by T. J. Berry
Jenny read the incoming data on the planet. The rings around it were primarily ammonia, but the atmosphere itself had a high concentration of water vapor and oxygen.
“We could land…” she began.
“No,” said everyone in the cockpit at once.
“I swear, you are trying to kill us,” said Jim.
“Yeah, nah. I was just spitballing,” said Jenny, pretending that she wasn’t miffed that they didn’t consider her perfectly reasonable idea of landing on an unknown, hostile alternate dimension with practically no supplies, a breached hull, and no horn for an FTL jump. Amateurs.
Ricky kicked a few of the trisicles into the corner. They still clawed at everything within reach, but with the planet’s gravity pinning them to the floor, they weren’t catching much. A few popped out of existence, then reappeared a moment later elsewhere in the cabin, but they fell back down just as quickly.
“Forget orbit where all the trisicles are,” said Jenny. “Fix the breaches, get back into the engine room, and pull the FTL drive offline. We can jump back to openspace right from high atmosphere.”
“That is a very good idea,” said Gary, rubbing the base of his throat. The ship stabilized and hovered over the surface of the planet. It was mostly shades of brown down below. No sign of lights or built objects.
Boges poked her head out of the door.
“Hull breaches are sealed, Captain. One of my kin is heading into the engine room to pull the drive offline.”
“Excellent,” said Jenny.
“Good,” replied Jim at the same time. He leaned over to her and only sort of whispered. “You remember I’m the captain now, right?”
“Then captain something,” she hissed right back.
“Take us out of bugspace,” he shouted at Boges, even though that was exactly what she was doing.
“Yes, Captain,” said Boges, with the tiniest of glances at Gary. To his credit, Gary kept his eyes on the instrument panel. Any reaction at all and Jim would have thrown a fit. Jenny was starting to wish she’d had Gary as a co-pilot all these years.
“Hold onto something,” said Boges, relaying a message from further down the tunnel.
The image on the viewscreen compressed until it was a thin glowing line. The ship thrummed with a harmonic vibration, then squeezed in the middle, like when Jenny and her friends had put a bunch of rubber bands around a rockmelon. It took on an hourglass shape right before it burst open. Jenny’s eardrums hummed and ached, then the pulsing stopped. On the viewscreen, the ringed planet had disappeared.
“We’re back in openspace,” said Boges. The relief in her voice was tangible.
“The ship is stable,” said Gary, glancing up from the pulsating spot in the wall that looked for all the world like a beating heart.
“See? That worked,” said Jenny, with a casual smile that took a herculean amount of effort to muster.
“I should have taken my chances with Wenck and the Quag, because you are out of your damn mind,” said Jim. His voice shook with anger. “I can order you to do what I want, you know.”
Jenny scoffed at the idea.
“I can drop you back there, if you like,” she said. “I’m sure we’re not too far from Earth.” She tapped to figure out where they’d reappeared. It was outside of Earthspace, which was good, but the nearby natural satellites didn’t look familiar.
Ricky stepped over piles of inert trisicles and leaned down over the back of Jenny’s chair, squeezing her shoulder.
“Well, I like your driving, Perata. You remind me of my Auntie Nash, who once flew a stoneship so close to Reason Command that she scraped a layer of paint off the building.”
“One time, I blew a general out of an airlock for grabbing my ass during an inspection. I mean, he was suited up. I wasn’t trying to kill him or anything. Just gave him a ride,” said Jenny.
“If I had a dollar for every time I had to break the fingers of some guy grabbing my ass…” began Ricky.
Jim turned to them both, his face stricken.
“You two think this is funny? Look.” On the viewscreen, he pointed to several glowing red spots in the distance.
“Oh bollocks,” said Jenny.
“What now?” cried Ricky. “What could possibly be happening now that is any worse than pirates, ammonia, falling out of orbit, and being eaten alive by trisicles?”
“Redworms,” said Jim.
“Aiyā,” cried Ricky. “I take it back, Perata. You definitely have a death wish.” She hesitated for a moment, hand on the cockpit door. “I don’t know whether to watch this trainwreck from up here, or have a last drink before we’re all dead.”
“I vote drink,” said Jim, starting to unbuckle.
“Oh no,” said Jenny, putting a hand over his. “You have to stay up here and go down with the ship, Captain.”
He sat back with a string of mumbled curses.
“Sorry, guys,” said Jenny quietly. “It was all I could think of.”
“Well, you’re an idiot,” spat Jim. “Always making the wrong call and getting people killed. The Reason never should have put you in command, especially after Copernica. Everyone around you ends up dead.”
Jenny rubbed a finger across her lips thoughtfully, wondering how many blows she could land on Jim before Gary pulled her off him. Maybe, given their history, he wouldn’t pull her off Jim at all and she could break his nose and maybe his jaw before he begged her to stop. Without Jim’s help, they wouldn’t be able to get through the checkpoints around Reasonspace. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to keep the fury out of her voice.
“All right, Jim,” she said, with false brightness. “I’m sorry about what happened to Cheryl Ann. And we can have that out later… for the thousandth time. But for the moment, we need to figure out where we are and also how not to get dissolved by redworm acid.”
Gary raised an eyebrow at her.
“What?” Her patience was wearing thin.
“I think you are handling this difficult situation admirably,” said Gary, and all her anger dissipated.
“Ta, Gary. Thank you. See? Gary thinks I’m doing a good job,” she said.
“No one cares what he thinks,” grumbled Jim.
“I care what he thinks,” she replied.
“You would take his side,” said Jim. Jenny let it go. Leave it to Jim to start a pissing match right before a redworm attack. She rolled her eyes. And took a breath and held it. She was used to rolling with the punches, but she was reaching her limit. Her chest ached, her head pounded, and she was getting that cabin fever antsy feeling again from the ship jumping into and out of bugspace. She let out the breath and her jumpsuit changed from Reason red to cobalt blue.
Jim was too wrapped up in being pissed off to notice, but Gary made an interested little grunt from behind her.
“What was that?” he asked.
She gave him a warning look.
“It was nothing. Anyway. Redworms. All right. We’ve done this before,” said Jenny, squinting at the viewscreen. “See there? They’re zigzagging in a grid pattern, which means they haven’t spotted us yet. They’re just canvassing for food. If we’re lucky, they’ll miss us in all this openspace.”
“We are never lucky,” said Jim morosely.
“I am very lucky,” said Gary.
“You are not helping right now,” said Jenny, turning to him. “Do your little bubble glass thing and steer the ship where I tell you, please.”
Gary nodded, but he looked amused. Again she thought she could get used to flying with him. He certainly made a better wingman than Jim.
“Cut the external lights and any heat-generating equipment,” she said to Boges. “They’ll be less likely to find us if we’re cold and dark.”
Boges nodded and disappeared down her tunnel. Jenny picked up her tablet. It was still receiving some external sensor data from the ship, which was sent wirelessly. It just couldn’t access the control mechanisms, which were the wired connections the trisicl
es had chewed through.
“Let’s see where we are.”
The tablet churned through star maps, then announced they were in the Demoryx system. Of course. She didn’t bother mentioning it to anyone. No need to bring up those bad memories again.
“How long to Fort J?” asked Jim.
“Thirty-six hours in FTL,” said Jenny. Jim made a low whistle.
“Well, that’s not enough time before the Summit. We have twenty hours,” he said.
“How long before you can get us into FTL? Even a short hop?” she asked Gary. He reached up and felt his head.
“Four hours.”
Jim gestured angrily at the redworm cluster undulating in the distance. They moved up and down, left to right, methodically searching for anything edible.
“We’ll never stay hidden from them for four hours. We can either sit here and pray they miss us or we can turn on the engines and run. We might get pretty far before they catch up, but I guarantee it won’t be four hours. I give us two hours tops before we’re toast. And even if we do stay away from the redworms and by some miracle that guy,” he jerked his thumb toward Gary, “grows enough horn to jump us to Fort J, we’re not going to make it until after the Summit, so no delivery, no cash, no ship. Good job, Jen. Another successful mission.”
“I thought you were in charge,” said Jenny sharply. “Fix it, Captain.”
Jim threw off his harness and stormed out of the cockpit, stumbling over trisicles on the way out. He slammed the cockpit door hard enough that Jenny cringed. She traced the edge of her tablet with a fingernail, ticking through possibilities. She hadn’t quite given up yet. She wondered if there was a way to overclock an FTL engine. Or if they put another trisicle back into the drive maybe they could hop to a spot closer to Jaisalmer.
“Don’t even think about flying on trisicles again,” said Gary. Jenny jumped. For a moment she’d forgotten he was back there. She unclipped her chair and turned it to face him. She was grateful that a cockpit that was big enough for full unicorns was plenty large enough for her and her chair. Reason ships were tightly designed and she often couldn’t fit her chair in the captain’s spot. It was one of the other reasons they’d given on her discharge papers. “Inadequate accommodations onboard standard vessels.” Though that seemed like their problem to solve, not hers.
“I know you were considering it, because I was considering it,” said Gary. “But I don’t think it’s worth the risk. We jumped into the rings of a planet this time, but next time it might be the center of a planet or halfway through another ship.”
“There aren’t any ships in bugspace,” said Jenny.
“Not any good ones,” said Gary. Jenny suddenly wished she had time to ask him all of his stories about traveling the universe for a hundred years.
“I bet you have stories,” she said, watching with relief as the redworms changed their heading downward, away from the Jaggery.
“I’m sure you do as well,” he replied. He turned back to his control panel and started shutting down as many systems as they could spare.
“You’re a good co-pilot. I wish I’d had you at Copernica.” She realized her blunder as the words were coming out of her mouth. Gary had been at Copernica Citadel, but on the ground, directing the assault against her and other Reason troop carriers. Her face went hot.
Copernica Citadel had been one of the last bastions of Bala power. This was long after open battles were over and humans had turned the Bala planets into the collective known as Reasonspace. The remaining free Bala had congregated in the ancient stronghold on Copernica. The Reason had tried to bomb it out of existence during the active fighting, but the city-sized fortress was protected by the spells of a hundred different magical creatures, including five free necromancers.
Jenny’s only mission was to shoot down anyone who tried to leave Copernica. The situation had stabilized years before she had arrived, and for the most part, the residents of Copernica Citadel were content to live quietly in their impenetrable castle. They didn’t start trouble and they ignored the Reason patrols that dogged their planet. It was a grudging truce that the Reason expected to remain unchanged until they decided to change it.
As the captain of the RSF Pandey – with its complement of eleven hundred troops – Jenny’s job was to sail her ship on an elliptical orbit between Copernica and the fifth planet in the system. Four other Reason ships followed different patrol routes within the area. Between all of them, there was always a Reason ship within hours of Copernica. Every couple of months, four of the five ships ended up back at Copernica at the same time while the last completed the farthest orbit. For three days they checked in, compared data, resupplied, and partied so hard it took a week for everyone to recover. But in a grunt job, quite a distance from Jaisalmer and far from any sort of recognition, they needed something to get them through the long stretches of nothing. Jenny considered it part of boosting morale.
It was during one such gathering that Copernica Citadel attacked. The Reason captains had assumed that any aggression from the Bala would involve projectiles from the surface. No one had been expecting a direct assault in openspace. The Bala had slipped all five of their necromancers into orbit on the backs of some ridiculous mishmash of an eagle and a horse called a hippogriff. No one had any idea how they’d flown that high or how they were even breathing in the vacuum.
The Bala had hit on day two of their revelry, when most of the crew was passed out in the recreation rooms at the far end of the ship. Necromancer magic crushed three troop carriers before half the crew had even woken up. Jenny’s first indication of trouble was on her viewscreen, when the RMF Armistead twisted in half like a wrung-out towel. Frozen bodies spilled into space as purple lightning streaked across the vacuum. It took her a moment to realize she wasn’t hallucinating from larval eggwine and they were under attack.
Jenny took over the pilot’s chair from a swaying helmsman and maneuvered the Pandey through the wreckage of her comrades’ ships. She dodged violet bolts and ducked behind the largest pieces she could find. She ordered her gunners to fire, but finding the necromancers against the debris flying in all directions was tricky. The Reason ships were built to fight other ships – equipped with huge missiles that missed their tiny Bala targets by a wide margin.
Jenny instructed her crew to target the origin point of the lightning with a wide spray of any small items they could load into an explosive casing – screws, nuts, bolts, whatever. They weren’t trying to pierce a hull, just incapacitate a flesh and blood body.
The hardware missiles worked. The Pandey took out two of the hippogriffs. The three remaining necromancers focused their magic on the main bridge of the Pandey, attempting to tear the ship in two before they could load another shell. Jenny called the order to evacuate the bridge as the first bolts hit, but the ceiling torqued before they got out. The metal cracked and their precious air vented into space. They ran for the door as the emergency bulkhead started to come down and seal off the bridge from the rest of the ship.
The crew members closest to the door got through all right, but the forward bridge crew weren’t going to make it in time. There was no override when it came to hull breaches. You saved whoever you saved.
Jenny slid under the bulkhead and stopped herself halfway through. The door came down, catching her on the pelvic bone. It stuck there for a few seconds, pushing with unrelenting force. She felt the bone bend – an unnatural sensation that would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life. Her helmsman shoved the remaining seventeen people under the door, past Jenny. That door just kept pushing. She thought it was going to slice her in half. But at least her crew would be able to continue the fight from engineering.
She’d passed out from a combination of trauma, shock, and air loss before all seventeen of her crew were off the bridge. They told her that after the door had crushed her pelvis, the helmsman and two others had dragged her out from under the door to engineering. Then they’d radioed the other survi
ving Reason ship with instructions for building their own space shotgun. Between the two Reason ships, they picked off all the remaining necromancers, bar one who flew back down to the surface and was never found.
Without necromancers to protect the citadel, it fell quickly. The remaining Bala were rounded up and transported to Reason Command on Jaisalmer, which is where Jenny ended up during her recovery. When it was clear she wasn’t going to make a miraculous comeback, they’d dubbed her the hero of Copernica Citadel, propped her up in a wheelchair, still dizzy from pain meds, and Reason brass pinned medals on her jacket while taking thousands of promotional photos. There was an entire generation of soldiers raised on the legend of her selfless victory at Copernica.
“How did you get the necromancers to breathe in orbit?” she asked into the terrible silence in the Jaggery’s cockpit.
“Mermaids,” said Gary. “They’re quite proficient at regulating bubbles of air and pressure. We put them on the backs of the hippogriffs with the necromancers.”
“Smart,” said Jenny.
“How did you shoot down the necromancers?” he asked. “They were trained to avoid your heat-seeking projectiles.”
“We stuffed shell casings with metal scraps and chucked them toward the source of the lightning.”
“Resourceful,” he replied thoughtfully. “I hope we’re never on opposing sides of the same battle again.”
“Me too,” said Jenny. “I don’t have any spare legs to lose.” She’d meant it as a joke to lighten the mood, but the nod he gave her was full of resigned understanding from a fellow vet and it bloody well cut her to the bone.
A silver flicker on the viewscreen caught her attention. A ship had materialized off their starboard side. Jenny zoomed in on it. It was the Arthur Phillip.
“What the fu–” she began.
The Arthur Phillip fired on them before she even had a chance to lock her wheelchair back into place. The Jaggery jerked backward from the force of the purple blasts and Jenny hit the console hard enough that her teeth dug into her bottom lip. She hit the intercom.