Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  DUTTON BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by E. K. Johnston

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780735231863

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover art/photo © 2021 by Jeff Langevin

  Cover design by Maria Fazio

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  To Josh, who has believed this was a book since it was a text message of four bees.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Content Warning

  Epigraph

  Part One: “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: “High, High Hopes for a Living”

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three: “Shake Like the Bough of a Willow Tree”

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four: “You Make a Fool of Death with Your Beauty”

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CONTENT WARNING:

  This book contains a scene of medical violence.

  Characters also obsess about food and count calories.

  Take your broken heart.

  Make it into art.

  —Carrie Fisher

  When the Stavenger Empire turned its eyes to the stars, seeking new worlds to conquer, it found exactly what it was looking for. Planet after planet came under the imperial banner, the conflict providing impetus for the original warring Stavenger states to stick together as the empire grew. Worlds that could support life were colonized. Worlds that could not were stripped of their resources and left spinning in the dark. And then the armada reached the edge of the Stavenger solar system, looked at its great æther-workers, and wondered what it was going to do next.

  The star-mages had the answer. There were so, so many stars, after all, and some were closer than others, and therefore reachable. The metal-mages used the æther to build ships and the grain-mages used the æther to stock them, but the travelers themselves were wary: The distance was so vast, and the destinations largely unknown. The Stavengers cried out for a hero, and they got one. A new kind of mage, one who could combine metal and sky, making Wells to hurl ships over the vast distances and Nets to catch them when they arrived. It was dangerous and it took all the years of the mage’s life—not to mention several generations of her descendants’—but when the Well-and-Net relay was done, there were seven bright stations between the Stavenger system and that of their target, the Maritech. A journey that might have taken generations at normal sublight speeds now took days of quick jumps that crossed distances so vast, the mind could scarcely comprehend them.

  The first Stavenger ships that landed in the Maritech Net were not ungreeted. It’s hard to conceal such a large construction project, after all, even if you are using magic. The Maritech knew that they were coming, and met them in force. Five times the great waves of the Stavenger armada broke into Maritech space, and five times they were repelled. Not even æther gave the Stavengers an edge, for the Maritech had a form of it themselves. A few foolhardy mining ships were able to sneak through the lines and collect gasses from the outer planets in the system, but no Stavenger ship so much as pierced atmosphere on an inhabited Maritech world. The empire, humiliated, withdrew, and the Maritech destroyed the station that supported the last Net in the relay, so that no jump could ever be caught (the only logical conclusion after none of the adventurous ships that made the jump from Brannick Station ever returned).

  Determined to salvage something from their disastrous effort to colonize the stars, the failing Stavengers began exploiting those resources that could be found near the remaining space stations they had built. Initially restricted to asteroid mines and the odd nebula for gas collection, Stavenger ships soon began encountering huge numbers of a space-going creature they called oglasa. At first the creatures were just slaughtered to clear the space lanes (which will give astute observers an idea of how many there were), but eventually some scientist analyzed the remains and realized that the Stavengers had, almost entirely by accident, discovered the most perfect food source in the known universe.

  The oglasa were massacred. Billions of tonnes of them were caught in the blackness of space and brought to the stations for processing. The stations, meant to be merely way stations and restocking points for traveling armies, were redesigned to house trade at the levels in the capital of the Stavenger homeworld. Oglasa were almost pure protein—which the æther-workers needed to perform their magic—and contained enough vitamins A, C, and D to prevent the two most common immunodeficiencies found on long-haul space travel. And it didn’t go bad. Ever.

  The Stavengers no longer needed Wells and Nets to travel through the farthest distances of space. Instead of building expensive installations, ships could now be stocked with enough food to last the journey. Instead of spending the lifetimes of dozens of mages building one road, they could spend the lifetimes of thousands of colonists creating hundreds.

  A properly supplied and coordinated colony ship could be sent out at regular sublight speeds, and the crew could just reproduce until they got where they were going, as long as the ship stayed sound and those aboard it kept track of their stores. Plans were made. Designs were drawn. Calories were counted. Colonists were screened for suitability. And then disaster struck.

  A burst of unknown radiation erupted out of the Stavenger sun, and swept through space at an almost scientifically impossible rate. It left organic matter unharmed and electronics unburned. It didn’t interrupt sound waves or fritz out the invisible pathways by which information was transmitted.

  But the æther was fried. Even the greatest living masters of magic struggled to muster enough power to boil an egg, and since there were easier ways to heat water, they didn’t try. Only magic that had already been d
one remained.

  Fortunately, this included the Wells and the Nets, though they now had to be manually controlled from aboard each station. The seven stations saw their chance and took it, desperately trying to secede from the empire as the armada was drawn back to the homeworld to protect the aristocracy from insurrection. Despite the stations’ bravery and general good timing, the empire had one last blow to strike. The most powerful remaining Stavenger grain-mages were stuffed to the gills with all the food they could stomach, and then forced to spend their life’s energy on one last great work.

  So the stations’ rebellion died—or at least died down. The economy shifted once the general die-off was over, and eventually some sense of order returned. The Empire fell apart, but their successors formed a complicated hegemony to exert power over the home system, and continued to bicker amongst themselves over who should benefit most from the wealth collected from the stars. Parts of the armada had been abandoned in space when magic was broken, and to survive, the crews of those ships turned to depravities best left unmentioned.

  On the stations, life continued. The oglasa were a memory, too far away to reach, and so the people scratched out resources from asteroids and gas clouds and hoped against hope that the mines would last forever.

  And gradually, gradually, gradually, the æther healed, and the magic came back.

  “YOU’LL NEVER LEAVE HARLAN ALIVE”

  1.

  THE FIRST TIME PENDT Harland saw the stars, she was five years old. She was watching her brothers play Spark in the crèche on board the Harland, where the Family children learned ship operations in the guise of competitive play, and the lines of alliance formed before teeth were cut. Pendt couldn’t play Spark. Or, she could, but she lost every time and so no one wanted to be on her team. She couldn’t make the cards light up yet, activating the necessary circuits to identify a match in her opponent’s hand, let alone find the set in her partner’s. She was a liability, and so she always sat out. On the bright—ha!—side, this gave her more time to study the less popular aspects of the Harland. While her brothers learned to run the engines, Pendt taught herself everything she could about interstellar travel itself.

  It was a strange thing, knowing oneself useless at five. Space was dark and cold, and worked against life in most of its forms. For a human to be in space while also being a liability was dangerous, for the human and for everyone around her. Pendt did her best to stay out of the way, and to excel wherever she could. Her bed was always made the most neatly. She always scraped her plate the cleanest, getting every trace of protein from the meal. She cleaned up the crèche if her brothers or cousins forgot something, and she always volunteered to run errands when a messenger was called to run belowdecks. Pendt avoided the captain, but there was no avoiding the first mate: She was Pendt’s mother, and they shared quarters.

  The day that Pendt saw the stars was the same as every other day since the Harland had set out into deep space. Pendt had been born shortly after their departure and knew no world but the grey metal that lined the innermost hull.

  Sometimes her mother was kind and warm—cuddling under blankets in those last few moments before the alarm went off and made them rise for the day—but more often she was the Harland’s first mate, and had no higher loyalty than to its captain. Her children must grow quickly, as their cousins had, and earn a place on the ship. Her oldest boy, Kaeven, was ten years old, and they went down like rungs on a ladder to Pendt.

  All of the children tensed the moment Lodia Harland entered the crèche. As a matter of survival, all Harland children could tell when their mothers were being Family or Officer. The captain was rarely Family, but Lodia was softer, and with her there was always a dreadful moment of uncertainty. Today, as Pendt examined her mother’s face, she found no answers there. Lodia was a strange mix of Officer and Family both.

  “Pendt,” Lodia said. “Come with me.”

  Pendt was moving by the time her mother finished saying her name. Behind her, Willam found a match in Antarren’s hand, and Rheegar immediately began to accuse the twins of cheating.

  “If we can do it, and if it doesn’t cost, it’s allowed,” said Willam, and Rheegar conceded the match with an angry glower while the twins crowed and little Tyro looked grateful he was also sitting out and wasn’t forced to pick a side. Kaeven was too dignified for squabbling and stayed out of it.

  For her part, Pendt felt nothing, no glimmer of the pull that circuits and spare parts always mustered in her siblings. Her youngest cousin, Karderee, sat by the door reading an engineering manual. He was eleven, and was too old for Spark now. Soon Kaeven would join him, and then they would both disappear to the engine room forever. Now Karderee settled for sniffing disdainfully at Pendt as she went to answer her mother.

  “Good luck, little cat,” he said, a sneer twisting his mouth.

  In the early days of space travel, there had been a cat on board every ship to hunt vermin. Now there were environmental filters for that, and cats were an outdated luxury, another mouth to feed. Pendt was never sure if her family meant the name as an insult, though it did seem like her cousins felt that way.

  Pendt raised her chin and took it like a Harland. Lodia squeezed her hand, just a little bit, and pulled her out of the crèche.

  The Harland was a transport ship, specializing in living cargo. Primarily, they took workers and supplies out to the mines and brought back raw ore for processing. The ship was old, too old for the engines to propel it quickly. A new vessel might make the same run in half a decade, while the Harland was set to spend eighteen years in space. But what the Harland lacked in speed, it made up for with size. The new ships were fast and small, and so they couldn’t carry the sheer bulk of materials and people that the outer reaches required. That was how the Harlands had made their name: each generation born into the cycle of travel with a captain to lead them and engineers to keep the power flowing. They never stayed still long enough to spend much currency, it was said, but they were worth a lot of it.

  Despite the size of the ship, Pendt spent most of her time in either her mother’s small suite, the mess, or the crèche. The medical bay was visited only in emergencies, and Pendt had rarely been ill in her few years. When she took messages below, she went only as far as the hard-seal door that prevented any of the paying passengers from gaining access to the ship. Conditions belowdecks could be very rough, especially as the years wore on and the food and water down there ran low. It wasn’t a very safe way to travel, and it was only moderately safer for the working crew, so the door was sealed against any and all incursions. The only exit they had below was to space, and the only news they ever heard was messages from the ship’s microphone. Pendt took the job seriously, mouthing the words written on the datapad she was given without really understanding them. The text was all times to destinations, perhaps meant as a morale boost and an indication that the bleakness would not last forever. When she spoke her words into the microphone, they were relayed or they were not. She had no way of knowing.

  In truth, she knew very little about the ship or their mission, save that both were vitally important, though to whom she had no idea. Much of the galaxy was beyond her, which was only fair given that no one ever told her anything worth knowing, except sometimes by accident. She knew that the bare minimum of supplies had been brought along, and must be carefully dealt with. There were opportunities for trade every few years when the Harland arrived at a mining colony, but preparation and rationing were of the utmost importance.

  “A generation ship is only as good as the next generation,” the captain would say, both as praise and condemnation. This was the only reason Pendt could see why her mother had six children to the captain’s four. Ten mouths to feed was a serious investment, and the captain expected them to pay off even if she was too busy to give birth herself.

  Today, as Lodia pulled her into the lift, Pendt felt fear for the first time in her life. Spac
e was always fraught with some measure of uncertainty—either the void would get her or it wouldn’t—but it didn’t truly frighten her. And despite their best efforts, she was not afraid of her brothers or her cousins. But something about today was different, and on a spaceship, different was usually a bad thing. The lift moved in response to Lodia’s bio-code, not Pendt’s, which was much more restricted.

  Pendt looked up at her mother, a hundred questions on her tongue, but she saw that Lodia had fully become the officer as the lift began to climb. Harlands didn’t speak to officers unless they were spoken to. Instead, Pendt counted decks. They passed engineering, which Pendt had only seen in pictures. It covered several levels, both due to the size of the engines and the number of operations controlled there. Everything from air and water to light and the intercom was routed through the power sources there and tended to by Pendt’s oldest cousins and those born in Lodia’s generation who hadn’t reproduced.

  Above Engineering was the deck where the non-Family crew members lived. Pendt had only ever seen the ones who worked in the galley. Anyone wishing to move to a colony could book passage on a ship like the Harland or try to get hired. The crew had better quarters and rations than those who just handed over currency and tucked in to enjoy the ride. Those passengers were kept below: out of sight, out of mind. The crew didn’t necessarily know much about ships, so the jobs they did were the least desirable ones on board: cooking, cleaning, basic maintenance. The only exception was Dr. Morunt, a haggard-looking woman who had been added to the roster during a rare trip to Katla Station long before Pendt was born. Pendt never knew quite what to make of the doctor. She had a way of looking at her that made Pendt uncomfortable.

  Last came three massive levels of stowage, where the captain kept the items she was delivering, the supplies she rationed, and, eventually, the ore she—or her descendant—hauled in from the stars. It was sealed almost as tightly as belowdecks, and no one was permitted in without clearance. Pendt had never been tempted.