Space Unicorn Blues

by T. J. Berry

  Boges ran up, pushing her carved wooden wheelchair. Rassick set her down into it and stood there awkwardly smoothing her hair.

  “So, I’ll be off now,” she said. “Hope you get where you’re headed.”

  Jenny grabbed Boges’ arm and mimed a tablet. Boges handed over her own and read over her shoulder as Jenny typed and held it up to her. The dwarf ran for the crew quarters.

  “You guys headed back out to Bala space?” asked Rassick.

  Jim shook his head, still watching Jenny warily. “Gotta drop some cargo at Fort J first.”

  Jenny watched him right back. He could easily call over the authorities and have her arrested again, but he seemed thrown by the fact that she’d reappeared. He looked at her with a fearfulness like she had some Bala magic that kept her coming back. Who knows, maybe she did.

  Boges ran back into the hold. She handed Jenny a box, which Jenny held out to Rassick. The private opened the box and the aroma of lavender wafted out.

  “Oh,” she said, stroking the purple bars with the tips of her fingers. “I couldn’t. Not after what you went through.”

  Jenny put up her palm to insist.

  “Man, I’m gonna shower for days. You’re good people, Cap. You kept your word after everything.”

  “You could give me some soap, Perata,” said Ricky. “I got you all the way up that ladder.” Jenny rolled her eyes.

  Rassick tucked the box under her arm and walked down the ramp. She stopped at the bottom and turned, coming to attention and bringing her hand up in salute to Jenny. Jenny saluted in return.

  Behind Rassick, Reason officers headed to their various ships. Every one with that bloody spheres and tears flag on the shoulder. You could tell the civilians by the furs and flora they wore that had been stripped from the bodies of various Bala creatures. A woman in heels walked by trailing a pixie on a leash. Another man rode high on the back of a centaur. She knew that being ridden was an insurmountable shame to equine Bala. She wondered what they had to have done to that centaur to pummel it into submission. Another man walked past the open door and Jenny smelled the distinctive odor of elf semen. Smeared all over one’s body, it really did make a foolproof magical disguise. Jenny wondered who it was under all that elf sperm. Maybe it was a blemmye. She laughed to herself without opening her mouth.

  The door started to close and Jenny turned her chair to see Boges at the controls.

  “We’re about to leave for Jaisalmer,” the dwarf said, watching to ensure the door sealed properly. “We have a landing slot scheduled for eleven AM, Fort J time.”

  Jenny rolled back toward her quarters. A sturdy calloused hand landed on her arm. Boges dropped a tiny screw-top bottle of silver liquid into Jenny’s hand. It was no bigger than a marble. She was afraid to drop it.

  “This is all I have left, but take it,” the dwarf said. “Go find him.”

  Jenny popped off the cap. Boges’ face compressed. Jenny couldn’t tell if it was anger or anguish.

  “You do this and all debts are cleared,” said Boges. Jenny didn’t think that was true, but she wasn’t about to turn down even a thimble-sized dollop of unicorn blood. Jenny tipped the vial back and let the globule coat the remains of her teeth. She swished it around. It was thick enough that it made her want to gag. In the spots where it touched her mouth, her cuts sealed. Her teeth rebuilt themselves with a sharp toothache that had her seeing double.

  “I’LL FIND BOTH OF THEM,” Jenny typed onto Boges’ tablet. Her tongue was thick and heavy, coated with a metallic tang.

  “Can Cowboy Jim be trusted?” Boges asked. Jenny shook her head. The bones in her jaw were re-aligning. She touched her eye with a finger to warn Boges to watch him.

  “HOW LONG BEFORE THE CARGO OPENS,” Jenny typed.

  “Ninety minutes,” said Boges.

  “CUTTING IT CLOSE.”

  “It would not have been my first choice.” Sometimes, Boges sounded just like Gary.

  Boges handed her the patu that Wenck had stepped on and cracked in half. The dwarves had mended it with wood glue and careful sanding. You could still see the crack, but it blended in with the other carvings on the wood.

  “Your grandmother would have been proud of how you fought,” said Boges. Jenny was suddenly glad that she wasn’t able to talk.

  A chime sounded and the ship lurched into FTL. Boges slipped back into her maintenance door, leaving Jenny alone in the cargo hold. Jim kept the gravity on. He could care less that Jenny wouldn’t be able to get down the dirt hallways in her chair. The pain in her legs intensified, shooting down her backside and into her calves. Her toes curled from it. On the pain chart they’d given her at the hospital, she was the orange face with worried eyes. She was willing to bet that full unicorn blood did the same job with a lot less anguish.

  The last time she’d felt this much pain, it was right after Copernica. Her entire company had looked in on her in the hospital. Major Yerkel had come to visit with a basket of fruit.

  “You’ll be up and around in no time, Perata,” he said, ruffling her hair. “You did good, Captain. People lived because of you.”

  She’d nodded along, high as a kite on the drugs the hospital had provided. She’d spent months in bed, waiting for the bones to heal. They didn’t have enough unicorn blood for every vet who came through the doors. After that, they’d moved her to rehab. A few of her best mates had come by every day to cheer her on during a break in the rotation.

  “Come on, Cap. Take a step.”

  “You can do it.”

  “One foot in front of the other.”

  But no matter how much she wanted it, her legs would not move. She pulled herself up, hanging onto those parallel bars over and over, but as soon as her weight shifted, her legs collapsed out from under her. The crew was quiet as she reset and tried again. Over and over. Day after day.

  After a couple of weeks, her mates started skipping rehab appointments. They’d realized she wasn’t going to be one of those miracle cases who ended up running marathons a year after their pelvis and spine were crushed to bits. She was just going to be sitting in her chair while they went back out to the front. She didn’t blame them for being disappointed. She was too. When they were assigned to new ships and redeployed, she wheeled herself out to say goodbye to each of them. It was heartfelt – there were tears – but there was a separation between them. She was the one who got left behind.

  Most of those kids were dead now. She wondered if her sacrifice had meant anything. She’d bought them a few more months of living, that was all. It hadn’t hurt to give her legs for them. It hurt to know that it didn’t make any difference in the long run.

  Jenny pushed her chair out of the cargo hold and into the hallway. Her wheels sank into the soft earth. The uneven ground made her chair unstable. She wrenched it forward, inch by inch.

  She made it to her quarters, stopping every few feet to rest. She had asked a lot of her body over the last twenty-four hours. Gary’s blood was helping, but her bones ached and her muscles felt tight and sore. She pulled on some clean clothes and re-laced her boots. She tried to brush her teeth, but her jaw wouldn’t open wide enough yet. The bones were no longer grinding past each other, but the joint was tender and stiff.

  She tossed a couple of personal items into her duffel. She hadn’t even really unpacked yet. A comb. Her patu. A jumpsuit. She traveled light these days. You never knew when you had to bug out of somewhere fast.

  “Boges,” she called through her stiff jaw. A different dwarf poked his head into the room via the dwarf door.

  “At your service.”

  She opened her mouth to speak and grimaced. The dwarf looked around the slightly tidied room. He anticipated her request.

  “Would you like me to bring your bag to the cargo hold?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “With pleasure.”

  For once, it sounded like the dwarf was sincere. She thought of Cheryl Ann and the way she had worked to learn everything about each
of the dwarves on board. They had been delighted by her interest, inviting her into their inner circle and regaling her with stories of their adventures on the Jaggery.

  “Wait,” she said.

  The dwarf’s head returned.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s your name?”

  For a moment, he looked like he hadn’t understood her mumbled request. Then his face brightened.

  “Sunder,” he said.

  “Thank you, Sunder.”

  “You’re welcome, Captain.”

  She shoved her chair over to the cockpit. Jim was still regarding her like the walking dead. They had thirty minutes to kill before they could leave for Fort J and she wasn’t planning to let Jim out of her sight for a minute.

  “You look better. A little color back in your face,” said Ricky, standing in the co-pilot’s spot. She started to step out, but Jenny waved at her to stay.

  “You too,” said Jenny, trying not to move her sore jaw. She stood near the Bala instruments and tried to read them, but the various bubbling fluids and twirling leaves were incomprehensible. She hummed to the ship and it hummed back to her.

  A new tablet was stuck on the console to replace the one Jim had dropped. Jenny pulled up the documentation for the cargo delivery and handed it to Ricky. She was, after all, an expert in contracts.

  “Lady Nashita’s bill of lading says we have to get the boxes to the planet’s surface before they open. Nothing about actually bringing them into the Summit,” said Ricky.

  “Is someone coming to pick them up?” asked Jim.

  “It doesn’t say here. They need to be delivered to Fort Jaisalmer before the timer reaches zero. It actually seems pretty easy,” said Ricky. “Just drop them at the docking station and that fulfills our end of the contract.”

  Jenny and Jim did not respond. Nothing was ever easy. Especially when the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion were involved. It was in one’s best interests to follow their instructions to the letter.

  Jim looked exhausted and he kept stealing glances back toward Jenny, like he was afraid she was going to jump him or something. She made her eyes wild and wide, like someone showing ferocity to their enemies. Jim sat as far up in his chair as he could to get away from her.

  “Why’s this ship called the Jaggery anyway?” he asked, trying to distract her. “What the hell does that even mean?”

  “It’s sugar,” said Ricky. “A pressed cake of it. Gary’s mother named the ship. Or… renamed it really. After she married his dad.”

  “Who’s Gary’s mom?” mumbled Jenny. Her jaw cracked and popped when it moved, like the leather seats in a new ship. She knew his father was a full unicorn, but she assumed his mother was just a random human on one of the early pioneer transports.

  Ricky tapped a name into the tablet and held out the article for Jenny to read.

  “Her name was Anjali Ramanathan. Though you’re probably more familiar with her colloquial name – Apocalypse Angie.”

  “Huh,” said Jim.

  “Yeah. She led the early rebellion against the Reason when they were just a collection of broken-down generation ships. But before that, Gary’s mother was the chancellor of Proxima Centauri.” Ricky had slipped effortlessly into antiquities dealer mode. She sounded for all the world like a professor giving a 101-level history lesson.

  “Anjali’s title was mostly ceremonial, but her job was to preserve as much culture from Earth as possible. Languages, artifacts, history, old films and shows. That’s why Gary doesn’t talk as formally as the other unicorns. He probably had more of an Earth kid’s childhood than most of us did.”

  Jenny took the tablet. The photo accompanying the entry showed a brown woman in her twenties dressed in a formal sari dotted with shining stones. It was her official photo, but she’d been caught mid-laugh, so it looked like an outtake. She looked genuinely happy. It was hard to imagine Gary with such a young, joyful mother.

  As if reading her mind, Ricky reached over and flipped to the next page. The photo was Anjali again, holding a tiny Gary on her lap. His dark hair curled at the base of a horn as tall as her hand and you could just tell that he was sticky. His eyes had the same serious expression that they did now, but his mouth was open to show four tiny teeth.

  “How does a woman even make a baby with a unicorn?” muttered Jim.

  “Are you asking for an anatomy lesson?” said Ricky archly. “Because it’s obvious if you think about it. Unicorns are asexual and there wasn’t any sex involved, so…”

  “Bala magic,” said Jim.

  “See? You got there all on your own,” said Ricky. “When Anjali’s ship arrived at Proxima, three faster ships that started after hers were already having conflicts with the Bala they found there. They thought the Cristobal’s people would act as reinforcements. Which is all in the history books, but what they won’t tell you is that Anjali fought to keep her ship from joining the war on the side of the humans. She almost had them convinced. The Cristobal was this close to siding with the Bala in the fight.”

  Jenny thought again of the moments that could have changed the tide of war in a completely different direction. If the Cristobal hadn’t joined the fight, perhaps they would all be living on Bala worlds instead of Reason ones.

  Ricky flipped the page. This photo was candid, probably a still from a ship’s video feed taken during the first battle for Proxima. An older Anjali leaned over a map, both hands gripping the edge of the table. She looked like she was arguing with the other humans in the room. Her face was set and tired, but her eyes blazed. Ricky swiped again. The final photo was the Anjali Ramanathan Memorial Shrine on Proxima. You could barely see the inscription behind the fruits, flowers, and other offerings left at its base. Bala used to travel from all over openspace to leave her a tribute. The first human to fight for peace between her people and the Bala.

  “Amazing,” mumbled Jenny.

  “Oh, you haven’t seen his father yet,” said Ricky. She reached over and tapped on the tablet.

  “Findae Cobalt,” she said. The entry shifted to a much shorter article. The image at the top was an oil painting, not a photograph. Ricky enlarged it.

  “Gary’s dad is the king of the unicorns. Gary won’t ever tell you, but he’s actually Prince Gary. And if you ever call him that, he’ll turn six shades of red and deny that there’s a royal family any more.”

  “Yeah, he did that on Beywey when some of the locals recognized him as a Cobalt,” said Jenny.

  “Man, it’s a good thing unicorns are extinct or they would be pissed at you for keeping Gary hostage,” said Jim, looking at Jenny. “But I guess you did what you had to for the survival of man.”

  Manifest destiny came the reply in Jenny’s head that had been drilled over a lifetime. She tossed the tablet onto the console.

  “FTL Jaggery, this is Chhatrapati Shivaji. You are clear for takeoff,” said a voice over the comm. Jim touched the tablet and backed the ship out of his parking spot. Grunts in EVA suits waved him frantically over to the left. He scraped the hull along the support strut. It groaned along the edge of the stoneship. When they’d backed out, Jenny could see a bent beam sagging toward the station.

  “They’re going to bill you for that,” said Ricky.

  “They can try to find me,” replied Jim, spinning them toward Jaisalmer.

  After a few hours of rest and restocking at Chhatrapati, the Jaggery descended through the upper atmosphere and Fort Jaisalmer sprawled beneath them. The fort was located on a dry area of the planet, covered in sandy gray clay. Fort J spanned two time zones on a single continent. It was where the Reason Command trained their armies and planned their conquests. It was the largest concentrated gathering of humans anywhere in the universe, even including Earth.

  “FTL Jaggery to Fort Jaisalmer with a SSA delivery, requesting a landing site for an eleven hundred scheduled touchdown,” said Jim into the comm.

  Fort J traffic control did not answer for several minutes. Jim shifted i
n his seat.

  “This paperwork is legit. I don’t know why they’re not talking to us.” He looked back at Ricky and Jenny. “Maybe they can tell you two are aboard.”

  He looked about to toss them both out an airlock rather than jeopardize the delivery. The comm came to life.

  “FTL Jaggery, we were not aware that you were Halcyon class. We don’t have much room for a stoneship. Do you have a shuttle you can take down to us?”

  “That’s a negative, Fort J. We need a landing location.”

  The comm went quiet again.

  “I’m going to get my luggage,” said Ricky, heading for the door. “Don’t leave without me.”

  Jenny rolled her chair into her spot at the controls.

  “You gonna look for Kaila?” asked Jim, without looking at her.

  “Mmm,” she replied. She wiggled her jaw back and forth and it felt intact. She opened her mouth and aside from a few rough bits of teeth that hadn’t quite finished regrowing, it felt pretty good.

  “You can take my gun if you want,” said Jim.

  “I don’t want your gun,” replied Jenny.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if we both ended up with dead wives,” he mused.

  Jenny was stunned. Something was seriously wrong with this man.

  “Like karma, I mean,” he continued, digging himself in deeper.

  Obviously bored with waiting, Jim dropped them through the atmosphere like a stone. If he didn’t ease up on the stick, they were going to slam into the surface. She wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t be intentional, either. Jenny grabbed the tablet out of his hands.

  “Let me drive,” she said.

  “Still my ship,” he said, but he let her have it.

  She glided them to a spot just outside of the city and hovered, waiting for landing clearance. Ships were stacked up in a long line, coming out of orbit one after the other with just a couple of minutes between them. Air traffic control would be slammed.

  Ricky came back in.

  “Perata, the suitcase I traded for passage is in the cargo hold by your bag,” she said, watching the ships land.