“Something took a bite out of space here,” Dijo said, staring into the hologram that showed the shape of hyperspace. Even though the surf had faded, the map was hard to read . . . but still, this solar system almost looked . . . tilted. “Something really massive, bigger than that gas giant sitting atop our Beacon. That’s why the drive overheated and the field collapsed early. On top of that, there’s no trace of the Dresanian Relay, there’s no other traffic—”
“And we’re about to run straight into the Beacon,” Sirius said, watching the world loom up upon them. He lifted the steering bar for the gliderdrive up and locked it, then pulled out the simpler paired joysticks for the maneuvering thrusters. “At nearly fifty kilometers a second.”
“I’m . . . I’m not getting traffic directives,” Toren said. “Maybe we should abort—”
“I’ve got the new mass distribution in,” Leonid said. “Recomputing our options—”
A glowing cone showing their possible courses appeared on the holograph. The end of the ship’s velocity obstacle was entirely contained within the surface of Halfway Point. Even if they could restart the glider now, it wouldn’t fire until they were fifty kilometers underground.
“It’s too late,” Sirius said, as the ship struck atmosphere. “We’re going down.”
—————
Serendipity gasped. She stood on rolling hills of wheat before a blue metal castle nestled in the shade of a floating lake. The shimmering green lake was a kilometer across, a fat, glistening oval twice as wide as it was tall. Beyond it, beyond the mountains, beyond even the clouds, the curved limb of a gas giant planet climbed the sky—Halfway Point’s parent world.
Visible even in daylight, the roiling, turbulent clouds of the enormous sphere stamped a pastel rainbow watermark over half the heavens, but it was not alone. Beyond it, the Plume was also visible, a shimmering of stars and clouds, like frozen smoke from fireworks, given inconceivable depth and scale by hanging behind the planet before her.
“Wow,” Serendipity said. “I mean . . . wow. This is why I voyage in space.”
“Definitely not boring,” Tianyu said, eyeing a butterfly-like creature suspiciously. It settled down on a waving frond, then trilled at him. Tianyu leapt back, hiding behind Serendipity’s black foreboot. “And definitively not what was recorded on the map.”
“Point taken, mister scaredy-but-not-cat,” Serendipity said; her metaconscience had already called that to her attention. She reached into her satchel and released her mapping sphere, which flitted off to scout the area. Then she started forward across a field of waving alien wheat, toward a castle at the foothills of impossible mountains, where the floating lake hovered above the copper ribcage of the skeleton of a leviathan.
The low gravity was exhilarating, maybe seven-tenths Earth normal, less than half what she was used to on T’syar’lyeh. They hopped through the fields of wheat, covering vast ground, but even so, the castle was so far off she thought of flying on her farstaff. She’d picked a model more than long enough for her pony body, after all, and it could get her there faster than her four legs. But when she popped out the farstaff’s kickstands and hopped on, sailing over a musty crevasse as though surfing a wave, she found she missed the feel of the wheat tickling her belly. So she hopped down at the other side and slung the staff, deciding to relish the journey.
As Tianyu bounced around her, Serendipity reassessed what she was seeing. The blue-white castle was a ruined spaceport; the floating lake was water collected in the focus of its landing cradle. The jutting ribs of the cradle, made of near-indestructible coppery thact, were weather-stained. Even the slender black spire of the Beacon, still flashing, looked ageworn.
The steep mountains beyond the port were barren, but all around her, especially in ruddy valleys between curious domed hills, were tattered remnants of a society. Lumps that could have been buildings. Stumps that might have been foundations. Giant coils of frayed wire.
Perhaps there was a Caretaker left here, a lone Andiathar, living in a cave, keeping things running. Or perhaps, the Beacon had simply survived that long: it was Dresanian equipment, after all. But the colony that had settled here ten thousand years ago had failed.
They paused in a clearing beside a stand of slowly swaying golden trees, giant cousins of the stalks of wheat. “I thought,” Serendipity said, her voice unexpectedly weak even to her own ears, “I thought something would have survived. The Beacon’s been running like clockwork.”
“Me too. Definitely is a mystery. But . . . if you were looking for a place where your work was cut out for you,” Tianyu said, hopping atop a jagged lump of glassy circuit slabs that might have been a household computer core, “you definitively found it.”
“Headstrong, you said,” Serendipity said, fists on her foreshoulders, farstaff slung over her foreback. She recalled the transaction she’d prepared in her neural weave and reviewed it carefully, making sure she’d gotten it right. “I prefer the term determined.”
The mortgage on the mammoth port before her, and the region of space it claimed with its Beacon, had been in default for almost ten thousand years—but after the war shifted the spacelanes, no one thought it worth claiming. She knew better, and hit execute.
When nothing happened, fear gripped her; she’d lost the Transference Relay, the data network that wove together the Dresan-Murran Alliance. Then she relaxed: the computer woven into her only had a one-centimeter transmitter, and here she was, atop a six-thousand-light-year-long column of gas. Direct connection to the Transference Relay was out of the question.
“Uh-oh,” Tianyu said, canting his head. “I thought the signal loss was just me.”
“You’re not that much of an antique,” Serendipity said. She frowned at the Beacon: nearly a kilometer tall, the black needle was still flashing as regular as a metronome. “That thing’s got a connection. It let me file a travel plan, or at least appeared to. What’s up?”
She pulled out her “archaeologist’s spectacles”—round purple sunglasses with active ranging scanners integrated into each temple. Even from this distance, she could get a good read on the components of the Beacon, projected on the lenses in an augmented-reality view.
“Dashpat. The Beacon’s half burnt out. The emission spire’s still intact, the buffer pod is still receiving, but its local relay is totally shot.” She squinted at the needle’s base, then told the spectacles to run a diagnostic. “The relay almost looks . . . melted. We’ll have to repair it.”
“We have to repair that?” Tianyu said, craning his neck at the skyscraper-tall spire.
“Eventually, I mean,” Serendipity said, giving him a little noogie. “If we want live access to the Transference Relay. Still . . .” She recalled her mapping sphere while she scanned the ruins, thinking. “Still, there’s far more infrastructure to rebuild than I’d thought.”
“Rebuild? I think you should declare a mulligan on Halfway Point and start over,” Tianyu said, pawing at the cracked, dirt-stained slabs of computer core beneath his feet. On a second look, it seemed long buried, perhaps only recently exposed by erosion. “Fixing this place up could definitely take a lifetime.” He canted his head again. “But isn’t that what you want?”
“Maybe,” she said, catching her mapping sphere. “Definitively, a big job.”
The diagnostic of the Beacon completed and appeared on her spectacles: its structure was sound. She smiled. It had survived here, sending diagnostic packets every seventy-two years since before the dawn of recorded human history, and if it could, they could too.
“Well, what do we do?” Tianyu said. “If we can’t even call for help—”
“Oh, come on, we teleported here. Surely we can improvise,” she said. After a moment’s thought, she unclipped the hypertensor booster from her farstaff and ran a filament from the nape of her neck into it. “See? This can be configu
red as a six-centimeter transmitter.”
“Headstrong,” Tianyu sniffed, “and completely hopeless.”
Serendipity grinned at him. Then she looked back at the Beacon, the port, the ruins. It had all gone to rot when the war had cut off the shipping lanes, ten thousand years ago, but there was everything here needed to build a colony . . . and no one had yet stepped up to claim it.
Until today.
“Yes,” she said, uploading the transaction she’d prepared into the booster’s buffer. After a little thought, she added their recent memories and a few letters to friends and family, just to be sure. After all . . . she might be here for a while. “This is what I want.”
She hit send. The booster surged, the message departed, and Serendipity felt a pang. Somewhere out there, ripples in hyperspace would become bits in cyberspace, then transactions in financial space, exchanging money for responsibility, and her inheritance . . . for this planet.
Serendipity was committed. It was her world now. She had to make it work.
“Have you seen my parents?” asked the small, scared voice of an Andiathar child.
—————
Serendipity flinched and nearly bolted, the voice was so close. She caught herself mid-wheel and stopped, staring at the scared little elf-monkey child with the shock of turquoise hair hiding in the stand of wheat-trees, wearing only a ragged cloak that looked like packing burlap.
“Oh my dear Lord,” Serendipity said, her fingers pressed to her collarbone beneath the hem of her shrug. Andiathar were the dominant species of the Alliance, Dresanians-from-Dresan, elegant and refined after two hundred thousand years of continuous culture—but this boy looked like a refugee, with wan, splotchy skin, trembling tail and drooping ears.
“Definitely worse than we thought,” Tianyu muttered silently over their comlink.
“They went hunting for food,” the boy said in an older dialect of derkesthai just barely on the edge of triggering Serendipity’s translator. Tail almost limp, he hugged himself, shivering, clutching a plain wooden staff. “There’s not much edible here. But they never came back.”
“How long ago was that?” Serendipity asked, peering at the boy with her archaeologist’s spectacles. He couldn’t have been older than eight, but his slender ears had the swiss-cheese look of the long malnourished—and his dialect was ancient, ten thousand years old at least.
Almost exactly the length of time the Beacon had been signaling like clockwork.
“I don’t know,” he said, hugging himself, his spray of hair falling in his eyes. Then Tianyu shifted in the grass, and the boy looked up, eyes hungry and desperate. Tianyu bolted behind Serendipity’s hoof, and the boy fell back, scared. “Please . . . have you anything to eat?”
Serendipity swallowed, standing there frozen. She was acutely aware of her hearts beating against each other in her upper and lower chests. Her metaconscience remained silent—accusingly silent. Then she relaxed, reached into her satchel, and brought forth the wrap.
The boy eagerly reached to seize it, and Serendipity knelt before him, saying soothing words, inspecting the soundness of his skeleton and the balance of his blood with her glasses, desperately pinging her metaconscience for advice on how to treat Andiathar malnutrition.
Then a thunderclap struck them both like a hand of flame.
—————
The screaming of the trees drowned out everything. Serendipity flinched back as the massive trunks quivered and shot back into the earth. Giant pores she’d mistaken for bunched roots clenched in their wake, leaving only the wheat, once golden, now burnt to a crisp.
Serendipity and the boy now stood howling on a burning, shuddering field as a spacecraft sheathed in red fire shot over their heads towards the landing cradle. Untouched by the flames, Serendipity seized the boy, brought him inside her shield, and watched the ship go down.
The grey and white ship was both ancient and elegant: its mammoth head was a slowly spinning cone and cylinder like something from the Apollo era, but the vast dark vanes erupting from the staggered cylinders of its cargo and engine pods gave it the appearance of a dragonfly.
The ship’s repulsor field had ballooned to an immense size, driving before it a rumbling, crackling shockwave heated to a glowing red. From her primary school navigation labs Serendipity recognized the maneuver: emergency aerobraking, used to kill excess velocity without burning fuel.
But that was weird. This was a starship, not some in-system transport: blazing atop it was the katana blade of an emission spire in landing mode—a gliderdrive, Serendipity recognized, and with that she marked it: an NCE-class ship, one of humanity’s last grand solo projects.
“This . . . this can’t be happening,” she whispered, shielding the boy in her arms.
Serendipity watched as that ship, that seven-hundred-and- fifty-year-old ship, that priceless historical treasure, barreled toward a landing cradle inappropriately filled with a floating lake. Too late it banked aside, the word INDEPENDENCE gleaming as it turned toward a mountain.
Earth plowed up around its field like muddy water splashing in slow motion. Seconds later an enormous WHUDDDD impacted her, followed by a heart-wrenching squeal as the repulsor field collapsed, the nose impacted the ground and the ship flipped upright.
The aft sensor pod sprang high in the air, its running lights flashing like a second Beacon, before twisting wildly as one of Independence’s vanes struck a hillside and was near sheared off. The engine pod rotated a three-quarter turn while the nose kept grinding . . . then was still.
Serendipity stared at the downed ship in fear and horror. She was staggered by the loss of finding such a historical treasure just as it was destroyed. Then she was shamed by her care for the ship over its crew. And then she was terrified . . . for someone needed to go and help.
The child tore out of her grasp and began running toward the ship, running through the burning wheat as if the fires didn’t bother him. Perhaps they didn’t: Andiathar were tougher than humans, even if they didn’t have human long-distance endurance.
“Where are you going?” Serendipity cried, quavering. “What are you doing?”
“Going to help,” the boy said. “We have to help! My parents died like this!”
“Wait, what?” Tianyu said, tail standing up like a brush.
But the boy was off and running. Serendipity whirled, bolted, unlooping her farstaff and powering it up, hands trembling as she set the program. Fear gripped her, and she turned to her metaconscience for aid. Damningly, it gave her the worst kind of excuse it could: approval.
You should flee. Your rescue gear is inadequate. You can help most by going for help.
But she had rescue gear: A survival kit. A medical blade. Half a sandwich and a satsuma.
“Tianyu?” Serendipity asked, still holding the farstaff. “What—what should I do?”
“I’m just your familiar,” Tianyu said softly, as he climbed up onto her shoulder. “I can’t decide for you. I think your metaconscience is right: if you go for help, it’s still help. Real help. You don’t have to go to the wreck to help them. But . . . you don’t have to run away either.”
“Right,” Serendipity said. Then she straightened her upper body. “Right.”
Trembling, Serendipity slung her farstaff over her shoulder, swallowed and turned back to the shipwreck. The devastation was awesome. A burnt swath cut across quivering fields. Trees flattened and water sprayed from ponds where the ship banked. Then a rut of torn earth and the ship tilted against a mountain like God’s own dreidel.
And a little refugee boy running straight toward it without fear.
Serendipity set her mind and darted after him. Quickly she paced the boy, extended her hand and lifted him, gasping, onto her back. He gripped her with the fierceness and claws of a cat, and she was stung by embers clin
ging to his cloak. But she kept running toward the wreck.
—————
It took longer than she’d expected—the ship was larger, and had traveled farther, over rougher terrain, than she’d first imagined. But she kept running, thankful for all the endurance training her grandmother had put her through, while the child actually grew tired riding.
“How can you still be running?” the Andiathar boy said. “I’m so hungry.”
The grey hillside whacked by the maneuvering vane was a landsliding ruin, so she cut to the left of the red rut. Shifting earth and sliding rubble worried at her, so she invoked her metaconscience’s solver, letting it pick out a safer path that was far from obvious.
Slowly the distant dreidel that was the starship grew large, then loomed like a skyscraper over her. Here torn hull strips and smashed bits of equipment mixed through the sprayed earth, but overhead the ship’s engine pod still blinked, whole.
The acrid tang of burnt plastics mixed with the rich scent of fresh soil. She jumped at a squeal far above—hot plasma venting from the engine. Her spectacles showed her the radiation was slight—and her metaconscience told her it was manual venting. She pressed on.
She crested a ridge overlooking the wreck—and froze, bewitched.
Climbing from the ship were the most beautiful people she’d ever seen.
They wore armored spacesuits, patched in a thousand places, and painted to look like animals. Helmets folded back revealed inner pressure suits decorated too: one girl in a leopard outersuit had a snakeskin helm, adorned with feathers, over skin painted a pale blue.
Serendipity gasped. These were adventurers. The gravity was clearly punishing their slender frames, but they kept going, crawling out of the smoking ship from every hatch, rappelling down on spacelines, tools jangling on their belts when their boots touched the broken earth.
Not one of them looked a day over sixteen.
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