“Back to how your meema got up here. I got the idea when I saved your ass from that guard, when we were running away and you lifted me up through that vent in the ceiling. See?” Giselle peered up at a metal plate in the ceiling of the control center, screwed in place. “What if she got in through there?”
Aster often thought of her mother, of the young woman named Lune Grey and her strange experiments, her Y deck life, her research, her suicide. She wondered how she looked. What clothes she preferred. How she felt about the Sovereignty. Never once, however, had she imagined her mother crawling through the ship’s ducts like Aster so often did. It was hard to imagine the dead having adventures. It was hard to imagine her as a person at all.
Aster stood on top of the control board, boots pressing into dead keys, took the knife out of her boot sheath, and used the pointed tip to undo the screws. They were tight in there, and it took her several seconds to make the first bit of metal budge. She was up there for ten minutes loosening all four. Aster lay the thin metal plate onto the floor, then hoisted herself inside, struggling because there was nothing to get leverage on.
“See anything?” called Giselle from down below.
“Black,” replied Aster, breathless. She crawled through the airway for several meters until she saw another vent plate, this one leading down into a staircase. She couldn’t reach the screwheads from this side and used her knife to saw open the sides.
“Aster?”
“Get me the axe in the firebox,” she yelled, then crawled back and reached her arm down. Giselle placed the wooden handle of the axe into her hand.
“Find something?”
“Perhaps,” said Aster. She went back to the other vent and rammed the head of the axe into it until it began to split open. The toothed metal cut against her torso as she lowered herself into the staircase. She was at the top of the main staircase that went from the middecks all the way up to A and one level above, dead-ending into a wall. Aster pushed her hand against the wall, felt the plaster, the wood. Not quite a false wall, but not as sturdy as the walls that lined the rest of the stairwell. Someone had built it years ago to obscure entry into the Shuttle Bay.
Aster had a good idea when it was built. The disaster referenced in the recordings Theo’d let her listen to: 255 years ago.
Back in the Shuttle Bay, she watched Giselle, who looked more glorious than Aster had ever seen her, shining triumphantly with madness. A sky that was an actual real sky above her through the glass. The blaze of stars. There was an excitement coming from Giselle. She was standing on the edge of a new world and so ready to jump. How Lucifer felt upon leaving the Heavens. He didn’t fall. He dove.
“I think your meema found a way out, Aster. That’s what that thing in the center of the star map is. Maybe it’s the Promised Land. Or something else. She knew how to get there.”
“Then why would my mother kill herself?” Aster tapped the thick glass of one of the shuttles, the sound of it so dead she knew there’d be no breaking through. She reckoned it was the same glass that made the dome.
“I read that note, Aster. All it said was that she had to leave you. What if she didn’t kill herself like you always thought? What if she was planning escape? Something bigger than you or me or Matilda.” Giselle put her palm out, predicting Aster’s protest. “We’ve all spent our whole lives believing this ship is it. If you knew it wasn’t, wouldn’t you give up everything too? I would cut out my own heart and throw it into the beyond for the split second it would beat somewhere other than this cursed fucking cage.” She did not unravel in her rage, but became tighter: lips pursing, neck muscles stiffening.
“Why do you think I risked going to the Sovereign? For an adventure? Because I was bored and I found working shifts too dreadfully dull? It was because I knew he was part of Lune’s secret, and Lune’s secret is the way out. I have to get out. I have to burn this metal world of torture and despair.” Giselle lifted herself onto the wing of a shuttle called Lioness. “I killed him, you know.”
Aster exhaled a tremulous breath. She closed her hands into fists, widened her stance.
“I just thought it, and it happened,” said Giselle. “It was so easy too, Aster, you have no idea how easy. First time I went to him was during the blackout. I gave the nurse 125 grams of poppyserum to take her place. She said yes. So I dressed up like her. Even in the light of day, the guards couldn’t tell the difference. And he saw me. He said, moaning and writhing and coughing, Who are you? And I said, Hello, Sovereign, my name is Giselle. I am your nurse today and here forward. He said, Aren’t you pretty? Then passed out. And every day I tended to him. And I searched and searched his room. You know what I found, Aster?”
Aster needed to know if it was the eidolon. She needed to know how her mother and Sovereign Nicolaeus were connected.
“Nothing. I found nothing. Until I put aside his trunk and moved the little rug he had underneath. It was such a beautiful rug. Dark red and this lovely arabesque. A magic carpet from a story. And under the rug was some hinges and a latch. And so I opened it. And there was stairs. And I walked down those stairs. And I saw it. The most beautiful thing I ever seent. It was this.” Giselle pointed to the sky. “I saw the stars. He had his own view of the whole world that he could see anytime. There was a couch and a table. A cabinet of spirits.”
That meant the sickness came through the glass. Lune had gotten it in the Shuttle Bay and control room. Nicolaeus had gotten it from his private quarters. The only two parts of the ship with windows, unprotected by the metal hull. Aster guessed it was a combination of exposure to eidolon and radiation from the outside of the ship.
“This morning, I was pacing about, wondering what I was going to do. And he said, Don’t you worry about me. And I said I wasn’t worrying about him. I was worrying about myself. And he asked me to come closer, and I came closer, and he was sick and lying back on his pillows, and he reached up and touched my lips, and I closed my eyes and wished he was dead. And he died, like that, on my command.” She hugged herself tightly. “I haven’t even cried thinking about what I done,” Giselle said, but tears mixed with intraocular fluid in her eyes, glazing the whites surrounding her irises. Giselle, like Melusine, like Aster, was not prone to breakdowns, but sometimes the sorrow seized you. She appeared on the verge of collapse, her taut lines growing so rigid they’d soon snap.
“For so many years I believed my mother slit her own throat,” Aster said. “Crawled into some forgotten crevice of Matilda to die alone because what is a life of only suffering?” She thought it might be right, good, nice, to reach out and lay her hand on Giselle’s knee, that doing so might translate her garbled thoughts into a language Giselle could understand.
Instead, Aster tinkered with the pieces and parts of a shuttle called the Fleeting, until she found a knob. She pressed it—nothing. Turned it—nothing. Only when she twisted the tiny metal button counterclockwise did something happen, the faint sound of clicking, and then a keypad appeared. When she rolled the knob in the reverse direction, the keypad flipped and disappeared back into the door, no visible cracks or seams.
“I was never angry with her for committing suicide. I felt only thankful that she had sacrificed her own well-being for so long in order to bring me into this world.” She watched Giselle for a reaction. “They can beat me and beat me and beat me until every bone in my frail little body breaks, but until they kill me, I am glad. I am so glad.” Aster didn’t know why she was confessing this. The moment seemed right, she supposed. “But what if my mother really found a better world? What if they could never lay a hand on us again?”
It sounded like a dream, but Aster believed.
xii
V deck felt colder than Q and it hurt to breathe. The bundles of chickadee flowers burned by a young woman named Haneefa did not help matters. Vents absorbed and filtered most of the smoke, but the air of the cabin nonetheless thickened. Naveed’s sallow face, usually a vibrant, olive-tinged gold, sucked in, creating caverno
us hollows under her cheekbones. Aster could barely make out her wan figure through the gaseous particles of gray.
Naveed was with child, and ill. The other inhabitants of V-01003 had abandoned the quarters to give Naveed space and quiet. Only Haneefa, Naveed’s older sister, remained. “A bunkmate is heating a tub of water in the head. They’ll be back soon,” she said.
Aster placed her hand over Naveed’s forehead. “Her body temperature has already surpassed acceptable levels. Whatever the ailment be, I do not believe a fever will effectively treat it. The time for sweating it out has passed. Do not bring warm water.”
Haneefa placed a small sheet of folded paper atop burning greenery, watched it turn to ash, then squashed the tiny flames with her hand in prayer.
Aster lifted Naveed from the floor pallet to the table and laid her on her back, careful to set her head down gently, like an egg into a nest. Naveed was nineteen years old, but slender and not particularly heavy.
“You’re an ox,” Haneefa said, fetching a pillow. “The way you carry her around like that.”
Strands of Naveed’s hair weaved through Aster’s fingers. Naveed moaned weakly, the little black mustache over her lips wet with sweat. Aster fixated on every detail, trying to distract her mind from what she’d found in the Shuttle Bay.
She was jittery from anticipation, from cold, from anxiety. Restless energy made her heart thump in a steady hum. It hadn’t taken very long in the control room to piece together more of her mother’s story. The papers that weren’t Lune’s handwritten notes were readouts from the various consoles and stations. They recorded the entire history of Matilda’s flight. Aster couldn’t understand the logs, but she understood Lune’s summary of the logs. Of particular interest to Aster:
It comes as no particular surprise that this was the section of the ship to malfunction so catastrophically; it was the only section of the ship managed by the Sovereignty. Thank Heavens for their misplaced belief that only the most holy should be in charge of the direction of Matilda’s journey, as that belief led to a good many of them dying.
Measure twice. Cut once. It’s not difficult. If you’re going to rely on a computing console for your numbers, by Heavens, account for the mass of your own goddamn ship when inputting your data for the navigation projections! It’s basic astromatics when a spatial condenser is in play.
It was bold to plot a course through an asteroid field and a clever tactic to simulate the course of the asteroids to predict the best path. But for an accurate simulation, you’ve got to consider the mass of the ship and it’s resulting gravity—not typically relevant in such matters, but certainly relevant when you’ve got a thousand tons of siluminium pumping around you, creating a distortion balloon.
Perhaps they hadn’t needed such precision when navigating through empty space, or even when avoiding larger planetary objects, but it’s definitely an issue when approaching a storm of gigantic rocks.
Aster loved to read Lune’s true voice rather than the deliberately obscure personality she’d come to know in the other journals. For once, the answers were being handed to her. She’d learned eidolon’s true name: siluminium. A rare metal that allowed Matilda to travel at velocities approaching light-speed by compressing space.
Lune’s poor opinion of the Sovereignty was a joy to witness, as was her intellectual indignation at what turned out to be a significant calculation error:
An asteroid had grazed Matilda. The impact didn’t break the hull, but it did dent the control area of the ship, metal pressing into the pipes that cycled the siluminium. The liquid leaked through, a large portion of Matilda’s uppercrest dying from metal poisoning days later.
Thank Heavens someone had the good sense to switch the navigation system to automatic. I feel we are safer in the hands of a machine than we ever were with those lot.
Aster was slightly more forgiving of the navigators than Lune was. At least the asteroid hadn’t hit the glass section of the hull that made up the observatory dome of the Shuttle Bay. That would’ve caused a breach in the air supply, destroying the ship immediately. It didn’t matter if the material was the same superglass that contained Baby.
“Do you need anything?” Haneefa asked, her hand on Aster’s shoulder.
Aster wished she didn’t have to concentrate so much right now. She wanted to think about Lune, eidolon, Matilda, the Shuttle Bay. “I am going to lift your dress and reveal your nethers. Is that acceptable?”
“I’m not shy,” said Naveed.
Aster placed her hand on the young woman’s belly, which barely protruded at all. She pressed, imagined the fetus’s tiny elfin shape. Barely the size of a nut.
“Did you take something?” Aster asked. “To extract it?” The symptoms were too pronounced to be anything like influenza. Red dotting in the whites of her eyes concerned Aster, and the blood vessels surrounding them were discolored and engorged. It was unlikely to be a sickness if no one else had gotten it. “It’s fine if you did, but I need to know.”
Naveed’s eyes scooted toward her sister’s, then she closed them, her whole face squeezing into a little knot. “Navi, what did you do?” Haneefa asked. She made the sign of the star over each of her cheeks.
Aster fixed up a dose of activated charcoal and castor oil and held the spoon to Naveed’s lips. “Drink. This will help.”
Naveed took a sip, coughing roughly, spit spraying on Aster’s hands.
“More,” said Aster.
Nodding, Naveed took another spoonful, then another, her face contorting.
Next, Aster removed the appropriate tools from her belt: a jar, some tubing, a large syringe for suction.
“What’s that for?” asked Haneefa.
“To terminate,” Aster said. “The fetus. Not Naveed. That is what you would like me to do, correct, Naveed?”
“Aye, please. Please. I’d have come to you first but I needed it right away and knew you were busy. It’s just a small thing inside me and people are dying.”
“Navi, you can’t do this,” Haneefa said. She wiped a wet washcloth over her sister’s neck. She turned to Aster, her eyes widening. “They’ll flog her for it, send her to the brigbox. I’ve heard of even worse happening. Night cabin checks are soon. A guard will see.”
“No one will see. I move quickly and efficiently,” said Aster. She rubbed petroleum jelly between her hands to warm it, then slid her palms over the ends of the speculum until the metal wasn’t so cold to the touch. “She will not feel safe until it is out of her, and she will not begin to recover from what she took until she feels safer, calm. I will take care of the poison once the fetus is removed. Naveed, what did you take?” Aster spread her open. “Is this position comfortable?”
“I wouldn’t call it comfortable.”
“Acceptable?”
“Yes.”
Naveed’s belly heaved in and out several times, and she thrust her head to the left, spitting up a small amount of bile onto her sister’s chest. When she calmed, she wiped her mouth, said, “I don’t know what I took. Bought it off Jane from Quince Wing. She said it’d work.”
Aster forced another dosage of charcoal into her.
Haneefa swore, grabbing a towel to clean the bile off herself. “That greedy cow would sell a ball of lint and call it a cure for cancer. For all you know, you swallowed a vial of arsenic, stupid, stupid girl.”
Jane was the queen of snake oil and an embarrassment to the science of alchematics. Aster didn’t understand why people continued to seek out her half-cocked serums. “What did it taste like?” she asked.
“Shit,” said Naveed. “Deathly bitter, and sulfurous. I don’t even remember what color it was.”
The swelling in the eyes suggested something in the Evening Vein family, but there was none of the characteristic paralysis of the extremities.
“Tell me my stupid, stupid sister will be okay,” Haneefa said.
Aster nodded, removed a cloth pouch, and sprinkled herbs onto Naveed’s graying tongue. The
abortion proceeded painlessly—a brief suction, then nothing.
“Do you know what it was?” Naveed asked, scrambling to get a look at the jar. Aster had already emptied the contents into a pail. “Girl? Boy?”
“I don’t understand such things. I have to go.” Aster took off her gloves, rubbed witch hazel tonic onto her hands. It was twenty till, and she could make it back to Q deck easily if she left now. “I will be back to check on you at my earliest convenience. The activated charcoal should be sufficient, however.”
“Can you forge a pass from the Surgeon to get her out of shift tomorrow?” asked Haneefa. “She needs rest.”
“I cannot.”
“Please?”
“I cannot.” She wished she could but she wasn’t brave enough to do so. She was so close to finding out what happened to Lune. To finish what she started, she needed freedom. Getting in trouble would compromise her ability to roam the ship with few restrictions. Aster also had Lieutenant to think about. He might recognize a pass she forged. He was a careful and diligent despot.
“Sleep until morning bell, if you can. You do not look well. It is likely your deck overseer will allow you to miss without a doctor’s pass.”
She left the clotted tissues from Naveed’s uterus in the jar. She would burn them when she got the chance, but for now they remained tightly sealed inside.
Vacuum fetal extraction had been the first thing the Surgeon taught her, and all these years later, she still did not like it. It made her remember she was an orphan.
Ainy used to tell a story about a woman who had thirteen sons, and each one was a god, born from the spirit of night. Each son had a power: One to heal. Another to inspire nations to war. Another who could capture the essence of things such as flight in birds and transfer it to another (so the fish might soar, the blackbird might plunge to the depths of the sea). And so on. They started out well enough, raised up good by their dear meema. But after a time the world turned them into cruel gods and they made it nastier still.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 14