The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  It thinks we’re working for a rival faction of the Axiom, Sebastien said. It doesn’t even occur to the ruler that we could be anything else. Certainly not some lesser species.

  I like flying, Ashok said dreamily. His horde was outside, guarding against interruptions, in theory.

  “Just do as you’re told,” Callie demanded from a score of throats.

  The leader stroked the screen. “It’s done. The others will know something’s wrong, you know. The… encourager of efficacy? Efficiency expert? Something like that… will wake in the engine of the Dream and tear open your pod and kill you. You’ll–”

  The horde grabbed the leader and dragged it bodily into the corner while Callie took her one-handed body to look at the screen. I don’t know what I’m looking at, she said.

  She felt Sebastien’s attention shift, and he was in this body with her, an intimacy that would have been repulsive not so long ago, but now felt, if not good, then at least natural. The ruler did as it was told, Sebastien said. Recalled the gatherers, and told them to go inert. Stood down the terror drones and the station’s other defenses too.

  That stuff about an efficiency expert? Callie said. That sounded… ominous.

  We’d better get back to the waking world, Shall said.

  Callie sobered up fast – Q gave her something that counteracted the effects of the sacrament – and found herself faintly embarrassed by the banality of her epiphanies. We are all one, everything is connected, none of us are free so long as one of us is in chains… it was the stuff of inspirational posters, but it had burst in her mind like divine revelation.

  Maybe some of it was a little bit true, she conceded to herself.

  “So, what do you think the odds are we make the whole station blow up?” Ashok said. “One in four? Worse?”

  “The Axiom hate each other,” Shall said. “I don’t think they’d allow the destruction of one of their pods to trigger some self-destruct sequence that would destroy all the others. They’re probably in there plotting to murder each other’s real bodies all the time anyway.”

  “Sure,” Ashok said. “But one of them could have set up a failsafe thing, you know – if I can’t get mine, you won’t get yours either. They could have sewn atomic bombs into their bodies. There’s no telling.”

  “That’s reassuring, Ashok, thank you,” Shall said. “Just plug in the thing, please?”

  Callie wobbled upright. Shall was still in the dream, keeping the ruler under control, but he was out here too, splitting his attention, directing Ashok to set the last charge.

  “We have to go fast,” Callie said. “Minutes in here are hours in the Dream, and the other players will start to wonder what’s going on when the ruler stays incommunicado. If they realize there’s a threat to the station, in the real world… I don’t know what will happen.”

  A pod on the lowest level burst open with a shrieking tear, and a limb – an arm? a tail? – unfolded from the torn seam, joint after knobby joint, extending upward. Spines ran along the length of the arm, and at the end, a mechanical claw whirred and spun. The encourager of efficacy? Suddenly, Callie wasn’t curious at all about what the Axiom really looked like inside those pods.

  “Now!” Callie shouted, and Shall set off the charges.

  They’d used directed explosives, their energies pointing inward, but even so, the flashes of light and heat that filled the space left Callie dazed and blinking even though she’d closed her eyes. When she could see again, she was impressed: there was just a black shadow of ash where the splitting pod had been, and a fragment of arm, or tail, or whatever, with a twisted metal claw at the end, smoking a few meters away. “Very efficient,” Callie shouted over the ringing in her ears. “The expert would approve.”

  She did a quick check, to make sure all the inhabited pods were ash. The Dream engine was now populated by forty-seven dead Axiom. That was a good day’s work, and, if Lantern’s estimates were correct, a not inconsiderable percentage of the race’s total population.

  “Should I switch off the simulation, Callie?” Shall said. “I’ve got access to the root controls in there. I discovered a whole different set of admin privileges, related to being a project leader, instead of just winner of the game – which our overthrown ruler was, apparently. The admin panel was locked with biometrics, but fortunately, the ruler’s body is still in here, so. I’ve already taken the liberty of turning off the… something… tunneler project. It was occupying fully seventy percent of the station’s processing power. The game was just what the Axiom did to pass the time while that program was running, I think. Like a coder playing video games while they wait for their code to compile.”

  “Good work. As for turning off the simulation… give me a minute.”

  “Give you a subjective hour, you mean. Communicating with myself across non-matching timescales is very disorienting, Callie.”

  “You’ll live.” She walked over to Sebastien, who sat, knees drawn to his chest, hugging himself. Q and Stephen were on either side of him. “Is he OK?” she said.

  “He doesn’t want the counter-sacrament,” Q said.

  “I don’t want this feeling to end.” Sebastien looked up at Callie, his eyes shining with tears. “I haven’t felt like this since I was a little boy, with my mother holding me and singing me to sleep. Maybe not even then. I… Everyone else always seemed so thin, Callie. Sometimes they were interesting, usually they were boring, but always like they were made of tissue paper and popsicle sticks.”

  “Ha,” she said. “I always knew you were a psychopath.”

  He winced. “I don’t know about that. Maybe just… self-centered.”

  “A narcissistic personality disorder was also on my list of informal diagnoses,” Callie said.

  Sebastien hitched out a sob. “I… I didn’t know I could feel this way. Like I’m part of something. Like I have a purpose within a greater context. When the drugs fade, will this go away?”

  “Most members of the church report positive long-term outcomes, psychologically speaking,” Q said. “They self-report as being more thoughtful, more empathetic, and more aware of the impact of their actions on others, after taking these sacraments.”

  “The intensity fades, of course,” Stephen said. “And there can be a let-down as your brain chemistry adjusts. Sometimes serious depression. But that’s why we have meetings, and fellowship, and lesser sacraments, as well as the Festivals. To help us refocus and re-center. The sacraments reveal the truth, that’s all: we’re stronger as a community. We’re better together.”

  Sebastien just nodded, still crying.

  “I’m glad you’re getting in touch with your feelings,” Callie said. “Do you want to go into the simulation, or what?”

  “What?” Q said.

  “We made a deal,” Callie explained. “If he helped, he could stay in the Dream, the only real boy in puppet-land, and enjoy exploring his God complex. Shall’s in there with his finger on the ‘delete’ button, Sebastien. So does he switch off the universe, or leave a light burning in there for you?”

  “I don’t want to dwell forever among shadows,” Sebastien said. “Even if the people I created in the Dream thought they were real, they’d just be aspects of myself. Reflections. Hopes. I want… to find my place in this world. Could I come to some of your meetings, Q?”

  “All are welcome,” Q said. “Unless they act like total assholes. Then we kick them out.”

  That’s gonna be a high bar for Sebastien to clear, Callie thought. “Shut it down, Shall,” she said.

  Back on the Raven, they set more explosives on the terror drone asteroids, and moved a safe distance away from the station. “Let her rip,” Callie said. She watched through the magnified viewscreens as torpedoes sped toward the hub. Destroying the Axiom was just step one. They needed to make sure no one else wandered by and plugged themselves into one of the other pods. It was true they couldn’t annihilate the station entirely, but they could fuck up the central sphere beyo
nd repair. Without that control center, the rings were just broken computers with all their data wiped, incompatible with all other operating systems anyway.

  The sphere exploded, flinging debris out through the no-longer-spinning rings, smashing chunks of them into whirling fragments. The asteroids and terror drones were nearly vaporized, the charges Ashok and Shall had planted probably complete overkill, but they didn’t want chunks of even partly intact Axiom war machinery falling into the hands of passing explorers.

  There was a deactivated terror drone in the cargo hold, though, because Ashok had begged, and he’d been a good boy all year. He just wanted to take it apart and see how it worked, not conquer the universe or anything. From him, Callie believed it.

  “Good enough?” Callie said.

  “There’s a debris field, but people will assume it’s some Liar artifact if they encounter it,” Shall said. “The swarm appears to be just inert matter now, and with the Dream deleted and access to the simulation cut off, there’s no way to turn them back on.”

  Callie swiveled her chair and faced Q, who’d requested a front-row seat to the destruction. “Well, supervisor? Did we fulfill the terms of Almajara Corp’s contract?”

  Q nodded. “You did.”

  “What’s your report going to say?”

  “That you discovered an abandoned facility with automated defenses, presumably built by a group of unknown Liars, out near the asteroid belt, and that you destroyed it. We didn’t find any of the missing surveyors or auditors, but based on their coordinates at the time of the disappearances, we’re confident the abandoned facility was the problem.”

  “Don’t be afraid to recommend us for a bonus.” Callie switched to shipwide comms. “Mission accomplished, everyone. Good work. Take it easy on the ride back to Owain. We’ll drop off Q and our friends from the Malted Milk and then, unless anyone has a better idea, the rest of us will head back home to count our money.”

  “About that,” Stephen said on her private channel. “Could we talk in person?”

  Chapter 33

  Elena sat on her bunk – she almost never used her room, since she tended to sleep with Callie – and leaned her head against Sebastien’s shoulder. “I just got you back. I just barely got you back.”

  He leaned his head against her own. He could do that, now that hummingbird-sized drones weren’t buzzing around him all the time. “I know. You can visit me, though. I’d like that. But there’s work for me to do on Owain. The things I joined the goldilocks mission to do – create settlements, set up infrastructure – they need that kind of work here. There’s a church, too. A community. I think I need that, to keep myself from getting… lost inside my own head. Are you sure you don’t want to stay? It’s beautiful there, from everything Q has told me. Like a dream of what Earth could have been. A paradise.”

  “I’ve got my paradise already.”

  “Captain Kalea Machedo. I… don’t know what you see in her, Elena.”

  “Pfft. Sure you do.”

  He chuckled. “She is formidable. I can imagine, if she was on my side, instead of against me, that would be comforting.”

  “She’s also hot as hell. And a good person, Sebastien. She never pretended to like you, but she kept you on her ship, and gave us resources to help you, and she never complained – much – even when saving you seemed hopeless. She did all that for me, because you were important to me, and I’m important to her.”

  Sebastien kissed the top of her head. “Then you’re lucky, and I’m glad for you. Will you visit me sometimes?”

  “Of course. Owain is just a wormhole away, and it’s not even going to be eaten by nanobots any more.”

  Callie and Stephen sat in his quarters – the second-best on the ship, after hers – and sipped glasses poured from an ancient bottle of bourbon he’d been carrying around since he left Earth. “Never had the right occasion to open this before,” he said. “Cheers.”

  “Fuck you.” She slumped, staring into her glass. She’d coveted this bottle for a decade, and now that she had a glass in her hand, she couldn’t even enjoy it.

  “Don’t be like that. You don’t have to cash me out all at once.”

  “Fuck you. You think this is about money?”

  “Then what is it about?” he said mildly.

  “It’s about me and you,” she said. “You were the first person I hired, XO. I was full of fire and rage, and I was going to be the best, the fastest, the most feared captain in every system I touched. Then you came along, solid as bedrock, and kept me from getting myself killed or arrested or arrested and then killed in jail.”

  “There were some near misses,” he said. “That one time on–”

  “Fuck you. Don’t reminisce. You’re leaving me.”

  Stephen sighed. “I’m older than you, Callie. I thought all this sort of thing… caring about someone, this way… I thought all that was behind me. Even when I met up with my congregation on Meditreme Station, even during the Festivals… I barely felt anything, to be honest. I did it because feeling something was better than nothing. A part of me always stood back, though, and watched. I observed myself having feelings, instead of just feeling them. Q… I don’t know. She lights up parts of me that haven’t been lit up in a long time. She wants to see where this goes. I want to go where she does. You understand.”

  “She can come on the boat,” Callie said. “We got rid of Sebastien, so there’s room. We could use, I don’t know, a logistics and supply person. We need logistics and supplies.”

  “She has work to do on Owain.” Stephen enfolded Callie’s hand in his own. “Good work. They need surgeons there, too. They have entirely too many paintbrushes and not nearly enough scalpels down there. The work you’re doing, against the Axiom, is crucial, and I respect the hell out of you for doing it, but… I don’t want to die in space, Callie. Not when I could live, really live, on the ground. What would you do, if Elena wanted to settle down?”

  Callie slumped. “I don’t know. I think part of why I love her is because she doesn’t want to.”

  “I wish you both all the happiness in the world,” Stephen said. “Can you wish the same for me?”

  “Ugh. Yes. Fine. But you’re not rid of me. I’m going to visit you, old man,” Callie said. “And you’d better not put me in a guest house that’s shaped like a boot or some shit. You’d better find me a house-shaped house.”

  “It’s been an honor serving with you, captain.” He raised his glass.

  “Fuck you,” she said again. But she clinked her glass against his.

  They had a raucous farewell dinner on the way to Owain. The crew of the Malted Milk regaled Stephen and Sebastien with tales of life on the planet, and everything they had to look forward to there – the projects, the plans, the parties. The crew told Q all the funniest stories they had about Stephen, which usually involved him being long-suffering and doleful in the midst of various sorts of chaos, devastation, and danger.

  “This cuddlebot smuggler put a gun to his head,” Ashok said, “and Stephen goes, so deadpan, ‘Could you please point that elsewhere? I keep my brains in there, and someone in this room should retain the ability to think.’” Laughter, and drinks, and toasts all around. It was a good farewell.

  Callie and Elena sat in the corner, and watched. “You’re going to miss Stephen, huh?” Elena said.

  “He was like… a non-shitty stepfather to me.” Callie shook her head. “Anyway. It is what it is. How about you and Sebastien? He’s like his old self again, huh?”

  “He’s arguably better than his old self,” Elena said. “But I never expected him to stay after we cured him. It’s hard to see quite how he would fit in on the ship.”

  “Ha. Yeah, that wouldn’t work out. He’s too much like me.”

  Elena turned and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Confident, sometimes to the point of arrogance. Smug. Always thinks he’s right.” She grinned. “Too pretty for his own good.”
<
br />   “You’re prettier.”

  “You look upon the Machedo nose through eyes of love.”

  “If it’s attached to your face, it’s the best of all possible noses.” Elena sighed. “I’m going to have to study my ass off, Callie, if I’m going to be the ship’s doctor. Stephen showed me a lot, and he’s given me all the resources I could ask for, but I want to do this right. There are classes I can take in the Hypnos, and eventually I can try to get properly licensed. I’m going to be busy for the next couple of years.”

  “You’re going to be even busier than you think,” Callie said. “I talked to the crew earlier today. We’re all agreed. You should take over as executive officer.”

  Elena sputtered and almost spit out a mouthful of punch. “What? That’s… I just got here. I’m not qualified.”

  Ashok clattered over and sat down. “Did you tell her? You told her. Ha.” He saluted drunkenly. “Aye, aye, XO.”