by Essa Hansen
The others would be better off without him coercing them to help when they shouldn’t. He had wondered why his jagged edges didn’t puzzle into the crew’s smooth sides, harming then even when he tried his best. His edges fit the Casthen already.
Caiden set the glass chicory flower on the center of the console. Hopefully the core of him, the shining spirit Leta had seen, would keep him sane in whatever Casthen void he headed into.
“I’m not the boy who ran away. I’m the man who’s coming to avenge.”
The ship sang as he lifted his hands into the drive guides. Tendrils of light wrapped his fingers, infiltrated his nerves. Caiden’s neural firing knit into the glossy spine above him, and his sense of body expanded to the ship, from its delicate shielding to the heavy, ancient mineral of its fuselage. There was something primordial yet deeply advanced about her: the ineffable patched with the mundane.
The Azura’s mini thrusters hummed. The floor of the hangar dematerialized on command. The particles twinkled away like sand, revealing the massive hollow of a hangar gaping beneath. He lowered the ship gently. Light-studded landings stacked the hangar’s walls, with passager ships of all size and type berthed against them. A hexagonal pad in the center of the space lay empty except for Threi’s Glasliq. Purple ruffles of flame edged the ship’s quiet thrusters as it landed. The avian wings shivered and collapsed to its compact body, rippling into a seamless vitreous surface.
Caiden’s heart stumbled at the sight of the enemy. He arced his hands, spinning gently around to face the Glasliq as he lowered. A doleful tone filled the Azura when he set her down on the pad.
Compression jammed his chest. Shoulders rigid. He withdrew his hands from the guides, which dissolved in weepy sparkles. The engines ramped down.
He rolled out of the seat and signaled the bay doors open with a mental command.
Threi’s crew clustered by the Glasliq’s base, while Threi strode for the Azura, a holosplay database unfolded over his palm. He flicked at a map, and hardly looked up as he strolled into the Azura’s bay. The moment Threi stepped in, the energy hum of the ship agitated, scratchy in Caiden’s neural link like interference in a signal.
Threi said, “I can fly us home, it’s quite far—”
Caiden snapped, “It’s not my home.”
“Oh, pup, do yourself a favor and accept these facts early. If you have any resistance, the Casthen will break you. You’ll be much more resilient if you lean into it. Besides, it’s true. We can even visit the lab where they mixed up the cocktail that’s you. Or the warehouse where your birthing pod was housed. How about that?”
While Caiden smoldered, Threi continued linking together a route of egresses and universes on his map.
“The journey will take enough time that we can get to know one another, but I already know you, young mechanic-would-be-soldier. There’s very little you need to know about me that I haven’t told you already.”
“You’ve only told me your name and that you’re loyal to yourself yet serve everyone. They call that a ‘slut,’ I think.”
Threi laughed. “And I’ve stayed alive a long time.”
Caiden closed the bay door. “So, which of the fables are true? The Casthen Harvest is a portal inside a whale’s stomach? Folded into the interstices of time. Scattered between different universes that make up a whole. You have to sacrifice the blood of an innocent to get in, or sing the right notes of an old star-mariner song?”
“All of those, yes,” Threi said, squeezing the holosplay shut. “Though it’s technically not a whale; we call it a holobia.”
“You’re joking.”
Threi angled for the pilot’s seat but hesitated as Caiden flinched. They locked eyes until Threi backed up with an elegant gesture to the chair. “You fly. I’ll instruct. If you pass out from strain, I’ll grab the twitch drive.”
Caiden hesitated, fingers tickling the glave on his hip.
“Oh, stop. I’ll be right behind you.” Threi positioned at the back of the seat. When Caiden didn’t move, Threi said, “For your own sake, pup. I know about your accident. Your leash hasn’t ever been unclipped, but it’s time now. I have more years in a cockpit than your Taitn Maray Artensi. More conquests than Endirion Day. More crew under my command than Laythan Paraïa. Sit, Winn: let’s go kill the Casthen Prime.”
CHAPTER 29
GATEKEEPER
It was better not to say goodbye. The crew would know what he chose, and in time they’d move on. He’d just be a stray Laythan had fixed up that ran off again. He had to head into his darkness alone.
Caiden relaxed in the pilot’s seat as Unity’s rind approached and engulfed the ship, filling the view with a swash of pearlescent color. Once they were through, the scenery past the cockpit window crisped into detail. The ship systems pieced together light into imagery more stable than their velocity would afford a human eye. Blue and lavender gases devoured a nearby planet. Behind it, tiny stars buttoned a swath of milky dust. Charting appeared in the cockpit, overlaying the view.
Background processes analyzed the redshift of nearby alignment stars, and within moments the ship’s timepieces calibrated. The transmitter tech clocked subatomic dimensional wobble based on the local universe’s gravity wave carrier … and stalled messages from the crew stacked in.
Anguish leached into Caiden’s breast. These’ll break me if I read them now.
“Can I offer you some advice?” Threi asked, coming up behind him.
“Shut up.”
“If you’ve made a decision, own what you’ve chosen. Don’t look back or vacillate. You’re sad? Fine. Feel it and get it over with, because in this multiverse you’ll be up against something else in the next moment and you’ll need that head clear. Let me fly.” Threi sidled into the cockpit. “We need to chain through multiple egresses and I don’t want to be directing you the whole time.”
One stellar egress lay up ahead: a wall of opaque, glowing dust hanging like a spiral curtain. Bundles of distorted lines pulled the milky light back into a ring shape, with a starless void gaping in the middle: a hole in the folds of spacetime. Stellar egression would get them quickly between universes across vast distances, jumping galaxies and universal clusters.
Caiden peeled himself from the seat to let Threi take his place, the man fitting poorly with his Casthen armor.
“How long is it going to take to get there?”
“It’ll feel like a couple days.”
“Are you capable of straight answers?” Caiden twitched at the sight of an intruder in his seat.
Threi shrugged and zoomed the ship right into the black maw of the egress.
The void slammed into Caiden. Every particle of him stopped, slathered across space and time. Squiggly electric filaments whipped across the walls, his skin, every inch of space. Then pressure slapped him back together. Wavy threads of light sucked back into their surfaces. The darkness pooled.
Caiden clung to the seat as nausea boiled and sparks danced. It was far worse than crossover.
“First of fifteen. Get used to it.” Threi sat forward, hands in the twitch drive instead of the light guides. His fingers moved with delicate precision as he rode gravity like rapids.
Through the cockpit, another egress drew near: glowing dust spiraled into a starless pit, strapped open by belts of curved light. Caiden groaned.
The light ring of the egress swept over them, then the black circle engulfed the cockpit. Caiden was again buffeted, streaked, and snapped back into his body, stumbling to a kneeling position. The view filled with prim asteroid belts around a striped gas giant. Beside them, a universe rind dominated the expanse with fiery waves of cerulean and orange. The rind swept through the ship, kicking Caiden in the stomach and stopping his heart for several beats. He gasped on the other side and blinked at bizarre afterimages.
Asteroids hurtled at the cockpit. Caiden death-gripped the seat as Threi calmly spun the ship sideways.
“Relax.” Threi dived effortlessly, his fi
ngers a flurry of spasms in the twitch drive. “We have incredible shielding.”
Caiden winced at each nick in the Azura’s armor field.
“What a find.” Threi pulled out of the rocks. “To think she was perched in the desert this whole time. We combed that planet and found nothing. At least, not anything that wasn’t well buried at the time.”
“Shut up.”
Threi craned his neck back and smiled at Caiden’s scowl. “Sorry, pup.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sure, soldier.”
Caiden was ready for the next egress, which helped, but Threi banked the ship sharply right into a second. The gut-kick of it doubled him against the back of the seat. His joints popped, and a buzz oozed out of his head.
“Twelve more of these?”
Threi waved Caiden off. “Take a break, you’re annoying. Rest. Eat. And so forth.”
There was nothing to eat but emergency rations. Caiden already missed Ksiñe.
He headed to the scour, fully clothed. It didn’t clean as thoroughly, but he welcomed the tingle and untangling. In the sleeping chamber, exhaustion folded him on the bed. But memories waited in sleep, and he wasn’t ready for those to hammer more cracks in him. He rebounded between deep relaxation and the adrenaline of catching himself falling asleep.
Metal banged metal, reverberating into the room.
Panic seared Caiden awake. His brain mashed the sound into memory and kicked him back to the desert: Sand worm, wriggle out.
“We’re here,” Threi called down.
Caiden jolted from the bed, quivering, swearing, and ran a hand through sweaty hair. He walked up into the bay and peered out the cockpit windows. The ship drifted beside a tiny moon or a very large asteroid, wreathed in fine dusts. The surface was oak brown, rough and pitted, nothing of interest except a few bluish scabs.
“All right, hotshot, put this on.” Threi tossed him a body harness of silvery webbing with small wing-shaped tanks over the shoulder blades.
Caiden unfolded it, frowning, then walked over to the cockpit windows. The cloudsuit was for spacewalking, but this moon-thing orbited nothing, and the vicinity map looked sparse. A distant sun lay behind them. “Why don’t we land?”
“That’s not a planet.” Threi strolled to the end of the bay and poked around in a holosplay of auxiliary systems. He initiated an atmoseal membrane over the doors: it purled like fire then calmed into a luminous sheet of violet.
Caiden said, “You’re not used to explaining things, are you? You just order people around.”
“Usually, yeah. Suit up so we can get you tethered.” Threi fished a long cord from the bag he’d brought and looked around for something to tie it to. “It’s not a planet, it’s the species called holobia.”
“Species?”
“It survives in space by having a self-sustaining internal ecosystem. Water cycle and plants and critters— or so I hear.”
Caiden paused mid-dressing, one leg in the lattice of the suit. “Shit. There really is a portal in its belly?”
“We’re not going inside it. What I need you to do is get it to uncurl.”
Caiden straightened. “You’re serious.”
“Deadly.” Threi began attaching the line to a tether loop in the floor. “Entrance requires at least two people; I’ll be the pilot, you be the bait. A good first test for you, don’t you think? This holobia won’t flinch at being pummeled with space debris or weaponry, but it’s sensitive to bioharmonic electromag fields. If you touch it, it’ll start to move and I’ll fly you out to lure it away, then reel you back in. It’s faster than you think, so don’t get ground to mush between the surface plates or whacked into the void or, you know, swallowed.”
“Swallowed? This is sounding more and more like a joke,” Caiden grumbled as he yanked on the rest of the harnessing over his clothes and head. The silvery cords crisscrossed his limbs and torso. Threi threw him the end of the tether, which Caiden fitted into the molecular fastener between his shoulder blades. All in all, it didn’t feel like much protection. “Who do you usually get to be live bait?”
Threi glided over, grinning. “Oh you’ll meet everyone soon enough. Your brand-new family, Winn.” He clapped Caiden on the back, which also triggered the cloudsuit.
A second skin of fleecy material spread over Caiden’s body, filling up between the spaces of the harness. The fleece crawled over his skull, and he held his breath as it sealed up his mouth and nostrils— but then the material all over him flashed and puffed up. Gas expanded in gaps between weird molecules, continuing to puff out until the material became a hazy, translucent aura wreathing him entirely. The protective cloud scintillated, infiltrated with floating particles of other materials or functions. Caiden inhaled tangy oxygen as a pocket of air formed around the front of his face.
Threi punched the bay doors open. The Azura’s tail split to a vista of stars. The luminous atmoseal membrane across the opening was all that defended them against the void.
Brow scrunching, Caiden walked over and stood before the opening. “You want me to touch it? Where?”
The ship had drifted so the thing Threi called an animal swung into view below: a sphere of oak skin, bland all around.
Threi shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Can’t tell front from back anyway.”
Caiden stepped through the atmoseal, which fizzed angrily around his cloudsuit until he was past. Into the utter silence of space. Blood rushed in his head, breath whisked his ears.
The unfolded bay-door panels made a ramp out to nothingness, and as he walked to the edge, he left the Azura’s scalar gravity field. The invisible nodes of it tugged his body until he was out, weightless, feet lifting off the ramp.
Nothing but the semi-visible cloudsuit protected him from space. Nerves flittering, Caiden peered down. I’m really going to let Threi tug me around like a worm on a line?
He tried to figure out how it was all a big joke, Threi winding him up for a lark. When he glanced back, the bastard was smiling.
Caiden sucked in a deep breath and pushed off into the vastness of space.
The tether wiggled behind him, an umbilical to the ship.
Stars spotted the ether.
Caiden floated, and his heart kicked at him, but not because of the cold beauty of the surroundings. Because the sensation in his body was the same as the memory jog process, a weightless and silent pressure carrying him.
Groundless, alone.
The holobia’s desolate surface looked like RM28, the nophek planet. It stretched to fill his view as he approached. Caiden was going back to the desert, stranded on a prison world he shouldn’t have escaped. That fear was a whisper, this time, not the punch it had been before when the flight-simulation planet triggered visions of home.
The cloudsuit wicked away his panic sweat in cold little flurries. The suit’s composition regulated temperature, radiation, and atmosphere, while the edge of it, a half meter from his body, pushed a path through the dust.
Caiden glanced behind; the Azura’s black flank glistened under distant sunlight. The tether snaked to her across the void.
Inertia drifted him closer. The rock had no noticeable gravity, artificial or otherwise, despite its looming presence, a couple kilometers across. He stretched out a gloved hand to stop his glide.
He touched, palm flattening on the oaky surface. Dust curled away.
Nothing happened.
That bastard. Probably cackling at me right now.
Caiden gripped the rough surface so he wouldn’t rebound away. He peered over his shoulder. The Azura’s thrusters idled. The umbilical tether was still attached, at least.
He sighed into his suit’s pocket of air and closed his eyes, stilled his mind and racing pulse.
The rock under Caiden’s palm split open.
Brown texture peeled back like a lid. Cloudy membranes slithered aside and glassy flesh beneath rolled with color.
A pupil contracted to a void-black circle in front of
him.
An eye. Fifteen meters across. Caiden flailed back, kicking instinctively to propel away. The eyelid slammed shut like an avalanche then peeled open again, all the more terrifying because the huge motion was utterly silent. Deep as a lake, feral colors swam in a bioluminescent iris and that great pupil dilated like a black hole. More skin split, and across the holobia’s surface, twenty more enormous eyes opened and swiveled to Caiden.
Swears poured off his tongue. Caiden rowed his limbs uselessly through the vacuum.
Laborious and silent, the massive beast moved at him.
The tether yanked. Caiden rushed backward, breath wrenched from his lungs. Stars streaked. Threi punched the acceleration to drag him away. Caiden’s intestines clumped against his bladder. The velocity made the cloudsuit congeal around his head and back, hot and tingly.
A rumble from the holobia juddered Caiden’s bones. He peered past his feet and watched the holobia’s body uncurl. The puzzle-piece armor of its surface uncoupled as it stretched, no longer a sphere but more of a flatworm shape. Amidst the folds of its segmented body, Caiden spotted the reason why they needed it to move: the beast curled around a stellar egress. Light speared out into space as the brilliant ring of the structure was revealed.
All damned, this bullshit is the Casthen’s front door? Caiden whipped through space as Threi jetted the Azura away, and the holobia followed. Its front was all eyes, and the skin separating them diminished or sank in until one monstrous single eye surface stretched the front of the animal.
The pupil squeezed into a horizontal bar. Which split open. Into a mouth.
Caiden squeaked indecent sounds.
The holobia picked up enormous speed as a freakish maw opened, a whole planet split in half to swallow the Azura whole.
“To void with this! Threi! Faster!” The suit absorbed his words, and there was no audio link to the ship anyhow, but Caiden streamed curses and scrabbled back to clutch the tether.
The holobia’s mouth was a muscular pit wide enough to consume a ship a hundred times the Azura’s size in one bite. Saliva curtains layered inside like atmoseal membranes.