by Pearl Foxx
The Vilka’s Secret
A Shifters of Kladuu Short Story
Pearl Foxx
The Vilka’s Secret is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, place, or event is purely coincidental and not the intention of this collection.
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright holder listed below, unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal and international copyright law. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners identified herein.
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Vilka’s Secret copyright © 2017 Pearl Foxx
Contents
Untitled
1. Maeve
2. Noaz
3. Maeve
4. Noaz
5. Maeve
6. Noaz
7. Maeve
8. Noaz
9. Noaz
10. Maeve
About the Author
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The Vilka’s Servant
1
Maeve
Cursing around the food packet clenched between her teeth, Maeve Delgado juggled her thermos, a stack of vidscreens, and data chips as she shoved open the door to her lab with her hip. The door swung open, but the lid on her coffee popped off and black boiling liquid seared across her wrist.
“¡Ya valió madre!” she cursed, dropping the toppling pile in her hands on the nearest workbench.
She scrubbed her red wrist against the leg of her Zynthar International Space Station issue uniform. She’d unzipped the top and tied the arms around her waist. Her lab was closest to the station’s fuel reactors and thus hotter than a solar flare. Her white undershirt stuck to her back as she sat down at her monitor to review the most recent batch of data analysis from Saturn’s sector while sucking on her food packet and taking scalding sips of coffee.
The tar-like liquid soothed her frayed nerves, and she forgave the divine liquid for trying to burn her alive. She shoved a mouthful of processed, unflavored food substitute in her mouth. It was grainy and mushy like oatmeal but without the flavor. Living in space really sucked sometimes.
A set of numbers on the screen pulled her attention, and she dropped the food packet on the desk. Goo leaked out over the desk, but she couldn’t take the time to care. The spatial dimensions within the rings of Saturn had changed. Something was warping the gravitational fields.
My wormhole.
Since the first anomaly on her astral charts appeared two years ago, Maeve had spent every night chasing a dream that no one in the entire fleet understood. She worked her usual shift as a lead astrophysicist and then holed up in this lab during the rest of her free time, watching the readings and picking apart the numbers. Quick showers and fresh overalls were the only reasons she visited her quarters these days. Her quixotic mission confused her superiors and left her in a constant state of sleep deprivation and over-caffeinated jittering.
She knew the wormhole was out there. Tiny variations in the data she’d compiled suggested there was something out there, something no one knew about. No one but her.
But this gravitational anomaly was something completely new, even to her. No known asteroids had entered the area, and no gas emissions from the planet had been recorded as high enough to affect the rings. It could be a solar storm, but Maeve hoped it was her wormhole warping the numbers.
A tingling rush spider-walked down her spine. Analyzing data was better than any orgasm she’d ever had—not that she’d had many, but judging by the ones she’d had, data was way better.
Maeve flipped through her screens before grabbing the oatmeal-stained stack of recyclable papers on her desk. She was the only scientist on the station who still used hard copies, but she stood by her penchant for nostalgia; she even had a collection of old jazz records from a time before digital music even existed. She wiped the grimy reports off on her overalls, not even registering the mess. Her heart beat out of her chest, and her hands shook as she shoved a stray lock of black hair behind her ear. She pushed her glasses up her nose and flipped through the pages for the latest readouts from her wormhole’s sector.
“Maeve Delgado,” her computer interface chirped.
Startled, she dropped the stack of papers. They fluttered across the lab floor like a snowfall. She righted her thermos before it could spill across her keypad.
Holding the comm button down, she replied, “Go for Delgado.”
“Maeve, there you are!” her supervisor, Thom, barked through her speaker. “I’ve been calling your quarters all morning.”
Maeve blinked. “Morning?”
“Yes, morning. It’s five a.m. Are you still in your lab?”
She’d been up all night again, it appeared. She bit her lip and glanced around her lab. The floor was covered in towering heaps of books and printouts. Vidscreens of all sizes and piles of data chips buried the benches. Her massive chalkscreen took up the entire back wall, and errant legible-only-to-her scribbles about her wormhole theories covered the surface. “I am,” she said cautiously. “I’ve been working on that report for you …”
“Don’t lie. You’re terrible at it.”
She grimaced, her elbow stuck to bits of sticky food remnants on her desk. She peeled her skin off and said, “Sorry, sir. But I think I really have something this time.” Her gaze flashed back to the incoming data from the sector. “The climate near the rings is clear for the first time in months. The dimensions—”
Thom made a sound in the back of his throat that caused static to burst through the speaker. “Not the wormhole again.”
“I’ve got something, Thom.” Even as she watched the numbers roll in, she couldn’t believe it. This was what she’d been waiting for. This would change everything. “I need some time off to trace the numbers. I really think this is it.”
“Sure it is. Just like it was the last time and the time before that.” Thom sighed. “I need you working on your assigned duties. The results of the latest drone data on extra-planetary resources are three weeks overdue, and we need to plan the next Falconer mission. You’re holding up the entire fleet for your personal crusade.”
“But—”
“No, Maeve. It has to stop. Now. I’ve put up with a lot over the last year, but I need those reports tonight or I’m going to have to knock you down to researcher. You know what that means?”
Maeve’s stomach twisted. Thom had never threatened her with a demotion before.
“Maeve?” He wanted to hear her say it.
“A one-way ticket back to Earth,” she grumbled.
“Exactly. I don’t want to send you away any more than you want to go, but I need you to take your job, your real job, the one you applied for that pays for your pie-in-the-sky obsession, seriously.”
She heard him speaking, but her eyes were following the numbers on her screen. She knew she’d said that before, but this data was it. “If I could just—”
“Commander Gideon has already approved the preliminary paperwork for your demotion.” Thom’s words stopped her data reading short. Commander Gideon had approved her departure from the stati
on? “It’s not up to me anymore. You have the most brilliant mind on the station, but if you can’t focus on your work, we can’t use you up here.”
The comm light went black, and Maeve was out of options. She was about to be fired. For real.
“¡Qué poca madre!” She shoved back from her desk and paced away. The skin beneath her right eye twitched.
A verified wormhole would change the face of the galaxy. What if it went to an unexplored quadrant of space? To heaps of new planets where the Falconer Elites could explore? The America Corporation would have countless options of extra-planetary minerals to buy mining rights to. Not to mention the discovery of other alien life forms. The Intergalactic Alliance of Planets and Lifeforms would have to be revised. Everything would change.
Because of her wormhole.
But she should finish Thom’s reports. She had all the data right on her desk. It would take a day, tops, to crunch the numbers and check the spectrometer reports against her extrapolated projections to make the best guess as to what minerals were on which planetoid. The data chips stared back at her.
So did the blue lines of the wormhole’s gravitational anomaly.
In the day it would take to finish Thom’s report, the climate near her wormhole might dissolve again.
Maeve had zero doubts in her hypothesis. Too many strange things had happened in that sector of space: missing ships, solar flares from nowhere, uncharted asteroid storms.
The screen flashed and the blue lines moved again, wider and with a red symbol indicating a new source of orbital retraction. All thoughts of Thom’s reports forgotten, Maeve raced back to her desk and hunched over her keypad, her eyes racing to follow the incoming numbers.
She queued up a quick extrapolation. Her breath caught in her chest as she waited, but an error popped up on her screen. Insufficient Data, it flashed.
“What? No. No. No.” Maeve tried again but got the same error.
She spun around in her chair and stared at her chalkscreen. She needed more data to run the extrapolation. The computer couldn’t do it on its own. She bit her lip, thinking. If she waited until the rest of the data ran, the anomaly would be inactive. Her data source would be limited. She could already hear the other astrophysicists pointing out the bias in her data set when she presented her proof of a wormhole.
She needed more. If she was out there, right next to the anomaly as it happened, she could collect the data. But she wasn’t a pilot, and she’d never rope one into a covert space voyage to run some numbers. Of course, she’d taken basic flight training …
What was she thinking? She shoved her hands through her hair. That training had happened in a simulator, not a real ship. Not to mention she would have to steal a ship to get out to the anomaly.
She’d never gone this far before. Never crossed this line. But she’d never seen an anomaly like this before.
She checked the time on her screen. It was almost the six a.m. shift change in the flight deck’s command center. It would be relatively quiet, running mostly on autopilot as the late-night ships came in and out without any real schedule. No one would notice another ship leaving, and the early morning hours were the best time to slip past the guards and few engineers on deck. In theory, she could nick a ship without anyone questioning the departure too closely. Returning would be harder, but she’d have the data with her that proved the existence of a wormhole. No one would care about the stolen ship for too long in the face of a discovery that big.
Across the room, the red symbol flashed again on her screen.
“Fuck it,” Maeve declared, jumping to her feet. “I’m going.”
She ripped the zipper of her overalls over her white tank, pushed her glasses up, and regathered her hair into a sloppy bun on top of her head.
With a quick glance back at her lab, she slammed the door behind her and strode toward the Falconer landing field.
Maeve stepped out of the airlift onto the fast-paced flight deck of the Falconer Elites. Every person who trained for a flight license aimed to get here. The Falconers didn’t just fly; they explored. They took off toward the stars and found new worlds for the America Corporation to mine for much-needed resources. Without the Falconers, there would be no life left on Earth, and space stations would be humanity’s only option.
At the end of a row of ships to the side, Maeve spotted Jude Quincy. That woman had bigger balls than most of the Falconers, and she needed them since in a week’s time she would take the final flight test to earn her wings and become the first official female Falconer pilot.
Jude was doing exactly what Maeve dreamed of—making her own path, becoming something more than what other people assumed of her. That was why Maeve knew she had to get out there and find the wormhole while it was open. This was her chance to prove to her peers who dismissed her as just another dreamer that not only was she right, but she was also goddamn brilliant.
Maeve slunk around the parked ships, watching the foot traffic and listening to the announcements from the command tower. As she’d suspected, the engineers on deck were too groggy to pay much attention to their surroundings. At the last ship in the row closest to the flight deck, Maeve climbed the steps to the ship’s top hatch. It opened with a hiss, and she climbed inside, settling into her pilot’s chair with giddy exhilaration. Hands shaking, she buckled the harness straps.
“Just like in the sims,” she muttered to herself. “You will not crash into the deck’s ceiling and get arrested before you can even prove your wormhole is out there.”
She flicked on the main power switch, lighting up the nav center of the ship and alerting the command tower that the ship was active. If she was going to get caught, it would be now. She rushed through the safety check, trusting the computers to tell her if anything was wrong, and coasted out to the flight deck, lining up with the strip and waiting for the light to turn green.
“Command to Falconer 379, all systems go for space flight. You are cleared for takeoff.”
The voice scared the crap out of Maeve, and she had to keep herself from yelping at the sound. She took a shaky breath and hit the comm button. “Falconer 379 to Command, acknowledged. Beginning takeoff procedures now.”
Maeve punched in the coordinates for Saturn and set the ship to autopilot. “See? You won’t even have to fly it,” she muttered to herself.
“Come again, Falconer 379?”
“Uh,” she stammered. “Disregard, Command.”
Maeve turned up the throttle. The ship, built for speed and maneuverability, was small as far as space traveling ships went, but the sound of its reactors was deafening. Her seat vibrated with the mean growl of the machine. She flipped the sonic engine ignition and held on for dear life as the ship shot forward, through the landing strip, past the force fields maintaining the space station’s inner atmosphere, and into the empty blackness of space.
No turning back now.
The ship careened through space. Maeve had never been so close to the stars before, and she knew the flight simulations she’d taken to be certified wouldn’t come close to seeing her first love—space—in person. But she’d be damned if she opened her eyes.
She kept them squeezed shut as the G-force pressed her deep into her seat and the nav system chirped redirections at her.
Saturn’s rings approached faster than she’d expected. The ship slowed its momentum on its own and fell into an easy orbit around the gas planet. Maeve peeled open her eyes and promptly screamed.
With joy.
Saturn’s icy rings appeared so close that she could lean forward and touch them. The Enke and Keeler gaps between the multitude of rings stretched wide, inviting her closer like a lopsided smile. Keeping her distance from the planet’s orbit, she watched as the rings’ particles rotated past the ship’s windshield. Even for all their technology and advancements, Saturn and its complicated system of rings remained a mystery to humans. It was more breathtaking than she ever could have imagined.
Double-checking he
r coordinates against her handheld data-screen, she instructed the autopilot to align the ship toward the anomaly. The ship slowed down to match the velocity of the rotating planet. Squinting through her front windshield, she strained to see past the particles and moons and the gaseous planet’s flares. What would a wormhole look like to the naked eye? Surely forces that great would warp the space around it, draw down the waves of light, and ripple with the energy of the stars. Instead, she saw nothing but the icy mist of the planet’s rings.
Her nav system chirped a proximity warning, but she overrode the autopilot’s attempt to retreat. The ship nudged forward and automatically dodged a small smattering of asteroids to dip beneath a ring. Maeve held her breath as the shattered debris of an asteroid swept by, inches from the nose of her ship.
How in the world did the Falconers do loops through these rings at full speed on manual control alone? They had to be crazy.
What had she been thinking to come out here? If she even touched one of these particles, her ship would blow apart. Jude Quincy might rocket through these gaps, but Maeve was just an astrophysicist. She should have been studying space from her desk, not the cockpit of a ship.
“Command,” a disembodied voice from her speaker chirped. “We’ve got an unaccounted departure of Falconer ship number 379. Can you confirm your logs?”
They knew. Maeve cursed. If she was going to get this data, she had to go now, no matter how sweaty her palms were or how hard her heart was beating in her chest.
She refused to let fear keep her from the greatest discovery of her career. She maneuvered closer to the planet and ignored the warnings emitting from the panel.
Her ship shuddered and rotated slightly. She went to correct her alignment when a deep black void twisted into view. One moment it had been flat nothingness, and the next it yawned toward her like a vast butterfly net trying to swipe her out of the sky. The wormhole is two dimensional! That explained so much. Her indeterminate readings, the fluctuations in the data. Her sensors weren’t calibrated to expect only two dimensions.