The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Someone groaned, and Elena recognized the voice: Callie. She struggled with the straps, freed herself (with Sebastien’s help), and pulled herself through the dimness to the next bed. “Wha’ hit us?” Callie said. “Elena?”

  “The terror drone did… something,” Elena said. “Knocked us all out, and disabled the ship somehow. We’re drifting, I guess? I don’t know why the drone didn’t just tear us apart once we were disabled.”

  Callie fumbled with the straps, and Elena helped her. “How is everyone?”

  “Unconscious, mostly.”

  “You brought me in here?” Callie pressed a hand to her forehead. Elena had almost never seen her look so vulnerable.

  “No. Sebastien did. He helped us. All of us.”

  Callie turned her head. Sebastien gave her a funny little bow. “Like I said. I want to help.”

  “Even without your tiny flying babysitters.” Callie looked at Sebastien for a thoughtful moment. “OK. Elena, you’re our only conscious medic, so see how everyone is doing. I’m going to see if I can get Shall and the rest of the ship back online.” She pushed herself awkwardly across the room, floated through the open door, and on down a corridor.

  Elena checked on Sebastien and Q, who both seemed unharmed – no new bumps, blood, or bruises, anyway, though Q wouldn’t feel good when she woke up, still being tender from her earlier snuggle with death. Elena opened one of the supply cabinets and found capsules of ammonia inhalants, for rousing people from faints or snapping them back to wakefulness after injuries that left them dazed. In gravity, you could often wake someone up by putting them on their back and elevating their legs to increase their venous return and pump oxygenated blood to the brain, but that wasn’t very effective in a weightless environment. She broke one open under Stephen’s nose. He jolted awake at the first inhalation and batted Elena’s hand away.

  “Oof. We’re alive? We’re alive. All right. To work.” He held out his hands for the vial of salts and went to Q. “Elena, go check on Ashok and Drake and Janice. I’ll try to figure out how to wake up Lantern.”

  “I think I can help with that.” Elena had studied Liar physiology a bit, and though it was hard to know anything for sure given the species’ penchant for self-experimentation and modification, there was usually a nerve cluster at the base of the two major pseudopods, and if she gave that spot a hard poke with two stiffened fingers…

  Lantern flailed and spun, shoving herself away from Elena and floating halfway to the ceiling. “Ah! What!”

  “Sorry, sorry, you were unconscious!” Elena said.

  Lantern oriented herself in the air and fluttered distress. “Oh, no, the drone, the terror drone, they were made for stopping escapes, for quelling riots, for crowd control, for disabling… Ashok!” She twirled and shoved and went hurtling down the corridor.

  “I think Lantern can be counted on to check on Ashok.” Stephen looked up from helping Q and made a shooing motion. “Drake and Janice might need you. Go!”

  Elena went, and Sebastien trailed after.

  “Come on, come on,” Callie muttered. She was in the depths of the ship, below the engine room, in the usually-sealed cylindrical space where Shall’s brain lived. The banks of processors around her should have been warm and humming and glowing with soft white light, but they were cold and quiet and dark. There was a backup of him on Glauketas, and an instance of his consciousness running on Lantern’s base too, helping to rear the Liar children they’d rescued, so Shall wasn’t dead – he’d just lose his memories of this trip, and everything that had happened since they left their home asteroid. But if she couldn’t wake up this version of him, they might not survive to fill him in on everything he’d lost. Repairs that would take hours with Shall’s drones scuttling around on the hull and deep in the guts of the ship would take days or weeks if Ashok, Lantern, and Callie had to do it all by hand, and she did not relish the idea of being wherever they were, disabled and helpless, for that long.

  After she finished checking all the physical connections, she pressed down hard on a bright-red stud in the center of one wall and held it, counting slowly to thirty under her breath, then released it.

  Nothing happened. “Come on,” she said. “Resurrection Day, goddamn it.”

  Another five seconds went by, and then a light flickered, and then another, and then a whole array of lights, all around the cylinder, and she heard the ship wake up too, with a deep and reassuring thrum – the first thing Shall did when he came back online was set things right again. He was the best ship a captain could hope for.

  “Callie,” Shall said. “I was dead for a little while there. I hate being dead.”

  “I know the feeling. You’re OK?”

  “Self-diagnostics check out. Something knocked everything offline. Some kind of electromagnetic pulse attack, I assume?”

  “No, I… The blast didn’t just knock the ship offline – it knocked our brains offline. All of us passed out for a while. I don’t even know if everyone is all right.”

  “Checking life signs… they’re OK. Everyone’s awake accept Drake and Janice. Let me restart their chair, so it can administer medication, maybe stimulants if the expert system thinks it’s warranted… There it goes. Oh, dear. Janice is swearing a lot. Not an EMP, then. Some kind of Axiom weapon, that disrupts electrical systems and biological ones. That’s not terrifying at all.”

  “Where are we?” Callie said.

  “Drifting, a few dozen kilometers away from the Axiom station. The blast the terror drone hit us with must have had some concussive element as well as a disabling one – or else it followed up the disruptor with a more conventional blast.”

  Callie nodded. “That makes sense: disable any security systems, then kablammo.”

  “The attack caught us glancingly, because the drone was aiming at the spot where it thought we were. We only got hit with a fraction of the weapon’s full intensity. That was enough to send us spinning, though. When we went dark, our displacement projectors stopped working, and the illusion vanished – maybe the terror drone thinks we’re dead. At any rate, it must not have noticed the real version of us twirling through the dark, or else it’s satisfied we’re no longer a threat, because I don’t see it on my scans. Its asteroid is there, though… and it’s whole again. Looks like an innocent stone potato. I can’t even detect the seams, and I know where they are. That’s bizarre. But the spider has crawled back inside its egg.” He paused. “I don’t think the direct approach is going to work for us here, Callie.”

  “But that’s my favorite kind of approach,” Callie said. “Running straight ahead, with a dagger in my teeth.”

  “Alas. Life is little more than a pageant of disappointments.”

  “I think that line was in our wedding vows.”

  “The good news is, we aren’t dead.” Callie looked over the assembled crew in the galley, their de facto meeting room since forever and always. It was strange to see Q there, but she seemed a decent enough sort – she hadn’t freaked out or made impossible demands when she found out about the Axiom. It was even stranger to see Sebastien there, but at least his drones were buzzing around his head again – that made her feel better. He hadn’t objected to the reinstatement of his minders, or even sulked about it, which was either reassuring or worrying, depending on how you looked at it. “The bad news is, the swarm isn’t dead, either. Or the terror drones. Or the really big, terrifyingly big, giant-sized big Axiom facility. Walking up to the front door didn’t work, and there’s no back door. So. Suggestions?”

  “Evacuate Owain, seal off the bridge to this system, and leave forever?” Q said. “I don’t want to do that – I worked hard to make that planet what it is – but if the alternative is horrible death or being turned into raw material to build a giant robotic alien eggbeater, a retreat is worth considering.”

  “We’ll call that Plan C,” Callie said. “It would be tricky to implement without letting everyone know about the Axiom. Even if we could convince t
he artists and utopians to leave a planet they have finally terraformed to their liking – ha, that would be easy, I bet – the Corp isn’t going to want to walk away from an investment of this size.”

  “You have connections at Almajara, though,” Q said. “Maybe you could come up with a story that would convince them?”

  She snorted. “Yeah, no. Uncle Reynauld isn’t going to take the advice of his grand-nephew’s ex-wife, or even his grand-nephew. He’s got that thing where he thinks he always knows best, even when he doesn’t know shit. Still, it might come down to saving as many people as we can. Let’s try to come up with a Plan B first, though.”

  “The truth-tellers,” Lantern said. “Their station is only a few days’ journey from here – beyond the Axiom facility, and so not really in the path of the swarm. I thought the cell must have been destroyed, but perhaps they’ve gone silent for some other reason? They may have answers. My sect has been watching this Axiom facility, and secretly protecting it, for thousands of years. I’m sure there’s data there.”

  “I prefer blowing up enemies to paying them friendly visits, but I appreciate the necessity of doing the latter before I can do the former,” Callie said. “Does anyone else have a better candidate for Plan B?”

  No one did. “Are you going to use your, ah… personal bridge generator for this trip?” Q said.

  “Stephen told you about that, huh?” Callie shook her head. “Despite my natural inclination to move fast, we should take a minute. We still have to run a lot of diagnostics to make sure the ship is in good working order, and frankly, after that encounter… we could all use a little down time before we have to risk someone else shooting at us.” She turned to Lantern. “Go talk to Janice about the coordinates, and she can chart us a course that takes us the long way around the Axiom base. The rest of you, get some rest, center yourselves, take painkillers if you got banged up, whatever. We’ll reconvene when we have something to reconvene about.” She felt pretty banged up herself, and went to take her own advice.

  When Elena came in, Callie was in bed, staring at the ceiling. “Want some company?”

  “Only if it’s your company.” Callie scooted over, and Elena folded in next to her.

  After a long quiet moment, Elena said, “I’m glad we’re alive. I would have missed you, in the endless abyss of nothingness that lies beyond life.”

  “Likewise.” Callie wrapped her arms around her. “We had what, in technical terms, is called a failure today. But my ship still works, and nobody died, so I’m declaring it a draw.”

  “How about Sebastien, though?” Elena said. “That’s a win. He was the first one to wake up. No drones watching him. Total freedom. And what did he do? He helped.”

  “Mmm,” Callie said.

  “What, mmm?”

  “Nothing mmm. Just mmm.” Callie shifted around, drawing Elena closer, nuzzling into her hair. “I am acknowledging that I heard and processed the words you spoke.”

  “Hold on, I need to adjust my mental state,” Elena said. “Let me look at the world through your eyes for a second. I just need to be sixty percent more suspicious, twenty percent more cynical–”

  “Forty.”

  “Forty percent more cynical… Ah. So maybe Sebastien didn’t prove himself today. Maybe he took an opportunity to trick us into trusting him. Am I on the right track?”

  “No comment.”

  Elena took her own turn staring at the ceiling as she worked it out. “The ship only had emergency power anyway. No engines, no weapons, and no wormhole generator. Sebastien had his freedom, but he couldn’t go anywhere. There was no incentive for him to throw our bodies out an airlock, at least not right at that moment, because he needed us to fix the ship. So instead, he played helpful junior crewman and did good deeds, so we’d start to trust him and let our guard down, all the better for him to murder us later.”

  “That interpretation fits the available evidence just as well as your theory, you must admit.”

  “Such a dark worldview for one so young,” Elena said.

  “Yours is bright enough for both of us.”

  Chapter 21

  “We should be close enough to communicate with the truth-teller base now.” Lantern was in the cockpit, perched in one of the chairs behind Callie. “Assuming it wasn’t devoured by the swarm. Janice, can you broadcast a message from me? I need to establish my credentials before we can talk directly.”

  “Queue it up and I’ll send it.”

  Lantern’s pseudopods tapped at the terminal attached to the chair for a moment. “Transmit that message, on the frequency I noted.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “What did you tell them?” Callie asked.

  “It’s just… what would you call it, a code word? A secret handshake? Something to let them know I am of the truth-tellers. They will ask me why I’m on a human ship, and I’ll…”

  “Tell a lie?” Callie said. “I hope you’re going to tell a lie.”

  “Yes. I must. I hate to knowingly tell a falsehood, it goes against all my training, but as the elders deceived me, so I must deceive them. It’s true that I was sent by the central authority to determine why they lost contact. I will tell them that, and that I acquired a human ship so I could travel to Taliesen without attracting attention, as the Free are a minority there. I will be indignant, and demand answers on behalf of the central authority. As the head of our cell in the Jovian system, I have high-level authorizations, so they might even answer me, if there’s anyone alive to do the answering.”

  “The Jovian system?” Callie said. “Why isn’t it called the Earth system? When the Liars found us, humans only lived on Earth and the moon and a few space stations.”

  “Jupiter is where the bridge is,” Lantern said. “From the point of view of secret servants to the Axiom, that’s the important part. I’m sorry. I didn’t devise the nomenclature.”

  “Jovian system,” Callie muttered. “If they heard that in the Imperative, they’d be even more smug and insufferable.”

  “We got a reply,” Janice said. “Audio only.” She played a few seconds of whistling and screeching.

  “That’s… extremely odd,” Lantern said.

  “What?” Callie said.

  “You must understand, sound is only one of the ways my people communicate among ourselves – movements of our limbs and alterations in color and even pheromone discharges are crucial for adding nuance and detail. Hearing just the audio is the human equivalent to a sentence spoken in monotone, with no adjectives or other modifiers. But the closest translation is probably something like… ‘Praise the masters, and welcome.’”

  “Do they mean that like, ‘Thank God, you’ve come to rescue us,’ or is ‘praise the masters’ a religious greeting like ‘peace be unto you,’ or what?” Callie said.

  Lantern fluttered her pseudopods in dismay. “‘Praise the masters’ is a ritual greeting, but only among the elders of the truth-tellers, the ones who know our sect’s real purpose. But Callie… no elder would send that greeting over an open channel. Or any channel. It’s something that’s only said face-to-face, and there’s a thrill of secret danger even then, because if anyone overheard it, there would be questions. I’m very confused. I’ll request permission to dock and board the base.”

  Another message sent, another wait, and then another audio response that Lantern translated in bewilderment. “It says we should enter the… I don’t know if there’s a word in your language for this. The term refers to a part of sleep, just before you begin to dream? ‘Enter the place before the dream begins.’ That phrase, ‘the place before the dream begins’ is sometimes meant literally, to describe the time right after you’ve fallen asleep, but it’s also an idiom among my people, referring to the… time of mental and practical preparation that comes just before you commence a great work of some kind. The moments before you begin the work of making something imagined or talked about into reality. But without some visual cues, I have no idea if the tra
nsmission means it literally or metaphorically – and no idea what it would mean in either case.”

  “I heard ‘welcome’ and ‘enter’ so that’s good enough for me,” Callie said. “Let’s get ready. Are we taking weapons? We could fire up Shall’s military combat drone.”

  “That might make the wrong impression,” Lantern said. “I come cloaked in the raiment of our sect’s authority, and a show of overt force would be unnecessary… unless things have gone badly wrong here. I should go alone – or, at least, apparently alone.”

  “Got it. I’ll come along in stealth. Death from the shadows.”

  “Perhaps just inconvenience from the shadows, at first?” Lantern said. “There may be junior members of the cell on board who are blameless.”

  Callie scowled. “Even your junior members are happy enough to kill any innocent person who stumbles across Axiom technology.”

  “Because they think it is necessary to protect all life, Callie.” Lantern was patient but implacable. “The sincere truth-tellers see Axiom technology as an infection, and if that infection is allowed to spread, it could kill every thinking creature in the galaxy. They take whatever steps they believe necessary to contain that infection, and regret when innocents are harmed.”

  “I’m sure their regret is a great comfort to the dead thousands on Meditreme Station. But all right. I’ll stick to non-lethal solutions, unless there’s no other choice. How long until we reach the base?”

  “We’ll be in visual range by the time you get dressed,” Janice said.

  “That is so not your color,” Elena said, as Callie dressed in the ruinously expensive prototype environment suit she’d acquired from a canceled Trans-Neptunian Authority research project.