The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1)

by mikel evins

  Thousands of shattered pieces of bridge and hull still surrounded us, black fragments invisible against the black sky. Each one was a razor blade waiting to puncture a lung or open a vein. Originally, there must have been much more debris. Most of the lighter pieces, the dust and smaller fragments, would have flown much farther away. The shards around us were that small part of the shrapnel that had not been blown into the distance by the blast. It was the tiny fraction that moved slowly, so slowly that after a century it still hugged the ship’s hulk.

  “Torch the tent?” Jaemon suggested.

  “Won’t they see that?” said Mai.

  “It won’t matter if they’re all inside it,” Jaemon said.

  “Suppose they aren’t?” Angier said.

  Jaemon scowled and scratched the back of his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

  We floated in the dark, hoping for inspiration.

  On the other side of the debris field, away from the tent, the derelict waited, black and silent. It was still invisible to us. We could see only the void where its bulk blocked a thousand distant stars.

  “Survey Team, what’s up out there?”

  It was Captain Rayleigh on our Fabric channel, voice only.

  “Um, we have a situation,” Jaemon said. “We’re trying to keep chatter to a minimum, so let me send you a log.”

  “Trouble?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Silence again while we waited. Then Captain Rayleigh swore.

  “I’ve got to get back there.”

  “That’d be nice. You make the delivery yet?”

  “Making it now. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. This guy wants us to stay a while. He thinks they’re gonna have trouble here shortly, and he wants to draft us.”

  “Um…”

  “Don’t worry. I get it. We’ll be on our way in a jiffy.”

  “A whole jiffy?”

  “As quick as I can make it, Jaemon.”

  “Understood.”

  Jaemon made a face that looked like indigestion.

  We floated in empty space, cut off from our habitat and supplies. Somewhere a few thousand kilometers away the only person who could help us was meeting with a customer who demanded more than he contracted for, and who hadn’t yet paid his bill. Somewhere much closer were hundreds of tiny nightmares that wanted to eat us alive.

  Commercial shipping was not as dull as I had been led to believe.

  10.

  I was staring at the derelict again. It was silent and motionless. Unlike our tent, it had no surrounding halo of black motes. I zoomed my cameras and studied it. I shifted my visual spectrum up and down.

  Nothing.

  “Inside?” I speculated.

  Jaemon said, “Inside what, Lev?”

  I lifted an arm and pointed back through the debris, into the starless blackness of the derelict’s shadow. A tiny fragment of hull material bounced off my arm, making a ‘plink’ that I could hear through my skin. The fragment flew away into the dark.

  “What, the hulk?” said Angier. “You don’t mean to go in there?”

  Jaemon looked at the shadow speculatively.

  “What are you thinking, Lev?”

  I tried to make myself say something about walls, protection, camouflage, armor. Nothing articulate came out. I just made sputtering noises.

  “Inside!” I insisted. I held up my hands and tried to mime the shape of a box.

  “He’s lost it,” said Angier.

  Jaemon shook his head slowly.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “Think about it. It’s a way to get out of sight.”

  “What is?” Angier said. “Going inside the hulk? It’s a way to get eaten, that’s what it is. That ship’s probably full of them.”

  “We don’t know that. There’s no sign of them over there. They’re swarming around our tent. Why aren’t they swarming around the hulk? Maybe because they’re all over at our camp.”

  Angier snorted.

  “Maybe you taste good with spices. You’re gambling a lot on maybe.”

  “You have a better idea? Listen, if they find us anywhere, we’re done for. There’s no way the four of us can outfight a swarm of secondaries. We’re not equipped for it. If we float around out here long enough they’re definitely going to find us. That’s what they do. They wander around until they find something they can use, and then they use it. Take it apart. Break it down. Consume it bit by bit and turn it into raw materials.”

  “All right, all right,” Angier said. “I get the picture. Geez, you don’t have to rub my nose in it. So what, then?”

  “So we need to keep them from finding us as long as possible. Once they do find us, keep them from getting to us as long as possible. We have no chance of doing that out here. Nothing to work with. But in the derelict... If we can get inside the hulk, we have hatches and bulkheads to work with. We can get out of sight and seal ourselves off. It won’t keep them away forever, but maybe it’ll keep them away long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “For Kestrel to get back to us.”

  Angier groaned.

  “Oh, man, that’s gonna be hours, at least.”

  “Right. So do you want to spend those hours floating out here in the open? Or do you want to put hatches and bulkheads between you and the Titans?”

  Angier licked his lips and stared wide-eyed and pale at the hulk. He shook his head.

  “But what if they’re in there waiting for us?”

  Jaemon looked at the derelict.

  “That would be bad. But they’re definitely out here right now. Let’s get moving. Nice and slow. We’re still floating in a cloud of shrapnel here, and we don’t want our jets working any longer than necessary.”

  “Why are they called ‘Titans?’” Mai said. “Doesn’t ‘titan’ mean ‘giant?’”

  “Because they’re from Titan, duh,” said Angier. “You know? Saturn’s moon?”

  “Oh. But—”

  “Save it, Mai,” said Jaemon. “Ask the Fabric about it later.”

  “Okay.”

  Jaemon slaved everybody’s jets to his again. He took one of my arms and Angier took the other. Mai had my ankles again. We drifted slowly toward the derelict, scattered pieces occasionally bouncing off my metal skin. ‘Ping! Ping! Ping!’

  I watched the starfield in front of us above and below the black shadow of the dead ship. I saw no telltale flicker, no signs of Titan swarms moving toward us. I rotated my head and pointed my cameras back toward the tent. I could still see them in that direction, moving around like a cloud of cinders in a firestorm, swirling and eddying. They weren’t approaching us, though. They were shredding our tent, dismantling our air and water tanks, stripping the fullerene and steel and aluminum.

  “Building what?” I said.

  “What’s that, Lev?” said Jaemon.

  “Building what?”

  He lifted his head and looked at me with a quizzical expression. He saw the direction my cameras were pointing and looked over his shoulder. He pursed his lips.

  “The bad answer?” He said. “They’ll build a primary. That’ll take them a long time, though.”

  “What is a primary, anyway?” Mai said.

  Jaemon said, "Primaries are the real Titans. Secondaries are just tools. The secondaries are scary, but the primaries are what we really have to worry about. They’re the brains of the outfit.”

  “They’re the big ones?” Mai said. “The giant spiders?”

  “Yeah, that’s them,” Jaemon said.

  “Those are scary-looking,” Mai said.

  “Yeah. But don’t worry about what they look like,” Jaemon said. “Their looks aren’t what’s gonna hurt us. I’ve seen worse-looking people in Lamberta, or some of the Trojans, and they were perfectly fine.”

  As we approached the derelict it blocked out all of the stars so that there was nothing in front of us but a wall of black. It was so featureless that
without my radar pulses even I couldn’t tell anymore that we were moving. I knew we had reached the derelict when my face banged into the hull and we bounced gently away.

  “Get your boots against the hull,” Jaemon said. “Get stabilized.”

  All three of them tugged against my mass, turning me this way and that to get their boots lined up. Their soles touched the hull material and engaged, grabbing the surface with Van der Waals forces. They pulled at me, pressing me against the hull, and my skin did the same thing. I clutched at the derelict with my hands, holding on to a dead ship I still couldn’t see.

  “Okay, the bridge section is this way,” said Jaemon. “Let’s get up there and see if we can crack it open.”

  11.

  “Survey Team, this is the Captain. What’s your status?”

  The Fabric feed showed us Esgar Rayleigh’s worried face. His thick eyebrows were drawn down in a frown. His drooping black mustache emphasized it.

  “All here,” Jaemon said.

  “Hsst,” Angier hissed. “Not so big and bright. What if they see you?”

  Jaemon turned and looked at him.

  “It’s a Fabric feed, Angier. They can’t see it. It’s in our heads.”

  Angier winced and then mimed smacking his hand against his head.

  “Damn,” he said. “I must be losing it.”

  “Any news?” The Captain said.

  “Found our way back to the hulk. We told you the bugs got our tent?”

  “Yeah. You went back to the derelict?”

  “Yeah. Lev’s idea. We’ll try to get inside it, make it harder for them to find us.”

  Captain Rayleigh squinted and pursed his lips.

  “What?” Jaemon said.

  “Nothing, just...”

  “What? Come on, spill it.”

  “Okay, what if there are more of them inside?”

  “We thought of that,” Jaemon said. “But we’ll be no worse off than we are out here. And even if they are waiting for us in there, we might have some chance of finding a hidey-hole. Either way…”

  “Either way,” the Captain said, “You need me back there tout suite.”

  “How’s that going?” Jaemon said.

  The Captain grimaced. “We’ll see in a minute. Station master’s a giant pain. Claims he’s not gonna pay off on the contract if we leave. I can’t blame him too much. His people have been dealing with Titan attacks, and I think they want outside help even more than they want the arms we brought. I’m trying to get him to see that I can’t just leave all of you floating, but he’s only looking at his own problems. It’s making him unreasonable.”

  “Just get us out of here and I’ll go collect from him myself,” Jaemon said. “I’ll persuade him.”

  “That would be fun to watch. Anyway, I didn’t let any of that stop me leaving. I did tell him I’d see him in court. That’s when his boys pulled their guns on us.”

  “They what?”

  “Don’t worry. We got past it.”

  “How? You didn’t shoot it out with them, I hope?”

  The Captain looked sideways and scratched his jaw with one hand.

  “I um…I may have mentioned something about how flexible our propulsion system is. Oh, and how Kestrel pines for us when we’re away.”

  “Esgar! Are you crazy? You’re asking for a system-wide ban if you even hint at pointing a torch at any kind of habitation. Or worse. Some system authorities will just blow you out of the sky if they think you’re in breach. You want respectable stations shooting at us?”

  “Hey, I never said the words ‘point’ or ‘torch’ or ‘station.’ I think I remember him mentioning something about ‘you wouldn’t dare,’ or something like that, but he did let us walk.”

  Jaemon was shaking his head.

  “Pretty risky play, Big Brother,” he said.

  “You want me to come and get you or not?”

  “Yeah, I want you to come and get us. The sooner the better.”

  “Okay, then. I’d better get moving. Hang tight. Stay alive, all right?”

  “Working on it.”

  12.

  Jaemon popped open my right arm’s casing and pulled a few leads free. I automatically tried to flex my right hand, but nothing happened. He took off the safety caps on the ends of the leads and they hung there on their tethers, looking untidy.

  I couldn’t rig the connection to the conduits with one hand and no feeling in my fingers, so Jaemon had to do it. With gloves on he wasn’t much better than I was. We finally cobbled together a connection, though, and I started trickling power into it.

  “Titans,” I said.

  “Where?” Angier said, jerking his head around.

  “No,” I said. “Before. Before before before.”

  Jaemon shook his head and said, “This is getting to be like charades, except mostly without any clues. Do you mean you did this before? You think maybe your trickle charge woke them before?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “Okay. That’s what I was thinking, too. We’ll just have to get this hatch open quick. Or hope there are no more of them sleeping on the hull. Angier, Mai, keep your eyes peeled. If you see anything moving, sing out.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Mai. Angier muttered something and fooled with his sidearm. Jaemon started poking around the edges of the hatch.

  “Sir?” said Mai.

  “You see something, Mai?”

  “No, Sir. I was just wondering...”

  “What?”

  “Well...the secondaries are just tools, right?”

  “Right. Primaries are the ones to really worry about. Without them, the secondaries are...well, they’re not harmless, not by a long shot. But we can outsmart them, I think.”

  “Okay. But...”

  “But what?”

  “Why would there be secondaries here and no primary?”

  He frowned and shook his head at her, then shrugged.

  She said, “Why would there be tools someplace, but no tool user?”

  Jaemon stopped poking at the hatch.

  “Shut up, Mai!” said Angier.

  “No, she has a good point,” Jaemon said. “What the heck are all these secondaries doing here if there’s no primary?”

  “Dead,” I said. I made a burst of static that I meant to sound like an explosion. I opened my hands and moved them slowly apart until my right arm stuck at the end of the leads that we had attached to the power conduit.

  “Maybe,” said Jaemon. “Maybe their primary got blown up in the explosion. Maybe not.”

  He sat still for a bit, looking into the distance.

  “Listen,” he said after a while. “I still think the secondaries are orphans. If there was a primary, we would have noticed. They wouldn’t be acting so simple-minded. They would’ve been more organized. For whatever reason, I think we can figure there’s no primary, or that it’s out of commission. At least for now.”

  Angier heaved a sigh. Mai just watched Jaemon closely, occasionally changing the tilt of her head.

  “But listen, don’t just assume there’s no primary at all, okay? Keep your eyes peeled. Maybe there’s one hiding in the hulk. Maybe it’s in hibernation. Maybe it was messed up bad when that explosion happened, and those secondaries are trying to get it up and running again. We don’t know. All we know for sure is that no primary is directing those things right now.”

  We exchanged glances.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this thing open and get inside.”

  13.

  “Survey Team, this is Esgar. We’re away from Arnessen Station and on our way back to you.”

  We mustered a limp sort of cheer at the news.

  “Listen,” the Captain said, “If any more deliveries for Arnessen come up, we might just want to pass.”

  “So you didn’t come to an understanding, then?” Jaemon said.

  “No, I’d say we came to an understanding, all right,” Esgar said. “Part of our unders
tanding is that if anybody from Rayleigh ever meets anybody from Arnessen in the future, bad things may happen.”

  His luminous image pursed its lips.

  “Now, before you start criticizing my diplomacy—”

  “Criticizing?” Jaemon said. “Criticizing? You’re on your way back here, aren’t you?”

  “Yes…”

  “Then I’m not criticizing. You won’t hear a word of criticism from me, Esgar. Not a word. Anybody feel like criticizing? Not you, Angier.”

  Angier’s mouth was open, but he clamped it closed, frowning at Jaemon.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” said the Captain.

  14.

  “Are you two ever going to get that thing open?” Angier said. He’d begun fidgeting and working himself into a state, moving around from side to side, scanning the sky, occasionally pressing his head to the hull in an attitude of listening. Mai sat still, tail to hull, and watched him.

  “I think we’ve just about got it,” said Jaemon. Sure enough, he did something with a small tool and the hatch slid back.

  “In you go,” he said, “but sweep it with a spotlight first, okay?”

  Angier dived for the opening, but then arrested himself at its edge when he heard Jaemon’s warning. He switched on a spot and played it around inside the hatch.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just a companionway.”

  It was empty, just four walls, a service ladder down one of them, and another hatch at the other end.

  Mai pushed in next to Angier’s shoulder and peered over the edge, nose pulsing.

  “I don’t smell anything,” she said. “Just old metal.”

  “What would you smell in space?” Angier scoffed.

  “She smelled the secondaries,” Jaemon said. “But Angier has a point, Mai. There’s no atmosphere in there to carry scents. I guess you’d need to make contact. You’d have to get your membrane right up against the bulkheads.”

  “I can do that,” she said, tail wagging.

  “Go ahead, then, but be careful. Sing out if you find anything.”

  She scrambled through the open hatch and snuffled her way down the companionway, booties gripping the bulkheads. With each step her Fabric link transmitted a faint ripping sound as a booty pulled loose from the wall.