by Tim Pratt
“Really? That seems like a lot of people to go fetch groceries.”
Elena snorted. “We’ve been cooped up here for months, and going off-station is a treat people line up for, even if it’s just to run errands.”
His eyes widened in alarm, or a good facsimile. “Are we stranded here, then? What if we suffer some disastrous failure of infrastructure? I can’t imagine pirates are scrupulous about doing safety checks. Are there escape pods or anything?”
This is a natural and reasonable thing to worry about, she told herself. “Oh, no. We’ve got two ships. They took the Golden Spider. We still have the White Raven in case of emergency.”
“Mmm.” Sebastien spun the empty bulb in the air before him, and watched it twirl. “Where are the bathrooms? I gather I’ve been peeing into a tube for some months, and I look forward to reasserting my agency in eliminative matters.”
“I’ll show you.” They floated out into the corridor. “There’s a whole locker room, basically. Showers, toilets, even a sauna.” She led him through a hatch and pointed. “Stalls over there. The toilets are basically the same as the zero-gravity ones we trained on. I’d sort of hoped five centuries of technology would make them more elegant, but nope.”
“Straps and vacuums? Charming.”
“That’s the word for it. There are lockers over there, and towels in this dispenser here. The showers are nice.” She pointed to a row of gleaming silver cylinders standing upright on the other side of the room. “You get in, slide the door shut, and water and optional soap sprays at you from various adjustable directions, then the water gets slurped out by fans at the top and bottom, and there’s forced-air drying. It’s really quite refreshing. You should try one.”
Sebastien looked over the showers. “Hmm. They look big enough for two.”
Elena’s face warmed up, and she shrugged. If he could fake nonchalant, so could she. “They’re nice. The pirates weren’t very good housekeepers, but they stole quality fixtures.”
“If you’ll excuse me?” He drifted off to one of the toilet stalls and swung the door shut behind him.
Elena floated over to look at the showers. Big enough for two… maybe she’d mention that to Callie.
Ashok murmured in her earpiece: “How goes the tour?”
“Fine so far.”
“No warning signs?”
“No red flags yet.” She thought about his questions regarding weapons and escape pods. Curiosity, or pointed curiosity? “Maybe a couple of pink ones. Things are going a lot better than they did last time, though.”
“There’s not blood everywhere, it’s true.” Ashok signed off.
Sebastien emerged from the stall, shaking his head ruefully. “That process will never feel natural. It would be nice to live somewhere with gravity again.” He floated to the towel dispenser and pulled out a strip of cloth, then drifted toward her. He cocked his head. “I haven’t had a shower in five hundred years. I think I’d like one. Care to join me?” He began to slide down the zipper of his jumpsuit.
She put her hand on his chest – just below the unzipped portion – and lightly pushed him away, sending him drifting backward. “Sebastien, I…” She swallowed. “I’m flattered. But I’m with Callie now.”
He regarded her for a moment, his expression blank and unreadable, and then smiled widely. “But that’s wonderful! To find love, across the centuries! How marvelous. Is it love?”
Elena nodded. “As far as I can tell. You’re not upset?”
“Upset? No, no – she’s the daring space captain who saved your life. It’s only natural for you to show your appreciation. Rank has its privileges and all that.”
She frowned, but before she could formulate a response, he went on.
“I’m disappointed, of course – I always thought, once we reached our destination and set about the great work, that you and I might… explore our relationship further. But hopes are not the same as expectations, and neither of those is the same as a requirement. I would still like a shower, though, even a lonesome one. Show me how it works?”
Elena decided to let his shitty comment roll off unremarked-upon. He’d been through a lot, after all. “Of course.” She slid open the nearest cylinder. “There’s a button there–”
Sebastien shoved her into the shower, and she yelped as she crashed against the interior wall. She spun herself around in the small space, but he was already sliding the doors closed. She hit the release button, and the doors tried to slide open, but something had them jammed – he’d tied the towel around the door handles, trapping her. He looked at her through the crack in the door. His expression was utterly blank.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Pursuing my destiny, Elena.”
She darted forward, slipping her hand through the crack to try to jab him in the eyes, but he pulled back and vanished from her sight.
Elena sighed. “Ashok?”
“Yes.”
“Sebastien just locked me in a shower pod.”
“I see.”
“Where’s he going?”
“He’s coming toward the medical bay. I could tase him or something but I guess we’re supposed to see how this plays out?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Standing by, then.”
Elena listened to the low hiss of the open channel for a long moment, tense, waiting for sounds of violence.
Finally Ashok said, “He didn’t come in. He switched on the infirmary’s quarantine mode and sealed me inside. We knew those Axiom implants gave him great computer skills, and I guess his brain remembers them. I’ve still got him on the monitors, though. Now he’s systematically checking all the parts of the station you didn’t show him on the tour.”
“He’s looking for the armory,” Elena said.
“I assume. Oops, there we go, he found the guns. Huh. So… do we call this a failure? I can punch us out.”
“Give it a moment? Obviously it’s not a success, but… let’s see what he does. Maybe we’ve made some progress. For a while there, he really seemed like his old self. He hasn’t murdered anyone yet. Being less homicidal, that’s a big step, right?”
“I feel like you’re setting a pretty low bar there, Elena, but sure, let’s see where he goes from here.” Pause. “He’s at a terminal, consulting the station map. Now he’s pulling up the technical schematics for Glauketas, but I can’t tell what he’s looking for.” Pause. “Now he’s heading for the airlock, where the White Raven is docked. You think he’s going to take off? We could yell at him over the public address system if you want.”
“I don’t know what we’d say.” Elena rested her forehead against the smooth, cool wall of the shower pod.
“He’s boarded the White Raven.” Pause. “He’s powering up the engines.”
“Well. At least he went non-lethal this time,” Elena said. “He just locked us up. Maybe his conscience is starting to grow back–”
“He’s firing on the station now.” A distant thud made the room vibrate. “He… yep, he’s definitely targeting our life support systems. I guess that’s what he was looking at the schematics for.”
“All right, fine,” Elena sighed. “It’s a failure.”
She sat up in the medical bay, where Ashok was unplugging himself from his own Hypnos rig. Sebastien slept on, diadem still sparkling on his brow.
“Sorry that didn’t go better,” Ashok said.
Elena nodded. “Me too, but… even so, there was progress. It’s not like last time, when he just murdered everyone. This time he was calm, conversational, even seemed like his old self until the end.” As she spoke, Elena realized that wasn’t as reassuring as it had seemed initially.
Ashok shrugged. “OK, sure, but this time he was manipulative and made plans to escape before killing us. He went from homicidal maniac to cold-blooded premeditated murderer. In some ways, a total beast is easier to deal with than a mission-driven psychopath.”
“I know.” Elena looked
at Sebastien. “Still, getting his higher functions back is a start. He’s not his old self yet, I know, but it seems like elements of his old self remain. If the drug therapies keep doing their work, maybe his empathy will come back.”
“That would be nice,” Ashok said. “He seems like he’d have a lot to offer if we could tone down the killing-spree stuff.” He handed Elena a bulb of coffee, and she sipped the lukewarm contents. Not nearly as delicious as the coffee in the Hypnos, of course. That was the joy of virtual reality, at least when using the absurdly high-quality gear they had here: everything was its best self.
Except Sebastien.
Chapter 12
The White Raven was built for space, and it was going to stay in space, under the care of Drake and Janice and Shall. The rest of the crew took the canoe – their transport-and-landing vessel, usually tucked snugly into the Raven’s cargo hold – down to the planet’s surface, a bumpy ride through atmospheric turbulence. Lantern was especially miserable, since the canoe had been made with human passengers in mind, and they’d had to improvise a webbing of straps to keep her in place. Once they got about ten thousand meters above the surface, Callie switched them over to auto-landing mode, letting the ground control tower at the spaceport outside the planet’s main settlement, Rheged, guide them in. They landed with barely a bump, but the unaccustomed gravity dragged them all into slumps.
Their doors were sealed while the port’s sniffer-sensors made sure there weren’t any nasty radioactive substances or pathogens on board. Then the airlocks unlocked, and Callie opened both the inner and outer doors to the world beyond.
Owain smelled like–
“It smells like Halloween!” Elena said.
Ashok took a deep breath through what he had instead of a nose. “Oxygen, water, assorted aldehydes, alkyl benzenes, some oxygenated monoaromatics, and various polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
“Burning leaves,” Stephen said. “Or wood smoke.”
“Burning,” Lantern said. “Is there danger?” Lantern hadn’t spent much time on any planet, and in ships and on space stations, the smell of smoke was almost never a good thing.
“I don’t think so.” Callie stepped out of the canoe, blinking in the sunlight. There was a certain brightness and harshness to the light that she associated with deserts on Earth, which was just due to the fact that Owain’s star didn’t shine at precisely the same wavelength as Earth’s, though the relative distance between the bodies was roughly equivalent. The air here was crisp, but not cold, and that tinge of smoke in the air really did remind her of her childhood autumns spent camping on Earth.
They were in a landing zone, surrounded by a dozen ships parked in their own little marked-off areas. There were stands of leafy green trees off in the distance, and buildings of a curiously jumbled-looking design nearby. The sky was remarkably Earthlike, blue and scattered with low clouds, but that made sense, upon reflection – the terraforming engines the Liar and human engineers built had attempted to recreate as Earthlike an atmosphere as possible.
Callie waved to a ground control officer, dressed in a jumpsuit decorated with a constellation of sparkling tiny lights in various colors. Good for visibility for night landings, probably, but also clearly just the local – what had Elena called it? – bohemian style. “What’s on fire?” she said.
“Hmm?” The officer cocked their head, then grinned, showing off a mouthful of teeth somehow carved into tiny skulls. “Oh, that’s the wood-fired pizza ovens. It’s the lunch rush.” They pointed to a cluster of buildings across the landing zones, beyond the parked ships. “That’s the Welcome Center. Over there we’ve got food, drinks, rooms for rent, entertainment for weary travelers, all that sort of thing.”
“Food isn’t a terrible idea,” Callie said. “What do I do for ground transportation?”
“Just hit up the local channel on the Tangle, should give you all the options in the world. The port has an expert system to help you winnow down the choices and find the right option for your budget and business needs, blah blah blah. Welcome to Rheged!” They waved and bustled on about their business.
Callie turned and looked over her crew. Stephen prodded gingerly at the smooth, hard surface of the landing zone with the toe of his boot, his customary slouch even more slumped than usual. Ashok was peering at the Welcome Center through his external optics, probably reading a menu from five hundred meters away. Lantern delicately ambled around the nearest ship, a low-slung rich person’s toy – just about every Liar Callie had ever met had a deep and abiding interest in machines, and Lantern was no different.
Elena was… well, she was gamboling. Bouncing on her toes, doing little pirouettes, stretching out her arms and spinning. Callie half-expected cartwheels. The gravity was heavy, but Callie felt good, too. You had to take care of yourself in space, and she’d kept up on her supplements and electro-stimulants, and they’d all taken small doses of Stephen’s personal blend of muscle enhancers before departure. She wasn’t up for running a marathon, but she could probably manage a sprint if she had to.
Elena bounced over to her. “Callie! I am on another planet. I am an interplanetary explorer! I’ve been on moons before, sure, but, pfft, moons – this is another planet! Humans live here, did you know?”
“It is, and they do, and I did. In that restaurant over there they probably have food made with things that grew in the dirt in the open air. And maybe made of some things that ate those things, if you’re feeling carnivorous. The prospect of fresh food from planetary soil sounds exciting to me, and I’m not even an unfrozen prehistoric caveperson biologist.”
“Do you think they have cheese made from actual milk and not nutritional yeast?”
“I live in hope. Why don’t you amble over that way while I make arrangements to meet our contact at Almajara Corp?”
Elena bounced over and gave her a kiss. “Do you know what you are, Kalea Machedo?”
“What?”
“You are the heart of my heart.” Elena zipped away and herded the others together and toward the restaurant with the force of sheer enthusiasm.
Callie opened her comms. The White Raven was in orbit, close enough for real-time communication, so she reached out to Shall. “We didn’t crash.” That was her traditional way of saying “We arrived safely,” a message she’d once upon a time sent without fail to Michael, now deployed only on occasion with his estranged digital twin. “We’re going to get something to eat at the spaceport.”
“You humans and your need to consume organic material in order to replenish energy,” Shall said. “It’s like you’ve never heard of nuclear fusion.”
“Could you reach out to our point person at Almajara and let them know we’re here and ready to start solving all their problems for money? Maybe set up a meeting?”
“I live to serve.”
Huh. Michael had said the same thing to her when she asked him for a favor on Ganymede. The similarities between the two of them were more glaring now that she’d had an ex-husband refresher. “Do you? I hadn’t noticed that.” Callie checked in briefly with Drake and Janice – “We’re fine,” Drake said; “We know how to make a ship fall continuously in a circle around a planet without crashing, thanks,” Janice said – and then strolled along after her crew, enjoying the feel of her muscles moving against the gravity.
Her crew made an odd-looking group, viewed from a little distance: the alien, the cyborg, the woman out of time, and the doleful mountain of a man. Callie felt a sudden rush of love for them – for her whole crew. They’d gone through unimaginable things together. Attacked by hostile cultists, lost on a deadly space station, witnessing the deaths of fifty thousand of their friends and neighbors on Meditreme Station, months hiding out and pretending to be dead – and they were still together, still willing to fight for each other, still walking together companionably toward a meal. These were her people, along with Drake and Janice and Shall, and these moments, when they were all as safe and happy as their individu
al capabilities allowed them to be, were precious, and to be savored. They were what she fought for.
She ran a little to catch up.
As they drew closer to the Welcome Center, Elena vocally marveled at the architecture, and even in the depths of his grumpy heart, Stephen had to admit it was all rather cute. “Is that building shaped like a giant mushroom?” Elena said. “And that tower at the end… is that a carrot? Look, it even has a big green sprout on top! That one looks like a rocket, but the old-timey kind–”
“So, like, the kind they had in your day?” Ashok’s tone was all innocence. Was he capable of such dry teasing? Stephen wondered. No. He was probably being sincere… but if he was developing a new degree of conversational nuance, that was a development that bore watching with suspicion.
Elena was apparently unoffended. “Even earlier than that, if you can imagine it – it’s like the way people in the past imagined rockets of the future would be. Look at those round portholes, and those fins at the bottom! Why are all the buildings shaped like things? That one over there looks like a giant snail with a rainbow shell.”
“Artists,” Stephen shook his head as he tromped along, feeling every kilogram of his body’s weight for the first time in ages. “Owain is lousy with them. They get in everywhere.”
“Give materials science its due,” Ashok said. “Most of the buildings here are made of ultragel.”
“An innovation of the Free.” Lantern spoke from an artificial voicebox, of course, but still managed to sound smug.
“Hey, now, ultragel is a true collaboration,” Ashok said. “Look at that building over there! It looks like someone threw a bunch of sticks in the air and then froze them in the act of falling.” The tower at the far end of the plaza was an organic and chaotic assemblage of eight or nine rough cylinders of assorted lengths, all painted and sculpted to resemble twigs half-stripped of their bark, subtly joined at peculiar angles. It reminded Stephen, unpleasantly, of the internal-structure-of-an-anthill organic shape of the Axiom space station where they’d rescued Elena’s crew. “That would be a pain to build with concrete or steel or wood, if you actually wanted people to be able to live and work and walk around inside. But ultragel makes it easy.”