Here Be Dragons

by Alan, Craig

  He wore a simple gray jumpsuit, the pant legs bloused into his boots. It would have provided absolutely no protection against a vacuum. Without his heart to beat his blood had flowed out from the center of his body and collected in his skin, and turned his complexion ruddy. He had short black hair that curled over his ear and frost in his heavy beard. There was a cleft in his chin and dark rings around his closed eyes. He was slender and extraordinarily tall, and would have been a giant back on Earth even among her generation, which had been well-nourished compared to the three that had come before. Elena had met some very tall people in the Agency, colonial brats who had grown up on the Moon and Mars, but it would take decades of life in low gravity to produce a new normal like this.

  On his left breast was another Star of David, and on his right, two words in Hebrew. Elena reached out to touch him, but Rivkah grabbed her arm sharply. Elena pulled back, and Rivkah drifted closer to read the writing on the man’s chest. Then the doctor touched her bracelet and disabled her comm circuit. Elena and Ikenna shared a glance, but said nothing. They hung awkwardly in freefall while Rivkah bowed her head over the body.

  Gabriel’s corridors were rough and utilitarian, but they were still fit for human habitation. This was a place that had clearly been made for machines first and foremost. The walls were a jumble of wires, pipes, dials and levers, and she saw none of the decorous access panels that hid the guts of Agency vessels. Everything was exposed and crammed together, and there were no computerized screens anywhere in sight—all the work was done mechanically. It was such a mess that Elena wondered how anyone could keep it straight.

  Rivkah raised her head, and reactivated her intercom.

  “The ship is called Gideon,” she said.

  Her voice was flat. There was a pause. The intercoms weren’t sensitive enough to pick up on biological white noise—nobody wanted to sit there and listen to their partner breathing for hours on end. So Elena wasn’t sure why she suddenly imagined that Rivkah was swallowing repeatedly inside her helmet.

  “And this young man is named Binyamin,” the doctor she said. Then she began to cry.

  Elena rushed to her side and tried to peer through Rivkah’s faceplate. Any sort of liquid inside a helmet could quickly pool around the user’s face and suffocate them, and if Elena needed to rip the cover off she would. But her visor, connected to Rivkah’s life support, reported no danger. There were no tears, only dry, heaving sobs that rocked Rivkah again and again. She seemed unable to breathe.

  Elena hesitated, and hated herself for it.

  She put her arm around the doctor and pulled her in close. Their helmets bumped against each other with a clang, but neither noticed. Rivkah threw her arms around Elena and held tight. She continued to shake, and Elena had to reach out a hand to the wall to steady them, careful to avoid striking Binyamin. They floated there together next to the outsider.

  They had to pick a direction, and Elena chose “down,” towards Gideon’s opposite face. Even the Archangels had sides that had been designated as the top and bottom, and both Gabriel’s and Metatron’s names had been painted on their hulls at such an orientation to reflect this fact, though the distinction was completely arbitrary. But Gideon seemed to be symmetrical and undifferentiated in every direction—up and down had vanished as completely as gravity. Its builders had thought in true three dimensions.

  Rivkah had recovered, and was quietly tying Binyamin’s body to one of the walls. It seemed obscene to leave him hanging like a condemned man from the gallows. Elena knew they were on a timetable, but couldn’t bring herself to hurry Rivkah along.

  She and Ikenna examined the rest of the compartment. It was a perfect cube, with square hatches in all six of its sides. Every other inch of the walls was covered in piping, wires, and machinery. Elena took pride in the Gabriel’s form follows function aesthetic, but her vessel looked like a cruise ship next to Gideon. It had made her feel soft and green, as if she’d been playing at a hard life while the outsiders had been living it. And there was no writing anywhere, not even anything that appeared to be a directional sign. The outsiders would need a flawless sense of space just to navigate their own ship.

  Rivkah finished, and returned to them silently.

  The next compartment was a storeroom. Elena gave Ikenna permission to break open one of the containers, which was packed with dark, dry algae. They cracked a few more, and each was the same. Only the color was different—red, green, yellow. There was nothing else to see, only liter after liter of water, frozen solid inside the jugs. Ikenna opened the next hatch, and went through first.

  They had died in their beds. At each of the eight corners of the room was a sleeping bag, just like hers, and each of these had been tied to the walls at the top and bottom by taut cables so that the crew would not drift in their slumber. The sight was so familiar and strange that Elena blinked. Two of the bags were filled, and when Rivkah moved towards one Elena and Ikenna drifted towards the other with unspoken courtesy. A fleck of something bounced off Elena’s faceplate, and she reached out and snagged a tiny black lump, like coal.

  Inside the bag was a young woman, not much more than eighteen years old to Elena’s eye. She had short dark hair and big eyes, and her delicate beauty was marred only by the dried blood that clung to her nose and mouth. She must have been touching the outer hull or an electrical circuit when the bolt had struck Gideon and run through the ship, and it had electrocuted her and burst the tiny vessels beneath her face. Elena saw that the sleeping bag had been cinched tightly around the dead woman’s neck by a drawstring. Her arms were inside the bag, and there was no way for her to have done it herself. Someone had carried her to bed and tucked her in.

  Ikenna drifted to the triangular cabinet which occupied the corner of the room, and Elena loosened the drawstring and looked inside to check the woman’s nametag. The body was nude. She hurriedly pulled the string tight and joined Ikenna.

  The cabinet contained three spare uniforms, neatly folded, and a book. Elena pulled it out and found Hebrew lettering on the spine. It was a Torah. She opened to what she knew now to be the first page, and saw a column of names and dates inscribed on the inside of the front cover. They had been written in Roman characters, some in quite faded ink.

  Herschel Tenenbaum, Lodz, 1888

  Mendel Tenenbaum, Lodz, 1911

  Meyer Tenenbaum, Warsaw, 1930

  Golda Tenenbaum, London, 1955

  Reuven Mazar, Beersheba, 1973

  Golan Mazar, Tel Aviv, 1998

  Meytal Mazar, Tel Aviv, 2024

  Joav Segal-Mazar, Haifa, 2046

  Miryam Segal, New Jaffa, 2073

  Moishe Segal, New Jaffa, 2095

  Yitzhak Segal, Showa, 2125

  Esther Segal, Showa, 2152

  The first few cities she recognized as belonging to old Europe. And Haifa, at the very northern tip of the State of Israel, had been one of the few communities to escape the fallout of Tel Aviv’s destruction and survive to see the year 2049, if only briefly. But Elena had never heard of New Jaffa or Showa.

  Esther had signed her name just the year before.

  Rivkah appeared, and glanced briefly at the names in the Torah before looking away. She floated towards the middle of the room and drifted slowly. Elena wondered what the doctor had seen in the opposite corner. She started to put the book back in the cabinet, but turned instead and placed it within Esther’s sleeping bag.

  “What was her name?” Rivkah asked. It was the first that Elena had heard her speak since she had arrived on Gideon.

  Elena glanced at Ikenna briefly, a habit that didn’t leave her even when she could no longer see her companion’s eyes.

  “Esther. Esther Segal.”

  “What is over th—“

  Ikenna cut himself off and glanced back at Elena, and though his face was hidden Elena could see from the set of his shoulders that
he was embarrassed. Rivkah answered anyway.

  “Muhammad al-Araj.”

  Elena knew nearly nothing of Rivkah’s culture, but even she could tell that this was not a Jewish name.

  Silent now, they moved down another compartment to Gideon’s equator, just outside its center. There was actual writing everywhere in this room, and all of it was in Hebrew. But Elena had spent nearly two decades in and around spacecraft, and knew what she was looking at. She recognized the room as a power plant immediately. The outsiders had placed it as deep inside the hull as possible, to protect it.

  A cylindrical trunk ran from one wall to the other, and thick steam pipes burrowed into the bulkhead next to it. The control panel was all dials, meters, switches and levers, and like every other room this one lacked computers entirely. Everything was analog. Elena shrugged off her bulky thruster pack and lodged it next to the panel, and turned to examine the fuel cell. She put one finger to the cold metal of the turbine chamber.

  Bloody red light flooded the room. All three of them jumped, as much they one could in freefall. Elena cleared the corners, but there was no one but Rivkah and Ikenna inside the compartment with her. She turned back to the fuel cell and ran her hand along what she seemed to be its condenser. The dials and meters remained lifeless. She looked back up at the crimson lights, sparsely distributed throughout the compartment, and guessed that they were emergency illumination only. The fuel cell was still offline, but something else was powering the ship.

  There was no longer any reason to continue going down. The innermost bulkhead was rounded and convex, and at its very tip was a bulbous hatch. Elena knew what lay beneath. The heart of a ship was always at its center. They were looking at the top slice of a sphere, and beneath it would be the bridge. Elena settled on top of the bulkhead next to the hatch, and undid the fasteners slowly. She could hear the twisting and grinding of the metal as she worked. They opened the door to the core and dropped inside.

  Gideon’s bridge was a hollow sphere, nearly ten meters across. Thick round beams emerged from six of its poles, each of which corresponded to one of Gideon’s six vertices. They ran the length of the bridge and converged at the center to form a large globe, its interior space bounded by two interlocked rings. Elena thought it looked like a gyroscope, or an avram. The globe contained a single chair, and an outsider sat within it.

  Suspended next to the chair was a woman in a blue Agency issue spacesuit. She faced the outsider, her back turned to Elena and her crew. Her helmet had been removed and placed to her left, and her long, red hair wafted about her shoulders. A pair of silver stars had been fixed to her uniform sleeves. At her right was a large life-support unit, about the size of a quarter barrel. It filled the room with blasts of hot, oxygenated air.

  The woman heard them enter, and rose slowly and turned to face them, hands held before her and clearly visible. She smiled, and Elena felt the world open up beneath her feet and swallow her whole.

  “Please come in. And do hurry and close the door, or I shall catch a chill.”

  Elena, Rivkah, and Ikenna floated to the nearest bar one by one and held to it. Elena felt the blood rush from her head and the bile rise in her throat, and she held tightly to the metal, as if she would fall. The center of this particular strut had been engraved with Roman, Hebrew, and Cyrillic characters. They formed the word Naphtali.

  “You may if you wish remove your helmets. It would be more pleasant to speak face to face,” she said. Her English was fluent but German flavored, reminiscent of Jacob Erasmus’s Afrikaner accent. She gestured to the heater. “I have activated the solar collectors, and they are drawing emergency power from the plasma torus. This conditioner will maintain circulation in the air until the life support is back online, and you may keep your rebreathers active as well.”

  The Gabriel party followed the beam until they were nearly to the center of the room. Without discussing it, Ikenna and Rivkah separated and floated to the beams to Elena’s left and right, and left her alone in the middle. Blacks spots swam the bridge before her.

  “I have to say, to see friendly faces so far from home would be a delight,” the woman said.

  Elena’s crew glanced at her, and when she did not move or speak, unlocked their helmets and removed them. The woman smiled and nodded to each of them in turn, Rivkah first, respecting the rank. She turned to Elena, whose breaths inside her helmet were quick and shallow. With each heartbeat a black ring tightened around her vision a little bit more. The woman remained at the center of her tunnel of vision, waiting for her.

  Elena took off her helmet, and the cool air struck her at once and blew the black veil from her eyes. The woman smiled again, and Elena spoke.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “It’s good to see you too, Elena,” Captain Anne Muller said. She moved closer, and Elena put out a hand.

  “Stop. You are fine right where you are.” She lowered her arm and shook her head. “No, you’re not fine. You’re dead.”

  “I can explain that.”

  “Archangel was lost with all hands. The Agency confirmed it.”

  “On the contrary Elena, every single member of my crew is alive and waiting for me on Metatron.”

  “Stop lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying, Elena,” Anne said. “Not anymore.”

  “And stop calling me that.”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  Elena shut her eyes, and breathed. She turned on Ikenna.

  “How much of this do you know?”

  “Captain?”

  “You served with her on Archangel.”

  “For a few months,” Ikenna said. “They asked me to commit to the mission indefinitely, and I declined. I was transferred off that day.” He glanced at Anne. “I was the only one. I know as much as you do, Captain.”

  Elena turned back to Anne.

  “You’re going to explain all this. And if I think you’re lying—if I think for a second that you are a threat to my people or my mission—then I’ll call my XO, and he’ll blow your ship to hell, with every single member of your crew on it. And I’ll leave you here to think about it.”

  “You would kill your own?” Anne asked.

  “It won’t be the first time.”

  Anne nodded.

  “Ask your questions, Captain.”

  “Where the hell did that thing come from?”

  “And where is Archangel?” Ikenna asked.

  “Two questions with the same answer,” Anne said.

  “Archangel was destroyed,” Elena said.

  “No, Captain. She was reborn.”

  “Captain Muller,” Ikenna said. His voice, though steady, sounded a flawed note that Elena had never heard from him. Ikenna was just as lost as she. “I found the debris myself.”

  “No, Mr. Okoye,” Anne said. “You found debris.”

  “Where has she been all this time?”

  “The trojan asteroids,” Anne said. “The closest unclaimed territory in the solar system. It took us over a year to reach them. We could not risk a rocket burn, you see.”

  “That’s incredible,” Ikenna said.

  “It’s insane,” Elena said. “It’s fucking loco. Why do all this? Why are you here?”

  “Gabriel and Metatron share the same mission, Captain.”

  “Es verdad? We came to protect humanity from the outsiders.” Elena held her hand out to the dead man at his post. “Who the hell are you saving it from?”

  “Its worst enemy. Itself.”

  “We were hunting monsters,” Elena said. “If I had known they were men, I would have stayed home.”

  “Thank you, Captain. You’ve summed up the situation quite nicely.” Anne said. “Dr. Golus, could you assist?”

  Rivkah looked to Elena, who nodded to her. The doctor crept along the beam to the sphere, where Anne sl
id aside so that Rivkah could see the man in the chair.

  “He is Rabin Weizmann,” Rivkah said. “His uniform identifies him as a seren.”

  “A captain,” Anne said, and Rivkah nodded.

  “How many of…of them…are there?” she asked.

  “We don’t know, really,” Anne said. “We know less than you probably think we do. Seven digits, at the very best.”

  “Millions?”

  “That’s a very rough estimate,” Anne said. “We don’t know their original population size, or their rate of natural increase. Birth rate and death rate and so on.”

  “Life must be hard out here,” Rivkah said softly.

  “But easier than on Earth, in at least one way,” Anne said. “Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun, and its magnetic field is ten times as strong. The Storm would have passed right over them. I don’t know if they saw it coming, but there would have been no better place to hide from it.”

  “How did they get here?” Ikenna asked.

  “I believe Dr. Golus can probably guess,” Anne said. “Can’t you?”

  “Moishe Avramovich.”

  Rivkah had yet to take her eyes off Rabin, and she spoke quietly, to the air, as if she were alone with the body.

  “Yes,” Anne said. “He had the resources, and the motivation. The historical record is fragmentary, but we know that the Avram Corporation was conducting unmanned exploration of Jupiter as early as 2040. Exactly when that exploration became manned is a matter of conjecture,” Anne said.

  “Tel Aviv,” Elena said.

  “We believe so. It would have been slow going at first. A few handpicked settlers, the pioneers, the true believers.”

  “Aliyah,” Rivkah said. Elena had no idea who this could be.

  “But after Tel Aviv,” Anne said, speaking slowly, her eyes on the doctor, “we imagine that recruitment picked up steadily.”