by Barry Lyga
The announcement that His Lordship was dead and that Robbo’s psychic spikes were no longer a threat went a long way toward assuaging the crew’s fears and misgivings. They’d been under His Lordship’s rule for so long that they didn’t know how else to live, so Thanos left their conditions—as horrendous as they were—the same. For now. He fully intended to liberate every last one of them, but right now he needed them all to keep up their tasks. It was no good to win the ship only to have it fall apart.
Thanos rechristened the ship Sanctuary, just as he’d done with Exile I. Until he returned to his rightful home, all others would merely be temporary refuges.
“What now?” Kebbi asked. It was a day later, and Thanos had spent that time spreading the news, answering questions, dealing with various concerns that His Lordship had ignored, some of them literally for generations.
“Now,” Thanos told her, “we see what His Lordship knew that he wasn’t willing to share.”
“Ah, the artifact.” She said it sardonically.
“Do you think it doesn’t exist?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure the Asgardians have possession of a great many artifacts. I’ve heard they are long-lived, damned near immortal. Worshipped as gods on some backwater planets and in the occasional shadow dimension. But an artifact that could fix a dead world?” She shook her head. “I think His Lordship was mad.”
Thanos chuckled. “They called me mad, too, Kebbi. And yet here I am.”
“Yes. Lord of a star-bound junk heap that will collapse around your ears should you breathe too hard.”
He fixed her with a gaze. “Did you speak so impertinently to His Lordship?”
“No. But he could have had Robbo drive a psychic spike through me at any moment.”
Stroking the ridges that adorned his jaw, Thanos considered this. “Can I trust you?”
“A question that has only ever been answered one way,” she responded, “by liars and truth sayers alike.”
“Then the answer is yes.”
She laughed. “The answer is yes. The truth is it depends. You don’t have Robbo to protect you, but your madness seems more compatible with mine than His Lordship’s. You can trust me as long as I can trust you, Thanos.”
He nodded. “I accept that.”
Together, they searched His Lordship’s personal quarters. It was a noisome, gag-inducing task. The quarters had not been cleaned in years, if not decades. Dust hung thick in the air. Soiled clothing, dirty linens, and rotting food intermingled into a fetid odor that defied description. It was practically its own life-form, a smell that took on sentience and followed them throughout the room. Thanos envied Kebbi her kerchief.
They found old holotapes from Kilyan, various sorts of interspecies pornography, half-written edicts and treatises that inevitably rambled off into declarations of war on His Lordship’s long-dead enemies. They found dishes and glasses, goblets and flatware. They found ChIPs loaded with out-of-date star charts, delineating the presence of jump gates that had been decommissioned decades ago.
But on one ChIP, Thanos found a file tagged IMPORTANT and named POWER. He opened it on His Lordship’s personal portable reader. The image on the screen, flat and two-dimensional, was difficult to manipulate and decode, but eventually he figured it out. It was a star map. The jump gate data were out of date, but the stars and systems themselves were still relevant.
The end point of the map was labeled ASGARD.
“Even if you could get to Asgard…” Cha said.
“I can,” Thanos told him.
He, Cha, and Kebbi were in what had been His Lordship’s dining room and now was Thanos’s. The food was… passable. With the death of His Lordship, Thanos and his team had undertaken a survey of the ship’s resources. They had discovered that the food replicators had been dialed all the way down to SUBSISTENCE, a way of preserving their stores and guaranteeing longevity.
Now that Thanos had already ordered the ship aimed at the Kalami Gate he’d discovered before his mutiny, they knew that soon enough they’d be back in the civilized galaxy. Within a day, they’d be at the gate, and assuming the ship survived the stresses of gate travel, they would arrive on the other side soon after. So Thanos had ordered the food quality dialed up significantly.
“Even if you could get there,” Cha went on stubbornly, “and there’s no guarantee of that because His Lordship certainly couldn’t—”
“His Lordship wasn’t even following his own charts,” Thanos said. “He was merely stumbling around the Sweep.”
“You’re going to trust a lunatic’s maps?” Cha asked wryly.
“Just because he was insane and incompetent doesn’t mean he was wrong.”
Cha chuckled and shook his head. “You’d have to fight your way through beings who think of themselves as gods to get what you’re looking for. And then, even assuming you survived all of that, you’d need to get back out without being stopped, all while hauling whatever this artifact or weapon is.”
“I’m surprised you’re so impressed with the puissance of these ‘gods,’” Thanos mocked. “Do you truly admire those who’ve been instilled with such violence?”
“I may dislike violence,” Cha sniffed, scratching behind one pointed ear, “but I understand it and respect it.”
“In any event,” Kebbi put in, “the artifact itself is quite small, according to His Lordship’s notes. Smuggling it out isn’t the problem. The problems are all lined up before that.”
Thanos shrugged. “If this artifact is as powerful as His Lordship thought it was—if it can truly rewrite the laws of nature—then it will be well guarded. I’ll need inside information.”
They sat in companionable silence for a while, eating. Then Cha spoke up.
“We,” he said.
Thanos paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Sorry?”
“We. Just now you, you said, ‘I’ll need inside information.’ But that’s wrong. We’ll need inside information.”
“It’s my intention to set you free once we go through the gate,” Thanos told him. “You owe me nothing. I am not your owner. You are not indentured to me.”
“You liberated us,” Cha said. “I won’t turn away from that.”
“You’re a damned fool,” Thanos said, pleased. “A damned, damned fool.”
“Then I suppose I am, too,” said Kebbi. “Because I’m coming.”
“No,” Thanos said, shaking his head. “You have no part in this. You should return to your life.”
“What life?” she asked with a short, unhappy laugh. “I was born on this ship, and from my earliest days, I knew I’d die here, too. You saved me from His Lordship. You gave me the chance to live a life beyond this hull. The least I can do is help you out.”
“If you do, that new lease on life you’re so happy about may be considerably shorter than you’d like,” he told her.
She shrugged. “At least I’ll die outside.”
As epitaphs went, Thanos thought, there were worse.
CHAPTER XXII
THEY HIT THE KALAMI GATE WITH THE FORCE OF A PEBBLE tossed against the tide. Sanctuary juddered and shook; her hull panels groaned. On Deck Five in the Hydroponics Arc, a panel split off, whisking ten souls out into the kaleidoscopic blur that was gate-space. Emergency doors slammed shut—eventually—and there was no further loss of life.
Thanos reminded himself that those deaths were the consequence of saving so many more. His Lordship had been right about something at least: Sometimes only brutality would suffice.
The ship’s lights flashed and flickered all through gate-space. No one knew where they’d end up. Kalami Gates had been built millennia ago by the now-extinct Kalami, who had come to the Milky Way and attempted to exert an imperial will over half the galaxy. They’d been routed and crushed by a combination of the Kree, the Nova Corps, and a loose alliance of other races who had put aside their own bickering just long enough to boot the interlopers back out of the galaxy.
The K
alamis’ gate technology was fussy and imprecise, but cheap and durable. Until better, more accurate tech came along, many worlds continued to use the left-behind Kalami Gates. Over the centuries, gates had been decommissioned, torn down, or just plain abandoned. This one still functioned, but there was no way to know where it would spit them out. But anything had to be better than the Raven’s Sweep.
They emerged, according to the navigation computers, near Willit’s Star, a system on the outskirts of Xandarian space. Xandar, home of the Nova Corps. Of all the societies expanding throughout the galaxy, the Xandarians were one of the most open, accepting, and trustworthy. Cheers echoed so loudly down the corridors of Sanctuary that Thanos feared the ship might split apart from the din.
“How fortunate,” Thanos said under his breath, scarcely believing their luck. Then again, the Kalami had fled from the might of the Nova Corps, so it made sense that there was a gate in the sector. The Kalami had used it to escape; Thanos was escaping, too, in the opposite direction.
“Fortune had nothing to do with it,” Cha said somewhat smugly. And since he did not go further and invoke a ridiculous metaphor involving flowers—merely let the whiff of it linger in the air—Thanos allowed him his moment of satisfaction.
Sanctuary’s command center bore all the hallmarks of His Lordship’s lackadaisical discipline, but it was still the central node for the ship’s functions. Thanos had directed his crew to clean and repair the bridge as much as possible during their trek to the Kalami Gate, but it still reeked of phlegm and body odor, now overlaid with the sharp scent of disinfectant.
By the time they had closed to within three AUs of Willit’s Star, they were intercepted.
“Attention, unmarked vessel!” a voice blared over the most common hailing frequency. “This is Denarian Daakon Ro of the Nova Corps. State your affiliation!”
Kebbi, sitting in the second-in-command’s chair, activated the ship’s short-range sensors, and soon a large screen lit up with the image of a Xandarian Star Blaster. Thanos breathed out a sigh of relief he’d been holding since… forever.
“We are Sanctuary,” Thanos announced, “and we seek refuge.”
“Oh great,” muttered Daakon Ro. “More refugees.”
“Your comms are still active,” Thanos said in an overly polite timbre.
“I know,” Ro said. “Who or what are you fleeing from?”
“It’s something of a long story,” Thanos said. “Literally hundreds of years long.”
“I should have taken early retirement,” Ro grumbled. “Why didn’t I listen to my husband?”
“Comms still open,” Thanos reproved gently.
“And I still know that!” Ro shouted. “Power down your shields. I’m boarding you.”
Thanos shrugged and glanced over at Kebbi, who mouthed, What shields?
Shortly thereafter, Daakon Ro was escorted to the bridge by Cha and Demla. The Xandarian was tall, well fed, well poised in a crisp, pristine Nova Corps uniform. His expression said that he was offended by everything inside Sanctuary. Thanos could hardly blame him.
“Holy hell, what in the three suns are you?” Ro spluttered when he first laid eyes on Thanos.
“I am Thanos of Titan.” Thanos stood up from his command chair, well aware that this move made him even more intimidating. His presence purposefully filled the bridge that he commanded. “Welcome to Sanctuary.”
Ro stared, his eyes bugging. “Titan? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“I have never seen anything like you in my life. And I’ve seen quite a bit.”
“We need your help, Denarian Ro.” As quickly as he could, Thanos sketched out the history of Sanctuary and its crew, with Kebbi and Cha chiming in on occasion. (Demla, blessedly, remained silent the whole time.)
“This ship is a deathtrap,” Ro complained. “And you’ve got me on it!”
“We’ve detected an outpost of yours on a planet orbiting Willit’s Star. If you could just direct us to a landing pad,” Thanos said with equanimity, “then you could leave—”
“It’s not that simple. There are forms to fill out. There’s a whole bureaucracy to—”
Thanos nodded once, sharply, and gestured to Demla, who approached him and handed him the pulsating glob of fleshy material that was Bluko.
“Denarian Ro,” Thanos said, holding out Bluko as though offering a gift, “right now, we all breathe on the sufferance of a shift-blot’s patience and attention span. Perhaps you could speed the bureaucracy along?”
Ro pulled away from Bluko as though offered a meal of living maggots and dragon guts. “I’ll… see what I can do.”
The Xandarians wouldn’t let Sanctuary land on their precious outpost without thoroughly examining the ship, but they quickly put together a refugee camp outside the colony’s main administrative building and began ferrying His Lordship’s victims down to the surface. Thanos remained on board until everyone was evacuated, then spent two more days on the ship with an annoyed Nova Corps tech named Lurian Op, figuring out how to disable the ship’s sympathy circuit. It would have gone faster if not for Op’s constant whining about ancient technology and caveman systems.
Still, they managed to get the job done. Thanos took a solitary shuttle to the surface of the imaginatively named Nova Colony Seven, where he joined the rest of Sanctuary’s crew in the hastily assembled refugee camp. It was the first time the crew of Sanctuary had breathed fresh air, stood on solid ground, or felt the heat of sunlight in a long time. For some—those born on the ship, who’d never been off the damn thing in their lives—it was a whole new world, quite literally.
The camp was a collection of phase-tents in a flat field. In the distance, the skyline of the colony’s main commercial center glowed with light and life. Thanos felt a tug toward it. Even on a basic outpost like this, Nova-controlled space was civilization. It was science and architecture. He could imagine civilized people discussing matters of import, matters of art and culture. No one would be obsessed with mere survival or keeping an old man alive long enough to figure out how to kill him. The city was the surest sign that he was once again moving in the right direction; it reminded him of home.
Then again, at this point anything that was not a spaceship would have reminded him of home.
It had rained earlier in the day, so Thanos’s first footsteps on a planet since being exiled sank into mud. He trudged through the slop until he found Demla, crouched under one of the tents, staring up at the sky as though he expected fire to crash down.
“Water!” he croaked when he saw Thanos. “’ere’s water comes down from up top!”
“It’s called rain,” Thanos told him. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Just ain’t natural!” Demla complained.
Thanos held out his hand. “Here.”
Demla’s eyes widened and he forgot all about the impossibility of water falling from thin air as he beheld Bluko, still throbbing and encasing His Lordship’s heart. “Bluko!” he cried, reaching out.
“Thank you for letting us borrow him,” Thanos said.
Bluko chose that moment to shape-shift, flowing into a greenish feline form as he snaked up Demla’s arm to perch on his shoulder. His Lordship’s heart plopped into the mud.
“Well,” Thanos said. “That’s that.”
He ground the heart deep into the mud with his foot.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CAMP, HE DECIDED, WAS NOT MUCH BETTER THAN THE ship. It had the benefit of atmosphere and the distant hope of the Xandarian colony, but otherwise the refugees seemed just as beleaguered and downtrodden as they had been under His Lordship’s rule. As Thanos walked the muddy, slushy alleys between the hastily erected tents and pavilions, he found himself thinking of the refugees as his people.
They’re not, he reminded himself. My people are on Titan. My people are in danger.
His people. Sintaa. His mother. Gwinth, who still haunted his dreams, never speaking any but the same words. With each d
ream, she was more and more corroded, her flesh wilting, her hair dropping out in clumps. And yet he recognized her each time, knew her anew.
He had to get back. He had to save them.
A fight broke out in one of the tents. Thanos heard the cry as a crowd gathered around. Fifteen, twenty, maybe more, standing in the rain, stomping their feet in the mud and cheering as two of their crew mates battered each other with clenched fists.
He parted the crowd, shouldering his way through, and grabbed the two combatants by their necks, hauling them apart.
“Stop it,” he said. “Now.”
“But he—” one began.
“I don’t care,” Thanos said. “You have a new beginning here. A new chance. Don’t launch into it with idiocy.” He shoved them away from each other.
He roamed the camp. Arguments and fistfights abounded. On Sanctuary and even on the Golden Berth, everyone had had a place, and everyone had known that place. Now the order was upended. No one knew where they belonged. Suddenly people had territory to defend, even if it was just the few square meters of somewhat dry turf under a phase-tent. They had belongings now, even though they were nothing more exotic than the refugee aid kits distributed by the Xandar government.
Give people who’ve had nothing something—anything—he realized, and they will fight to the death to protect it.
The fights and squabbles were bad enough. The suicides were worse.
It was an epidemic. The dead cut across all caste, species, and gender lines. Thanos found the grieving friends and families in every corner of the camp. There were as many reasons as there were deaths.
The gravity was too strong. The gravity wasn’t strong enough. The air tasted strange. The food wasn’t processed enough.
At the core, though, all the reasons came down to one: fear.
Thanos had rescued them from the only home and the only life most of them knew. Even the conscripts had become institutionalized, relying on His Lordship and the familiar confines of the ship to define and constrain their reality. Let loose in the world, on a world, they were at odds with themselves. They didn’t know how to be free.