Ironheart

by J. Boyett

  She went to the hyperdrive controls. Even though all that involved was swiping the screen to a different window with her fingers, it felt like she was leaping across a deep chasm to safety. Even now, under the rage and unfamiliar desperation, there was a spark of admiration for these mortals who had proven such a worthy challenge. Even if she’d had to hamstring herself, for them to be so.

  Anya hit the short-cut to the random-jump sequence. She didn’t care where they went, as long as it was a point in realspace unoccupied by a star or any other object.

  But when she hit the command, nothing happened. It was as if the jumping apparatus were empty. As if there were nothing inside the Brain Chamber’s crystal.

  Anya stared at the readouts, stunned. For a moment she couldn’t move, so encased was she in horror. They had killed her brain.

  ***

  The Canary’s crew didn’t know yet how extensive the damage done by Ironheart was, but the stabilizers were definitely among the casualties. The ship was shaking like crazy—Madaku had to grip the console to stay in his chair, and Willa was rolling on the floor. Only Burran stayed still in his seat, immobile as if he’d been too massive to budge, frowning at his console. His last attempt to shear off Anya’s final blaster had failed. He was preparing to try again.

  Weapons were Burran’s specialty. Madaku concentrated on trying to get the helm back under control. It would be pretty hard for Burran to shoot straight as long as their guns were shaking along with the rest of the ship.

  Wild surges of electricity were rippling through the ship. Madaku had prioritized them lower than helm control. But now a panel in the ceiling burst off as something exploded up there, and an electrical cable came whipping out, torn in half by the explosion and spitting blinding sparks as it snapped into the room like a mad snake, its jagged end blazing and dancing dangerously close to Willa, who still couldn’t walk or move well.

  Madaku accessed the schematics and tried to cut the power to the cable, assuming that the robot would leap from its niche to save Willa from immediate harm. But it didn’t.

  By the time Madaku realized the cheap, shitty robot hadn’t activated, Burran was already leaping over his console. He put himself between Willa and the cable, and was going to push her to safety when the cable’s exposed, electrified end smacked him right in the face.

  He jiggled there, electrocuted, until Madaku managed to cut the power. Then he crashed to the floor, his face a black and bloody burn from nose to forehead.

  The Canary was only partially stabilized, but that would have to do. Madaku switched to weapons control. Here goes nothing, he thought.

  ***

  Anya was taking potshots at the Canary. Even with the targeting systems still disabled, her shots all nearly hit home, and it was only a matter of time.

  “You fought well,” she muttered to its occupants, across the void. “But no matter. Take Ironheart’s thrusters, it is no matter. I shall go to sleep again, and a hundred thousand years hence when next I am awakened, I’ll not be so gentle. Whoever they are, I shall take their brains and their goods at once, and not dally and chat and strive to make friends.”

  She prepared to fire again. This one, she felt sure, would be the direct hit. She could feel it.

  Before she managed, a laser bolt came from the Canary. Even through the stabilizers she felt the rumble of an explosion: it was done, her final blaster, her final thruster, destroyed.

  Before Anya had truly comprehended the disaster’s magnitude, another bolt hit Ironheart, this time in the body of the ship. It did not penetrate the hull, but it knocked her spinning helplessly out of orbit, with no thrusters to counteract the motion.

  Another hit. Her external sensors went off-line. As the AI scrambled to bring them back up, she guessed from the rattling that she was being hit again, and then again.

  Above the shock, rage, and even fear, calmly floated the question: Is this the end?

  ***

  Willa was crying. She crawled toward Burran as he shook his blinded face back and forth and gasped, “Willa!” His mouth and jaw were relatively undamaged. His eyes had burned down to shriveled burst beans. “Willa! I need to see Willa!”

  Madaku kept firing and firing into Ironheart, direct hit after direct hit. He wasn’t going to penetrate Anya’s hull, he finally realized—it must be made of amazing stuff. All he was managing to do was to push her further and further away, increasing her speed each time a laser burst against her ship.

  But he was more than happy to do that. Viscerally happy. He unloaded the laser banks on her until her acceleration was enough to break out of the system’s gravity.

  Ironheart’s hull might be invulnerable to the Canary’s weapons, but without a subspace antenna the ship was effectively mute, its communications able to move only at the speed of light.

  Madaku’s looked down at his two crewmates, shocked that Willa hadn’t gotten the doctor out yet to start patching Burran up. Didn’t she realize that his wounds could be dangerous, if nothing were done? Then he remembered that the doctors had been sabotaged, and the sweat pouring out of him chilled.

  Willa had calmed down, now that Burran needed her. She cradled and stroked his ruined head in her lap.

  “Willa,” he sputtered. “I want to see you, Willa.”

  “Hush,” she soothed. “Hush, baby.”

  Madaku stared at the tableau. Then he slapped the comm toggle. There was still a light-speed channel open to Ironheart. “Anya, you bitch!” he snarled.

  Her voice crackled through the speaker, wild and mythical. “Still alive!” she crowed. “Still alive, mortal!”

  “Not for long!” But any threat he might make would be empty. It would take a couple weeks of repairs till the Canary was ready to even navigate through realspace again, much less through hyperspace. If Anya continued on her way all that time, there would be no way for them to hyperjump and catch up with her. Willa might be the greatest intuiter ever, but not even she could make a jump to such precise coordinates without a lot of physical objects around, whose shades could help her maneuver through the hyperfield. And even once they were working again, the Canary’s weak realspace thrusters wouldn’t be enough to make up Anya’s head start, not unless they were willing to spend many months inching up on her.

  Of course, they could inform the Registry of the threat she posed, and perhaps someone would hyperjump a ship with faster realspace thrusters out to pursue and destroy her.

  But then again, would they? Say anyone out there half-believed them, and sent a force after Anya. Would they really blow her up? If anyone believed him at all, they would likely want to catch and study her. And Anya would get the better of her captors ... given time.

  Assuming they were even willing to do something so uncivilized as hold her captive.

  “Still alive, still alive,” she continued, then lapsed into a taunting sing-song in some long-forgotten tongue.

  “Listen to me,” said Madaku. He checked the star-charts to confirm the truth of what he was about to say, then continued: “We’re right on the galactic rim here, and you’ve just fallen off its edge. There is not a single star in your flight path, nothing between here and the Aquarian galaxy. Not a planet, not a star, not a soul. Your ship will run out of air and you will fall asleep, and after that you may as well be dead because there will be nothing to wake you.”

  “I shall never die!”

  “At your current sublight velocity time and space will both come to an end long before you hit another star system. And I’m erasing all record of your current course from the Canary’s memory banks. In a few minutes there won’t be any way for anyone ever to find you again, even if they were stupid enough to want to.”

  “You listen to me, puny thing.” Her voice was lower, colder, harder, stranger; Madaku could better understand now those distant, primitive humans who had both worshipped and feared her. “In all the vastness of time, I shall fall into the palm of some rescuer. Many have been the times that I have gone
into some desolate place where no sentient ever set foot, and rested there, only to find the sentients followed me. Or else I have returned there, to find the place changed and teeming with thriving sentients. Though you cannot conceive it, the dark between the galaxies is merely one other such desolate place. Some band of sentients shall find and awake me, and I shall fly on as before, with Ironheart restored. And you’ll all be dead.”

  “You’re crazy if you think people are going to start building trillions of kilometers’ worth of cities in between the fucking galaxies. Space is vaster than time, Anya—at least, this time it is, as far as you’re concerned. Every last star will wink out before you escape that dead coffin-ship of yours.”

  “Ironheart lives! Ironheart lives, and so do I! And I shall awake, and you’ll all be dead!”

  “Turn her off, Madaku!” cried Willa.

  Startled, Madaku turned back to where Willa still held her dying lover’s head in her lap. He’d been so wrapped up in gloating, he’d nearly forgotten them.

  “Burran’s going,” she said. Her voice was clear and strong, though there were tears on her face. “He’s going, and I don’t want him to be listening to Anya right now.”

  Madaku felt ashamed. “Right,” he said, and cut the channel.

  ***

  On Ironheart, Anya brought her fists down on the console again.

  “You’ll all be dead,” she hissed.

  ***

  Madaku watched Burran’s and Willa’s final moments together. Now, he would have liked to say something to the guy—thanked him, or something. But he hung back, trying to be invisible.

  “Shhh,” said Willa, and stroked Burran’s hair, lightly, careful to find unburned places where she could touch him.

  “Wanna see you, Willa,” he said.

  “Shhh. I’m here.”

  “But I wanna see you.”

  Willa stroked his chest. She leaned over and put her lips against his ear. “I’m naming the planet Burran,” she whispered.

  Burran lifted his right hand and gestured with it. “Hey.” It seemed like he was trying to take hold of Willa’s hand, but he wasn’t sure where it was. “Hey. Hey.” His chest stopped moving and his head rolled over to the side.

  Madaku couldn’t believe it. He kept staring at Burran, waiting for him to move; surely he would start moving again, surely he wasn’t dead; it wasn’t possible.

  Except that it was.

  They had been a special couple, Madaku reflected; they had been very special. He kept his eyes down and waited for Willa to start crying again. But she didn’t. Maybe she was through with crying.

  ***

  Anya listened for the sounds of any more sparks, any crackles of rogue current. Usually she knew better, but right now she truly believed she didn’t need the diagnostics to tell her whether or not there was something wrong with Ironheart. She had been with the ship so very, very long, and knew it as well as she did herself. Better. In herself there were more blank and muddled spaces.

  The ship was stable. Anya was sure, and the AI confirmed it. Grievously wounded, but stable.

  Anya stroked its bulkhead and whispered to it not to worry. There was nothing else it need do; not for a long, long time. Only be a box to carry her through the void and keep her company.

  Ironheart strained to maintain gravity and life support. It knew that in vacuum she could only function for a few minutes before she went to sleep. Anya took pity on it. She would let it rest, and she would rest, too.

  She returned to the bed these latest mortals had found her in, that once long ago had been a suspended-animation coffin but that had only ever served her as a place to sleep; she strapped herself down before turning off the gravity. Then she instructed the life support to begin its slow power-down.

  Would she be awoken someplace distant, many ages hence? And many ages after that, would she have forgotten this struggle with this latest batch of mortals, who had either been more formidable than most, or else had had the good fortune to find her during one of her especially careless periods?

  Perhaps what he’d said had been true, that mortal (already his name was blending with those of so many others she’d known), perhaps she was doomed to rocket through the emptiness forever. But how certain he’d seemed of it! Mortals had so little respect for the infinite reach of possibility.

  Anya estimated that she had something like a hundred thousand years of subjective, lived experience, not counting all the time she’d spent asleep—buried under rockslides, floating through vacuum, once chained to an anchor and dropped to the bottom of the sea (that one, she hadn’t yet forgotten). In all that time, only one thing had always proven true: she did not die.

  And yet she supposed that not even her own death was beyond the reach of the possible.

  Cold. Thinness of air. It came—she could feel it, the sleep.

  As the air thinned out, she worked harder to draw it in. Who knew? Perhaps this would be her last.

  She drew her hands up to rub them against her arms, as the heat leaked from the ship. Soon the temperature plummeted far below what any normal human could have survived. Instead of taking her hands off her arms, Anya drew them up higher. Until her forearms were crossed over her chest, each hand’s fingers brushing the edge of the other side of her collarbone.

  Her breath grew smaller and smaller as the oxygen got used up, her chest moving in tiny hitches that would be almost imperceptible to an observer and soon wouldn’t be there at all.

  As the motion of her chest grew slighter and slighter, she smiled. Then her smile widened, the corners of her mouth stretching back, exposing her teeth.

  Yes, perhaps these would be her last few breaths. And yet she knew they wouldn’t be.

  Soon, she went to sleep. Her eyes were open.

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  Did you love Ironheart? Then you should read The Little Mermaid: A Horror Story by J. Boyett!

  Brenna has an idyllic life with her heroic, dashing boyfriend, Mark the lifeguard. She knows it's only natural that other girls would have crushes on the guy. But there's something different about the young girl he's rescued, who seemed to appear in the sea out of nowhere--a young girl with strange powers, who will stop at nothing to have Mark for herself.

  This edition includes three bonus stories.

  Also by J. Boyett

  Rogue Galaxy

  Rogue Galaxy, Episode 2: Command Material

  Rogue Galaxy, Episode 1: The Captain and the Werewolf

  Standalone

  The Little Mermaid: A Horror Story

  The Flaming Sword of Eden

  Ironheart