A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  But it was too late. One of the soldiers had caught sight of him and fired off a volley of screaming metal in their direction. It whizzed down the corridor toward them, rounding the corner. Nilah’s reflexes kicked in, and she rolled away, hearing the fléchettes embed in the wall beside her.

  A low boom sounded inside the anteroom, followed by shuffling, a clank, and finally, silence.

  Malik brushed himself off and smiled. “See? Easily done.”

  Nilah’s eyes locked onto a golden glint just above his foot. Her mind wanted to make it a piece of rubble, part of Malik’s outfit, anything but a fléchette. But there it lay, buried in his calf muscle: a trio of guidance fins, a smooth barrel, and a deadly payload delivery system. A spasm tugged at the corner of Malik’s mouth, and his fingers flexed.

  “Malik?” Nilah’s voice was weak. “You … There’s a …”

  Malik’s legs bulged as though electricity coursed through his body. His eyes darted to his hand, and he raised it to carve a shaky spell. “It’s o-okay. I just need to h-hibernate until you c-can get me to m-m-med—”

  He tried to write a glyph, but his convulsing fingers wouldn’t listen to him, the soft luminescence of purple smoke dissipating before he could make any progress. Malik shook his fingers out like he was freezing cold and tried again before grinding to a halt. His hand locked in place, and he cried out in pain.

  “I’ve got this,” he whispered, his tongue sticking on the “s” sound. “I can—”

  Nilah rushed to him and yanked the dart from his calf, a wicked barb taking with it a squirt of blood. “Malik, stay calm! The poison will go slower, if—”

  The bands of muscle through his legs creaked like an old rope being pulled taut. His lips pulled back in a rictus, and for the first time, Nilah saw panic in his eyes. His neck bulged as the poison worked its way toward his brain.

  “Come on,” said Nilah, tears forming in her eyes. “Concentrate.”

  His fingers flared purple, guttering like a match flame, and held. He scowled at his hand, as though chastising it. Haltingly, he began tracing a glyph.

  “Put me in c-coma. Get … m-m-me to sh-ship. F-fast.”

  Hot streaks of water ran from Nilah’s eyes. Malik had been such a paragon of calm and rationality, and seeing him afraid shook her deeply. She kept him as steady as she could, for fear of interrupting his casting. He wouldn’t get a second chance.

  “S’okay.” He sucked a shallow breath and tried to speak, his voice barely audible. He pushed himself to the last stroke of the spell. “Tell … Aish—s’okay.”

  His spell snapped to life, a whistling ball of violet energy. Malik fell forward into Nilah’s arms, and it was like being struck with a statue, his body was so rigid. Nilah had to tear herself free as he began to curl around her like a dying insect, each muscle going taut.

  Nilah eased him onto his side and placed a hand on his shoulder, finding only strips of hardened muscle. “Oh, god, Malik. Okay. You’re going to be okay. We’ll get you to the ship,” she whispered, stroking his back.

  His eyes remained fixed on hers until his spell wrapped around him, sucking into his flesh like water into a sponge. Its work done, the poison began to thaw from his body, muscles slowly going limp, and he let forth a gurgling sigh.

  Nilah placed a hand in front of his mouth and nose—and felt nothing. Sobbing, she wiped a tear away and reached out again with the wet side of her hand.

  A coolness—breath out. She waited, teeth clenched, lips quivering, for him to inhale.

  He breathed—slow, weak, but breathing all the same.

  She stood and wiped her nose. No time to go to pieces. Her eyes darted to what remained of the antechamber: a pile of bodies, and at the center of them, deathly still, Ranger, its joints peppered with the poisonous little darts. Pinpricks of gold riddled it from groin to neck, and it lay like a slain lion.

  “No!” Nilah dashed toward it, not bothering to look for threats anymore.

  She couldn’t lose Orna, too. Not now. Not after all this. She traced her glyph as she reached Ranger, knelt down, and thumped her bare palm against his chestplate. The system rose against her, and she wrestled its AI out of the way of the armor locks. The computer’s defenses evolved quickly, but Nilah was faster, and she disengaged Ranger’s bolts. With their brief contact, however, it had become a much more formidable opponent; Nilah prayed she wouldn’t have to fight it again anytime soon. The armor popped open, revealing the still body of the quartermaster inside. Nilah couldn’t see where any of the darts had pierced the protection, but even a little puncture would’ve done the trick.

  With trembling fingers, Nilah reached down to Orna’s neck to check for a pulse. “No, I’m begging you, no. Please get up. Please.”

  Orna’s breath caressed the underside of Nilah’s arm as she reached across. Nilah dared to hope.

  “Orna?”

  The quartermaster yawned and blinked the sleep from her eyes with a lazy grin. She sat up, brushing Nilah’s hand away. “I take it we got them all?” She glanced about for danger, then soured as she noticed Nilah’s tears.

  “Where’s Malik?”

  Nilah’s breath caught. With all her might, she managed to force the words, “They … they got him. He forced himself—into a coma. We have to get him back to the ship right now or—”

  She barely managed to snap her hand back in time as Ranger’s chestplate slammed shut. The mechanical beast rose underneath her, sending her tumbling off, and its knife-claws clacked in its hands. The armor hissed and whirred, and when it turned to face Nilah, it didn’t offer her help rising to her feet.

  It merely said, “Get to the garage.”

  “Not without—”

  “Find us a getaway car.”

  Nilah backed away through the garage doors, leaving the enraged quartermaster standing amid the pile of sleeping bodies, blades sharp and willing.

  The garage stretched before her like a cove teeming with exotic fish. Sports cars and flyers of every color of the rainbow filled the bay, just as breathtaking as the first time she’d seen them. Duke Vayle Thiollier’s collection of fine vehicles rivaled any in the galaxy, valued in the billions of argents. The first time she’d visited the duke’s palace, she’d wandered this hall for hours, marveling at the sights within: the archrome finishes, the hypertuned engines, the brilliant and bizarre automotive histories contained therein. The duke’s garage had been a temple as holy as any race paddock.

  And now she had to steal one of these cars or die.

  A scream rang out behind her—one of the guards in the antechamber—and she tried her best to ignore it as she sprinted down the row. She couldn’t take a flyer; the airspace was too well defended. The wheeled vehicles would be tricky too; the roads around the duke’s palace were fraught with blind corners and bluff faces, scarcely protected by ancient guardrails. She ran down the specs in her head as she jogged down the row:

  Robison R70—too slow through the corners, notorious understeer.

  Start XR—good brake horsepower, low top speed.

  Langheim GP Papania—a classic, but not exactly quick on a modern scale.

  On and on she went, imagining the scenario to come. The palace guard was clearly a part of the conspiracy, or they’d been tricked into thinking she and Orna were the murderers. They would come after her with everything they had, and that meant fast flyers, homing missiles, and worse. If the pair really wanted to try an overland getaway through the mountains, their drive had to be the total package: speed, acceleration, cornering, and braking.

  That was when she saw the Carriger Hyper 1, the groundbreaking vision upon which her own car had been based. Before Lang Autosport bought the team, Michael Carriger had pushed his people to sixteen galactic championship victories.

  She looked at the fragile bodywork and wondered if it would hold Ranger. When the far doors slid open and a pack of slinger-toting palace guards slipped into the garage, she decided there wouldn’t be time to test; she’d
just go for it.

  Nilah popped off the steering wheel, hopped into the cockpit, and slid low. She wished she could get low enough to hide in the footwell, but the car wasn’t exactly spacious. The seat had been uncomfortably molded to someone else’s posterior, but this was only supposed to be a getaway, not a two-hour race, and a little survival was worth a lot of discomfort. She slid the steering wheel home and locked it, running her fingers over the controls. What was the startup sequence for the Hyper 1? Did Vayle keep his cars fueled?

  She wrote out her spell, and her mechanist’s art linked her to the computer.

  It responded that it did not, in fact, have any fuel.

  Oh, good. I’ve climbed into my own coffin.

  The computer chirped; there were two eidolon crystals in the engine with some juice. The feature predated the Arclight Booster, and was for boosting and overtaking strictly within designated zones. To use them to operate the car on all parts of the track would’ve been against the rules … and it would burn out the engine.

  She could probably keep the car together for ten minutes once she routed power from the crystals to the main engine.

  Guards fanned out through the rows of cars, their slingers popping off shots at her exposed head. A bolt landed on the intake next to her head, sending tiny shards of stinging fibron into her exposed neck.

  Nilah yelped and traced her glyph. The connection made, the Hyper 1’s engine screamed to life, causing the guards to jump. Nilah wasted no time getting underway, slipping it into drive and lurching forward. The cold wheels refused to grip, so she slammed down the throttle, spinning out clouds of choking polymer dust. The guards staggered backward, covering their faces and firing wildly into the smoke. Nilah winced as another shot almost took her nose off.

  The second her wheels were the right temperature, she rocketed forward. She struck a guard in mid-spell, and the man bounced off, encased in a shimmering bubble of magic. Nilah hurtled down the row of sports cars toward the open door—but she didn’t have Orna. She veered hard right, and the Hyper 1 understeered, nearly sending her into one of the duke’s all-terrain vehicles. Her own Hyper 8 was so vastly different, so much subtler in its handling, that she needed a moment to readjust. She glided past an array of stunt fliers and watched in horror as the oncoming palace guards fired at her from behind cars. Nilah whipped left and right in a serpentine pattern, as though she was warming her tires on a formation lap. A hail of spells slammed into the cars around her, and Nilah recognized the white oval of a discus round. One shot from that, and her car would be cut in half. One of the guards twirled out a glyph and lassoed the race car with a green arc of power.

  Nilah felt the magic trying to wind its way inside to gum up her gearbox, and so she connected it directly to the eidolon output. The shock of power traveled back up the line and popped in the guard’s face, throwing him onto the hood of the car behind him.

  As she completed the loop of the garage, she slid directly in front of the door to the antechamber, her front wing lined up exactly on the garage doors. She couldn’t stick around here. They’d button the place up and she’d never get out.

  Come on, Orna.

  The only thing louder than the roar of the Hyper 1’s engine was the sickening crash of Ranger landing on top of the chassis, its clawed feet digging into the body panels. The car would’ve been priceless to collectors, but now, with a rapidly melting engine and punctured aero work, it was junk.

  Really fast junk.

  “Drive,” commanded Orna, booming through Ranger.

  Nilah dropped the hammer, only to be rewarded with wheel spin. She’d been afraid this would happen. Ranger was heavy—far too heavy to start the car from a dead stop. The grip would be all wrong, the aerodynamics would be broken. A discus round whizzed over Nilah’s head, and the robot dodged, returning fire and shredding several priceless cars. Orna fired two bright orange spells from her slinger and millions of argents’ worth of automotives burst into flames.

  “Damn it!” shouted Nilah, unable to help herself. “That was a Devlin ST!”

  “And now it’s not,” said Orna. “Let’s go.”

  No more spellfire echoed in the wake of the explosion; the guards were dead or hiding. Nilah glanced into her rearview mirror and saw Malik hanging limply underneath Ranger’s arm, his hands drooping to the ground.

  “I need you to push!” Nilah called back.

  Ranger locked its claws around the rear wing with a clank and ran forward, shoving the car. Nilah let off the brakes and dropped into first, slowly taking over for the robot. Once they were coasting, the metal beast leapt onto the body, its talons barely missing Nilah’s head as it straddled the intake port behind her. The harsh scratching of regraded steel on fibron filled her ears, and she wished with all her might for a helmet. One slipup from Ranger, and it would have jammed its foot into her head.

  “Hang on!” Nilah shouted, dodging flaming wreckage. The handling was sluggish, but with her psychic link to the Hyper 1, she could soften the suspension on the outside and compensate a little. Nilah downshifted and laid into the accelerator, zipping toward the garage door and the open night air around Thiollier Palace. The lights outdoors flared, and she recognized searchlights. They’d be waiting for her in fliers, perhaps with more of those fléchettes. They’d certainly launch a volley of rockets.

  Human reaction times were terrible. If she could get up enough speed, maybe she could get clear before a wave of magical death crushed their escape. She downshifted again; too much acceleration, and it’d be wheelspin, not enough, and they’d emerge too slow. She watched her revs: a little more. Nilah white-knuckled the wheel as they shot through the opening in the palace wall.

  They burst forth into the courtyard, a line of fire from Carrétan scout fliers decimating the palace wall behind them. Though Nilah felt heat surge around her, they’d gotten clear. Orna straightened and returned a few rounds, but Ranger’s grip was too tenuous to hang on to the car, Malik, and the slinger. With a final shot into the front gate, Orna gave up on trying to fight back and stowed her slinger.

  They raced through the remains of the gate and down into the serpentine paths of the mountainside. In years past, Vayle would take these roads while redlining the revs of his favorite sports cars, almost like a racetrack. Nilah had joined him once, and had dreamed of doing it again one day, but not like this. The roads would be easy to close, and the authorities would be all over them. She took a sluggish corner in her overweight race car, and several flaming rounds from the fliers melted the front wing. It wasn’t a problem to lose it—her current configuration had plenty of downforce.

  “I’m switching to knock rounds,” said Orna. “If they set up a blockade, just keep driving. I’m going to hammer it off the road.”

  “A knock round won’t lift a car!”

  “The ones I make do.”

  Only a flimsy guardrail on the left side of the car protected them from a sheer drop down the cliff face and into the Gray below. Nilah rounded a downward-sweeping hairpin and spotted flashing lights. Ranger’s slinger snapped into its hand, and two blue bolts went flying from the muzzle, striking the center of the blockade. Thudding bursts of energy swept the cars over the face of the bluff and sent policemen flying like rag dolls—some of them into the Gray with their vehicles. As she weaved between the prone bodies, Nilah forced herself not to look to see whether or not they lived.

  “You can’t just shoot policemen!”

  “This planet runs on corruption,” grunted Orna. “It’s kill or die.”

  Nilah had to veer across the lanes to avoid a strafing run from one of the fliers. The pavement exploded into lava before her, and she had to take care that she didn’t roll over it and blow a tire. Meanwhile, the other flier blasted the corner ahead with frosty rounds of ice spells, freezing the sharp turn solid. They’d never take it at speed, if they could take it at all.

  “Orna!”

  “I see it,” she said, and fired a knock at it. The blue
bolt burst in the air, its shock wave instantly powdering the ice. A second airburst round blasted the ice free.

  They shot around the turn, barely maintaining traction, and the lights of a mountainside village loomed large in the distance.

  “We’ve got to get rid of these fliers,” said Orna. “When we hit that town, get ready to head around the block a few times.”

  Nilah shot down the road toward the blaring lights of the town. A glance into her rearview showed a smoking spire above the mountaintop, the Flamekeepers’ treacherous blaze roaring out of control on the top levels—the end of a short, sad relationship with Duke Vayle Thiollier.

  “Look out!” boomed Orna, and Nilah barely weaved between a pair of parked delivery trucks. “Keep your eyes on the road and double back. I’ve got to get rid of a few pests.”

  The suspension strained in agony as Ranger leapt free of the Hyper 1 and began to climb the nearest townhouse, its claws shredding concrete to dust as it scrabbled up the side.

  Free of her burden, Nilah felt the grip of her tires catch in that familiar way. She wouldn’t be able to establish the flow of a PGRF track, sinking into a perfect rhythm from turn to turn, but she could certainly react, and she was one of the PGRF’s finest. The Hyper 1 screamed under her fingertips, and she forced her spirit deeper inside, her magic intertwining with the car’s subsystems. The few blocks that comprised the little palace town may have been littered with civilian vehicles, bystanders, and less-than-perfect road paving, but they still formed a circle …

  And this was racing.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Extradition

  Boots keyed on the Midnight Runner, the glow of its heads-up display filling her eyes with prismatic light. The Capricious bucked with an explosive hit, and she grit her teeth. Even though the belly of the ship was its most reinforced part, she couldn’t be sure it would survive a direct hit from an advanced antiaircraft battery. She’d felt the crunch of heavy magic a thousand times, and yet she tensed with every glancing blow. Surely military spells hadn’t come so far since the Famine War that they rendered Cordell’s shields useless. Their captain could deflect almost anything, right?