Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

  An image popped into my head. A ferocious doglike creature crouched over my mom, snapping and biting at her.

  “You’re warning me there’s going to be a Vulpin on board,” I said.

  “Yes,” Tycius said. “And, to be frank, you may find some of the other species a bit . . . disturbing.”

  9

  Our skiff rocked back and forth as it entered Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the hellish chemical storm that raged across the gas giant’s surface. My heart pounded, and a cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck.

  “Should we really fly into this mess?” I asked Ty, my voice cracking.

  “Relax,” he replied. “I’ve done this a few times.”

  The ship must have sensed my distress, because I felt something fresh and frosty inject into the back of my neck. A full-body spearmint iciness lowered my heart rate and mellowed me out.

  “Oh yeah, this is fine,” I said.

  And it was. Because just when the pressure in Jupiter’s atmosphere should’ve turned us inside out, the maelstrom parted and we entered an unnatural pocket of calm.

  At the center of Jupiter’s never-ending storm—maybe even its cause—was an absence. A gap. A tear. A blot of nothingness that I couldn’t quite get my brain around. I mean, space is a lot of nothing to begin with, but it’s still pretty noticeable when the fabric of the universe has a rip in it. There was no distance in here, no context for anything.

  “Is this a black hole?” I asked, knowing even as I said it that my guess was wrong. The gravity in a black hole is so strong that nothing can escape it, not even light. My half-Denzan eyes told me that if I somehow entered this anomaly, I would come out the other side. Somewhere else. The space chasm was safe, relatively speaking. In fact, I was drawn toward it.

  “Picture a map of the universe,” Tycius said. “All the star systems in existence, millions of them, mostly unexplored. At one end is your Milky Way and Earth. All the way at the other end is my home galaxy and Denza.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “What are you picturing?”

  “A map of the galaxy, dude.”

  Tycius sighed. “What does it look like? How is it printed?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to play along with Ty’s random exercise. “I don’t know. It’s on a big, old-ass parchment and was drawn by Michelangelo or something.”

  “Good,” Tycius said. “Now, a journey between our two planets in a straight line across your map would take eons. But if you were to crumple up your parchment into a ball, that would be a more accurate depiction of the universe. Perhaps now our two galaxies are separated only by a bit of air, the fold of a paper. And if we were to rip through that paper and gain access to the in-between . . .”

  I opened my eyes. “A wormhole. That’s how you travel between galaxies.”

  “Correct.”

  “You could’ve just said ‘wormhole,’” I replied. “I’ve read a lot of science fiction. I know my stuff.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “What are those things?” I asked.

  I hadn’t noticed them at first—I was too focused on the wormhole itself—but around the edges of the cosmic emptiness were sections of ultonate scaffolding. While they looked small against the size of the wormhole, each of the rectangular structures was probably a few miles long.

  “Girders,” Ty explained. “The universe wants to heal itself after we tear holes in it. Those keep the wormholes open. We also use them to monitor what kind of traffic is coming through.”

  “So, my dad . . .”

  “Whatever door he opened, he closed it behind him,” Ty said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t find it again.”

  Our skiff slowed down considerably, and the needle that had been impaling the back of my neck for the last day and a half finally withdrew, taking its cocktail of space-travel drugs with it. I immediately got a groan-inducing pins-and-needles feeling in my legs, which I hadn’t really stretched in the last thirty-six hours. With our skiff no longer racing forward, there was no force holding me down. I began to float, restrained only by my seat belt.

  “What now?” I asked, shaking some feeling back into my limbs.

  As if in response, a woman’s voice crackled over our speakers. She spoke English, her voice deep and authoritative.

  “This is Captain Reno. Reeling you into the Eastwood now, Tycius.”

  “Good to hear your voice, Reno,” Ty said with a smile.

  I’d been so focused on the wormhole, I hadn’t even noticed the alien ship floating nearby. I whistled.

  The ISV Eastwood was a hell of a lot bigger than Ty’s crummy skiff. The bulk of the ship was a massive ring, constantly spinning to create artificial gravity. A network of spokes connected the ring to a tubular rocket at its center. The whole thing looked very much like a donut with an arrow through its middle.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, what does ‘Eastwood’ mean in your language?”

  Tycius shook his head. “Captain Reno chose the name. She wanted to honor her favorite Earth actor.”

  I sort of remembered an old man who made movies about yelling at young people, but I’d never seen any of them.

  I noticed a long barrel on the underside of the Eastwood’s rocket. It looked very much like a massive cannon.

  “Pretty big gun,” I said, pointing that out. “My mom made it sound like you guys are a bunch of pacifists.”

  “Denzans do abhor violence like any species should,” Ty replied. “And that is not a gun. It’s the Subspace Piercer. That’s how our ships create wormholes. Though I suppose in the wrong hands, it could be used as a weapon.”

  A beam of white light similar to what Ty had used on my mom’s truck shot out from the Eastwood. The spotlight enveloped our skiff and guided us toward a small opening in the Eastwood’s rapidly spinning ring.

  We floated into a domed docking bay shaped like the chamber of a revolver, the bullets in this case being skiffs just like ours. My stomach swooned as I adjusted to the Eastwood’s artificial gravity, my seat belt digging into my abdomen. Our skiff tilted as it parked top-first in an open slot, my feet now dangling toward the ceiling. Outside, I heard seals pressurizing, the vacuum of space shut out beyond the docking bay, fresh oxygen rushing in around us. What was once the ceiling of our skiff peeled open, our seat belts snaked away, and Tycius and I both lightly dropped to the sloped wall leading out.

  I’d told Tycius that I’d read a lot of sci-fi, and that was true, but none of my books had prepared me for the interior of the Eastwood. I’d been expecting futuristic flashing lights and sleek metallic hallways. Instead, beyond the cold functionality of the docking bay, the Eastwood looked like a yoga retreat. The floors and walls were all paneled with a soft wood that reminded me of bamboo. The lights were warm, like a summer sunset. There were plants everywhere, shelves in every wall dedicated to the greenery. Some of the plants I recognized—a patch of violets, a spiky green fern—but most were completely alien. Dark vines that pulsed with a neon-colored ink, swaying palm trees the size of my pinkie finger, a flower with delicate petals that looked like flickering flames. After the cramped and drugged journey aboard the skiff, I felt a rush of fresh oxygen in my lungs, the whole scene somehow both invigorating and homey.

  “Welcome aboard,” boomed Captain Reno as she emerged through a sliding door flanked by three other . . . people? Humanoids? I wasn’t entirely clear on the nomenclature. Two of them were Denzans, and the other some kind of robotic stick figure.

  Anyway, at that moment, Reno demanded my full attention, swaggering ahead of the aliens. If she was supposed to be around the same age as my grandfather, she sure didn’t look it. The Eastwood’s captain was a powerfully built woman with curly blond hair streaked through with silver. Some wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, but mostly her skin was tan and smooth. She reminded me a bit of one of those rich housewives from reality TV who could afford a ton of really good plastic surgery. She wore an unzipped flight suit that show
ed off an amount of freckled cleavage that made me immediately self-conscious of where I was looking, especially when she stopped right in front of me and pinched my cheek.

  “My lord, you look just like him,” Reno told me. “A bit underfed and missing a flask of scotch, but otherwise you’re a dead ringer. Your gramps—let me tell you, there was a man who knew how to keep a lady entertained on a long voyage between systems.”

  “Uh . . .” I only managed a single syllable in response. It didn’t matter. Reno had already moved on from me.

  “And you, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said to Tycius, pushing some of his wiggly hair out of his face. “Took you long enough.”

  “They didn’t want to be found, Captain,” Ty replied.

  “The good ones always play hard to get,” Reno said.

  While Reno and Tycius got reacquainted, one of the Denzans shuffled toward me. His thin frame was bent into the shape of a question mark. Besides his posture, I could tell he was older than Tycius by his hair—it wasn’t gray but translucent, the color completely sapped from it. Despite his advancing age, the Denzan’s hair was wrestled into a swooping pompadour. Coming from Earth, I didn’t know anything about Denzan style, but I still got the sense he was wearing his hair like someone much younger. Unlike Reno and the other crew members, this Denzan wore a flowy tunic thing, splotched with food stains, that reminded me of an old-timey nightshirt. He looked like a retired wizard with an interest in ska.

  The Denzan smiled at me, then said something in his language. I shook my head.

  “I don’t understand,” I replied.

  He smiled wider, like we were now playing the fun game of shouting foreign words at each other. He tapped his chest. “Vanceval.” Then he tapped my chest. “Sydney shush.”

  “You’re Vanceval,” I responded. “And I . . . should be quiet?”

  The Denzan chuckled and shook his head. “Sydneycius,” he enunciated, and I realized that he was attaching “-cius” to my name, like Tycius and Marcius. That must have been how Denzan names worked.

  “Oh no, I mean, yeah, but . . .” I stammered my way through first contact. “Just Sydney is fine.”

  Watching from behind Vanceval, the other Denzan let loose a sigh, like this was all a waste of his time. He looked about the same age as my uncle, his dark purple hair patchy and receding. One side of his face was badly scarred and droopy, like he’d been splashed by acid. Perhaps what stood out most about this Denzan was the sleeve of obsidian metal that covered his entire right arm. Like the bands I’d seen squeezing Ty’s bicep, this Denzan’s metal sleeve seemed to be uncomfortably tight, pinching him at the shoulder and wrist.

  The second Denzan brushed aside the smaller Vanceval and held up a sliver of ultonate, a writhing bit of quicksilver that looked like a slug.

  I took a step back since this guy felt the need to be right in my face. “Okay? What—?”

  At “okay,” the Denzan grabbed me roughly by the chin. I yelped and tried to brush his hand away, but his long fingers were surprisingly strong. He pressed the sliver of ultonate into my ear canal. I felt a brief slurping sensation, like my ear was filling up with water, and then a cool numbness.

  The Denzan let me go and took a step back. Vanceval clucked his tongue in disapproval. Now Tycius and Reno were paying attention. My uncle glared at his fellow Denzan while Reno simply chuckled.

  “Do you understand me now, mutt?” the rough Denzan asked.

  At that moment, I was too bewildered to even take exception to this rude-ass alien calling me a mutt. I could understand him. I still heard him speaking Denzan, but a split second after he spoke, an echo of his words translated to English played in my ear. The little device he’d shoved in there even did a decent job of matching his tone and timbre—in this case caustic and gruff.

  “Wow, yes,” I said. Still feeling a bit like my ear was full of water, I instinctively jammed my pinkie in there.

  He slapped my hand down. “Don’t touch until it’s finished calibrating.”

  I held up my hands. “Okay, man. Not big on personal space on your planet, I take it.”

  “There’s no need to be so rough, Arkell,” Vanceval said, gently scolding his fellow Denzan. “Sydneycius and I were just beginning to understand each other.” We were not, but okay. “And besides, we prefer to explain the personal translator before jamming it into a cadet’s head.”

  Arkell only sniffed in response, turned on his heel, and shuffled out of the corridor.

  “He seems nice,” I observed.

  “You’re working with him now?” Tycius asked Reno, his voice low. “Really?”

  “The Senate assigned him to me,” Reno replied, throwing up her hands. “He’s been the Eastwood’s engineer for five years, and we haven’t had any problems. He’s either a changed man or a neutered burnout. Don’t much matter to me which. He’s given me no cause to transfer him, I’ll tell you that. And no, a little rough handling of a cadet isn’t going to do the trick.”

  By the way my uncle’s eyes narrowed, I could tell he hadn’t planned on this Arkell guy’s presence. Him calling me a mutt told me all I needed to know about his opinion of half-Denzans. Before I could eavesdrop on any more of Ty’s tense conversation with Reno, Vanceval gently patted my shoulder.

  “Young Sydneycius, I am pleased to welcome you aboard the ISV Eastwood, a Serpo Institute training vessel,” he said. “I am Vanceval, this ship’s proctor. My teaching assistant, Aela, will be supervising your orientation as we travel back to Denza.” He glanced at the mechanical figure still lingering by the doorway. “Come forward, Aela.”

  “Cool robot,” I said to Vanceval.

  “Not a robot,” the robot said, their voice a pleasingly generic alto, like a car’s GPS.

  They came forward, slender as a skeleton, and definitely modeled on Denzan anatomy. The not-a-robot’s body was made of a sturdy chrome-colored material. Where their face should have been instead was a glass plate behind which I saw a swirling cloud of magenta gas. Streaks of electricity occasionally flared through the gas, like little bolts of lightning in a storm cloud.

  “Glad to meet you, Syd,” Aela said, firmly shaking my hand. “I’ve never been friends with an Earther who shared my place in the life cycle before. New experiences sustain us.”

  The mechanized voice was endearingly upbeat, so I smiled dumbly, seeing my teeth reflected back in Aela’s faceplate. Just because I had a universal translator jammed in my ear didn’t mean I had any idea how to talk to new life-forms. I already hadn’t hit it off with Arkell, although that didn’t seem like my fault. I didn’t want to offend anyone else.

  “So, if you aren’t a robot, you’re a . . .”

  “I’m a wisp of the Ossho Collective, contained by a mechanized exo-suit.” Aela tapped their faceplate, and the cloud inside wiggled in response. “That’s me you see in the tank.”

  “Oh, hello,” I said. I was talking to an alien cloud now. Dope.

  “I’m very excited to teach you all about my culture,” Aela said enthusiastically. “By necessity, that’ll be the first part of your orientation.”

  “Let’s not overwhelm the Earther,” Vanceval said, then laughed merrily. “I’m kidding. Of course let’s overwhelm him. Your first voyage into the Vastness! We are going to explode your brain, young Sydneycius.”

  I didn’t necessarily want my brain exploded, but the ancient Denzan seemed so hyped about knowledge that I had a hard time not smiling in response. Before Vanceval and Aela could get any further into my crash course, Reno broke away from Tycius and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you feel it yet, young buck?” she asked me, grinning.

  “Feel what?”

  Without warning, her hand slipped off my shoulder and under my armpit. Effortlessly, the old lady lifted me off my feet, dangling me in the air like a doll. So far, I was getting manhandled a lot on the Eastwood.

  “The strength,” she said. “Want to see if you can throw me?”
/>   “Not really,” I replied.

  Tycius shook his head. “Put him down, Captain. He’s only thirty-six hours out. You’re going to traumatize the kid.”

  Reno did set me back down, then ruffled my hair. As she did, I got the sense that she could’ve squeezed my skull like a ripe orange.

  “Welcome to the Vastness, my dear, where you’ll discover great power and endless possibility,” she said. “You’re going to love it.”

  10

  My fingers brushed the leaves of a ghostly pale plant in one of the shelves that lined every hallway on the Eastwood. The entire branch curled in my direction and let out a low keening noise, like it wanted me to pet it.

  “The Eastwood’s onboard AI is capable of producing artificial life support in case of an emergency,” Aela explained, the wisp’s voice tinny and chipper. “But, under normal conditions, the atmosphere is entirely sustained by the flora you see around the ship.”

  “Oh,” I said, drawing my hand back. I didn’t want to mess up the air I was breathing. “Should I not touch them?”

  “They’re all perfectly safe to touch, or pet, or rub your whole face in,” Aela replied happily. “Some are even meant for eating.”

  Aela paused the tour to pluck a round fruit from a branch that emerged from the wall, tossing it to me. The thing looked like an oversize grape or a small, purplish peach.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A plum,” Aela replied, pausing. “I thought they were native to Earth.”

  “Oh, oh yeah,” I replied sheepishly. “I guess I expected everything on here to be extraterrestrial. Didn’t expect there to be a random-ass plum tree.”

  “Random-ass,” Aela repeated, testing out the phrase. “Interesting!”

  My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten any solid foods since the diner. The drugs I’d taken on the flight here were wearing off, my body’s systems waking up. I turned the fruit over in my hand, shaking my head. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten one of these before. I came all the way to Jupiter to eat my first plum.”