by J. N. Chaney
“Hello? Anyone around?”
The voice had come through the intercom. It jarred Dash a little to hear a woman’s voice echo through the Slipwing. Or, at least, a woman’s voice that wasn’t crying out in pleasure.
“She’s awake,” Viktor said, then gestured to the bastardized cooling system. “I’ll put this back the way it was, if you want to go talk to her.”
Dash took a last look at Viktor’s amazing improvisation, trying to commit it to memory. It really wasn’t that complicated, but oh shit was it dangerous. Of course, no more dangerous than having a bunch of missiles bearing down on you.
He finally nodded to Viktor and headed back along the narrow passage leading forward from the Slipwing’s engineering bay, toward her habitation module.
Leira sat up in what was actually Dash’s bed, the only one in the ship not laden with stuff—miscellaneous containers, components, and things that were, frankly, junk. Dash couldn’t bring himself to just toss the latter out, though. After all, you never knew when you might need an energy transfer junction—for an entirely different type of ship than the Slipwing, sure, but it might be adaptable, and it might even be worth something, if he ever thought to try selling it.
Leira smiled as Dash leaned in through the hatchway, then immediately winced. “Ow. That hurts.”
“What does?”
“Everything.”
“Well, my auto-doc is a pretty basic model. It scanned you and just told us to let you rest. Now that I think of it, it says that for a lot of things, actually.”
“I think I’ve had enough rest,” Leira said, gingerly touching her head. “What I need now is something for the pain.”
Dash nodded at a small box on the deck beside the bunk. “Figured you would. Good stuff, too. Takes the worst edge right off a hangover.”
As Leira fished out the painkillers, Dash took a moment to take her in. Such green eyes. Emerald green. And that was just one beautiful part of a stunning woman.
The green eyes were looking at him. “Got any coffee?”
“Uh, coffee?”
“Yeah. It’s a beverage, made from hot water and—”
“No, I know what coffee is. If you just need something to wash those pills down, there’s a flask of water right there.”
“Water is meant to be made into coffee.”
Dash shrugged his surrender. “Galley’s this way, if you’re up to walking.”
Leira clambered to her feet, wobbled a bit, then followed him along the passage.
“I guess,” she said from behind him, “I owe you a pretty big thank you, for saving us.”
“You do. You also owe me payment, per that contract.”
They entered the tiny galley.
Leira nodded, then winced as she did. “I guess we do. And we’ll make it good, once we—”
“Here we go.”
Leira frowned. “What?”
Dash crossed his arms and looked into those so-green eyes, now much closer thanks to the cramped little space. Huh, green, with some golden-brown flecks.
“The oldest story there is for couriers. Yes, I’ll pay you what I owe, just as soon as I get to this place and sell that thing to those people.”
“Sorry, I don’t carry around many credits.”
Dash pointed out the hot water dispenser, then the storage locker where he kept the coffee. He only drank the stuff occasionally himself.
“This is coffee?” Leira scowled at the container. “Not much of a coffee drinker, are you?”
“No, I am not. But, hey, feel free to return to your friends back there and see if they’ll offer you a cup.”
She sighed. “This’ll do.”
“So,” Dash said, “while we’re on the subject, who were your friends back there, anyway? And how’d you get onto what’s pretty obviously their bad side? Oh, and how about that really, stupendously valuable something you mentioned? Is that what they were after? And is that what you intend to sell?”
Leira put a coffee pack into a clean-ish mug and added steaming water, and the earthy aroma flooded the little galley. “To answer your last two questions, yes and no.”
“Okay, how about my first few questions?”
Leira sipped coffee and winced again—this time apparently at the taste, though—and said, “There are some things it’s better for you to not know.”
“Really.”
She gave Dash an earnest look. “Look, you did Viktor and I a huge favor. We thank you for it and will make sure you get paid…well. But you really don’t want to know anything more about our business than that.”
“Yeah, see, here’s the thing. It sounds like whatever really valuable something you have is probably aboard my ship right now. Whatever it is, the crew of that middling-asteroid-sized ship we barely managed to escape…well, they seem to want it pretty bad. You seem to think you’re protecting me from bad shit by not telling me what it is, but that only says to me that it’s really really valuable, or really dangerous. Or, more likely, both.” Dash uncrossed his arms and pushed his gaze into those oh-so-green eyes, looking past the beautiful and into the woman beneath. “So, you see my problem here. I’m really not good with not knowing what this something is, why it’s so valuable, why it’s so dangerous, who’s after it, and how far they’re willing to go to get it.”
Leira shook her head. “Please…Dash, right? Please, don’t press me on this. It’s better for you to not—”
“Know, yeah, I hear you. And I’m saying I don’t give a shit about what you think I should know or not know, because when it comes to my ship—”
“Leira,” a gruff voice cut in from the passage outside the galley, “you’re going to have to tell him.” Viktor leaned into the galley, which would no way fit all three of them.
“Viktor,” she replied, “please, we talked about this.”
“That was before Clan Shirna discovered we had…the something, as Dash here calls it. But I think he’s earned the right to know, considering he saved us from them. Besides, we no longer have a ship. This one is far from perfect, but it’s good enough, and Dash is an amazing pilot.”
“What do you mean good enough?” Dash snapped. “The Slipwing is a damned fine ship. Good enough to save your sorry asses.”
Viktor held up a hand. “Yes, yes, my apologies. Your Slipwing is an excellent ship, but it could be better. I’ve already seen a dozen things that could be refined and turned.”
Dash thought about Viktor’s cobbled-together refueling rig. “There’s this damned hum in the auxiliary fusion generator I can’t get rid of. Makes my teeth vibrate any time I’m near it. Think you could take a look?”
“Probably a harmonic in the containment field. Yes, I can probably fix it. But that’s not what we’re talking about right now. Leira?”
Leira looked from Viktor, to me, then sighed. “Fine. Go ahead, Viktor, show him.”
In answer, Viktor extracted something from what Dash had assumed was just another tool pouch on his harness. It was a faceted, crystalline disk just small enough that he could hold it in one hand. Dash peered at it. It looked like a big gemstone. But he didn’t recognize the type, and couldn’t even really decided what color it was. It looked black at first glance, but might actually be a really dark blue, or maybe purple, or even red.
“Okay,” Dash finally said, entirely underwhelmed. “So it’s a big gem? I mean, okay, sure. But I could probably repli-print this exact same thing back in engineering. Hardly seems worth, well, any of this.”
Dash deflated. He’d been hoping for a big payoff, and got this. A piece of crystalline matter that, in the distant past, might have been rare and valuable. But when you could print things pretty much one atom at a time, things like this were worth pretty much nothing.
“It is not a gem,” Leira said. “It is a device.”
“Ah,” Dash said. “And what does this device do that makes it so special?”
Leira looked at Viktor, who just nodded.
“What i
t does,” she said, “is make stars explode.”
Dash stared at Leira, then at Viktor, then at the gem.
Then he laughed.
“That makes stars explode. Really. Well, then, that sure would make it pretty valuable.”
The grave looks he got in return said that these two actually meant—actually believed—what Leira had just said.
Dash, still grinning, shook his head. “You guys…okay, look, I think we’ve all agreed that I have the right to really know what—”
“This is no joke, Dash,” Leira said. “It’s no lie. This is the Lens of Eternity. It’s Unseen tech. I don’t know why it was created, but I do know what it can do. It can make stars explode.”
“It can, can it? And just how does it manage to do that?”
“It is a hybrid sort of tech,” Viktor said. “It somehow integrates our real space, and a parallel anti-space, into a single, self-contained universe, for lack of a better word. Just like the deuterium and anti-deuterium we use to power our translation drives mutually annihilate each other, so do the space and anti-space that are bridged by this device. The amount of power generated is colossal, at least equal to the instantaneous output of a blue giant star.”
Dash looked at the Lens, then back to Viktor. “Right. And what does it do with all that energy?” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait, you told me all ready. It blows up stars.”
Viktor frowned at Dash’s flippant tone. “It does. It opens a wormhole into the target star, and somehow causes its core to begin fusing light elements into iron.”
“And iron,” Leira cut in, “is the end of the line for a star. Iron fusion uses more energy than it produces. It causes negative fusion, as it were. Without the outward pressure from positive fusion to balance its own gravitation, the star collapses.”
“Then. . . boom,” Viktor said, mimicking an explosion with the hand not holding the Lens. “Depending on the size of the star, what’s left is a white dwarf or a neutron star. We don’t think it can affect stars large enough to collapse into black holes, but we’re not even sure of that.”
“I know how stars work,” Dash snapped, then glared at the Lens. “And I know you can’t blow them up with…something you can hold in your hand. I mean, shit. Come on, you can’t really believe this.”
“It’s Unseen tech,” Leira said. “So, yeah, it’s crazy by, definition—from our perspective. But for the Unseen, this might have been the sort of thing everyone carried around in their pocket.”
Dash shook his head again. But it lacked some of his earlier conviction. Unseen tech was almost utterly inscrutable, so Leira’s and Viktor’s story was plausible. Unseen tech was also extraordinarily rare; that, together with it often being immensely powerful, made it even more immensely valuable. If this Lens could actually do what they said it could, it really might be worth as much as they claimed.
“Okay, fine. Let’s say for a minute I believe you, and that you aren’t deluded, and actually know what you’re talking about. Where did it come from? How did you get your hands on it?”
“It came from the Globe of Suns.”
Dash narrowed his eyes, thinking. The Globe of Suns was a stellar cluster, located on the far side of the Shadow Nebula, a colossal cloud of dust and gas that dimmed and obscured everything beyond it. Dash had never been to within more than a few light-years of the Shadow Nebula because, as a courier looking to do work to keep body and ship together, he’d never had any reason to. There was nothing out that way. The only other thing he recalled about the Shadow Nebula was that it was strange for its type of phenomenon, studies of it seeming to suggest it was formed by the explosion of not just one, but several stars, all over a short span of time.
Shit.
Dash looked at the Lens. It glittered back at him, enigmatic crystalline. “Okay, so how did you get it? And this Clan Shirna? Who are they? Did you steal it from them?”
Leira opened her mouth, but Viktor held his empty hand again. “This is as much as we tell you now, Dash. Leira was right, there are some things you don’t need to know. What we have told you should be enough to convince you that we really are carrying something truly valuable and important.”
“Hopefully,” Leira said, draining the last of her coffee, making a soft yuck sound as she did, “it will likewise be enough to convince you to take us back to…somewhere, anywhere, where we can get ahold of some sort of ship.”
Dash considered the two of them, and the supposed Lens. “I’m going to take us out of Fade, fully into unSpace, and head for Penumbra. That’s about as far as the fuel you gave me will take us. Don’t know if you’ll find a ship there, but you can probably get passage to somewhere you can. That is, assuming you’ve got more to bargain with than”—he pointed at the Lens—“well, that.”
“We have some credits,” Viktor said.
“You mean I’ve got some credits,” Dash countered. “Remember, you still owe me.”
“And you’ll get paid,” Leira said. “Just get us to Penumbra.”
Dash took a last look at the Lens then shook his head. “You really believe that thing can—wow, can’t believe I’m saying this. You really believe that that thing there, that you’re holding in your hand, in my galley, can actually blow up a star?”
Leira said, “Yes, I do.”
Viktor nodded. “So do I.”
He studied their faces. Dash considered himself a pretty good judge of character; moreover, an accomplished liar, he always prided himself on being able to see through most lies.
These two weren’t lying. They really did believe what they were claiming.
As Dash extricated himself from the galley and headed for the cockpit to get them underway to Penumbra, he chewed on how remarkable that would be. And by remarkable, he meant utterly insane.
Still, the Shadowed Nebula was the remnants of a bunch of stars that should not have all exploded at once, but apparently did. That didn’t mean this Lens was responsible for it, of course.
But it also didn’t mean it wasn’t.
Of course, as he clambered into the Slipwing’s cockpit and turned his attention to the nav, it stuck him that all he really knew was that Leira and Viktor believed what they were saying. Whether they were right or not was one question.
He called up the nav data for Penumbra, but paused and looked out at the Fade-distorted ghost of real space.
Whether or not they were totally deluded, well, that was another, entirely separate question, wasn’t it?
4
With a flare of Cherenkov radiation from suddenly-displaced particles, the Slipwing translated out of unSpace and back into the real version.
Dash instinctively watched the scanner. Penumbra hung in the black, a cloud-mottled, bluish sphere, the reflected light from its star washing out all but the brightest stars. It made the universe look a lot emptier. But Dash wasn’t concerned about the planet. His attention was fixed on the traffic going to and coming from the planet. There wasn’t much, because Penumbra was a frontier world—and a bit of a shithole at that. But any of the dozen or so ships transiting toward and away from the planet could be trouble—magistrates on the prowl for law-breakers (and Dash still had a warrant on him, one he hadn’t yet been able to bribe away), someone he owed money, even a desperate courier turning to piracy as a way to make some quick credits. But none of this traffic fit any of those profiles. They were either lumbering freighters bringing to Penumbra the stuff they couldn’t grow or make for themselves, or smaller ships streaking about on business of their own.
Dash relaxed a notch or two. Those first few moments following translation were always nerve-wracking, because you didn’t become a successful courier without making a few enemies or bending the occasional law. And this time, he couldn’t even translate back away, or even get much use from the Fade, because the fuel Viktor had jury-rigged into the translation drive was all but expended.
“How long until planetfall?”
Dash turned and found Leira leaning i
nto the cockpit. “About two hours shipboard,” he said. Leira nodded, but made no immediate move to withdraw. Dash gestured at the almost-never-used copilot’s seat. “Autodoc said you’re supposed to take it easy. That was a pretty nasty concussion.”
“You should feel it from this side,” she said, sliding into the seat. Dash noted she did it with the natural, fluid grace of someone used to cramped cockpits. He’d originally thought Viktor was the pilot, engineer, and the rest of the crew all rolled into one, and Leira was his passenger, someone with a background in Unseen and other ancient tech. But, watching her while they’d translated to Penumbra, and now—the way she readily maneuvered herself around the nav, past the scanner and engineering station and into the seat made it clear she was more.
“You’re a courier, aren’t you?” he said.
Leira nodded, then winced at the movement. “Note to self, don’t move the damned head too fast. Anyway, yes, a courier, like you.”
“So that Raven was your ship?”
“Ours. Viktor and I have been together—well, a long time now.”
“Seems like a hell of an engineer.”
“If it’s broken, Viktor can fix it. If it’s not broken, he can make it work better.”
“So, you two are partners.”
She nodded again, but this time slowly and gently. “We are. Works way better than going it alone.” She gave Dash level gaze, meeting his eyes without fear.
To which he smiled. “Yeah, well, I’m a loner. Always have been. Don’t get close to people, because that just makes life complicated. Same reason I never work for the same employer twice.”
“You’ll eventually run out of employers.”
“It’s a big Galactic Arm.”
They sat in silence for a while, surrounded by the pervasive hum, whine, and rumble of the Slipwing’s workings. Finally, Leira said, “You really don’t believe what we told you about the Lens, do you?”
“You have to admit, it’s pretty…”
“Insane?”
“Insane works, yeah.” He made a minute adjustment to their course, then shrugged. “You genuinely believe it, though, and that makes it hard to just, well, write it off as nothing but insanity.”