by T. J. Berry
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“A few ships took off from Broome City around the same time we did. One of them is following us south,” she said, opening the intercom.
“Jim, where did you get to?” she asked.
“He’s getting drunk in his cabin,” said Gary.
“Bloody hell. We are not on this ship ten minutes…”
“And he hit me,” said Gary.
Jenny was unmoved.
“Gary, you ate his wife. You’re lucky I packed all of his antique six shooters into my bag. You’d be sitting here with a hole in your head.”
“I already have a hole in my head.”
She chuckled.
“After the stop at Beywey, we’ll use the little bit of horn you have to jump us out of Earth’s vicinity. You can eat the trisicles and start regrowing enough horn to get us to Fairyfloss Checkpoint.”
“What’s that?” he asked. A lot had changed while he’d been gone.
“You can’t get into Reasonspace without going through a checkpoint any more. Fairyfloss is the main entry point. It’s pretty busy on a normal day. Today, the day before the Summit, it’s going to be pandemonium. There’s no way they can board and inspect all of the ships coming through. We’ll sail into Reasonspace without a second glance. The FTL from Fairyfloss to Jaisalmer is just a matter of hours. We might even have time to spare.”
“It’s a very ambitious plan,” said Gary. If just one thing went wrong, they could lose precious hours fixing the problem. The readouts in front of him showed a ship that was teetering on the edge of malfunction. Stoneships were living biomes that operated in synergy with the creatures living within them. After ten years in storage, the machinery might work fine, but the heart of the ship was sick with loneliness.
“Maybe Boges can find some rats nesting in the walls so you can get a head start on growing horn,” said Jenny. Gary cringed. There was an outraged sound from behind the dwarf door in the wall of the cockpit. Boges was still watching over him.
“There are no rats in my walls,” called Boges indignantly from behind the door.
“I’m sure there aren’t,” said Jenny. “Which is why we’d better hope that Bào Zhú has a supply of trisicles.”
“Humph,” said Boges, stomping away down the hall.
Gary took off his baseball cap and rubbed the rough patch where his horn should have been. There was a little jagged spot that he could feel with his fingertips. A sharp outcropping where his body was attempting to regrow layers of dense horn.
Jenny eased the Jaggery to a stop at a desolate spot in the desert. Bare branches of dead trees poked out of the ground like fingers reaching toward the sky. There was no other ship in sight, but the Bala controls in front of Gary hummed excitedly, indicating they were in the presence of another stoneship.
The Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion flew the FTL Redshift, which was a sibling to the Jaggery.
“I don’t see them,” said Jenny. Her dull human instruments weren’t picking up any other ship in the area.
“They’re invisible,” said Gary.
The two stoneships began conversing in a harmonic language older than unicorns. Gary couldn’t translate most of it, but there seemed to be a lot of complaining on the part of the Jaggery. Human ears couldn’t pick up the frequency, but Jenny tilted her head as if straining to hear someone speaking in the distance. A woman’s voice came out of the tablet.
“You’re being followed, Jaggery.”
“Hey there, Redshift. I’m aware. Let’s meet on the surface before he gets here,” Jenny replied.
“No time. We’ll teleport the cargo directly onto your ship.”
Jenny sat bolt upright.
“No, that is a bad idea, Redshift. The last time we tried teleportation–”
“Boges knows what to do. Have Gary meet us in the hold,” replied the Redshift and the comm clicked off.
“I guess that’s the end of the discussion,” said Jenny. Boges came over the ship’s intercom.
“Gary, the Sisters are in the cargo hold. They say you have sixty-seven seconds to join them in here before the apocalypse starts.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion
Gary had once been advised that if he inadvertently found himself in a room with the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion, the best course of action was to stand very still and hope that he was not the one they had come to kill. He ran to the hold as fast as he could, dodging dwarves who had already started laying fresh soil in the hallways. The Sisters were known to be volatile and capricious. Their objectives were often so far in the future that their present actions did not always make sense.
They were ostensibly a religious order, which gave them exemptions from searches, seizures, and the majority of Reason laws; however, their allegiance was not wholly transparent. They undertook a significant number of jobs for the Reason, but Gary was under the impression that they only did that to direct scrutiny away from their tiny cloister on the waterlogged planet of Varuna. In reality, their loyalty rested with the Pymmie. The same almighty Pymmie who had brokered a tenuous peace between the humans and the Bala one hundred years ago and who were arriving in just over a day.
All beings, no matter what planet they hailed from, harbored a deep inborn dread of the Pymmie. Which was a shame because, as far as Gary could see, the Pymmie harbored no ill will toward anyone. They were simply scientists. Granted, they could also disintegrate a galaxy with a single thought, but they were rigorous in their data collection just the same.
Survey a thousand cultures from throughout the universe and each would have terrifying stories about thin grey aliens with huge black eyes who visited their planet to poke at them. The Pymmie were only a meter tall, but able to control space, time, and matter with alarming proficiency. You could see the intelligence behind their murky eyes, but also a horrifying indifference. They simply went about their grand experiments without concerning themselves with trivial matters like suffering. The Pymmie were not particularly clandestine with their experiments, the same way that an entomologist would not bother to conceal her presence from an ant.
Humans had encountered the Pymmie throughout their history, but it was not until a hundred and fifty years ago, around the time of the mass exodus from Earth, that the Pymmie had endeavored to make direct contact. They offered plans for generation ships to a human culture that had barely started to harness the power of the sun and wind. Predictably, the results were less than optimal. Most of the ships failed due to engineering mistakes or because two hundred thousand lives were placed in the hands of the lowest bidder.
Gary’s mother had been on the Cristobal, one of the first ships to leave Earth. It limped toward a habitable planet for decades, only to find that a faster generation ship – one that had left after them – had made it to the new planet first. The Cristobal arrived to a tense situation as human colonists wrangled with the planet’s magical Bala natives. His mother had stepped in to mitigate tensions between the two civilizations, but the divisions eventually escalated to open warfare. The Pymmie again stepped in and forced an uneasy truce, vowing to return in a hundred years to evaluate the progress of the alliance.
Gary had grown up watching his mother’s attempts to steer humankind toward cooperation until she finally gave up and simply joined the Bala in the fight. He hoped the Pymmie would realize the destruction humans had wrought in the last century, but he was not confident that their solution would be pleasant for anyone.
Boges waited in the cargo hold. She chattered instructions as Gary walked to the back of the room where the Sisters stood at attention.
“There are just four of them, but they are decidedly on edge. Do not make any sudden moves. We already locked the cargo down, but the Sisters have a message for you that they insist on delivering in person,” she said.
Gary stopped next to two immense boxes that had been tethered to the floor. Four Sisters waited for his
arrival, all wearing crimson flight suits and matching red veils. The Sisters could see out, but no one could see in. Three were bipedal and the fourth had a human woman’s torso atop a horse’s body. Centaurs were renowned for being devastatingly powerful fighters, but they were mercurial and rarely followed orders. They also disliked unicorns with a red-hot hate.
“You called for me?” he asked.
The smallest bipedal Sister stepped up to him, holding out a red envelope.
“Gary Cobalt, this message is for you.”
Gary’s heart pounded as he took the heavy cardstock. No one used paper to convey messages any longer, and certainly fancy cards like this were a thing of the distant past. One of the few people who had continued such a wasteful practice after the ships had left Earth was his mother. The envelope was worn at the edges and warped from dried water damage. It felt fragile, as if the paper might snap in half if he folded it. He held it by one corner as if it might bite him.
The handwriting on the outside of the envelope was the proper tidy cursive of his mother’s hand.
Do Not Open Until Christmas
“How long have you had this?” he asked.
“It has been in the possession of the Sisters for sixty-nine years.”
“Nice,” said the centaur. The tiny Sister’s veiled head tilted at her.
“This is my mother’s writing. Which Christmas does she mean?” asked Gary. “Now or sixty-nine years ago?”
The small Sister shrugged. “Our instructions say to deliver the card to you in person, on this ship, at this location, along with this specific cargo.”
“I don’t know what’s in these boxes. They’re not mine,” he said.
The Sister looked up at the largest Sister, a tall and broad woman who stood with arms across her chest. She made a small motion with her hand.
“They sort of are yours. Don’t open the boxes early, but you should be there when the locks pop,” said the smallest Sister.
“You mentioned an apocalypse?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
“It’s coming,” said the small Sister. “But the form it will take has not yet been determined. As arranged, this cargo must make it to Fort Jaisalmer in time for the Century Summit. The temporal geolock on the boxes is not to be tampered with or there will be injuries. The boxes will open automatically if they are in the correct location at the appointed time.”
“You could deliver these yourself with far less trouble,” said Gary. “We barely have enough horn to make it out of this system.”
“The tenuous relationship between the Sisters and the Reason has broken down. The Redshift cannot even fully materialize in this universe without being fired upon. You’ll have to do the best you can with what you have,” she said.
“Of all foreseeable futures, the best outcome results from you, Captain Perata, James Bryant, and Ricky Tang all being aboard for the trip to Jaisalmer,” said the tall Sister. “But the outcome is tenuous and ever-changing. Do your best, work together, and perhaps most of you will live.”
There was a soft buzzing from near the Sisters.
“We need to leave,” said the centaur. The tiny one lifted her hands to shoulder level, palms upward. Purple lightning streaked from her fingers and encased all the Sisters in a glowing electric cage. Gary stepped back. This was necromancer magic, absolutely illegal throughout the Reason. Not even the Bala wanted to be near it. All the necromancers had supposedly been slaughtered during the Siege of Copernica Citadel. Well, all but one, and this definitely wasn’t him.
All four Sisters stiffened as the lightning grazed their flight suits. Even benign necromancer magic was not painless. With a crack and a flash, they were gone. Boges stood on tiptoes to check the geolock on the cargo boxes. It glowed a remaining time of 24 hours 23 minutes, along with a set of coordinates for the delivery location.
“If the Sisters are hiding from the Reason, what chance do we have of making this delivery?” Boges asked.
“The Sisters base their decisions on the reverend mother’s knowledge of future events. They wouldn’t have given it to us if we weren’t the best chance of success.”
Boges ran her hand over one of the boxes. Gary felt a shiver down his spine.
“Whatever is in here, it’s certainly large, Captain,” she said.
The boxes were nearly three meters high, made out of an opaque white synthetic material that the Reason had concocted in a laboratory. But it was also suffused with a charge of Bala magic. Gary didn’t even want to touch it. He suspected that was by design. Technology was excellent at locking up valuables; magic was good for making you forget they ever existed.
Gary knelt down in front of the dwarf so that they could speak eye to eye.
“Boges, you need to stop calling me Captain,” said Gary.
The dwarf drew herself up to her full height.
“I will never,” she said indignantly. “Humans cannot be trusted. They will always act out of greed and spite, even if it’s not in their own best interest. If you were to give the word, the Jaggery would be yours again. All of my kin agrees.”
“I’ve rarely heard so many words from you. And I have never heard you speak of mutiny,” said Gary.
Boges gripped the cargo box and leaned in with panicked eyes.
“I will not stand idly by while you are tortured. Not again.”
“You aren’t responsible for what happened to me,” said Gary. Boges blushed.
“I should have stopped it,” she said.
“I’m a practically immortal being with healing blood and the strength of ten of them and I couldn’t stop it.”
“I will not allow history to repeat itself,” said Boges, stomping toward the dwarf door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Orbital Burn
The Jaggery’s Bala instruments bubbled and churned behind Jenny. None of it sounded good. The ship was damn unhappy to have humans on board again. Her tablet pinged with a warning that was clear and easy to understand. The Reason ship that had tailed them into the desert was hailing them.
“FTL Jaggery, this is the RSF Arthur Phillip. On the orders of Colonel Wenck, you are to land your ship immediately and prepare to be boarded.”
A lazy smile crossed Jenny’s face. She clicked open her comm.
“Kia ora, Ondre, is that you? I haven’t heard from you since Copernica. You still have that pixie you used to keep in a mason jar?”
If being a war hero didn’t bring you fortune, at least it bought you a few minutes of idle chatter with which to stall your pursuers.
She switched over to the internal intercom.
“Gary, speed it up in the cargo hold. Reason’s here.”
The Arthur Phillip’s communications officer answered in hushed tones.
“Is that you, Captain Perata? Man, it’s been ages. That’s some ship you’re flying. You’ve done well for yourself. Listen, my boss wants to take a look on board. Can you just give him ten minutes? He’s searching for some half-unicorn that we have to bring back to Fort J. I don’t know why he thinks it’s with you.”
“That’s really weird,” said Jenny, feigning innocence. “All right. Let me get this rock landed. I won some rich guy’s stoneship in a poker game this morning and I barely know how to fly it. Do you know where I’d find the attitude controls?”
Ondre launched into a detailed explanation of stoneship control mechanisms. Jenny had learned that while blasting your way out of situations worked middlingly well, the best way to extract yourself from under a man’s control was to pretend you needed his expertise. You could stall for hours with a few well-timed uninformed questions.
She turned down the comm volume, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes. Her lower back ached and her right arm was still sore from hitting the singularity pie. Also, her brain was tired. She’d been trying for years to break onto this ship. Now she was here, in the captain’s seat, but she didn’t feel the vindication she’d been hoping for. The fear in her core hadn’t dissipate
d one bit. In fact, thinking about the task ahead, it had intensified.
Jim came in, reeking of cheap cigars and larval eggwine, and holding a small plastic baggie in his hand.
“Don’t smoke on board,” she said, not looking up from her tablet.
“It’s all I got left, Jen.” Which was what he said when she asked him to stop any of his ridiculously annoying habits. Like spitting, or drinking while flying, or demanding grilled cheese sandwiches on space stations that hadn’t seen bread in a generation. It was the way he shut down every argument that he didn’t want to have.
In the background, Ondre paused for breath. Jenny flicked on the comm again.
“But wait, where is the main engine on this thing?” she asked, and turned the mic off while he tried to explain that there wasn’t a conventional engine on board stoneships.
Jim opened his baggie and poured a bit of water from a flask in his coat pocket into the hard orange pellets at the bottom. He resealed the bag and started moving the stuff inside around with his fingers.
“Do you really have to rehydrate your cheese at this very moment?” asked Jenny. “I am trying to stop the Reason from boarding. You could help, you know.”
“It’ll take a few hours to be ready. I wanted to get it started now,” he said, shaking the bag to make sure that the water touched every little cheese shred. This man was exhausting.
“Did you hit Gary?” she asked.
“Might’ve.” He finished working his cheese and put it back into his pocket for later when he could get the dry bread out of storage and make himself a grilled cheese sandwich. Jim would be thrilled that Boges would allow fire on board. Jenny had had fire safety drilled into her brain when she was a Reason officer. She didn’t allow so much as a stick of wood on her ships. Well, with the exception of her wife, of course.
She was grateful that Gary hadn’t been judgmental about how long it had taken Jenny to get back to Fort J to look for Kaila, but the huge distances between planets were only navigable when unicorn horn was plentiful. Now that it was a scarce resource, communications and shipping routes had started to become strained. They’d even stopped holding annual voting for elected officials because the distances were too great. Or so the Reason said.