The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  Ahro was nervous about what was to come with Fumiko and her plans that were still a mystery, but he tried not to think about that—focused instead on the better things that might wait ahead. About Oden. Alone in his hatch, he stared at the ceiling, as he remembered all he had felt between the two standing rocks. His hand traveling past his navel to take care of what was necessary as he relived the feel of Oden’s hands, his mouth. The eyes on his eyes, pinning him to the center of nature. Maybe once all this was done, and Fumiko had figured out what made him go and no longer needed him, he would take some time to himself. Maybe he could visit Kilkari again. Stand by the docks until he found him again. While away a few more hours on that mountaintop.

  But most of the time, his thoughts were on the ship. On the last night of the trip, he walked the Debby, wishing to absorb all that he could. His stomach full with all the food from the crew meal Royvan had cooked earlier, the fruity greens and wild beans, the ample glass of spirits Nia allowed him, he swam the echoed space of the cargo hold, where they stretched before each emergence; the medica, where Royvan would tell him stories from his hungover school days as he performed his monthly diagnostics. He sat at the kitchen table and remembered the sweet rice. He flipped through books in the common room. The adventures of the warrior queen Nia had read aloud to him. And then he went up to the cockpit, where he sat in the copilot’s chair and placed the headset on his ears. Listened to the white noise of the Pocket. Why he always returned here to this chair, to these sounds, he did not know. Maybe Fumiko would know the answer. He sighed. It didn’t matter. Regardless of explanation, something elemental within him communed with the noise and quieted him to sleep, which was what he did that final night; slept soundly in the head of the Debby, while around him played the songs of the universe, unaware when the woman entered the room with the syringe in her pocket, until the dream was snapped as she locked his head in her arms, and stuck him in the neck, his consciousness dimming out with these last thoughts of terror as she depressed the plunger, and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  There was no going back.

  Down the dark causeway Vaila went, her footsteps quiet, the soles bare as she padded along the cold grating with his limp body in her arms. Down the steps into the cargo bay, to the lockers beside the airlock, where she laid him down and dressed him in one of the spacesuits. Fitted the helmet over his doped-up head, and propped him up inside the locker. She had slammed the door shut when a voice called out to her from the entryway. Every nerve in her body prickled.

  “What are you doing?”

  It was Em.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She patted the locker door. “Thought I’d just—I don’t know.” She laughed. “You?”

  He nodded.

  “Same,” he said. She watched him walk to the center of the bay, where he gazed up at the shadowed catwalks. She joined him there. He shook his head. “Hard to believe it’s over.”

  “I know.”

  “Still. You must be happy.” He grinned at her. “Fumiko will be all over you, I bet. You deserve it after all this time.”

  “No,” Vaila said. She smiled as the tears streamed down her cheeks, and left Em confused on her way back to her room. “I don’t.”

  * * *

  —

  Morning. Nia stretched in the small space of her room, folding herself in half, her hands gripped around the balls of her feet, her muscles aching from the whiskey of the previous night. When she was limber again, she dressed and went to the kitchen to make breakfast for Ahro, pouring out a few glasses of water for the coming dehydration. Normally she had him make his own food, but today, the last day of their trip, she would make an exception. She smiled as she sprinkled sugar over the bowl. She would spoil him rotten.

  She made him his sweet rice on the stove element, along with a cup of spiced tea; placed these things with care on the tray and bounced to his room. But when she knocked on his hatch, there was no answer. Again she knocked. Supposing he was still asleep, which was unsurprising considering all he had eaten and drunk the night before, she walked back to the kitchen and left the tray on the counter for him to discover when he later emerged. She finished off her tea as one by one the crew entered. Conversation was light, yet charged; same as all those years ago, when she finished the Umbai job and they all had the great sense of impending.

  The intercom let out a burst. Vaila’s digital voice told them the ship would soon be unfolding. They all went up to the cockpit to watch. Nia frowned when she saw that Ahro wasn’t there in the cockpit, but when she asked them if anyone had seen him, no one had an answer. “He wasn’t up here when you came in?” she asked Vaila. The woman shook her head without looking away from her controls. Nia sighed.

  Again she knocked on his hatch, her stomach worried into knots. She’d never known him to sleep in so late.

  “Ahro?” she said. “You awake?”

  Still no answer.

  “I know it’s scary,” she said to the door. “Being at the end. But like I said before, I won’t let anything happen to you. Okay?” She placed a hand on the hatch, the cold metal of it. “Come out when you’re ready.”

  “Is he still asleep?” Sartoris asked when she returned.

  “I think he’s scared,” she said. “Can’t say I blame him.”

  “What’s he scared about?” Sonja asked. “If Fumiko’s a problem, he can just get the fuck out. And it wouldn’t even matter at all, ’cause we’ll still get paid.” She almost broke into a jig. “Still working out what I’m gonna do with all that money.”

  “Like open a hospital on a City Planet?” Royvan suggested.

  “Or buy our own City Planet.”

  Nia laughed.

  “We’re here,” Vaila said. She turned to Em. “Can you?” He nodded and ran down to the engine bay to flip the core. Nia regarded Vaila as she manipulated the console, the woman’s jaw worked into a rictus, tension vibrating off her body; supposed this tension was rooted in their shared anxiety of the coming end.

  “All right,” Em said over the intercom. “Let’s do it.”

  “Leaving,” Vaila said.

  The world flexed. Nia felt a slight tingle in her guts, but nothing more. She smiled when she saw Sartoris rubbing his thumb along the tines of an old comb. And then the flexing stopped. The viewport shutters rattled open.

  Nia squinted against the sudden blast of light. They were facing a blue-green sun. She reached up and adjusted the tint on the screen. Blinking, she saw that the sun let out great bands of light, like swords. In one of the swords, suspended in the blue-green beam, was a small black dot, almost invisible to the eye were it not for the gilding of light that described its shape. “Is that a ship?” she asked.

  “Maybe it belongs to Fumiko?” Sartoris suggested.

  “Open up the comms channel,” Nia said. “Vaila?”

  “I’ve had a surprisingly beautiful time with you,” Vaila said. Before Nia could ask what had come over her, she flicked the comms link and left the cockpit, with Sonja asking, “Where the hell is she going?”

  Something wasn’t right. “Hello?” Nia said into the headset. “This is Captain Nia Imani of the commercial transport ship Debby. Who are we hailing?” There was no answer. Just static. Again, she repeated, “This is Captain Nia Imani of the Debby. Who are we speaking to? Does this vessel belong to Fumiko Nakajima? Hello, is anyone there?”

  Then.

  “This is the Umbai warship Euphrates. We have come to collect our rightful intellectual property. Please allow the Umbai representative on board to exit unharmed with said property. Comply or we will be forced to perform disciplinary action. Compliance will be met with peace.”

  “What do we do?” Sonja asked.

  Nia punched the intercom. “Em, we need to fold. Now.”

  No re
sponse.

  “Em?”

  And then they heard it, the sound from the other side of the ship. A balloon popping. A cork exploding. These were Nia’s first associations, though it was obvious it was neither of those things—that it was, in fact, the resolve of a triggered pistol.

  What happened next occurred within a three-minute window.

  There was a third pistol shot; the lights flickered; a tingling sensation Nia was very familiar with overcame her—she had enough wherewithal to grab the console’s edge before her feet left the floor. Unlike her, Royvan and Sartoris had never experienced a malfunctioning Grav unit before—or a sabotaged one—and they scrambled in the air as Sonja grabbed one of the wall railings and asked Nia what she wanted to do. Nia shouted, “We’re going!” and she kicked herself from the console and through the hatch to the causeway. Together she and Sonja climbed the rungs while messages looped through her brain, Keep the boy safe, Keep him close, Keep him safe. She waited as Sonja slipped into her hatch and emerged with two rifles. With one hand gripped around the rifle, she propelled herself down the causeway with the other, blood coursing through her veins, pounding at the gates of her head. They passed the common room. She stole a glimpse inside, saw a sea of books and chairs. A lamp suspended, tipping orange light into the kitchen. Sonja stopped at the stairwell down to the engine room. “I don’t think she’s down there,” she said, reading Nia’s eyes. “No exit.” Which meant she was in the cargo bay, the airlock. “Em?” she asked.

  Nia doubted the engineer was still alive.

  Don’t think about that now.

  “The boy comes first,” she said.

  They frogged down the rungs to the cargo hold. It was a strange experience, to maneuver through her inverted home, turned as it was ninety degrees to the right as she clambered along the wall. It was lucky she had stretched that morning. She thought it funny that she was even thinking about that. It was the adrenaline; a calm in her head that allowed the grace for these extra notions. Sonja held up a hand when they arrived at the portal to the cargo hold. She peered around the lip. “I see her,” she said. “In the airlock.”

  “Go.”

  They propelled themselves down into the wide space of the hold, gripping the straps on the floor that once restrained the crates of dhuba seeds, the floor now a high wall that they clung to like rock climbers, their rifles trained on the woman in the spacesuit who floated in the depressurization chamber of the airlock, a second body in her grasp held hostage. The woman was about to shut the interior hatch and open the exterior doors when Nia shouted her name.

  “VAILA!”

  And then the woman, as if on instinct, held the boy in front of her like a shield and shoved a pistol through the crook of his arm and fired twice. One shot ricocheted off the wall behind them, but the other snagged Sonja in the shoulder, the momentum spinning her away, Nia watching her fly, unable to shoot Vaila, afraid she would hit Ahro—all she could do was let go of the rifle and propel herself forward as the woman punched the button and the hatch shut and Nia slammed against the metal surface, banging against it, watching wild-eyed through the window slit as the exterior door was opened and the woman jumped out into space, propelled by the spine jets of the suit, dragging the boy behind her, their bodies all but invisible in the blackness as the exterior door shut behind them.

  “The suits!” Sonja shouted from across the way. She was slowly twirling, suspended in the middle of the hold, clutching her bleeding shoulder. Blood escaped between her fingers in thick globs. With her rifle hand she pointed at the lockers.

  Nia footed the window slit of the airlock and leveraged herself up until she could reach the wall rungs again, and as she climbed her way up toward the lockers and yanked the door open and wrestled an extra suit from its hook, Vaila, jetting through the vacuum, sent out a ship-agnostic transmission blast, picked up by both the Euphrates and the Debby.

  I’m outside the ship with the boy. They’re going to follow me. Do something.

  In the cockpit, Royvan heard the transmission, and knew what he had to do. He grabbed Sartoris by the collar, kicked himself off the old man’s chest, and fell into the console. With a sweep of his hand he switched the intercom and shouted his warning to the others.

  “They’re going to fire! Hold on to something!”

  Nia and Sonja looked at each other.

  On the bridge of the Euphrates, the captain sighed, and said not to destroy the ship. “No need to punish them too much for being misled,” he said. “A slap on the wrist should suffice.” He nodded at his chief gunner. “Fire a concussive round.”

  The gunner spooled the wheel and a small, beveled cannon emerged from the starboard side of the warship, like a thumb between fingers.

  Nia stopped struggling into the suit and pulled herself into the locker. Her hand was about to shut the door when she looked out at Sonja. The vet was still suspended in the middle of the bay, holding her bleeding shoulder, nowhere close to safe purchase. Nia shouted her name. They traded one last look. There was a sober quality to Sonja’s eyes. A cold realization. She nodded. “I’m sorry,” Nia shouted before she shut herself inside the locker. With a click, the cannon fired its payload. The discharge was invisible. Composed of materials too minute to be seen. A wave of kinetic energy that traveled thousands of miles in the span of microseconds and smashed into the Debby’s hull, the slap on the wrist pirouetting the ship into the black, the G-force slamming Nia into the locker’s wall, cracking something in her body, she wasn’t sure what, couldn’t be sure, for her world was spinning out of control, the breath squeezed out of her lungs as it spun away from her, all the food in her stomach, and the thoughts in her head.

  * * *

  —

  Her eyes blinked open. Three straps pinned her to a bed. That was all she could tell through the blur as the man who floated above her—Royvan, she realized, distantly—said that he was sorry, that he had to do it. She fingered the latch of the strap with her right hand, the cold metal. Her left arm was bound to her chest in a wrap. He told her it was broken. She nodded, half understanding, before she drifted out again.

  * * *

  —

  Thirteen hours swam by, each of them dreamless, before true consciousness returned. Her skull was tight, her brain a grape in its fist. Her eyes were sore. Light was dagger-sharp. There was no moisture in her mouth. Royvan gave her water through a straw, and time to order her thoughts, before he informed her of what had happened to the rest of her crew, his voice shredded as he told her that both Sonja and Em were dead. He found Em by the folding core, drifting among tendrils of cabling. Vaila had shot him in the back, twice. He bled out a few hours before she woke. As for Sonja, he couldn’t tell her that eye to eye. He had to look up at the ceiling. When the ship spun, the floor had hit the vet’s body. Killed her fast. Most of his time since had been spent cleaning the mess. He smiled as he said this. Like he couldn’t believe it. Her body was with Em’s in the cargo bay, wrapped in tarp. “I wanted to wait for you to wake up before I…sent them off.”

  Nia didn’t know what to say.

  No words came to mind.

  “Ahro?” she asked.

  She knew the answer, but her heart still withered when Royvan shook his head. “They’re all gone,” he said.

  All but Sartoris, who was in the medica, bound to an improvised stretcher of Royvan’s creation. The stretcher was hooked to a wall railing. A tube disappeared up the old man’s sleeve, feeding him with nutriments while he gargled for breath in his coma. Half his face was bruised to the point where he was almost unrecognizable, his skin a wrath of swollen berries. Nia thought he might pop if she stroked his cheek. “I don’t expect him to survive the week,” Royvan whispered.

  “Yes,” she said, her finger grazing Sartoris’s smile lines, “probably not.” She turned away. “Where are the others?”

  The bodies
were hovering before the airlock doors, each of them wrapped in tarp and bound by rope. Nia put a hand on both of them. She gave Royvan time to say goodbye; waited outside the airlock as he hugged Sonja’s form, the tarp crinkling as he whispered things the veteran wouldn’t have understood even if she were alive, choked as the words were. She and Royvan suited up, and they carried the bound forms out through the airlock and pushed them into the black. Royvan clung to a railing and watched them drift away as she jetted up to the hull and surveyed the damage her ship had taken from the concussive round, her gloved hand touching the warps along the hull. The back was broken. If they folded, the ship would disintegrate. She was numb as she recognized this.

  There was only one hope. Outside intervention. With Royvan’s help she opened the panel above the cockpit, twisted the handle, and activated the SOS beacon. The small blue light blinked as the beacon pulsed a looping emergency broadcast message; the ship’s designation, its coordinates; pulsed the message past the blue-green sun, out to whoever might be listening.

  The nearest inhabited system was a three-week fold away on the Irresolute Current. It was a six-month wait in real-time. The two of them settled in for the long wait. Their bodies moved on autopilot. Basic survival. Royvan counted their rations in the storage bin and the kitchen cabinets while Nia checked the water recycler. There was enough food to last them four months. Five months for water. But none of this mattered.

  They had only one month of air.

  * * *

  —

  As the beacon pulsed, the days became listless, powered only by the inertia of routine. They ate the freeze-dried stuff and drank the spheres of water that thought-bubbled from the faucet. They went to the bathroom in emergency vacuum bags and ejected the bags through the engine filtration system. They were not always successful using the vacuum bags, and would argue about the messes, shouting from across rooms about smells, particles in mouths, their bodies drifting past each other, close to strangling the other, until they would remember that air was scarce and they would fall quiet again, clutching their chests, heaving. There was no choice but to live with the sick film on their tongues.