Stranded

by James Alan Gardner

  “Why specialize in history then?” Tianyu said. “The family tradition of masochism?”

  “What? No! I wanted perspective,” Serendipity said, peering into the starry map. The Dresan-Murran Alliance stretched ten million light years in every direction; how could anyone hope to make their mark in that? “I wanted to be able to see things others don’t.”

  “There are cheaper ways to induce hallucinations,” Tianyu sniffed. “What did you find?”

  “The Alliance doesn’t cover all the space it claims. It’s just a collection of colonization bubbles around its homeworlds, like the one expanding from Dresan that had claimed Earth seven centuries ago, and like that new bubble, the Qorin bubble, just outside the galaxy.”

  Serendipity poked the map, and a star lit up brightly.

  “And that knowledge helped me find,” she said, “a waypoint smack-dab between them.”

  “Looks dreadful,” Tianyu said, staring at the blinking star at the tip of a giant plume of gas six thousand light years long. He batted at it, zooming in so the edges of the colonization bubbles were barely visible. “Why did you pick that? It’s past even the Frontier!”

  “Halfway Point is a simply brilliant world,” Serendipity said defensively. “An Earthlike moon around a gas giant with a yellow star? It has it all: living space, plenty of hydrogen fuel and a great big lump of mass that makes a perfect jumping-off point for a hyperdrive.”

  She flicked her hand at the display, making the world itself loom close. “There aren’t ten thousand planets like it in the galaxy, and they always end up just spectacular. Dakaimetan, the capital of the sector; Pinyetaum, capital of culture; Murrarrenar, major trading point—”

  “And yet no one has been to Halfway Point in ten thousand years,” Tianyu said. He swiped at the star, making dataflakes puff out around it in a mind map like a textual snowflake. “According to this, they even tried to set up a port and failed. What does that tell you?”

  “That war screws everything up,” Serendipity said, flicking her hand to roll time back. The colonization bubbles shrank—then were split by an angry red neutral zone. “There, right after Halfway Point was colonized. That blockade lasted millennia. That killed it.”

  “So what makes you think you can bring it back from the dead?” Tianyu asked.

  “Halfway Point went fallow because the war cut off this trade route, but it stayed fallow only because this region of space has been contested ever since the war,” Serendipity said. “The rights only cleared up a few years ago, after, well . . .”

  “Oh, don’t leave me hanging. Wait—let me guess, if you’ve shut up then she’s involved,” Tianyu said. “So the rights cleared up . . . after your grandmother helped Earth join the Alliance, or after she negotiated that détente between the Alliance and the Frontier?”

  Serendipity snorted. “It’s called Halfway Point because they wanted to do what I want to do: set up a port between those two bubbles, which have grown so they almost touch. Shipping routes are still rerouted, but they won’t stay that way. Halfway Point’s even got a black hole—”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Tianyu said. “Sounds like a big KEEP OFF sign to me.”

  “Hush, love,” Serendipity said. “The orbit’s far enough that the inner planets are stable, but close enough to power heavy industry someday. In all the galaxy, Halfway Point is unique. I have no idea why it was overlooked, but I’m not about to let someone else step up and claim it.”

  They stared at the little blue-green moon, that forgotten jewel, curling around the rainbow pastels of its mammoth mother planet.

  “I looked up headstrong in the dictionary,” Tianyu said at last, curling up in a huff. “Your name was all over it: synonym, hyponym, see also, properly capitalized and everything.”

  “Be a good sport,” Serendipity said, ruffling behind his ears. She cleared the breakfast tray, pulled out the satchels and saddlebags she’d packed last night, and laid them out on the desk so she could verify she had everything she needed. “Double-check my kit, would you?”

  She was packing light: two boleros, four blouses, six tapestries of the style she loved to drape her horse barrel with—in combination, forty-eight outfits, not counting her overcloak, her spare slogs or accessories like her roseflower. She twirled the little computer in her hands, then decided to put it in her hair in place of the flutterby she wore now.

  As the roseflower’s filaments slid behind her horsey ear toward the port at the nape of her neck, Serendipity smiled: her hair had come in red today, nicely augmenting her freckles and flower. She always felt most like herself in red and freckles, and she winked and smiled.

  “All very proper Simpson’s Guide. Looks good to me,” Tianyu said, patting the rainbow flutterby working its wings on her desk. He gently nosed it, pushing the smaller robot toward her satchel. “Your turn at the checklist. Unless you want to throw in another outfit.”

  Serendipity stuck out her tongue, then rummaged her bags, running her metaconscience’s checklist, making sure she had two ways to do everything. Maybe this felt like a fun vacation, but it was still space travel, not a day trip to the islands, and she had to be properly prepared. She was a proper Dresanian, after all, never going into space without everything at least once redundant, yet leaving nothing wasted.

  Serendipity preferred redundancy in overlapping threes. An omniknife, fabribox and nanoseed were her tools; a medical blade, survival pak and civilian Aegis were her shields. And to document her trip she carried a handlecam, memory slate and brittanica.

  The most important of all of it was the nanoseed, of course, so she slipped the glassy ampoule from round her neck and flicked it with her finger, watching glowing diagnostics shimmer across the liquid metal shivering within its diamandoid vial.

  The nanoseed distilled thousands of engineer-years’ of effort down to a few grams of silvery nanoplasm, machine-phase matter capable of assembling anything atom by atom. With enough raw material it could make almost anything—but most importantly, more of itself.

  Satisfied, she slipped the glittering vial back round her neck and flipped open the coppery disc of her civilian Aegis, running its diagnostic. Force field, life support, thrusters, scanners all checked out: the Aegis was practically a spacecraft in a belt buckle, a design pioneered by her grandfather. It couldn’t get her to the next star, but it could keep her alive in a crash.

  Then she checked the charge on her force rod, good for repelling animals and ruffians. Her grandmother preferred full arms and armor, but between her force bracelet and force rod Serendipity felt well armed, and between her Aegis and shield brooch she felt well armored.

  Besides, her grandmother had trained her. Under the armor was no slouch.

  Finally, she slid out her medical blade and ran a checkup—on herself. The long, slender blade looked like a machete made from circuit boards, but the complex fields it emitted could perform delicate surgery and the handle could extrude anything from a bandage to a cast. Soon the blade gave her a clean bill of health—and passed its own diagnostic, so she stowed it and began buckling up her saddlebags and satchel.

  None of her gear was too big to hold in one hand, except for her macdonald and survival pak, similar coppery cases counterweighting each saddlebag. Altogether the whole kit weighed less than twenty kilos, but it would keep her alive for months even on a world with no air.

  If all that failed, even Serendipity would be triply redundant. Naturally she’d bring her familiar, Tianyu: the ruddy little robot continually downloaded her memories so Serendipity could be reconstituted if killed—a beastly practice, but it had served her grandmother well.

  But she’d also bring the fruit of her tree. She took her farstaff from the umbrella rack and stepped up to her table. She dinged the tuning fork atop the two-meter ironwood staff, the rings around the fork began spinning to life, and she extended
her hand toward her brainsai.

  The little tree quivered. The air around her rustled as the farstaff drew power. A glowing ball of light appeared in the brainsai’s branches, accumulating leaves and moss. Serendipity’s hair lifted and tousled as the humming farstaff built up an air pocket around her.

  “Serendipity,” Tianyu said softly, staring out the window. “Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” Serendipity said, as the hum rose. She hadn’t the heart to tell her grandmother she was going, but she didn’t want to be followed, so she’d filed a quasi-private travel plan: once they left, they’d be on their own till the end of summer. “You’re right. This . . . will be a big move.”

  Light shifted outside, perhaps the sails of an airship, and briefly Serendipity reconsidered. She did love T’syar’lyeh and all its mazelike stairways, filled with hundreds of human and alien variants bustling on the endless steps winding beneath its mammoth angled trees.

  But it had become a lonely place. Her siblings had fled the nest. She’d always been the youngest of her cohort, so her school friends were scattered across the ten galaxies. All she had left on T’syar’lyeh was her karate club—and they all saw her as sensei’s granddaughter.

  The light shifted again, and she stiffened at the sound of hooves striking the path beneath her window. Her grandmother was almost home, her parents were always away—and as for her so-called friends, all she really had were a pair of professional companions purchased for her.

  “Even a move this big,” she said, “can’t possibly be far enough away!”

  Serendipity snapped her fingers. The map of the Alliance collapsed into the tiny glowing sphere, which leapt from the tree and flew into her hand. Tianyu scampered up onto her shoulder and rubbed her cheek, and Serendipity rubbed him back as the farstaff chimed.

  “Let’s go on an adventure,” Serendipity said—and in a twinkle of light, they disappeared.

  —————

  Serendipity skipped from world to world as if they were stepping-stones across a river, traveling the surface of the galaxy outward toward the six-thousand-light-year deep streamer of gas they called the Plume, at whose tip dangled the jewel that was Halfway Point.

  Within an hour she’d traveled farther than she ever had in her life. Within the afternoon human space was far behind her. By evening, she was dining beneath mauve trees in a café by a glowing blue stream, talking via translation to creatures who’d never seen a human before.

  Once they began climbing down the Plume, traveling became harder, worlds fewer. With a two-meter farstaff, she could travel at most seven millimeters of hyperspace—maybe a hundred light years each hop within the disc of the galaxy, but only forty when climbing out of it.

  After three harrowing jumps, all airless, the last lacking even solid ground, Serendipity pulled out her mapping sphere. Hanging near a nub of a dry station, with five millimeters of air between her and space, she compared the map with the nebula towering before her.

  Tianyu clambered up, rubbed her cheek. Serendipity rubbed back.

  “It’s not too late to turn around,” Tianyu said, arching his furry eyebrows. The copper spine of a far trader slid by, seven kilometers of rarities from the Triangulum angling for its next jump. “We could hitch a lift, maybe for free if we trade the gravitics of our jump history.”

  “You’re right. If we run home now, I’ve still time to train for the tournament.”

  She arched her eyebrows too; then he cracked up, and they both burst out laughing.

  The gold disc of her Aegis glowed as Serendipity flitted to a trading pod where she bought an algasagna wrap, a tensor booster, and a small oxygen cylinder the alien trader called a “pony bottle,” which made her suppress a smile and made Tianyu crack up.

  Serendipity reserved twenty cubic meters a short distance from the pod. There, they had a little picnic in space, nibbling at the sandwich, hanging in space before the glowing lines of the map, planning their route with the galaxy sparkling beneath her black-booted hooves.

  After they’d eaten their fill, Serendipity resealed the edible wrap around the grilled algae, tucked it into her satchel, and ran a thin life support line from her Aegis to the pony bottle. She grinned as cool oxygen began rippling around her, then, smile fading, clipped the tensor booster to her farstaff. The new route was better, five hops rather than twelve, but it needed not just the booster, but the bounce. She’d be traveling like a skipping stone.

  “I’ll stay in here, thanks,” Tianyu said, hiding in her satchel.

  “Right,” Serendipity said. She took a deep breath of fresh air—and jumped.

  Fifty-one light years. The stars flickered—jump. Sixty-five more light years. A stellar nursery sparkled below—jump. Fifty-seven more light years, the nebula loomed closer—jump! Thirty-five more light years, a new star shone bright—jump, another seventy light years—

  And she was down on Halfway Point.

  —————

  Explosions echoed through the whole Engine Module, staccato drumbeats as fuses blew in the gliderdrive. Sirius winced: he could barely think straight here, just beneath the drive, but since the girls had cut the trunk cables to the Command Module, the cargo control chamber was the only place with a functioning Helm—where he could directly fly the ship.

  “Keep it running,” he said, wrestling the twin grips of the glider’s eighteen-axis steering bar. The computer was better than any human at flying in eleven-dimensional space—when it had a functional drive and a plotted course. Now, with the glider shorting out beneath them and space inexplicably torn up, it was taking all Sirius’s experience and all the computer’s finesse working together just keep the field alive. “Undervolt it if you have to!”

  “The field will collapse,” Andromeda said, whacking at a stuck breaker. “In minutes—”

  “We only need one!” Sirius said, tapping a footpedal to zoom the holoprojection in close enough to show the approaching world. Space was somehow messed up here, but Sirius guessed they were still two hundred million kilometers out—far enough that they could still die before reaching port unless they were rescued. Sirius had no intention of dying just as they were within reach of safety. “One minute is the difference between a parking orbit and deep space—”

  The gliderdrive groaned. Sirius shuddered. It felt like he was being twisted inside out. Sirius knew that feeling from a thousand jumps with his parents: this was the transition from dual to real coordinates. The gliderfield was collapsing.

  “We’re losing it,” Andromeda said, throwing booster switches. “We’re losing it!”

  “Why are we losing the gliderfield?” Dijo said, the feathers on her helmet snapping back and forth as she glanced between a holographic projection of the space they were flying into and a flat monitor that showed the glider’s vitals. The normally smooth, sloped waves of an approaching solar system were churned up into something Dijo called Christoffel surf. Flying into that mess, the glider was having so much trouble the row of sparklines on the monitor made it look like an old man going into cardiac arrest. “What’s wrong with space here?”

  “I’m not reading anything other than the Beacon!” Leonid yelled from the nav table.

  “Screw it,” Sirius said, kicking another footpedal to trigger an emergency launch into hyperspace. Capacitors discharged, the lights flickered, and fresh energy poured into the glider. They were already in hyperspace, so the launch failed, causing the rest of the gliderdrive’s fuses to spark out all at once like a string of firecrackers. But it gave them a few more precious seconds of field—enough to close that final gap. “Everyone hang on!” Sirius yelled.

  The whole ship shuddered now, steam roaring out of the gliderdrive as it tried to cycle. Everything doubled in Sirius’s vision as field collapse played hell with the law of refraction. His teeth rattled, and the ship shook with a
bang. Then everything went still.

  The gliderdrive let off the last of its steam with a fading hiss . . . followed by an acrid smell of burned wires and blown fuses.

  “Oh, God,” Andromeda said. “Oh, God, it’s overheating and we’ve boiled off all the rare earth water. It’s going to burn up and we’ll be stuck here—”

  “And it’s all your fault!” Toren said, shoving her aside from the glider service panel. “You and Leonid. This never would have happened if—dammit, you’ve changed everything since I last served a shift. Help me! We’ve got to flood the drive with potable water—”

  “Potable won’t take a tensor charge,” Dijo said. “All that energy, lost—”

  “But it will save the glider. Brilliant,” Andromeda said, pushing Toren back aside, popping the service controls, exposing the patch panel, fingers leaping over the cables. “I’ll reroute the water valves. Toren, stay on communications, get us landing clearance—”

  “Agreed,” Leonid said, moving to join Dijo at the glider control station, managing the console while she threw the safeties. “We’ll try to bleed off the field—”

  Sirus relaxed despite the many alarms. The ship had dropped early, the drive was frying, life support was still out, the beeping was getting worse—but his plan had worked. They were all working together, boys and girls together again—at last.

  Sirius smiled with pride—then realized the beeping was a proximity alert.

  “Hail, spacers,” Sirius said. “Shouldn’t the planet be farther off?”

  They all turned to the forward viewer. The Beacon blinked before them, overlaid on a looming garden world—but it wasn’t a freestanding planet, it was a moon around a mammoth gas giant. And it wasn’t ten million clicks off like they’d planned. It was ten thousand.

  “What the hell?” Leonid said, stepping back to the console he had just vacated, as the egg-shaped blue-green moon swam toward them, slowly eclipsing the banded pastels of the parent planet that wasn’t listed in their Lore database. “I checked these readings—”