The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  Ada growled. “Is this piece of junk even going to make it to space?”

  Baoji shouted back. “Don’t insult my ship or she’ll die just to spite you!”

  The ship rattled in angry agreement as the sky lost its cyan hue entirely, becoming darker and darker. Another loose pizza box fell out from the cockpit and Ada caught it, looking at it more closely this time. She didn’t really understand what she was seeing, aside from it being some kind of technological artifact, so she tossed it aside. She’d figure it out later.

  “That bike!”

  She turned to see Turou, who was holding his hand to his forehead like he was an idiot. “What, the thing you were riding?”

  He turned to look at her. “It was a rental! I used the academy’s account, they’re going to throw all kinds of extra charges on there - lost, damaged, late return - my department head is going to bill me and the administrative -”

  Ada didn’t understand what he was complaining about, but she had the distinct impression it was trivial. “I thought Baoji already established they were going to kill or exile you.”

  A voice crackled into the ship through the cockpit. “Attention Monkey King , you were not cleared for that launch corridor. Please power down and submit to boarding.”

  “Boarding? What for?” Baoji sounded remarkably calm. “I had a request in, I - oh, I don’t think I adjusted my ship’s time zone -”

  “You are suspected of harbouring a fugitive -”

  The voice crackled and disappeared, Baoji’s mutter barely reaching her. “Nope.”

  The ship suddenly veered sideways, throwing Ada and Turou towards the wall. Ada stared at Turou. “Who is this guy and how do you know him?”

  Turou looked nervous. “Well, er, he was my roommate when I studied on Chang’e.”

  The acceleration was easing, and the strange sensation of weightlessness started to overtake them. Ada looked around and sent a seeing eye up to the cockpit - they were in space. They’d made it.

  Then they were actually floating off the floor - or at least Ada and Turou were, the levitation sigil pushing them up towards the cockpit. Elsa turned around to say something to them, but when she saw them approaching her eyes widened.

  “What - why are you floating?” She shouted. “What did you do to the back of the ship ? ”

  Baoji glanced. “She did something to my ship? Ada, we’re going to need to establish some rules about creepy evil magic on my ship.”

  Ada and Turou both grabbed onto the handrails, stabilizing themselves. “It’s fine, I swear!”

  The mirran pilot shook his head. “Everyone hold on. EMP in three…”

  Something sparked and the entire ship went dark. Silent. Had the ship failed? Were they all going to die? She grabbed at the bulkhead with one hand and Turou with the other, floating impotently in the air, and she looked up to the cockpit to see a single red light blinking by Elsa as Baoji continued his countdown.

  “Two, one, go.”

  Elsa hit a switch, and the red light burst into sparks and flickered out. A few strange, crackling sounds emerged from the ship’s guts, but nothing else seemed to happen. After a second Baoji did something that turned the ship on again, lights and whirring engines and everything, and the force of acceleration pushed them further out into space, slowly hauling Ada and Turou down the handrails harder and harder.

  For a long moment Ada expected more chaos, more drama, but nothing happened. She hung there on the ladder, heart racing, looking around at the scattered mess of pizza boxes and other garbage strewn across the ship in moments of weightlessness and then dragged down the hallway. The ship truly felt like a tower, now, with Baoji and Elsa awkwardly laying on their backs at its ceiling.

  Nothing happened. “Are we clear?”

  Elsa turned around and looked at them both. “Yes and no. We’ve got about a day to reach the jumpgate at Freyja Four, if we time it right to get the Chang’e connection.”

  “Four? I thought we were just on Freyja.”

  Turou corrected her. “We were just on Freyja Five, the habitable planet.”

  Elsa nodded. “Freyjas One through Four are rocky lumps of crap, so we put jumpgates around Three and Four. That way if the jumpgates explode, less people die.”

  Ada nodded. The memory of being shot flashed through her mind, pain and darkness. She flinched. She didn’t want to think about that. “So we’re clear?”

  “I need to mess with our route.” Baoji was shaking his head. “If we approach at optimal cruising speed to make the Chang’e connection, they’ll be able to easily predict our route, so we need to add inefficiencies in our acceleration and deceleration and orbital approach. I can make it look like we’re going for the Tlaloc timeslot and then brake at the last minute to make Chang’e instead. Huge waste of fuel and money, but less chance of them mobilizing security on the other side to wait for us.”

  Ada wasn’t sure what that all implied, but she was sick of hanging from the ladder. She climbed up and sat on what had been the back wall of the cockpit, now its floor, her head bobbing up next to Elsa who lay back-down in the other seat. “So… we’re going to be okay.”

  Elsa glanced at her, strange expressions dancing across her face. “I hope so.”

  Ada hoped so too. One death was enough.

  She reached to the locator stone in her pocket, grasping it firmly in her palm. Isavel was out there, somewhere across the stars, her first death already long past. How had she dealt with this? Ada’s heart was still pounding in her chest - thank the gods for that - but now that their escape seemed complete, small sounds in the ship were starting to creep into her ears, little creaks and hums that whispered fears of all the ways this ship might break in space and kill them.

  Repairing a wound was one thing. If she were blown up, or launched into the void of space, what could she do about it? She hated this. She hated being out here, powerless, afraid, and mostly alone.

  Only mostly. She took a deep breath. “Turou, Baoji, Elsa… thank you.”

  Turou looked at her from where he was still standing on the ladder, and nodded. “It’s the right thing to do. I mean… The military and the Defense Coalition have a bad history, but when Elsa played me the recording you got… ”

  Her eyes widened. “Right! Elsa, we need to share that. Somehow.”

  Elsa glanced at her. “At this point we can’t make our situation much worse. Baoji, can we bounce it off one of the tachyon relays?”

  Baoji stared at them both, then laughed. “Ladies, after today there’s no way I’m keeping this ship. Do whatever you want, doesn’t matter how big a target we paint on it.”

  Elsa hummed. “Okay, Ada, I’ll get it done.”

  “And can we send a message to Earth?”

  The cockpit was silent for a long moment before Elsa responded. “None of the tachyon relays are configured to transmit in that direction. Why?”

  “I want to call a ship. I want to go home.”

  Turou’s eyes lit up. “Could I go?”

  “The technophage would destroy your brain.”

  “Oh.” He glanced at Baoji. “Could we send -”

  Baoji stammered. “No, no, you can’t send Baoji to the haunted dead planet infested by space witches and exotic diseases. Baoji will not go. Baoji disapproves. Just ask him.”

  “I meant any mirran -”

  Ada scowled. “Frankly, after what I’ve seen here, I’m inclined to ask the gods to reinstate their policy of shooting down any ship that gets too close. I don’t want your… government touching my planet. Or the people who live there. Or our relics.”

  Elsa rounded on her, frustration skewing her face. “Well we didn’t want your whiny psycho ass showing up and painting huge targets on our backs, but here we are, so start showing some gratitude and help us figure out a way to get out of this mess alive. Nobody asked you to hop onto that ship on Earth, and we both know for a fact there’s at least one person back there who wishes you hadn’t, but you’re here any
way so deal with the damned consequences.”

  “I am dealing with the consequences! Leaving is how I plan to do that!”

  “And what about me?” Elsa pointed at Turou and Baoji. “What about them? We stick our necks out for you, and you just run off and hope we figure things out?”

  Ada pursed her lips, thumping her closed palm against the bulkhead she was sitting on. Elsa was clearly right, of course. She had endangered people just by coming here, and she couldn’t just abandon them.

  She wanted to, though. She really wanted to.

  Baoji coughed, and started unstrapping himself from his seat. “Ada, how about I introduce you to pizza. Elsa, Turou, keep an eye on things up here will you?”

  She glanced at him as he swung down from the back of his seat and lowered himself onto the ladders running down the core of the ship. When he had climbed down to one of the doorways, he looked back up at her.

  “Coming?”

  She glanced at Elsa, who was staring straight ahead, then followed down the ladder and into a room that felt properly oriented for once. Most of the walls were dominated by storage compartments and boxy machines, but a small table and stools were welded to the floor near the only bare wall, a wall Baoji had covered in glossy paper flashing with colours and words, all in a script Ada couldn’t read.

  Baoji grinned at her, his toothy smile more subdued than Zhilik’s. “Ready for this?”

  “I don’t know what it is, so.”

  Baoji opened one of the storage compartments and pulled out another of those metal pizza boxes; she wondered just how many he had recovered from the skimmer. He popped open one of the sides, to an audible hissing sound, and with a jerking motion skillfully slid the entire thing out onto the table.

  The first thing that hit her was the smell - hearty grease, acidic tangs, cooked meat, and a dizzying puff of scents she had never before experienced. The food in front of her was a large circle of some kind of pale crusty dough, and it was covered in a thick white-yellow goo that had crisped brown in a few places and rested atop alien meats and vegetables, themselves all resting on some kind of saucy red substrate.

  Tomatoes? She smelled tomatoes. And garlic. Her eyes widened.

  “This thing is huge, how am I supposed to eat -”

  Baoji had already returned with a long, broad knife, and gave a defeated shrug. “If I had known we’d be having pizza I’d have a real cutter. Fingers off.”

  She had barely realized her hands were resting on the risen edges of the crust. She pulled them back, and he awkwardly forced the knife down a few times in a row, cutting the circle into two halves, four quarters, eight eighths. None of them were properly the same size, and the goo on top stuck to the knife and awkwardly pulled off of the food. It was an awful mess of a meal, but it smelled amazing.

  Baoji sat down, curling his fingers oddly in excitement, and stared at her. “So?”

  She wanted to eat it, her mind temporarily blotting out everything that had just happened. She was starving . “I, uh -” He hadn’t given her anything, so it must be hand food. She pulled one piece out by the crust, lifted it, it flopped downward, and half the toppings promptly fell off onto the table. “Oh shit.”

  Baoji laughed, a hissing laugh with a cackling human edge that was odd to hear from a mirran. He reached out to her hand. “Rookie mistake. Fold it in the middle, like this. Try another one, I’ll take that.”

  She gripped the second piece as he had showed her, while his own four fingers gathered up the mess she had made and stuffed it back on the fallen slice. He was watching her, though, waiting. She felt incredibly awkward, so she bit it, and in a moment the gush of familiar and alien flavours seeped into her brain and made her laugh. “Gods, what is this?”

  She heard Turou yell from the cockpit. “The bad stuff. Fresh is best!”

  Baoji shook his head, already eating his own ruined slice. “Best thing humans ever invented, if you ask me. That and dogs.”

  She took another bite. “Oh, you eat dogs?”

  “No, no, I love dogs.” He laughed. “Proper pack animals, like us. Rhasks just aren’t the same.”

  She frowned and him and kept eating. She realized he was trying to distract her from the spat with Elsa, but she had to admit food really was a better thing to think about. He walked over to shut the door before sitting back down with her and kept eating.

  “Ada, how old are you?”

  She paused. It was a strange question. “I’m almost twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-one Earth years. Hm.” He seemed to contemplate her. “They say human brains aren’t developed until they hit twenty-six. You’re not the same kind of human, exactly, but still.”

  “Are you calling me a child?”

  “No, no.” He took another slice of the pizza and bit into it greedily before continuing. “But you remind me of younger humans. When I was in school with Turou, actually. People your age - and mirrans a bit younger - vary a lot. But some of them are still…”

  He trailed off, and she got the distinct impression he was trying hard not to be insulting. She munched on the rest of her slice quietly for a bit, waiting to see what he would come up with.

  “Do you run away a lot?”

  She thought about it; it wasn’t always true, but it was true enough to nod with her mouth full.

  “But you seem to do well. How does that work?”

  “What do you mean?” She stared at him. “If I don’t like something I go away. Or I fix it.”

  He chewed some more, contemplatively. “I get the sense you’ve never had to temper yourself. Not yet, not really. Something pisses you off and you just react, and if anything bad happens it doesn’t stick.”

  She took a deep breath. She had no interest in tempering herself. What he said was true - throughout most of her life, she had never had reason to temper herself. Nobody had been worth the trouble. “Isavel sticks with me.”

  “Who?”

  “She… I left her behind on Earth, after I said we’d stay together. She wouldn’t come, but I had to go. But I can’t stop feeling like I made a huge mistake. I miss her.”

  “Maybe you did.” He nudged a slice towards her. “Eat.”

  She picked up the next piece and kept chewing. It was easier to talk to mirrans, for some reason. She couldn’t figure out why that was. “What’s your point, Baoji?”

  “I’m totally pointless.” He chuckled. “I just want to figure out why you seem like such a wrecking ball. Maybe things are different on Earth, I don’t know, but most people here expect each other to be mindful of the things that tie them together. Elsa and you are in this together. So’s Turou. So am I, even though nobody warned me what I was getting into. I don’t think you realize just how dangerous it can be to even be associated with someone the regime wants dead. And when you only think about what you’ll be doing next, other people get stressed out. You can’t untangle everybody’s futures.”

  “So what? I don’t expect them to think of me.”

  “Isavel was thinking of you, I bet.”

  She stopped chewing and drew in a deep breath through her nose. He didn’t know what he was talking about, of course - it was just conjecture. But she had seen the look in Isavel’s face, the failed expectation, the betrayal. He was probably right. She swallowed. “I already fucked up there.”

  “Everybody does at first. You know how to make sure you don’t fuck up again?”

  She glared at him. She wasn’t normally amiable to being talked down to, but the food was excellent, so she felt conflicted. “What?”

  “Practice.” He leaned back, biting into the pizza crust. “On the three of us. Trust us, work with us; take care of us and we’ll take care of you. And when you go back to Earth and find that girl again, you’ll be better at it. Trust me.”

  She crossed one arm and kept eating with the other. “You’re a bandit living alone in a spaceship.”

  He laughed, throwing his head back and exposing the pale fur on the inside of his
neck. “Bandit! Heavens, girl, I’m a criminal but I’m not a bandit. And I may live alone, but don’t think I don’t go visit my parents every new year. And don’t think I’ve survived this long without having people I trust who trust me. Maybe I’m wrong, but what if I’m right?”

  She sighed, staring at the pizza. They had eaten half of it. She reached for another slice, then hesitated. If he was right, she could train herself to be more… what Isavel needed. What she herself needed, to not make the same kinds of mistakes that would stick with her, wound her, hobble her going forward. To be able to keep the people she wanted in her life. If she wanted to, at least.

  She stood up, moved for the door, and hauled it open. “Hey, puny humans!” She glanced up into the cockpit. “Come get your pizza.”

  There was a brief pause before they started climbing down. Turou passed her by grumbling something about restaurants, but Elsa stopped next to her in the doorway and exhaled heavily through her nose. “Sorry, Ada. I know this is one big mess.”

  “I don’t mean to be selfish.” She tried to maintain eye contact, but it was embarrassing and difficult, and her gaze faltered. “I just don’t… think of these things. I’ve never had to. It’s easy to get by alone on Earth if you don’t get along with people.”

  Elsa chuckled. “I bet you like that.”

  “I did.” Ada bit her lip. “But I could have done better, so. You know.”

  Elsa extended her hand. “If you’re going to apologize -”

  “I’m sorry.” She clasped Elsa’s forearm. “Now eat the pizza I could have eaten myself but kindly left for you instead.” She turned back into the kitchen. “Baoji, what the hell is that gooey stuff?”

  His slit-pupiled eyes widened as Elsa took a seat. “Cheese?”

  “Uh, okay, but what is it?”

  The colonials exchanged glances and shared a laugh, presumably at her expense. The four of them barely fit around the tiny table, but they managed.

  Chapter 9

  Something made of fabric hit her in the face.

  “Wake up. We’re about to jump.”

  Ada’s feet were cold. Why were they cold? Oh, the blanket had been removed, and thrown at her face. She shifted around and stared at Elsa. “What?”