Sasha swallowed visibly. He was telling her he was going to blow the ship. That she and the crew would have to abandon ship.
“Yessir,” she said crisply. “All those checks are done.”
“Good,” he said. He stabbed the red button that executed the changes he’d just programmed into the system.
Then he slid his foot free and drifted over to the nav console.
“Captain, I’ve got something weird on my last fix,” said the quartermaster, a thin, blond man named Brian Chenowith. “My planetary fixes all check, but my sidereal fixes are off. It looks like a systematic error.” He frowned. “I just can’t trace it down.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said Grant.
Chenowith blinked. “Don’t sweat it?”
“As long as we’re holding good orbit versus the planet, we’re okay. We’ll figure out the error in the star fixes later.”
“But—”
“Look, I want you to check in with the crew, one by one. Let them know we’re suspending casualty drills for the duration of this job.”
Chenowith opened his mouth and then shut it again.
“If they hear an alarm it’s going to be the real thing,” said Grant.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the quartermaster, not taking his eyes off his captain.
Grant clapped him on the shoulder and drifted over to the next console.
The feint against Zombie’s palace had worked perfectly, drawing in the crime lord’s security. What Grant hadn’t counted on was Rad’s refusal to leave. He had made his deal with Zombie never expecting he’d have to honor it.
But because Rad hadn’t fled, neither had he.
Which meant he was going to have to help a mad man spread his unique brand of corruption across the stars.
And Grant just couldn’t do that.
Raised voices cut through his reverie.
“We’ve been in orbit for nearly a week,” said the octopus.
The engineer shrugged. “Dee rose requires delicate adjustment. You don’t vant me to make a mistake, do you?”
“I want to be on our way, Engineer.”
“To vere,” she snapped. “Enceladus?”
A cold, frightened silence fell over the bridge like a blanket, no one speaking, everyone looking anywhere but at the octopus and his chief engineer.
One just did not talk to the ruler of Hole in that way.
In a soft, dangerous voice, Zombie said, “It is past time to go, Engineer.”
Radhani opened her mouth to answer, but before she could get the words out the panicked shriek of an emergency klaxon tore through the bridge.
“Report!” Grant shouted.
Sasha looked up from her board. “Captain, I have a hot plasma leak on the starboard fuel line. The transfer pump is venting.”
“Secure the line.” He looked at Chenowith. “Cut that alarm.”
The terrible bleating suddenly cut out.
Sasha’s hands played across her board for a few moments and then she looked up. “Sir, I can’t isolate the line. The iso valves are damaged.”
Grant was over her shoulder, studying the board. It was a sea of crimson. “We’re going to lose the ship,” he muttered. He looked over at Chenowith and roared: “Quartermaster, pass the word. All hands abandon ship.”
“Wait,” Radhani shouted, pushing her way through the crowd of soldiers.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” snapped Chenowith. He picked up the 1MC mike and said, “All hands abandon ship. I say again, all hands abandon ship.”
“WAIT!” Radhani roared.
“Go, go,” said Grant, pushing Sasha toward the bridge’s spacetight hatch. He looked over at Chenowith. “GO!”
“You don’t have to abandon ship,” said Radhani. “You can do a hot vent to space.” Her fingers were flying across the board.
“No, Rad. Just go. If you don’t bleed the plasma off fast enough we could have uncontained matter-antimatter intermix and—”
The red lights on the engineering board flickered back to green.
“There,” said Radhani.
Just then the freighter shuddered. Then again. And again.
“What’s that?” cried Zombie.
“It’s rats,” said Radhani bitterly. “Leaving a sinking ship.”
“What?” said Grant. “What’re you trying to—”
She turned to look at him, those dark eyes locked on his face. “It’s him,” she said coldly. “He shows up and someone tries to steal the rose from your estate. And then there’s a sudden ‘disaster’ aboard his ship, one that’s not really a disaster, at all. I bet one of his escaping crewmen took the rose.”
It wasn’t true, but it would seem true to the crime lord. In fact it was a better plan than Grant’s real plan.
Zombie stared at her for a long moment.
“Lear!” he roared.
The orangutan jerked upright. “Mejia. Simmons. With me.”
“You, too, Engineer,” said Zombie. “Ensure for me that my prize was not damaged.”
Radhani nodded gravely. “Yes, sir.”
They pushed off from the deck and tumbled out of the bridge hatch.
“None of this is true,” Grant said, after they were gone.
“We shall see,” said Zombie. “I warn you, Holtzmann, if it is true my anger will be very great.”
Ten minutes later the ship shuddered one last time as the final escape pod rocketed away.
***
Lear returned to the bridge and there was something in his face that Grant had never before seen.
Terror.
No one had taken the rose, but someone had damaged it. The vandal had melted iron and dribbled it onto the device until it hardened into a rough, gray cap. None of the petals were visible.
“Can this be fixed?” asked Zombie, when he saw the damaged treasure. “Where’s Shekaran?”
“We got separated—” Lear began.
“Gone,” said Grant. “I’ll bet the security feed will show she took the last pod. She was the traitor all along. She tried to steal the rose and when she failed, she damaged it.”
“You are certain?” said Zombie.
“Well I know it wasn’t me.”
Zombie shook his head. “She is a fool. I’ll find someone to repair the rose and we’ll hire a new crew for this ship. She has delayed my plans—not stopped them.” His voice grew arctic. “And someday she will pay for this insult—if I have to hunt her through every last world in known space.”
The octopus turned to his lieutenant. “Signal the planet to send a shuttle to retrieve us.”
Lear nodded vigorously, only too happy to comply.
Grant pushed off against the deck, drifting away from Zombie and his soldiers. He didn’t believe a shuttle was coming—though it would take the octopus a long time to figure that out—and even longer to figure out why.
The lightspeed barrier was an absolute limit, an obstacle that could never be crossed. A rose could be used to change that barrier, to give human vessels some more head room, to allow them to go faster and faster, effectively reducing the distances between the stars.
But it could work the other way, too. It was possible that the rose could be used to reduce the speed of light. Grant thought of Chenowith’s bad fixes. He thought that was exactly what would happen if there was a lightspeed differential between Hole and the external universe.
Carolina had been in orbit for a week, and for every second of that week the speed of light had been growing slower and slower. So slow that interplanetary travel would take ages, shuttles wouldn’t be able to reach escape velocity. Maybe even the slow, steady beat of a human heart would push up against the new, slower barrier.
Everyone on the world below was a fly trapped in amber.
In his heart, Grant forgave Rad for abandoning him. She had no other choice. It had to be her that escaped, so Zombie couldn’t force her to repair the rose. It had to be her that escaped, so the corruption that had swallowed their world coul
d be bottled up and never loosed upon the stars.
Besides, it was only fair. He was the one who had escaped last time.
Grant looked out on the stars for a long time and was surprised to find that he was not worried about his fate. It was true that he, too, would be marooned on this slow world, but that didn’t frighten him. For he’d been caught by love many years ago.
And from such traps there was never any escape.
Introduction to “Snake Bi”
Kellen Knolan makes his second visit to Fiction River’s pages, with another story centered around residents from the fictional town of Nexus, Louisiana. He’s now working on a novel in that universe. He has published three novels and two novellas in his Surfland series, under a different name.
Kellen’s first comic convention inspired this tale.
“It was incredible,” he writes. “I’d never seen a place where people of every persuasion felt free to be themselves. Not just the geeks and the Trekkies and the like. But people of every race, orientation, size, and shape. They were liberated, and if there’s anything young adults want to feel, it’s that.”
Snake Bi
Kellen Knolan
“So, they’re actually going to kill us? That’s what you’re saying.” Direct as usual, Sydney Latour was hoping her brother would tell her she was wrong.
“Yep. But promise me if I go first and you survive this, you’ll insist they make me into a pair of boots,” he shot back to her now confused face. “It’s better than being turned into one of those assless set of chaps, don’t you think?”
“You’re sick. You know that,” Sydney said, once again staring through the bushes at the rest stop a mile outside New Orleans.
“Me? Sick? I’m not the one wearing assless chaps.”
Rolling her eyes, Sydney took some comfort knowing that if this indeed was the end, her brother would go out of this life the way he’d lived it: As a jackass.
Irritating, sometimes infuriating, and just a bit disrespectful considering she was his older sister by five years, he was if nothing else consistent. He’d been that way from the moment of his birth two decades ago, and despite it all, nothing had ever really changed him. Not their half-crazy mom, not the racial insensitivity in high school, not when they’d nearly lost their coffee shop, not even when a left-for-dead bayou hex turned them into snake people.
Nope, not even then.
***
They were both used to it by now: Sydney and her brother, Sidney—that would be their half-crazy mom’s doing—were half-human, half snake. They hadn’t always been that way, of course. (High school was bad enough, especially as African-Americans.) They’d changed one night as they slept a few months ago. Not one’s typical day on the bayou, to be sure. But as just about everyone between 12 and 25 in their hometown of Nexus, Louisiana, had mutated in the past several months, their status was beginning to seem somewhat normal in its own freakishly abnormal way.
Everyone who had changed had become the latest generation of “The Storied,” just like every other generation before them that called Nexus home. The only generation that didn’t change was the previous generation, the parents of the kids who were changing now.
Historically, the residents of Nexus had always transformed in the decade after puberty’s onset, becoming the living embodiments of the “myths” of the swamps and bayous of western and southern Louisiana. Some were transformed into Roux-Ga-Roux, a werewolf shape-shifter. Others became nearly translucent, their glowing skin becoming “The Dancing Lights,” or Feu Follets. Others were Nixies, beautiful women who kept to the warm waters and the land that surrounded their homes. Living with them were the “Swamp Monsters,” strange men with webbed hands and feet.
There were beautiful men and women with webbed feet, too, just as there were female Roux-Ga-Roux. It had been that way for generations, though before people changed no one knew just which of The Storied the residents would become or as what myth they would live out their lives. They only got one choice: Whether or not to become “The Storied” in the first place.
And that’s where the tale became a very different one for the Latours and every other youth in Nexus: They hadn’t chosen to become Storied at all. Each one of them had simply woken up across a span of mornings last summer to discover they literally weren’t themselves anymore. Ashley Foret had become the living embodiment of the high school mascot. Jessica Vincent became a witch, Lance Cormier a zombie—although he still ran on the track team; that was interesting—and Destiny Doucet was a mermaid. The list went on and on. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, Sydney wasn’t sure.
Why people became the things they became and why it had suddenly started happening again in Nexus after not affecting their parents’ generation at all, no one knew. Certainly it was not without its problems. Madison Gaudet, who had always been one of the best young chefs in town, was now a vampire, a definite problem for someone who preferred to work with garlic. Marc Boudreaux, also African-American, was now a Roux-Ga-Roux and still trying to answer the question: “Is Head and Shoulders for butts and legs, too?” And Niki Bordelon had become a kind of pregnant dog, whose lactating in the cafeteria was beginning to cut into her dating schedule. (Sydney would give the hex this: It appreciated irony; Niki had always been a bitch.)
In any other town, this might have been a horror, a tragedy, or something in between—but not in Nexus. Part of it, of course, was that the return of The Storied was just that—a return. With the exception of the previous generation, the whole town understood what was happening, even if they didn’t always understand the departure from the normal swamp myths.
Moreover, Nexus was in Cajun Country, one of the most historic and yet impoverished parts of America. So, the people of Nexus had always taken things as they came, celebrating their challenges instead of being afraid of them. “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” they said. “Let the good times roll.” And through decades of poverty, storms and deprivation the people of Acadiana’s Cajun Country had.
And no two people more so than Sydney and Sidney Latour.
Their names were their mother’s way of never needing to yell more than one name to gather the two of them. Named for a city she’d never been to, in sympathy with an Aboriginal people she’d never met, she even gave the siblings the same middle name, sort of. Hers was Jean, as follows blue, while his was Jean, as precedes “Luc Picard.” Indeed, when she wanted to call them individually, that’s how she would do it.
Their mother’s quirks undeniably made life difficult. (Probably the reason Dad was long gone.) When she picked the siblings up from school in her pink Volkswagen Bus, there was always something weird coming out of the van’s speakers—sometimes Simon and Garfunkel, sometimes jazz, and sometimes the sounds of a didgeridoo. Their mother’s music symbolized her: definitely different. When they were in high school that difference, as much as being African-American, was what made some days harder than others. On the other hand, it had its benefits to two kids trying not to fall prey to casual racial stereotyping. “The Sounds of Silence” rattling the principal’s office windows from a block away could do that.
Indeed, by the time her brother had graduated from high school four years after her, Sydney could honestly say racism really wasn’t much of an issue in their lives. Not exactly the stereotype people had of the bayou, but true nonetheless. Not that everything was perfect; there was still the occasional redneck. But that certainly hadn’t stopped her and her brother from opening a coffee shop on the highway outside of town and doing rather well at it.
Until a left-for-dead bayou hex turned them into snake people. That again. At first they’d decided to stick with their small drive-thru kiosk on the side of the Nexus’s Jackson Bypass. Figuring they could get used to the never-ending comment, “Hey! I didn’t know it was Halloween,” there certainly was nothing in the Louisiana health code that forbade human-snake hybrids from making coffee. (They’d even gotten a 100 on their health department score.)
What they didn’t count on, however, was the exodus of their now-transformed local customer base. With the customers scared to leave town in their transformed state, the siblings’ business had fallen by more than half. At the time, Sydney had wondered what the big deal was to just cross the road (and, OK, a creek) from Nexus to the shop.
She was beginning to understand it now.
***
The Latours had made the two-hour drive to the outskirts of New Orleans to buy supplies as they had every two weeks since moving the coffee shop. Relocating to the old downtown, even though it was more boarded up shops and busted windows than actual businesses, had seemed to be the only way to stay open. That, and they really were getting tired of the Halloween jokes.
What they hadn’t counted on was the refusal of their coffee supplier to drive into downtown Nexus. Something about the streets not being wide enough for drivers, or some nonsense. So, along with changing the name of their shop from “Up-and-At’Em,” to “Coffee Down Under” (an allusion to downtown they knew would make their mother happy), they were now driving into the city a lot more than they ever intended. That having been said, it was all pretty easy: They got there in the dark hours of the morning, wore hooded sweatshirts, and were on and off the docks with no one any the wiser.
Until this morning.
At first it was like any other: They got their beans and began to head back to I-90 West about a half-mile south. And, like always, at the first stoplight they peeled off their sweatshirts, a necessary precaution for two semi-lizards who tended to overheat even in the Louisiana winter.
The carjacking, however, that was new. They’d never seen it coming. One minute they were chatting, the next they were being forced at gunpoint out of their van and left on the side of the road. For anyone, this would be a nightmare. For two members of the Storied of Nexus, it was nearly impossible.
Realizing the first thing they needed to do was get to a less populated area before the sun came up, they made their way to a small rest stop they knew of just a mile or so down the interstate. Getting there just as the sun came up, they sat in the solitude of the nearby trees.
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