False Horizons

by CJ Birch

  I shake my head at Dr. Prashad. I don’t want everyone knowing I have this intruder inside me. Even if the doc says it’s dormant, people will still be prejudiced. The only people who have mind knots now are the Burrs, and I certainly don’t want to be associated with them.

  “It was just a thought. Because of Sarka.” He looks at me, assessing, then sighs. “Well, I guess we could use a diagnostic cube. I’ve run out of all other options. It will take me a while to get Chloe over to the Persephone to get the necessary supplies.”

  “Actually, I’d like you to do the procedure over there. I’d like to be present as well,” I say.

  “But there’s no life support. We’d have to suit up and ventilate Hartley. That’s a lot of work.”

  “I know.” I don’t expand because I don’t know Wells enough yet to trust her like I do the doctor and Yakovich. Something about this ship still bothers me. I’ve been trying to get off it since we boarded, and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one. But at times even I feel this pull to stay. The longer we stay, the stronger it gets.

  The doctor gives me the benefit of the doubt and nods. “I’ll ask Chloe to join us. She won’t be happy about having to do this procedure in an enviro-suit.”

  “She’ll deal.” She always does. Chloe, the doctor’s nurse, complains a lot, but she always gets things done in the end. I had to drag her into the jungle when we went to rescue the captain, but she handled herself fine.

  I turn to Yakovich. “Can you find Foer? I want him to give me a progress report.” Maybe they’ve been able to crack the encryption and gain access and we won’t have to wait for Hartley to get better. But as I stare down at his prone form, a deeper worry creeps up. I’ll feel better when he improves. Something’s very scary about the way he’s just lying there. His usually brilliant grin is slack, and those bright, playful eyes are hidden. It’s not right. The Persephone needs her head engineer.

  It takes a couple of hours to set everything up. With Chloe complaining it feels longer. I had Yakovich take Wells with her. With a battle pending, the illya don’t have the spare resources to return her to the Posterus. It’s just as well. I’d rather have her here instead of at the mercy of Gladwell’s bad advice.

  We’re in our med center. In fact, I think this is the exact exam table the doctor did my procedure on. I’m happy to be on the other end of it this time. Chloe’s stripped Hartley to his boxers and attached a ventilator to his mouth and nose to make sure he gets air during the procedure.

  The doctor picks up a scalpel to cut into Hartley’s hip. “Confirming patient is unconscious.” His eyes flick to mine for a brief second as if to say, “See, this is how it’s supposed to be done.” As painful as it was, I don’t regret being awake for the procedure. I trust the doctor, very much, but something about giving up total control devastates me. At the time I was terrified he and Jordan would keep me in the dark for my own good. More than anything, I needed to know what was wrong with me.

  “Confirmed,” Chloe says.

  As Dr. Prashad cuts into Hartley, I wonder what Jordan must have thought watching me. She was my only source of comfort during that whole experience, but she must have thought I was bat-shit crazy to refuse pain medication. Watching the doctor slice Hartley open and insert the diagnostic cube into his hip, even I can concede I was bat-shit crazy to let him do it without anesthesia. I feel like I should be holding Hartley’s hand, even though he can’t experience pain. I’m not really the hand-holding type, though.

  His face is still slack under the ventilator. He hasn’t moved since the procedure started. He’s fine. I can’t understand why I’m so nervous for him. But when the doctor pulls the suture out to stitch him up, I take an involuntary step back. Something deep in my gut just wedged itself in my throat. I can’t believe I was awake for this procedure.

  After the doctor finishes stitching him up, Chloe turns on the monitor to view the data the diagnostic cube is sending back. The doctor squints up at the screen, where a red sensor is beeping in the left corner.

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “What?” I circle the table to get a closer look. Not that I’ll understand what I’m seeing.

  The doctor shifts the screen and enlarges a section that shows a list of numbers running up the side. He brings up another slide with more numbers and mounts the two beside each other.

  “What do those numbers mean?”

  “The diagnostic cube passes blood through its sensors as it makes its way through the body. We can program it to look for certain things, but it does this automatically. So far we’ve found nothing wrong with Hartley. Everything we’ve tested for has come up negative. But this sensor,” he taps the screen, “is indicating an anomalous reading. I pulled up an early medical record, and he definitely has something in his blood that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Could that be causing the issue?”

  “I won’t know for certain until we do more tests, but it’s definitely possible.”

  I know the doctor well enough to realize I won’t get anything more out of him. “Keep me posted. I’ll check back in later.” I next stop to check in on Yakovich and Foer to see if they’ve made any progress. We need to get the Persephone back up and running now. I don’t want to wait. Whatever happens with the illya and the Varbaja, I don’t want the Persephone stuck in this ship. I’m sure their cause is worthy and the Varbaja deserve what they get, but we need to get our crew off or we’ll get caught in the middle. We didn’t come thousands of light-years from home to get blown to pieces.

  Walking the empty, dark ship in my enviro-suit is creepy. With the engines silent and no one on board, it’s like being on a ghost ship. On one of my first assignments, we responded to an emergency call from a mining ship. They’d been struck by an asteroid that had torn apart a good section of the hull. By the time we got there, the airlocks had failed and left nothing but an empty ship. The entire crew had been blown out the hole—all except the helmsmen, who we found wedged between his seat and the console. He’d had the good sense to get into an enviro-suit but had long since run out of air. I remember thinking what a horrible way to die. At least if he’d been sucked out the hull he would’ve died with the rest of the crew. Quickly. Instead, he had time to sit there at the helm thinking about how he would eventually run out of air and suffocate to death. That’s an excruciating way to die.

  As I’m about to enter the chute down to engineering, the ship lights blink on. I’m blinded for a moment as I orient myself. Then they begin to pulse red, and an alarm blares through the corridors.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jordan

  When the view screen goes blank, I can still see the imprint of Ash. I’m stunned. What are she and Yakovich doing on the illya’s ship? I’ve been busting my ass to get back to the Persephone, back to Ash, and now she’s sided with the very enemy we’re up against? I can’t concentrate on any of the surrounding conversations. Only one thought absorbs me. What the fuck did Ash do with my ship?

  Sarka nudges me, pulling me back from the brink of explosion. When I turn to him I’m seething, and for the first time my rage isn’t directed toward him. I’ve been mad at Ash before. With some of the shit she’s pulled, how could I not be? But I’ve always been able to see it from her point of view, realize she was trying to do what she felt was best for everyone. Even selflessly trying to commit suicide was, in her mind, the best for everyone. Sacrifice the one for the many. But I have no context. I have no information whatsoever, and that’s gnawing at me.

  “What?” I growl.

  He points to the view screen. “Well, you don’t have to worry about those bombs I set. Alison made it through just fine. All the pieces are there.” As he says this, a dangerous thought enters my mind.

  “Some of the crew may have made it out, but I don’t see my fucking ship anywhere, do you?”

  He pauses, and I can see him going through the thought process. “That’s a good point. Huh. I really thought she’d figur
e them out. They were dead simple to disarm.”

  Before I can redirect all my anger at Sarka, where it belongs, Veera steps forward and pokes my leg to get my attention. “We’re going to send over a delegation to their ship—”

  “I want to be part of that,” I say. I need to see Ash, and not just through a screen. I want to talk to her face-to-face and find out what happened.

  “No, you don’t.” Veera’s voice is flat and hard.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “The soldiers we’ll be sending over there will be on a suicide mission.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll be strapped with explosives. If we time our attack right, we’ll destroy their command structure and take out their main cannons.”

  “Won’t work.” Sarka shakes his head. “You don’t think they’ll be ready? You’ve been at war for centuries. More than likely they’re planning a similar strategy. Why else would they have agreed so easily?”

  Veera turns all her attention to Sarka, gauging if he’s worthy of her time. Before this she’d almost dismissed him as another thug, but now it seems she’s sensed something more useful from him.

  “I would listen to him.” I hate to side with him, but if we’re caught in the middle of this situation, I’d rather have the time to get my people out of the line of fire before they blow each other up. “He’s been at war probably as long as you guys have been, and he’s still alive.”

  Veera jumps up onto one of the consoles to even out the height difference. “What do you suggest?”

  “We have people on their ship.” He turns and points to me. “Captain Kellow’s crew is over there. At least her first officer and head of security are. It’s likely they’ve found themselves in a situation similar to ours. If we can get a message to them, we can have them sabotage the ship from the inside.”

  “How do you know they’re not on the illya’s side?”

  “The captain here just needs to give the order, and her crew will follow. They’d follow her anywhere.”

  Veera paces back and forth along the console mumbling to herself. “It’s an idea. It’s definitely an idea. How do you propose we get in touch with them?”

  Sarka taps his head. “I have a piece of technology in my head that can communicate with Captain Kellow’s first officer. It’s rudimentary, but we can get a simple message through that I believe she’ll understand.”

  My vision actually goes white from blind rage. It’s a visceral response to the concept that Sarka’s connected like that to Ash. I’m jealous of that connection, as he knew I would be. He’s taunting me with the idea that he’ll be more intimate with Ash than I could ever be. He glances at me sideways, and that’s all the proof I need. He’s been waiting for this opportunity, biding his time until he could thrust his knife in.

  And the worst part? I have no choice but to agree, to submit Ash to that invasion, because if we don’t, the outcome is so much worse.

  “Okay. This is a good plan. But we need to devise a message that will convey our sabotage strategy. The illya’s ship will not be easy to undermine,” Veera says.

  “Get your engineer guy to help, Jordan. I’m sure he can destroy anything,” Sarka says.

  I say, “We don’t even know if he’s on their ship. We have proof that Ash and Yakovich are there, but what if they’re being held prisoner?”

  He places a hand on my arm, and I jerk away. “Do you really think Ash would leave the crew behind? If she’s there, the rest of the crew are there.”

  “But once they do sabotage the ship, how do we get them off?”

  “We’ll have to leave that to them,” says Veera, who’s still up on the console conferring with one of the other aju. “We don’t have the resources to help in that matter. Now, come with me.” She jumps to the floor and beckons for us to follow her. Something about the tiny woman scares the shit out of me. But if she thinks I’m going to sit back and hope my crew has a way off that ship before all hell breaks loose, she’s nuts.

  Veera shuts Sarka and me in one of their classrooms with one of their engineers to brainstorm. We need to figure out how to configure Sarka’s mind knot to talk to Ash—it’s not as easy as he made it sound—but also what message to send.

  The message has to be simple because we don’t want to overload the mind knot on the first go. But it’s hard to figure out how to send a simple message with a complex meaning. We want to give them the instructions for how to disable the ship, something Veera’s engineer hasn’t figured out how to do yet.

  It’s best to ignore Sarka. It’s been a day since I saw Ash on the bridge of the illya’s ship, and it’s killing me not to know how she’s doing or how she got on that ship.

  “Isn’t there some self-destruction timer you can get them to hit?” Sarka’s squished into one of the chairs with his boots resting on top of the desk. “That would be an easy message to send. Hit. Destruction. Button.”

  The engineer, Troer, ignores him, as he’s ignored most of what Sarka says. So that makes two people now. And the more we ignore him, the more he talks. Troer is an umquashi with one long patch of flowing red hair right down the middle of his head. He must be a lot younger than the others I’ve seen, most of whom have very white hair. His eyes are black specks sitting in the middle of his face. His lips are also black, which makes his face look like a round white plate with three black beans sitting on it. He’s had his head buried in a tablet since we arrived.

  “What if we tell them to blast a hole in the side of the hull? That would decompress the ship, and in the chaos you guys could charge in and blow them up.” When this suggestion is also met with silence, Sarka drops his boots onto the floor with a loud thunk. “What about taking another smaller ship and ramming it into the bridge of the ship? Or an engine?” He drums his fingers on the table. “What if—”

  “Enough.” I slam my palm on the table. “Leave if you’re not going to be helpful.”

  “Me? I’m coming up with all the ideas. You guys are just sitting there like lumps of shit.” He points to Troer. “And this guy, you’re the one that’s supposed to know the most about their ship, and you haven’t said shit. What are you doing over there? Reading a novel? We’re running out of time.”

  For the first time Troer lifts his head from his tablet. “I’m studying our historical database on the illya to find any mentions of their ship configurations. I’ve never seen an illya ship before, so forgive me if I’d like to enter this assignment with knowledge instead of guessing, like you’re inclined to do.”

  “We need to find a solution that won’t make the illya aware of our intentions.” I turn to Sarka. “If it were up to you, we’d go in guns blazing. I have crew on there I don’t want killed. We also need to find a solution that’s a slow burn. Something that gives them time to escape.”

  “You can’t have both, Jordan.”

  I ignore his comment. I can’t worry about all the worst-case scenarios. For my own sanity I have to focus on what we can accomplish and trust that my crew can do the rest. Outside the classroom I hear a stampede of boots rush by. Things have calmed down for the most part. The revolt is over and there’s a new regime. For the first time the aju are in charge—people who lead with their brains instead of their fists. Perhaps that will make a difference. Not that they’ll stop fighting. We’ve already seen that the goal is the same, to destroy the illya.

  “Have you come up with any ideas of how my crew can sabotage the illya’s ship?” I ask Troer.

  “Yes, but all require too much instruction. The trick is coming up with something simple that can be compressed enough to be sent through your friend’s device.”

  I also ignore the friend comment. “How much space do we have to work with?”

  “About a hundred gigs.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What did you expect? It’s centuries-old technology. We’re lucky we have it to use,” Sarka says.

  I leap to my feet and tower over him. “Lucky? Is that what I
should be feeling?”

  He stands, taking the challenge. “Don’t start.”

  He’s a foot taller, but I don’t back down. “And don’t pretend like you didn’t have this planned in the back of your mind from the start.” I jam a finger into his chest. The anger that’s been building since he came aboard my ship escapes its cage, and its power makes me feel strong and, most importantly, right. “You love the fact that you can shove this situation in my face. You know, she won’t even tell me what you did to her, because it’s so bad she doesn’t want to relive it. You treat people like they’re objects. You use the ones who are useful until nothing’s left and discard those who have no value.” Sarka takes a step back, obviously unsure where this is all coming from. To be honest, I’m a little surprised myself. I rarely lose control like this. But now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.

  “I’ve seen you do it my whole life. You think you’re this great leader, but people don’t follow you. They’re afraid of you. Mom hated you so much she chose death over staying with you.” God, I want to hurt him. I want to hurt him like he hurt Ash, like he did Mom. But nothing I say will ever accomplish that. “You’re nothing but a fucking bully and screw-up. God. This whole mess”—I slam my fist on the desk—“is your fault. We’re stuck on this fucking ship because you had the bright idea to jettison an escape pod into fucking nowhere.” I push him, but he doesn’t budge. “Even worse, we’re lost in this fucking solar system because of you. Because of your grand, stupid, fucking ideas. If you hadn’t meddled. If you hadn’t gotten involved—where you didn’t belong, I might add—then none of this would be happening.” I punctuate each of those last words with a slap to his torso. His face has turned to stone. I can’t read him at all. “Get out of here. You’re no use to us. We’ll solve this without you.”

  “Jordan—”

  “Out. You’re not wanted.”

  He doesn’t say anything as he turns to leave.

  I’m still panting several minutes after he’s gone. I’m on the verge of tears, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to cry in front of Troer.