by J. S. Morin
“You two all square now?” Carl asked. He had the dark glasses pushed up on his head, nestled in the ridiculous blue hair that he had asked Mort not to fix. Beside him, the inside door of the airlock stood open, waiting.
Mort heaved Lloyd into the airlock chamber, using a foot to prod a stray leg all the way inside. With a nod to Carl, he let the Mobius’ captain do the honors. The inner door shut. The outer door opened. The outer door closed, and it was done.
“Glad you killed him first,” Carl said. “Even for a bastard like that, airlocking’s a rough way to go.”
“Oh, I didn’t kill him,” Mort said and walked away.
# # #
Rhiannon sat at the kitchen table in the common room, staring down into a mug of coffee that had long since gone cold. Like the rest of them, she had awakened hungry, confused, an uneasy in her real body once more. They had all been subjected to an inhuman violation of privacy, but for her the sting went far deeper.
“I thought I loved him,” she muttered.
Esper worked the mug loose from her unresisting fingers and replaced it with another with steaming contents. “We all live with disappointments and betrayals. It doesn’t make it any easier when it’s happening, but you get past it.”
Rhiannon glanced up briefly and twitched a smile of thanks. She sipped at the coffee, but it was still too hot to drink. “I thought he loved me.”
“Well, that was your mistake,” Carl said from the couch where he ate a plate of bacon and pancakes from his lap. “You’re just plain unlovable. You talk like you’re five hundred years old. You’ve got a voice like a dying crow. And you look just like Dad. I mean, you’re the spitting image. You’ve even got a little hair on your upper—”
Carl’s recounting of Rhiannon’s flaws was interrupted by a clatter of his plate hitting the floor as he dropped it trying to shield his face from the spoon his sister threw. But it had worked. Despite herself, she was laughing, even with her eyes still red from crying. “You’re a bastard. You know that, right?”
Kubu slunk into the room, summoned by the sound of falling food. He flipped Carl’s plate over and licked both it and the floor clean in seconds. By Carl’s reckoning, he was now too big to be confused with a dog. Not that he’d stop calling him one anyway.
“Rhi, you just throw yourself into love so hard you can’t help falling out the far side,” Carl said.
“Like you know anything.”
“Hey, no one I’ve slept with has tried to kill me.”
Tanny chose that moment to emerge from the hall to the cockpit. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it a few times.”
“How we doing?” Carl asked, leaning back and stretching the length of the couch.
“Well, we didn’t change course or anything,” Tanny said. “We’re still headed for nowhere. Nothing on the comm log, so he didn’t give away our location or heading. Sensors aren’t picking up any sign of Lloyd inside the ship or outside.”
Of course they weren’t. Lloyd had gone out the airlock hours before Mort woke everyone else from their catatonic states. It was long enough that they were well out of sensor range. Mort hadn’t wanted anyone else to see the body, just in case there was an overwhelming majority who wanted to be ghoulish and check that he was really dead. Carl had just wanted to wait until all the systems in the common room came back online. Nothing spooked the crew like having half the ship non-functional while they were deep in the astral.
“Hey Rhi, you got anywhere you need to be?” Carl asked.
Rhiannon sighed. “I dunno. Peractorum was nice, but I was just renting. Don’t suppose I could show my face around there.”
“Probably not,” Carl agreed.
“You can stay with us as long as you like,” Esper said, smiling across the table at Rhiannon.
“I don’t know if I want to sleep in the same room where Lloyd and I…” Rhiannon shrugged.
“You can use my bunk,” Esper volunteered. “It’s not like I’ve done a good job keeping it secret that I’ve been sleeping in Mort’s quarters. Besides, now you’ve all seen firsthand what we’re really doing in there.”
“Oh?” Tanny asked. “Is it supposed to be less freaking creepy that you’re spending nights in a fantasy land where Mort is God? That place is as fake as a bouquet of plastic roses.”
“One time…” Carl muttered, glaring sidelong at Tanny.
“No, it’s not,” Esper replied. “Lloyd’s head, yes. Mortania is beautiful, though. And I’ll never learn magic in my lifetime if I can only practice in the real world. I got too late a start in life. So go ahead, Rhi, take my quarters for as long as you need them.”
“Well, you’ll be the first stray we’ve picked up in a while where I know ahead of time what I’m signing up for,” Carl said with a wink.
“Where is Mort, anyway?” Tanny asked. “I figure we ought to do something nice to thank him… you know, for saving us all from winking out of existence.”
“He’s sleeping it off,” Esper said. “I figured he could use some alone time in Mortania.”
“A little mental breather?” Tanny asked.
Esper grinned. “No, to clear up all the boulders and stone corpses.”
# # #
In a cavern with no entrance, and the only exit a bottomless abyss, there hung a cage of iron. Chains, each link as thick as a man’s wrist, tethered it to the cavern walls. There were eight chains in all—one for each of the cage’s corners. The bars were set far enough apart that a leg or arm could dangle loose, but not quite far enough to squeeze a prisoner through. There was neither lock nor door, yet there was an occupant.
A wizard stepped into the cavern, appearing from nothing to stand atop a thin, polished gray plate. As Mort strode forward, new plates rose from the abyss to support his feet, each solid despite a lack of dimension, formed from color rather than any mortal material.
“Mordecai!” Lloyd shouted from his cage. He shook it by the bars, causing the cage to rock with what little slack the chains allowed. His clothes hung from him in rags; his matted beard reached his collarbone. “You can’t hold me here forever! I’ll find a way out of here, and when I do, you’ll pay for this.”
Mort clucked his tongue. “You get so few visitors,” he said as he drew close. “If I stop coming, you’ll have none at all. You might try being more polite.”
Lloyd let loose a manic chuckle. “Polite. Polite? You expect polite from me?” He threw back his head and cackled. “If I had bested you, I would have been merciful about it. Quick delivery to the Convocation. I wouldn’t have caged you in an empty room for months on end with no company, no diversion. I don’t even have magic here to order my thoughts.”
“Can’t very well have you magicking up the place,” Mort said with a shrug. His silver stepping plate bobbed slightly at the gesture. “As for the length of your incarceration… you’ve been here for all of two hours.”
“Two… hours?” Lloyd echoed, retreating to the far side of the cage. “No! It can’t be! How long do you plan on keeping me here? How can it be only two hours?”
“You never did discover what was in that book I stole, did you?” Mort asked. “The respectable members of the Convocation never looked inside themselves. Let’s just say that I’ve made the most of its contents. I am old, Lloyd Arnold, old in the only way that matters: in the mind. And don’t expect frequent visits; I’m finding that I can’t even enjoy gloating over you. You’re an unpleasant little creature, worse for having been stripped of a veneer of civility that seems to have encompassed most of your personality. What is left is…” Mort gestured vaguely in Lloyd’s direction. “…pathetic.”
Mort turned to leave. The silvery plates rose behind him to form a path to the edge of the cavern.
“Wait!” Lloyd shouted. “Don’t leave me here. Kill me! If you don’t kill me, I swear I’ll find a way out of here and make you pay.”
Mort paused and turned to look over his shoulder. “Pay? Out of here? There is no ‘out of
here’ for you, Lloyd. What’s in here is all that’s left. I devoured your mind and disposed of your body. I’ve got other little caverns like this; not every bounty hunter who came for me died in flame and lightning. Some of them have been here for a very, very long time. But I’ve learned from them, and I’ll learn a few things from you, too, I’m sure. But not right now. You brought my friends into this Convocation business, and I’m not quick to forgive that sort of thing. You can use a few hundred years to think about what you’ve done.”
And with that, Mordecai The Brown vanished, leaving Lloyd alone with his thoughts.
Moon of Odysseus
Mission 8 of the Black Ocean Series
J.S. Morin
Moon of Odysseus
Mission 8 of: Black Ocean
Copyright © 2015 Magical Scrivener Press
“Blackjack, this is Scarecrow. I finally found it. We’re going to be rich.”
Carl Ramsey raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t often anything showed up on this old comm ID. Few even knew he had it. Checking on it had become a habit more than an expectation of getting a message, but that didn’t mean the message was unwelcome. It was welcome as hell. For months the Mobius had been drifting around, sneaking in and out of colonies, starports, and scrapyards. Small time stuff. A theft here, a barter there, and once in a while a frantic escape.
Carl set the datapad beside him on the bed, still displaying Scarecrow’s message. This could be the real deal. Plenty of shady contacts out there offered too-good-to-be-true opportunities; Carl’s message dump was filled with them. But this was Scarecrow, his old wingman and one of the survivors of Squadron 333. The day Scarecrow’s word wasn’t good enough for him was the day he didn’t deserve to captain a starship.
There were no details in the message, no explanation pending if he read farther down. The only hint was a set of coordinates buried in the comm routing code. It would be a rendezvous site. That would be where they’d meet, if Carl wanted in. And Carl wanted in.
The night was silent, save for the thrumming, mechanical background grumbles that he had learned to all but ignore. The holovid playing in the common room had ended nearly an hour ago—some weepy romance that Rhiannon and Esper were keen on. He couldn’t hear any signs of activity from beyond the door of his quarters. He had time to think while the crew all slept.
Come morning, he’d need to have a plan to convince them all to go treasure hunting.
# # #
Outside the cockpit window, the pin-speckled darkness of the Black Ocean loomed. As Carl watched, the unfamiliar local starscape faded, blurring into the uniform gray of astral space. Counting in his head, he waited. At fifty-eight, the gray darkened into realspace once more, and the stars reappeared. It had been happening at regular intervals all morning as Esper practiced guiding the ship back and forth between the two planes of existence.
The first time he’d noticed them drop into astral, he’d blamed Mort. A random astral drop by an experienced wizard was an annoyance. Instead Mort had informed him that it was part of Esper’s training. Being tossed without warning into a parallel dimension by a novice was downright terrifying. However after a few weeks of not dying, the terror had worn off, replaced by a dull, nagging worry—the same sort of worry as getting onto a decrepit intra-system shuttle or getting worked on by a med tech wearing a “trainee” badge.
“Get out of that goddamn chair.”
The regular pilot of the Mobius tore Carl from his musings. “Hey, Tanny. Got a comm last night. Figured I’d run it by you first.” He levered himself out of his seat and offered it to Tanny with a flourish.
She didn’t take her eyes off him as she settled in behind the controls. “What kind of comm we talking? Did you break comm silence?”
Carl held up an oath-swearing hand. “All passive. I promise.” He brought up the message from Scarecrow and handed it to her.
Her brow grew increasingly furrowed, and Carl knew she had read it more than once. “I’ll bite. What’s the scam?”
Carl grinned. “I don’t know. Sounds like a nice break from pillaging deserted relay stations and cleaning up dead-space battlefields though, doesn’t it?”
She tossed him the datapad. “Pass.”
“What?”
“I said ‘pass.’ We don’t need a cockamamie scheme right now. We need something solid; we’re barely scraping by out here. One bad job and we might not recover.”
“You make it sound like we’re taking a job posted to the omni,” Carl said, resting his elbows on the copilot’s chair. “This is Scarecrow. I know you two never got along, but I’ll take this lead over anything we cobble together. This could be the break we’ve been looking for.”
Tanny crossed her arms. “Ask yourself how often you’ve thought that. And how does it always turn out?”
“This is different, though. Scarecrow—”
“Charlie,” Tanny corrected him. “She’s not your wingman anymore. And she’s the craziest of the bunch.”
Carl twitched a smile. “The Half-Devils of Squadron 333, craziest fuckers in Earth Navy. It was practically our motto. But Scarecrow’s no crazier than I am.”
“I don’t say this often, but I think this time you’re not the more reckless one. Besides, it could be a trap. Why would she even send you a comm? Everyone either believes you’re dead or in hiding.”
“Hatchet would have told her,” Carl said with a shrug. “I told him to pass the word around to the squad.”
“You WHAT?” Tanny threw up her arms. “How were you expecting to fake your death if you had Hiroshi going around telling everyone you weren’t dead?”
“Hey, I owed it to them,” Carl said. And he did. The Half-Devils weren’t just old navy buddies; they were family. Same as they told Rhiannon, Carl had to let the news get around that he wasn’t actually a dead man. “Besides, who knows what those crazy fuckers might have done to Silde Slims for vengeance.”
“You see? You see?” Tanny said, pointing. “That’s what I mean. They’re loose cannons. Hiroshi might have been the most stable of the bunch. But Charlie’s gone nuts.”
Carl took a step back and put up his hands. It wasn’t the time to get into Hatchet’s personal history to refute her point. “You know what? Fine. I don’t need consensus on this… just a majority.”
The race was on. Carl bolted down the short corridor to the common room as Tanny extracted herself from the pilot’s chair to give chase. She was quicker than him, thanks to her chemically enhanced physiology, but he had too large a head start.
“I found us a lead on something huge,” Carl blurted out as he skidded to a halt.
All eyes turned toward him. Esper and Rhiannon looked up from their breakfast. From the couch, Roddy stopped flipping through the holovid database to glance over. Mriy opened the door from her quarters to peer out, her feline ears swiveling in Carl’s direction.
“What’s this all about?” Mort asked, stepping out of the shower in a bathrobe. The wizard was still sopping wet.
“I got a comm,” Carl said, glaring over at Tanny. “No details, but I’ve got coordinates for a meeting.”
“Good.” Mriy shut her door. That was the nice thing about her sometimes. She could just take good fortune at face value.
“Lemme guess,” Rhiannon said with a mouthful of cereal. “This isn’t the sort of gig where I sing and people pay us, is it?” Her career had been put on hold while the Mobius crew was in hiding. Skulking along the outskirts of the civilized galaxy wasn’t conducive to an aspiring singer’s prospects.
“Where’s the lead from?” Roddy asked. “I’ve about had my fill of garbage picking, but I’m not working for a question mark if I can help it.”
“An old navy buddy,” Carl said.
“Hatchet?” Esper asked, perking up. They’d worked with Hiroshi ‘Hatchet’ Samuelson on the heist that got Carl his own toy racing ship—one that was a civilian racing model based on his old military Typhoon IV. “He was nice. I’d work with him aga
in.” Carl had to give Hiroshi credit; he had that effect on a lot of women.
“No, not him,” Carl replied. He looked over his shoulder, checking himself before he made eye contact with Tanny. “My wingman, Scarecrow.”
Rhiannon chuckled. “You pilots and your call signs. I couldn’t believe my ears when you told Mom and Dad the guys you flew with.”
Scarecrow, Hatchet, Brick, Wolfhound, Rib-Eye, Vixen, Cricket, Samurai, Juggler, Jackhammer, Wallaby, Biscuit, Athena, Vegas, Dynamo, Knuckles, and Prune Juice. And one Lieutenant Commander Blackjack Ramsey to lead them. The names cycled through his head in seconds as Carl’s eyes lost focus. Nearly half of them were dead, but he could still hear their voices over the comm, calling the role.
Roddy snapped his fingers. “Yo, Mobius to Carl. We lose you there?”
Carl blinked and shook his head to clear it. “Nah, just thinking. Anyway, I trust Scarecrow.”
“What if it’s a setup, and it’s not really her?” Tanny asked. “Ever think of that?”
Carl replied with a shrug. “I always think of that. But my gut tells me this is legit.”
“Your gut’s about as reliable as Kubu’s,” Tanny said.
“Speaking of… how’s Kubu’s food supply?” Carl asked, veering from the subject at hand.
“Still got two giant carcasses stinking up the cargo bay,” Roddy said. “Can smell the rot clear back to the engine room.”
“How long’s that going to last him?”
Esper cleared her throat. “The hippo lasted him three days. He’ll probably get another three out of two moose. We’ve got some odds and ends that might hold him over longer, but you know Kubu… he loves to eat.”
“Sounds like we need a source of income to buy him some more, and soon,” Carl said, sounding very concerned. Tanny had adopted Kubu, a puppy of a sentient canid species. But while he had come aboard the size of a large dog, he was growing at a frightening rate. He was already too large to fit through the ship’s doors without risk of getting stuck, limiting him to the cargo bay.
Tanny set her jaw. Carl watched her eyes scanning the crew, looking for signs of support, or at least that’s what he imagined. Sometimes there was just no telling what was going on in that head of hers.