Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Before he could rise to check on the steersman, the captain noticed a faint noise. He paused to listen. The sound was unintelligible at first, but as he concentrated Freigh thought he heard raspy, excited whispering.

  “…Said—reaching—once—mutilation—responsible…”

  “…See—stolen—restored—condemned…”

  The source of the muted chatter eluded Freigh and doubled his resolve to quit the room. He stretched out his left arm to light the bedside lamp, unaware of the bitterly cold blade thrusting out to block him. Screaming in pain, Freigh tore his hand away from the icy metal.

  A deep blue glow limned the curved, charcoal grey sword held by a cloaked figure standing to the left of the bed. When Freigh's eyes adjusted, he saw that it was Mordechai. The passenger’s pale mask leered at him in a sterile reprimand.

  “Leave me!” the captain begged, clutching his frostbitten palm. “Leave, and take whatever curse follows you!”

  “We were agreed,” Mordechai said with the harshness of air venting through a hull breach. “I was to accompany you to the world circling Thera’s star.” Somehow, his icy voice grew still colder. “You have broken your word.”

  “By Elathan’s eye!” Freigh gasped, his voice trembling. “Go. Please go!”

  The cold blade vanished into Mordechai’s cloak. The indigo nimbus faded, plunging Freigh’s chamber back into pitch darkness.

  “Mordechai?” Freigh dared to whisper after several moments had passed. When no answer came, his right hand crept over to turn on the bedside lamp. The mellow circle of light that touched all but the farthest corners showed that he was alone.

  Freigh remained in his bed, rocking slowly and nursing his shriveled hand. Yet his wound was a trifle against his unspeakable relief at the monster's departure.

  His consolation proved short-lived. The muffled chittering resumed, emanating from the lightless corners. Freigh clenched his eyes shut and longed for his nightmares’ return as cruel laughter burst from the shadows.

  6

  Teg arrived outside Deim’s quarters at dawn and rapped his knuckles on the door twice. He stepped back and waited in the tunnel, his patience thinning by the second. Eight hours had passed since Deim Cursorunda’s last turn at the Wheel. In Teg’s thinking there was no cause for him to still be asleep, no matter that Deim had made the run to rescue him.

  Muttering a curse, Teg approached the door again. This time he gave three harder knocks at longer intervals.

  The matte grey door slid open an inch. Through the crack Teg saw a smooth, olive-skinned face. “What time is it?” Deim asked groggily.

  “Fifteen minutes after you should’ve been up,” said Teg. “Senior staff meeting’s in ten.”

  Deim’s hand brushed unruly black hair from his eyes. The only one visible through the cracked door had puffy dark circles under it. “Go and tell Jaren I’ll be right there.”

  “Think I’ll wait here,” said Teg, suspecting Deim would crawl back into bed if he left.

  Deim shuffled away from the door but left it ajar. The hiss of running water sounded from within, followed by a flurry of general rummaging. Soon thereafter another sound issued from the room—one that held complex emotional associations for Teg.

  Deim’s soft chanting filtered into the tunnel. Most of the atonal song was foreign to Teg, but the act it accompanied wasn’t. Right now, as he did each day, the junior steersman was kneeling at a small shrine carved into a corner of his rock-hewn chamber. Deim’s morning prayer stirred up memories of Teg’s brief childhood on Keth, where his mother had once practiced a similar observance.

  Teg stretched muscles grown stiff from a night on a hospital cot and felt a stab of protest from his lower back. He tuned out the pain and focused on Deim’s chant. Most folk considered such devotions eccentric at best. Even Jaren, whose ancestors had deemed piety a virtue, saw no use in petitioning obscure powers who’d long since abandoned the universe—if they'd ever existed at all.

  When anyone asked, Deim said that faith was worth holding onto, if only because the Guild said it wasn't. In Teg’s opinion, a young man of twenty-five should’ve outgrown such boyish fancies, but he respected the steersman’s commitment to something larger than himself.

  The droning chant ceased, replaced by silence. “You done in there?” asked Teg. He peered through the slit and beheld the face of a goddess. The sight didn’t surprise him. Thera Souldancer’s grey-winged image had adorned the steersman’s back since early childhood when Deim’s late father had inked it there.

  Teg saw Deim finish his meditation, rise, and snuff out the candle that stood its lonely vigil in the shrine’s alcove. Its sweet pungent scent wafted through the door, which opened wide a moment later to reveal the steersman standing in its frame fully dressed.

  “After you,” said Deim, fastening his belt with a talisman resembling a giant lizard’s eye in amber—another heirloom that cast doubt on the Cursorundas’ taste in art.

  Teg preceded Deim down a narrow tributary channel that slanted away from Melanoros’ flat peak in a wide spiral. The path intersected the bed of an underground river that had once issued from a chimney on the hill’s west face. Teg imagined how the falls must have looked plunging down the vertical shaft eons ago. The water was long gone, but the hidden cavern it had carved out made a perfect hangar for the Shibboleth.

  The ship looked just as he’d left it the night before. Of course, he’d been delirious from shock at the time. Its black crystalline skin flowed in a series of graceful curves; the main hull flanked by a pair of forward-swept wings.

  Teg noticed that the sound of Deim’s trailing footsteps had stopped. He looked back to see the steersman gawking at the ship with an idiot grin on his face. Deim’s pride was obvious, if unearned. He never tired of telling how his great grandfather had laid the hull with Jaren’s father in the last days of the Gen resistance.

  To hear Deim tell it, his ancestral ether-runner had singlehandedly won a lost war. Teg knew better. The frigate was too small to trade broadsides with capital ships and too heavy for dogfights. More credible was Jaren’s account of its service raiding enemy convoys—a role the ship still served long after its builder had fled to Tharis. That the Shibboleth had flown a black flag longer than any other pirate craft wasn’t an idle boast.

  “Hoping she’ll be yours some day?” Teg asked in a tone that left no doubt the question was rhetorical.

  Deim’s smile remained as he faced the swordarm. “She already is,” he said before rushing past Teg and up the aft boarding ramp.

  Teg ascended the ramp at a less hurried pace, savoring the lightning scent of ether. Once aboard, he headed for the small room directly aft of the bridge that the crew simply called Tactical. The chamber featured a six-sided conference table made of the same black alloy as the ship's hull. There Jaren presided over meetings of the senior crew, consisting of himself, Nakvin, Deim, and Teg, who entered to find just such a meeting underway.

  Before taking a seat, Teg studied his fellow officers’ positions. Rank followed a flexible pecking order that varied with the business at hand. Jaren always sat at the head, but his seconds-in-command followed a complex rotation. Deim was co-owner of the ship and nominally Jaren's partner in financial matters, but Nakvin outranked him on the Wheel. Teg, the only senior crewman to have begun as a hired hand, technically answered to the other three; but even the captain deferred to him when weapons were drawn. Outsiders might have called the arrangement convoluted, but Jaren had let the chain of command develop as his officers worked together best.

  Filling the empty chair across from Nakvin, Teg listened as she shared the fruit of her research on Temil. Her target had been a Guild Magus who’d developed a sudden interest in history: specifically, the time of the Great Purge. “Shan made several unlogged runs into former Resistance space,” she said. “After a few weeks he started up a small-time smuggling operation.”

  “How’d we make him?” asked Teg.

  “He us
ed the same fence as us,” Jaren said.

  Nakvin slid an obsidian plaque to the middle of the table. “These charts track the orbit of an unnamed asteroid. It looks like Shan stumbled onto an old Gen military base.”

  Jaren picked up the plaque and scanned it. “You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “This wasn’t a Gen base. From these notes, I’d say it’s a thuerg fortress.”

  Teg raised his hand. “What’s a thuerg?”

  “Nothing now,” Nakvin said. “They were a Middle Stratum race that fought beside the Gen during the Purges.”

  “I thought Gen meant any nonhuman,” said Teg.

  Jaren’s grip on the tablet visibly tightened. He seemed to stare right through it, emerald fire flashing in his eyes. “There were others,” he said, though Teg had to strain to hear it.

  Facing his swordarm, Jaren spoke up. “In my father’s tongue, Gen means our people.”

  “Were your people killed in the Purge?” Deim asked Nakvin. She and Jaren stared at the junior steersman as if seeing him for the first time.

  “That's complicated,” Nakvin said. Her curt reply declared the subject off-limits.

  “Getting back to current business,” Jaren continued, “Magus Shan robbed this grave. It’s all ours now that he’s in his.”

  “We might even make some money,” said Teg. “If he left any swag behind.”

  “We’ll have more use for guns,” Jaren said, “if Dan’s pitch drummed up enough interest.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said Teg. “Pirates flock to freedom like Kethans to an open bar.”

  Jaren turned to Nakvin. “I want you on the Wheel,” he said. “Deim’s on backup.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting someone?” asked Teg.

  “I don’t expect much trouble,” Jaren said. “Pick out ten hands to crew the ship, then stay put and heal up. No sense risking your health on a salvage run.”

  “You’re leaving me here with twenty raucous pirates?” Teg said with mock surprise.

  Jaren cocked one red eyebrow. “Someone’s got to tidy up for company. Any objections?”

  “The sooner you leave, the better,” said Teg. “Then I can walk around in my skivvies and drink milk from the jug.” He winked at Nakvin, who rolled her silver eyes.

  Few of Teg’s past employers—and even fewer law enforcement officers—appreciated his sense of humor. Jaren’s tolerance of and occasional participation in Teg’s jokes remained a key reason for his continued service to the Gen. The growing excitement that Teg’s flippant demeanor concealed pertained to another, even more important reason. Like every member of Jaren’s crew, Teg had suffered loss at the Guild’s hands. Among the thinning freelance ranks, only Jaren seemed intent on paying the Steersmen back in kind. That resolve had earned Teg’s loyalty. Now, against all odds, it looked like his captain might pull it off.

  7

  To Nakvin’s eyes the asteroid field looked like a cannonade of gravel fired into a pink smoke cloud. The Shibboleth saw it as a school of lumpy grey jellyfish drifting in the ether current. The ship’s magnified, accelerated senses discerned the complex order disguised as chaos and shared that vision with its Steersman. Through the Wheel, Nakvin contemplated every detail. She saw each rock’s pitted surface, heard the chimes of signals bounced back to the ship, and tasted the coarse saltiness of cosmic dust.

  The Shibboleth heard a sustained sound originating from a position just ahead of the Wheel. Nakvin focused her dual awareness on her own senses. What the ship had perceived as a sluggish protracted vocalization, she recognized as Jaren’s voice.

  “ETA to the asteroid field?”

  Nudging her consciousness another step toward her body allowed Nakvin to respond. “At this depth, we’ll reach the outliers in about eight minutes.”

  The captain was standing behind his chair. His hands gripped the headrest as he stared through the bridge canopy into the vast pink haze. “See anything out of place?” he asked.

  Ignoring the absurdity of applying “out of place” to an asteroid field, Nakvin said, “The system looks just as deserted as Shan said.”

  Jaren drummed his fingers on the headrest before asking, “Where’s our target?”

  Nakvin superimposed Shan’s map over the canopy. Colored bands outlined each asteroid. “There,” she said, highlighting a rock that was dwarfed by most of its siblings.

  Jaren held his peace. Nakvin noticed the rest of the bridge crew silently looking at him. At length he hopped back into his chair and said, “Take us in.”

  Nakvin brought the vessel out of the ether like a runner slowing from a sprint to a jog, and the misty curtain gave way to the black of space. Jaren had spent the trip fretting over possible calamities: a Guild ambush, engine failure; an ether flare; something. The Steersman hoped that her captain’s mood would improve now that they’d arrived in one piece.

  “Deim,” Jaren spoke into the ship’s intercom, “Nakvin’s bringing us in. You’ll relieve her once we land.”

  Nakvin felt a little relieved as soon as Jaren gave the order. She was glad to have Deim along, if only because his presence cut her time on the Wheel in half. There was a reason the Shibboleth only had two steersman, and it wasn't her captain's thriftiness. Handling the Wheel took more than knowledge. Strong mental discipline and self-detachment were equally vital.

  On Deim’s first day of training, he’d asked Nakvin why she stood at the Wheel. She’d corrected his theory that installing a seat atop the circular dais would impede the sympathetic interface. “You’ve got it backward,” she’d said. “Standing forces you to stay at least a little focused on your own body. If you got too comfortable, you could lose yourself in the transessence.”

  Contrary to her intent, Deim had taken Nakvin’s warning as a challenge. She in turn held his infatuation with ether-running in bemused contempt. She didn't like the Wheel. Only iron discipline kept the sensation of having two bodies—one her own and one utterly alien—from driving her mad. Persistent rumor claimed that each year, a troubling percentage of Apprentices failed where she’d succeeded.

  Nakvin emerged from her daydream to see a craggy mass of iron and silicon looming before her. The asteroid’s irregular shape and erratic rotation complicated her approach, but she smoothly guided the ship into a stable orbit.

  “Not much to look at,” said Crofter, the forward gunner. A frown twisted His broad youthful face.

  “That's the idea,” Jaren said. “During the Purge, the Guild laid a bounty on anyone who wasn't human.”

  The captain turned to Nakvin. “The entrance won't be obvious. Sweep the whole surface.” After a brief pause he added, “Take it slow.”

  Though Nakvin focused all of her Wheel-amplified senses on the small celestial object, nearly an hour passed before something caught her attention. “Look,” she said, gesturing past the bridge dome to a raised point on the horizon.

  “Looks like every other pile of rock we've flown over,” Crofter said, but Jaren quietly studied the ridge.

  “Try to imagine if it were shifted about seventy degrees to the right,” Nakvin said.

  Jaren stood. He kept his back to Nakvin, but she saw his reflected face light up in the canopy. “Circle around to the north. Then line us up with that signpost and bring us in.”

  “You catch on fast,” Nakvin said.

  Crofter’s puzzled glare alternated between the captain and the Steersman. “What's everybody looking at?” he asked.

  Jaren pointed to the small range of hills. “That ridge looks natural at first, but from this angle you can see it's the thuerg sign for north. They took the asteroid’s rotation into account when they raised that pile. It’s almost impossible to see from the standard approach.”

  Muttering to himself, Crofter returned to his instrument panel.

  A quiet voice had nagged Jaren all the way from Tharis. When the Shibboleth touched down, the warning rose to a crescendo. It took all his resolve not to order an immediate retreat. He even considered brea
king his own rule against ship-to-shore sendings during a run but dismissed the idea. If he led his people into a trap, there’d be nothing that Teg could do about it from Melanoros.

  Once the ship was moored on a level field below the ridge, Jaren organized a landing party. He chose five of the ten crewmen to accompany him, but Nakvin spoke up.

  “I need some time away from the ship,” she said.

  Jaren eyed her skeptically. “You just came off a full shift at the Wheel. Aren’t you exhausted?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “At least I will be when I’ve had a chance to stretch my legs.”

  “All right, just don’t wander off and fall asleep.”

  The captain gathered his team in the ship’s small but well-stocked armory. He savored the scent of gun oil and the weight of his trade’s tools. Each man was issued the standard equipment that Teg had prepared before the ship’s departure: a belt-mounted aura projector that generated a thin envelope of fresh air and lessened harmful impacts, a wrist-mounted version of the same device, a zephyr, a splinterknife, and a blue gemstone ear stud Worked to carry sendings.

  Jaren wasn’t surprised to see that Nakvin eschewed the standard gear. Her Steersman's robe compensated for most of it, and then some. Even Jaren found the badge of his enemies captivating. The black silk drank light like space itself, and thread of gold patterns at sleeves and hem named its wearer a Magus skilled enough to teach her craft. The robe was more than a status symbol. Its every thread was infused with Workings of defense and influence whose power increased with its owner’s rank.

  “At least take this,” Jaren said, offering a zephyr to Nakvin. Teg maintained the armory like a man under holy vows, and the weapon’s finish held a mirror shine.

  Nakvin declined the offer with a gesture of her graceful hand. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’ve got my own protection.”

  Jaren knew about the dagger hidden in the folds of Nakvin’s robe. It wasn’t a neat, slender tool like the splinterknives, but a wicked-looking archaism with a corroded blade of beaten iron. Even Nakvin wasn't sure whether it was Worked or just cleverly forged. The lattice of cracks in the porous metal drank venom from her fangs, holding the poison till the blade cut something living.