by J. J. Keller
“What do you think you’re doing?” Hectar demanded. “You can’t load people through it while the belt’s still running. It’s against health and safety rules!”
Ogonaovan shrugged. “Stay here, then.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
Ogonaovan reached to the panel that operated the airlock door. Hectar sprang inside with a sudden look of panic. Ogonaovan closed the doors and turned the wheel that locked them in place. The morrans scuttled up into the wide corridor leading up to the Nimrod, their blue-black talons gripping the rungs.
Ogonaovan moved easily up the gravity-devoid chute, the electromagnetic tread of his mobility chair creeping up the wall. Reigo followed, hands and feet on the rungs. The whirr of the conveyor belt droned continuously behind him as the pallets made their way up to the Nimrod’s cargo bay.
A loud snap sent a tremor up the tube.
“Reigo!”
A hand grabbed the front of Reigo’s tunic. His head jerked back on his neck as he was yanked upward. A loud crash sounded behind him. Ogonaovan released him, sending him pitching up. He threw his arms over his face as he collided with the airlock door. Air tore back into his lungs in a painful gulp and dark patches swam in his vision. A whining noise became audible, like air blowing through something, and he began to drift back down the pipe. Ogonaovan grabbed him again. One of the morrans screamed, a flat metallic sound.
Wind ruffled Reigo’s hair. Ogonaovan was still in his chair, the tread stuck to the wall. Hectar clung to the rungs above, screaming and yelling and flailing his free hand about. Reigo had to twist himself about to work out what had happened below. The strap securing the last pallet to the belt had broken, and now the pallet and the frame with all the worms in the jars was spinning and banging back and forth across the loading chute’s aperture. It had already punctured a ragged hole about a foot in diameter in the thin metal of the wall, in the place he’d been before Ogonaovan grabbed him, through which the air was escaping.
“The worms are going to get damaged!” Reigo said. The violent motion of the pallet in the air turbulence was causing more damage, battering the hole and enlarging it.
“Screw the worms! If this carries on we’re going to have an explosive decompression on our hands!” Ogonaovan gripped Reigo by the forearm and pulled tools from the back of his chair with his other hand. “Hectar, shut the fuck up! Na’Athril, c’mere!”
Ogonaovan threw a morran at Reigo and it caught onto him. The morran clambered across from him and got onto the still-moving belt, scrambling down toward the loose pallet. Ogonaovan threw another morran to Reigo. This time, it was Na’Athril.
“Na’Athril, hold on to my leg,” Reigo said.
“No!” the morran shrieked. “Your boot will fall off!”
Reigo dug his toe into the heel of his other boot, and levered it off. It drifted slowly away toward the gap with the bouncing pallet, where it was sucked down swiftly and disappeared. Na’Athril screamed.
“Now it won’t fall off. Na’Athril, shut up!” Reigo pushed the morran down with his free hand, his other hanging on to Ogonaovan’s arm. He stretched out his leg, and the morran dug its hind claws into his shin and wrapped all three tails around his knee. The wind lashed Reigo’s hair in his eyes and waved the morran’s quills down over its neck.
“Na’Athril, you get hold of the other side and hold it steady so it doesn’t fall on Ro’Orrin when e ties it down!” Ogonaovan shouted over the noise of wind.
The two morrans managed to get hold of the pallet and stop it spinning. Ro’Orrin got hold of the strap on the frame and secured it to another point on the belt.
“Good!” Ogonaovan yelled. “Now pull the side off that pallet!”
Ro’Orrin got hold of the side of the sheet of metal and levered it up. Na’Athril took over, peeling it off. All four of its legs were on the metal, and Reigo could feel the grip of Na’Athril’s tails sliding down his leg.
“Na’Athril, be careful!”
The metal suddenly broke off, and Na’Athril lost its grip. The morran screamed as it surfed down the chute on the bent plate.
“Shit!” Ogonaovan yanked Reigo’s arm.
The plate flew over the gap and the air current pulled it down with a clang that reverberated up the length of the tube. The sucking noise faded to a faint wheezing. The morran sprawled across the plate, its legs and tentacles splayed out like a starfish. Its quills were bright white.
Ogonaovan let off a shout of relief, and roared with laughter. “Na’Athril, here!” He threw a tool. “Weld it down!”
Reigo winced against the magnesium-bright light as the morran ran the welder along the edge of the plate, sealing the tube. Its legs were shivering as it climbed back up the rungs to him.
“Nice one, Na’Athril.” Ogonaovan laughed once they were up in the cargo bay. Reigo found himself laughing too. It seemed to be an instinctive reaction to relief when it could so easily have been a horrendous accident. Even Na’Athril started to tremble slightly less, its quills taking on a faint orange tinge.
Hectar slumped against the side of a crate of worms, breathing rapidly. “You stupid idiot!” he roared at Ogonaovan.
Aspera entered the cargo bay from the door at the far end. “What’s going on?”
“This...lunatic!” Hectar pointed at Ogonaovan.
Ogonaovan shrugged. “Fuck off, Hectar.” He turned his mobility chair about and charged off into the corridor.
“That miserable excuse for a mechanic!” Hectar was still out of breath. “He’s gone running off to Tiorné to file an incident report to make himself look good, just because he can move faster than I can!”
“Hectar, calm down!” Aspera laid one hand on Hectar’s shoulder, rubbing his chest and crumpling the fabric of his tunic with the fingers of the other. Seeing her touching him thus always gave Reigo a strange feeling. Hectar and Aspera had come aboard the Nimrod together, several years ago when he’d been a young boy. He’d never heard much of an explanation of either’s past or reasons for asking for sanctuary, but Hectar was a halfBlood and Aspera was obviously of the Blood, and even had an interface shunt on her forehead, although Reigo had never seen her use it. Aspera never spoke about her past and refused to deny or confirm any rumors presented to her.
“And you, you shouldn’t be laughing at him.” Hectar was addressing Reigo now. “He’s a liability, and one day he’ll go too far, and someone will end up dead!”
Reigo forced a straight face. “I’m sorry, Hectar. In fact, I’m going to speak to my mother about it.” He added, “I’m not going to point fingers or anything like that, but you can be sure I’ll give a neutral account.”
Hectar relaxed a little. Reigo left him with Aspera and headed up to the bridge. As he walked, he turned over what he was going to say in his mind. Ogonaovan was Reigo’s friend. As a child, he’d learned a lot from him, and Ogonaovan had been happy to teach him. They had a laugh together. Ogonaovan and Hectar had never got on, and now Reigo was older, their relationship seemed to be growing more openly antagonistic.
On the other hand, Reigo had never really liked Hectar. The man was both dull and irritating, concerned only with rules and trivialities. Those same qualities didn’t exactly impede his role as auditor on the Nimrod, though. Hectar did his job properly. The Pagan Atheist taught that a noble man was of Steel and Flame. That meant Reigo must put aside his personal convictions with regard to Hectar and Ogonaovan, and assess them by their merit toward their purposes alone.
Ogonaovan was already on the bridge, speaking with Tiorné. He walked straight in and interrupted Ogonaovan mid-sentence. “Ogonaovan, I need to speak to Tiorné now, could your matter wait until later?”
“Reigo.” Ogonaovan met his gaze awkwardly.
Tiorné nodded. “Ogonaovan.”
Ogonaovan turned his chair and left. Reigo took a seat on the opposite side of the crescent-shaped table. Tiorné folded her fingers together under her chin. The bolt on her forehead, her interface to the
Nimrod, was dark, inscrutable. Reigo could hear the dull hum of the ship’s fusion engine and feel the sensation of inertia dampers countering acceleration in his guts.
“Mother, there was an incident in the loading bay. I fear... I fear Ogonaovan may not have furnished you with an objective account of it.”
Tiorné exhaled through her nose. “Reigo, I know it was Ogonaovan’s fault. I’m of Steel and Flame. You think I can’t see through his bluster?”
Reigo stared at her. “If you know, why do you not ever say anything? Why don’t you stop him, before something goes wrong? Why do you let Ogonaovan carry on in this manner aboard your ship?”
“Ogonaovan...” Tiorné became pensive. “Ogonaovan is quick to act and judicious in the event of a crisis.”
“That he is,” Reigo said. And so he needs to be, with his track record, he stopped himself from saying. Steel and Flame.
His mother lowered her eyebrows. Her gaze cut into Reigo. “Ogonaovan can be controlled. He can be made to stay behind the line.”
“Then make him!”
Tiorné’s expression did not change. “Who is second in command aboard this ship?”
Reigo sighed. “I am.”
“Then you make him.”
“What? He won’t listen to me. He’s known me since I was a child!”
“And you are not a child now!”
“It’s not that simple!”
“Is it not? The day will come soon, when you must decide what you are to make of your life. You have not the Blood to be a castellan, but I hope you have it in you to become a merchant, as I am. What are you to become if you cannot hurdle such obstacles?”
“That’s different. If I had my own ship, the crew would know I was captain of it. I wouldn’t know them from before.”
“Is it different?”
“Ogonaovan...Hectar, Aspera. They won’t respect me. If I tell them what to do, they’ll tell me where to go. Or they’ll just ignore me and do something else.”
“Then you must find ways of making them respect you. You think it was easy for me? I was barely older than you when I took control of this vessel, and took on Ogonaovan as its mechanic. I had you with me, an infant. Most merchants leave their child in the father’s custody. I made Ogonaovan respect me. I had to.”
“But you could have made him leave had it not worked! You at least had that to use as leverage.”
Tiorné shook her head. “This path is yours, and yours to walk alone. I cannot make this right for you, and even if I could, it would be of no benefit to you. The day draws closer when you must make your own way in this galaxy. How you handle yourself now determines the way it will be.”
Reigo considered again a day when Tiorné and the Nimrod would not be there, and it was a daunting thought. He wanted to tell Tiorné, but he could not say the words. An uncomfortable silence followed. Reigo changed the topic. “Are we moving in to slingshot now?”
“Yes.”
“Can I go to the observation deck and look at the sun?”
Tiorné nodded. “Although I would rather you had read up on the matter before, then at least you would have some idea of what you were looking at.”
Reigo put his hands on the desk, and rose.
“Son?” Tiorné frowned. “Where is your other shoe?”
Chapter 2
The sun occupied most of the port side of the vitreous alloy dome of the observation deck. The photomitigator chemicals in the filter had become almost opaque to screen off the radiation streaming from the sun’s atmosphere into space, but the blue-hot chromosphere still shone bright, the convection cells in its outer boundary seething like boiling sugar.
Tiorné was right, Reigo considered as he looked upon the spectacle with his arms resting on one of the thick support pillars. It would be more beautiful if he understood better what he was looking at.
Ogonaovan came toward him, his chair moving silently. “Hey Reigo.”
“Just think,” said Reigo, gazing at the sun. “Tomorrow we’ll probably be looking out on a different sun. I’ve been seeing different suns my whole life. I can’t even count how many. I can’t even imagine the distances between them, not on any sort of scale that makes sense anyway. Yet we’re traveling them every day.”
Ogonaovan shrugged. “Best not to think.” He gave a curt nod to the sun. “What’s this one called?”
“Phlygema.”
“Why’s it blue? Most of ’em are red. Or sometimes yellow or white.”
“I’m not sure.” Reigo again wished he’d read more. “I think it’s something to do with the emission spectra of certain elements in its atmosphere.”
A sudden noise echoed down from the main corridor. Reigo sensed a tremor through the soles of his boots. The faint sound of the ship’s engine began to lower in pitch.
Ogonaovan frowned. “What the fuck was that?”
Reigo stared up at the surface of the dome, trying to make sense of the feedback available to him from the ship’s computer. “I don’t know.” “Mother?”
“Reigo, is Ogonaovan there with you?”
“Yes, we’re on the observation deck.”
“I need both of you to go to the starboard airlock immediately and prepare for an excursion out. Something just hit the tachyon array and the long-range scanners aren’t working.”
“Ogonaovan, she needs us to go to the starboard airlock, to fix collision damage to the tachyon array.” Reigo and Ogonaovan hurried to the corridor. Reigo continued to transmit to his mother as they covered the length of the main cross-sectional corridor, Reigo at a run and Ogonaovan’s chair racing ahead.
“Surely we can’t go outside with the ship moving.”
“The ship is always moving. You can’t go outside when it’s accelerating or decelerating, or when the Alcubierre engine is running. I’m off-lining the fusion thrust now, so as long as the ship continues at constant velocity there’ll be no problem.”
Ogonaovan unfastened the straps securing him to his mobility chair and lumbered to the floor. He scooted across the alcove outside the airlock on his fists and the stumps of his thighs. Yanking open one of the storage cupboards, he pulled out a space suit. “Na’Athril, Ro’Orrin!” he called. “We’re goin’ out! Get into yer airtight unrippables!”
A scraping sound ran around the inner edge of the room, then the two morrans clattered out of a ventilation duct. Reigo already had his locker open and was climbing into his suit and, within thirty seconds, all four of them were sealed in their suits and Ogonaovan was back in his chair. They waited in the airlock, Reigo with Na’Athril balanced on his shoulders.
Reigo booted the computer in his suit while Ogonaovan carried out the checks on the airlock and locked the inner door. The warning horn sounded, and the drone of the decompression pump began, and slowly faded. The outer doors parted, revealing a gap of starry void. Ogonaovan’s chair moved forward and tipped over the airlock lip.
Reigo activated his electromagnetic boots and clambered up over the edge to stand on the hull. He held onto the morran’s suit-clad forefeet as he adjusted to the feel of his boots and looked around.
The starscape of the Sagittarius arm made a dusty band across the sky. The Nimrod’s long tail stretched away to his left, a hole in the stars. The intense glare of the Phlygema sun picked out the fins interspersed along the tail segments as stark points, and illuminated tensile cables like spider-threads. Directly above the bearing his boots held him on, he saw the pectoral wing as a white blade that hurt his eyes. To the fore of the ship, all the stars were tinted blue. When he turned to look aft, all the stars behind were red.
“Mother, look.”
“Yes, Reigo, I have seen a blueshift before.” Tiorné’s thought-transmission carried a petulant tone.
Reigo spoke into the communicator in his helmet. “We’ve got twenty minutes maximum before she needs to make a decision.”
“Then let’s us have a look and see if we can find where the bugger hit us.” Ogonaovan’s voice so
unded crackly and mechanical over the transmission.
Ro’Orrin and Na’Athril scrambled onto the scaffolding of the pectoral wing, quickly becoming lost among the oblique shadows. Reigo followed Ogonaovan, dropping into the strange rhythm his electromagnetic boots imparted. The down-angled lights on Ogonaovan’s mobility chair showed protruding apparatus: cooling cylinders and masts bordering their walkway, and innumerable tiny craters and pock-marks on the hull. The electromagnetic tread of the chair trundled over the uneven surface, making the pool of light jerk and sway. The Nimrod was old. Tiorné hadn’t been its first owner.
“That’s the badger,” said Ogonaovan as the lamps fell upon a larger dent in the shielding.
Reigo transmitted his view of the crater to the Nimrod’s computer. “Can you see what caused it?”
“There’s nowt there. Must’ve smashed through the array, hit the hull, and bounced off.”
“What could it have been?”
“Dunno.” Through Ogonaovan’s suit, Reigo could discern little of his body language. “Wee space rock. More likely some bloody wanker dumped some crap out here and we ran into it.” Ogonaovan sighed through the suit’s radio. “I ’ate them bloody tossers.”
Reigo tilted his head up from where the boots anchored him until he could see the communications array through his visor. He couldn’t see Na’Athril, but he knew it was up there.
“And don’t stray out of the ship’s shadow,” he heard Ogonaovan address Na’Athril. “Stupid morran.”
“I thought you liked morrans,” said Reigo.
“Ay, selfish six-gendered bastards that they are. Better company than some men.” Ogonaovan chuckled. “At least they can’t look down at me like men do.”
Reigo rolled his eyes in the privacy of his helmet. It was the second time that morning Ogonaovan had made a bad joke about his lack of legs.
Ogonaovan swiveled forward in the harness of his mobility chair, tilting it so his face was suspended over the dent in the shield. “Hull’s weakened,” he said. “Better get on with it.” He disentangled the welding gear from the chair, and began to seal over the hole.