by R J Theodore
“Your head’s gone soggy, mate. The Tempest is a real thing, but the Veritors are a bedtime story.”
They were both supposed to be bedtime stories. Hankirk inhaled through his nose. Enough of these sky faring types and their condescending tone. “I’m looking for a ride to Subrosa, or someplace near enough. I can pay.”
Cigar captain shrugged and exhaled a large cloud of over-sweet smoke. “We’ve got room.”
No one else spoke, so Hankirk nodded his thanks to the captain.
She jerked a thumb toward the docks. “Lonesome Lad is in berth seven. We leave as soon as our tank’s full. You ain’t on board by then, we won’t feel guilty ’bout leavin’ without ya.”
He nodded. “I’ll return with you presently. I’ve no luggage to gather aside from the coat hanging by the door. My thanks for your hospitality, madam.”
She tossed her head back and laughed at that. “Ye are a leeward babe, aincha? Right, then. Just another minute, still gotta thaw me rudder ’n keel.”
The sailors returned to their banter while Hankirk descended into the depths of his thoughts. So many parties locked in a race to reach the alien ships.
On those ships, the prizes to be won were simula. Each of the alien blank bodies was another potential avatar for Meran. Hankirk reached up, without thinking, to pat his chest and feel the ring still there. As if he could miss the presence of the thing, like too many cups of coffee settled over his heart. Like the pull of Nexus before Nexus had ceased to pull.
A moment later, a man approached Lonesome Lad’s captain and handed her a narrow slip of paper. She pocketed it without reviewing its content, then clapped her hands. “All right, nice and warm. Back into the rain again, y’landlocked boy. We’re off, bound for dryer skies and warmer beds.”
He followed her back out into the rain. They were drenched and cold again by the time they reached the ship’s berth. The cabin they gave Hankirk would have been better described as a locker, but it was private and had a shelf and ticking that passed for a bunk. He removed his prosthesis and massaged the irritated skin of his remaining upper arm. The miserable weather hadn’t helped. As the crew pushed away from the storm center’s docks, he curled up under a worn blanket, thankful to have a chance to dry off again.
Despite his damp skin and wet clothes, he wasn’t cold. He was mad as hell and felt flushed and over warm. The Veritors had made their move, opening the borders and inviting the world to see them lift Emeranth to her throne. At least he knew that he’d given the crown princess enough warning about Patron Demir and the aliens.
On the deck above, a chorus of voices started up a bawdy tune about meeting mermaids in the rain clouds and winding up with soaked trousers. Its ridiculous lyrics were barely audible over the weather outside, but he’d heard the tune before, and it wormed into his mind and confused his thoughts further.
Emeranth and Diadem were behind him. Beyond his help. All he could do was move forward. She wanted to send the aliens away, though he’d warned her that she had to be patient, methodical, and wait for public opinion to turn against them. If she spoke against the aliens, what would they do to her?
But his stomach twisted beneath the blade of anger. He curled tighter beneath his blanket and hoped fervently for a flash of inspiration, or for sleep.
Chapter 23
Talis descended toward an offline portion of the Yu’Nyun hull. She glanced over her shoulder frequently, but Ketzali het Parantu was peaceful. The Bone temple ship had returned to hang low in the sky. It looked for all the world like a sirenia that had died and not yet vented enough gas to fall all the way to flotsam. Any activity on deck was guarded against prying eyes by the curtain of canvas, but they had lowered their lift platform again, ready for the rescue Talis had promised.
Her boots touched down on the alien hull with a dull metallic thunk. Then a squeaking whine, like a hand across a steamed mirror, as she slipped on the frost that iced the curved surface. The metal did have joins, but they were smooth and windtight—designed to keep the nothing of space from sucking the life from its occupants out beyond atmo. They offered nothing in the way of purchase.
The first time Talis saw a Yu’Nyun ship, the way it gleamed, it appeared as if formed of a single piece, an organic shape of sloping metal fins around a spheroid central body. Up close, the material looked more like the plating of a war ship than the silver beast she’d initially taken it for. She brushed off a layer of frost. The material was like no iron hull she’d ever seen, as though the metal was not pounded from ingots but poured like a liquid then cooled to set. A chatoyance under the surface reminded her of iron shavings arranged under a magnet. The inclusions shifted under the light as she moved, a shimmering luster beneath an otherwise smooth surface. It was as otherworldly as the people it transported here.
Scrimshaw once told her xist ship was a scout. Sent ahead to find what they wanted before the rest of the Yu’Nyun fleet moved in to take it. As such, it was smaller than the others, with only one ventral cannon. More benign—less threatening—than this larger attack vessel, which bloomed with dozens of gun ports mounted around the hull. There were sure to be more decks than on the scout ship she’d explored, but from what she knew of the aliens’ preference for rigid standards, she suspected the interior layout wasn’t likely to be much different.
According to the temple ship’s captain, her people had found a powered hatch and gone in that way, and they’d pointed out which one. Talis marked it on Sophie’s schematic, then chose her own entryway. She didn’t intend to follow the Bone crew into some unknown, frosty doom.
She balanced herself as best she could, feet to either side of the hull’s arching curve. Her gas torch lit with a grumbling hiss, and she twisted the knob so the flame turned from orange to blue, as concentrated and forceful as she could get it. Turning the flame against the metal hull, she imagined the ship beneath her was in full operation. Imagined the ship dropping out of the sky all over again, only by her own hand this time, instead of Meran’s.
Before she disappeared into Nexus, Meran had scattered the alien ships with a casual gesture, like that of a child callously tossing its playthings. A chill ran down between Talis’s shoulder blades that had nothing to do with the freezing air pressing against her descent suit. She’d been sure, at the time, the aliens were done for. That if Scrimshaw survived xist wounds, xe would be the last living alien on Peridot. Later, she learned more than a few of the starships managed to launch lifeboats. Smaller versions of the rounded ships, spreading the aliens across the skies like seed pods on a wind. The Yu’Nyun had a plan, it seemed, even in defeat. They headed straight for the inner Cutter islands to the seat of the Empire in Diadem where the Veritors of the Lost Codex had welcomed the aliens and the technological power they represented. The god-killing power.
It was satisfying to see the torch singe and scar the starship’s flawless hull. The metal gave way without argument. The material was so thin, it puckered and rippled beneath the flame, and she was able to pull it back with her free hand. It came away like the peel of a fruit, pliable and soft, though it didn’t buckle under the impact or weight of her feet.
Beneath the metal skin, wires, conduits, piping, and insulation corded like muscle fibers, packed and threaded between geodesic support braces. A neural and skeletal system of electronics.
A click in her ear, and Sophie’s voice came over comms. “Tell me what you see, Captain.”
“The guts of the monster.” Talis offered wry humor to make up for her lack of expertise. “Lots of pipes and wires and junk. Insulation. A rigid structure, looks like it supports the hull’s shape and protects the bits that run the whole mess.”
“Oh, I’d love to take a chunk of that home with us.” The younger woman’s voice came back as wistful as if Talis told her it was feather down and warm flannel.
“I’ll slice you off a piece of the cake. Cuts like it. S
end down a harness.”
“Acknowledged!” The word poured over with glee, and sounded like their old Sophie, more curious than cautious.
Gods grant they could all be so restored by the end of this job.
The underlying frame took more effort from the torch than the outer skin, but Talis managed to cut a sizable access hole and to keep it in one piece for Sophie’s examinations. Yellow sparks flared from some of the wires as she severed them, popping small fireworks and smoke back up in her face. She flinched in spite of the protective glass helmet.
By the time she cut clean around, the harness had lowered beside her.
“Might still be some power left in this section.” She secured her torch. “Got some sparks out of it. Nothing serious.”
“It’s still powered?” Sophie’s voice was breathy with wonder. “So that could mean I misinterpreted the tablet’s error messages.”
“You say that like you actually know how the thing works.”
“You may have stopped practicing your Yu’keem, Captain, but I never did.”
True enough, and Sophie had barely put the communication pad down since they’d boarded Im Ufite Rantor. What started as random explorations of the symbols on the screen had evolved, even to Talis’s eye, into deliberate navigation of menus and displays. A pad of paper, with at least fifty pages of notes on what any unfamiliar Yu’keem symbols roughly meant, went everywhere the tablet did.
Talis hooked the straps on the harness around the chunk of alien hull. “How the hell you found time to practice a language we didn’t think we’d even need to know anymore—with three and four jobs to go to on alternating days and building those contraptions around the edges—I’ll never know.”
Sophie’s confident chuckle vibrated in her ears. “Jobs didn’t take up a whole lot of my brain power, Captain. Maybe it’s lucky I never found work I could sink into. I ran through Scrimshaw’s lessons whenever I mopped, swept, washed, or laundered. Hands were busy as gales, yeah, but my mind wasn’t.”
Talis chuckled. “Weren’t you once docked pay for mixing a red apron in with the family’s white sheets?”
There was a click as Sophie closed her end of the connection. Talis could imagine the face the little imp would be making at her from above. She laughed louder and fogged the glass of her helmet. But these suits were the best their secret client’s money could buy, with vents and fans that ran off copper power cells, and the condensation cleared again in a moment.
She gave a crisp tug on the harness line. The piece of Yu’Nyun fuselage lifted away, leaving Talis staring into the dark shadows within the alien ship.
Chapter 24
Okay, let’s try it, then.”
Talis was ready to be out of the suit. Ready to feel a breeze across her face and not the lifeless eddies of her own exhalations cycled through the gentle whir of the suit’s fans.
Bored waiting for Sophie to suit up and join her, she’d burned through the last of the paraffin in her torch to widen the opening in the Yu’Nyun hull. Now, it was more than large enough for the big items that Eneil’s list told them to expect. Since they didn’t need to get into the ship via its ventral hatch, they were going to give it a tug and try to roll it upright.
Sophie came down to join Talis in the refuse layer while Tisker took over the winch levers and sky watch.
Hooking up tethers to the half-submerged dorsal ridge of the round ship, and to the edges of the access hole Talis made, took most of the morning. She was hungry and had the infuriating tickle of a stray hair on her cheek that she was dying to brush away. But she wasn’t too cranky to appreciate that she’d been in the descent suit for hours and still had full feeling in her fingers. They could stand to wrap around a warm cup of coffee, but for Talis, that was always the case.
The lines stretching from Im Ufite Rantor to the Yu’Nyun starship took up their slack. For a moment, given the alien vessel’s size and weight, Talis feared that the hauler above would only reel itself down toward flotsam. But then, with the scrape of settled garbage sliding against the hull, the starship began to move. The crown slowly rotated up out of flotsam and around to its original upright position.
“Good, okay. Stop.” She held up a hand as though Tisker would be able to see it at that distance. He might if he had the scope on her, but more likely, he had one hand on the winch lever and the other holding the comm receiver.
“Locked in, Cap. Thrust matched against the weight. We can burn all day.”
“Whenever you’re ready, Soph.”
Sophie gave her a positive signal from her place on the other side of the makeshift access, and they edged down the outer hull until they could step foot onto the decking revealed within.
“Tisker, prep the platform. We’ll talk to you in a bit.”
“Aye, Cap. Bring me back something shiny.”
Talis grinned at Sophie. “Ready for this?”
The mischief in Sophie’s eyes matched the twinkle of the frost around them. “Captain, I’ve been wanting to rob these bastards since the first time I saw their ship.”
That was certainly true. They unclipped their harnesses from the main descent line, and the white noise of the open comms went silent as they entered the alien ship through Talis’s opening. It would be all shouting and hand signals from here.
The low pile carpet of the interior decking provided a bit of purchase. Smooth white bulkhead panels reflected their torchlights so that it was easy to scan the room even without the ship’s lights. The cabin looked like an office. There was a smooth, curved workstation built into the floor, facing the hatch to the corridor. A high-backed metal chair tilted against the far bulkhead, broken off its pedestal leg. A glass tablet was crushed beneath it, shattered into three pieces and surrounded by fine crystalline splinters. Otherwise, the room was empty.
The women crossed the spartan cabin, tapped the wall terminal at eye-level—as lifeless as they’d expected—then set upon the door with their tools.
The three-panel door took both of them to open. It parted smoothly enough, once they figured out how the edges overlapped and got their sally bars wedged in, but some heavy mechanism in the bulkhead forced it back closed as soon as they let up the effort, and there seemed to be no ratchet points for the panels to catch and hold themselves open.
Finally, and with a curse, Sophie clipped herself back into Im Ufite Rantor’s comm line and had Tisker drop them a fresh paraffin tank. Taking her frustrations out on the ambivalent door, she softened the metal until she could batter it out of shape along the seal edge. Then, with Talis holding the doors panels open with her feet and both hands, welded it into the pocket in the bulkhead, cursing the door’s mother—and grandmother—the whole way.
“Feel better?” Talis asked as Sophie breathed puffs of exasperated condensation in her helmet.
There was a bead of sweat dripping down Sophie’s temple, and she blinked her eye on that side and tilted her head in a quick motion, trying to dislodge it. “Warmed me up again, anyway.”
“Glad you had fun. There are probably a hundred doors on this ship.”
Sophie stared hard at the ruined edges of the door frame. “If we’re going to make a career out of salvaging Yu’Nyun tech—”
“We are definitely not.” Talis meant it to sound casual and dismissive, but since she had to raise her voice to be heard through the suit helmet, it came out sounding more like a desperate protest.
“Yeah, but I could probably rig up a kind of ratcheting sally bar that could hold the doors open—”
“No time today, Soph. Come on.”
Talis unbuttoned a flap on the outside of her left sleeve, under which was pinned their folded shopping list, and skimmed the sheet again under the light of her battery-operated torch as Sophie took their Yu tablet out of her belt pouch. There were more than a half dozen items listed that were potentially larger
than either of the two women. Back on Im Ufite Rantor, they’d planned their approach and agreed to find the smaller items as they looked for the missing Bone crew, so as not to tire themselves out, navigating around the sections of the ship that still had power to get as close as they could. On these upper levels that meant more communication tablets, mostly, but also medical kits and carving tools.
Talis had a feeling those tools were for carving alien bodies. The Yu’Nyun exoskeleton was the preferred canvas upon which—and into which—the aliens chose to express their social status. Scrimshaw’s carvings were mostly shallow, but as detailed as lace. They’d met other individuals whose carvings were so ornate and whose designs perforated so far through their outer layers, that the blue jewel-toned flesh beneath was exposed as often as not.
Talis wanted to ask Scrimshaw more about the carving, but once xe’d declared xist-self ‘ruined’ and willing to talk about Yu’Nyun society, she never got the chance. There were a lot more questions Talis might have asked, and which Scrimshaw might finally have answered.
As infuriating as Scrimshaw’s cryptic answers had been while xe was still attempting to act the loyal Yu’Nyun agent, once xe had cast off xist social rules, the curious and thoughtful personality had remained, and had begun to grow on her.
Now, with Scrimshaw dead, Talis wouldn’t mind if she never saw another Yu’Nyun.
She and Sophie encountered some anyway. In the corridors, their bouncing torch beams played off slumped tangles of alien corpses flung against bulkheads. The bodies with the most damage lay in pools of frozen blue blood. With the ship righted again, they stuck to the walls as if trapped by the silk of a spider. The blood glittered under a coat of hoar frost, looking like the inside of a geode filled with tiny blue crystal teeth. She and Sophie moved carefully around the still figures, picking their way through the corridor in what she hoped would be the fastest route to a companionway they’d picked out on the tablet. Her muscles tensed, prepped to run, as though she anticipated the bodies would rise on broken and splintered limbs and come after them. She tried to relax her shoulders, but they kept creeping up again. There’d be a headache from the muscle tension later, for sure.