“I have been wrong, my dear, dear Etelie. And we are in much danger.”
There is nothing else in this small room. The door is closed and likely sealed. I think we’re still onboard the Galaxy Cruiser, but I’m not certain. We’re still in space; I’m surer of that. The air smells of chems I don’t recognize, but my thoughts are sluggish. I can feel my heart beating, but it feels wrong. It feels too regular. It makes me want to reach up and slice . . . something. Avera squeezes my fingers, and I slump against her again.
“We were interrupted before,” she says. “I am sorry. But now, do you understand?”
“Yes.” I do understand, but maybe not what she wanted. “You’re wrong. He spoke to me. Eibon spoke to me, and—”
“Shh.” This time, she squeezes harder, the rough hairs scraping painfully against my skin. “There are scanners.”
I close my eyes, resting on her shoulder and thinking of the heart. I can feel it, and Avera must too. It’s too close, though my containment holds. Such simple hex, it seems now. If we are still on the ship, we should be arriving soon at Saturn, and the time is right. I can feel that too, feel the forces pulsing through my blood, their rhythm fighting against my own. The heart must be reacting, but it will need help to meet its potential, and there is the issue of the Saturn Door.
The door to our room—our cell—slides open. I sit up, though my head is still heavy with words and chems, and my body aches. I know the figure at the door: it’s the spacie I saw at the viewhall. They have two ship monitors with them, carrying the heart. They set it down, and the spacie waves them out with its short grey arms. Once they’re gone, it speaks.
It tells us we are charged with obstructionism, that we will answer to spacegov. It has an ID-code that chirps. It tells me that the heart is contraband, that our mods (I have no mods) are unauthorized, unlaw. It tells me that I must open the containment, that they will place the heart into their own care.
Avera looks at me. She squeezes my fingers. Her glassy black eyes show nothing, but I know her, and I know she fears. I squeeze back. I do understand, more than she knows.
“You do what you are told, but nothing is clear,” I tell the monitor. I have seen their rockets make contact with the agents of other forces. I have heard their promises, their lies and madness, whispered to me with other truths. I know what waits now on Cykranosh—what is behind the Saturn Door, waiting for the opening. I have seen the bags of dying flesh that call themselves the high robes of my people; I have heard the garbled echoes they take for the voice of Frog, and I know better. But there is only one way forward. I look to Avera. “I will prepare the heart,” I say to her. She says nothing, doesn’t look at me. (I don’t think her eyes are for seeing now.) The hairs on her antlers, on her fingers, shiver.
The spacie nods, sliding back, so there is space before the unit.
The sci-based containment has been tampered with but not breached. Maybe they wanted to see if they could take it without me. More likely, they don’t understand hex. I put in the codes. It reads my gen—this takes longer than it should. Looking at my blackened hands, I wonder if it is more than stain. But the containment releases, and I speak the tongue to release the hex. I turn the heart three times, three times again. I look up. The spacie watches, and I know that they can’t tell what I have done, can’t feel the pulsing of the heart, almost in synch with the echoes of Cykranosh on Saturn.
“Is it done?” they ask.
“No. It will go faster with help.”
They grumble words I do not understand but with clear meaning.
But Avera, too, is startled. “No!”
The spacie produces a weapon—some kind of rayblast—and raises it to her. Avera touches the side of her face, purses her lips.
“Do what she says,” they order her.
I want to reassure her that I have a plan, but I can’t make it clear without giving away too much to this spacie scratch. I direct her to sit across from me. I look at her, I tell her to do as I say. But the words that follow are hex, drawing power from the heart, not instructions. They are a warding. Avera nods, understanding now. The spacie shifts uneasily, not sure if it needs the blast. They should’ve sent someone more mad, who understands hex, not just someone who will follow orders.
I start. I’ve spent more time with the heart, and I know its rhythms. I draw it from the container, fingers splayed, and I start to speak them. Uncontained, it pulses more strongly, calling to my blood. I can feel my own heart responding, and I do not fight.
Avera joins me. Again, her antlers glow luminous, their light diminished where they have been damaged. I read pain on her face as she begins, her hands mirroring mine, splayed above the heart as mine are below. Her light begins to pulse in time with the echoes from Saturn, and she speaks their rhythms. Our chants conflict, syncopated, but slowly, slowly, we bring them into synchronicity. I could do this without her, but it was not untrue that it’s easier, faster, with her help. We fall out of time, and there, we find accord and are as one—she and I, the heart and its home.
We begin to pull. Our words, spoken as one, change. We slide in space, slicing open the heart with our new hex.
My job was to prepare the heart. I did not know the opening hex. That honour was for the high robes. But they are not deserving of such knowledge, such power. The half-truths they took for revelation would have sliced more than our people from the worlds. As the Saturn Door begins to open, the spacie senses that something is wrong. He tries to blast me. I feel the ray graze my skin, but I feel no new pain.
Blackness seeps from the door, writhing outward. Maybe it’s a guardian or something like it. It flows around Avera and I, reaching for the spacie whose rayblast is not effective against it, either. They are enveloped, consumed, and the blackness presses on, seeping through the shielded door as easily as my guardian.
Avera and I nod together, knowing we must end this, knowing the ship is likely lost already as more of this ancient’s servant spills out around us. We reach across the open door, taking each other’s hands, stepping through, turning the heart into itself, pulling it closed as we pass through.
The winds of Cykranosh feel cold, or perhaps it’s the great writhing black mass of which only a small fraction has passed into our space. Avera’s antlers flare brightly. Hand in hand, hand on heart, we speak loudly the words of warding—the words of Frog—and pass together through this new world.
Heather Hatch is a doctor with several degrees in pirates, all of which are going to waste. She works at an archaeological repository in Ontario, Canada. This may sound cool but is actually regulated at a consistent temperature because it is better for the collections. She is a gamer (the pen-and-paper kind, but often over the internet because it is 2017), a writer, and a knitter. She has previously published fiction in the anthology High Seas Cthulhu, in addition to a number of academic journal articles about piracy. As a queer woman, Heather is very excited to see the Cthulhu Mythos continue to evolve by embracing a broader diversity and distancing itself from the racism and misogyny of Lovecraft’s original work.
Cargo
Desirina Boskovich
Illustrated by Justine Jones
We’re in the lounge on the lower deck where we like to spend our downtime.
Xander and Del are playing cards and disrespecting one another’s heritages. Rafiq is knitting a spacesuit jumper for his sister’s baby back home. I’m running lazily through my weight-training circuit.
Cicely, our engineer, appears in the doorway and takes a seat. She looks tense. “Guys . . . we’ve got a problem. It’s the protector shielding. It keeps overloading. I’ve been running diagnostics for the past two hours. Can’t figure out what’s wrong.”
She should have told the captain first. Or at least Xander, second in command. But things are complicated right now.
“Can you get in there?” Xander asks. “Take a look at the system, take it apart.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll need Del’s help,
though.” Del’s our second engineer, mechanic, and dock manager. “We’ll have to take it offline. Which means we’ve got to work fast.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Del says.
“I’ll need to scope the route first,” Rafiq says. “Make sure we’re not headed for anything too hot.”
“You know I have to tell the captain about this,” Xander says.
“We can fix it,” Cicely says. “I think.”
“I know. No worries. But chain of command and all that.”
“Of course,” Cicely says. “Chain of command. Most certainly.” Which in the parlance of Cicely’s people basically means, “Get fucked, pal.”
Xander rolls his eyes. “I don’t make the rules. Let me go talk to him now. Before you guys take the shielding offline. Make sure we’re all on the same page.” He doesn’t wait for them to agree before striding off toward the bridge.
The others look to me. They know Xander and I are sleeping together; they assume this lends me special powers to interpret his behavior or maybe even control it.
I shrug.
“You think this is because of the . . . uh . . . cargo?” Rafiq says to Cicely. He’s asking, but he’s not really asking. “Stuff breaking. Tech going haywire. Like the stories say.”
“She’s supposed to be fully isolated,” Cicely says. “Complete psionic quarantine. Safe.”
She doesn’t sound convinced; she sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.
* * *
To be fair, Captain Oswald did consult us before accepting the cargo. He brought the job to us and asked us what we thought as he often did. But I think we all knew he planned to take this job, no matter what we said.
It would have been better if he hadn’t asked at all.
Cicely, Rafiq, and I were against it. Cicely said it violated her beliefs. Rafiq feared the penalty if we got caught. This wasn’t like smuggling diamondchips or hydrocells or weapons.
Xander was loyal to the captain, always. He didn’t think this was a big deal, anyway. We’re couriers and smugglers; sometimes the cargo is legal, sometimes it isn’t. We inhabit the gray areas of the law. How was this any different?
Del agreed with Rafiq about the potential consequences, but his desire for the payday outweighed his fear by a hair.
Pike, hired gun, didn’t care.
The captain wanted the money. Actually, I think the captain needed the money. So he took the job.
The cargo is a girl.
She was born on an outlying colony on a cold rocky world called Soline. Her people are mildly empathic and quite technologically advanced. They’ve hidden the secrets of their technology, but we know their machines are intricately interwoven with their psionic powers.
Like all children born on that world, the girl underwent a series of tests as an infant to determine if she carried a rare genetic strain. The tests came back positive. Her phenotype rendered her uniquely compatible with the sacred network.
In this culture, such children are revered.
She was taken from her parents and returned to the homeworld, Novjor, where she remained for a decade or so, undergoing the surgeries and modifications that would enable her to fully interface with the network.
The person who first explained this practice to me, when I was just a naïve girl, gawking at the bizarre abundance of the worlds from the vantage point of a stool in a bar, described the role like a cross between priestess and systems administrator.
I think of it more like a meld of princess and slave.
Whatever you want to call it, she’s ready to begin. So we’re returning her to the colony where she was born.
Novjor has been granted a cultural dispensation to continue this practice because it’s their heritage. Their colony, Soline, is also in the clear. In the galaxy at large, however, exploiting empathic children is outlawed: a “Class A” felony under the laws of the Federation of Planets.
The Titania’s involvement is at best “pretty illegal” and at worst “punishable by death.”
Not like diamondchips. Not like hydrocells.
A girl.
Whatever they did to her brain means she can’t be around sensitive instrumentation. On our ship, she floats unconscious in a tank reinforced with several layers of superalloys and aerogels and a fullerene coating to block any excess psionic waves. Like a Faraday cage for empathic energy.
In the panel above her face is one small transparent square.
Sometimes, I go down to the cargo bay and watch her. I stare at her tiny heart-shaped face, her papery eyelids, her weightless hair.
Del knows I do this. He doesn’t mind.
* * *
Rafiq analyzes our projected course and determines the optimum window for repairs.
He calculates we’ll have fifty-seven minutes to dismantle the machinery, assess the problem, fix whatever we can, and get the system back online before the ship begins accruing serious damage.
Cicely and Del map each move down to the second. They plan their strategy, step by step, and organize the tools they’ll need.
Xander and I are on backup.
“Start now,” Rafiq radios from the bridge, and the work begins.
Cicely and Del are grim and focused. They don’t need to speak much; they’ve already spent hours rehearsing. You can hear the grind of metal on metal, the humming of machinery, the steady inhale/exhale of Cicely’s breath.
Xander and I are quiet, too. Cicely and Del request tools, and I hand them over. Xander watches the seconds and calls out the time at five-minute intervals.
Cicely and Del work with quiet concentration. But occasionally I notice one or the other toss back an ever-so-brief glance at the cargo bay behind us.
I feel it too—an energy, like being watched, prickling right there at the back of my neck.
I’m sure we’re imagining that.
“The coolant packs around the power core are malfunctioning,” Cicely says in a voice so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “Four packs. Three aren’t working correctly. This one’s only running at seven percent.”
“Do we have backups?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Always. But just a few. I’ve never seen them all go bad at once like this.”
“Can we replace them now?”
“How much time?”
“Thirty-seven minutes.”
“We’ll try. Mina, can you bring the replacements?”
Carefully, I punch my shipman’s code into the safe where our most valuable components and replacement parts are kept. No time for errors; no time to waste.
The packs are heavy. Xander helps me remove them from the protective casing, and one by one, Cicely and Del maneuver them into the slots and secure them.
There are only two.
“Twenty-seven minutes.”
Another component is also damaged: a part of the system that automatically modulates the shielding’s magnetic field based on the debris and radiation levels in our current location. Cicely doesn’t have time to explain the details.
“We don’t have a replacement for that part?” Xander demands.
“It’s not something that usually needs to be replaced.”
Cicely is hard to read. Her expression is always neutral, somewhere between tolerance and acceptance. Her low-pitched voice is always calm. She’s like that now.
Yet because we all know each other so well—living in close quarters will do that—Xander and I understand she’s panicking.
“Twenty-two minutes.”
Cicely and Del do some reprogramming to route around that component of the system. It’s just a temporary fix.
They get the shielding back online with a few minutes to spare.
* * *
We debrief in the bridge.
Cicely shows charts on the overhead display: the system’s projected failure rate. Unless we can fix or replace the coolant packs and soon, the whole engine is going to start overheating and failing completely in about three days. And because the
y reprogrammed the shields to bypass the automatic modulation system, we’re running at full capacity, which definitely won’t help the power core stay cool.
We’re seven days from the colony.
Captain Oswald is stymied by the failure and angry at everyone for no reason at all. “This is my twenty-seventh run across the galaxy in the Titania,” he rants. “Never had a problem like this before. Never heard of a problem like this before. Seems awfully strange it would happen now.”
We know without being told that he means now, when our cargo is dangerous, when a year’s worth of salary is at stake, when the crew’s conflicted.
“I believe this is my thirteenth run across the galaxy with you, sir,” Cicely reminds him politely.
Cicely is an excellent engineer. Patient. Perfectionist. She isn’t the type to make mistakes. We all know it; so does she.
Rafiq turns away from his seat at the navigator’s station. “We might as well address the elephant in the room,” he says.
“Which is?” Captain Oswald demands testily, though of course he knows.
“We’ve all heard the stories,” Rafiq says mildly. “We know what we have in the cargo. We know our tech tends to break around . . . people like her. Spaceships, too. There’s a reason that space smugglers only carry Novjorians in psi-proof boxes. Remember what happened to the Queen of the Caraways?”
“Urban legends,” Pike scoffs. “That’s just shit they tell baby spacers. Get them all riled up so they can laugh at them later.”
“I don’t think so,” Rafiq says. “You know why we’re headed seven days out? Why they settled Soline at the edge of the mapped worlds? It’s because Novjorians are not exactly welcome most places.”
“Perhaps because most cultures find their exploitation of empathic children upsetting,” Cicely remarks.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 11