Against Impassable Barriers

by Kate MacLeod

  He looked profoundly sad, but Scout still couldn’t help asking, “Six years?”

  “No, I’ve been trying to unite all of us on the surface and in space for a lot longer than that. When I was a young man, long before the war, I visited the surface once. I loved it: the land, the city life, the people.” He lingered over that last word and seemed to drift off into thought, but then he took a breath and came back to the moment. “I did everything I could to return, but the increasing tensions and then the war made it impossible. Short of creating my own landing craft, which believe it or not I looked into, I was separated from what I loved best. But soon that will be over.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Scout said. “The technology should be shared, and the coronal mass ejection storms should be a thing of the past.”

  “Definitely,” Caleb agreed. “Do you have people still on the surface, people who might be worried about you and your dogs? I have a way to send messages to the surface. Or at least I did; it’s become unreliable of late. I’m not sure if anyone is still down there to hear me, but I’ll be happy to give it another try.”

  “No, there’s no one,” Scout said, but something was bugging her. It took her a minute to work out that it was his eyes. They were so familiar. Then something inside her brain went supernova. “Who is your contact on the surface? What’s her name?”

  “Her name?” Caleb repeated. “It’s Viola McNabb, but how did you know it was a woman?”

  “Because you remind me of her,” Scout said. Well, not personality-wise—in that sense they were complete opposites—but there was no mistaking those eyes. Some of the facial structure was also the same, and the kinky gray hair. “You were her mother’s secret admirer who lived in space. She kept every letter you ever sent her.”

  Tears sprang into Caleb’s eyes. “Did she? She never answered. Not even once.”

  Scout stepped closer to the table and hugged Shadow close to her belly. She felt the sudden need for his warmth.

  “I’m not sure when Viola’s mother died,” she told him. “She never said. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Viola is dead too.”

  “Viola,” Caleb said, running a shaking hand over his mouth. “I did fear that. She never really talked to me, but she would pass things on, squawk her communications equipment, so I knew she was still there. But all of a sudden even that stopped. Do you know what happened?”

  Scout bit her lip. Viola had died spewing blood, poisoned by a trio of girl assassins who weren’t even targeting her. She had just been collateral damage.

  Scout hated that phrase.

  “It was in the last coronal mass ejection storm,” Scout said.

  “That was a bad one,” Caleb said. “Four days. I asked the Months to intervene when the Tajaki employees in space started dismantling those satellites, but they said their hands were tied.” He sniffled, then turned to look over the counter behind him to find a tissue. He carefully kept his back to Scout, and she tried not to notice the shaking of his shoulders. “I had never met her—Viola. I had always longed to, and I was getting so close.”

  Scout tried to think of something to say, some words of comfort, but before she could summon any, the door opened with a soft hiss and a young man walked in, eyes on a tablet in his hands before lifting them to Scout and Shadow at the table.

  “A dog,” he said, his face lighting up. “I drew the lucky card today.”

  Shadow registered the man’s growing enthusiasm and started wagging his tail, thumping against Scout’s side. At least Shadow’s injured leg was one thing that could be easily fixed.

  The rest of her life and her mission to get to galactic central, what could be salvaged, was going to be much harder.

  12

  The doctor injected Shadow with a single nanite and prescribed a day of low activity while the healing happened unseen inside of Shadow’s body. Then he played with the dog for far longer than he had taken for diagnosis and treatment, gently tussling with him and rolling him over to scratch his belly.

  Scout wondered if this was still going to be the norm in galactic central, that her dogs would charm the pants off of everyone they met. Why did no one in space ever have dogs?

  The door chimed, and Caleb signaled for it to open. Sparrow was standing outside, Gert sitting close at her side.

  “Emilie and Geeta are going to be staying in the intensive care wing, but I was wondering if you would like to walk the dogs around? I can give you a tour of the ship,” she said.

  “Shadow can walk short distances, but watch him closely,” the doctor said, suddenly serious. “If he starts to limp or favor that leg, you should pick him up.”

  “Okay,” Scout said. “Thank you.”

  “I think a tour is a splendid idea,” Caleb said to Scout and Sparrow. “I myself need to get back to the Months. We are nearly at the barricade, and they will need my assistance negotiating the bureaucracy.”

  “Is it worse than Space Farer bureaucracy?” Scout asked. She had spent an entire day being processed there. Granted, she and her dogs had all needed medical care and food, but still.

  “This is far worse,” Caleb said, “because it’s not routine. We’re in the midst of a cutthroat legal battle. Scores of lawyers throwing everything they have at each other over even the simplest of actions. It’s a miracle anything gets accomplished at all. But once we’re past it, we’ll be on our way.”

  “Have you been to galactic central?” Scout asked.

  “No, not yet,” Caleb said. Another wave of melancholy washed over him, and Scout could just imagine the dreams he’d had for the future that were all dashed now.

  He was in pain enough just knowing Viola was gone. Scout was glad she hadn’t told him the whole story. It would only have made things worse.

  Caleb and the doctor stepped out of the room, but Sparrow and Scout lingered a moment as the two dogs greeted one another as if they had been separated for years and not just a matter of minutes. Gert sniffed at Shadow, especially at the site where the doctor had injected the nanite, but seemed to conclude that this was still her Shadow and not some Shadow doppelgänger.

  “What would you like to see first?” Sparrow asked brightly as they turned and started back down the glowing hallway. Apparently, they were being sanitized again, to prevent hospital germs from spreading to the marketplace.

  “I don’t know,” Scout said. “I don’t even know what’s on this ship.”

  “It’s amazing,” Sparrow said as they emerged into the noisy marketplace. “It’s not like on Amatheon Orbiter 1. No one is here just because they were born here. They want to be here.”

  Scout looked around. She didn’t feel that vibe, but she didn’t want to argue. Maybe she’d sense it later after she spent more time here.

  Or perhaps not. Sparrow had grown up in space, where life was very regimented. Scout had grown up inside the confines of a protective dome, but she had been about the same age as Sparrow when it had been destroyed. She cast her mind back to her first days alone with Shadow, crossing the prairie on her bike, finding little towns hiding amongst the tall grasses. She hadn’t even known such places existed before her family died.

  Those towns had been founded by people fed up with the rules inside the domed cities, preferring to find their own means of protection against the—at that time infrequent—solar storms. She had found their pioneer spirit contagious and had never spent more than a night or two under a dome since.

  Maybe she did know what Sparrow was feeling. Freedom. But freedom at such a young age was scary and exhilarating all at once.

  “Do you have a job here?” Scout asked.

  “Not yet, but I will,” Sparrow said. “The Months took me in because they said they owed it to my brother. They told me to just wander the ship until I found my place. So that’s what I do. I watch people doing stuff, and if it looks interesting, I ask questions. Everyone is super willing to show you anything. I’ve learned so much more in the last few days than I ever did in school
.”

  Scout smiled. She remembered that feeling too. “What do you like best?” Scout asked.

  A big grin spread across Sparrow’s face. “Engineering. Do you want to see?”

  “Yes, let’s,” Scout said. Partly she was humoring the kid, but more than that, engineering sounded like the sort of place that would have a lot of wide-open spaces and fewer people, particularly compared to the marketplace.

  Sparrow led the way to the far end of the market, pausing only once to procure a paper cone filled with fried dough dusted with cinnamon and sugar. She shared this treasure with Scout. Scout had never had such a thing, but it didn’t disappoint. How could something that was largely air on the inside be so delightful?

  Then they were back in the part of the ship that looked like it had been tunneled from a single brick of metal. Each turn Sparrow took brought them to a hallway even more sparsely lit until they were so deep inside the ship the lights only came on as they walked under them and blinked out behind them. Scout had walked through hallways like that before on Amatheon Orbiter 1, but she still found the experience more than a little unsettling.

  “You’ll like my engineering friend,” Sparrow said as they walked. “He’s been to the surface a few times. That’s where you’re from, right?”

  “Right,” Scout agreed. “Is he from there?”

  “No, just visits,” Sparrow said.

  “Like secret spy stuff?”

  “Yeah, I think,” Sparrow said. “He is one of the sneakier pilots. He can get down and back without the upper management at Amatheon Orbiter 1 even knowing he’s there. They watch pretty closely, you know.”

  “I got that impression,” Scout said. “What does he do?”

  “Uh, maybe he’d better explain that,” Sparrow said, her cheeks flushing brightly enough to be apparent even with her dark skin in the dim lighting. “Sometimes I talk too much.”

  “Understood, I won’t press you,” Scout said.

  “Here we are,” Sparrow said, taking a few running steps forward into the cavernous space at the end of the corridor. Gert trotted at her side, giving a happy bark that was lost in the immensity of the space.

  A few lights were spaced along the walls, hooded to direct their light down to the floor. But most of the light came from a glowing blue cylinder sitting in the middle of the room. It glowed too intensely to look directly at, and yet the room around it was so large that even this light could barely reach the walls and the ceiling high above was lost to shadow.

  “This is the engine!” Sparrow said, running again with Gert keeping pace beside her. “It’s what makes the ship so fast. It bends space-time!”

  Scout had no clue what that could even mean. She nodded and smiled, picking up Shadow to carry him inside. It felt like her footsteps should be echoing in such a large, empty space, but something was swallowing up all the sounds, even Sparrow’s voice as she ran too far ahead of Scout. Scout walked faster until she reached where Sparrow stood at the very end of the glowing cylinder.

  “What did you say?” Scout asked.

  “I said isn’t it awesome?” Sparrow shouted. Scout would swear that glowing thing was sucking in all her words. Even standing next to her Scout could barely catch them.

  Scout looked up at the cylinder. It pulsated from white to blue, and Scout had the disturbing sensation that it was looking at her, all the way inside her.

  Judging her.

  “Maybe you want to step back.”

  Scout took a moment to put the sounds together in her head to form words, then another moment to realize it wasn’t Sparrow speaking that time. Then a hand closed on her shoulder, gently guiding her back.

  That pulsating . . . it didn’t seem to be making a sound, and yet something in her chest heard it. Not a feeling like when she was close to a rocket launching and felt that low rumble in her chest; this was different. It was like it was humming at two different frequencies, and her ears couldn’t hear it, but her heart could.

  “Keep stepping back,” the man guiding her said, and Scout saw that he had put an arm around her shoulders to keep her moving, step after step, further back from that glowing thing.

  “What is that?” Scout asked. Her voice sounded hoarse like she hadn’t used it in days.

  “Just the engine,” the man said. “Some people respond to it differently than others.”

  “Sorry, Scout,” Sparrow said sheepishly. “I forgot about that part.”

  “Don’t forget it again,” the man said to Sparrow in a voice that was both stern and fond at the same time. “This was a mild reaction to the warping field.”

  “You didn’t feel it?” Scout asked.

  “Never do,” the man said, letting go of Scout to continue walking alone through the semidarkness.

  “Me neither,” Sparrow said with beaming pride. “That’s why I’d make such a good engineer.”

  “It takes more than that,” the man shouted back. He must have learned how to pitch his voice inside this strange room. Scout could hear him quite clearly even though Sparrow’s words still seemed muffled.

  “I have to study,” Sparrow said.

  “Was that your friend?” Scout asked. She hugged Shadow tighter and looked down at Gert. Whatever strangeness Scout had just experienced didn’t seem to have affected the dogs at all.

  “No, that’s his dad,” Sparrow said. “Hey, Mike! Where’s Tom Tom?”

  “Off duty,” Mike said. He didn’t shout, and yet it was like he was speaking right next to Scout’s ear.

  “I know what that means,” Sparrow said with a roll of her eyes. “Back to the marketplace. Unless you wanted to see more here?”

  “No, I’m good,” Scout said, trying to swallow. Her mouth had gone almost painfully dry.

  She had seen quite enough of engineering.

  13

  Sparrow and Gert half walked, half ran back through the labyrinth of corridors to the now pleasantly soothing hum of voices that was the marketplace. Scout set Shadow back down to walk, but that meant keeping a slower pace. Sparrow didn’t seem to mind. She liked promenading down the street with Gert beside her. The big black dog drew lots of attention and Sparrow soaked it all up like a sponge.

  “He’ll be in here,” Sparrow said, ducking through a narrow doorway. Scout was afraid it would be another drinking establishment like the one in the black market back on Amatheon Orbiter 1, the one she had been in when Sparrow’s brother Hal had been murdered. But once her eyes adjusted to the dim light beyond the doorway, she realized it was something quite different.

  The space was cluttered with squarish machines, some tall and some short but each with a person sitting inside or two people sitting across from each other. Their hands were all moving at lightning speed, and everything inside the boxes was a wash of color and light, everything moving too fast for Scout to make sense of any of it.

  And the noise! A cacophony of metallic clangs, grunts, screams, explosions, shots fired. But none of it sounded real, Scout realized. It was all a simulation. As Sparrow stepped up to a box containing two people sitting facing each other, Scout realized the clanging sounds were coming from the holographic forms floating between the two people: a man and a woman, both heavily muscled, fighting with great gusto with swords.

  “Games?” Scout guessed.

  “Yeah,” Sparrow said. She sounded a bit embarrassed, like perhaps Scout wouldn’t think such things were cool. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was something far beyond Scout’s experience back on the prairie.

  “Hey, Stewart!” Sparrow said to a man across the room focused on a single-player game. He looked up at her. “Where’s Tom Tom?”

  “In the back,” Stewart said, jabbing a thumb back over his shoulder before returning his focus to the tabletop in front of him.

  Scout followed Sparrow, matching her winding path through the narrow spaces between the games and up a flight of steps to a second, more claustrophobic space. Here the floor was packed not just with the game
boxes but with people standing around the tables, watching the players within vying against each other.

  Scout was worried about the dogs, Gert in particular. Crowds of strangers made her edgy. But Sparrow sensed the dog’s growing anxiety and stooped over to rub her ears and settle her down before pushing on through the crowd to a game box at the very back of the room.

  “Tom Tom,” Sparrow said to a boy about Scout’s age. “I have a friend with me. She’s from the Amatheon surface.”

  At first, Tom Tom didn’t even seem to hear her, focused as he was on whatever game he was playing. But when he heard where Scout was from, he slapped a palm down the middle of the game board, freezing the play. Then he stood, extending a hand for Scout to shake. He was Space Farer pale with dark blond hair shaved on the sides but long enough over his forehead that he had to flick his head to get it out of his eyes before he could look at Scout.

  “I’m Tom Tom,” he said. “You’re Scout Shannon. I’ve heard about you.”

  “People keep saying that to me,” Scout said. She had picked Shadow up when they had reached the crowded part of the room, and she shifted him in her arms now so she could shake Tom Tom’s hand. “Are you that tight with the Months, then?”

  “No, not really,” Tom Tom said. “I do small jobs for them. They value my work. But I’m not in the inner circle.”

  There was that phrase again: value my work. “So where did you hear about me?”

  “Actually, it was down on the surface,” Tom Tom said. “I have a friend down there. Technically my contact when I make deliveries, but he’s a friend too.”

  “Tucker,” Scout said. No matter where she went, she could never quite escape his sphere of influence.

  “Yeah,” Tom Tom said. “He told me all about you.”

  “I shiver to think what that could be,” Scout said.