Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year One

by Holly Lyn Walrath

  I went down below. Father had arranged for a private cabin, the last gift he ever gave me. It was large enough that if I lay flat on my back my feet would touch one end and the top of my head the other, but right now it felt claustrophobic and dark despite the magic-cast lantern swinging in the corner. I pulled out my trunk and rifled through its belongings, looking for something that might work as a weapon. The closest I found was a decorative hairpin, a long silver spike topped with jeweled flowers. She had given it to me, a sign that she knew who I really was, a sign that she was officially in on the joke. Some joke, that got me kicked out of my homeland.

  I shoved my trunk back into place, pulled down my cot, and stretched out on my back, holding the hairpin to my chest.

  And waited.

  The ship rocked along, as calm as always. Occasionally feet pounded overhead, and the lantern would flare and then sputter—magic working its way through the walls.

  I wrapped my fingers more tightly around the hairpin, the jewels digging into my palm. I closed my eyes, whispered her name.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  And then:

  A loud, cracking boom.

  I sat up as the boat jerked and tilted. My head slammed against the wall. Spots of light flared everywhere. The hairpin clattered to the ground, and I cried out and launched myself at the floor, feeling around for it in the murky shadows. The lantern was almost completely depleted.

  Another round of cannon fire. The ship didn't move this time. My fingers closed in on the pin, and I brought it up just as the lantern failed.

  Footsteps: pounding, frantic. Men screaming. Pistol shots. I sat hyperventilating in the dark, holding onto the hairpin as if it were her hand.

  Cannon fire reverberated up from the floorboards. But the boat didn't jerk and shudder. We weren't hit.

  The door to my cabin flew open.

  I screamed, cowered back on my cot. A man stood in the doorway, a magic-cast lantern in one hand and a sword in the other.

  "Oh shut up." He stepped inside and kicked the door closed. With his sword, he knocked down the original lantern and hung his in its place. The light was different, greenish-blue instead of white.

  I shoved myself up into the corner. "Take what you want!" I shouted, kicking at my trunk. "You can have it all!" That wasn't entirely true; I'd claw his eyes out before I let him have the hairpin.

  He laughed. "That ain't why we're here." The light in the lantern brightened momentarily, and I got my first good look at him: He was tall, bony, and Jokjani, although he wore a ragged Empire jacket. He paced around the cabin as he talked, his sword out, his hand on the butt of his pistol. "Just looking to take the boat. Old one don't meet with the captain's needs."

  The cannon fire had stopped.

  "Are you going to kill me?"

  "What?" The pirate stopped. "Kill you? No, not unless you do something stupid. Captain don't like killing non-Confederates. That's you, sweetheart."

  I'd read enough pirate stories to know what the Confederation was. I glared at him, which just made him laugh again.

  "We'll drop you off first port we come to. Starlight Rock, most like. "

  "Is that in the Empire?"

  The pirate looked at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. "No, girl, it ain't in the Empire. Pirates' island, and not much there but starlight and rocks. Hence the name." He gave a little flourish as he said that last part, but my body felt like it'd been emptied out. Some abandoned pirates' island was even worse than landing in Lisirra. It was a true prison.

  "You'll stay locked up in your cabins till then. Sailors got a choice of joining up or not, course. Now, if one of 'em says no—" The pirate drew a line across his throat. "Well, we drown 'em, usually, but—"

  "Why are you in my room?" I didn't want to hear any more about murdering sailors.

  The pirate grinned. "To keep you secure till things get settled. Ain't gonna touch you, if that's what you're worried about."

  I shuddered and drew my knees up to my chest. I didn't let go of the hairpin. The pirate tapped his sword against the side of my trunk. He looked bored.

  "How long's that going to take?" I said.

  "Don't go planning anything." He looked at me. "I told you, we're gonna let you go."

  "On a pirates' island."

  "Better than the middle of the ocean."

  He was right, of course. I couldn't imagine them just letting us go, but it also seemed like if this pirate was to kill me, he would have done it already.

  "Couple hours," he said.

  "What?"

  "How long it's gonna take." He shrugged. "Till we got the new crew sorted. And then we'll be on our way."

  He looked up at me and grinned, his face splitting into two, and the green light carved his face into shadows.

  Continued in The Manticore’s Vow by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Now available for purchase

  Excerpt: Twelve: Poems Inspired by the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale

  The Third Sister

  by Andrea Blythe

  The library beckoned, and she answered the call, slipping herself in between the welcoming shelves, letting the stillness and quiet seep into her, the soft motes of dust alighting on her skin and the smell of the leather-bound volumes soothing the aches of her body and spirit.

  The books whispered their longing to be read. She plucked them from the shelves at random, gathering them up and cradling them in her arms. She laid them out upon a table and savored the creak of their spines as they opened.

  She read—words unveiling worlds more astounding than the glittering gold and silver gardens she and her sisters found hidden under their floorboards. She read until the candles burned low, until her eyes felt like sand and her vision blurred, until her spine bent into a bow, and she fell into a restful sleep, a treatise on the alchymical uses of plants as a pillow.

  As time passed, she faded into the library more and more—so many hours at a stretch, the days and nights blurred together in a litany of poetry and candlelight. She read and she wrote, the nib of her plume scratching out the results of her research, ink-splotched pages filled so thickly with text they appeared black. When visiting students and scholars spoke with her, she held discourse on the natural world and the worlds beyond, leaving them wide-eyed and awed when they returned to their universities.

  Her father sent messengers to draw her back into the sitting rooms and gardens and ballrooms, the light and airy places where princesses belonged. When this failed, he stormed into the library himself, prepared to drive her out with the thunder of his speech and the lightning of his hand. The tall stone shelves greeted him with their towering height—full of tomes of natural history and philosophy and mathematics alongside the ramblings of novelists and the fancies of poets—all the crushing weight of knowledge pressing down upon him. He searched and found only books and silence, the whisper of his own breath loud in his ears. Eventually, the eerie quiet unsettled and drove him back to the clattering noise of the court, to the voices and laughter and music that filled up his thoughts and hours.

  The library became her realm. She slept on the nests of old discarded pamphlets and nourished herself on the pages she consumed. Over time, her skin paled and hair thinned. Her hands became marked with paper cuts, nails black with ink. She padded through the shelves like a specter, leaving a wake of near-completed tracts and treatises and historical accounts at her feet—treasures scholars discovered and smuggled out into the world, published anonymously to great acclaim and outrage. She was rarely seen, more mythic creature than person—a ghost some said, a monster, a patron saint of the stacks. It was a blessing, it was said, or a curse, claimed others, to see her and have her look upon you. She might read you and find in your flesh the story that shapes you.

  Continued in Twelve by Andrea Blythe

  Forthcoming in Fall 2020

  Excerpt: Local Star

  By Aimee Ogden

  There was
nowhere Triz Cierrond would rather be than elbows-deep in a starfighter. But twenty levels above her, the Hab's main arcade was crammed with people celebrating the victorious return of the Confederated Fleet. For once in her life, the station wrenchworks were the last place she wanted to be.

  And Kalo was the last person she wanted to be stuck there with.

  It was partly her fault, for making him wait while she finished checking in the other six light attack Swarmers. But if she had to be miserable, her ex might as well be too. Soon, soon, she'd be uphab celebrating with Casne and her quadparents. A small part of her knew she was hesitating over that too. Probably best to wait a few hours anyway, to give them some time to try being one big happy family. She still didn’t know how she fit into that equation.

  Triz ducked under the left-hand engine pod of Kalo's swarmer, noting an oozing coolant leak where the wing had partially sheared away from the fuselage. Scorch marks streaked the cockpit, and the nosecone was less of a cone now than an impact-flattened nub. She shook her head and recorded a note on the tablet: total wrench job. "Shitting stars," she muttered, and pulled her facemask up over her nose and mouth. "How are you not dead after this?"

  "I apologize on behalf of the Cyberbionautic Alliance. I'm sure the ceebees wish they'd finished the job almost as much as you do." Kalo sprawled atop Triz's eternally-in-progress refit of an Escoth V-27 engine assembly. The Escoth, as well as the pile of damaged ore-Scoopers hurriedly rearranged behind it, had been set aside for the sudden influx of paying work. Ships like Escoths were fast and sporty, great for fixing up and selling for a little credit. The Scoopers were scavenger crafts that filtered through the silt layers on the outside of asteroids, panning for something richer than iron oxide in that dust. Kalo didn't seem to mind his precarious position. If the prospect of getting oil on his dress greens alarmed him, he didn't show it. He didn't look at her, but combed one hand through wavy, dark hair. He needed a haircut.

  Not that it mattered much how he looked. Once he escaped to the festivities uphab, he and anyone else in a Fleet uniform would be deluged by offers of drinks and dalliances tonight, and those with a Light Attack Swarm pin on their collar more than most. Greaseball mechanics just didn't invite the same level of attention—especially the ones who'd grown up as guttergirls in a recycling engine, and with the manners to match.

  Casne would probably be just as beset with admirers as Kalo . . . but Triz knew her best friend and most significant of others wouldn't be entertaining outside interest tonight. Some things were worth waiting for. Triz dragged her stylus across the screen of her tablet, scratching out her notes one slow stroke at a time. She glanced over at Kalo, who was fidgeting with one of his silver-ringed cuffs. Good. Let him be impatient.

  "I was thinking," said Kalo, and Triz's stylus froze against the screen. There were a lot of things that could come after those three words, and she doubted any of them would improve the current situation. "The atmospheric handling hasn't been great for me lately. The greaseheads over at Auzhni Hab got a little creative with the repairs after that little to-do outside Hedgehome, and it's not exactly sticking on a hard turn, but it's not exactly not, either. If you could just get in there and change the calibration of the—"

  "Don't tell me how to do my job." That did it. She scratched off the rest of the note in shorthand, signed it, and stormed across the wrenchworks bay to thrust the tablet at Kalo. "It'll take me forever to get this thing spaceworthy. How long is the Fleet here?" Longer meant more time with Casne; it also meant more chances for head-to-head collisions with Kalo and the shrapnel of their former relationship.

  It was supposed to be fun. Kalo was supposed to be fun.

  Until he'd neatly snipped things off right before the Fleet left for Hedgehome: no reasons, just a polite this-isn't-working-is-it, just shy of nine cycles after Casne had enthusiastically introduced them—almost a whole year together, reckoning by the local star! But no great surprise there: they'd been skimming that event horizon for a while already. Triz had found herself starting idle fights whenever Kalo was back on-Hab, finding annoyances in little things that hadn't bothered her before. Just as well, because gods, was it annoying to ask someone to give a shit about you as they flew blithely off to their untimely death! At least Casne crewed a whaleship, one of those practically Hab-sized behemoths with just enough engines attached to nudge them through space. Whaleships were built to withstand fire, cradling their heavy-fire tactical arrays, providing a safe haven for their battered swarms to return to after battle. Whaleships always came home . . . almost always. With Light Attack Swarms, the odds weren't so good. And when they did come home, it might well be in pieces of a size suitable for packing in a mealcase.

  He’d left her. And now he was back here, in her 'works. Trying to be friendly.

  If Kalo noticed her taut silence while scanning through her notes, he didn't reach out to strum it. He scrolled upward several times to get through her full report, and he whistled low when he reached the end. "Gods of Issam. I really should be dead."

  "Better luck next time." She poked his hand that held the stylus, and he dashed off a signature. The tablet chirped politely, and an invoice estimate winged its way to the Fleet bursary at Centerpoint. "Maybe next time, don't burn so hard on a wing when you know it’s busted."

  "Don't tell me how to do my job." Kalo tossed the tablet back to her and she caught it low, just a few inches above the ground. "Thanks for the lookover. The Fleet's parked here for three days while we refuel and wait for Centerpoint to stop shitting their pants over what to do with the ceebees and actually send us our new orders. If you don't have the time to fix me up altogether, at least get things started so the techs on the whaleship don't have to start from scratch." His mouth twisted in that familiar half-smile she couldn’t help but love to hate. "Or if you're short on time, you can skip making it spaceworthy and just set up a feedback loop in the coolant line so I blow up halfway between here and Centerpoint. That'll save both you and the techs a lot of trouble."

  "I wouldn't." Dragging a clearance hose, she retreated back under the Swarmer, as much to put some space between them as to start working. "Casne would know it was me and I'd never hear the end of it."

  He followed her over to the repair bay and leaned against the good wing with one arm. "Well, I certainly wouldn't want my murder to cause you any inconvenience. Besides, you'd miss me if I was space dust."

  The hose was heavy; Triz bent her knees to get under it and tried not to look like she was struggling. He might do something really hideous, like offer to help. "The only way I'd miss you is with a lancet gun. And not more than once."

  He ducked his head under the fuselage. "And yet here we are, alone in the wrenchworks. By your plan, by the way, not mine. Not that I'm objecting. If there's anything you wanted to say—"

  The metallorganic seal on the hose suctioned itself onto the gaping wound in the side of Kalo's Swarmer, and Triz flipped the switch on the pump with her foot. The vacuum clattered twice then roared to life, slurping down the coolant spillage and its unwanted fumes. "We're all set here," Triz shouted over the noisy belching of the pump. She wasn't sure if Kalo could hear her over the noise and didn't especially care. The vacuum spoke for itself.

  He yelled something back at her and gestured to the pair of lifts that stretched all the way through the Hab. The wrenchworks made up the bottom of the station—or at least what everyone agreed via the consensus of artificial gravity counted as "bottom," in deep space—the lift started here, then crossed the recycling and recovery levels, the living quarters, and the arcade, ending in Justice at the very top. Maybe he was asking where to go now? Triz couldn't pick just one of the seven hells, so she shrugged and slipped her earmuffs from around her neck to cover her ears. Finally, Kalo gave up and disappeared into one of the lifts.

  Triz gave it two minutes to make sure he was really gone, then killed the vacuum and collapsed against the battered Swarmer. Intellectually, she knew the fighting between th
e ceebees and the Confederated Fleet had been ugly. She'd seen the vids of dead alien intelligences after the ceebee commander's attempts at rapidfire terraforming: lifeless mounds of iridescent tendrils and broken segments of carapace, poisoned by the introduction of atmospheric oxygen. Sitting beside the newsport, she'd listened to the rolls of names of planetary colonists killed in the forcible resettlements at Hedgehome. Ceebees never balked at remaking their own bodies, using any and every tech available to fit themselves to their environment; they'd proven they had equally few qualms about remaking an environment to better serve them to often horrific effect.

  It was strange now, to have the war brought to her own door like this. Usually, the wrenchworks here at her home habitation ring of Vivik didn't see more than the odd freighter every week or two. Vivik’s local star had no habitable planets and nothing particular to recommend it beyond a gas giant resort for platform jumpers. Even its economic role as a shipping-lane nexus for the past hundred years only allowed freight to pass through on its way to the bigger systems farther out.

  Triz liked Vivik Hab’s usual quiet. Her home for the past ten years had always offered her safety.

  But Moxu and Vogett, the two closest big Habs on this ragged edge of settled space, had been destroyed in the fighting, leaving Vivik the only nearby survivor able to pick up the pieces of the Fleet and send it on toward the center of the Galactic Web. Ships weren’t the only wreckage clotting the Hab. None other than Commander Rocan shitting Dustald-3 Melviq himself was a prisoner of Justice here. Many of Vivik's citizens had already gone to war; now war had come to the Hab itself, too.

  When she could breathe again, she emerged from under the Swarmer's belly and hurried into the wrenchworks office. The earmuffs clanged when she tossed them into her locker, and she scanned her wristfob for a tiny water ration to splash her face in the sink. She didn't want to open the fighter up until she was sure it was coolant-free, so no reason not to celebrate with the rest of the Hab. She could buy a round for some friendly-looking whaleship crews and still give Casne time and space to enjoy her quadparents for a while yet.