in her operation. She’ll have to settle for this instead. Maybe I’ll send her a message, see how much new swearing I l
earn from her when she gets back to me.
The silence stretches again, and I can feel it, sitting in the air between us. That goddamn question. Everyone always asks me that goddamn question, no matter what bullshit hotdoggery they’ve seen me pull out of my ass.
“Why don’t you fix it?” he asks.
Yep, there it is. The common thread of humanity isn’t eating, shitting, fucking, and death. It’s this stupid question. I shrug. I’ve got the answer that will end the conversation quickest memorized like the rosaries Auntie once taught me to say. “Advanced brain damage. I’d need a hell of a lot of money and downtime for the cybernetics to integrate.”
“Oh.” He pats the couch, smart enough to not try to pat me yet. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I wish . . .”
“It’s fine.” Technically, I told Ayren the truth. It would be expensive as hell to do those kinds of cybernetics , to make me see “normally.” I was born with an underdeveloped occipital cortex, and my parents were never sure why and never made it to a station with good enough and cheap enough medical to find out. Not enough radiation shielding in the baby jar, maybe. For all I know, I also glow in the dark.
But money’s never been my problem. Anyone that knows ships can calculate how many hundreds of thousands of credits I’ve lovingly dumped into the Pearl. I just stopped giving the real answer decades ago because I got sick of explaining my life.
I feel another vibration echo through the ship, and it’s a relief. “We’re about to do an unassisted skip. You ever done that before?”
“No. Planet born and raised.”
“Then hold on tight. You’re in for a bumpy ride.” I lean my head back and tuck the sensor between my teeth. There’s no flavor quite like shrieking spatial unreality—like licking the sweaty taint of an angel—and here she comes.
• • • •
It’s six goddamn months before my ass comes straggling back home to Corona Nine, my Traveler trailing behind me and wondering why the fuck we’re back to this dump. We could afford a better grade of dump now, if I wanted. I’ve got some new tricks, some good stories that’ll get me some free drinks, and a handmade scarf that Selah made for me, which Ayren swore will be a great gift for dockmaster Karis-dee no matter which shade of humanity she comes in.
I’ve got it tied loosely around my waist like a bit of swagger. Selah told me it made me look like a storybook pirate, which is not a compliment I’ll turn down. But I don’t go to the stevedore bar where the dockmaster holds court. Instead, I head to my regular haunt. It still smells the same, old beer and mold and a weird cinnamon undertone, the one constant in my life. Well, one of two.
“Well fuck me,” Bara says. “I heard you were dead.”
“And I heard you were a cheap asshole,” I call back.
“Just as well. You wouldn’t make much of an angel,” they tease.
“Fuck you.” Because that’s how friends say I missed you. “I’d show ’em how to really fly. My table better be free.”
“You already know it is.”
I throw myself into the creaky station chair, stretch out my legs, let myself grin like a smug bastard. Because who in this backwater shithole can say they’ve managed to skunk the Satrapy blockade twice? Just me. And the paydays are gonna roll in.
I hear Bara walk up behind me, their footsteps familiar as my own heartbeat. Then there’s the well-remembered click of a sipper cup being set down. But before Bara can go, I nudge the extra seat out with the toe of my boot, guided by my Traveler, who’s now starting to catch my drift.
“Who you waiting for?” Bara asks. “No one much here today.”
“Seat’s for you,” I say. So far, there have been only three people who have been in my life more than a day and never asked me That Stupid Question: Auntie, my Traveler , and Bara. Home is people, Ayren had said. I’m not giving him the satisfaction of admitting he might be right, not out loud.
Bara huffs a slightly metallic laugh and sits. “Pick up any other weird habits while you were running with the wolves for six months?”
I laugh. “Downsiders are fucking crazy, Bara. I sure hope not.” But my hand unerringly finds the tail of the scarf and plucks at it, lets the fine, soft strands of spun animal hair—imagine that shit, animal hair—trail through my fingers. “You like this color?”
* * *
Alex Acks is an award-winning writer, Book Riot contributor, geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. Angry Robot Books has published their novels HUNGER MAKES THE WOLF (winner of the 2017 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award) and BLOOD BINDS THE PACK under the pen name Alex Wells. A collection of their steampunk novellas, MURDER ON THE TITANIA AND OTHER STEAM-POWERED ADVENTURES, is available from Queen of Swords Press. They’ve had short fiction in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Giganotosaurus, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and more, and written movie reviews for Strange Horizons and Mothership Zeta. They’ve also written several episodes of Six to Start’s Superhero Workout game and races for their RaceLink project. Alex lives in Denver (where they bicycle, drink tea, and twirl their ever-so-dapper mustache) with their two furry little bastards. For more information, see http://www.alexacks.com
The Fisher of Bones
By Sarah Gailey
Chapter 1
Naming
The moon was dark the night our Prophet died.
Outside of his tent, Margot the healer wept, her hands clutching at the white stubble on her scalp. Black vines of withdrawn illness clung to her wrists, thick and steaming and insoluble. She hadn’t taken breaks to shave — nor to eat, nor to sleep — over the six days and nights she’d spent trying to hold back the strangling blisters that crept up the Prophet’s chest. It was obvious that she’d done all she could. We couldn’t hold this death against her. The illness was stronger than Margot’s magic. It was stronger than anyone’s magic.
It was an ordained death, and nothing less.
The Prophet said as much. He told me in his final hour, just before he banished me.
• • • •
When the Prophet was a young man, he fled the hundred eyes of his city, and he found himself lost in a field. It was there that he discovered the bone tablets, which were half-buried in mud so thick he lost his shoes in it. He tripped over the tablets in his bare feet, and when he pried the strange slabs from the mud, he saw them to be bone, and he saw them to be etched with letters that no man could read. And when he looked upon the writing, his eyes were opened by the Gods, and he no longer feared the beating that awaited him at the Chancellor’s House, for he saw his purpose.
• • • •
He was looking at me with eyes that were dark like the death-moon, black from edge to edge, stained by Gods Sight. They’d frightened me when I was a child, before I learned to look for the creases at the corners. “Take care of Margot,” he said.
“I’ll take care of all of them,” I said, and my voice didn’t tremble even though it should have. He snorted at me.
“You know what I mean. Be kind to her in the next few days,” he said. “She’s sensitive. She’ll blame herself. Counsel her to—”
“Trust in the Gods. I know,” I said. There I went, getting impatient with a man whose cheek was turned toward the sunlight of his own death. I studied his weather-beaten face, suddenly desperate. “Surely there’s more I need to know. Surely there’s more you have to tell me, I’m not ready for—”
He patted my wrist weakly, the sun-bruised brown of his hand two shades darker than mine, tanned from always pointing the way. He cleared his throat. “Ducky,” he said, and the first tears blurred my vision. “Listen. I know I haven’t always been the best father.”
Oh.
That.
• • • •
It was the Gods’ own magic that worked through the young man who would become the Prophet. Everyone knew that the Gods had been cast out when the Chancellor came to power. Everyone knew that the Gods were illegal — the only thing worth worshipping in the
Chancellor’s city was work. Everyone knew that. But none of them knew that the Gods were waiting for their children to follow them out of the City.
No one except the Prophet.
And when the young man touched the tablets, the Gods’ own magic opened his eyes, and he gathered his people to him, the children of the Gods. And they set out into the wastelands outside the city, and they began the journey.
• • • •
“I’m sorry, Ducky. I know that leading these people has kept me from you. I wasn’t there for you after your mother died, and that— it wasn’t right. You shouldn’t have been alone then.” He stared at me with those dark eyes. “And I know I’ve been hard on you these past few years, trying to get you ready. But I hope you know how much I love you. How much I’ve always loved you.”
“I know, Dad,” I whispered, and my voice did tremble that time, because there was a lie there. I was never a good liar.
And then his breath rattled in his chest, and it was soon, and we both knew it. He laid a hand on my forehead, and his hand was cold, and I wasn’t ready.
“I hereby—” he paused for breath, and when he spoke again, his voice rang out louder than it’s possible for a man to speak. Loud enough for the two hundred ears in the camp to hear. I wanted to say don’t — wanted to tell him not to use the last of his strength for this, wanted to tell him to give me just thirty minutes more, I had so many questions, please, no, I’m not ready — but one mustn’t interrupt a Prophet when he’s Speaking.
So I closed my eyes and listened.
• • • •
The Gods’ instructions, legible only to the Prophet, spoke of the journey. Come, they said, and arrive at the appointed hour, and we shall be awaiting you with open arms. The land is a land of plenty. Rich hunting and plentiful fish and good, clear waters await you, and your spawn shall be many, and no harm shall befall you from above or below. Come at the appointed hour, do not be late, and we shall welcome you.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 16