by Tim Pratt
“Him! It should be Ashok,” she said. “He’s worked with you for years, he’s experienced, he knows the ship–”
“He doesn’t want the job,” Ashok said. “By he I mean me. Besides, I have to keep the ship running. I’m busy. Drake and Janice won’t do it, and Shall’s got enough to do, and he worries too much about what Callie thinks to be a good second-in-command anyway.”
“Hey,” Callie said warningly. “How many times did you push the joy button on your skull tonight?”
“As often as the mechanism allowed.” Ashok smiled at Elena. “We like you, Doctor Oh. We trust you. You’re gonna be great.” He lurched off to rejoin the party.
“I don’t even understand how the ship works,” Elena said, looking around as if dazed – seeing the ship through the eyes of incipient responsibility.
“You can learn,” Callie said. “To be XO, you just have to be able to make decisions when the time comes, and you can do that. I’ve seen you do it.”
“But how do I know it’s the right decision? How do you do it?”
“You trust your experience, your intuition, your conscience, your moral compass, and when all else fails, you just give it your best guess.”
“That’s it? That’s your guide to executive officering?”
Callie shrugged. “Heavy lies the head that wears the crown occasionally when the head that usually wears the crown is off the boat for some reason.”
They overnighted on Owain, and kept the party going. Elena got a little drunk – people kept buying her drinks to congratulate her on her new position – and she ended up in the corner of a tavern (which looked, for some reason, like an immense terracotta chicken from the outside), sitting beside Lantern.
“Lantern!” Elena said, too loud, and then too softly: “Lantern. Tell me. Are you in love with Ashok?”
“Ah. Is that what Callie was working up to asking me before?” Lantern said. “Now I understand. No, Elena, I don’t think so – not in the way you mean. We are just very good friends.”
“Oh.” Elena slumped. “That’s too bad. Everyone should be in love with someone. It’s very fun and interesting.”
“I never said I wasn’t in love with anyone, Elena.”
“What? Who?”
Lantern’s skin scintillated and shone prismatically, but just for a moment. Elena’s brain was sluggish with alcohol but she remembered reading about that physiological response when she researched Liars: it was an involuntary coloration, the equivalent of a blush in humans, and could indicate embarrassment or acute self-consciousness. “I’ll… see you later, Elena.” Lantern scuttled away across the bar.
Elena decided she was too drunk to think about that.
Callie elbowed Ashok at the bar. “So. You. Lantern. Is that, are you, a thing?”
“Wait. What? You mean… a thing? Like a you-and-Elena thing, a Stephen-and-Q thing, kind of thing?”
She nodded. “Yes. I thought about it. I’m OK with it. It’s no weirder than everything else about you.”
“That is very open-minded of you, cap, but no, I’m not in love with Lantern, or doing sexy things with her. I don’t even know how we’d, like… go about it. I have not looked into the subject. We’re just friends.”
“Lantern might be in love with you, though.”
“Nope. Her heart – or hearts? I think she has like six of them – belongs to another.”
“The shit you say? Who?”
“I’m sworn to secrecy, cap.”
“Bah. Well. Too bad. I was hoping you were, you know. Having some fun. Assuming that’s the kind of fun you like to have. I don’t even know. It’s probably sexual harassment to even ask you that.”
“Could be!” he said cheerfully. “If you’re asking if I’m asexual, no. I’m just super picky.” He raised his glass in the direction of Sebastien, who was laughing and talking with Q and Stephen. “I am not attracted to Liars. I’m attracted to him, though. I would climb all over that.”
Callie stared. “Sebastien? He’s your type?”
“Pretty much. He was way hotter when he had a metal spider-brain implant embedded in the back of his skull, though.” Ashok slapped her on the shoulder. “I gotta go empty the waste containment units, cap.” He lurched off through the crowd.
Space is big, Callie thought, gazing into the depths of her drink. There’s room for all kinds of things in it.
The remaining crew returned to the White Raven the next morning, popping anti-hangover pills and groaning at the bumpy ride up in the canoe.
“How’s my ship?” Callie demanded, strapping into her chair in the cockpit.
“Refueled and resupplied,” Drake said. “Our ammunition has been topped off, too. Courtesy of Almajara Corp. Your ex sends his thanks and regards, and says if we want another job, give him a call.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Is Stephen settling in OK down there?” Drake said.
“I don’t know,” Callie said. “He’s in love. Maybe it’ll wear off and he’ll call us to come get him in a few months, but I doubt it.”
“I’m going to miss the old man,” Drake said.
“Can we have his room?” Janice said.
Callie snorted. “I’ll think about it. For now, let’s just get through the bridge and back home to Glauketas.”
The pirate base was much as they’d left it, with Lantern’s starfish-ship hovering near the Golden Spider. There was a message on the station system from the Jovian Imperative, acknowledging that the asteroid was now duly registered to the Machedo Corporation. “We own real estate now, everybody,” she said over the PA. “Try not to wreck the place too much.”
Lantern bid everyone farewell and set off for her station, to check on the younglings and make a report to the central authority of the truth-tellers, informing them that Elder Trogidae had gone mad and killed those under his care, and presumably destroyed the Axiom facility in his sector in the process. Lantern hated lying, but she’d do it, if she had a good reason.
Everyone who remained on the station retreated into their respective domains. Elena plugged herself into an immersive medical school simulation in the Hypnos, where she was planning to spend hours every day, apparently. Ashok dragged the terror drone into a disused machine shop on the far side of the asteroid, accessible from the living quarters only via a maintenance tunnel, so if the thing blew up when he took it apart, it probably wouldn’t kill everybody, just him. Drake and Janice hooked into the Hypnos in their own quarters (where it was not, and never would be, Gravity Day), and dreamed their own private dreams. Shall reintegrated his consciousness from the ship into his consciousness on the station, and after a long moment said, “Wow. You all had a much more eventful time out there than I did in here.”
Callie chatted with Shall as she checked the station’s systems, making sure everything was operational, stowed, and ship-shape, and finally went to her own quarters. She’d come back from the dead, saved Owain, killed fifty space monsters, and gotten the company accounts back in the black. She’d earned a nap.
There was something on her pillow. A note. A piece of actual paper, with actual writing on it. Callie didn’t touch it – just approached slowly, as if it might attack her. “Shall. Who put this note on my bed?”
“What? I… let me review the security records… Callie, I don’t know. It just appeared, sometime last night. I didn’t notice it before.”
“Someone put it there, Shall. Someone was in my room, leaving things on my bed.”
“There’s nothing on the security footage, no indication that anyone boarded the station… I don’t understand. My diagnostics don’t indicate that anyone has tampered with my systems, either.”
“Scan for wormhole radiation,” Callie said. She possessed a short-range teleporter that worked much like the wormhole bridges, but with a range limited to kilometers, and with strict mass restrictions. It wasn’t the only one in the universe – some of the truth-tellers had them.
“There are…
traces of radiation consistent with a point-to-point short-range wormhole generator in your quarters,” Shall said. “But there’s still nothing on the cameras.”
“Those little person-sized wormholes open and close fast,” Callie said. “And there are ways to trick cameras.” Her own stealth suit could do that much – the telltale subtle shimmers wouldn’t even show up on the cameras.
She looked down at the note. In spidery black-ink handwriting, it read:
I’ve been watching your progress, checking in on you occasionally since you set out for Ganymede in that ramshackle pirate ship, and watching you closely once you reached Taliesen. Did you sense me? I thought you might have, once or twice. You’re very perceptive, for a human. You did excellent work dismantling the Dream. For your next project, you might visit the Vanir system. What you find there should interest you… and certain members of your crew.
Well. It was good to know she hadn’t been suffering from space madness when she glimpsed all those shimmers. It was less good to know they’d been spied on by a mysterious secret admirer.
“What does it say?” Shall asked.
“It says we should go to the forbidden system.” Callie decided the note probably wouldn’t hurt her, and picked it up, staring at the page.
“Who sent it?” Shall asked.
“It’s signed ‘the Benefactor,’” Callie said.
“Why don’t I find that reassuring?”
“I don’t either.” Callie was even more troubled by the little drawing underneath the signature, though it was just a couple of thick strokes, in ink of bright hue: a circle, with a smaller dot inside. Stylized, but instantly recognizable.
The drawing was a single, bright blue eye.
The crew of the White Raven will return in
The Forbidden Stars
Acknowledgments
Thanks first, as always, to my wife Heather Shaw and our son River, for their patience and support. They make this book-writing thing possible.
Thanks to my agent Ginger Clark for taking care of the business side of things, and to the Angry Robot team: Marc Gascoigne and Phil Jourdan and Penny Reeve and Nick Tyler and Mike Underwood. I quite literally couldn’t do this without them, since they publish and edit and promote and market these books. My thanks to Paul Scott Canavan for bringing the White Raven to life again with his marvelous cover art. Paul Simpson once again saved me from myself with his deft copyediting. Q Fortier donated generously to the Worldbuilders fundraiser in exchange for having his name used for a character in this book, and I’m grateful for his generosity.
I went on a little book tour for previous volume The Wrong Stars (three cities in three months!) while I was writing this book, and want to thank Emily and Connor Lane for letting me crash at their place up in Portland, and Jenn Reese and Chris East for keeping me company there. Thanks to Greg van Eekhout for driving me around in San Diego, and to Sarah Day for keeping me company on the trip. I love booksellers, and the ones at Borderlands in San Francisco, Powell’s in Portland, and Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego made me feel welcome and sold a bunch of books for me, so many thanks to them as well.
Several loved ones very tolerantly listened to me ramble on for months about Ganymede and Simon Marius and the peculiarities of various hallucinogenic drugs and twenty-first century medical procedures and whether I should murder characters or let them retire, and they offered advice, encouragement, expertise, and side-eye as needed, so thanks to Aislinn Harvey, Amanda Leinhos (I stole your Brandenburg Concertos joke), and Katrina Storey (Sarah and Emily, mentioned above, put up with a lot of that stuff too).
The majority of the first draft of this book was written in an unprecedentedly productive interval at the Bayou Retreat in Louisiana, and I offer my profound thanks to Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong for inviting me, and to all the other attendees for making me (one of the newcomers), feel welcome and supported. Thanks to my boss, Liza Groen Trombi, and my co-workers at Locus (especially Francesca Myman and Josh Pearce and Kirsten Gong-Wong) for making it possible for me to go to that retreat, even though it took place during deadline week on the hardest issue of the year; they did a bunch of my work for me while I was gone. Seventeen years in, being an editor at Locus is still the best day job a writer could ask for.
We’ll do it all again next year for The Forbidden Stars…
About the Author
Tim Pratt is a Hugo Award-winning SF and fantasy author, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He is the author of over twenty novels, most recently The Deep Woods and Heirs of Grace, and scores of short stories. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and other nice places. Since 2001 he has worked for Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, where he currently serves as senior editor. He lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife and son.
timpratt.org • twitter.com/timpratt
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By the Same Author
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
The Nex
Briarpatch
Venom In Her Veins
The Constantine Affliction
The Stormglass Protocol
Heirs of Grace
The Deep Woods
The Axiom
The Wrong Stars
Marla Mason
Blood Engines
Poison Sleep
Dead Reign
Spell Games
Bone Shop
Broken Mirrors
Grim Tides
Bride of Death
Lady of Misrule
Queen of Nothing
Closing Doors
Rodrick & Hrym
Liar’s Blade
Liar’s Island
Liar’s Bargain
Alaeron & Skiver
City of the Fallen Sky
Reign of Stars
Little Gods
If There Were Wolves
Hart & Boot & Other Stories
Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories
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Reach for the stars
An Angry Robot paperback original 2018
Copyright © Tim Pratt 2018
Tim Pratt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN 978 0 85766 767 0
US ISBN 978 0 85766 767 0
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 768 7
Cover by Paul Scott Canavan.
Set by Argh! Nottingham.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-768-7
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Tim Pratt, The Dreaming Stars