The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Absolutely,” Fergus said. He followed them to a much larger bay. The far end was open to space, and Fergus nearly shouted in shock, but there was air and no sensation of being ripped out of the ship to his near-instant death, so he managed to keep it down to a small, undignified yelp.

  The flyer that glided in was an old, nondescript Martian model, one of hundreds still in service in civilian hands, and had no markings other than its registration identifier. It settled, and the outer wall of the bay closed from several sides at once, without a sound. “Hello hello!” Feffi waved at the flyer’s opaque front window, and moments later, Isla stepped out, wide-eyed and pale, carrying a case that screamed so loud in Fergus’s mind, grabbing across the space between them, that he almost fell to his knees.

  “Fergus?” she asked.

  He shook his head, steadying himself. “I’m okay. They’re nearly overwhelming, that’s all,” he said as she set the case down on the bay floor and came over to wrap him in a hug.

  “Yes, yes, helloes,” Tugu said from behind Feffi. “And also another, mmmmmm?”

  Fergus looked over Isla’s shoulder as another person got off the flyer, looked around them for a moment, then unclipped their helmet and faceplate. And this time, he did fall to his knees.

  “Dru?” he asked.

  Chapter 22

  Dru looked . . . the same, Fergus thought, but also not, as if the Dru he’d known had been painstakingly recreated by the finest craftsman back into her whole self again, by people who had not quite known her well enough. Or I’ve lived so long with my memories of her colored by my guilt that it’s my eye that is off, he thought. Her rich brown hair, still kept cut short Marsie-style, was now flecked with gray, and her face had lost some of its roundness, leaving her harder-looking, but those differences seemed meaningless, in this moment. He’d never thought about her as pretty, but she was, and the fierce fire of her self still flickered through the layers of old pain and anguish that had been set down atop it over the years.

  “Fergus,” she said, and he could see her own struggle for composure war across her face and eventually win. “You’ve gotten older.”

  “It’s not for lack of trying,” he answered. He felt suddenly incredibly silly, having let himself be so overcome, and got awkwardly back to his feet. “It’s good to see you, but damn, this is a surprise.”

  Her face crinkled up in sadness. “You’ve lost your incomprehensible accent,” she said. “I’m sorry Mars took that from you.”

  “I gave it away voluntarily,” he said. “Mars gave me much in return.”

  “Are ye sayin’ we gab funny?” Isla said. “Soonds tae me like it’s yoo.”

  Dru’s lips twitched into a brief, fleeting smile. “Maybe so,” she said.

  “I have to ask, and it’s not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you doing here?” Fergus asked, more plaintively than he would have wished. His heart was still racing, and he felt weirdly adrift, as if reality had become unmoored around him.

  “The Mars Colonial Authority has tormented me for so long, they have forgotten who I used to be,” Dru said. “And I forgot for a while too, until during one of her visits, Kaice told me you were back and still trying to pull the impossible out of your ass. I came to meet Isla, and then, when it was clear none of Kaice’s people could get past the MCA to bring you this case, I volunteered. Kaice declined. So, I insisted. You know how hard it is to win a battle of wills against Kaice?”

  “I do, and you’re the only one I’ve ever known who could do it,” Fergus said. “But the Alliance, and the MCA—”

  Behind them, Feffi made a sound like air going in and out of a bellows. “We are mmmm an ambassador ship,” he said. “Also, a half of your standards ago, there was mmmmm an unfortunate diplomatic incident, on your Kemon Station. Your Alliance is, mmmmm, very reluctant to risk another offense of us.”

  Tugu’s entire body rippled, and he grew just slightly larger. “It was a terrible thing, mmmmmm,” he said.

  “It is okay now, Tugu!” Feffi said, and wrapped his arms around his crewmate in a big hug. Slowly, Tugu deflated.

  “The Alliance is still going to ask you why you picked up the flyer,” Fergus said.

  “We will say we do not remember, mmmmm?” Feffi said. “It is such, mmmmm, a human answer for not answering at all. It will take us about six of your hours to reach our final rendezvous with your bizarre green friend, and then ey will take you where you need to go.”

  “Where are we meeting em?”

  “Mmmmm we promised not to say,” Tugu said.

  “Who would I tell?” Fergus said. “Nobody. So, surely you can tell me.”

  “Mmmmm we do not remember!” Tugu said, and his whole body shook in delight.

  “Fine,” Fergus said, then locked eyes with Isla, then Dru. “Uh, are you sure . . .” he said.

  “We all go,” Feffi said. “Mmmmm, are already going. Do you like music? Tugu has been learning the trombone. Will you hear?”

  At Isla’s look of panic, Fergus smiled and walked over to offer her a hug, relieved that it turned out he didn’t need to have said his goodbyes after all.

  “We’d love to, thank you,” he said to Feffi. “It’ll be the memory of a lifetime.”

  * * *

  —

  The Ponkian ship briefly skirted the orbit of a medium-sized gas giant, far enough out in its solar system for its sun to be indistinguishable from just another star in the sky. Without knowing anything about Ponkian technology, or even if they’d gone into jump on the trip, Fergus couldn’t say for sure, but it sure as hell looked like Neptune.

  He and the others followed Tugu back down to the bay, where a small ship of unfamiliar design sat newly parked next to Dru’s. It was a deep, almost hypnotic shade of blue, and pointy in unreasonably many directions, as if it were a stylized sea urchin with anger management issues. Spindly, curved legs held it above the floor, and a small ramp had unfolded from one of the crevices between spikes. “Your timid friend is here, mmmmmm,” Tugu said. “Ey will not come out.”

  Timid was not a word Fergus would have ever thought to apply to Ignatio. He walked up the ramp and peered in through the door. “Ignatio?” he asked.

  His friend popped eir head around as corner. All four of eir eyes were wider than Fergus had ever seen. “Come in come in get in!” Ignatio said, the words all in a rush.

  “Is everything okay?” Fergus asked.

  “Is okay, yes, but we must go as quickly as now right now,” Ignatio said.

  “. . . All right,” Fergus said. He turned around and went back down the ramp, where the others were waiting. “It’s okay; he’s just in a hurry. You can go on inside.”

  Isla picked up her stuff and then turned back at the ramp and gave a weird little bow to Tugu. “Thank you for having us,” she said.

  “You are welcome!” Tugu said. “It is mmmmm always a pleasure for good company.”

  “Please thank Feffi for us as well,” Fergus said, and put his arms to his side and wiggled them in the closest human approximation of a Ponkian gesture of gratitude.

  “Aaaaaah mmmmm yes!” Tugu said, waving his arms in a similar way. Deep inside Ignatio’s ship, Fergus thought he heard a squeak of fear. He hurried after his sister and Dru, picking up the last of the crates and bags she and Isla had brought from Mars, and as soon as he was just barely inside the ship, the ramp slid in and the door slammed shut.

  “We must go we must go!” Ignatio yelled, already in the pilot seat and lifting eir ship up to turn around, as Fergus stumbled and held on to whatever he could to keep himself steady.

  “Is everything okay? Is the Alliance after us?” Fergus asked.

  “No no no, we are not chased,” Ignatio said. Ey looked terrified. In moments, the back door of the bay opened to let them out, and Ignatio shot them out into space and down toward the plane
t’s cloudy cover.

  “Then what is it?” Fergus asked. “Is it the door?”

  “No, not the Vraet; it’s those aliens,” Ignatio said. “They are big raisin people.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Fergus said.

  The clouds around them thickened, turned into an impenetrable haze. Ignatio whistled a tiny trill, and lights sprang on, illuminating only a short distance ahead. Isla clung to the arched doorframe onto the bridge. “What’s happening?” she asked. “Are we being chased?”

  “No, we’re not,” Fergus said. “Where are we going, Ignatio?”

  “To the door station,” ey said.

  “On Nept—” Fergus started to ask.

  Ignatio hissed fiercely. “Shooooosh, now.”

  Fergus sighed. The little craft shuddered in the heavy winds, and he hauled himself into the back, where there were a handful of seats that could at least accommodate a human form, if not comfortably. “Let me help buckle you both in,” he said. Dru nodded. Isla tried to do the same, her face turning pale, one hand over her mouth.

  “It should be a short flight, I think,” Fergus said as he gently got his sister into a seat.

  Dru had pulled herself into another seat and was trying to figure out the harness. “I’ve never left Mars,” she said when Fergus came over to help.

  “You didn’t have to, just for my sake,” he said.

  “I didn’t do it for you,” she answered. “The MCA never really let me go; they just made sure I carried their prison with me, and stopped by just often enough to make sure I knew the door wasn’t open.”

  Isla added, quietly, “I think that’s why Fergus ran away from home when he did, before his door could close.”

  Fergus finished buckling Dru in. “The truth of it is, you can spend a lifetime running through every open door you find and still never escape your own head. Now, why don’t you two talk about anything less depressing than doors while I go try to figure out where Ignatio is taking us.”

  He slipped back through into the front cabin. The shaking and shuddering were intensifying, the whole cabin filled with a deafening roar. He couldn’t tell how fast they were moving, or how much of it was the winds outside pummeling them, but all of a sudden, there was something solid-looking ahead, approaching fast up from below.

  “Uh, Ignatio . . .” Fergus started to say as he wrapped his arms as tightly as he could around the back of the empty chair. In the din, he could almost swear he heard a yowl.

  “Ice,” Ignatio said. “Do not worry.”

  “Coming from a person afraid of raisins, that’s not reassuring,” Fergus said.

  Ignatio whistled another trill, longer and more complicated, and this time with clicks, and a blue neon circle lit up on the control board in front of him. It shifted through blue to turquoise to green, and then slowly, achingly, faded toward white. The moment it was fully white, Ignatio whistled and the ship dove, straight toward the wall of ice below them.

  There was a flash, and when his vision cleared, he could see they were now passing through some sort of tunnel. The turbulence was gone.

  “Did we just go through one of the interdimensional doors?” Fergus asked.

  “No, no, only now we go to the door station, yes?” Ignatio said. “It is a secret way, and you will not tell?”

  “I don’t think anyone would believe me,” Fergus said.

  “Do not try to be believed. We mostly like humans, but we don’t like them everywhere in all our spaces being needy pests. Cute needy pests. Cute stupid needy pests—”

  “I get it. I won’t tell anyone,” Fergus said. He relaxed, just slightly, and then heard it again. A yowl, from the back of the cabin. “What was that?”

  Ignatio waved three legs. “I do not know! I am busy! Go see yourself, yes?”

  Ahead of them, the tunnel walls changed over from ice to rock, and Fergus dared a glance into the back, where a wide-eyed Isla now had a very spiky-furred Mister Feefs wrapped around her head. “Ignatio, you brought my cat?!” Fergus yelled forward.

  “What? No!” Ignatio said.

  “Yeah, well, then the cat brought himself,” Fergus said. “This will go splendidly.”

  Suddenly, they were in an enormous cavern, too smooth to be natural. Another ship was already there, looking more like a building-sized brick than a ship, and he’d have mistaken it for a structure if it wasn’t hovering above the floor on a column of blue light. Seeing where Fergus was looking, Ignatio wiggled eir legs. “The Thump,” ey said, as if that explained everything. “They will not bother us.”

  “Where are we going?” Fergus asked, and in answer, Ignatio pointed toward a platform with a rounded arch in the wall behind it, in the distance. It was only as they flew toward it that Fergus grasped the perspective of just how big it was. “Is that a door? I mean, one of the doors? To Ijto?” he asked. He’d pictured something more person-sized, but this was enormous.

  “A door, a door, of course,” Ignatio said. “We have several many of these door stations to go through before we reach our door to Ijto.”

  As they neared, Fergus calculated that every ship ever built by the Shipyard could fit through that arch, some side by side. “That’s bigger than I expected,” he said. “You could drive a small invasion fleet through that.”

  “Some are small, some are big, yes?” Ignatio said. “The keys are the same, but the frames were built and rebuilt by many others over the millennia. Tunnels between are not so big, mostly, and they twisty bend and change size and your fleet would get stuck. Some have, before learning. You will see.”

  “Can we see?” Isla called out plaintively from the back.

  At Ignatio’s nod, Fergus went and unbuckled them both, and they stood and watched as Ignatio’s ship drew closer to the gray wall within the arch, as solid and impenetrable-looking as anything he’d seen. Ignatio was not slowing down.

  To one side, there was a small white dot that grew on Fergus’s senses. Unlike the fragments in the back that were so close he felt like one point in a growing triangle of signal, this doorkey’s chorus was complete and singing its own song, closed to other voices.

  In moments, he could make it out as a semicircular niche precisely cut into the cavern wall, and inside it a roughly cube-shaped object was suspended. It had an ornate framework, this one in gold, and at its center was another cube the color of his own fragments. The patterns on its surface seemed to just slightly defy the eye to follow, but Fergus knew how they went, could feel the whole that his own shattered fragments desperately strove to become again themselves.

  “Augh,” he said, as sharp static coursed through him, his fragments agitated at the proximity of the other.

  “Soon! Hold on,” Ignatio said, and they hit the wall and passed through as if it wasn’t there. All around them, everything was inside-out, crushing together and exploding outward at the same time. There was a distressing sensation of being everywhere and nowhere, of moving in complete stillness, and Fergus could neither look away nor make any sense of what he was seeing and feeling, until a tiny, brilliant dot of light appeared ahead and rushed toward them, engulfing the little ship . . .

  . . . and then they were out, and Ignatio slowed eir ship down to where they were barely moving.

  The fragments in the ship behind him had quieted down, but he could tell they were awake now beyond his ability to calm, much less control. “That was fast,” he said, when he could find his wits again. “How far did we go?”

  “Only about three hundred and seventy light years,” Ignatio said. “It is a short tunnel, that one.”

  Holy shit, Fergus thought. That’s short? “Is this how you came here? To the Shipyard, I mean?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Ignatio said. “There are many branches, many tunnels, many worlds.”

  The new station was very different from the cavern on Ne
ptune, more of a long hall that seemed to curve away in the distance. Fergus leaned forward against the front window so he could take it all in. Arching columns that looked like fingers of stone fungus reached up to the roof, and a diffuse, warm, purplish light came from somewhere up among them, illuminating carved writing in some unknown language (or languages, Fergus had to guess, because there were distinct shifts in style) on the walls. The floor itself seemed to be some sort of mirror, or possibly unmoving water.

  “Where are we?” Isla asked.

  “An exoplanet named Hnize,” Ignatio said.

  “Nice,” Isla said.

  “Hnize,” Ignatio repeated.

  “Very nice,” Isla added.

  “Hnize!” Ignatio said, waving two of eir legs in the air in annoyance.

  “We got it, I think,” Fergus said, glaring at Isla. “But I thought you wanted the stations to be secret.”

  “Humans will never make it here,” Ignatio said. “And what do you know of ‘here,’ anyway?”

  “Not a damned— AH!” Isla shouted, and jumped back, pointing wildly. “There’s something below the floor!”

  Fergus peered out down, and sure enough, he could see a giant shape, lights along its sleek, pointy-ended body, slip by directly below the surface that he had taken for water. “A ship?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Ignatio said. “I do not know that kind. If one comes up above, then you can shout in my soundholes, yes?”

  They flew slowly, a meter or two above the floor, as the hall did slow S curves side to side for almost an hour before they reached another door, but Ignatio shook eir head and kept going. Four more ships passed them below, two like the first, none of them anything Fergus had ever seen. One was needle-shaped and so long and thin, he could hardly imagine anyone fitting inside, unless it was being flown by mice.

  Weirder things have happened, he thought, just as he felt a vibration and energy coming toward them. “Something’s heading toward us,” he said, and Ignatio veered to one side, slipping eir ship between columns as a dozen spheres, each about five meters in diameter and iridescent like soap bubbles, zoomed through, just barely missing several posts as they careened past. “Tikne,” Ignatio said, and then steered them back out into the corridor.