Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  Calm, Tembi reminded herself. Stay calm. Maybe letting the almost-princess talk to the general was the smart course of action.

  Rabbit watched them both to see if Tembi was going to push back, and then opened the door to the Flight Deck.

  Bayle nodded appreciatively; Tembi thought she might throw up.

  At first glance, Tembi thought she was falling; then she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. Every surface of the Deck was made of streaks of light, the floors, the walls, the ceiling, all of it cutting across her vision in stark bright lines. Here and there were people, apparently floating in space, waving their hands through holo-projections which (she assumed) controlled the ship. Others were standing in mid-air, talking.

  She closed her eyes and entered the room. Anti-grav devices kicked on and stabilized around her, and she opened her eyes again.

  The Deck was less of a headache once she was looking at it from the inside. There was more of an order to the streaks of light zooming around them, and it felt like…

  Oh, she realized. It’s almost like the Deep.

  Good. That made it somewhat familiar. Not enough colors and not nearly enough music, but faster-than-light travel was definitely in the same family as the Deep.

  One of the people examining a holoscreen stood and crooked a finger at Rabbit. Rabbit nodded, and then motioned Tembi and Bayle to lead the way.

  The man was familiar. Tembi realized she had seen him talking with Domino at the party in the Pavilion. He was wearing a wrinkled, less-formal version of his dress uniform, and his face was sweaty. Not exactly what she had expected in her first close encounter with a general, but—

  “I sent you to see what was breaking into the lockboxes in the Records room, and you return with two stowaways in stolen uniforms,” he said. “And one of them has your weapon? Explain.”

  Rabbit gave the quick version of events, beginning with finding the Witches and ending with the likelihood that someone at Lancaster had moved Tembi and Bayle to the ship.

  General Eichin had begun shaking his head about halfway through the explanation. “All right,” he said to the Witches. “You’ve had your fun. They’ve managed to track you to my ship, so unless you want the deaths of every single Sabenta on your souls, get out of here.”

  “Sir, we cannot.” Bayle was standing at her full height, fingers knotted together. She would have been a prim-and-proper princess from the storybook channels except for the Spacers’ uniform. “Someone jumped us here, and we are not able to jump out on our own. We are too inexperienced, especially with your ship traveling at FTL. Please understand, it was not our intention to cause you such problems.”

  The general stared at Bayle. “Rabbit, what’s this one’s backstory?”

  “Bayle Oliver, daughter of Lord Oliver, an Atlantean noble.”

  “The girl you were surveilling on Found,” the general said. He turned aside. “Rabbit, come.”

  Rabbit and the general moved to the center of the bridge and began talking. Or, the general began talking, while Rabbit listened with the attention of someone who knows they have been caught doing serious wrong and are waiting to learn the conditions of their punishment.

  “What do we do now?” Tembi whispered to Bayle.

  “We wait,” her friend replied, a small and peaceful smile fixed to her face.

  They waited. Tembi watched. The dizzying views from the Deck were actually quite beautiful once you got used to them, almost like staring into an aquarium—

  “Tembi?” Kalais said quietly.

  “I don’t want to hear anything out of you,” she said.

  “I want you to know, I really do care—”

  “Are you really from a military family?” She pointed her stolen popstick at him so he was forced to move away from her. “How about the small town you grew up in? Was any of it true?”

  “No, but—”

  “Don’t talk to me,” Tembi snapped, and turned her back on him so she could keep watching the stars.

  The general and Rabbit returned, with Rabbit looking slightly beaten.

  “Witches,” General Eichin said. The word had the sound of both a title and a curse. “Understand that my best-case scenario is that I throw you out an airlock and never get caught. That’s where I am right now.” He held up a hand before they could protest and plead for their lives. “As that’s not something I would do, I hope that tells you how excited I am about our options.

  “Walk with me,” he said, and left the Deck.

  Tembi and Bayle followed, carefully: Kalais and Rabbit were just behind them, and after that comment about the airlock…

  Tembi gripped her popstick and kept careful watch over her shoulder. If the general thought he was going to throw her and Bayle into space, she’d make sure their ex-boyfriends came with them.

  The general began talking. “We were making progress,” he said. “We were finally making progress! The Moonstone is carrying terms of use of the Deep from Lancaster. If the Sabenta and their allies agree to these terms, we’ll be able to use the Deep on a conditional basis to move refugees to safe quarters.

  “This is incredibly important to the Sabenta. We can move our families out of Sagittarius until the war is over. We can move thousands of people in an hour, instead of hundreds in a week.”

  Eichin stopped and turned to look at them. He seemed taller than physically possible, not with the hull of the ship curving over their heads. “With you aboard our ship, we stand to lose everything,” he said. “When the Tower Council hears you’re aboard, do you think they’ll realize the error of their ways and start to help the Sabenta? At best, they’ll think you’re two willful, stupid girls who tried to chase their lovers across the galaxy.

  “But I doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. “Or even if they don’t think we’ve abducted you, those sloths on the Tower Council who don’t want to lift a finger will use this as a reason to stay out of the fighting. If they discover you on board, that’s the excuse that’ll be needed for the hard-liners in Lancaster to refuse any kind of assistance, even transporting refugees.”

  The alarms began to sound again. Overhead, the red lights burst into life.

  “Gods take it all.” The general shook his head. “Rabbit, with me. Kalais, put them somewhere out of the way. Make sure they get through this without so much as messing up their hair.”

  “Get through what?” Tembi asked.

  General Eichin didn’t reply as he turned and walked back in the direction of the Deck.

  “Get through what?!” she shouted after the general. She would have started running after him, but the ship shuddered again, and she and Bayle were thrown to the floor.

  Tembi lost her hold of the popstick. The weapon spun off down the hallway and lodged in a niche between the wall and a plass display of a map. She tried to scramble after it, but the ship lurched again and she felt herself slam against the wall.

  A hand reached down. She grabbed it before she recognized that it belonged to Kalais; she pushed him away and went to help Bayle.

  “Not now, okay?” he said to her, as he moved them both towards a smaller hallway running towards the ship’s interior. “You can take it out on me later—I deserve it—but I’ve got to make sure you survive first.”

  “What’s happening?” she snapped. The ship rocked from another impact, and she and Bayle staggered against the wall for support.

  “I don’t know,” Kalais said, and paused. “But if I had to guess, the Saggs have found us again. We’re under attack.”

  _________________________________

  stonegirl

  help

  the painted woman

  help

  the painted woman

  help

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 18 July 4196 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “What are Saggs—wait!” Bayle said, trying to follow Kalais. It was close to impossible: he had his space leg
s and could walk in spite of the jolting of the ship around them, albeit unsteadily. Tembi and Bayle, however, kept careening off of the walls. “Wait! Do you mean the Sagittarius Armed Forces?”

  “Yes!”

  Tembi cracked her cheek against an exposed support beam. She gasped, and her head began throbbing again. The Deep grabbed her around the waist, and she and Bayle floated slowly towards the wall, where they slipped their hands into the openings in the support beams.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. The smell of a type of fresh fruit she couldn’t recognize came and went in response.

  “Over here.” Kalais had reached a door. He tapped in a code on the panel, and it slid open. “C’mon,” he said. “C’mon, hurry! There’s anti-grav in here.”

  They pulled themselves along the exposed beams lining the hallway. Tembi was beginning to see how the ship was designed for this kind of abuse; the curved edge of the metal beams was easy to grip, and the smaller holes cut in the beams were placed regularly enough to be used as reliable handholds.

  She looked up. The three silver balls on strings that hung over each intersection were dangling towards the right; she realized these were visual cues of the ship’s orientation in emergencies.

  The overhead lights began to flicker. Tembi and Bayle moved hand over hand along the beams, until Kalais grabbed them by their arms and hauled them into the room. There was a strange tugging sensation on Tembi’s kneecaps as the Deep fought with the anti-grav stabilizers over her legs, but she shooed the Deep away so the anti-grav could lift her into the center of the room.

  There were more silver balls on strings in here, and these were outside of the anti-grav field; as she watched, they whipped around in response to impacts she couldn’t feel.

  “This is why the Deck has anti-grav,” she whispered to herself. “To hold the crew stable.”

  “What?” Kalais asked, glancing up from checking a report on a data device set into his uniform’s sleeve.

  Tembi pushed away from him and glided towards Bayle. There were other people around them. Not hiding, no, but they stared each other and flinched with each new noise, or withdrew into themselves when the ship twisted.

  Bayle was speaking softly to a woman and her three children. “Hey, Tembi,” she said. “This is the Lelain family. They’re catching a ride back to Sagittarius on the…what ship is this again?”

  “This’s the Moonstone,” said one of the children. She wasn’t Earth-normal; her hair and eyebrows were feathery, and they trembled as she clung to her mother’s arm. Her two siblings looked nothing like her; they both had heavily textured skin and lips, almost like the bark of an old tree.

  An impact rocked the ship; everyone in the room made the kind of small worried noises that only come out when you aren’t sure you’ll ever get to make another one. The treelike siblings began to cry, and the mother pulled her children away to a quiet corner of the room.

  “What do you want to bet that the ship is under attack because we’re on it?” Bayle whispered to Tembi.

  “I’m not taking that bet.” Tembi looked around for a window or a viewscreen or…or something! Some connection to the outside world to let her see what was happening.

  “Do you think they want to kill us?” There was almost no color in Bayle’s face. As Tembi watched, the Deep began to repaint her cheek with the familiar long swirls of blue fronds.

  “I think they want to capture the ship,” Tembi said. “If whoever abducted us wanted us dead, they could have murdered us instead of jumping us here. If they catch us? Well, you heard the general. That ruins the possibility of a treaty between Lancaster and the Sabenta.”

  “But....” Bayle fidgeted, her hands turning over and over themselves. “But they can’t catch us! Not if we’re on a ship traveling at FTL speeds.”

  “Who told you that?” Kalais had overheard them. He drifted over gracefully, at home in the anti-grav. Tembi felt a flash of anger as she realized he had been feigning awkwardness when they used to go dancing. “Speed doesn’t matter if you’re using a lockship.”

  Tembi had to know. “What’s a lockship?”

  Kalais held up one hand in a fist. “This is the Moonstone,” he said. He stretched out the fingers on his other hand. “And this is a lockship.” His open hand wrapped around his fist, and clenched down so his two hands were locked together.

  “Is that what’s out there?” Bayle asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Those impacts you feel? That’s not from any weapon. That’s the lockship trying to drop down on top of us.”

  “When do you use a lockship?” Tembi asked. She was afraid she might already know the answer.

  “When you want to take over another ship,” he replied. “As soon as they lock on, they’ll seal their hull to ours, cut through it, and enter.”

  “What happens then?” Bayle asked, her eyes moving towards the mother and her children.

  “We’ll try and hold them off,” he said. “But we’re not equipped for a siege. We don’t have enough weapons. If they lock on, we’ll be taken prisoner, or worse.”

  Another impact knocked the three silver balls into uneven orbits.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and almost sounded as if he meant it. “The Sabenta are the galaxy’s best pilots. We’ll be okay. Once we shake them again, they won’t be able to find us again in FTL.”

  “Wait, what do you mean, shake them again?” Tembi asked.

  He paused to make sure the mother and her children weren’t close enough to overhear. “Well, that’s the buggy thing,” he said quietly. “Finding another ship while traveling at FTL is next to impossible. If that’s really the lockship banging on us, they’ve done it twice.”

  “How?” Bayle asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. New tech, maybe. A tracking system that moves in the FTL spectrum? We’ve been trying to develop that for our own lockships.”

  “A datasig?” Bayle said. “They could lock on to anything transmitting or receiving data on this ship.”

  “Bayle, come on. We’re an espionage ship,” he said. “Every datasig we need in order to operate is shielded, and we screen the Moonstone from fore to aft twice each twelve-hour cycle for unfamiliar datasigs that might be chatting with a third party.”

  Creeping dread was starting to curl up and make itself at home in Tembi’s stomach. “When did the lockship show up?”

  “Not too long before we found you.”

  The creeping dread tucked itself in for the rest of the night. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Did we bring a datasig with us?”

  Kalais recoiled as if she had unloaded a fully charged popstick into him. “Do either of you have an Identchip?”

  “No!” Bayle said. “My people use databands, and mine’s missing!”

  “I don’t, either. How do you screen a body for a datasig?” Tembi said, patting herself down. Bayle did the same, but they weren’t in their own clothes, and unless the tracking device was hidden in their underwear, then— “What if they made us swallow it while we were asleep? Or injected it into us?”

  “We have to get to a fully shielded room,” Kalais said, as he darted through the air towards the door. “One that blocks all transmissions.”

  Tembi pushed forward until the anti-grav unit caught her movement and carried her towards the door. “Where?”

  “There’s a conference room one floor up from the Deck! General Eichin uses it for secure meetings.”

  Kalais hit the doorway and floated through the shield. The ship’s gravity field caught him and he crashed against the floor, then was tossed into the air again as the full force of the lockship’s attacks rocked the Moonstone.

  “Deep!” Tembi shouted, as the ship’s gravity field seized her and sent her careening towards a metal wall—

  The Deep flowed around her, then swept back to catch Bayle and Kalais. The three (Four? Yes, four.) of them flew down the hallway, the humans grabbing hold of the exposed beams and using these to throw themselves
forward.

  It wasn’t easy. Even wrapped in the Deep, the ship rocked around them. Easy grabs suddenly weren’t; a handhold in close reach could twist away, faster than anything. Turn a corner, and a hallway that appeared to be empty could turn into a cyclone full of objects. Tembi and Bayle followed Kalais as closely as they could—

  —oh gods her stupid manipulative joke of an ex-boyfriend had a phenomenal butt, shut up shut up shut up! This isn’t the time for—

  —and the Deep kept most of those objects from rocketing into them, but those objects still slowed them down, and—

  “Oh!” Bayle cried out as she spotted a body tumbling across the hall. Tembi felt Bayle reach out through the Deep with the same kind of control that allowed them to yank a foam ball from midair and pull it to safety, and then her friend was cradling a strange man in one arm.

  “Leave him!” Kalais shouted. “We don’t have time for him!”

  “Yes, we do!” Bayle yelled back, dragging the unconscious man along with her.

  Tembi stopped, and saw her friend struggling with a man twice her size. “Deep!” she shouted, and pointed towards the nearest door. It flew open, revealing three worried faces. She didn’t have time to process any more details than wide eyes and pink skin before the Deep tossed the body at them and slammed the door shut after it. “Thank you!”

  “I’ve got to learn how to jump in FTL!” Bayle said, as she caught hold of a support beam and steadied herself through a powerful tremor.

  Tembi didn’t reply. That feeling of creeping dread hadn’t left; she was beginning to think there was only one way off of this ship in time—

  Another impact shook the Moonstone. It was severe enough for metal to shriek in pain around them.

  “Did they lock on?” Bayle shouted at Kalais, hands pressed against her ears.

  Tembi stared at her. Something about her hands—

  “Bayle!” Tembi gasped, as the answer finally hit her. “Your manicure!”