by Audrey Faye
His harsh intake of breath confirmed what she already knew. “Over there, by the rift.” He glanced at her, eyes grim, assessing. “Take us down.”
Her chest puffed again, even as her heart pounded against her ribs. This was what it felt like to be important. This was what it felt like to matter.
Amelie Descol blasted the single high, pure note into every nook and cranny of the devastated bridge—and knew she was fighting a losing battle.
She gathered her breath and pushed more power into the single frequency. Sustaining. Demanding. Trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Her Talent shrieked, protesting the abuse. This wasn’t sustainable, even for one of KarmaCorp’s very finest.
She knew what her Talent didn’t. This was the end game, one way or the other. If she couldn’t hold on until help arrived, this was her last Song.
And the likelihood of help arriving in time had narrowed down to one small blip. They had a signal-obliterating cosmic storm behind them and a MayDay beacon that had deked left when it should have gone right. Amelie watched the bridge’s last functional view screen as the tiny ship they’d picked up on their sensors came into view.
Her heart lurched. It was a surface flitter, barely bigger than the b-pod her brother flew for a living. Not the kind of vehicle that carried hull-piercing tools or interstellar comms.
Slowly, not letting her note waver in the slightest, she moved to step in behind the ship’s captain, keeping one eye on the screen and one on the only other two people on the Ios who were still alive. Both were unconscious, and mercifully so. It had been killing her to listen to their thready screams.
The captain’s hands clutched the edges of the console that was keeping her upright. “Attempting to hail incoming vessel.”
Vessel was a polite term for what Amelie saw onscreen. The flitter looked ancient, and more beat up than her favorite pair of land boots. The kind of transport that colonies way off the beaten track held together with shoelaces and instaglue.
She closed her eyes and felt the fatigue clogging her throat. They would keep doing all the right things because Fixers didn’t give up, and neither did the very tough captain of this particular small trading ship.
But shoelaces and instaglue weren’t going to fix this.
Kish’s head felt all swimmy and weird. Her DNA mother’s ship had probably looked just like that.
Broken. Alone.
It was calling to her. She shook her head, trying to fix the awful pictures it was making inside her skull. It wasn’t the same. This ship was new and shiny, not like the junker she’d been born on. Pops said it was a wonder that one had ever flown at all.
This one was a sleek trader ship, one of the ones that carried people and news and expensive things to colonies that could afford that kind of thing. And she could see why they’d crashed. One of the solar arms had a nasty, melted part. “They got hit by something.”
Pops nodded sharply. “Space debris. People who fly out there are idiots.”
Folks said the same thing about diggers. “They must have got caught in the solar storm.” It had been a surprise one, or at least that’s what the SatNet weather people said. No one on Halkyn VII had been surprised. Mama Simkin’s big toe had been acting up again, and that always meant solar flares.
The storm had been pretty. Streaking lights in the sky. Kish looked at the ship, crashed on the side of the caldera, and felt her chin wobble. Pretty things could be mean. Every miner knew that.
She circled, eyes sharp now, looking for the flattest place she could find to set down the flitter. Not below the ship—the hills were too steep.
“No.” Pops spoke sharply, moving his hands on top of hers. “Don’t land—we’ll hail them from here.”
Her hands froze on the flitter controls as she swiveled to look at him, gaping. “We have to go help.”
His eyes were angry—and full of the futile helplessness she only saw there when people were going to die. “It’s a spaceship, Lakisha. They need shuttles and a rescue ship, not a couple of people in a flitter.”
He never called her Lakisha. She looked down at the broken ship in horror. Halkyn VII didn’t have rescue shuttles. And they were in darkside rotation—their interstellar comm couldn’t send a message for hours yet.
Not a useful one, anyhow.
He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s hail them. Maybe we can bring them something they need. Until the rescue shuttles get here.”
Pop’s voice had that fake sound that happened when adults were lying about really bad things. Kish’s chin wobbled some more. “I’ll hold the flitter steady.”
His hand on her shoulder squeezed a little.
Amelie winced as the crackling view screen jarred against the note she was Singing. She was tired enough now that stabilizing the interference took noticeable amounts of effort.
Butterfly wings. Just like the space junk that had clipped them and the solar flare that had knocked out their proximity detector. And the guy in engineering who had hit his head at exactly the wrong time.
The screen resolved into two blurry figures—a man with more facial hair than Amelie had seen in cycles, and a small girl with huge blue eyes and a ghost-white face.
The Singer struggled not to react. She didn’t want a child to see this.
The man’s voice was brusque. “Trader ship Ios, what is your status?”
The captain’s fingers clutched the console more tightly. “Hull breach. We’ve lost pressure in six of our eight sections. Five dead, two badly wounded. All of us still alive are on the bridge and trapped. One of our solar ribs was driven through the bridge doors.”
Amelie had to respect that kind of capacity for understatement. There were two hundred tons of metal between them and escape. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
The captain’s breath rattled. “We’re losing oxygen.”
The man on the screen knew what that meant. Amelie could see the sad horror in his eyes and knew what that meant. Rescue wasn’t in his power to deliver. She jerked ruthlessly on her control as her Song wobbled.
Not now. She could be weak later. If there was a later.
The captain nodded feebly at the woman behind her. “Amelie here is trying some heroics.”
The man and the girl both stared, puzzled.
Amelie gulped for air in the waning oxygen supply. Earlier, she’d managed to move the solar rib enough to extract the first officer and their comms intern, for all the good it would likely do them. Now she was trying to use pure vibration to hold thousands of tiny leaks at bay.
The Singer version of shoelaces and instaglue.
The captain’s head lolled to the side. Dammit, make that three survivors badly wounded. Amelie stopped singing and stepped forward. Singers weren’t in the line of command on any space vessel—unless they were the only one left who could speak. “We’ll need something capable of drilling a hole in the side of this ship.”
The man was already shaking his head. “We have drills, but nothing big enough to get them here fast. It’s going to take hours.”
He sounded competent. And certain.
The little girl beside him looked ready to punch someone in the nose. “We have to help, Pops. They can disassemble the drills. We can fly the parts.”
She wasn’t as fragile as she looked. Amelie registered that one thought as she sucked breath to start Singing again. If she could block the leaks well enough, maybe she could buy those hours. She added volume to her note. Power. The kind of power that might save a ship.
And would almost certainly cost a Singer her life.
Amelie felt a trickle adding to hers.
Her eyes jerked to the screen. The little girl was standing now, hands fisted at her sides, face fiercely focused. Singing. Precisely matching resonance with Amelie’s note.
The Singer felt her eyes bulge. Talent. Immense talent, out here in the middle of asteroid hell.
The child stiffened as her father motioned for silence. And Sang l
ouder.
Amelie reached for the tablet in her pocket and, sustaining the note she knew would be her last, sent off a short, seminally important message to KarmaCorp HQ. If a rescue ship ever arrived, it might even get delivered.
She looked back up into the fiery blue eyes of the child who would one day have the kind of Talent that might save this ship.
The child who didn’t have enough control or knowledge to try today without putting her life on the line too. And Amelie Descol couldn’t let that happen. It violated every oath she’d ever taken, every rule in KarmaCorp’s very substantial manual, and every shred of human decency a dying Fixer had left.
So she shifted her gaze to the man beside the girl, looked him straight in the eyes, and let him see the truth.
He met her gaze for a long moment. And then he gave one sharp nod of respect and reached for the controls of the flitter.
The child’s keening wail as the transmission ended nearly broke Amelie’s heart.
And it made her smile. That one wouldn’t ever back down from a fight. The child with the blue eyes would make a fine Fixer one day. The one legacy of this final horror that she could be proud of.
Today, only one Singer would die.
Kish couldn’t see the ship anymore. They were almost back to Halkyn VII’s derelict landing pad now, and the broken body of the Ios had disappeared from view long ago.
But she could still hear it. The woman with the green eyes, begging the stars to help.
Because the girl from the digger rock couldn’t.
Amelie could still feel the child. Her anguish and her guilt, and the echoing resonances of a Talent that had tried to throw itself across a vacuum of space and do the impossible.
A child born to be a Fixer if she’d ever seen one.
If it please the fates, not a child destined to die as one.
Amelie took one last look around the battered bridge and then lifted her chin and blasted her high, pure note one more time out into the infinity of space. A final moment of defiance.
Then she bowed her head and changed her Song. To a lullaby. One that would send calm to the child still listening, and put everyone still alive on the ship to sleep. The gift of oblivion, as quickly as she could bring it.
Amelie felt the black coming. And Sang it welcome.
Three Months Later…
Pops had stopped coming with her, and when Kish got back, he would look at her with that cross face that made his eyebrows join together and lines run up from his nose.
But her astrosuit was always charged and ready to go, every night. And even though it was battered and dinged and two sizes too big, someone had done some careful repairs on all the seams.
She had no idea why she had to be in a dumb suit out here in the cold. Singing sounded way nicer in one of the abandoned tunnels, especially if she managed to swipe her brother’s heater mitts before she left. That’s usually where she went to sing.
But this note—it insisted that it must be sung under the night sky.
Kish placed the carefully shaped rock that would hold the surface tube open until she returned, and stepped away from the sensors. They were rusty as hell and nobody ever bothered to look at their logs, but occasionally even beat-up old crap managed to work right, and she didn’t want any more lines running up from Pop’s nose.
She turned herself toward the northwest. Toward the caldera.
The broken ship wasn’t there anymore. A rescue vessel had come. It had saved the captain with the sad face and the comms intern with the nice laugh and the first officer with the gruff voice and wrapped candies in his pocket.
But Kish had known they were too late for the lady with the voice of gold and the fierce, sad eyes.
She drew in a deep breath, remembering. And let the single, shattering note rise up from her ribs.
The sound reverberated inside her helmet like a space cat on synth-caf, but Kish barely noticed. She focused only on the beautiful, heartbreaking sound.
Just like always, it made tears run down her face. And just like always, her ribs felt like they might never breathe again. It had taken her two weeks to stop panicking and triple-checking the oxygen levels on her space suit.
The oxygen had always been fine.
Kish tipped her head back to the night sky and imagined her puny note rising up to the stars. She knew the stars would never hear her—she was just a girl from a digger rock, and a troublesome, skinny one at that. But she sang up to the sky anyway.
It was where the song wanted to go.
Note from Audrey: There are more exploding spaceships in this short story than in all my other books combined… no idea how that happened. :)
If you’re curious about what happens to Kish when she grows up and follows in Amelie’s footsteps, the book you’re looking for is Destiny’s Song, the start of my Fixers series. A lot has changed—but Kish still wants to punch someone in the nose on a fairly regular basis…
Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe
An Archangel Project Story
C. Gockel
Sometimes intelligent life is right in front of your whiskers.
Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe
What Little Werfles are Made of
“ … cells are made of proteins, proteins are made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made of particles … And do you remember what those are made of?”
“Waves, Third One!”
“Yes, you are waves manifest as matter. You can become waves again at any time.”
Sliding down the embankment, his ten legs not able to lift him, Hsissh reprimanded himself, Next body, no sleeping in a field frequented by lizzar. He knew better, but the rock had been sunny and wonderfully warm. And then one of the clumsy, wave-ignorant oafs had whacked him with its tail. Now this body was beyond reasonable repair and he had to move on. Finding a dry spot, he curled into a ball. Tucking his nose to his tail, he closed his eyes and … hesitated. He blinked. He didn’t want to let this form go … Shissh, his blood kin in her last life, had been urging him for years to give up this shell and the pain that was tied to it; to let his memories of their third parent become a dream.
“What’s that?”
His ears perked. It was the vocal utterance of a wave-ignorant Newcomer. Ish, one of the more scholarly members of Hsissh’s kind, had decoded most of the language and shared it in the waves. Hsissh hadn’t thought the Newcomers had spread this far north. He wondered what they’d found.
A sharp pain in his side made his body uncoil with a startled squeak.
“Is it some sort of albino-mutant-ten-legged weasel?” There was another sharp pain, and Hsissh was flipped over. Helpless in his weakened state, he lay sprawled on his back, all ten limbs and tail wriggling. Through blurry eyes, he saw three Newcomers standing over him. They smelled strange, like alien vegetables and meats partially digested and burned. Their naked bodies, where they showed at the edges of the faux furs on their heads and forelimbs, were disgusting. They looked smaller than he’d been informed; yet, even their shorter forelimbs were longer than his entire body. They could kill him by merely stepping on him.
“It’s a werfle,” said another Newcomer, using the enormous deformed paw on a hind limb to prod Hsissh’s limbs. “Their bites are poisonous. Don’t touch it.”
The poison oozing from Hsissh’s fangs could kill them with a single bite, but his body wasn’t responding to his mind’s order to roll over. And the pain was disorientating; he couldn’t focus enough to agitate the waves into starting a fire. A shadow moved. He felt a stinging in his chest and a soft squeal came from his lungs. His mind slowly processed that one of the Newcomers was jabbing him with a stick. Ish thought these beings were worthy of study … Obviously, Ish was an idiot. Hsissh felt rekindled determination to leave this body—when he was new and healthy again, he’d join the faction that was pushing to have the Newcomers wiped off The Planet.
“Huh, looks a
lmost dead,” said the one with the stick. He poked Hsissh again, and pain shot from every root of fur on his body.
“My mom says they’re really soft and we should make them into coats,” said another, prodding Hsissh’s side so hard it sent him rolling. When Hsissh came to a stop, he tried to squirm, but pain shot from his tail as one of them stepped on it, and he clawed helplessly at the dirt.
“Too small to make a coat. Maybe a muffler?” said the one that had kicked him.
Hsissh closed all ten of his claws and reminded himself he was a wave. He just had to focus …
“Leave him alone!”
The pain in his tail vanished. He shot forward and was able to feel the waves that coursed through his body. Grabbing hold, he let them carry him up and out, changing the electrical impulses in his body and mind to a pattern of particles in the waves. Bit by bit, memories from every shell he’d ever worn and his current thoughts were encoded. He felt Shissh’s consciousness in the wave, and felt her speak. “Finally! You should have left that hide ages ago.”
Not wanting to encourage her nagging, Hsissh did not answer. As the pattern that was Hsissh expanded out and upward, he was able to feel the scene in every direction. Above him, the Newcomer’s time gate hung like a ring-shaped moon, visible even though it was nearly midday. He could just barely make out the ships that were slipping into the gate and then disappearing, primitively transported in their physical forms across the Milky Way to their home planet “Earth” and nearly a dozen other colony worlds. Below him, much closer to his rapidly dying body, a smaller Newcomer was standing at the top of the embankment, fists clasped at its sides. It looked different from the others. The fur on top of its head was nearly black and pulled back in a way that exposed a flat metal circle at the side of its skull. Its eyes were nearly as dark, and its skin was a deep brown. The others looked more like what he’d gleaned from the collective consciousness of his kind, The One. They had hazel-to-brown eyes, tan skin, and fur that flopped over the peculiar metal ornamentation Newcomers wore in the sides of their heads.